Building Berkeley's $1B Innovation Ecosystem | Darren Cooke (Part 1/4)

Intro - 00:00:06: 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.

Our guest today is Darren Cooke, Interim Chief of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer at UC Berkeley. Darren also serves as Executive Director of UC Berkeley's Life Sciences Entrepreneurship Center, is a professional faculty member at the Haas School of Business, and is the former chair of the BioTrack at the Berkeley SkyDeck Startup Accelerator. In addition to his leadership roles, Darren teaches entrepreneurship at Haas and for the Innovation Corps programs for the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. He's also an investor and the former chair of medical device and digital health at Life Science Angels. As an attorney, Cooke led the IP legal team for the Life Science Tools Group of Bio-Rad Laboratories and was a life sciences patent litigator at Covington & Burling. Before law school, he was a mechanical engineer developing cochlear implants at UCSF. With deep experience across startups, academia, law, and investing, Darren brings a uniquely multifaceted perspective on life science innovation, making this a series you won't want to miss.

Over the next four episodes, Darren shares how he built a career at the crossroads of law, engineering, and entrepreneurship, shaping biotech innovation from the courtroom to the classroom to UC Berkeley's leadership. He also reflects on the lessons learned along the way, from the value of showing up and seizing opportunity to the importance of mentorship, humility, and building systems that connect people and ideas.

Today, we'll hear about Darren's early years in the East Bay, growing up in Livermore with a single mom, moving to Lafayette, and developing a strong curiosity for engineering that carried him to Cal Poly's 'learn by doing' program and a UCSF co-op working on cochlear implants. We'll hear how those choices led him to graduate school at Berkeley, then onto Columbia Law, and eventually into his first taste of high-stakes patent litigation at Brown and Bain in Phoenix. Along the way, Darren shows how pressure-testing assumptions and pivoting without drama became a through-line in his career, shaping the way he mentors students and thinks about work.

Without further ado, let's dive into part one of our conversation with Darren Cooke.

Jon Chee - 00:03:13: Darren, so good to see you again. Thank you for coming on the podcast.

Darren Cooke - 00:03:17: Well, thank you, Jon. It's my pleasure to be here.

Jon Chee - 00:03:19: I've really been looking forward to this, especially seeing an opportunity to geek out about Berkeley. My joke is that having grown up in Berkeley, you can take the boy out of Berkeley, but you can never take Berkeley out of the boy. And I'm really excited for this conversation. In traditional Biotech Startups Podcast fashion, we always like to turn back the hands of time and learn about your upbringing, how you grew up, and how it influenced your career, your leadership philosophy, and what those formative moments were. So if you take us all the way back, what was young Darren like as a teenager growing up?

Darren Cooke - 00:03:56: You know, it's funny. I've never been interviewed going that far back.

Jon Chee - 00:04:01: Oh, really?

Darren Cooke - 00:04:02: No. You would typically start with college, maybe at the earliest. But before that, I had to think about it a little bit.

Jon Chee - 00:04:10: Well, thank you for the privilege. We appreciate it.

Darren Cooke - 00:04:14: Well, thank you for asking. It's cool. It's cool to think about this. So going way back, I grew up in Livermore, East Bay, California. A single mom raised me out there. She was a dental hygienist, lived there with my sister. So, fair to say, I think I had a typical childhood of a guy who liked cars and toys and RC stuff—just kind of a nerd. There was no doubt when I went to college, I was going to go into mechanical engineering. That was the stuff that I was working on back then; it just led in that direction. I knew what I was going to do.

So I moved to Lafayette when I was a junior in high school and went to Acalanes High School here in Lafayette, so over the hill.

Jon Chee - 00:05:05: My co-founder went to Acalanes.

Darren Cooke - 00:05:07: Yeah, a lot of people from here.

Jon Chee - 00:05:09: Yep.

Darren Cooke - 00:05:10: You tee these up, and I'm like, I don't even know what to tell you about that. I don't think there's anything that interesting about that part of the story.

Jon Chee - 00:05:18: I was going to say, I'm already intrigued. Your fascination with cars—were you working on cars growing up? Was that a connection with mechanical engineering?

Darren Cooke - 00:05:28: Well, sure. When I turned 16, I sure was. It was bikes. And before that, it was RC cars and whatever. There was a lot of that. For sure. From the beginning. Anything with wheels, that's the thing.

It's funny that you ask this because I've recently, just when conversing with people, it could be an icebreaker. It could just be I'm sitting down for a meeting. I'll ask somebody—and I'm going to ask you—what are your three top hobbies? And then I'm going to ask you to put them in order. Okay?

Jon Chee - 00:05:59: Okay. Yeah. So I would say my first hobby is going to new restaurants with my wife. We're big foodies, and I think that part of growing up in Berkeley with Chez Panisse, kind of just being rooted into the food and culinary scene, is something that is woven into my DNA too. I think it's a big reason why, being in San Francisco now, we just can't find ourselves leaving because there's an endless amount of restaurants to discover. So I would say, number one, going to new restaurants. Number two, music. We love seeing live music. Before we hit record, we were talking about the Grateful Dead. Dead & Company was right in the park. So, we love going to see live music. And, honestly, that stemmed from going to The Gilman as a kid, and I was a ruffian at that time. That has never left me either, so live music would be two. And then three—and obviously, one and two are not exclusively just me and my wife—but I would say spending time with friends and family outdoors. So, we love to rock climb, and friends like to surf. I'm more of hanging out on the beach and grilling while they go surf, but we can all coexist. So those are my three hobbies.

Darren Cooke - 00:07:22: Okay. That's awesome. I love it. And obviously, there are no wrong answers. But the reason I brought this up is because, like I said, I've started doing this regularly. And then consistently, the person I ask will say, "Okay, well, what are your three hobbies?" And mine are similar, actually, in some respects. Number one, easy: cooking. Number two, working on old cars. And so that's why I mentioned this, is because it's coming up recently. People are like, "Wait, you work on old cars?"

Jon Chee - 00:07:51: Like, "I do. Is that weird?" No. That's not weird at all. I was going to say, one of the reasons why we always like going all the way back is because there are so many hobbies and formative moments that you carry with you to the current day. If you really think about it, even just how one conducts themselves, there are always these inflection points or through-lines that are really interesting. So, it sounds like at 16, you were completely into bikes, cars, and all of that.

Darren Cooke - 00:08:30: All that mechanical stuff. Oh, here's another point of intersection. My third is rock climbing.

Jon Chee - 00:08:36: Really?

Darren Cooke - 00:08:37: Big time. Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:08:37: Love it. Okay. Now we're going to start to really geek out. I used to go to Touchstone all the time, but the Touchstone gym in San Francisco is a bit farther. So we go to, um, it used to be called Planet Granite; now it's called Movement. Still geeking out, but I was way better back in the day. Looking back, I was like, oh, I used to be able to do so much, but now it's much more recreational than it is competitive. But I love that. What I will say is when you said cooking, I was like, dang. I wish I had that skill because I'm a terrible chef. I can do the eating, but the cooking is a bit harder for me.

So, you know, growing up, you're now at Acalanes. What were you thinking when you were approaching university? Were you like, I'm going to stay local? I'm going to go afar? And it sounded like you already kind of honed in on, I'm going to do mechanical engineering. But did you know where you were going to go?

Darren Cooke - 00:09:33: Yeah. No. So at the time, it's fair to say I was not a particularly good student. Let's face it.

Jon Chee - 00:09:40: Yeah. No. I mean, look.

Darren Cooke - 00:09:42: I'd say in high school and before, you wouldn't characterize me as being academic. I was more hanging out with friends who liked to work on cars. That was the vibe of high school. So when it came to going to college, I only applied in-state. I only applied to state schools. This is the eighties also, and I think that was...

Jon Chee - 00:10:02: I did the same, by the way. Okay. I did the same.

Darren Cooke - 00:10:05: So I was admitted to Irvine and Santa Barbara and Davis and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. And so I just went on a road trip and looked at each of those colleges, and it was easy. And if you've ever been to San Luis Obispo...

Jon Chee - 00:10:20: So nice.

Darren Cooke - 00:10:21: It's gorgeous there. So as soon as I was there, I'm like, heck yeah. This is where I want to be.

Jon Chee - 00:10:26: And a great engineering program too.

Darren Cooke - 00:10:28: Yeah. Right. Exactly. And I liked the ethos of it. Even back then in the eighties, the motto of Cal Poly was 'learn by doing.' So every class had a lab component. That's what I like to do, tools and things. So that was easy. I went there in the late eighties, and I had a great time. So that worked.

However, in the middle of this all, I got this notion—and I have to admit this was because of TV, a lot of stuff happens because of what you see on TV—that I got this idea of, you know what? I'll bet I could be a doctor. I don't know. ER was good. George Clooney was on it. It was a good show. I thought, well, what do I need to do? I need to take different classes because organic chemistry is not part of mechanical engineering. So I did. I took all those classes—biochem, O-chem, all the prerequisites to apply to medical school. And then I started looking for opportunities to be an engineer in a medical environment, which I did. I got a co-op at the time. It was like a co-op in the middle of college where you can go and work for nine months. So I did this at UCSF, Department of Otolaryngology, working on cochlear implants, which are fancy embedded hearing aids.

And I liked it a lot. But now I'm in a medical environment. Ultimately, according to the timeline, if you're looking at my LinkedIn or resume, that's where I went to work. So after I graduated from college, I went directly to UCSF to the same department because they hired me after graduation, just working on the same projects. But I've been in this environment where I'm the engineer who everyone knows is destined for medical school. That's the guy. And so they gave me all these opportunities for volunteering in the ER. I actually scrubbed in. This is surely not legal now. Probably wasn't even legal then.

Jon Chee - 00:12:36: Bring Darren in. We need to have a...

Darren Cooke - 00:12:40: I actually was working in the ENT clinics. Again, this can't be legal, but pretending to be a medical student, even though I was an engineer with the coat and everything, and would do the intake for patients. That's wild. And what did I discover? After all that—the people I was working with were fantastic. They were so supportive of helping me achieve my vision. And some of it was exciting and fun. I left thinking, this is not like TV at all.

Jon Chee - 00:13:07: Yeah. This is not the George Clooney lifestyle that I was anticipating.

Darren Cooke - 00:13:13: Exactly. And I thought, I don't want to do this. Whoa. It was a tough realization. I'm like, I can't believe I was fooled by TV, apparently. I thought this was going to be super glamorous. It was not super glamorous, and it was just something I didn't really like much, ultimately.

Jon Chee - 00:13:31: I mean, I think learning what you don't like is critically important because if you went down that path not having that visceral experience where you're like, I don't want to do this, and you've spent a decade of your life training for that thing... that's why I always think it's critical for everyone to just pressure-test those assumptions. Not that you can just go scrub in and see what it's actually like, but try to get a little bit of exposure just to figure out if it resonates or not. So I think that's a fantastic experience, albeit it didn't result in you pursuing the medical degree.

Darren Cooke - 00:14:10: And you're exactly right. This is what I tell students now. I teach at Haas. I used to have an undergraduate class that—I'll explain later why I don't; it still exists, it's just that I'm not teaching it. So I talk to a lot of undergrads at Berkeley, and I give them the same advice. It's like, how sure are you that this is what you want to do? You need to get the experience to make sure before you spend too much time doing it. The other bit of advice is don't overthink it. Guess what? If you go down a road and then you realize, 'Ah, shoot. This was not what I expected,' or 'Why am I doing this?' you can do something else. Right? Yeah. Don't sweat it.

Jon Chee - 00:14:46: I think, especially at Berkeley, most students come in with, 'This is my calling.' And then sometimes it is the calling. But when it isn't, it's like, 'I've gone too far.' No. It's never too late. It is actually never too late. You're a resilient individual and a human being, and you can change course if you want to. And, thinking back on your Cal Poly experience and being in labs, can you talk a little bit about that? Were you doing rotations in labs, or was there a specific professor that perhaps took you under their wing, or were there any mentors that shaped your undergraduate experience?

Darren Cooke - 00:15:26: Not really. I mean, there were certain classes I liked. There were certain professors that I liked. At Cal Poly, you have to do a senior project. My project advisor, I liked a lot, but would I categorize him as a significant mentor? Not really. To answer your question, you would think there would be, but not really. It was really when I graduated and went off to UCSF to work, then there were some mentors. There are folks I was working with; the chair of the department, this guy, Bob Schindler, was who I worked for. It was his lab working on the cochlear implants. He was fantastic. The junior faculty in his organization were fantastic. These are people I still keep in touch with today. So this is a while ago. That was transformative, not only because I realized, what am I doing thinking about going to medical school? But number two, yeah, I just met a lot of people. It was a very different group of faculty, other students. Suddenly, I'm working with UCSF med students, which most of them are quite good. That was a very different experience.

Jon Chee - 00:16:34: Absolutely. It sounds like a great experience. You met great people, and you got deeper exposure to life sciences at large. When did you know it was time to go to graduate school?

Darren Cooke - 00:16:46: Oh, yeah. So what happened then is that I was kind of at a loss. Because I thought, wait, medical school was the plan, but now what am I doing?

Jon Chee - 00:16:57: Yeah. Like an existential crisis.

Darren Cooke - 00:17:00: Yeah. I'm an engineer. I could just keep doing this. And then almost by default, just because I was in an environment where everyone—medical students were post-grads, right? They were grad students. And all the faculty I was working with—it just seemed at that point that I'm like, oh, this is the direction I'm going to be going. So out of almost no better idea, I just applied to grad school in mechanical engineering because that's what I knew. And that's when I was accepted to Berkeley. I was working at UCSF thinking, well, I guess I'll just go to grad school in mechanical engineering, and then I did. That's what happened. I was accepted and started at Berkeley in the early nineties.

I worked in a lab. I joined a then-junior PI's lab. This blows me away. Tony Keaveny, the professor I worked for, was brand new when I started. He just retired, which is hard for me to calculate.

Jon Chee - 00:17:57: Yeah. That's incredible.

Darren Cooke - 00:18:00: Yes. So I was in the Keaveny Lab, orthopedic biomechanics. Loved it. But pretty early on, I realized this was not my vision. I also went there sort of by default.

Jon Chee - 00:18:12: Yeah. And again, it's almost like people think there's a secret to all this, but it's trial and error. Most things are trial and error.

Darren Cooke - 00:18:23: That's all it is.

Jon Chee - 00:18:23: But you have to try. You have to try. And so, you're like, okay. Being a doctor, not for me. Being in the mechanical engineering laboratory, also not for me. From there, what was the next node for you?

Darren Cooke - 00:18:39: So, I was working with a medical resident at UCSF. Even when I came to Berkeley, whatever I was working on at UCSF, I brought over into my graduate program as a project. So there was still a crossover. Berkeley, I think, just started a joint program between UCSF and Berkeley. But in any event, I was bringing UCSF tech with me. There was a medical resident at UCSF. His wife was an engineer who became an attorney and was working at Wilson Sonsini, a big law firm. And this is the first I'd ever heard of this. I'm like, wait. I kind of got the idea that you could be an engineer and go to medical school because I already tried that. But the more I looked into it, I met her and I understood what she was doing, and I thought, ah, this is a lot more interesting. At the time, it was a better fit, a better vibe for me.

There are different paths. If you're curious to know what you could do when you're an engineer and you go to law school, there are different paths you can go on. Each one seemed neat. So I took the LSAT, the Law School Admission Test, I guess is what it's called. I kind of took it thinking that the 'A' stood for aptitude. Let me take the LSAT, which is a logic test. A bunch of puzzles.

Jon Chee - 00:19:57: Just wing it? You're just like, I'll give this a shot.

Darren Cooke - 00:20:00: I did some practice exams just so I knew the basic format. I'm like, okay. I get these. And they're all—you know what the questions are like. It's like, you're setting a table for 10. Mary can't sit next to Joe. That kind of thing. And you had to—it's just a bunch of puzzles like that. And I took the test, and I did well. Like, I have aptitude.

Jon Chee - 00:20:22: I love that. I had a similar experience while at Berkeley. For a moment, I was like, how can I apply this toxicology and biochemistry background outside of necessarily being in an under-the-hood pipeline? Obviously, now I'm in business. But at one point in time, I was like, maybe patents or toxicology kind of stuff. And at that point, I was taking a bunch of philosophy classes and Berkeley Law classes. That was my moment. I was like, oh, man. I don't got it. That was my moment. I did a stint at law firms, and that's when I was like, maybe not for me. But I had that same exact experience, and I have a great appreciation for the legal practice, and Berkeley's law school is fantastic. And also, I encourage anyone who's interested in philosophy at Berkeley—or even if you're not interested in philosophy—philosophy at Berkeley is awesome. So even if you're a scientist at Berkeley right now, I encourage you to go check it out because the professors are fantastic and the courses are really amazing.

Darren Cooke - 00:21:32: Good plug. You heard it here. Berkeley STEM majors, go check out philosophy.

Jon Chee - 00:21:39: Yeah. It's very cool. I took a bioethics course that was incredibly formative. And this book called Justice, which was one of the course materials, really opened my eyes to bioethics and the interplay between all of that. Again, just formative experiences. I encourage anyone who's still on campus at Berkeley, please. I'm jealous that you're still on campus because I can't just go roll into any course that I want anymore. Incredible mentors and professors who can broaden your purview. But okay. So you're like, okay. I'm just going to take this LSAT thing. Now you're applying to law schools. What was your mindset then?

Darren Cooke - 00:22:24: I hate to even bring this up because it involves television again, which seems like a recurring theme, which shouldn't be a recurring theme. You're too young to remember this, but in the nineties, NBC on Thursday nights had a slate of shows called Must See TV. And it was Seinfeld, Friends, Mad About You, something, but there were four of them. They were all in New York. They were all set in New York City. And I'd grown up in Livermore, then Lafayette, then San Luis Obispo, and now Berkeley. That's where I want to go, and that looks awesome. I'd just grown up in California. I wanted to live somewhere else, someplace with snow and cold weather and that sort of thing. And so from the beginning, Columbia Law School was my top choice. I thought, man, if I get into Columbia Law School, that's where I'm going because most people don't know this, but if you watch Seinfeld, there's an outside view of a restaurant. That's at Columbia. It's just blocks away.

So, anyway, that's where I wanted to go. And then wouldn't you know it, I got in. So as soon as that happened, I'm like, well, that decision is made.

Jon Chee - 00:23:38: Being in California for most of your early days all the way up through early grad school, how was that transition to the East Coast? Because it is very different than growing up in Livermore and Lafayette. How was that for you?

Darren Cooke - 00:23:53: Super exciting. This is where TV did not disappoint.

Jon Chee - 00:23:57: Yeah. Exactly. You know what I mean?

Darren Cooke - 00:24:01: Maybe ER was not an accurate representation of medical practice, but the TV about New York, yeah, it was. There was another one. Actually, what was it? There was a cop show that turned out was filmed in the neighborhood up by Columbia. All those shows, I suppose, are still TV shows that are filmed in New York, and I probably just don't know about them. But those were really popular at the time. So I got there, and it was just like TV. Loved it. Suddenly, I'm in a place where you have to wear a heavy coat, at least occasionally. That was different.

The first year of law school at Columbia, you get put into a dorm if you elect. Most people do elect to be put into a dorm, where I had five male roommates and six female roommates who were just across the hall. We weren't exactly in the same suite, but because the doors were right across from each other, it basically became a reality TV show. Not kidding. Twelve people thrown together from everywhere, high-strung, stressed-out first-year law students. There seriously could be a TV show about this.

Jon Chee - 00:25:11: That's amazing.

Darren Cooke - 00:25:13: Anyway, I loved it. It was a shock because all my classmates were Harvard, Yale, Princeton—and I'm not exaggerating. They all were. And then there was me coming from the state universities in California. So I was a bit of an outlier, but that group, we still stay in touch to this day. I just had my 25th law school reunion last summer. And most of the folks from my reality TV suite were there. Not just randomly. We actually emailed around first. Like, "Hey, we're all going. Right?" And then other people are like, "Wait. If you're going, I'm going." And then it sort of snowballed.

Jon Chee - 00:25:58: That's amazing. And when you were in law school, is this when you were like, "Oh, I found it"? Like, now there's actual resonance here.

Darren Cooke - 00:26:07: I liked it a lot. It was hard. It was competitive. For the first time in my life, I'd ever had to take a test with a pen, just writing words out. I was not used to that, but I figured it out and ended up doing pretty well.

And then you highlighted—and no one ever asks me about this because it's fair to say it's buried down at the bottom of my LinkedIn—I had the most unusual opportunity. Just a lucky thing happened. In law school, I worked for a judge. It started off as a class, a federal clerkship internship or something, where you take a class. Everyone in the class had to put their resume out, and the judges pick the students. The judges get the stack of resumes, and they rank them or they pick them, and they negotiate among themselves who's getting which student. And the judge that I was matched with was Sonia Sotomayor.

Jon Chee - 00:27:06: So crazy.

Darren Cooke - 00:27:08: Who was a trial court judge. Guess what happened later? Right? At the time, she was a district court judge. Somebody who's empaneling juries; this is a trial judge. Even at the time, people were like, "Oh, you're so lucky. People say that Judge Sotomayor is a possibility for the Supreme Court." Like, really? Wow. That's amazing.

Jon Chee - 00:27:33: That's so insane. I love that, though. And what was that experience interning for her?

Darren Cooke - 00:27:41: Fantastic. It was great. This was my second year of law school. I worked for her for a semester. The way that she wanted to set it up is she's like, "Hey, clear your schedule." And by the way, she's fantastic. She's really great. She's like, "I'm going to put you to work. It's not easy. So, clear your schedule for Thursday." I'm like, "Uh, I could do that. Okay." So I didn't take classes on Thursday. She's like, "I want you here all day Thursday." This is obviously well before—this is the nineties. I was wearing a suit at the time. This is a long time ago. But I spent every Thursday for a whole semester in her chambers, working with the other clerks. And she would give us assignments, and she treated her interns—I was the one intern—but she treated the intern as just another clerk, but just doing 20% of the work as the normal clerks. So it was great. She gave me an assignment that was really cool, and I did a fancy table for a—it sounds boring, but it was a big project about attorney's fees and compensation. And she actually published the result of my work. So it's published in legal journals, but still, I think, 'Ah, that was great.'

Columbia Law School has a requirement—oh, by the way, that summer, I'd worked as a 2L summer associate at a firm here in Palo Alto. But Columbia Law School has a requirement that you do a substantial amount of pro bono work or volunteer work while you're a student. Like 48 hours was the minimum. And I was looking around thinking, I don't know, I guess I could work for an agency or an organization or something, and there's a database of them. And then I saw on the list, you can also get credit if you work for a judge. I'm like, I know a judge.

So this is old days. I literally called her up on the phone, like, ring, ring-a-ding. "Hey, Judge Sotomayor, I need to do another bit of pro bono work to graduate. Can I come back for another group of Thursdays? This time, it's not part of a class, but I'll be getting hours for pro bono work." And she's like, "Yeah. Heck, yeah. Come on back." And so I did. But in the meantime, she'd been promoted to a circuit court judge, which is an appeals judge. So completely different experience. Different chambers, different office, different clerks. There were now four clerks, and the experience was just as good as the first time. It was so rad. She's great.

The one thing that I was most struck by is that I wrote some memo, some bench memo, and she gave it to her four clerks. I don't know how interesting this is, but it's just an unusual way to work. She gave the copy of the memo I wrote to her four clerks—and these are people who have already graduated from law school, and they're clerking for a circuit judge. So they seemed pretty senior to me at the time. They all marked it up individually. And then Judge Sotomayor put out their markups, and she's like, "Okay, this is going to go fast. So take notes." And she would look at each one and be like, "Yes. Yes." And identify which edits she wanted me to incorporate from the four markups. Whoa. It was wild. Whoa. She was right. It went really fast.

Jon Chee - 00:30:57: That seems like a superpower. It was like...

Darren Cooke - 00:30:59: Right.

Jon Chee - 00:31:00: Let me just quickly glance. That's kind of like what AI can do. Yes. The processing power. That's crazy.

Darren Cooke - 00:31:23: I think it was pretty clear that if you're an engineer going to law school, you could just go be a corporate attorney, I suppose. But because the technical background is so valued if you're working in intellectual property, patents, other stuff like that, and also it's probably what you're interested in. If you took the time to go to engineering school, you're probably interested in technology. And that's where there's an intersection with patents.

So I knew I was going to be working in patents. But if you're doing patent stuff, there are two main paths. Litigation, which is mostly companies suing other companies over patent infringement. So it's like Intel and Broadcom suing each other. Stuff like that. Or there's prosecution, which sounds criminal, but it's not. It just means you're translating someone's invention into something that could be presented to the patent office, and then you get claims out of it. That's prosecution. Fair to say, very different practices. Litigation is very much focused on—if you're representing a big company in a major patent litigation, you learn everything about that technology and the patent or the patents that are involved, and that's all you do for months. That's all you think about for months is that technology, and you think about the bad guys on the other side who are infringing it or, you know, depending on which side you're on. And there are arguments and motion practice, and that's what appealed to me. That's what I ended up doing.

Patent prosecution is more for people—for scientists who are interested in law school, and I do highly recommend it. If this is something that anyone's interested in, they should really think about this. But patent litigation: high stakes, kind of long hours, exciting, making arguments before judges, that kind of thing. Patent prosecution, fair to say, is different because it's mostly you working by yourself, working with inventors, researching the field, almost like writing a scientific paper, but it's for the patent office. And then having a cordial debate, if you will, fight with the patent office to negotiate claims. That's the other practice that people would normally go into. It appeals to different people. I loved litigation. It was great.

Jon Chee - 00:33:45: And so how did that first patent litigation opportunity present itself? You mentioned that you had your opportunity in Palo Alto. Did you go back, or did you look elsewhere?

Darren Cooke - 00:33:56: I met my wife in law school. We knew we were getting married when we graduated. We weren't married in law school, but we knew we were going to get married right after because we met the first day of law school.

Jon Chee - 00:34:12: Oh, wow. I know. That's crazy.

Darren Cooke - 00:34:15: But she wanted to do a clerkship. This is a thing that a lot of people do. And obviously, I interfaced with clerks in Judge Sotomayor's chambers. After graduating from law school, they go and work for a judge. My wife—I got that experience in law school. It was fun, a one-day-a-week clerk, but she wanted to do it full-time. So she was applying for clerkships. She's from Seattle, but she was applying for clerkships all up and down the West Coast. I don't know if it's still the protocol now, but at least this was in the nineties, the protocol was that if a judge accepted you for a clerkship, you take it. It's rude to say, "Hold on. Let me see what other offers I get." And because it's also a temporary job, it's not like you know?

So in this big stack of clerkship applications—we used to do this on paper, this is the nineties—there was one application in that stack. At the time, you could read books and find out who the judges are and what their background is. There was one judge that stood out to her who happened to be in Phoenix. It was the one judge that was not strictly on the West Coast. So, otherwise, it was San Diego, L.A., San Francisco, Palo Alto, Portland, Seattle, and one judge in Phoenix. Well, guess what? She got the call from the judge in Phoenix, and she went down there. She loved him. He liked her. Done. So we're moving to Phoenix.

Jon Chee - 00:35:49: There we go.

Darren Cooke - 00:35:50: That was the deal. And so I had clerked at Wilson Sonsini. Just coincidentally, the same law firm that the wife of the resident that inspired me to even go to law school, that's where she worked. But I was working for the summer at Wilson Sonsini in Palo Alto, and they offered for me to come on as a normal associate. But I thought, shoot. My wife has to be in Phoenix. That's where I have to be too.

So there was one firm. I was looking at all the firms in Phoenix, and after looking at the listing, I concluded there's really just one. Of all these top-shelf, tech-focused litigation firms, there's just one. It was called Brown and Bain. Fun fact: C. Randall Bain and Jack Brown started the firm. They moved from New York because one of them had a family member with a health issue where it was more healthy to be in an arid environment. They came from this top-shelf firm. And in fact, Brown and Bain still continued to use the letter templates and all this stuff from that firm in New York. But not just the letter templates, they really brought what we called—and we still call today; I really keep in touch with people from my time in Phoenix. I have a regular call with folks from there—The Brown and Bain manner. It had a 'grand manner.' Whoa. In Phoenix. Whoa. Yeah. That's wild. It actually taught me what it's like to work at the highest level. I could imagine if you were like a top-shelf sports team where winning was expected. Like Duke men's basketball or something. It kind of felt like that.

Jon Chee - 00:37:35: I love that. Because when I think back on the pivotal moments, at least in my career, I think about getting exposure to where you see what excellence is like. And your definition of excellence was quite different; you just don't know yet. You haven't seen it yet. And then you're like, oh, people can operate at this level. It's kind of like you go from varsity basketball or whatever sports you play, and then you go to Division I, or whatever division. You're like, this is what's possible.

Darren Cooke - 00:38:11: Where did you see that?

Jon Chee - 00:38:13: It was probably from the transition from Berkeley High to Berkeley. Honestly, Berkeley High, fantastic high school, and I thought I was just killing it. I thought I was absolutely killing it. Shout out to Mr. Fong, the AP Bio teacher at Berkeley High. He was formerly an IB grad student at Berkeley. And so I got a taste of what the Berkeley style of MCB can be like. But there's nothing like actually going and doing that at Berkeley, and you see, oh, this is a whole different level, and the bar doesn't get dropped. The bar just keeps going up, and that really opens your eyes to what the limits are. For me, really, are those limits that I'm setting for myself real or not? And seeing if you can exceed that. That was one.

And then, two, meeting my co-founder who also went to Acalanes. He went through the Haas track. But also, it's not only when you join winning franchises, like UC Berkeley, but also just meeting individuals who individually operate at a level that... and so I saw what excellence was like when I met my co-founder. But he also gave me a little bit of a nudge. He was like—I mentioned I was a ruffian growing up—he's like, "You could work a little harder here." And I was like, okay. So that was a formative moment for me. And it sounds like at this firm, you're surrounded by Avengers-level attorneys.

Darren Cooke - 00:39:55: They were that good. Yeah. So it was great. And it's funny to think that this is in Phoenix. Like, you wouldn't think, middle of the desert.

Jon Chee - 00:40:03: And what were some formative experiences at this firm? Were there any challenges or triumphs that are memorable to you, that stuck out to you? Like, a case you won or just, "Oh, crap. We're going to lose this. We gotta will this into a W."

Darren Cooke - 00:40:21: Yeah. So we went to trial. There were all-nighters. There were all sorts of fun stories to think about. This is back in the day when document production was literally done with boxes of paper, and you had to go through them and put some aside. And there were orders where we're like, "Wait. If we have to redo the production, we have to stay up all night." "Yeah. We do. We have to stay up all night to do this." So it was a whole lot. It was a lot. But the people I was working with were fantastic, so I loved that.

The one thing that I would have done differently—and you didn't ask me the question, but this is something that I still regret. And regret is too strong a word because I don't really care that much, but I still would have done it differently. My wife, after her two-year clerkship—so we were in Phoenix for three years—her two-year clerkship with the judge, that was the end of it. She had applied for a scholarship to go to Cambridge, England. Gates Scholarship, the equivalent of the Rhodes Scholarship, but funded by the Gates Foundation. It still exists. It's just less famous, I guess, than the Rhodes Scholarship, but the Gates Scholarship. And she got it. So now she gets to go to Cambridge, and it was such a generous scholarship that it would have paid for me to go and, I don't know, sit and drink coffee or something. I'm not sure what.

Jon Chee - 00:41:39: That's a cool scholarship.

Darren Cooke - 00:41:41: Exactly. But I was on a case that was going to trial. And I thought, I know the documents better than anyone on the team. No way can I go to the UK and just leave my trial team behind because how are they going to know what documents are what? So I said, no. Forget it. My wife can just go off to Cambridge, and they're supposed to go to trial pretty early in when she was supposed to be there. And I'll just catch up. She can go off. I'll finish. The case will go to trial. Then of course, the case never went to trial. It just got delayed. I never went to England.

Jon Chee - 00:42:19: Oh, man. Bummer. That ship has sailed.

Darren Cooke - 00:42:23: I had the scholarship just by dint of being married to her.

Jon Chee - 00:42:27: Yeah.

Darren Cooke - 00:42:28: But I passed on it. So the case finally got pushed out, and then it settled. But by the time that happened, she was coming back.

Jon Chee - 00:42:39: You're like, "Alright. Well, we're right back. Tell me how the United Kingdom was."

Darren Cooke - 00:42:44: Yeah. I know. So I did visit her once when she was there. The whole year, I visited her once. But, anyway, guess what? I wasn't that important. I thought I was. I was the guy that knew the documents, but realistically, now from this perspective, they would have survived. It would have been fine. I wasn't the only person who knew the documents. I don't know what I was thinking. So, anyway, point being, I don't know if it's a lesson or something, but don't overestimate your own importance, maybe, especially when you're a second-year associate.

Jon Chee - 00:43:17: I mean, that is definitely an important perspective to just take a step back for a moment. I think too, to go back to when you see what excellence is like, that experience of a humbling moment is also an important one. Because I think especially in company building or your career, understanding that there are always going to be people who are better than you at something, and that's okay. But actually, what's important is just to work with those people who are better than you as a team. That is the important thing. Because, definitely, going into Berkeley, I was like, I got this. This is going to be a cakewalk.

Darren Cooke - 00:43:57: Mhmm.

Jon Chee - 00:43:58: I don't got this. I need to step my game up. And so, it sounds like you basically got this firsthand experience, like a baptism by fire on what a high-performing law firm litigation firm is like. And I'm sure that the level of rigor and attention to detail, I can imagine, was crazy.

Darren Cooke - 00:44:17: Mhmm.

Outro - 00:44:19: That's all for this episode of the Biotech Startups Podcast featuring Darren Cooke. Join us next time for part two, where Darren takes us deeper into top-tier patent litigation at Covington in San Francisco and what operating at an elite level taught him about rigor, teamwork, and real feedback. He'll also share why he pivoted in-house to Bio-Rad as life evolved at home, how working closely with investors reshaped his view of IP strategy, and the career lesson he learned about being busy and bored.

If you're enjoying the podcast, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a friend. Thanks for listening. 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.

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