How We Built a Biotech Startups Launchpad at UC Berkeley | Darren Cooke (Part 4/4)

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.

In our last episode, Darren shared how simply showing up turned mentorship into teaching. He also went in-depth on tech transfer, letter agreements, and licensing for founders. If you missed it, check out part three. In part four, we pick up with the launch of UC Berkeley's Life Sciences Entrepreneurship Center where Darren ran 100 discovery interviews to map real needs then built programs around them: a fellows track for PhDs and postdocs, a life sciences twist on I-Corps using a purpose-built venture canvas, and a high-energy JPMorgan week showcase that pulled campus groups into one room. He also reflects on Berkeley's cultural shift towards entrepreneurship, what it's like working with Chancellor Rich Lyons, and the lessons he'd pass on to young founders about connection, persistence, and the magic of showing up.

Jon Chee - 00:01:30

So you're now professional faculty. I know your responsibilities at UC Berkeley continued to grow over time. How did the opportunity to work with the Life Sciences Entrepreneurship Center come about?

Darren Cooke - 00:01:43

That would be the next thing. So I was fully employed with my small law practice and the work that I was doing for the NSF and ultimately also the NIH. I was doing a bunch of entrepreneurship courses for those organizations. In 2021, the then Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer for the campus, Rich Lyons, got a gift that would allow the creation of this Life Sciences Entrepreneurship Center.

First-of-its-kind virtual center, the notion being, you know, we have so many resources on campus, and they don't seem to be working together.

Jon Chee - 00:02:23

You know?

Darren Cooke - 00:02:23

You know?

Jon Chee - 00:02:24

I was gonna say, it looks like it's all kind of interwoven, but you'd be surprised.

Darren Cooke - 00:02:32

Right. So, yeah, the gift came from Regent Mark Robinson, an investment banker at Centerview. He's a UC Regent. His friend, David Kern, the CEO of 4DMT, a public company started by Dave Schaffer here on campus. So those two, Mark and David, were friends from college. They gave—this is all public information—a $3 million gift to fund a five-year term center. This is an experiment that had never been done. It was like, "What if we give a $3 million gift to be spent over five years, hire somebody just to do something with it, and just try to knit together resources across campus with the goal of getting more biotech companies spun out of Berkeley?" That's the goal. But that was it. That's all we had.

So I remember sitting down with Rich Lyons on my first day at work. And what I said was, "What are we gonna do?" Truly a blank canvas. There was no direction on the gift other than just, "Knit together resources and more biotechs." However you get there is wide open. I was the executive director of the center. The center was just me, and Rich Lyons was the faculty director of the center. There were just two of us. There was no one else.

And so I thought, you know what I should do? Because I've been giving my students the assignment to do 100 customer discovery, market needs-finding interviews in seven weeks. That's the goal. That's a very intensive class that the NSF puts on. At this time, hundreds of students had gone through my classes, and I was giving them that assignment, but I'd never done it myself. So I thought, you know what? I'd better give myself the goal. I need to talk to 100 people who have relevant information about market needs for a virtual life sciences entrepreneurship center on campus in seven weeks.

And so I set out to do it. Now I'm a UC Berkeley employee, and I told them, "I'm setting up the center, just trying to understand the needs and wants and what works and what doesn't work." And I just did it. I got the 100th interview at the end of the seven-week time. But it proved to be so useful. Just because I knew it would be, I just kept doing it. Maybe not at quite the same pace because that's 15 a week. That's 15 calls a week.

Jon Chee - 00:04:53

That's a lot. Yeah. It's a lot.

Darren Cooke - 00:04:55

I just kept doing it. I'll tell you, what we ended up building was nothing like what we had initially imagined. We had ideas, like, "Oh, we could start a boot camp program for wannabe faculty entrepreneurs," or something. I had a bunch of ideas. We didn't do that.

Jon Chee - 00:05:12

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Darren Cooke - 00:05:13

You know, because based on the 100 interviews, I thought, "Ah, you know what we should do first? Start a fellows program for PhD students and postdocs," which we did, and it's still running. But this all just kind of shook out from the customer discovery process, from market needs finding. Market needs being campus market needs. I did that, started a whole bunch of programs. I'm happy to talk about all the programs because I'm super happy about them.

The fellows program is one of them, which is a signature. We're now in our sixth cohort. We take three PhD students or postdocs into a program. My colleague, Tobias Schmidt, who's now at Mubadala, which is a big venture capital firm, was a PhD student at the time. He and I started this. He's now graduated and gone on to be an actual VC. But we started this program to teach PhD students and postdocs what's behind venture, entrepreneurship, and startup formation, and we gave them the assignment of interviewing startups. That was the idea. Go find people who started companies and figure out how they did it. That was the whole process. It's expanded into a much bigger program now. It's now six months long. There's a showcase in the middle. Ultimately, there's a part of the program where they're now scouting for things that are potentially commercializable from the campus. And so we've now had up to 18 fellows who've been through the program. Amazing. They come back and say it was transformative.

Jon Chee - 00:06:38

They'll be like, "I got the job because I went through this program." And they're really good.

Jon Chee - 00:06:43

Is this limited to specific departments? Or...

Darren Cooke - 00:06:45

It's life sciences only. So we're looking at expanding the program now outside of life sciences. But right now, everything under LSEC, the Life Sciences Entrepreneurship Center, was life sciences only. So, anyway, there's the fellows program. I did a special version of the I-Corps program, which was life sciences only. Again, an I-Corps boot camp. I used to teach it for two weeks, but now it's only life sciences teams.

In these classes, we have something called a Canvas, a business model Canvas. Frankly, the classic business model canvas never really worked for life sciences companies just because the market's all totally different. So I came up with a different canvas, which we now use. The Life Sciences Venture Canvas is now used in the special version of I-Corps. I used it in the NIH boot camp that I taught last year. I don't teach the I-Corps program anymore, but somebody else does, and she uses the Life Sciences Venture Canvas. Works like magic.

Actually, this was—I just published a paper a couple of weeks ago in Nature Biotechnology on how to do a pitch deck. How do you do a good life sciences startup pitch deck? Went through step-by-step, like, what you'd wanna see. I give this presentation a lot, and she knew that, and so we collaborated on this paper. But the Life Sciences Venture Canvas made it into the paper. It's now not quite famous, but it's itching towards becoming more legitimate.

Jon Chee - 00:08:12

Very cool. How does one get involved with this curriculum?

Darren Cooke - 00:08:16

Oh, so it's NSF funded. We have a grant. I guess it's now limited to academic entrepreneurs. But if they're interested, Bay I-Corps, b-a-y-i-c-o-r-p-s. So, like Marine Corps, but I-Corps. bayicorps.com has all the information.

Jon Chee - 00:08:33

Cool. It sounds rad. Like, it sounds like a rad opportunity. I mean, if I was still on campus, I would definitely be signing up.

Darren Cooke - 00:08:40

That is the number one thing. If anyone comes to me and says, "Hey, I've got this idea. I think we could do something with it," I'm like, "You gotta take the I-Corps class first." Not that you have to, but it really changes your mindset.

Jon Chee - 00:08:52

So you got fellows, you got I-Corps...

Darren Cooke - 00:08:54

We got the I-Corps. We've got the showcase. So this is a signature event for Berkeley LSEC. You know, knitting together couldn't be more knitting together than doing a showcase at JPM, where we say, "Look what's happening at Berkeley." And we bring in Bakar Labs tenants and Bakar Fellows awardees and folks from the IGI and Berkeley Skydeck, and we all work together and just say, "Look at all the biotech stuff coming out of Berkeley." And it's a huge event. Earlier this year, in January, we got 1,100 people wanting to attend. I mean, we could do this in the Cow Palace.

Jon Chee - 00:09:30

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Darren Cooke - 00:09:32

That's amazing. We're renting a pretty big bar, but still, it has a capacity of 300. So, big event. So this showcase event, we started launching startups because what I consistently kept hearing, even though we have so many resources on campus, I would talk to faculty or my fellows would find somebody who had something potentially commercializable, and they'd be like, "Yeah, we should totally do something with this. We're thinking about starting a company." And I would say, "You totally should." I mean, we've got a lot of programs, and then they wouldn't. The activation energy was too much. They just wanted to do more experiments or something first.

And so we put together this program called the Venture Grant program to push them over the edge. A little bit of grant funding paired with a little bit of private funding from the Berkeley Skydeck fund, $300k in total. And then they have to do the I-Corps program. They have to do the speed teaming events that we cooked up. They have to do all this stuff. It's part of the deal: if you're gonna get the money, you have to do all the other things. Skydeck programming, meet with advisors, Skydeck Demo Day—all the things that we think are effective on campus. And so we've now launched six biotech startups through the program. Literally, in exchange for getting the money, the first thing you have to do is get a bank account and figure out how to incorporate.

Jon Chee - 00:10:54

Yeah. With that.

Darren Cooke - 00:10:56

Right? So we did that. I just mentioned the speed teaming event. It blows me away. A super simple concept because I kept hearing from PhD students or even faculty, they'd say, "You know, we have this idea, but hey, we're just scientists. There must be somebody at Haas to help us." And I would say, "Probably."

Jon Chee - 00:11:20

Yeah.

Darren Cooke - 00:11:20

I don't know what to tell you. So we brainstormed this, and we thought, "What if we had a speed dating event, but we call it speed teaming for a reason?" We just get people with science, and they meet people with business skills, and they just meet for ten minutes each, and everyone meets each other. And that's the event. No notion that anyone would ever like each other. The original concept was 10 people with science and some invention and 10 people with business skills. So classically, a PhD student and an MBA. And then they all just have to meet each other for ten minutes. Who knows? Maybe you get to the end, and you're like, "I hated every one of them." It never happened that way because we surveyed the heck out of it.

People came out of it, and it was up to them. What I tell people is, "Hey, most of these interactions, nothing will happen. Be prepared for that, but it's only ten minutes. I hope you enjoy the conversation anyway." But maybe you're gonna find someone who you're like, "Yeah, we should follow up. We should go get coffee or something." The average number of follow-ups that even just a 10-by-10 had was three. On average, the participants were following up with three people they met randomly.

Jon Chee - 00:12:44

Wow. I know. That's crazy. I was gonna say it reminds me of when you set up those Zoom rooms.

Darren Cooke - 00:12:50

It's a similar idea, I think.

Jon Chee - 00:12:51

Get together. And it reminds me of, honestly, me and my co-founder. Speaking for Berkeley, I don't know what it's like at other schools, but Haas and the life sciences departments don't really have opportunities to meet. If you're still on the Berkeley campus, most of the people at Haas, if you're an undergrad or MBA, are just in these recruiting cycles. "We gotta get ready to go to investment banking and then consulting." If you're on that track, it's unlikely you're gonna meet someone else who's in the lab the whole time. You never cross paths.

Darren Cooke - 00:13:33

Well, so they volunteered.

Jon Chee - 00:13:35

Yeah. Obviously. But it's just like, let's create a forum in which they can meet when, left to their own devices, they're probably going in opposite directions.

Darren Cooke - 00:13:46

Exactly. Right. So we've had an early success story from this. A postdoc at Berkeley Lab signed up, this guy, Julian Reese, and an MBA/MPH student, Hannah Weber, a current MBA student at Haas, both signed up randomly for the class. They met in one ten-minute Zoom. I guess they hit it off. They did the I-Corps class. They did I-Corps together after meeting in speed teaming and said, "Yeah, we think we have something, and we get along great. We should totally start a company." They started a company. They went to Berkeley Skydeck. They got some grant money. Then they got some more grant money. They actually brought in a $225 million BARDA grant for their tech. And they met in one ten-minute Zoom.

Jon Chee - 00:14:37

Oh my god. Right? That's so crazy. That's really, really cool. And how do people sign up for speed teaming? For anyone out there.

Darren Cooke - 00:14:49

Yeah. So this is now run twice a year by QB3. So if you go to qb3.org, somewhere on the website, speed teaming will be there. Please, anyone. QB3 has expanded it. So we used to do just 10-by-10. That was what we could manage. I think they're now doing two rooms of 10-by-10, so they're getting 40 people through at once. So it has a bigger bandwidth.

Jon Chee - 00:15:14

It's a great event. I love that. And I love hearing all this just because for me, when I was on campus, and I'm sure it's very, very different now, entrepreneurship, especially coming from the bench, was not really embraced. Honestly, I had some nasty conversations about starting a business via my experience in the academic laboratory.

Darren Cooke - 00:15:40

It was always like going to the dark side.

Jon Chee - 00:15:42

That stigma, it sounds like is kind of changing culturally.

Darren Cooke - 00:15:47

It has changed significantly, to the point that we wrote a book about it.

Jon Chee - 00:15:53

Oh, I love that.

Darren Cooke - 00:15:54

The book is literally How UC Berkeley Became an Unexpected Leader in Entrepreneurship and Startups. The point being is that, you know, from the beginning, it says, "How did the University of California, Berkeley, once skeptical of involvement with corporate activities, become a leader in entrepreneurship and startups?" And so this is coming out soon. You can order it on Amazon.

Jon Chee - 00:16:18

Love that. If you're gonna give a teaser of what happened—I mean, by the time the cultural change happened, I was no longer on campus. But obviously, you don't need to give spoilers for the book, but how did you see it start to evolve over time?

Darren Cooke - 00:16:32

I think the big thing started in 2012.

Jon Chee - 00:16:36

Right when I left. I was right off campus right after. Exactly.

Darren Cooke - 00:16:39

The Bakar Faculty Fellows Program was launched in 2012, a translational research grant program. And translational research means pushing research in the direction of commercialization. $300k per faculty distributed, I think, over three years. And so now, it's been around for thirteen years. There have been 90 fellows, close to 100 fellows, and 22 companies started.

The thing is, first of all, there was a bit of FOMO because some faculty are getting these grants, starting companies, and making it look cool. And then others are like, "How do I do that?" You know what I mean? But that really snowballed. So that was the big change. The other big change is that the then Vice Chancellor for Research all through this period, Paul Alivisatos, now the president of the University of Chicago, was a startup founder himself and interested in entrepreneurship. The tech transfer office was within his organization, and so he really pushed this forward.

This is before my time. He commissioned a report back in 2018 written by startup founder faculty and other faculty who were involved with entrepreneurship at the time, around the 2016-2017 time frame, to say, "How do we improve?" Even then, we had a lot of resources on campus. "How do you make sense of all the resources? How do you optimize them? How do we improve the process?" And they came back with, you know, the number one recommendation is that we need to hire somebody to make sense of it all. That was the idea. We need to hire somebody because we have a bunch of resources, and they don't really necessarily work together, but they could work together. What if there was a person in the middle of it all?

And so Rich Lyons just finished being the Dean of Haas. He was the dean from 2008 to 2018. He was our first Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer that we hired in 2019, one year after he concluded his ten-year deanship. So Rich Lyons came into that role and really started things that helped a lot—transformative, if you will. The I&E Council, a major organization on campus, sort of keeps people pointing and pulling in the same direction. He was behind—you heard of the PitchBook rankings? We're number one for undergraduate alumni who have started companies, by a lot. So all this happened under his leadership, and so he really leaned into this. He's very effective. He really leaned into innovation and entrepreneurship. And then you may have heard what happened to Rich. Last summer, he became the chancellor.

Jon Chee - 00:19:20

Yeah. I was gonna say. I think I saw the announcement.

Darren Cooke - 00:19:24

Super lucky that we have, really, the "innovation and entrepreneurship chancellor" because he brought this with him to that office. So under his leadership, we also started the Chancellor's Venture Capital Fund, which furthers our ability to invest in companies that are coming out of the campus. He started the Equity Services Group, now called the Venture Services Group, thinking about how we can actually do more investing, either through the chancellor's fund or through other mechanisms. How do we get some of the financial upside of the innovations? All this is coming from now Chancellor Lyons. So, anyway, the history is—if we didn't get to this part of my career yet—when my then-boss became the chancellor, I moved into his old role. So that's what happened.

Jon Chee - 00:20:07

So cool. Speaking from what I remember, I would always look at Stanford and just be like, "Why do they get to commercialize? We're just as badass as them." Why can't we have an outlet? And I always thought this is a shame because a lot of this stuff just doesn't see the light of day. It's published—obviously, nothing against academia—but sometimes there are things that should be translated and spun out. And I'd love to hear that there's now an infrastructure, a framework, and a support system that embraces it rather than ostracizes it.

And so very cool to hear. And now that you're Chief Innovation Officer, how have your responsibilities evolved? You had this blank canvas. "We're gonna stand this thing up." But now it sounds like it's a well-oiled machine that's a much larger operation. How has your role changed, and what are you spearheading as you look forward in the next year or two?

Darren Cooke - 00:21:14

Yeah. So the big innovation, and I'll admit, this is something that was kind of born out of laziness. Many times, the stuff that I come up with is really because it seems to be the easiest way. But when I took over Chancellor Lyons's old job, I inherited the I&E Council. The I&E Council, really, is the secret sauce of keeping this—I think of the Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer as kind of the conductor of the ecosystem. You gotta have someone in the front of the orchestra, and that person doesn't make any noise.

Jon Chee - 00:21:50

Yeah. And your back is turned as well. Exactly.

Darren Cooke - 00:21:54

You're just waving your arm, and you got a tiny stick. But you need the person. Otherwise, the orchestra is gonna be all doing their own thing. That's what was happening here. And the way we do it is through the CIO office. And the way it practically happens is the I&E Council. This is just the group of people who are invited. They're representing 65 organizations on campus. They're invited to be on the council.

When I took over, I looked at it because I was only life sciences and only thinking about a quarter of the people on the council. I looked at it and thought, "I don't know what most of these people are doing." I could guess, but I really don't know. And I thought, "I guess I could have a phone call with everybody, one by one, and talk to them, but that's gonna take forever." I thought, "How about we put together this shared spreadsheet, basically, where they could just put"—and this is actually born out of laziness, but it's something I'm most proud of because it's so ridiculously effective—the "Wins and Opportunities" sheet. Everybody has a row on the sheet, every organization. As part of being a member of the I&E council, once a month, you gotta put in just a few words about what you did in the previous month. That's it. You're not getting graded on it. If it takes you more than a couple minutes—literally, if this takes you more than a couple of minutes, you're doing it wrong. This should just be jotting down, "We hired an EIR" or something.

And so this was really for me in the beginning. I just wanted to know what everybody was doing. And then it turned out to be so popular with the other people on the council because suddenly, they're like, "Oh, we can see what everyone's doing." So there's a "wins" column. There's an "opportunities" column, meaning it's optional if you wanna put something like, "Hey, we tried to run a point-of-sale service, and it didn't work." You can put that there. There's a "help" column, meaning like, "Hey, we're really needing help finding a point-of-sale service." For some reason, this just keeps coming up. That's why I use it as an example. And then finally, there's an "I can help" column, meaning that someone else could put in, "Hey, I know how to implement a point-of-sale service on campus. We've done it. It was hard, but we figured it out."

Well, it's worked like magic. Suddenly, everyone's just like, "Oh my gosh. We can see what everyone in the ecosystem is doing," and people have found ways to collaborate. They found connections they never knew existed before. We did this as an experiment at first, all optional. Just like, "Hey, if this seems useful, just jot some stuff down." A couple of months in, we did a Zoom poll. Question one: "Should we keep doing this?" Answer, overwhelmingly, yes. Useful. Question two: "How frequently should we do it?" Once every year, twice a year, every quarter, once a month, or continuously. People voted for once a month. And then the last question is, "Should we make it mandatory?" Meaning that if you're on the council, it's an expectation you do it. They voted yes.

Jon Chee - 00:25:06

Wow.

Darren Cooke - 00:25:07

The vote has it. I can't believe you just voted for giving yourself work. So now the format has been adopted by other organizations on campus. It's so simple, but it's just turned out to be really effective.

So keeping that going, the other stuff that my office is now doing is—I hinted at this before, but Berkeley LSEC, my old center—obviously, speed teaming has moved to QB3. I didn't mention this, but the I-Corps program has moved to Haas. My undergraduate class, which I didn't even talk about, has moved to the School of Public Health. So LSEC is slowly—the parts are getting taken up by other things, but because we started the six companies, it's been perceived as being very successful. We're looking at launching a clone outside of the life sciences. That's a big thing.

So including—and this also doesn't seem like a big deal—an Entrepreneur in Residence program, which we just launched, exceeded every expectation possible to the point where I'm frequently getting comments like, "How did we not have this before?" Because it's obvious and also really effective. The inspiration for the EIR program, if you're interested, was the venture grant program. We're launching these companies out of faculty labs pretty consistently, many times with no one really to lead them. A faculty member is going to be part-time, a postdoc may not be the right person. So we identified the gap. It's like, we need to get a real legit, seasoned entrepreneur to come in and help, or find people. Maybe that person is the leader. Whatever. Just somebody on the ground. So we just launched this. We now have our first EIR, Ariel Notcovich. Fantastic.

Jon Chee - 00:26:55

Super cool.

Darren Cooke - 00:26:56

Yeah. We plan to expand that.

Jon Chee - 00:26:58

Very awesome. I was gonna say, one, just like the council, there's a theme here of connecting the dots. I don't wanna call it fiefdoms on campus, but everyone is just so focused on their thing that you can lose sight of the forest. But I love this connectivity that you've orchestrated and engineered to connect it all because that's where I think magic happens. Left to their own devices, much like speed teaming, it's like two ships passing in the night, and you'll never cross paths. So you create an environment where magic can happen. I love that. Man, I wish I was back on campus. I'm like, "Dang. I need to get back on campus. This is so rad."

And, Darren, you've been incredibly generous with your time, and I've loved learning about how you have—honestly, it sounds like you're doing God's work on campus because I wish it was in place when I was there, but better late than never. Now I don't have to feel jealous of Stanford. It's like, no, we're gonna be just fine. And I've learned a lot, and thanks again. In traditional closing fashion for the Biotech Startups Podcast, we have two questions for you. One, would you like to give any shout-outs to anyone who supported you along the way?

Darren Cooke - 00:28:27

Oh, gosh. I was just thinking about that. Here's the thing. As soon as I start giving shout-outs, there's gonna be a dozen people who deserve them who I won't hit.

Jon Chee - 00:28:39

Understood.

Darren Cooke - 00:28:41

Folks like Sonia Sotomayor and Sonya Winner, I've already mentioned them. But most recently, working with Rich Lyons, there was a reason he was the dean of Haas. There's a reason he's the chancellor. It's rare that you get to meet with somebody who has that sort of leadership style. And then to be able to see it up close, that's something. So, shout-out.

Jon Chee - 00:29:05

Big shout-out. And you know, Berkeley's glad to have him in our corner.

Darren Cooke - 00:29:11

Absolutely. But, yeah, keep in mind, I just mentioned him, but there are two dozen other people who I should have mentioned.

Jon Chee - 00:29:17

Yep. Absolutely. It takes a village. So, we definitely don't want anyone feeling like they didn't play a part in this. But the last question is if you could give any advice to your 21-year-old self, what would it be?

Darren Cooke - 00:29:28

Okay. This is bordering on sounding like I'm bragging about my kid.

Jon Chee - 00:29:33

No, do it.

Darren Cooke - 00:29:36

No one likes that. So my daughter's now a 19-year-old at the University of Washington, doing great. But I never really had the facility—I learned it late in life—to be able to really talk to most people and get along. I was kinda shy. Let's face it. Kind of a dork. I was never really that good at this. But even when she was 10 years old, I don't know where she got this, she seemed to be able to talk to anybody. And I asked her, "How are you so good? You can just talk to anyone in any situation and really seem to hit it off. How did you figure that out? Because you're just 10."

And she's like, "Oh, no. It's super easy. Number one, figure out what someone likes to talk about and talk about that." And number two—this is weird for a 10-year-old—she's like, "Number two, make them feel smart." 10 years old. I'm like, "That's exactly right." That's the advice I would have given myself, which is weird that it's looping around. I wish I knew that before.

Jon Chee - 00:30:48

Wow. And that's really, really tactical too. For a 10-year-old to articulate it... most would be like, "I don't know. I just do it." But she's like, "No, there are two things."

Darren Cooke - 00:31:00

Somehow she figured that out.

Jon Chee - 00:31:02

I love that. And especially in the early days, I feel the same way. And I still struggle with it. It's really hard because, being more introverted, I see friends of mine who are more extroverted and can just go into a room and crush it. And I'm over at the bar, nursing a drink. I'm just gonna stay over here. So that's advice that I could definitely impart today, not even to my 21-year-old self.

Darren, thanks again for your generosity and for sharing your story. I will make sure that I'll be back on campus, or maybe we'll go to Kinder's and run it back for old times.

Darren Cooke - 00:31:41

We could do that too. No, seriously, let me know next time you're at Berkeley.

Jon Chee - 00:31:45

I'll give you a shout. Absolutely. Thanks again, Darren, and I will see you again soon.

Darren Cooke - 00:31:50

You're welcome. Good talking to you, Jon.

Outro - 00:31:53

Thanks for listening to our four-part series with Darren Cooke. From a hands-on East Bay upbringing to high-stakes patent litigation, from Bio-Rad to angel investing and teaching, and ultimately to building Berkeley's Life Sciences Entrepreneurship Center, Darren's story shows how curiosity, rigor, and showing up can turn ideas into impact. If you're enjoying the show, please subscribe, leave a review, or share it with a friend.

Join us for our next series featuring Jimmy Sastra, co-founder and CEO of Monomer Bio, a software company building next-generation tools for lab automation and cell engineering. Jimmy has two decades of experience in robotics, applied optimization, and lab automation. As VP of Engineering at Transcriptic, later Strateos, the world's first biology cloud lab, he led the development of more than 20 automated work cells spanning biological assays, chemistry, and synthetic biology. Earlier in his career, Jimmy was part of the groundbreaking team at Willow Garage that created the Robot Operating System (ROS), now used in more than half of the world's robots. He earned his PhD working on automated parameter optimization in autonomous legs and humanoid robots. With a unique background bridging robotics, automation, and biology, Jimmy brings a systems-level perspective on how labs of the future will operate, making this a series 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 its sponsors. No reference to any product, service, or company in the podcast is an endorsement by Excedr or its guests.