By Bega Murray
Scientific training involves a huge amount of creative thinking. We identify gaps in knowledge, generate hypotheses, and carry out experimental investigations to develop new understanding. However, as trainees, we rarely see how this same skillset can be applied to developing a viable business. Therefore, it was exciting to hear the story and insights of Viraj Mane, PhD, when he spoke about startups at an iJOBS talk on March 24th. Dr. Mane is an academically trained scientist who turned his ideas into a successful business, Lactiga. Dr. Mane presented a very engaging and interactive talk titled “Zero to One – The Startup Advantage”. He explained that “zero to one” refers to starting from nothing, i.e., a completely new idea, and turning it into something tangible. However, he emphasized that this was not just a talk about entrepreneurship, and he hoped it would provide ideas for everyone in the audience, regardless of their planned career trajectory.
The talk was divided into nine main themes that summarize the structure and early stages of startups, their operations, and the key elements of their success. There was then ample discussion time at the end, where the audience asked many engaging questions that expanded on Dr. Mane’s own career trajectory and startups in general.
The incumbent (established company) versus the startup
Early in the talk, Dr. Mane spent time explaining differences between well-established companies and startups. Incumbents are much larger, with well-defined, high-scale products, and typically organize employees into teams focused on specific products or problems. Therefore, individual employees may not have a broad understanding of the whole process or product, only the functions assigned to their team.
Startups are typically much smaller, so they tend not to have the resources to generate these distinct functional teams. Their production process is more of an iterative process with interim solutions, where a product is launched, and lessons are learned along the way to further refine it. Startups involve doing many things at a rapid pace: learning, customer discovery, building the minimal viable product (MVP), and making decisions. They also do things at a much smaller scale than incumbents. This iterative, fast-paced approach closely mirrors the way trainee scientists develop successful research projects over time, where they test hypotheses and refine experiments over time to produce a concise scientific story.
The role of inspiration
The role of inspiration can be particularly important in biology and medicine-focused startups. Dr. Mane shared his own inspiration, which was a multistep process. After learning about David Vetter, also known as the boy in the bubble, a child who suffered from Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID), Dr. Mane decided to pursue a career in biological research, leading to a PhD and postdoctoral training. The second part of his inspiration for Lactiga came from becoming a father, which put him on a new path towards entrepreneurship. When becoming a dad, Dr. Mane became aware of the processes of new mothers’ pumping breast milk, e.g., at night or at work, and giving it to babies later, and that sometimes this breast milk is discarded due to storage limits, despite containing many valuable nutrients and antibodies that remain viable. This led to his hypothesis that antibodies could be extracted from these unusable milk pouches and repurposed for treatment of immunocompromised people, such as SCID patients like David Vetter. This example highlights how personal experiences, combined with scientific training, can spark ideas with real-world impact.
While this was Dr. Mane’s own personal inspiration, many of us scientists have similar stories of what led us to pursue research as a career. This intrinsic motivation is often what drives us forward in academic research, so it was interesting to hear how this personal inspiration combined with scientific training can lead to entrepreneurial ideas.
Why startups play a different game (and often win)
In this section, Dr. Mane outlined what makes a startup successful in the early stages. Startups begin with an insight or idea, not a product. The key question is whether that idea addresses a problem important enough to justify building a company around it. His opinion is that biology- and medicine-based startups are driven not just by profit, but by the goal of solving meaningful problems. Incumbents, on the other hand, are often tied to profit margins and so avoid uncertain, narrow, or unproven opportunities.
Here, he went back to his original inspiration in the story of David Vetter. Scientists at NASA developed a specialized suit to allow David to safely leave his bubble and experience the outside world. This product was generated by scientists solely to improve David’s quality of life, not for profit. He encouraged us to think about how we can put our own spin on a problem statement and focus on it from a personal founder’s perspective: why we noticed the problem and why it matters. This will be key to your startup's success. This thinking is also applicable to your scientific training career: what idea is important enough to justify spending your graduate or postdoctoral fellowship studying? While not driven by profit, outlining your key research problems and their validity early in your traineeship will ensure a fruitful experience where your work pushes your field forward.
How do startups learn faster than incumbents
Startups follow a loop of learn, build, and measure. Critical to the success of startups are key early assumptions: what would kill the idea if proven false, the first thing you choose to test and why. These details are very important when resources are limited. For startups, most early work is assumption testing and risk assessment. Learning happens at speed because these businesses are smaller, rather than having multiple teams work together and communicate at larger companies. This process closely resembles the scientific method, where hypotheses are rapidly tested and refined. The faster you can redirect your research after a failure of a key assumption, the more productive your research project will be.
How founders figure out what matters
A key step in early startups is assessing the need for your product. Traditionally, businesses ask customers what is important to them. But how does that work in the field of biology and medicine, such as Lactiga, when dealing with novel therapies? There is a wide variety of customers, including patients, doctors, pharmacists, etc. You need to identify who you are selling to and talk to them. In this field, you also need to identify which regulatory agencies you need approval from and begin conversations with them.
In the initial stages of Lactiga, Dr. Mane talked to a wide variety of “customers” to get their input and feedback. This included talking to midwives, lactating mothers, and milk bank directors. He talked to scientists, immunologists, and physicians that he had trained with. Lastly, he confirmed with patient foundations that represent and advocate for severely immunodeficient patients. By this point, he had gathered enough feedback from many different “stakeholders” to approach investors confidently.
While important in business, customer discovery is important even in science-based domains. It is important to listen to the target populations of your product, rather than pitch to them. This approach reduces the risk for potential investors, suppliers, and vendors before capital is committed and ensures that innovation is aligned with real needs. This is a reason that many funding bodies in the research space will work closely with patient advocate groups, and it is a good idea for junior scientists to become familiar with these entities and their goals in advance of grant applications
Early startups break the “rules” that incumbents follow on purpose
While incumbents often prioritize scalable, profit-generating processes early on, startups frequently focus on approaches that do not initially scale. In Lactiga’s case, Dr. Mane knew he would require a patent. To get that, he knew he needed to do some preliminary studies. For these preliminary studies, he collected samples from new mothers and hired a lab to extract the antibodies. This established the Minimal Viable Product (MVP) from which he could base his patent and future startup plans. The purpose of these studies was to yield critical insights, as should be the function of any early investigations that establish an MVP. Although these early processes could seem inefficient from an outside perspective, the aim is to get you to a position where you can adapt and scale your product. This is similar to preliminary experiments in research, which are designed to generate insight rather than final results. From these preliminary results, you can apply for grants to establish a larger research project and produce publishable results.
Minimal Viable Product (MVP):
A critical component of startups is establishing an MVP. The purpose of this product is to gather initial evidence of viability without building an entire product. This MVP can then be used to apply for funding, file for patents, and launch a larger-scale operation.
For example, a small volume of milk collection and self-funded studies in the early days of Lactiga led to the company’s first patent. With a patent in hand, Dr. Mane could then reach out to interested investors and apply for funding, such as his first NIH award. This allowed him to close his first venture capital investment in the company. Once they pulled in additional investors, they could fund more studies and gather sufficient data to apply for orphan drug status with the FDA. After this, they got their first publication, which led to two more NIH awards.
Building a startup is an iterative process, where each small step builds on the previous one. Lactiga now has 7 issued patents, 16 research awards, and 2 publications. All of these milestones were built on the initial data generated during MVP development. Similarly, building a research direction for your career in academia is an iterative process, whereby each of your trainee research projects and publications develop skills and insights to guide you towards your next career goal. Eventually, you will have gathered enough training and preliminary data to write your early investigator grants to establish your own lab and apply for job positions.
Uncertainty
In the world of startups, you are required to make high-stakes decisions without complete information. Therefore, you need to become familiar with the feeling of uncertainty and how to make the best decision with the information available. You will frequently need to make such decisions in your academic career as well, where you need to decide what project direction to follow or experiments to carry out with limited preliminary data or high time pressure with project funding limits or defense deadlines looming. A general rule of thumb is that decisions can be good, fast, or cheap, but not all three. While you cannot wait for certainty when making decisions in startups, you can weigh the consequences of a decision to decide which are more critical and so require more conservative approaches. Some decisions are reversible and should be treated as such.
Examples of how startups and small companies change the market
There are many disruptors in different markets that have driven change in their industry. Examples include the water brand “Liquid Death,” which was sold in a can rather than the standard plastic bottle, and Rivian electric off-road vehicles, which were launched to compete with Ford gas pickups. Small companies can influence how established companies approach product design and manufacturing, just as a trainee project with new findings can change the direction of your lab’s research or your own career trajectory.
What can you do differently in a small startup? You can learn, carry out customer discovery, and build an MVP at speed. These rapid processes allow you to launch new and innovative products that may change the face of your industry.
Final thoughts
Overall, Dr. Mane provided incredible insight into the world of startups in the realm of biological and medical products. Doing so through the lens of his background and experience setting up Lactiga made for a very engaging and insightful seminar, inspiring many budding entrepreneurs that tuned in for this talk. His story illustrates how the skills developed through scientific training, including problem-solving, iteration, and working under uncertainty, can translate directly into entrepreneurship, while also providing insightful information on how to drive our academic research forward in a fruitful manner.
This article was edited by Junior Editor Matthew Brown, Senior Editors Janaina Cruz Pereira, and Joycelyn Radeny.