Purpose-Driven Innovation: Building Teams to Solve Biotech Problems | Bogdan Knezevic (Part 3/4)

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Intro - 00:00:55: Welcome to The Biotech Startups Podcast by Excedr. Join us as we speak with first-time founders, serial entrepreneurs, and experienced investors about the challenges and triumphs of running a biotech startup, from pre-seed to IPO, with your host, Jon Chee. In our last episode, Bogdan Lukowiak shared how his time at Oxford reshaped his thinking around research, startups, and what he wanted to build after grad school. If you missed it, be sure to check out part two. In part three, Bogdan talks about his time at Frequency Therapeutics. The moment he realized he wanted to work in startups, and how founding the Rhodes Incubator taught him what great teams need to succeed. He also shares what he learned at Creative Destruction Lab and Entrepreneur First, and how those experiences paved the way for launching Kaleidoscope with two longtime friends and future co-founders. 

Jon - 00:02:00: You're at Frequency. Tell me more about the Frequency experience. 

Bogdan - 00:02:03: Yeah, yeah. So that was super cool because like I said, it was an exposure to so many things. And I shared a post about this recently where like the very visceral realization that I wanted to work in startups was one concrete day where I like looked up at the clock and like it had been 13 hours. And I hadn't really realized and realized at that point, oh man, I wasn't ever looking at the clock of like, when can I clock out? And I was doing pretty mundane stuff, but it felt important. And so to me that clicked and I thought, okay, I need to find a way to do more of this. And so I did ultimately decide to like go back, like Frequency offered for me to stay and like just do full time. I think I had enough self-awareness to know like if I do that, like that's fine, but I'll probably never do my PhD. And it's like, I do kind of want to go back. I think if I didn't have the Rhodes community, maybe I wouldn't have gone back. But I just thought like it's a miss to go and not interact with this group of people for another couple of years. So I'm back, but then I immediately changed my mindset and moved me away from like, what are all the things I could do academically to, okay, what's the stuff I need to do to like have a project and like contribute to the science? But the extra time I have, like how do I put it towards like more stuff in this area? And to me, that was important, not just because I had realized like, well, I like this area, but another big learning over the several years prior was just the importance of like, until you experience a thing, like you don't know a thing. And I think that's, that's like something that bothers me a lot with like, probably the, you know, investor world is one where it's like, it's very hard to like, unless you've done the thing, like, you have to be a very, very, very special individual to be able to actually have awareness of like where your biases are because you haven't done the thing. And so I know the counter argument, and we're digressing the counter argument here is like, oh, well, if someone's done a thing, they're going to have a lot of bias, like the way to do it, especially if they've succeeded because they've only seen one slice. Sure, but at least they'll know what the grind felt like. And so for me, I'm like, okay, until I fully was a researcher, because I'd done research in undergrad, but it was always like evenings or weekends. So until I was like fully a researcher, I didn't realize like, oh, I don't want to do research. And until I was fully at a startup, did I realize like, well, I actually really like this. I probably had the flip kind of a version where I was like, oh, startups are like the hot thing so many people were doing. And I was like, well, I don't want to just like do a startup until I was in this situation and then thought, oh, I actually love this. And so when I went back, I thought, okay, what's all the things I can do in my spare time to like immerse myself and just like learn and like learn by doing. So one of those things was like starting up the Rhodes Incubator, which was like, you know, it started off like very simple idea, which is like a lot of people in the Rhodes community are doing like really cool stuff in like tech and entrepreneurship. And it doesn't always have to be tech. It could be social entrepreneurship. But the focus of the scholarship historically had been like politics, law, medicine, and like consulting in the last several years had emerged where like McKinsey had like great, great pipelines. And like that was the kind of the defaults, like you go and you do your Rhodes, either you just go back to whatever your life you had before, or you go and advocate for things or you go and run for office or you go to consult. And so the idea behind the Incubator was like, well, there's all these people doing like really dope stuff. Like let's just start connecting what they're doing. Let's start exposing people to like design thinking. Let's start like taking people to the valley and just like kind of cross-pollinating, like showing the communities what they can be. Let's start by helping connect people to like other advisors or investors or like a network. And we ended up launching that, building like a pretty cool network around it. And I think there's something valuable there because it's still running, which is always a testament because we did it and like we launched it in like 2017. So I was involved in like 2016 to 2018 and then stopped. And we had all, all of us who launched it like graduated, but it's still running and it's evolved and changed. But like, that's to me a sign like, hey, there was something there. And it was like a way to just like pull this community together. 

Jon - 00:06:13: Cool. I mean, honestly, I always think about student-run organizations as like a little startup. 

Bogdan - 00:06:20: Yeah. 

Jon - 00:06:20: I did student run organizations while I was at Berkeley, while I was like in the lab. And then I reflect on Excedr now. I'm like. Same principles, like same principles. Like how do you work within a team? How do you get the word out on this student run org? Like I was speaking from the Berkeley perspective now. It's just like, if anyone who went to Berkeley are probably familiar with people who are out at Sproul, basically the camp is tabling. And there are hundreds of other student-run orgs. And how do you get people to be interested in, how do you stand out amongst the sea of other organizations? And then like, how do you make your organization like actually function well? How do you keep people within the organization? How do you fund the organization? I'm like, oh, this feels like a startup. Except for within the context of a school. So how was that experience for you? Like just like mechanically building and founding that thing.  

Bogdan - 00:07:17: Yeah, I think exactly what you said. You learn a lot of the same principles. It was even the simple stuff like how do you open a bank account? 

Jon - 00:07:22: Yeah, how do you open it? 

Bogdan - 00:07:23: Get something registered. 

Jon - 00:07:24: I didn't even know about that concept of opening a student-run organization entity bank account. So for the first couple of weeks, I just had a Ziploc of dues, of cash. And then they were like, you can't do that. And I was like, oh, got it done, got it done. But in the early days, there was a Ziploc of cash. And I was just like collecting dues. I was like, all right, yeah, here we go. Thanks. I just like mark it on a piece of paper, dude's collected. You're just like, dude, you got to make this an actual bank of guts. 

Bogdan - 00:07:55: Exactly what you said, like the silly, naive stuff that until you've done it the first time, you have no idea. 

Jon - 00:08:00: Yeah. 

Bogdan - 00:08:01: I think there's also a lot of learning how great people all have different personalities and how to understand, like, okay, what kind of person can you lean on or involve or pull in when you need just something executed fast and precisely versus who do you want around when you're just blue sky talking about stuff and who's a good connector? But it might, you know, I don't want to create a false dichotomy, but it might not be the person who goes and follows things through. And so that whole, or what are the incentives? I think that was my first time I was exposed to and started meeting more VCs, formerly, and ones who wanted to be good sounding boards and mentor. And I'm very thankful because I was able to get, I think, a truer sense of that world because I wasn't a startup going to pitch them for money or anything. And so, like, in a lot of ways, I could get much more transparent answers. And I learned a lot of stuff, like, what's an example of, like, a simple tactical thing was, like, I heard the term, like, passing the trash for the first time, which is this idea of, like, it's like a VC speak, where it's like, if a VC introduces a company that they haven't invested in to another VC, that's sometimes internal lingo called passing the trash. And it's because it doesn't matter if, like, you say, like, oh, that's not a good, like, our fund doesn't invest in this, whatever. It's like, if the company was good enough, you would have invested in it because you didn't. And you're just, like, introducing me. You're, like, passing me the trash, which is, like, crazy. I was, like, so glad I learned that before, like, being deep in my founder journey. Because, like, who would have thought? 

Jon - 00:09:40: I'll be honest. That's the first time I've ever heard it. 

Bogdan - 00:09:43: And I don't know if this is like as widespread as or if it was if it's just like a valley thing or just like a whatever. I don't know. But I imagine that this is like an actual thing. And I learned it because, again, one of the mentors in the community kind of shared when I asked like for an intro to and we're working with like a bunch of different companies and stuff and said, like, I'm happy to make the intro, but you should know like this thing. And so I think there's a lot of stuff like that, like little, little things and not so little things that I took out of that. And I think also the other big thing, because we were around other teams as well, like we had our team that I think functioned quite well. And then the other teams that we were like that pulled the initiative together and then the actual teams that we were supporting. I think that's where I also could very easily see the importance of like how well you click as a group. And that coincided with like what led to Kaleidoscope eventually, which is that around that time, my now co-founder. So I actually went to high school with Ahmed. So we were like friends bonding over like being immigrants and both having left like wars. 

Jon - 00:10:51: Yeah. 

Bogdan - 00:10:51: And then I met David, him, he and David, the third co-founder worked together, I think like co-opt at Lore, like the education company. And then right after graduating college, Ahmed was at Google and like three months in David, like, you know, poached him to come join another startup, Socratic, where David was the first hire. And Ahmed was like the first like engineer they brought on. And so that's how they met. And I met David through that. And so that was like my anchor to like the tech and startup world. So there was this like natural overlap that happened of like, I realized I don't want to be an academic. I don't want to work in medicine. I definitely want to work in startups. I know how important it is to have the right team at the same time as David and Ahmed. And I have to give credit to Ahmed here because he was the kind of central. He like introduced the two of us where he was like, look, there's something special here because it's very rare to have. So he's a software engineer. David's a designer turned to product. And I come from the sciences. He's like, it's very rare to have like a group of people that are like very different background wise that he thought we were. And he's very, very spot on, motivated by like the similar things and have similar concepts of what success looks like and similar concepts of like what's meaningful work and want to work in startups and want to take that risk and like are willing to grind. So Ahmed was like, guys, we should do like something together. Like, I don't care what it is. Like, we should do something together because there's like there will be magic if we do. And so all of this is kind of like starting to overlap around that time. And so I think all the experiences I had leading up to that moment made me realize like, yes, I want to do something. I want to start a company with these two individuals. The only kind of last mile thing there, like last piece there was I did feel like pretty burnt out by the end of grad school just in terms of like needing a break from that. And David at the time was at Google Health doing like really interesting cancer skin diagnostic product stuff. And so he also was really interested to like see the kind of project through. Where we landed was like, okay. I let David do that. Ahmed was doing like founding engineer type work and founding CTO type work. I was going to go back to Toronto, still work in the startup world somehow, but just like take a little bit of a break. And then let's, you know, start talking about things that we find interesting and compelling and eventually start a company. So that's like the end of the grad school journey there. 

Jon - 00:13:31: When you went back to Canada, is that when you started doing creative destruction stuff?  

Bogdan - 00:13:38: Yeah, so I joined Creative Destruction Lab there, which is a nonprofit also geared at helping early stage technical companies figure out like value prop market positioning, fundraising, like all of that. I joined, they had several offices around the world. Toronto is where they're headquartered. I joined there to like lead their AI, they call them streams, but like their AI focus part of their practice. It was an interesting time, I think also good for me to, again, I think I had this like naive understanding of like, oh, nonprofits. Mean, inherently everything is, is great and it's like, the nonprofits are the same as far profits like, all the politics, all the like, everything is like, it's not really different than a corporate. It's just like, what happens like-  

Jon - 00:14:19: It's groups of people. 

Bogdan - 00:14:20: Like, yeah, yeah it's groups of people like how the like PNL looks, this is like a different thing. But, yes, so I left Oxford in 2019, I still had like, four or five months to, finish up my thesis, I started working full-time, um, so that was like not a great four or five months, because it was just like very dense. And then, submitted my thesis, and scheduling my defense. Thankfully, because, a lot of my work was in the immunology space, thankfully the panel members for my defense, were like, really well versed immunologists, like really well-known immunologists in the U.K.. Because in December of 2021, when we're scheduling the defense, they were like, we don't think we should schedule it to be in person, which is, for context for any listeners, Oxford, if anything, is annoyingly obsessed with sticking with tradition to the point where you will do exams wearing a gown. You will do three, four-hour exams wearing a suit with a gown because that's what you do traditionally. So the idea of doing a remote defense would have been completely left out of the room. But it was two immunologists being like, there's this virus that looks like it's going to get really bad. No one else had really—I think people were like, oh, don't travel to China and you won't get the virus. Or like, maybe don't go to big world conferences and you'll be fine. But they were like, no, this is not looking great. If the defense is being scheduled for like March or April, there's a chance that this is a really bad time to travel. We will petition the university to let you do it remotely. And obviously them being like respected immunologists could say like, this is not healthy or safe. I remember literally at the time being like, okay, but can I also just book tickets? And if it's fine, like I'll come. Like I didn't want to like graduate in that way. This is so like, I want to go in person, right? Thankfully, we did that because obviously by March it was like shutdown and chaos. So I did the defense remotely. I still wore the gown and the suit and the bow tie just like on Zoom.

Jon - 00:16:23: As you should, as you should. It's a culmination of it. But let's not like, yeah, can't completely throw out the decorum. 

Bogdan - 00:16:30: Exactly, exactly. We're civilized, right?

Jon - 00:16:32: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Bogdan - 00:16:34: So did that. And so this is when I was working at Creative Destruction Lab. And so it was also odd because it was like, we were in many ways like an events company because we would put together these like huge conferences every couple of months. And so that shifted to fully virtual. So there's a lot there where I was like, I don't think this is like a fit for me in this way. It's not exactly the job I thought I was going to be doing. And now in this new format, it's not great. But I still want to be working with startups and on the ground. And so I had separately through, again, I think a big theme of mine in my realization in my life is like, put yourself in serendipitous situations because like serendipity is pretty magical. You just have to like put yourself in them.  

Jon - 00:17:16: My wife was just like, it's like manufacturing your own fortune. 

Bogdan - 00:17:19: Yeah. 

Jon - 00:17:20: That always comes back to serendipity. For me, it's just like, you never know what's going to come of it, but you put yourself in an environment where serendipity can, there's a chance of it happening. Big believer in that. 

Bogdan - 00:17:31: Yeah. And so I had heard of this company called Entrepreneur First, which was basically a VC. They just they don't invest in like the idea. They believe that like bringing great people together will lead to great things. And so what the premise of the thing is like, if you apply and get in, you're paid three months to just try to find a co-founder and a thing to work on. At the end of those three months, you can then pitch the thing. And if they like it, it's like a hundred K investment. And you go into a thing and it's like a graduate. Program after that. Right. But they had had some success with this and I had been following them because they launched in London. So I knew of them from my time in the UK, and so like I saw a tweet from the CEO. Matt Clifford, who he's now spearheading a lot of the UK's AI and Government Programs and like advisory and like really thinking through a lot of that. He has a lot of like thoughtful stuff he's written for anyone who's interested in that stuff. But he had tweeted that they were like opening a Toronto office. And then I had basically replied, forget the details, but basically I like replied, was like, oh, it's like about time. Like Toronto's like a great place for this kind of thing. Or like my friend had tweeted at me who knew him and then I had responded and my friend pulled Matt in and then Matt was like, oh, DM me. And so I did. And then he was like, oh, you should meet like Frankie, who's like going to be the general manager, like launching Toronto. So like Frankie was like in Toronto for 24 hours because he'd been at the Singapore, leading the Singapore office. He's like originally from Montreal, like in Toronto for like 24 hours. Like Matt really hit it off great. And he's just like a very organic, natural person. I was at his wedding in Vietnam a couple of weeks ago, which is why I was traveling. 

Jon - 00:19:08: Sweet, sweet, sweet. 

Bogdan - 00:19:09: So Frankie was like great because it was just such a genuine connection and he wasn't trying to like sell me or pitch me or anything. He was just, and he just involved me and stuff. And so when I felt like, okay, I actually, like I had left CDL and I was like, okay, what do I do? I still care about this space. I was like, oh, Frankie is like in Toronto, I think. So like I messaged him and he was like, are you actually serious? And I was like, yeah, I've like left my job. I'm not, I'm not like trying to like leverage to get like a rate. Like I'm serious. And he's like, okay, well we literally have like one other remaining person we're trying to hire for this team. We just are like halfway through interview process with people. If you're serious, I will schedule you for like all of the interviews in the next seven days. So we can like catch you up so that you can like be assessed with everyone. And so that's how I ended up joining Entrepreneur First and leading their, basically their first program in Toronto. 

Jon - 00:20:00: That's freaking awesome. And like, I'm a big supporter of Nucleate, the student run org that kind of is like, you know, a big movement to equip graduate students, whether it be PhDs, MBAs, whatever, in grad program to get into bio entrepreneurship, or just the biotech industry, the life sciences industry. And I actually was just getting a text message on like, how do I put myself into these scenarios? And I'm like, you'll be surprised. Sometimes it's just a DM away. Like, obviously do it tastefully, like do it tastefully, engage tastefully. Don't just be like, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock. Like, and just like, you know, be kind of like, you know, barging in and like trying to just like, take, take, take, take, take. But you'd be surprised how responsive people are, if you're authentically engaging with them. And opportunities come of that. Like, I think a lot of great opportunities come of it. 

Bogdan - 00:20:59: Yeah, I agree. I think like I definitely benefited from that. And I think at a time when it's very easy to en masse reach out, it does stand out if you're genuine. A piece of like unsolicited advice I have for anyone listening who is in that position is like, it's great if you like take the initiative and reach out and do it authentically. But if you like only do it if you're actually serious, because it does happen that people do that, I respond, and then I don't really hear back or I hear back like a month later, I'm like, well, you weren't had you just met me with the energy that you had initially when I when I responded. Great, like we could have done really cool stuff. But yeah, so I ended up at EF and did that for a year and got the like first cohort off the ground and running recruited for the second cohort and felt at that point that it was it was time because David had basically wrapped and left Google. And I was like, guys, like, are we gonna do this? Because like, now's a good time for me to like wrap the thing I'm on.  

Jon - 00:21:54: Wow, both of them timed up perfectly. 

Bogdan - 00:21:56: Yeah, well, well, I was basically like, guys, tell me when you're ready, and I'll drop what I'm doing like that level of conviction. And obviously, he really cares about setting places up well. So he wasn't gonna do it overnight. But around then, when we realized, like, okay, we're gonna be doing this, he was like, okay, well, what's the plan? So we decided that by September, we will full time go into figuring out like, what do we want to build, we should take some time off, and then he could work backwards from there. So basically, I think he wraps stuff up by like the start of the summer, so that he could have a couple of months, we each took like a couple of months off in our own way, and then got together in September. And we're like, okay, cool. So like, what are we doing?  

Jon - 00:22:35: Interesting, interesting. And the one thing about your co founders that stood out to me is that you've known them for a long time. And I don't know if it's still a prevalent piece of advice that's given to people, you know, or they're like, don't work with your friends. I've actually taken an opposite approach. Like, I love working with my friends. For example, my, my co founder I've known since I was in fifth grade, one of my teammates I've known since I was three. I know a bunch of people like since I was like a child. And the benefit of working with your friends is one, it's super fun. Fun, like, right, if you're going to spend so much time working on something, you ought to have fun. Two, they're kind of reading between the lines that we were kind of talking about. Like, with your friends, it's kind of like, you can just pick up on cues, like, explicit or implicit. And there's like a base level of trust that I'm not second guessing my friend who I've known since I was like, 10 years old. Like, I know what you're getting at. Like, all right, for sure. And you can just make decisions really quick. You're just like, let's go, like, let's go. And like, obviously, there are hard conversations like that kind of like, damn, that kind of hurts, man. I'm like, kind of like, dude, we're all working towards the same goal. This is kind of it gets back to the athletics thing, where you're like, I've been playing lacrosse. It was like a team sport. So it's just like, you can get frustrated with your teammates. But it's not because you're like, are like, I dislike you. It's just like, come on, like, let's let's do better to achieve this joint goal. And that's something that I think about that good teams and like, sometimes good teams are comprised of friends. And I don't necessarily fully believe that it's always a bad idea to work with friends. And this is the big asterisk to it is like, if you know that you can't work well with a friend, that's also cool, too. But I don't think it's like completely, it should be something where you're like, you should never do it. 

Bogdan - 00:24:27: Yeah, yeah. I agree with the advice in that just because I was a friend, if that's the heuristic, it's probably riskier than it's likely to succeed. But like what you just said, I think if you are able to really think about, okay, what are the ways in which you've worked well or ways that triggered arguments with a friend before, like will that bode well for starting a company or building a company? If you end up answering yes, we resolve conflict well, and we have like diverse thought, but similar motivation, like all this stuff, then I think, like you said, you're actually really well positioned to do great things. So like the trust is a big component. 

Jon - 00:25:10: You're absolutely right though, it could flip in the other way. Like, really bad, it's kind of like, you live by the sword you die by the sword.  

Bogdan - 00:25:16: Yeah. 

Jon - 00:25:18: But- 

Bogdan - 00:25:18: Yeah.  

Jon - 00:25:18: Magic happens, like it when, it when it does work out well, but I think, it's like a, it's a matter of being really honest with yourself and honest with your friend, like have that conversation, if you can, before you like, get wedded by whatever the thing is. So okay, you guys are now starting to think about, okay, what is it the thing that we're going to work on? Like what was the driving force to form Kaleidoscope? 

Bogdan - 00:25:41: Yeah, a lot of it is asking both what we want to do and also what we not want to do. Like what's important to us. So we thought, okay, we come from these three distinct backgrounds. It would be amazing if we could find something at the intersection of it, because it would be such an organic thing to, like, own and spearhead in, and lead. We knew that we wanted to find a problem that was meaningful enough for us that we could grind for however long it was. And if we were achieving our goals, we would feel fulfilled and that the fulfillment wouldn't have to come only if we are, crushing certain metrics at any given point in time. So it mattered to us the population we're serving, that there was something huge there, but that the population and the problem mattered. Us as individuals. And so that ruled out a lot of stuff that we thought we could do. Many of those things probably could have grown a lot faster because they're for easier populations or like quicker things to build or whatever. But that to us didn't matter as much as the problem. And so naturally, a lot of the conversations that we started seeding with was just me. And I had complained to the two of them over the course of my grad school and the different observations. So it was like digging into that of like all the frustrating things about science that weren't science. And it comes honestly to my comment about the tools for like Neurotech, where I think a lot of the distillation of like the four or five months of those conversations that we were having was like, hey, there's a lot of stuff holding the field back that's to do with like the software infra. Here that actually ends up leading to failures or shutdowns of companies or like slower drugs to patients. And so it could be really meaningful if we found a slice of this to tackle because it would be us putting our energy and our expertise towards like really elevating like an entire field and helping them go zero to 10 or 100 in many ways, which is a rare opportunity. I think a lot of phenomenal businesses that hyperscale, hypergrow is not zero to one or zero to 10. It's scaling things or like adding more to something that exists. And we felt that like, look, there's such an immense gap between like the quality of the science is being done by these teams and then what they have at their disposal to do that. And at the same time, we thought there was a lot of changes happening in the industry, like tailwinds. And so those things being stuff like for the first time ever, there were non-biologists and non-chemists working in these spaces, which means people who have different expectations in different languages trying to collaborate. It meant that it's different data formats and different individual team goals building towards the same thing. There was this big change in like decentralization. So no longer was it the case that 10 pharma companies in the world did all of research through to all of commercialization. They had like outsourced, they had outsourced to academia and to biotech and biotech had outsourced a portion to like contract research organizations and CDMOs. And like you had this like interplay of stuff. So we're like, okay, different types of data, changing hands a lot more, bigger volumes of it, complexity of science growing, which means that you have to get more efficient at like translating this. All of that being underpinned by very rudimentary software tools were like the only real innovation that had happened, which was a super important one. I don't want to take away from it. But the only real innovation that happened was like, the industry had finally realized like, we shouldn't be doing stuff in paper, we should be doing stuff digital. And I think the companies that have paved the way for that, like the benches of the world, I think they did like a lot of important work, because like that, it's hard to make that shift happen. Like, I don't think people realize that like how much stuff is pen and paper in science. I think if you asked non-scientists, they'd assume that it's like robotic labs.  

Jon - 00:29:34: That's my mom and dad. My mom and dad didn't realize that it was like a lot of it was on paper. They're like, what the heck? I'm like, yeah. And exactly what you're describing. There's a massive behavioral shift that needs to take place to kind of like unlock all of this. But I'm glad that it's starting to, because it felt like we were in the stone age. We're like, what the heck? 

Bogdan - 00:29:55: Yeah. And I think the observation for us or the bet we were making was, A, you have these other disciplines now working in this field. So you do have people from, let's say, the software world who are going to have different expectations of the tools, which is good impetus for change. For the first time ever, the people that are starting to enter leadership positions or starting to launch their own companies are people, the first tech native generations. It's like our generations of people who, by the time they were in high school, smartphones existed or earlier. And so the bet we're making is like, yeah, now this is going to be more tailwind for change to happen.  

Jon - 00:30:34: It's an actual expectation, like, exactly what you're describing, even though I'm on the, hardware infras-side. But like I was like, there's an expectation with our, you know, our generation that, because we have this technology at our fingertips, it's like, that consumer grade, like consumer grade ease of use UX/UI, it can't be clunky, it needs to be fast, it needs to be organized, and like from the outside looking in, I can see the tailwind, so like, you know for sure, I could like, I'm imagining, if I was a fly on that wall, while you guys having that conversation, I'd be like this pump. People are like, hell yeah. Hell yeah. Please. Let's get off the pen and paper. Like, please. 

Bogdan - 00:31:13: Yeah, and it's like powerful to think what the future could be and what the future will be. And it's a matter of, like you said, realizing where's the bar now higher than it's been, which makes the work harder for sure. But like that's the work that we find like motivating to get up and do because now we are looking at with our product. It's like complex engineering happening under the hood. Like the way we can collapse like nth-dimensional data for people and then wrap like really beautiful, elegant UI around it. Like that's very non-trivial. There's very, very, very, very few teams in the world that can like do that kind of stuff. And it's hard. And then also obviously that you're trying to like sell and educate at the same time. But again, it's like it's so motivating when you see what people do shift and how quickly they can see certain improvements and how much better we get with that over time to realize like, oh, wow. Like there's a real opportunity here to not just make, in our case, Kaleidoscope, a company that like every biotech has heard about, but potentially be the company that you can point to concrete drugs that reached market like one to two years faster than they would have. Because of the burden that we took on operationally and cognitively and that we removed and offloaded off people so that they could do more of what they're supposed to be doing. So that I think for the three of us and like the team that we have is what makes it a meaningful problem. And it's not the like let's chase growth for growth sake. It's like if we need to take a bit longer, fine. It's worth figuring that out because the like translation of those efforts to like it matters and it matters to people and populations we care about is like so profound in a way that's very rare. Like there's only very brief windows in time in fields where that's possible, where you're actually like kind of pioneering the thing. 

Jon - 00:33:19: Absolutely.

Bogdan - 00:33:20: Not that there's anything inherently. There's like a lot of amazing businesses that are not pioneering, even if like the PR is like we're pioneering. They're not. And they're doing like pretty incredible things. But it is just a unique moment in time for this field to be doing these things and to have like a team that's like well positioned to do that. 

Jon - 00:33:39: Absolutely. I think about Excedr in a similar vein. We've been slower to grow, but that's because we've just had this like super long term vision of what we think the future to look like. And rushing it any faster would kind of take away for like it would it makes that future state seem actually harder to grasp if we just like cut corners to go a little bit quicker. You've got to do it right. And I think also you talk about growth for growth's sake. It's like, you know, we're a leasing company that only leases to the life sciences. Like that's super freaking weird. Leasing companies are like generally like, oh, is it a physical thing in the world? Can you attach a dollar to it? We'll lease that to you. Versus we're like, no, like we will not touch anything that's not in the life sciences because it's exactly what you're talking about. The population that we're serving and catering to their specific needs the best we can. We think that everything else is kind of a distraction. This is I'm speaking for Excedr now. I love my banks. Like I love banking. Like my banking colleagues, they'll finance a bunch of things, but just not our business model or in our mission and value set here. 

Outro - 00:34:55: Thanks for listening to part three of our conversation with Bogdan Knezevic. In the final episode of this series, Bogdan walks us through how Kaleidoscope came to life, from defining the company's mission to building the early team and product. He breaks down how they're helping biotech streamline R&D, the long-term impact of the right infrastructure, and why saving time isn't just about efficiency, it's about giving more patients a chance at better outcomes. If you've enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a friend. See you next time. The Biotech Startups Podcast is produced by Excedr. Don't want to miss an episode? Search for The Biotech Startups Podcast wherever you get your podcasts and click subscribe. Excedr provides research labs with equipment leases on founder-friendly terms to support paths to exceptional outcomes. To learn more, visit our website, www.excedr.com. On behalf of the team here at Excedr, thanks for listening. The Biotech Startups Podcast provides general insights into the life science sector through the experiences of its guests. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from the podcast is at the user's own risk. The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not the views of Excedr or sponsors. No reference to any product, service or company in the podcast is an endorsement by Excedr or its guests.