Lessons From Building the World's First Robotic Cloud Lab | Jimmy Sastra (Part 2/4)

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, Jimmy reflected on his international upbringing, creative and rebellious streak, and the path from Penn's bioengineering labs to a PhD in robotics where he modeled legged locomotion, optimized control parameters, and learned to teach himself the skills he needed. If you missed it, check out part one. In part two, Jimmy talks about the hard lessons of grad school, his move to Silicon Valley, and his time at Willow Garage during the rise of ROS. He also shares how he helped build the first biology cloud lab at Transcriptic/Strateos, what it taught him about building fast and staying focused, and why hiring for personal mission matters.

Jon Chee - 00:01:20: Yeah. Absolutely. And as you reflect back on that experience in your PhD program, were there any memorable challenges or triumphs where you're just like, "This is gonna be really hard," but you managed to break through it?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:01:32: I thought I was good at math when I was in high school. Now when I went to grad school, well, it was kicking my ass. Yeah. I still loved applied mechanics, like advanced dynamics and controls. That was my interest, but part of my PhD, I also had to take these other classes in fluid dynamics. And that's where I brushed up with the limits of what I can do in partial equations. Yeah. But somehow, I survived.

Jon Chee - 00:02:00: There are two things that stood out to me about that experience. One, sometimes you just gotta grit through it. You just gotta grit through it, and there's no glamorous way. You're just like, "You're gonna have to grind." But also, knowing when you kind of hit your limit. And I think that's an exercise in self-discovery that I think is important. There are times when you can break through those limits, but there are also times when you're just like, "I have reached the limit." And then you see someone else where that is their thing, and they just keep going. But that's kind of where you have that self-discovery where you're like, "I'm good at this, not so good at this. I'm good at this. I'm not so good at this. I'm excellent at this. I'm terrible at this." And you start to piece together, again, your strengths and weaknesses. And then you start teaming up with people where your weaknesses are their strengths. It's like, "I'm not great at math. Let's work together." Yeah. Right? So I love that that is something that you learned about yourself through that experience. And as you look back on this experience as well, were there any key lessons or takeaways from your graduate school experience?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:03:05: Yeah. That I could teach myself what I needed, both in academic classes, but also engineering skill-set wise in the lab.

Jon Chee - 00:03:14: I love that because I think it's like proving it to yourself. It kind of builds up that muscle and confidence. And I think that's another entrepreneurship thing. It's like, "Even despite the uncertainty, I can figure it out."

Jimmy Sastra - 00:03:25: Yeah. Yeah. And this is before AI coding tools. And I remember getting a book on... it's called Accelerated C++. I was like, "Oh, I learned this thing." Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:03:37: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now you're just like, "Oh, I can just vibe-code my way through most things."

Jimmy Sastra - 00:03:42: Yeah. And if I couldn't figure it out, I just had to reread the page. Yeah. Different experience now with AI, and I've been using some AI coding tools. I mean, it's super fun.

Jon Chee - 00:03:53: Yeah. I mean, I'm sure it's a massive unlock now. I mean, I just remember doing... this is how bad and little experience I have, but debugging was absolutely just a terrible experience. I was like, "This sucks." And I'm pretty sure now, your AI tool just debugs it for you. There's a missing bracket here or...

Jimmy Sastra - 00:04:12: Or at least point you to the right place. Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:04:15: Yeah. You're just like, "Oh, something is off here," versus manually going through it. You're like, "Why compile? Oh, no."

Jimmy Sastra - 00:04:24: Both, yeah, reading software engineering books, but then also math books. It was like, you read your first couple pages, "I understand this, understand this, understand this. Oh, it's getting difficult. I think I understand it. Oh, this, I don't understand." You go back one page. "I don't understand this either." You go back. "I still... okay. It just doesn't make sense anymore." Yeah. I have to think all the way from the beginning.

Jon Chee - 00:04:50: Yeah. And also when... you know when that happens, they're like, "Alright. Here's a concept. You don't understand it, but everything else builds upon that." You're like, "I'm stuck. I'm actually stuck here. This is problematic." And I guess a question for you: do you think these AI tools for software and whatnot, are they overhyped, underhyped, perfectly hyped? I don't know. I am not a coder. Do you think it's actually as game-changing as what I hear in the news?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:05:20: Oh, yeah. In my personal perspective, it is a game-changer just for me, and I haven't gotten back into it after a long time. I'm not a great software engineer or anything. So I don't think I have a good special opinion on this. Other people have better opinions. Yeah. But I do wonder where does it end? Are we just going to end up product managers?

Jon Chee - 00:05:39: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Even as not an expert, for you to be like, "Oh, this is helpful." This is proper helpful, and that's signal enough. That's enough signal. You could shake off the rust. It's like, "Oh, this is great." So very cool. And after you're wrapping up your time in graduate school, did you know what's next after that?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:05:59: Yeah. Moving to Silicon Valley and fulfilling a vision I had when I was 13.

Jon Chee - 00:06:05: How did the opportunity to go to Silicon Valley come about? Did you just, like, "Screw it. I'm packing a backpack. I'm going?" Or was there an opportunity that presented itself and brought you there, or was it something completely different?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:06:17: Yeah. There was an opportunity at a company called Willow Garage, which was a very exciting company in robotics at the time that was in Silicon Valley. And so my mentor, Sachin Chitta, was working there. So he ended up getting me an internship there, and then later, I joined as a research associate.

Jon Chee - 00:06:36: Very cool. So can you tell us a little bit more about Willow Garage? What is this organization? I won't pretend to be super familiar. I did a little bit of research, but it seemed pretty badass.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:06:47: Oh, it was a very different environment going from academia to a garage. Little things like, as a poor graduate student, I'd have to scrounge free pizza every Friday. A very boring mechanical engineering and applied mechanics seminar, listening to a professor talk about fluid dynamics. And at the end, there's pizza, and you had to attend the whole lecture to be allowed the pizza.

Jon Chee - 00:07:12: Yeah. I see. I empathize.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:07:15: For pizza.

Jon Chee - 00:07:17: Yeah. Yeah.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:07:17: And then at Willow Garage, when I was there, there were, like, 35 employees, a full-time company, out of which three were full-time chefs from high-end hospitality providing breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Jon Chee - 00:07:33: Woah.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:07:33: Woah. So it's food provided by classy, personal gourmet chefs.

Jon Chee - 00:07:36: Woah. You're just like, "I made it. I freaking made it."

Jimmy Sastra - 00:07:41: Yeah. And then Willow Garage, yeah, it was very well-funded. It was funded by a billionaire from Google who thought of it as kick-starting the robotics industry. That was the main goal. The main goal wasn't to make money. It was very research-y. Lots of cool academic research went on anyway.

Jon Chee - 00:08:00: Very cool. So talk about these experiences in your internship there. What were your responsibilities? What were you working on?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:08:08: Yeah. I'll just bundle my internship and my later postdoc research fellowship work, but I learned the craftsmanship of designing and manufacturing various body parts for different humanoids, from pan-tilt head modules to grippers, and being taught by engineers from industry, showing me best practices, etcetera.

Jon Chee - 00:08:32: How did those industry practices differ from academic practices?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:08:36: In academia, often, it's: build the robot, get the video, prove that the math kinda works, publish the paper. Yep. You're done, and then you do the next thing.

Jon Chee - 00:08:45: Yep.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:08:46: Whereas, Willow Garage, they're known for having built a $400,000 humanoid robot that could very slowly fold clothes. Mhmm. But all autonomously. So that was cool.

Jon Chee - 00:08:57: That's kinda crazy. It sounds like there was more... was it a more long-term view on the project versus just, "Let's get this published and then move on?"

Jimmy Sastra - 00:09:08: Yeah. I'd say that in my PhD, it was more about proof-of-concepts, and it's more about doing something innovative and proving the math. Willow Garage, at least my part of it, I was learning more proper engineering.

Jon Chee - 00:09:21: Yep. Yep. And did any of the stuff at Willow Garage become commercial?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:09:26: Oh, yeah. There's a statistic out there that more than 50% of robots run some kind of ROS package, where ROS is the open-source development studio that Willow Garage built.

Jon Chee - 00:09:39: Woah.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:09:39: Woah. Humanoid robots or autonomous cars or that kind of stuff.

Jon Chee - 00:09:42: Woah. Like Waymo's?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:09:44: I don't think it's running in Waymo.

Jon Chee - 00:09:45: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:09:47: But these startups will run on ROS because it's a really nice framework to get started.

Jon Chee - 00:09:52: Very cool.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:09:53: And it has a lot of packages for navigation and planning.

Jon Chee - 00:09:57: Very cool. I guess, coming right out of academia, obviously, having catered breakfast, lunch, and dinner was a big surprise. But what was the most surprising to you about this industry role, your first industry role?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:10:08: Yeah. I would say I really enjoyed the Silicon Valley community, getting to know other people really passionate about technical projects that would change the world.

Jon Chee - 00:10:19: That's awesome. Yeah. I think there is something special about being in Silicon Valley and the broader Bay Area. For a moment, people thought it lost its luster, but I think there is something about this culture, and it's kind of like this flywheel effect, too. It attracts the same kind of mindset of this great passion and that pay-it-forward mentality, which I think built on top of itself.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:10:44: Yeah. And I think people thinking deeply about impact. I remember at Willow Garage, a lot of folks deeply thought about the impact they wanted to have on the world and change the world.

Jon Chee - 00:10:55: Yeah. I mean, it's monumental. So, now you had your internship. You're dipping your toes in the industry, kind of wrapping up your time for your postdoc. When did you know it was time to leave Willow?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:11:08: Yeah. I found an opportunity at this robotic cloud lab. It was a company called Transcriptic that was also just starting, started by Max Hodak, who later became president of Neuralink and later started Science Corp. But that opportunity let me tie my robotics engineering with my biology background and connect all the dots together.

Jon Chee - 00:11:31: What was that experience like?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:11:33: That was fun. And that connection happened through Y Combinator, actually.

Jon Chee - 00:11:38: Uh, okay.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:11:39: Yeah. He was involved somehow with Y Combinator, and a friend of mine posted my resume to the internal Y Combinator listserv, so leveraging the Silicon Valley community.

Jon Chee - 00:11:49: Yep. Absolutely. And what were your responsibilities like once you landed that gig?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:11:54: Yeah. I was one of the founding engineers there. I was the fourth person, and we ended up building the world's first robotic cloud lab. The dream was to let folks from their dorm room write Python and execute biology experiments. So that's pretty cool. We built really fast. That is where I learned to build fast.

Jon Chee - 00:12:13: Yeah.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:12:13: So my first real startup experience.

Jon Chee - 00:12:16: Yeah.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:12:16: Yeah. And in something like six months, we had built a fully automated lab from which you can run very simple biology experiments remotely by writing Python. We built a lot from scratch, probably more than we needed. We even built our own robotic incubators. But, yeah, that was a very fun experience.

Jon Chee - 00:12:35: And this was Strateos?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:12:36: Yep. So Transcriptic later became Strateos, merged with a company called 3Scan, and we ended up later bringing up a big robotic facility with something like 10 different robotic work cells. It was for Eli Lilly, designed by others, but we helped bring it up.

Jon Chee - 00:12:55: Very cool. And being at the ground floor, like, fourth employee, when you came in, what was the mission and focus and North Star for you guys?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:13:04: Yeah. The mission was this dream of enabling folks to write Python and run biology experiments. And the thing that always motivated me was thinking back to my undergrad time.

Jon Chee - 00:13:16: Yeah. Yeah. It was like, "Let's get rid of this laborious work."

Jimmy Sastra - 00:13:19: Yep. Yep. And then thinking back to my PhD work of automated parameter optimization and applying that to building the infrastructure to enable autonomous science for biology.

Jon Chee - 00:13:33: And was that focus... you mentioned working with Eli Lilly. Was that your target demographic, like the large pharmas of the world being able to utilize Strateos' technology?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:13:43: Yeah. I think the one thing we struggled with at Strateos was we were doing so many different things from cell-based assays to analytical chemistry to synthetic chemistry to synthetic biology. We would be very focused on the infrastructure, and so that's something I took to heart.

Jon Chee - 00:14:01: Makes a lot of sense. And you're at the ground floor. You're employee number four, and you're now raising money, and you're also building a team. Can you talk a little bit about those experiences? Like, one, maybe let's break it out into its constituent parts. How was your experience building a team? And maybe, you know, some tips for anyone who's doing it, common pitfalls that you should avoid, or key considerations.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:14:24: I think a lot of the common hiring practices I tried to follow. One thing I do different that might be unique is that I really hone in on people's personal mission. I remember at Willow Garage, people were really thinking about the impact they wanted to have on the world. And so I've spent a lot of time before starting Monomer thinking deeply about my personal mission. And that has come from all these life experiences that we've been talking about, from having an international life and being primed to become an engineer. So really enjoying building tools. And I'll mention that the first memory I ever have of anything in life is my little brother who was born premature by something like two months. And the first memory I have is seeing my little brother in the incubator. And I could tell from looking at my parents something was wrong. And later in life, I learned that the doctors thought he wasn't gonna make it and suggested turning off the machine. And then my dad being an engineer, he said, "Well, there's that other option of moving him to a different hospital where they're more aggressive in treatment." So they moved him to that other hospital, and he started recovering. And now he's a perfectly healthy human. He's an inch taller than I am. Both him and I like to swim, and he has better form in the butterfly than I do.

Jon Chee - 00:15:46: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:15:47: That taught me that one, life itself is amazing, but life also is very fragile. And so I could not think of a more important mission than trying to understand how life works.

Jon Chee - 00:15:58: Absolutely. And I think there's a saying. I don't know who coined it. It's like, "You need to find missionaries, not mercenaries." It might be John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins. I think he might have coined that, but I agree. I think when you're making these key hires, especially when it's like, you're number four, you bring another person in. That's five. That's, you know, 20% of the company. They're gonna have outsized influence on where this company is going and how the company operates. So you need to make sure that they're a proper missionary.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:16:31: Yeah. Yeah. I wanna know that they're passionate about what they're doing, how they're building up their career. I ask them why they did what they did. So I kinda hone in on that mission statement and try and align each other's life missions into molding this company.

Jon Chee - 00:16:47: Absolutely. And I'm gonna imagine you guys are working on so many things. You also probably had to do your first foray into raising capital. How was that experience?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:16:57: I go through people's experiences and, maybe to tie back to, yeah, what I experienced in college, choosing to do bioengineering. Partly came from, I'll admit, late nights hanging out with friends, too many next to a lava lamp thinking, "Life is amazing." These little folds in your hand, that's really hard for robotics engineers to build that kinda folding material, but it just has evolved over time. So thinking, "Wow, living cells are amazing." So, yeah, my mission has come from that experience too, wanting to study living cells, seeing them as the basic building blocks of life, and then my upbringing, hearing stories from my dad, from ASML, and from Philips, wanting to build tools to then explore how living cells work.

Jon Chee - 00:17:44: Very cool. It seems like you found that at Strateos. There was a kind of an alignment in mission, company mission, and personal vision.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:17:53: Yeah. It's funny that Strateos automated everything except for cell culture. So when I look at Monomer, we've always been interested in cells. Yeah. Automate cell culture and then saw the opportunity in the industry as well. I met my cofounder, and so all of the stars kinda seemed to align.

Jon Chee - 00:18:11: Very cool. And kind of to go back, as your company is growing, your team is growing, like at Strateos, what was your experience like scaling that company and raising the capital to scale that company?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:18:23: I think I learned how to build a team, how to work in a very multidisciplinary field from robotics and biology, and you learn a lot from going through that startup.

Jon Chee - 00:18:38: Did you also have to do sales as well? Did you have to wear a ton of different hats?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:18:44: Wore a ton of different hats. We ended up closing a couple different $10,000,000 deals.

Jon Chee - 00:18:50: Oh, sweet.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:18:51: At Ginkgo where we deployed our software and at Eli Lilly, I enjoyed being in the room where a lot of the discussions were happening. I was not the final person responsible for closing, but it was great to be involved in learning that.

Jon Chee - 00:19:04: Yeah. Because I was gonna say, one, those are big deals. And, two, when you're at a company at the ground floor like that, you tend to get exposure to all the things. And if you come from a technical background, sometimes you don't get that experience to do sales or be in there for the deal-making or even the fundraising. So, very cool that you had that ability to experience that. And, you know, when you look back on Strateos, no worries if not, but were there any mentors that showed you the ropes while at Strateos? Or was this also kind of a thing where it's like, "Blaze your own trail. It is yours."

Jimmy Sastra - 00:19:41: Yeah. It was a lot of learning by doing and then getting experience and then working with the team. Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:19:47: Yeah. Very cool. I mean, it sounds like a pretty sweet gig. When did you know it was time to leave?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:19:53: I had been there for six years, and that's about the time of a PhD. So I was getting the itch to do something else.

Jon Chee - 00:20:00: Yeah. Yeah. It's like, "This is reminding me of my grad experience. I think I need to move."

Jimmy Sastra - 00:20:05: Yep. Yeah. And then a variety of different things, working with various different robotics startups. One was a company called Built Robotics, which was... I look at it as any little boy's dream to automate robotic excavation, you know, those big excavators digging holes. Cool. A way to play in the sandbox with big robots. So I felt I had to do that. And then the pandemic happened. I also worked with a company called Robust AI, which got started by Rodney Brooks, who is the Roomba guy. He founded iRobot, and I look at the Roomba as the world's first commercially successful robot in the home. I had to get some experience working with Rodney. A lot of creative prototyping and building different robots. And then I did a bunch of freelancing, and then I got an opportunity to freelance with Ginkgo. And at the time, they were building, I think, the largest COVID screening center in the world. It's called the MegaWorks. So, yeah, that seemed important at the time.

Jon Chee - 00:21:07: Very cool. COVID was an interesting time where people were exploring very different things that probably wouldn't present themselves normally. It was a different norm at that time. So, you know, you're at Robust. You were at Built Robotics. You're doing some freelancing, and you're working with Ginkgo. After that, did you know what was the next thing once these roles came to their natural conclusion?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:21:27: Yeah. Those were all kind of short stints, the one at Built Robotics, Ginkgo, and Robust AI. And I really enjoyed being a contractor too. During that time, you try lots of different things. And actually, a great way to find your next gig is what I learned. But I think I thought more deeply about what I care about, what impact do I wanna have in the world, what am I uniquely good at, and it got me back to automating science. And, yeah, going back to my mission statement, thinking back to my time, seeing my little brother, understanding life is beautiful, but it's also very fragile, thinking back to my college years, realizing cells are the fundamental building blocks of life, and then always being an engineer and being able to make tools. So now I got back to Monomer, thinking we can build tools to help us understand living cells and how life works.

Jon Chee - 00:22:24: Very cool. And did you meet your cofounder at Strateos?

Jimmy Sastra - 00:22:29: That's kind of a funny story. During the pandemic, one of the ways to be social, I joined this meetup that my friend organized, Pavel Konov, who was organizing... in hindsight, it's very nerdy, but we read all these HBR case studies, and then we discuss them.

Jon Chee - 00:22:45: Rad.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:22:46: Once a month.

Jon Chee - 00:22:46: That's not nerdy to me. I think that's cool.

Jimmy Sastra - 00:22:49: So I'd say we got a free MBA by other folks interested in entrepreneurship. And, yeah, that's where I met Mark Zhang, my cofounder.

Jon Chee - 00:22:58: Very cool.

Outro - 00:23:01: That's all for this episode of the Biotech Startups podcast featuring Jimmy Sastra. Join us next time for part three of our four-part series where we'll hear how Jimmy and his cofounder turned Monomer's early consulting wins into a focused thesis on autonomous cell culture and why their mission centers on industrializing in vitro models to reduce reliance on animal testing. He'll also break down Monomer's three pillars (robotics, software, and biology), share how their work cells have been deployed across startups and big pharma, and explain the go-to-market paths that help teams scale from software-only pilots to full in-lab automation. 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.

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