so far in sf

a proverb i remembered recently originally from eddy's post:

let the young man in his desperation go out and hunt. if he kills the elephant, his poverty ends. if the elephant kills him, his poverty ends.

a bunch of things happened so far:

• Joelle and Anton visit (just good vibes and cool people in adjacent industries), we can meet sometime next week.
• Marianne Chapleau (unsure about warmth for now but gave helpful advice during call): start w/ academic contacts for LOIs [large for necessity in reproducibility] and also prioritize going to conferences over sending cold emails, and make sure if I can give a talk at those conferences, and have business cards, do so!! And after PoC is done w/ a good deck, send it to her since her husband works in tech as VC, and they both can help! the husband's colleague does biotech VC as well.
  • I know that CSHL hosts an event in "digital bio" and an August 10ish deadline for guest speaking submission which I could do once I have more progress by then. so also look into other events soon. perhaps the one in spain, etc.
• AI infra after dark
  • Craig Irwin said: just talk to influencer-level angels (with tripple-down influence outward and inward toward the VCs in the domain/space) like Bryan Johnson b/c avoidance loop means: people think celebrity famous don't msg, but that's why you should b/c everyone thinks like that. He also gave me the advice that when I talk to VCs I have to think anti-philosophically, basically not to tell them about my ambitions but to tell them about the business and the revenue and the quantifiable metrics that they actually care about because that is fundamentally what they care about, right? They are not here to build a company with you. They're here to help you scale it up with revenue, with capital. They care about exits and financial scaling more than everything else. You need to give a shit about the philosophy and altruistic outcomes. They don't need to. They care about the method and the method is strictly numbers.
    • I got an X blue checkmark to DM him. I should prob do so sometime soon.
  • Joel Carlson recommends/will intro me to Bostonian VC Ed Sim.
  • I'm invited to Founders' Fund by Natasha Whitledge. It's a party and going there is good network strategy!! It's started by Thiel.
• Ningwei Liu, his son (from UPenn CS) and intro to investor under Lexi Ventures — Jonah Probell (Maxx is another connection). But it's a secondary connection from Ningmei. We need to plan it soon.
• Yang Shaofeng: general angel advice.

macro plans (as things fruition) (every item in each phase will be acted on in parallel):

Phase 1

• Finish the current PoC. The culturing is done. Data collection for non-invasive (brightfield and phase contrast) longitudinal morphology is done. Sectioning is done. Optimization is ongoing. The actual official staining is next. And then we worry about the block 21 shipping, which I would probably return to the Amherst area to deal with. Finally modeling with the ENR plan, which needs good-looking results, which is the premise for all the Phase 2 objectives.
• The LOI Target Contact Hunts (key is the plan all of these out)
  • The automation in Codex has been running for a while and will continue to run by auditing, re-auditing, verifying, searching up people that are relevant, reachable, and verifiable to be added to the target list.
  • I need to prioritize direct conference-level outreach through in-person networking, tracking who will attend what conference. Best try to be a part of the keynote as a speaker and get business cards and good narratives to tell on stage. Good narratives is synonymous with the concept of just having everything in a package already when I talk. Or in other words, the technical milestones (which are the main thing) are impressive, but at the time of speaking about progress/milestones regarding recruitment/team and other established relationships with partners/customers.
  • Secondary fallback: for whom I cannot find information about where they will attend anything, try to have very good online outreach through good emailing and calls.
  • The key for both in-person and virtual outreach for potential LOIs is that I need to plan out how to be specific about what meaningful milestone I would get to before the LOI is signed and the plan after the LOI. And to get to LOI I need to take delicate, phased-approach, aka not jump into the topic of LOI immediately, but plan the route to that point. Maybe it will take multiple calls and back-and-forth emailing results. Praise people for their research work (be accurate, do my due diligence, and praising people is how people give things in return because you tell them they are more experienced, put them on a pedestal, and they will offer you something), but don't be too exaggerated and painfully obvious about the glazing. We will discuss target profiles in greater details and detailed goals of the LOI in Phase 2.
• The general networking I'm currently doing right now in the SF space to know more people, warm up to opportunities like founders' fund parties, runners' clubs, meeting intro-ed VCs/angels, meeting more people in general.
• Actually go through the market information and plans for commercialization and scaling. Quantify everything! Know about what my path to a certain financial revenue scale would be! I need to know the difference between OCC and organoids and how they don't occupy the same market, so I can clarify that the actual direct competition is the animal models that I'm trying to replace in the neurodegenerative diseases context.

Phase 2

• Work on IP by discussing and planning with Frank to advance that; remember I need to avoid any conflicts with UMass TTO.
• Start the actual customer discovery + LOI hunts (per phase 1, doing in-person and online emailing/calls altogether).
  • To list down the priorities of the target list from top/utmost to bottom/low:
    • Large academic/non-profit orgs like the MJFF. Academic and non-profit orgs are more perceptive of changes because they're not revenue driven. They are driven by research and therefore they will be more perceptive to new modalities. In fact MJFF has already been using organoids in research for Parkinson's.
    • Relatively new/small (perhaps very few) startups working on therapeutic drugs using brain organoids. They probably face the very problem of reproducibility and want to solve it on their own and are having difficulties doing so or trying to find CROs to help them do it. The CROs are using very very crude methods such as optimizations for growing but not this opposite first principle thinking idea of quality control for reproducibility like my method.
    • Either progressive/traditional biopharma firms showing semi-interest in adopting brain organoids as a new modality, with fear of low reproducibility and as a result sticking to animal models.
  • All these firms/orgs need to focus on neurodegenerative diseases that could be supported using the different morphogen-induced organoids grown out of the Sun Lab industry's proprietary, provisionally patented microfluidic devices. Newer versions of the latest iteration of the microflex devices will only scale in quantity of wells held, a.k.a. scaling in quantity held per device. Not new form factors that allow more channels of diffusion. Therefore, the organoid or the brain organoid types to be generated would be pretty much identical.
  • The inherent structure for good LOIs: Highlight that this is, of course, also non-binding. Need to be highly specific about trying to run recursive validation tests to find out human & animal model discrepancy vs. human & organoid discrepancy in the context of it being some disease-specific (and that some disease needs to be supported by the microfluid device). This would be the PILOT. Of course the interest of turning this LOI into an official pilot / recursive validation study run would be a highly accurate thereby production-grade, QC platform for specific brain organoid type that supports a specific desease (eg. Parkinson's) study.
• Update inception stage and college dropout/student-friendly programs such as ZFellows, 1517, Founders Fund, and all the other warm intro'ed people that I have known so far - hopefully relationships established through Marianne, Probell himself, Bryan Johnson, the Bostonian VC. The opportunities that could triple down to big VC firms.
  • The requirement for these is probably just sharing the good-looking PoC results and ongoing efforts to gather credible LOIs and recruit cofounders, since they're actually inception-stage. One of them has to take me for what I have already done because the opportunities I'm looking for here need to be actually inception stage. If they don't accept me because I'm not enough, that is the wrong opportunity, and I should try to find the right inception-stage opportunity, and stride forward on my own in parallel since that is already part of my plans in Phase 2.
• Recruiting
  • part-time until VC funding is secured
  • that secondary person in the secondary cockpit seat with me.
  • Try in Japan first. Why Japan? Because of the 1st principle thinking: the taste, perhaps my personal preference and bias. Just look at Matsumoto and his contributions to predictive QC in pituitary organoids: the invention of both iPSCs and organoids being in Japan.
  • For logistics this person is probably under some professor like Matsumoto and is highly ambitious and deeply technical in the foundations for AI and biology.
  • It needs to be Suzanne-shaped:
    • Has founder-level conviction and speed. Needs to believe in the mission.
    • PhD/postdoc-level credibility with foundations in comp biology + ML, since Telora more credible to pharma, investors, accelerators, and scientific partners. Organoid-specific things are learnable, so willing to learn from advisor (Sun) if not already ingrained.
    • Strong enough technically to co-own and build the QC/modeling pipeline and make technical scientific judgment calls.
    • Ideally understands or is interested in biomanufacturing automation, since Telora’s mid-term vision goes beyond a one-off QC model.
  • Totally acceptable if this person works part-time to collaborate/work together on things that don't require physical relocation until an official seed round led by hardcore VCs in the space. It's important to know that capital is absolutely necessary even though cofounder/founding-engineer candidates shouldn't join for the salary. They need fair salary to survive relocation and actual work.

Phase 3

• The currently established network (inception stage funding sources like Z and the more) shall triple down to the real hardcore VCs. I need to present: all the quantified company scaling information, market info, the PoC, the LOIs, the path to revenue, a team that will work full-time based on the condition that funding is secured, and the IP. e.g. Amplify, age1, Fifty years, etc. Then, begin.