3. 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

4. • 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

5. • 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

7. • 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

8. • 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

9. • 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