The Biotech Startups Podcast

"Find the thing that gets you excited, that fascinates you, and then have the thing you love be something else." We’re revisiting some of our previous episodes over the holidays this year. Our next re-release is this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, in which Jacob Glanville discusses his transformative years at Pfizer's Rinat site and his transition to Stanford. He describes how an open, collaborative culture allowed him to roam across teams, trading his coding skills for scientific mentorship while building critical bioinformatics infrastructure for antibody discovery. Jacob shares how he converted a corporate laptop into antibody.pfizer.com, creating an internal web server that centralized analysis tools and enabled scientists to rapidly interrogate antibody libraries. Early access to deep sequencing let him dissect repertoires before and after selection, iteratively design better synthetic libraries, and publish influential papers—ultimately being promoted four times to Principal Scientist with only a BA. Despite this success, his burning idea for a universal vaccine drove him to leave Pfizer, pursue a PhD at Stanford, and simultaneously launch Distributed Bio. At Stanford, Jacob explains how he "separated church and state," keeping therapeutic antibody work in his company while focusing academic research on T-cell receptors and cytokine analysis. He reflects on navigating Stanford's tech transfer process and contrasts the priorities of academia versus industry, emphasizing the value of finding work that fascinates you.

"You don't always know at the time how something will be useful in the future, but if you keep following what fascinates you, those threads can re-synthesize into something powerful down the line."​ We’re revisiting some of our previous episodes over the holidays this year. Our next re-release is this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, where computational immuno-engineer and serial entrepreneur Jake Glanville shares how growing up in a Mayan Tzʼutujil village in Guatemala during a civil war shaped his path into biotech. He reflects on living amid limited access to medicine, navigating personal health challenges like asthma, and witnessing how simple interventions such as deworming transformed entire communities, inspiring his commitment to developing therapeutics and vaccines.​ Jake discusses the profound influence of his grandfather, a Rocketdyne engineer who worked on the engines that sent humans to the moon, and how that legacy lowered his sense of what is "impossible" in science. Watching his parents run a hotel and restaurant gave him an education in operations, resilience, and people management—skills that translated directly into building biotech companies. He also unpacks the negotiation lessons he absorbed from Mayan market culture, where the goal is sustainable, mutual value rather than one-time wins.​ The episode follows Jake's transition to the United States after his father's autoimmune disease diagnosis, his strategic decision to attend UC Berkeley, and how his self-taught programming background fused with population genetics to create a passion for computational immunology.

"The biggest problem that we're seeing right now is that the efficiency gains have not translated to enterprise value. The customer is not seeing that result transcend into unit economics yet." In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, we explore Krish Ramadurai's insights on AI-native venture investing and the evolving biotech landscape. Krish unpacks the current state of AI ventures, explaining why the foundation layer is being rapidly commoditized and how defensibility now lives in full-stack applications rather than point solutions. He offers a candid perspective on what founders often misunderstand about market fit, revealing that efficiency gains haven't translated to enterprise value and that most AI companies are building vitamins when customers need painkillers. Krish breaks down the dramatic shift in funding benchmarks, where seed-stage companies now achieve revenue milestones that previously defined Series A rounds. He shares hard-won lessons from the tech bio space, explaining why platforms that forgot biotech is fundamentally a drug business struggled during the biotech winter, and why growth investors can only underwrite assets, not services models. The conversation also explores AIX's firm-building philosophy, emphasizing how combining technical expertise with authentic human connection—being "the same dweeb in and out of the office"—creates a competitive advantage in winning deals against tier-one funds with significantly larger checks.

"I'm only doing this because I'm already doing this or because I couldn't afford to hypothesis test." In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Krish Ramadurai, Partner at AIX Ventures, reveals his unconventional approach to building a venture capital career through simultaneous immersion in both academia and industry. The conversation explores how Krish pursued his master's in nanomedicine and PhD at Oxford University while working full-time at Harmonics Capital—an arrangement he negotiated by demonstrating that his research on machine learning algorithms for mRNA optimization directly aligned with his daily venture work.​ Krish challenges conventional wisdom about hustle culture, arguing that productivity drops after 55 hours per week and emphasizing strategic time protection over brute-force effort. He shares candid reflections on what he calls "controlled chaos"—how his achievements weren't the result of meticulous planning but rather making the best of challenging circumstances. The discussion then transitions to his strategic move to AIX Ventures, where he joined as the first institutional partner at a firm helmed by AI pioneers like Richard Socher (inventor of prompt engineering). Krish describes building AIX's TechBio practice from less than 10% to 25% of the portfolio in just over a year, leading nine deals while helping scale a fund that's become the #2 VC globally for performance with eight unicorns from their first fund.

"I was not like, 'Well, this partner helped me on it, and then we shared the deal.' I was like, 'I think I'm good at this because I basically did the output of an entire firm by myself, like, the first two years.'" In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, host Jon Chee continues his conversation with Krish Ramadurai, exploring his unconventional journey from Harvard academia to becoming a venture capital partner in record time. Krish shares how he applied his research training to venture capital, identifying a new category of compute-driven biotech companies before "TechBio" even existed, and executing twelve investments during his first year as an analyst—all while the COVID-19 pandemic sent markets into free fall.​ Krish reveals the critical importance of "shot-calling" in venture capital, explaining why many talented associates and principals get stuck in their careers by not claiming ownership of their wins. He describes compressing his MBA into sixteen months at Washington University while working two full-time positions, his rapid ascent from analyst to partner by consistently performing above his role, and the uncomfortable but necessary transition from technical expert to fundraiser when dealing with limited partners. Throughout the conversation, Krish emphasizes breaking traditional rules when conviction demands it, treating every investment like an evidence-based academic experiment, and understanding that in venture capital, you're only as good as your last deal.