“Get the Info, Take the Shot”: The DIY Mindset Behind Success | Roy Maute (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 Roy Maute, CEO and co-founder of Pheast Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing novel innate immune checkpoint inhibitors to revolutionize cancer treatment. At Pheast, Roy leads development of PHST001, an anti-CD24 monoclonal antibody targeting macrophage checkpoints. The FDA has granted Fast Track designation for advanced platinum-resistant ovarian cancer.

Before founding Pheast, Dr. Maute served as Director of Translational Research at Forty Seven Inc., leading the biomarker strategy for the breakthrough anti-CD47 program. Following Forty Seven’s $4.9 billion acquisition by Gilead Sciences in 2020, he launched Pheast in 2021. He also co-founded Ab Initio Biotherapeutics, which was acquired by Ligand Pharmaceuticals in 2019. With a PhD from Columbia, a BA from UC Berkeley, and deep translational science expertise, Roy’s journey from pioneering CD47 biology to building Pheast’s CD24 platform demonstrates how scientific insight can activate the immune system to eliminate cancer, making this a conversation you won't want to miss.

Over the next four episodes, Roy shares how growing up in Dallas with an architect father and artist mother fostered creativity and hands-on problem-solving, from DIY home renovations to laboratory experiments. He reflects on how a movie classic sparked his fascination with genetic engineering, why Berkeley opened doors despite initial struggles landing a lab position, and how serendipitous dorm connections led to his first research role.

Today, we'll hear about Roy's early days in Texas, how Golden Age science fiction and Jurassic Park introduced him to genetic engineering as a tool for building the future. We'll also hear about choosing Berkeley, landing his first lab position through dorm-mate connections, and learning foundational techniques in a neurological development lab despite starting with grunt work. Lastly, we'll hear about Berkeley's "sink or swim" philosophy, falling in love with California's natural beauty, and why the Bay Area startup ecosystem quietly captured his imagination. Without further ado, let's dive into part one of our conversation with Roy Maute.

Jon Chee - 00:03:23: Roy, so good to see you again. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

Roy Maute - 00:03:26: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Jon Chee - 00:03:28: Yeah. Before we hit record, we were just saying that we kind of went through the time warp. We had this on the calendar for a number of months, but I’ve really been looking forward to the run-up of this conversation. In traditional opening fashion for the podcast, we always like to go all the way back to your earliest days and really learn what inspired you and influenced your business philosophy and, frankly, what got you into science. So take us all the way back, Roy. What was "baby Roy" like?

Roy Maute - 00:03:54: I think I was kind of a pain—a very curious kid. I grew up in Dallas, Texas. Neither of my parents are scientists; I don't come from a family of scientists or academics. My dad is an architect and my mom is an artist. I'm one of four kids, and it was a very close, chaotic household. My parents were very focused on our academics and learning, but it was back in the 1990s, so there was a very different meaning to that then as opposed to today. It wasn't a pressure-cooker type of environment at all.

My parents really pushed us to have broad interests and to excel academically, but for them, creativity was the number one thing. Learning what we loved was really important. I was always really focused on academics generally and just really drawn to science. I really liked to understand how things worked. I didn't have a lot of exposure to the reality of hands-on lab science until much later in my life, but just this notion that there are things out there that nobody knows how they work, and the scientific process is how you start to chip away at that.

I also was really interested in science fiction. My grandfather was really into the Golden Age of science fiction, Isaac Asimov-era books, and I inherited a lot of those from him as hand-me-downs. I really loved that kind of stuff. And then Jurassic Park was published when I was in elementary school, and I really loved that book. That was where I first learned about the notion of genetic engineering and started to think about how that is actually a tool that might someday be useful for people to build the things that they wanted to see in the world. So I was really into that, and it was definitely a major inspiration for me to get interested in biology.

Jon Chee - 00:05:25: I love that. I love how it is the kind of simple hand-me-down from a family member that can really spark that curiosity and passion. Also, I can't speak for how being an adolescent is in this day and age, but I had a similar upbringing. It was just like, "Do your thing. Work hard, but do your thing, and you'll ultimately find your path."

I also love how your family emphasized creativity. I think for me, it was probably difficult because I had a very limited definition of what creativity could be. I always used to think, "I'm not that creative. I'm a terrible musician, I'm terrible at art." But I think over time, I learned that creativity manifests in different ways. Even if it is business or science, you can approach things creatively. It took me a long time to learn, but I love that creativity was a North Star present in your upbringing. When you were finding science, was it in elementary school when it started to become a focal point?

Roy Maute - 00:06:33: I think so. As far as my interests went, at least, I obviously did the usual kid stuff—participated in the science fair, though not like I did anything exceptional. Thinking about how kids are these days, the kind of kids who might come through an internship in a lab at Stanford now have been doing laboratory experiments since they were toddlers. I had no experience like that, but I was really interested in learning about it and read a ton of books.

That carried forward into high school where you get a little bit deeper into occasionally doing laboratory experiments in the classroom. These days, I have a mixed opinion on how important that really is for scientific education. Again, some kids now do serious laboratory work in middle and high school, which is pretty cool, but for me as a budding scientist, that really wasn't that important. Just learning about the larger world and starting to think about what the scientific enterprise was and the different types of things you could study—that was what really got me hooked. I was eager to carry that forward into my secondary education when I went to college.

I guess I could have gone in different directions because I had very wide interests. Again, that was something my parents really emphasized—not overly focusing on any particular thing. It wasn't enough to get good grades in biology and physics but not in English; they really wanted us to have a pretty broad view. Visual arts were also a big part of my life since my mom was an artist. I don't consider myself a skilled artist, but I think that was one of the great things she taught us. We were just always doing crafts at home, always doing artwork. It wasn't about building a specific skill set; it was just about expressing yourself and using your hands.

I think that was another really important part of the way I was raised: DIY projects. My parents had this real passion for renovating historic houses. As I was growing up, they would buy these fairly dilapidated properties and we would live in a construction site for years at a time. If they weren't working or doing something for the kids, they were working on the house. There was no idle moment in that respect. Every weekend was all about those projects, and the kids were definitely roped into that enterprise as well. It takes a small kid to get through the crawl space of an attic to put in fiberglass insulation in the Texas heat! That was just a baseline expectation for us.

That, honestly, was at least as formative as anything in the classroom. First, the notion that you should be doing something productive pretty much all the time. Second, that there is no task around you that's off-limits—just get the information, get the supplies, and give it a shot. It doesn't always work, but it was a real extension of the artwork my mom was pushing us to do. Just get out there and paint the wall; you don't need to hire someone to do that. In my current life, I try to carry that ethos forward. I'm a little bit more on the fence about whether it's always worth it to do it yourself, but...

Jon Chee - 00:09:24: Yeah.

Roy Maute - 00:09:24: Certainly, the notion that you are capable of doing it was something that was really important to my parents to teach us, and something I certainly think about with my own kids as well.

Jon Chee - 00:09:32: I love that. Your description of going into an attic during the Texas heat sounds intense. But what a formative experience. That is truly hands-on. When I think about my early upbringing as well, just really getting my hands dirty makes you appreciate physical labor. You're like, "This is hard. This is proper, back-breaking work." It puts things into perspective when you're later thinking, "This is hard," while just sitting in front of a computer. It gives you perspective on what "difficult" can actually be.

Roy Maute - 00:10:15: That's right. And depending on the flavor of science you do, it’s not back-breaking labor in the way construction can be, but it is a physical process. If you have a computational focus, maybe it's not like that, but certainly, my experience in the wet lab involves building things and executing experiments with your hands. There's a lot of overlap between that feeling of reward in woodworking and the feeling of reward if you've successfully executed an experiment. One way or the other, that feeling of crafting something in the real world is pretty important to me.

Jon Chee - 00:10:43: Absolutely. So now, as you're graduating high school, where was your head at? Were you thinking of specific schools, or were you just seeing how it unfolded?

Roy Maute - 00:10:53: I definitely had specific schools and a specific path in mind. There have been a couple of instances in my life where I can look back and be like, "Yeah, I really wanted to be a scientist." I really wanted to go to a science-focused school in California, even though I'd scarcely ever been to California. I didn't really know what it meant to "do science," but somehow I got fixated on this notion. It was the right idea, and now that I've done it, I think it was exactly the right choice.

I wanted to do laboratory research and study biology, even as I didn't have real experience with what that meant. I never spent time in a lab, but I knew that was the career path I wanted to pursue. So I focused on schools that I felt had the opportunity to give me deep research experience as an undergrad. The school I ended up going to was UC Berkeley. Great experience for me.

Jon Chee - 00:11:36: Go Bears!

Roy Maute - 00:11:37: Yeah, Go Bears! That's right. I now live close to the Berkeley campus and find excuses to go there as often as possible. It looms very large in my life and my mind as a wonderful place. It was a very different educational environment from what I was used to. The high school I went to in Dallas was a magnet school; it was part of a large school complex, but the teachers and the kids I interacted with were a very small group—only about 60 kids per grade. It was a competitive place and a great high school, but Berkeley is the exact opposite.

It’s thousands and thousands of undergrads coming from all over the globe. You’re a big fish in a small pond in high school, and then who knows what size fish in a big pond at Berkeley. But it was a cool experience and a very different educational ethos—"sink or swim." Those large classes are really designed to make you ask yourself whether you actually want to do what you think you want to do. There was an adjustment, for sure, but I really enjoyed my time there and found exactly the scientific opportunity I was hoping to find.

Jon Chee - 00:12:35: Love that. Growing up in Berkeley, I see that "sink or swim" is a broader Berkeley thing. Even at Berkeley High, they just say, "Figure it out. We're going to push you into the deep end." But likewise, it was a super formative experience. It makes you realize what you want to work on. You realize, "I'm going to have to fight through this." I'm curious, how did you land your first lab gig?

Roy Maute - 00:13:13: I was really focused on finding that opportunity on day one. There was some infrastructure to help match interested undergrads with labs on campus. I went through that application process my very first semester and didn't get matched. I interviewed with one or two labs and I think I did the same thing in the spring, so I was getting a little stressed because I didn't have that lab position. When you're that age, every passage of time feels so critical, like you're missing the window—which isn't true at all in reality.

Then I got lucky. In my randomly matched triple in the dorm at Berkeley, both guys I lived with became lifelong friends. One of them was a musician, but his sister was pre-med and she was in a lab that wasn't on the Berkeley campus; it was a Berkeley-affiliated institution in Emeryville. It was actually a UCSF set of labs, a satellite location, but occasionally Berkeley undergrads would find their way there. She was in her senior year and encouraged me to reach out to her PI because she felt they would want to replace her when she was gone. It worked out perfectly.

I had a chance to start as a basic research assistant. It depends on what kind of lab you end up in, but it is expected—and a crucial part of the experience—to start with the most grunty of grunt work. It was things like mixing salt solutions at the 20-liter scale and taking care of the mice, splitting them when they were ready to be weaned, that kind of thing. Since I ended up in that lab by connection and happenstance, it wasn't that I had a menu of 50 options and decided, "This is the one doing research I'm passionate about." I was pretty open-minded.

This lab was focused on neurological development, using genetic screening techniques in mice to study how the brain, face, and cranium develop. I didn't really realize as I was entering that that's a pretty unusual thing to do. Many people are interested in those questions, but they generally don't do random mutagenesis to find the genes involved. I sort of took it for granted that that was a reasonable approach. The people in the lab were really skilled, and I got to learn a lot of techniques. Because I had a general interest in molecular biology and a special interest in genetics, it was a great match. I learned a ton while I was there.

Jon Chee - 00:15:41: I love hearing stories of how people first get into a lab, because a lot of the time it is serendipitous—surrounding yourself with the right people who then connect the dots. From the outside, it can almost feel premeditated, but often it’s not.

Roy Maute - 00:16:07: It was not!

Jon Chee - 00:16:08: I try my best to stay in touch with folks on that journey, and they're always like, "It has to be premeditated." And I’m like, "No, it doesn't."

Roy Maute - 00:16:19: It’s easier said than done. You want to think just enough, and then don't overthink it after that. Follow the opportunities in front of you. There have been a couple of instances in my background where I made a specific course correction and felt it was the right decision, but this first step was an example of getting lucky. I didn't research this particular PI for years and show up at his favorite Starbucks; I just got started.

Jon Chee - 00:16:50: Absolutely. In those early innings, you just have to be a sponge. You’re talking about learning the basics. It’s similar to working summers in Texas—nothing is below your pay grade. During undergrad, you're doing dishes a lot of the time, or maintaining cell lines on the weekends. Someone’s got to do the maintenance. Those are the foundational blocks. During that first lab experience, was there anyone who took you under their wing?

Roy Maute - 00:17:36: Absolutely. The PI was a guy named Andy Peterson. I actually had the chance to catch up with him maybe two months ago; he came into the Pheast office, and it was really fun to talk to him. My direct mentor and supervisor was Kosta Sarbalas, who is a professor at UC Davis now. He was my day-in, day-out mentor. Yes, I was doing the dishes, and he was the one putting them in front of me! Both of them were excellent, patient teachers. It takes a lot of patience to get anything useful out of someone that junior who doesn't know science or how to work in a lab.

I think you were drawing a parallel between construction and the lab, and that's correct—the notion of a trade in a guild or union sense. Everything useful you learn is going to happen outside the classroom; it's going to be hands-on. In addition to the home construction I mentioned, my last summer before college, I worked on a concrete crew. It was the same feeling—these guys who had been doing it for decades had sore backs, so they weren't swinging the sledgehammer anymore and needed someone else to do it. But everything you needed to learn about a poured slab for a house, you learned by getting out there and doing it. The lab is the same way.

That lab community was interesting because it was UCSF-affiliated but not on the UCSF campus. It was a little bit insular. I got to know the people in the lab well but didn't see as much of the wider network of labs or go to departmental seminars until later in grad school. It’s just a reflection on how the particulars of the places where you train can form your path.

Jon Chee - 00:19:34: Yeah. So you’re at UC Berkeley studying MCB, learning the science, and getting your hands dirty. I’m guessing you’re thinking, "This is rad." Did the path toward grad school start to open up clearly?

Roy Maute - 00:19:53: Not exactly as perfectly clear as that. I did have to think about it, but one of the "perks" of being in an academic lab is that they are focused on convincing you that’s the path you want to follow. Working with someone like Kosta, who had a PhD and was in his postdoc, it seemed obvious that if I wanted to do the work he was doing, I’d need that degree. I didn't think much about careers in science that didn't involve graduate education.

The big question for me was whether I would go straight into it or do lab work for a couple of years first. Also, was I academically ready? I was a competitive student, but at a place like Berkeley, you find individuals who publish multiple papers while they're freshmen. I wasn't that. I needed to figure out if I could get into the graduate programs that were the right places for me. Once I decided I was competitive, I took a shot and got the opportunities I wanted.

Another big part of what decides your path is the people around you. While I was at Berkeley, I met my now-wife. We were committed to going where we could be together. She really wanted to go to New York City, and I thought, "Yeah, sure, there are some great programs there." So I applied primarily to programs in New York so we could do that together, and it worked out really well.

Jon Chee - 00:21:24: I love that. Likewise, I met my now-wife at Berkeley, too. It’s that serendipity. Having grown up in Texas and then landing in Berkeley, what was your experience with Berkeley as a place, broadly speaking?

Roy Maute - 00:21:43: I really loved it, and I still love it. There was a lot that was very new to me. Dallas is not the "most Texas" place in all of Texas; it was a bit of a sprawling city without a really strong identity compared to others. It was cool to come to a place that had a clear sense of what it was. The hippie culture, though less central to modern Berkeley, still had remnants that were fascinating to me.

California and the Bay Area loomed large in my mind because it was the dot-com era. I graduated high school in 2002. Hearing about Silicon Valley and startups was a big deal. Biotech companies then and now don't have that same prominence in the imagination—it’s harder for people to understand what we’re doing. For me, that’s a feature, not a bug. I love being able to do something serious at scale without the same scrutiny as consumer-facing companies.

The other piece is the natural beauty of California. We talked about the Texas heat—it’s a tough place to really enjoy nature every day. In California, you have 72-degree days all the time. Berkeley is nestled in the hills with beautiful nature right at the doorstep. I eventually had to find my way back to California for all those reasons.

Jon Chee - 00:23:41: Absolutely. Also, the Bay Area has great food, which is one of the hardest things to leave.

Roy Maute - 00:23:53: Hell yeah. And there was a ton that was completely novel to me. The exposure to international culture was huge—meeting people from everywhere, learning a lot, and eating great food. It opened my horizons exactly the way you want at that stage of life.

Jon Chee - 00:24:11: Now you're on your way to New York, which is also very international. Talk a little bit about the school you selected and your experience landing in New York.

Roy Maute - 00:24:23: I ended up going to Columbia University for my graduate studies. Biological science programs are organized in different ways; sometimes there's an umbrella program where you rotate through any lab. At that time, Columbia was a bit more of a traditional academic department, which appealed to me. I was coming from a genetics lab and was really interested in genetic tools. The fact that I could apply to the Department of Genetics and Development was very appealing.

I hadn't applied to Columbia as an undergrad because I really wanted to go West, but it’s a wonderful community. My mentors at Berkeley highly recommended Columbia because it’s historically strong in neurological development. Even though I didn't specifically want to study that as a grad student, I got a lot of encouragement. I loved it when I went to visit.

It was my first time in New York. At that time, there was a clear separation between the undergraduate campus in Morningside Heights and the Medical Center at 168th Street in Washington Heights. It’s a really vibrant neighborhood. The Medical Center is its own world with a zillion hospital buildings. I had a cool experience where I flew in and a blizzard hit, so I got trapped in town for an extra four days. I got to explore New York City when it was half shut down and people were cross-country skiing down Broadway. It was a great memory. And, of course, the professors and the people I met were exactly the kind of scientists I wanted to be around. It ended up being an easy choice.

Jon Chee - 00:26:55: Hell yeah. What a first impression of New York.

Roy Maute - 00:27:05: Yeah, they assured me it wasn't like that all the time! But you really get a sense of the city as a collection of little villages when you have to trudge through the snow because the buses are shut down.

Jon Chee - 00:27:20: Totally. So now you’re getting set up at Columbia. Tell us about the lab you were in and what that culture was like.

Outro - 00:27:31: That’s all for this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast featuring Roy Maute. Join us next time for part two, where Roy recounts choosing Columbia's genetics department, surviving a blizzard during his interview visit, and joining Riccardo Dalla-Favera’s notoriously demanding lab. He also shares why he sought the hardest training environment, learning from medical doctors and senior scientists, and presenting at 3:00 PM Friday lab meetings where imperfect work was immediately challenged.

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