New learnings continue

This week in "behind the scenes of building a biotech company", it's IP protection, manufacturing and marketing! And - of course - a lot of cell culture. Scientists, don’t believe anyone who tells you starting a company is glamorous 🙃

Here’s the fun part of building a company ➡ You'll work across all areas of the business as you build the version 1 of all major processes.

Here’s the reality of starting a company ➡ Initially, those self-developed V1 processes won’t be all that great.

Where we’ve needed to upskill over the last month:

1️⃣ Forming a well-researched opinion on intellectual property strategy

2️⃣ Website design, company branding, and sales

3️⃣ Manufacturing, supply chain, and distribution strategy for scale and geographies

4️⃣ Financials big and small: from stress-testing our funding strategy to improving our accounting

Where I’m confident:

✅ The science behind the product: As we would hope, given how long I’ve been a scientist!

✅ The market: Arguably the most important area to nail as an entrepreneur.

✅ Hiring, growing, and leading a technical team: It’s critical to make the right hires at the right time. I’ve done enough of this previously to be confident we’ll do a great job.

✅ Our ability to figure it out: Look, I’m naturally a little bit skeptical and a realist, probably “too much of a scientist” and not quite the ambitious, overly confident entrepreneur that plenty would argue I need to be in order to launch a company of this magnitude.

But we’ve built a laboratory, made the necessary technical progress, spoken with hundreds of potential customers, built V1 pipelines in all the critical areas, and have done so on a shoestring budget. This time last year, all of those goals felt insane.

Turns out that Katie-one-year-ago was capable of more than she thought she was.

So manufacturing and scale-up strategy, let’s bring it on.