The Secret to Biotech Success: Time, Tools & Teamwork | Bogdan Knezevic (Part 4/4)

Jon - 00:00:00: This episode is brought to you by Excedr. Excedr provides life-science startups with equipment leases on founder-friendly terms to accelerate R&D and commercialization. Lease the equipment you need with Excedr. Extend your runway, hit your milestones, raise your next round at a favorable valuation and achieve a blockbuster exit while minimizing dilution. Know anyone who needs lab equipment? If so, join our referral program. Give your friends $1,000 and in return earn $1,000 for each qualified referral. Start earning cash today by going to excedr.com and click the yellow button in the bottom right to get your unique referral link. Additionally, as a podcast listener, you can redeem exclusive discounts with a growing list of biotech vendors and get $500 off your first equipment lease by using promo code TBSP on excedr.com/partners.  

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 Knezevic talked about the early days of Kaleidoscope, how he met his co-founders, what pushed them towards a biotech infrastructure, and why aligning on the right mission mattered more than chasing growth for growth's sake. If you missed it, be sure to go back and check out part three. In part four, Bogdan shares how Kaleidoscope is helping biotech companies make better use of their data, streamline collaboration and extend their runway. He recounts real examples of how the platform is being used in the field, why early infrastructure decisions matter and what it means to support the teams working to bring life-changing therapies to patients faster. 

Jon - 00:02:02: And so for Kaleidoscope, you guys now have figured out this is the corner of the world that you want to be in. As you guys are just like kind of distilling down, what is Kaleidoscope's mission and focus? 

Bogdan - 00:02:12: Yeah, I think it's a great question and honestly refines and adapts with time. And I think it kind of coalesces towards a thing. I like to think of in the kind of ambitious, lofty sense is like a nerve center for your R&D, like the brain that helps you orchestrate and collaborate and manage your R&D efforts. Specifically the science and the data behind it, but then also the people and the milestones in the project. And so that sounds like very, very broad, but I think it's important to give that angle because there's a lot of software out there. And so kind of orienting ourselves is like the top-down brain of what are you doing? Like, are your programs on track on time? Like, are you going to hit the technical KPIs you need to, to like get your approval to get to market? Like, do you have the data you need? Like, are you at risk of, of like not, and therefore having to shut down as a company? Like those things are very like org level problems. So that orientation matters. And then from there, we then asked and spent time asking like, what are the more concrete ways that like use cases or solutions or like stories that people want addressed that, you know, built towards that kind of org or level. And so we predominantly work with biotech ranging from, you know, a few people in size to like multi hundred person teams. We've started interacting with pharma companies as well, but, you know, predominantly focused on, on biotech blend of therapeutic diagnostic, more like AI services, target based work sequencing. Like, you know, it's biotech broadly. And so the way in which we can like add value or, or partner with someone from that, you know, connect that like top high level, like, hey, we can be the thing that you like turned to for peace of mind. I'm like, am I running in the direction I need to be the way we connect that to like what's happening on the ground takes a few different forms, depending on the size and stage of team. So for like an early stage team, we can end up being a platform that like does a lot right away. It's like where they can see like what compounds or combinations are they working on? Like what experiments have they run? I can link out to like where they keep raw notes. If it's somewhere else, they can do like project planning and like mapping. There's like a series of things there. We just kind of, we can pretty quickly figure out like what's the thing to get someone going with, with larger teams, it might be a more specific or focused initial set. So a customer recently onboarded wanted to, they're, they're now, they're not doing that, but like wanted to basically use Kaleidoscope as the place to initiate and track a data requests with external partners. So when they're working with CROs so that they move away from like a web of like emails and threads and attachments to like a unified system. 

Jon - 00:05:15: It is crazy that the stuff that you would send, this is like important shit is that just gets sent in an email.  

Bogdan - 00:05:22: It's wild. It gets sent in an email. As soon as it's email and like on people's personal devices, it quickly can become much more compromised than that. And so there's like now this other act, there's like the access of like efficiency and staying on top of things. There's the access to like security and like peace of mind and like IP. And so for like, that's like a very defined thing of like, okay, we're going to help you do that in a single place performantly and then add other things that you can connect to this and then help you manage like internal flows. And then you're at this kind of like, you know, grand vision. But that's one example. I think, you know, another manifestation of it is like more the like compound centric tracking of phases or like a DMTA cycle and like, and knowing kind of where are you and like, what's the like relational web of stuff that you've, that you've like generated and like what decisions are driving advancements or not, or like changes in phase, like stuff like that. There's the more like project management in the truer sense of the word. So like getting out of like, this is what we need to have for this year and what we need to hit. These are like the key studies we have to run. And, and then as you generate data, seeing like progress against that and like using us for more of the like task based management. So these are just examples. I'm just trying to give you like a flavor of, of the kinds of things that we can help people with. 

Jon - 00:06:45: I can speak from my own experience at Excedr. What is the saying? It's just like, at first you shape the tool and then eventually the tool shapes you. And for any organization, it kind of like, I always think about this. It's like, if you go from like no tools at all, the pen and paper, it's just like a very leaky boat. Like, and you're just not running as well as you could be. It's just a lot of waste. There's a lot of waste. But, you know, as you're describing this, it kind of is just like this kind of connective tissue across multiple stakeholders, different workflows, different projects. And the second everyone starts to buy in to that and starts working within it, that's when the tool starts shaping you for the better. Because now you're all kind of speaking a common language and there's like visibility and accountability and security across all of it, such that you're just, your organization just gets like a step level function, like more productive and more efficient that you can start rather than like scrambling to like find like, what did we do like here? It's like, no, no, no. Like we don't even have to spend a second thinking about that. Okay, got it. Like quickly, you get up to speed real quick and then you can start pushing the ball forward and like moving the needle. So I love hearing this. And especially for any listener out there that is starting a company. These like tool decisions are like very important. It's like it's good hygiene in the very beginning. If you don't set up good hygiene in the beginning and you're, and you scale your company up without it, it's really hard to like, it's like, it's moving like an aircraft carrier. The organization's like way. Way bigger and bigger orgs have more difficulty making organizational change when you could have just saved yourself a bunch of heartache by sending up good infrastructure in the beginning and everyone is kind of bought in and everyone kind of will contribute in their own way to make the tool work for their needs. But I think... Because once you do that, right, and you set up your team with proper infrastructure that organizes things across the board, everything that you've just described, that's when like magic starts to happen. And we've been using HubSpot for a really long time for our CRM. That's just another kind of core infrastructure, like software infrastructure that most organizations have. And I see large organizations that maybe are working on like these kind of like hacked together like sales, SFDC, Salesforce instances, or like a hacked together, like, you know, whatever SAP. And then your whole organization starts revolving around that tool. And sometimes not in the good ways, right? You're like, I have a whole team that is like trying to make this tool work for us. But for us, we made a conscious decision to pick, you know, this is not a paid endorsement by HubSpot by any means. Because I'm just like, when we did the comparison, a lot of my teammates like lived in SFDC. And then now they're at Excedr using HubSpot. The amount of like things that you can do that would be such a problem with the other tool is now just like a breeze. And so it frees us to do more creative strategic things. We're not just like scrambling, like, did someone update the like the SFDC field? Like, and wow, it just broke or whatever. And I know at Salesforce, that scale, like really big scale can do magical things too. But all that to be said is that people should not sleep on incorporating these types of tools, especially early, because that unlocks future growth and future success in ways that you can't even imagine. 

Bogdan - 00:10:24: Yeah, I think that's a number of things you said there that were super resonant. One is the U-shaped tool and tool shapes you. And we love that. We welcome that all the time with customers, especially in their early days. They can give really valuable feedback and insights on things that would unlock them more. And something I wish that more people were aware of is just how quickly our team can move to get you to that place. But then to your point, so there's the initial first order improvements that you get. And in our case, it's people telling us stuff like, great, I've now on like individuals levels, we have like a day each back a week where we can do stuff. Because as a team, we're able to like do things like a quarter earlier in a year than we would. Or we're able to like increase throughput by like 20, 25% as a result. Those are like the first order ones. But then we also hear from people like not only did bringing Kaleidoscope on help in these ways, but it also completely transformed our ability to think about like data as an asset and move the needle and all these other things and improved our behavior on all these other things that we do. Because, we're now starting to think in this way. And our goal with Kaleidoscope was like, we have to build a tool that is definitely opinionated and built for this vertical. So it can't be the problem with stuff like Notion is like it's just way too much unruly flexibility. So it has to be opinionated. But yes, it also has to be flexible enough that like, it doesn't require like a year of customization per deployment. Like we can do it within like, you know, a couple of weeks or several weeks depends on like the magnitude of the customer, but like it's pretty quick. And so that means that you end up shaped in these correct ways because we're productizing like best behavior and best practices. The other thing that you said that stuck out is like, you know, making an investment earlier. And I think that like, the my big call to action to people would be like, yeah, if you're early on and the most astute and like impressive teams we work with are one that are in that category are ones that acknowledge that they've seen how bad it could be. And when you don't do that, it's a tiny investment. We've done a lot of work again, like one of my co-founders is a designer. And the whole benefit of that is that like the experience should be simple and intuitive. So it's a very small amount of work that we pair with you on to help get things going within a couple of weeks. And then you're you're set and you're you're saving yourself like immense headache down the line. So like do that and we can support in that. And then the other thing is for teams that are if you are at a stage where like things are kind of crazy and unruly and whatever. We have like pretty good recommendations we can make on like the tangible first thing that you start with. So I think if you're in that stage, like sometimes again, if you've gone through a couple of cycles, you know that you have to fix it because it could be like existentially threatening to your company. If you haven't, I think the trap could be thinking like some cost fallacy and being like, well, we're here. Like it's too painful now. I'm not going to do it. And while I totally understand that, the like thing I wish more people knew is that like if you talk to someone like us, you meet with a Kaleidoscope and you tell us like what's hard. We can help guide you and say like, okay, like of all the ways we can approach this. This is the thing that you can immediately get going with that won't take any time to set up. And we'll run a workshop and send you videos and how to and like you'll be up and running. And then, you know, the plan and six months out or 12 months out might be this like transformed way to work. But it doesn't have to be just the end result. It's like a series of things that you elevate. And like each is a stepwise, like you said, increase in like what you can do and how productive you can be. And then when you look back two or three years, you'll think, oh, wow, like I can't believe like that was the shift. But we can be the thought partner on how to like break that down into into manageable steps. 

Jon - 00:14:27: That's like spot on. And I think a friend of mine and colleague, he talked about it kind of from the perspective of like, he's like golf coaching as an analogy, perhaps you've been like swinging your golf club a certain way for many years. And then you go to the coach. A good coach is not going to just be like, throw all of that out the window. Like, this is how you should swing. They're going to probably break it down and chunk it out and be like, okay, by the way, I don't golf. So like, this is just like me imagining what it would be, but they're like, okay, see the way you're holding it, your pinky and your pointer finger need to be hooked like this. Start with that. Okay. Start swinging like that. Okay. That's the first one. Okay. Next. Like, let's try to like, maybe line this up a certain way. And then you layer it in the next one. Okay, maybe use your hips in this way. Right. Versus like, Hey, fingers like this straight, like this hips like this. And you're just like, dude, what am I, what am I even doing? Screw it.  

Bogdan - 00:15:25: Yeah.  

Jon - 00:15:25: Screw that. I'm going back to the old way I was swinging. Right. And that's an important thing to think is like, yeah, like, even if you have this big kind of thing that the sun caught, like, oh, we've just spent so much time and money and like resource and to build this thing. And it can be painful to part ways with that, but it doesn't have to be like that kind of just like immediately rip it out. You can kind of incrementally improve on these things and then slowly get to the point where you want to be that end state that you're talking about. And whoever's like listening to this and might be thinking about what you're in your software infrastructure might be. It's like, you're going to pat yourself on the back. Cause like that is true competitive advantage. Cause if you're doing it and the competitor isn't. And when you get to that state, you're now like going at a hundred miles per hour while they're stuck doing 20. Like who doesn't want that? 

Bogdan - 00:16:16: It's a huge difference. Yeah, I think people like the sharpest thinkers that I've seen have had success and failure and learn from failure on the bio side are ones who realize that and who realize how powerful compounding these gains can be and how it can be the difference between do you get something to market or not? Do you get it to market in time? What we can't control is like, is your science going to work? That's not what I feel like. 

Jon - 00:16:41: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Bogdan - 00:16:41: But it's like, if your science works, if like, you know, you can wave a magic wand and you know that the science actually works. It's like, okay, you now need to sprint to get and show that. And you need to do that before you're out of money. You need to do that before you get beat out. Because if someone launches before you, now it doesn't really matter. You might have lost the entire market piece. And it literally will make more sense to shut the company down than to try and like commercialize it. And so the like smartest people I've seen in the space are able to do that thinking and to be like, not just like, okay, what's the productivity I get week over week or month over month. But like, oh, wow, the value of this is. And so as long as the price tag isn't one that takes years to pay itself back, which it isn't, like the math on that's pretty simple, how within less than a year you've like more than made back that, like it always is worth the investment. The golf thingy said by the way like, the my, uh, the scar- 

Jon - 00:17:39: Do you golf? Did I screw that? 

Bogdan - 00:17:41: I do not, I do not. 

Jon - 00:17:43: Okay. 

Bogdan - 00:17:43: The first time, I ever like swung a golf club, I was going to meet my, now girlfriend and my partner's family, and she was like, oh, they're big golfers, and they, and she's like, let's go to the golfing range. And suggested that we were all together, and obviously, I'm not going to say no, but I'm like, this is the first time I'm meeting your family. 

Jon - 00:18:01: Yeah. 

Bogdan - 00:18:01: And like they're also like strict immigrant parents, like, they're gonna now look at me, awkwardly swing this thing. I'm like this is mortifying.  

Jon - 00:18:10: Yeah. 

Bogdan - 00:18:10: My only saving grace was that like, I think we went to the range, and I think I, I must have hit, like, or tried to hit 300 balls, and my only saving grace, was like, the 20 that I hit. Well went really far, because like I just, have like, sport history, and the other like, 270 that didn't, just was so awful and pathetic. 

Jon - 00:18:34: That is so funny. You're like, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna hit this as hard as I can. like in and you're just like the next day like my back really hurts. 

Bogdan - 00:18:43: Yes. Oh my gosh. Like and it was, yeah, like the kind of 48 hours later, where I'm like, I can't like bend it down to pick up, something from the floor. 

Jon - 00:18:51: This is actually awful, I should not have done that. Um, not hilarious. And like I think about the life sciences, like, what is the real currency that matters here? It's actually time. It is all about time. And I see it with Kaleidoscope, right? It's just like, you raise this money. That money is supposed to last you a certain amount of time. There's a time expectation there. You have board meetings in which they're going to check in on how much progress have you made in this set amount of time. Right? Everything up to that board meeting or whatever, whatever frequency you have this meeting, you need to be making the most of your time and capital. But like, first off, it's time, right? And with Kaleidoscope, it's like, okay, can we compress down, like all this work, can we compress it down to a smaller unit of time? If yes, and like exactly you said, and the money, the calculus on the financial works out, then it's a no brainer. Like even if you have to unpack some of the bad, kind of talking about unlearning habits, kind of like unlearning that email from the email or the writing style of the UK, right? But that is the right decision. If it's going to squeeze it down and make you more productive for per unit time, you should do it. And the same way, like I think about it from Excedr, from a leasing perspective, it's like, okay, you've been given capital. It's supposed to last you a finite amount of time. If you raise 2 million bucks, but you want to go spend a million bucks of it on equipment, you just cut how much time you have left by half. You bought the tool, but now you don't have capital to actually use the tool. Like you can't hire people. Like if you hire some people, then your life bar goes down even more, right? So our idea was like, okay, you've been given this capital. How do you make this capital actually last you longer, but you still need the tooling and you need the people. So like, why don't we just spread out the cost of that tool over five years? So now your health bar went from like here to here. And then now you have capital to hire people to use the tool, the physical tool. And then you have your board meeting coming up. You have smart people using the physical tool and you got your data in a quicker amount of time. And if you marry that with the software infra, you got it in even quicker time. You have that board meeting. You say, here's the data, read it and we, we got it ahead of schedule. Now you're cooking, like you're cooking with gas now. And I think, sometimes when you're in the trenches, it's hard to think about it that way, but it is imperative that entrepreneurs do or anyone who's in the Lifetimes venture. 

Bogdan - 00:21:27: Yeah, absolutely. And especially if you're like in a therapeutic space, you don't have a thing that you're selling until you get to market. And so like everything you should be thinking about is like, does this capital de-risk the next phase where like the next set of capital comes in? And so exactly what you're saying, like the way y'all are looking at it is this kind of like life bar and extending that life bar. The way we look at it is if I'm telling you that the cost of the license will pay itself back in like other things that you save fast. So now you don't even have to think about the margin. So then you shouldn't be thinking about, okay, will the money here, like if I had spent X less over the years? Well, it doesn't matter because like the only thing you care about is do I get to the market and do I get to the market fast enough? And so you should be doing like everything you can to like, increase the chance of that happening. 

Jon - 00:22:21: On the software side, the math can be as simple as like, how much FTE, like full-time equivalent hours am I saving? I'm going to assume as a therapeutics company, you have pretty expensive FTEs. Like, I will assume how many hours, like you quickly like, okay, like what is the hourly rate of a MD-PhD? Blah-di-dah. Like that, okay. How much is the cost of this tool? Okay. On to the next. My wife is in software and like, just like classic, like Silicon Valley tech. This is all they think about. Like, so like I'm kind of just like steeped in it, but I think I want to see life sciences really start to think about it from this perspective, because the things that really bum me out is when great teams and great science run out of time and then it never sees the light of day. They just close up shop because, because there's like these operational kind of aspects that hold them back or just never get addressed. There's like this inertia to just keep doing how things have always been done. And you kind of have to take like a, you have to have this like paradigm shift in terms of mindset if you're looking for outlier outcomes. 

Bogdan - 00:23:28: Yeah, it's not about avoiding failure. It's about avoiding every scenario where you look back and say, I could have done this differently and we wouldn't be here. If you end up still failing after all that, that's like you're kind of taking that risk on by working in any entrepreneurial scenario, but definitely in biotech. It's the thing that like, kills me is that world where you fail and you look back and you're like, damn, if we just had had three more months and we could have had three more months because we like did all this other stuff. Like we remember that one time where we waited around three months for a critical study to realize like someone had emailed it six months ago. And like that kind of stuff is so painful to hear. And so that's the thing that we care about making sure people avoid at all costs. 

Jon - 00:24:15: You know, in a similar kind of observation, I've been doing Excedr for about 15 years. So I've seen a couple of cycles and I've seen a couple of down cycles, like a pretty couple bad ones. And in terms of like insolvency proceedings, I've seen them all. You know, I've been kind of an observer of this. And I see stellar companies, when we look at the balance sheet while they're going through this very kind of, you were talking about you, sometimes you have to close up shop. I see the balance sheet and there was just a shit ton of equipment that was still on the, that was on the balance sheet during insolvency. And the first thing I think in my head is like, that was all formally cash at one point in time, but now it's being sold at pennies on the dollar. That should never be the case, right? Because if you had all that cash, it could have been that three months, that six months, however many months, right? To actually have been an opposite outcome. Not to make it like just super business morbid, but it's just a reality of what I've seen. And of course, when you, when you start a company, you, you pray to baby Jesus that you never get into that scenario. But what I'm kind of just describing is that these are all the things that help you avoid getting there. Like, and digging your head in the sand and just putting your head and you're like, it's going to be all good. It's not like, right. When, when money was like, just like getting helicoptered in, you can, it's easy to just put your head in the sand and screw it. The next check is going to be going to be there. But we've lived in a world for a couple of years now where that is not the case. Right. So you have to eke out these, like these gains everywhere, everywhere, because you don't want to like, I really, there was like a, like I saw the, like when I saw that balance sheet, I was like, holy crap. Like this could have gone towards like keeping the lights on for a few more months instead. It was just like a heartbreaking thing because then the IP itself, this like was getting sold to, you know, to folks who are just like coming in, looking for bargains, which is what ends up happening. Right. And so it sounds like you're working with small stage, medium stage, and starting to get a large stage looking forward. One year, two years for Kaleidoscope. What is in store for you guys? 

Bogdan - 00:26:26: Yeah. Well, first of all, just like building familiarity. It takes time for a market to like learn that you exist. So continuing to do that well, and we're seeing a lot of that happen like organically, which is great. We try and put out like thoughtful things that people will find interesting. That's not just product plugs. And so I think, you know, when I look, what I love to be the case in a couple of years from now is like every biotech is like aware that we exist. And whenever there is, I mean, I would always advocate that it happens as early as possible. But whenever there is some like, concrete operational pain point that you face that like they first think like, oh, let me turn to Kaleidoscope and see if they can help. I think naturally what will happen just because of the dynamics of this space is like in a few years from now, some of our customers will probably have had to shut down because the science might not work. But some might really hit gold and get stuff onto market. And we can know that we played a part in helping make that happen. And then another group will end up, you know, absorbed into, let's say, large pharma. And I think that an early kind of maybe contrarian bet for people who haven't been in the space long enough on the software side that we made is like, we need to be enterprise ready way earlier than a typical startup would. And we need to do a bunch of stuff that a typical tech company would put off for quite a long time because like IP and security matters immensely in this space. And so we did all of that, which thankfully means that like, we are capable and ready to take on and support. And we like pass those kinds of tests and the kind of questionnaires from from it with flying colors. And so I think that it's inevitable that and like I said, we're now at a stage where we are engaging with with teams at pharma where we can start becoming kind of an operational backbone within those companies, too. And like, it's always interesting to see like people who don't come in the space, where do their heads go in terms of risk versus when you're like in the space? So I know that a natural thing is like pharma always like does things themselves. They'll just like build stuff themselves and they'll just solve this internally. Like what's your answer there? And I think the reality is like pharma doesn't solve like, they are already dealing with so much that they don't have these like clean solutions that everyone in the company is using. And when I talk to people that have led major internal IT teams and build teams at all of the kind of or like three of the top 10 pharma that any listener here would have heard of, something I often hear is like even for the problems that we're like, okay, well, like it's it's a big enough problem. We should solve it internally. All the talent that they're bringing wants to be solving like, the interesting stuff, which to them, this kind of like infrastructural like piping and stuff is like not interesting. Like that's not people are like, oh, like the AI, well, like AI teams like solve this. It's like the AI and like ML people that are being hired there. Like this is not what they're trying to do. And I've had this confirmed by people who led those teams are like we always put off or avoided doing that because we want to spend time doing the stuff that we actually find because there's like so many there's like infinite problems you could solve. So we want to spend time doing the like stuff we find like intellectually like stimulating. And there's like this whole other set of like unsexy problems that we find like very compelling. And so I think it's just inevitable that we'll find our way to support and be this kind of like backbone or nervous system for a lot of like pretty big companies. And obviously all of them all operate on a FOMO model. And so it's like when the domino falls, then the other dominoes fall. And I think I'm curious to see like which of them are smart to realize like this is a big competitive advantage. And therefore we should work with Kaleinoscope earlier because if you're the last one to do it, you're not just like lost out on all the stuff you could have had. 

Jon - 00:30:24: You're behind. You're frankly behind. You're frankly behind. And I think that's awesome to hear. And I think when I was talking to Stavros over at TileDB, it's kind of like the same kind of issues that he was encountering too. They'll have like 10,000 people just hired to manage this unwieldy thing they built. They have the capacity to do it, but should they be doing it? It's kind of like similar to when AWS got invented. Like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Whatever. I guess you guys can afford to hire a bunch of people to buy and manage on-prem server racks. But should you? Maybe it's kind of like the Bezos, like you should focus on what makes your beer taste better if you're a brewer and not just like focus on just like the equipment to make the beer. Focus on actually making your beer taste better. It's like, let's focus on making better drugs, not managing exactly kind of this in-house built tool with a bunch of, you know, this is not even, you don't even want to be doing this. Like let people who actually want to be doing it and make up like who live for it, do it. Like it's kind of the same philosophy with exceeders. Like the value of your equipment comes from using it, not from owning it. Like, and it's that aspect of like, you've got to flip that pair, that understanding of just like you need to shift that mindset. And I think when it eventually clicks, you just start, they start like, they're like, hell yeah. Like we do, we can just now actually focus on cool things that we actually care about versus, it's kind of like we were talking about all the way in the very beginning, like taking out the trash. Yeah, taking out the trash is important, but do I need to make it my full-time job? Maybe not. Like, you know, I'm willing to do it. But at a certain point when you get to scale, it's like, let's have the professionals do it. Like let's have Kaleidoscope, who are professionals at this, do this and do what they do best versus like, let's go do some drug discovery. 

Bogdan - 00:32:21: Yeah, I think that's exactly it. And I think we very, very consistently here, when we get to a point where we're engaging with like the technical side of a company. And so I bring in like people from kind of engine, and prod and stuff to the table. One of the things we hear almost without fail is anytime the questions come up and we have answers like, oh wow, you guys have like thought about everything. It's like, yes, we spend all day, every day literally, thinking about this stuff. And so it doesn't matter that, you know, we're three years old or whatever. We've literally lived and breathed this and have a team that has built like very robust software in other contexts. And a lot of the team has worked in the bio context specifically. And so it's always like a pleasant surprise for people. And I think I'm like, what did you expect? I guess like a lot of startups, like in general can be like bullshitty. And like, maybe there are a lot of companies that like are just kind of like fishing and they're like, oh, I'll build it when someone gives me a contract. And it's like, no, we knew from the start that this space is one that we'll see through bullshit pretty quickly. People are building up their image of like, do I trust this company? They're like, you know, theory on that for a while before they reach out. But then when they reach out and you can solve something for them, then these like sparks happen and you can really take off. And so I'm like always proud of the engineering and product we've done. And it feels very tangible in those moments when someone has that kind of reaction. 

Jon - 00:34:00: You also lived it, man. 

Bogdan - 00:34:02: Yeah. Yeah. 

Jon - 00:34:03: Right. You lived it. And you were talking about just like the importance of having actually done the thing. You did the thing. Like you are intimately aware of like, and just like me, like I, I was intimately aware with the pain points of getting equipment because I couldn't afford equipment. Right. And I was like, oh, okay. Maybe, you know, and I was like, you know, being in the lab, I kind of like understood the mechanics of it. And I think, especially in science, it takes that firsthand experience to really, that's what, that's what I meant when I was like, we specialize in lab equipment leasing because labs have specific needs, like scientists have very specific needs. And so like, exactly what you guys just like, yo, I've lived this and then there's a surprise like, oh, whoa. You're like, yeah, I'm kind of like solving my own pain point here. Like, so like I, and, and I am you, like I am you. So therefore we're speaking the same language here. I'm excited to see that world where these new kind of time savings and cost savings are ultimately adopted more fully because at the end of the day, it's like the outcome just improves patient outcomes. Because that not only is time is of the essence internally at these like lifetime companies, time is of the essence for the patient. 

Bogdan - 00:35:13: Yes. 

Jon - 00:35:14: Right. They can't wait. 

Bogdan - 00:35:15: Yes. 

Jon - 00:35:16: So why would, why should we like, right? Why should we?  

Bogdan - 00:35:19: It's so funny. I mean, I'm so glad you said that because I think there's very few industries and this is one of them where you can say like, hey, empowering this group of people is not just like economically good for them, but has like, positive impact. No matter how you slice it, it's good for chunks of the world. I was talking with someone about, I forget the exact framing, I think it was around What's a good, you know, what if statement for, you know, a few years out or whatever. And so I was thinking like, okay, a few years out is not, you didn't say like decades out. So I like should like ground it in something. So I was like, what if every drug reached its patient like a year sooner? And the like initial response from the person was, can we like think of something like more exciting? Like, is that, I'm like, what are we talking about? I'm like, I don't think you realize what that means for patients. And my then response, obviously I was like incredulous that like I read this, but my actual response to the person was like, okay, well, internally I'm like, maybe they just said that and it's not buzzy or whatever. They didn't really think about it. So where my mind immediately went to was like, my mom was diagnosed with like leukemia in the late 90s. And literally the advances that were being made year over year in that specific time point in her type of leukemia are the reason that she is now healthy and was not obvious for a while that that would be the case. And then like something clicked. And if you had extended those timelines by a year or two, like, I don't know if she would have been where she is. And so to me, it's like very profound on like the impact is so clear that you could have on people who are not the ones doing the research. So it's now not only are you like driving growth of a field and economic growth and empowering like companies to blossom. But like the net result of that is these pretty life changing moments for people who are waiting for that tech to become commercial, whether they know that they're waiting for it or not. 

Jon - 00:37:30: Exactly, exactly. And that's like the exact reason why. I get out of bed every day, just like with that like sense of urgency and fired up to like get after it. And like, you know, life sciences and everything in the world, but it's everything to me because of that element. And it gets me fired up hearing about Kaleidoscope and everything that you're working on, because I feel like we're kindred spirits here in terms of like what we're shooting for. So it's really, really awesome to hear everything you guys are cooking up is super, super cool. And Bogdan, you've been super generous with your time. So thank you for being willing to spend this much time with me. And, you know, in traditional closing fashion, you know, there are two questions. And first is, would you like to give any shout outs to anyone who supported you along the way?  

Bogdan - 00:38:15: There's specific individuals that have been profound, but it's also been a collection of people that are just very generous with their time and people who maybe I only had a few interactions with, but I found that those interactions were really meaningful. And so I guess instead of giving you specific names, what I'll say is like, encourage people to just pay it forward. And if you can give your time for something and there is no clear benefit to you, like still do it because you don't really know how you can shape like the trajectory of a person and it can be very profound. So yeah, like thank you to all the like anonymous, miscellaneous, random people that gave me time that led to where I am. 

Jon - 00:39:01: Absolutely. And there's so many moments in my life when someone paid it forward to me and I didn't deserve it at all. I was like a snotty nose brat, probably. And I was like, no, I'm thinking about like, holy crap. It was almost like giving me that the time of day was maybe even looked like a bad idea. But they did it anyways. And I shaped up and I cleaned up. And it really that's like the profound the profoundness that you can't really anticipate. And I think the special thing. Absolutely. And second closing question, if you can give any advice to your 21-year-old self, what would it be? 

Bogdan - 00:39:38: Yeah, definitely just go and do the thing. And you won't know until you do the thing. And no amount of thinking you've read or absorbed through secondhand will prepare you for doing the thing. And you might find that what you thought your whole life you were going to do is definitely not the case. And you might find that something that is very hard is so compelling that it's worth doing. You won't know until you do it. So I have very few, very, very few regrets in my life. And this is not a regret. It's just advice to my 21-year-old definitely is like, if there's something that interests me, just try it earlier. 

Jon - 00:40:13: Absolutely. And one thing I'll add to that, I think people maybe underestimate their own abilities. And that by just doing, you just, like we talk about compounding, the more you do, the better you get. And it's a compound function. Like the longer you do it and the more you do it, you just see in the out years where you're just like, oh, how far I've come. Like whatever it may be. It could be business. It could be an instrument. It can be a sport. Like just starting early and doing it, doing the thing. You would surprise yourself at how far you can go. So I love that advice, honestly. Bogdan, this has been hella fun. 

Bogdan - 00:40:53: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me. 

Jon - 00:40:55: Yeah, yeah, this is super fun. This is super, super fun. My wife and I love to go to New York. Before we hit record, we're talking about how we got to get out of sleepy San Francisco from time to time and go live the New York lifestyle for, you know, and not just be sleepy in bed by like 8:30. So the next time I'm in your neck of the woods, I'm going to give you a shout.  

Bogdan - 00:41:16: Please. 

Jon - 00:41:16: If we can eat some tasty food. Thanks again. You've been super generous with your time.

Bogdan - 00:41:21: Yeah, thanks, Jon. Appreciate you.  

Outro - 00:41:25: That's all for this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast. We hope you enjoyed our four-part series with Bogdan Knezevic. If you did, consider subscribing, leaving us a review and sharing it with your friends. Be sure to join us for our next series featuring Michael Antonov. Founder and CEO of Deep Origin. Deep Origin is helping scientists solve disease and extend lifespan by building tools that simplify R&D, stimulate biology, and untangle the complexity of life. Michael is a highly accomplished serial entrepreneur and software architect. Before founding Deep Origin, he co-founded two companies that were both successfully acquired, Scaleform, which was acquired by Autodesk, and Oculus, which was acquired by Facebook. At Oculus, he led development of the PC Runtime and SDK for DK1, DK2, and the Oculus Rift. He also started the WebVR team, which shipped the Carmel browser and the React VR, and contributed to Caffe2 and PyTorch as part of the Facebook AI team. Prior to that, at Scaleform, he led development of its GFX product line, a GPU-accelerated graphics and UI toolkit used in major games across PC, console, and mobile. The software enabled seamless playback of flash content inside game engines and became the industry standard for in-game user interfaces. In addition to his experience in software, Michael is also an investor and the founder of Formic Ventures, which makes early-stage investments in biotechnology startups focused on human longevity as well as technology startups and companies that make human lives more meaningful. With deep experience in VR, AI, developer tools, and bioinformatics, Michael brings a unique perspective to building software for life sciences, making this a conversation you won't want to miss. 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.