The Rebellious Mindset That Builds Successful Startups | Jimmy Sastra (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 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 to how labs of the future will operate, making this a series you won't want to miss. Over the next four episodes, Jimmy shares how a lifelong passion for robotics and problem-solving led him from Strateos to co-founding Monomer Bio, where automation, software, and biology converge to transform cell culture. He also reflects on lessons learned from international experiences and the realities of startup building. We'll learn why adaptability and risk management are key, and hear about his Chinese-Indonesian parents, growing up in Eindhoven under the shadow of Philips and ASML, and soaking up early dinner table stories of precision machines and big ideas. We'll also hear how that creative rebellious streak led from late-night murals to a hard reset in Japan, how navigating a new culture and language sharpened his independence, and why math and making things became his anchor. And we'll trace the path to Penn through all-nighters in bioengineering labs, early lessons in discipline, and the moment Jimmy realized the wet lab tedium could be a problem worth solving, pointing him towards robotics. Without further ado, let's dive into part one of our conversation with Jimmy Sastra.

Jon Chee - 00:03:24: Jimmy, so good to see you again. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:03:27: Of course. Thank you so much for your time, Jon.

Jon Chee - 00:03:30: I know it's been a while. Maybe it was back around SLAS since we were first talking about Monomer and the journey and getting this set up. So we've been really looking forward to this. It's been a while since SLAS. Whenever we start these conversations, we like to go all the way back to the beginning and hear what influenced you and what not only influenced your business philosophy, but also your leadership style and what got you into STEM. So take us all the way back. What was young Jimmy like? And tell us about your adolescence and upbringing.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:04:03: Sure. In terms of upbringing, I'd say three adjectives come to mind: International, creative (in the creating and building things kind), and lastly, rebellious.

Jon Chee - 00:04:17: Yeah. I resonate with that.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:04:18: I think a lot of founders do.

Jon Chee - 00:04:20: Yeah. Yeah. Definitely the rebellious streak in me for sure.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:04:25: Yeah. But, uh, I'll unpack that. Always the rebellious till the end. International in that my parents are Chinese-Indonesian.

Jon Chee - 00:04:33: My mom's Indonesian.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:04:35: Really?

Jon Chee - 00:04:35: Yeah. She grew up in Jakarta.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:04:37: Yeah. My dad's from Jakarta. My mom is from Padang.

Jon Chee - 00:04:41: Cool. Very cool.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:04:42: Wow. Cool. This is the first time I hear about this.

Jon Chee - 00:04:45: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's always good to go back and start from the beginning.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:04:49: Yeah. Yeah. Cool. I wonder what else we'll uncover in the next couple of hours.

Jon Chee - 00:04:54: I'll say, I definitely miss Indonesian food and Malaysian food, too. It's hard to come by in the city, but whenever I get the chance, I always try to get my fill.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:05:04: Cool. Yeah. We gotta go out for some Asian food sometime.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:05:06: Yeah. Absolutely. But, yeah, my parents are Chinese-Indonesian. I like to joke that I was surprised to be born in The Netherlands. Born and raised there till I was 15, then we moved to Japan for two years where I finished up high school. And then I lived on the East Coast in The US. And now I've been in the West Coast of The US for more than a decade now. So that's why I say I had a very international upbringing.

Jon Chee - 00:05:32: What was The Netherlands like?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:05:34: I loved it. We lived in Eindhoven, which is known for Philips, their sports club, PSV, for soccer fans, and Philips also spun out ASML.

Jon Chee - 00:05:46: Yep. Very relevant right now. At first, when I heard, I was like, "Who the heck is ASML?" I was like, "Oh, very important."

Jimmy Sastra - 00:05:55: Very important. And as a kid, my dad would always come home from work and tell stories about his work at the physics lab at Philips, and he actually helped with a lot of the stage mechanisms that go into these ASML lithography machines.

Jon Chee - 00:06:11: Wow.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:06:11: And so I heard a lot of cool stories.

Jon Chee - 00:06:13: That's badass. That's seriously badass. And so at the time,

Jimmy Sastra - 00:06:19: I don't think I fully understood or appreciated, and in fact, the world didn't know about ASML. Cool to now see ASML on news and politics, being known as building the most complex machine in the world. And it's cool to now look back and know my dad was involved in building these machines that now go for, like, $500,000,000.

Jon Chee - 00:06:41: It's so crazy.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:06:43: Machine that is like the size of a bus.

Jon Chee - 00:06:45: That's so crazy. And it's interesting too because I have family who are in the semis industry, and semis were very uncool for a long time. Yep. Very uncool. Everyone's like, "a commodity." And now they're obviously very cool and very important to everything. So that's awesome to hear that you're able to experience that as a young person. And so that was... you said you were in The Netherlands right up to high school?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:07:15: I was 15 right when I hit puberty, where dad decided it'd be a good idea for me to move to a completely different country with a very different culture.

Jon Chee - 00:07:24: Was it a personal move, or was it a work move? And was your mom also at Philips too?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:07:29: My mom has always been a stay-at-home mom taking care of us. My dad moved us out to Japan because there was opportunity between Philips and Sony to do a joint venture, and he was the CTO leading that effort.

Jon Chee - 00:07:43: Very cool. Very cool.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:07:44: Later, he did the same in Korea and then between Philips and Lucky GoldStar for displays, and then later, he moved to Singapore. So very international and very creative, and I think I've always been primed to become an engineer. I think it was partly because of my dad.

Jon Chee - 00:08:00: Was there pressure, or is it just via osmosis where it was just like... Yeah.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:08:03: Osmosis. Yeah. Osmosis. No. My dad had all these books lying around that I now actually leverage, but when I was 10 through 15, I would read all these books, like Good to Great, Innovator's Dilemma, The World Is Flat, Emotional Intelligence. That's super cool. Classic business strategy books. And now they all come to you.

Jon Chee - 00:08:25: So yeah. That's what I was gonna say because it's Jim Collins. Right?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:08:28: Uh, Jim Collins, Clayton Christensen.

Jon Chee - 00:08:31: Yeah. I don't think I started reading those until I was... I wouldn't say recently, but I was an adult at that time. So, as an adolescent, those are really formative concepts and, you know, very cool that you're able to tap into that early. I think I could have found a lot of value. Probably made a lot less mistakes if I read those books earlier.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:08:53: Yeah. And I actually prefer those books because they're really well-thought-out, as opposed to a lot of just posts on Hacker News of someone's singular point of view and of one startup. Personal, yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:09:05: Yeah. And I think, you know, nowadays, people need to read more books rather than kind of little, like you said, little snippets. It just doesn't give you the full context. Yeah. The soundbites are insufficient at best. Um, so talk about your experience in Japan. I mean, that's, I'm gonna assume, very different than The Netherlands.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:09:24: Oh, yeah. I'd say very different.

Jon Chee - 00:09:26: Yeah. Yeah.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:09:27: It's a different culture, and I'll maybe contrast some of the cultures. I think in The Netherlands, that was what I was used to. And then when I moved to Japan and went to an international school, I was only 27 kids in my year, and I didn't speak Japanese.

Jon Chee - 00:09:47: I can imagine that's hard.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:09:49: Leading up to moving to Japan, my parents like, "You gotta learn English." I took English lessons.

Jon Chee - 00:09:56: Oh, man.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:09:56: I had to learn Japanese while I was there. So, yeah, I'd say it was a bit isolating. And then, I mean, I'm going through puberty. So...

Jon Chee - 00:10:04: Yeah. It didn't help. It didn't help.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:10:07: It didn't help. Yeah. But I think it was a really formative experience in learning to struggle and rely on yourself, learning that, oh, there's a different school. It has a different playground. It's different rules. Different things are cool.

Jon Chee - 00:10:23: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you have to learn new cultural norms for sure.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:10:27: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Adjusting to different norms and then moving to The US was a piece of cake.

Jon Chee - 00:10:33: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Did you have your rebellious streak through this kind of era? I'm gonna imagine as a teenager, it was kind of prime rebellious.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:10:43: Yeah. I would say right before moving to Japan. So during that time, I led a team of four, I like to say, and it was like a little graffiti crew. Yeah. Where we would make murals. We were artists. We make murals. So it wasn't vandalism when we would mural late at night, and it culminated in us getting arrested.

Jon Chee - 00:11:06: I mean, look. I'm familiar because, like, San Francisco... being in the Bay Area, San Francisco and the Bay Area had a very thriving graffiti scene and, like, Dream and, like, Crank and, like, KR one. And I was also... I had a rebellious streak. Familiar with what you're talking about. But, um, yeah. And, obviously, like, Twist and everybody in San Francisco. Anyways, you had a run-in with law enforcement.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:11:31: Yeah. Yeah. I had my own crew. I was... it was late at night. My three friends were supposed to be on the lookout.

Jon Chee - 00:11:36: Oh, boy.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:11:37: Didn't work out that well. Yeah. Like, I don't know, four cops, cop car showed up. I started sprinting, and, um, got pretty far, I like to say.

Jon Chee - 00:11:49: This was still in The Netherlands, or was this already in...

Jimmy Sastra - 00:11:51: The Netherlands.

Jon Chee - 00:11:52: Oh, got it.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:11:54: And I got as far as a fence that I started climbing, and then the cop grabbed me and was like, "Gotcha."

Jon Chee - 00:11:59: Oh, boy. How did your parents react?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:12:01: Uh, not good.

Jon Chee - 00:12:03: Not good. Yeah.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:12:04: Yeah. And neither did my friends' parents.

Jon Chee - 00:12:07: Yeah. I can imagine. You entered a world of pain.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:12:10: Yep. My dad said he was shocked because, for the most part, we were good kids. I got good grades. But my dad said, "Well, at least you're creating something."

Jon Chee - 00:12:21: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, it could be worse. At least you're creating something. That's so funny. Yeah. Those are kind of learned lessons. I'm gonna imagine your parents were like, "You gotta shape up. You gotta shape up." And did you reform your ways when you went over to Japan?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:12:37: Yeah. I pretty much got forced to because all of a sudden, I have to make new friends and... Yeah. Yeah. Different things are cool.

Jon Chee - 00:12:43: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe your parents had a plan all along. They're just like, "We're just gonna move Jimmy." Like... Yeah.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:12:48: Maybe it's the catalyst.

Jon Chee - 00:12:50: Yeah. Yeah. It's like, "You know what? We're moving him out of this environment. We're gonna move him to Japan, the polar opposite." But so you're in Japan for only two years?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:12:59: Two years. Yeah. And then and no more crime after that.

Jon Chee - 00:13:02: Yeah. Yeah. No more crime. I put my crime behind me. Now those are in the rearview mirror. And did you follow your dad to Korea?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:13:09: That's when I went to college. Mhmm.

Jon Chee - 00:13:12: Got it.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:13:13: Yeah. But I'll, uh, do a brief shout out to my three friends from that time in Holland. Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:13:17: Yeah. Yeah. Shouts out. Shouts out. Yeah. Be on better lookout next time.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:13:22: Exactly. Yeah. Martin, Bram, and Thijs, I feel fortunate that maybe because of that experience, we still keep in touch.

Jon Chee - 00:13:28: That's amazing.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:13:29: Zoom call every month.

Jon Chee - 00:13:31: Oh, cool.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:13:32: And I try to visit them every once in a while in The Netherlands.

Jon Chee - 00:13:36: Very cool. And so when you're in high school, did you gravitate to any subjects, or were you still figuring it out on what was intellectually, you know, your thing?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:13:48: Oh, yeah. I'd say I'd always liked math, and I was really good at that and, surprisingly, not biology. I was older when I really got into biology.

Jon Chee - 00:14:00: That's funny because I was thinking about my experience, yeah, and how you had an osmosis with your father. I had the polar opposite. My dad's a structural engineer, very good at math and physics. I'm not very good at math and physics. You know, arithmetic, I'm good, but I just couldn't hang. And all this, and my dad was just like, "Come on. Why doesn't this make sense to you?" I'm just like, "I don't know, man. I don't know." But biology definitely clicked for me, but math, for some reason, math and physics was just harder for me. But, you know, my dad's like, "Uh, fine. Whatever."

Jimmy Sastra - 00:14:33: Yeah. Maybe the artist background in me really loved geometry and then the math behind that. So that was my... I think you gotta find your angle into math because partial differential equations are really tough for me.

Jon Chee - 00:14:45: Yeah. I'm a visual learner. So, whenever I think about biology and systems and all this, I can visualize that stuff in my head, which is way easier than just numbers. So, on a piece of paper, I'm like, "Oh my god." Like, I just can't visualize it well. Very cool. So you're gravitating to math, and you're starting to think about college. Where was your mind at when you were thinking about what university to go to?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:15:10: So I went into college thinking I wanted to become an engineer. I was quite clear about that. Freshman year, undeclared, so I took a whole bunch of different classes. I remember thinking about electrical engineering and software engineering, and I naively thought that all the problems in that domain will be solved by the time I graduate and looked at bioengineering, like biology. And I was like, "Well, biology, I was reading my DNA," and I was like, "This is just an endless frontier of curiosity. This is just the tip of the iceberg of what we know." Whereas software seemed finite. And I even asked myself, like, "Oh, how many applications, software applications, do humans really need?"

Jon Chee - 00:15:58: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:15:59: Yeah. Yeah. Turns out quite a lot.

Jon Chee - 00:16:01: Yeah. It turns out a lot. Yeah. Lots of software.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:16:08: Then probably also I was told this is the hardest engineering major. There was a weekly Thursday biology lab that was long hours. It was a twelve-to-five lab, and then a write-up, and then it was due the next day. And often people stayed up all night to get that done every single week. Oh. And for some reason, I decided suffering was good for me.

Jon Chee - 00:16:29: So Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. More suffering. Need more suffering. Please bring it on. But I guess to just back up a little bit, was UPenn just like, "I'm going to UPenn?" Or did you have other schools in mind too?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:16:41: Yeah. I guess after a year in Japan, I...

Jon Chee - 00:16:44: ...was like, "Oh, now I can go to The US college." And then, yeah, applied to a...

Jimmy Sastra - 00:16:48: ...bunch of different schools there, got into UPenn, and I was told University of Pennsylvania is very international. So I was like, "Cool. It'll fit in there."

Jon Chee - 00:16:57: Nice. Nice. So now you're suffering on these weekly, just like pain marathons. So was that a lab?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:17:03: There was a lab every Thursday. Yeah. It's sophomore year only, but yeah. Okay.

Jon Chee - 00:17:08: Got it. Just for sophomore year. Did you have any other lab experience as well? Like, did you join a professor's lab, or was this the first kind of lab experience?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:17:16: During undergrad, I worked in various labs. Uh, I did the wet lab and learned how laborious... Yeah. Not just, like, pipetting, which is awesome. Just... but also just doing all the dishes and, like... Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:17:29: Looking in microscopes.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:17:30: Yeah. Uh, stuff in incubators.

Jon Chee - 00:17:33: Yeah. People who haven't had that experience think that labs are fully automated and a futuristic thing, but it's just... it's a lot of manual labor. Lots of dishwashing, you know, undergrads. The start of Excedr really came from just not wanting to do manual pipetting. I mean, that was one of the personal frustrations. I was like, "Can I just get one of those liquid handlers, please? Please?" But, yeah, I empathize. How was that experience overall, though, just being in those labs?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:18:01: Yeah. I think it taught me discipline to show up on time, and there was one time I did not show up on time, and one of my advisers got pissed off at me.

Jon Chee - 00:18:10: Yep. Yep. You'll learn that fast.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:18:13: Yep. So it was good there. I did enjoy bioengineering because it's very broad. It's like biology, but also engineering and some mechanical, electrical, and some software would be sprinkled in over those four years.

Jon Chee - 00:18:26: Yep. And I know you ended up going for your master's in mechanical engineering. And is that kind of when you're like, "Okay. I want to specialize a little bit more here?"

Jimmy Sastra - 00:18:37: Yeah. I think maybe after my time in the biology lab realizing how much manual labor there is, I was like, "Maybe, yeah, I should get into robotics and learn how to automate things."

Jon Chee - 00:18:47: For less manual labor. You're like, "I'm gonna solve my own problem."

Jimmy Sastra - 00:18:51: Yeah. I think after working in a biology lab, realizing how much tedious manual labor there is involved, I thought I would go jump head first into a PhD in robotics.

Jon Chee - 00:19:01: Yeah. Totally. Just to solve your own itch, and it's like, "I'm gonna automate all this laborious work." So when you're doing that, can you talk a little bit about, you know, selecting your lab for your graduate studies and whose lab you were in?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:19:14: Yeah. And it's easy to say in hindsight. The nice story of, like, "Oh, I worked in a biology lab. I learned how tedious it was. I went to a PhD to study robotics to automate a lot of the work." Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:19:26: Yeah. Yeah.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:19:27: Hindsight.

Jon Chee - 00:19:28: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:19:29: When you're connecting the dots. Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:19:30: Yeah. Yeah.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:19:31: The moment, the honest answer is that I met a professor in a robotics lab who was starting a lab, who was building robots, and I was like, "Oh, that looks super fun." Yeah. Building all these different mechanical systems. And another, like, third, realistic reason is I needed to get a green card, and I heard getting a PhD makes it easier to get a green card. And so, yeah, the realities of living international life.

Jon Chee - 00:19:55: Yeah. My father was getting his PhD at Berkeley, and that was kind of a similar route. That is a path to getting that. So tell us about that lab, though, that you're in, building robotics. Like, whose lab was it? What was the culture like?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:20:07: Yeah. It was Doctor Mark Yim's lab. Uh, he came from Xerox PARC. It's super innovative culture. Super fun. I learned everything from mechanical to electrical to software engineering. And what I ended up getting really interested in was doing automated parameter optimization on dynamic robots. And so think like physical systems, like legged robots. You may have seen videos of, like, Boston Dynamics, their dog, uh, or now there's a lot of hype around humanoid robots. And so I was building those kinds of robots and teaching them how to run or walk, different types of locomotion.

Jon Chee - 00:20:46: Very cool.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:20:46: And when you're doing that, there are many parameters to tune. And what I learned during my time there was also how to mathematically model these machines and then create dynamic models and then use that as the way to control them. Because you have all these degrees of freedom, uh, that's way too much to think about. So you model this system. What I learned was to model this as a spring-loaded inverted pendulum and just thinking like you're simplifying the full robot as a mass on a pogo stick. So springy legs. And that kinda blew my mind.

Jon Chee - 00:21:22: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:21:23: It simplified that, and then you reduce the degrees of freedom, and then you can think about the system in a much easier way. And then once you have it boiled down to, let's say, six parameters to tune, now you can use multivariate parameter optimization and basically do gradient descent on this multidimensional surface and automate the gaits of a robot. So, like, when our robots were running, we'd simplify it down to stride length, stride frequency, a couple of parameters, and then have the robot run back and forth and then tune those parameters, like autotune it, and then get it to run 30% faster than any human could tune the robot. And that was very magical to me. To think about this physical robot, it's very complex in the real world, and then simplifying it down to math. And you can think of all the different parameters in, like... let's say you have three parameters. You can think of it as a three-dimensional space where you're trying to find the local minimum, which is the optimal set of parameters and, like, think of a ball rolling down that three-dimensional landscape from just the right parameters. And as you had more parameters, let's say you have six parameters, then now that's like a six-dimensional shape.

Jon Chee - 00:22:33: Very cool. Yeah. I and I love that, even just applying that concept of this very complex thing with too many infinite options and just chunking it down into its more straightforward constituent parts. I feel like that is a strategy for just general problem-solving. It doesn't always work out, but it helps tackle these big hairy problems. Because usually, if you just try to tackle the big complex problem out the gate, you're just like, "This is impossible." But so you just have to break it up.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:23:04: Yeah. I see. Yeah. If you're trying to generalize through, I guess, yeah, it's like, if you get too deep into the details, it gets overwhelming. You gotta somehow have some, like, mental model.

Jon Chee - 00:23:14: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And in this lab, was your PI super hands-on, or was it just like, "Alright, grad students, do your thing?"

Jimmy Sastra - 00:23:24: Getting your PhD is notorious for just being thrown in the deep end, and you figure out a topic, which I think is good for entrepreneurship. There's an open-ended problem, and you have to rely on yourself to come up with something. And PhDs take a long time, and robotics tends to be, like, six years. It took me seven years, but it's like, you have to figure out... you have to motivate yourself because if not, you could end up six years in your PhD program and wasting your time.

Jon Chee - 00:23:50: Yep. Yep. Absolutely. I mean, I always think about that kind of experience in graduate school as, in startup land, it's just pure uncertainty.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:24:01: Like, even in an industry job, in a big company, you basically get chewed down to tasks. Yep. And guidance. Yep. But PhD is very much like entrepreneurship. Yeah. You're put in it.

Jon Chee - 00:24:14: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:24:15: I guess the thinking behind it is that, well, you need to come up with new stuff. So come up with new...

Jon Chee - 00:24:20: Do it. Because a lot of the time when I talk to grad students, they want... they ask themselves, "What am I gonna do with this?" And I'm like, "A ton. Like, there's a ton you can do." It may not be the exact field of what your dissertation was in, but exactly what you just described, it's a great way to cut your teeth on what it means to start a company. Because no one's gonna hand... but there's... if there was a playbook or something that they can just, you know... "This is how you create a successful company. This is the playbook." Everyone would be doing it.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:24:54: Exactly. Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:24:54: Like, no one has it figured out. Everyone is just feeling around.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:24:58: Yeah. Every startup is unique. Every PhD thesis, uh, by definition, has to be something new and unique, and it's just kind of a long road, even with startups. They say startups is a sprint, but, you know, I find it's a daily...

Jon Chee - 00:25:11: Yeah.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:25:12: ...improvement, a little bit, getting some clarity.

Jon Chee - 00:25:14: Yeah. It's definitely a marathon. That's for sure. And I think treating it as a sprint is how you supernova out. You gotta have that long-term mindset.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:25:23: Yeah. And, like, my PI, my professor, Mark Yim, really awesome, really supportive. Any direction I had an interest in, he would support me, very creative. And I think being paired with someone who is in the same situation as I was really helped. And I wanna give a shout out to Sachin Chitta who basically taught me everything I needed in terms of engineering, like, onboarded me on Linux, taught me Emacs, how to write papers in LaTeX, how to program in Python, and later some C++. This is gonna date me, but he taught me how to use Subversion, which is the versioning system.

Jon Chee - 00:26:01: A fellow grad student?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:26:03: A fellow grad student, and he kinda took me under his wing.

Jon Chee - 00:26:07: Amazing.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:26:08: All the technical stuff that I needed to know. And, uh, he was like a godsend.

Jon Chee - 00:26:12: That's amazing. I always think about those people that you encounter on this journey, who they didn't have to do it either. They didn't have to take you under their wing. It makes me optimistic and super... it's kind of that pay-it-forward mentality. Right? Especially... I think that's... there's a very strong pay-it-forward mentality in science and also in entrepreneurship, and especially in the West Coast too. It's kind of like you owe it to the next person or you owe it to your colleagues to pay it forward. So that's really awesome that you had someone like that guiding you.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:26:44: Yeah. To this date, I find other founders to be incredibly helpful in the day-to-day just like this person, uh, Sachin, was to me during PhD.

Jon Chee - 00:26:54: Very cool.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:26:55: With the PI or the investors, they'll give you higher-level guidance, but for the day-to-day, it's other folks in your peer group. That's what really helps.

Outro - 00:27:04: That's all for this episode of the Biotech Startups podcast featuring Jimmy Sastra. Join us next time for part two of our four-part series where we'll hear how Jimmy moved from the rigors of graduate school to Silicon Valley, joining Willow Garage during the early ROS era and learning the craft of building robots that work outside the lab. He'll also share how helping build the first biology cloud lab at Transcriptic/Strateos shaped his views on speed, focus, and hiring for mission, and the personal story that set his compass on automating science. 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. 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.