Who am I?• I apologize, but I find this hard to answer...

• I work as a CTO and co-founder of Seven

Bridges Genomics

• I've spent 10+ years in the industry

• I've spent ~7 years in various startups wearing

different hats

• Yes, I am kinda old

• But I feel like I'm 30!

Who we are and what do we do?• We are a biotech startup based in Boston and Belgrade

• No, I haven't heard that Eagles song

• I don't care to...

• We are a platform providing infrastructure for parallel and scalable execution of a

genomic pipelines and scientific collaboration in the cloud

• (I am now trying to explain the previous sentence because I don't understand it

either)

• Yes, we're actually trying to help biologists and bioinformaticians to focus on

research, they don't care about platform, tools, or cloud - they care about the

results (data)

• We have 23 employees in Belgrade and 7 employees in Boston

Why is it important?

• We are facing a rapid drop of the cost of DNA sequencing

• That means exponential growth of genomic data each year

• With better knowledge of DNA information and processes, we

are getting into an era of personalized medicine

• It means that we will be able to treat cancer with proper drugs

and/or design them for each patient

• It also means we will be able to understand and, perhaps, treat

many rare genetic disorders

Why is it hard?• It takes about a day just to align a whole genome (high quality data, ~600-800GB per genome) on a ~100 m2.4xlarge EC2 instances, that is - if you can• We don't write/implement the actual "algorithms" and genomic applications, we make them seamless to run, "pipe" and parallelize their execution using AWS infrastructure• There are several hundreds of various applications that labs/institutions want to see running on top of our platform, some of them commercial and/or developed in-house• It's a hard problem and we are the only company that actually managed to build a product, not a prototype• Yes, a "minimum viable" product someone actually wants to pay for - it took us 2 years• Most of the labs/institutions struggle with both resources and knowledge on how to do this

How does it look?

What's our story?• Deniz (Kural) and I know each other for >10 years

• We actually met in person 2 years ago, after we started our

venture

• Deniz finished math at Harvard, worked on 1000 Genomes

Project and started his PhD at Boston College

• He figured a market and product vision

• John (Sheffield), Deniz' friend from Harvard did the finances

and hustling

• I figured out how to build the platform and engineering

team

What have I learned?• You are hiring a team to work with you, not for you

• Credibility is all you actually got

• Be humble, if you're working with the right team you'll feel like an idiot

several times per day...

• ... and you are an idiot, nothing you can do about it except

acknowledging it

• Keep your feet on the ground, arrogance works only when the times are

good

• Do a proper legal paperwork, use standard templates - they are there

for a reason

• Do a founder vesting

• Everyone is replaceable, if you did a proper job - especially yourself

Final words of frus^H^H^H^Hwisdom

• You'll have to go through many situations and decisions that

will make you feel like a crap

• Only way to avoid the politics is to deal with it

• Expect pretty much anything, do your homework

• There is nothing like a "founder DNA", it boils down to hard

work and persistence

• Don't underestimate luck, but don't count on it

• Don't ever, never let your co-founders call the platform by your

name