The Science of Success: Transforming Scientific Concepts into Marketable Products with Stacy Frye, co-founder and CCO of Stimulus Bio

Today I got to speak with Stacy Fry, who is the Chief Commercial officer at Stimulus Bio. Stimulus Bio is a consulting firm that specializes in helping startups figure out all of the operational commercialization aspects before it gets too far into the process. So they really help with the de risking and putting all the systems into place and they'll even provide some scientific expertise as needed. Stacy and her co founder are leveraging their great experience successfully growing and exiting two previous biotechs, which is a great feat. As you know, it's difficult to have those successes and they really aim to help startups get off on the right foot and to really understand what the challenges are ahead of them. So she had a really unique perspective, starting in marketing, getting a PhD in chemical engineering, and then taking that engineering mindset into growing biotechs. I love this conversation and I think you'll enjoy it as well.

Welcome to the Building Biotechs podcast. Over the years, I've helped over 90 biotech, life sciences and venture capital firms strategize and hire thousands of employees to scale companies that impact human health.

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Of growing biotechs to learn their tactics on building these companies from the ground up. I'm your host, Karina Klingman.

I hope you enjoy the show. Stacy, thank you so much for agreeing to be on the show. I'm excited to talk to you. You have a really interesting background and I would love to start with you giving us a little overview of your career path. Did you want to be when you were 7? What are you now and how did you get there?

Oh, well, thanks for having me, first of all. Yes, that's a very interesting question. My career path has not been traditional at all. So thinking back to when I was seven, what I really wanted to be was an archaeologist, ballerina. So I loved my dance class more than anything. But I'm showing my age here. I was heavily influenced by Indiana Jones movies and I never wanted to be the person that was like in the pit of vipers searching for something. I always thought it would be would be interesting to see the artifacts, understand them, investigate them. So really be in the lab. Well, spoiler alert. I am not an archaeologist ballerina. But what's interesting about that is the melding of artistry and science has really influenced my entire career. I'm currently the chief commercial officer and co founder of Stimulus Bio. And the way that I got here is very circuitous. So it started out at my mom's advertising agency. She owned the company when I was about 12. I started doing projects and from the time I was 15, I was working there regularly. I learned graphic design, content creation and the importance of messaging while I was there. But of course at 16, I knew everything. I was never going to use that ever in my entire career. I was going to be an engineer. So went to school for engineering, spent a summer in an oil refinery, spent a summer at a chemical plant, and decided that I truly loved healthcare and biology. So I went back to graduate school and got my PhD in bioengineering. So my first job when I was hired as a bioengineer was really in customer facing roles. I was a product application specialist. So I had to go in the field, I had to train people, I had to troubleshoot and I had to bring the voice of the customer back into product development. But it was a startup company so they didn't have any marketing people. So what did I find myself doing? All of the marketing as well, because I had experience. So all of those skills that I was never going to use, I ended up using them throughout the rest of my career. What I soon found out is that I really did love the commercial and the marketing and design aspects, but telling that story. So that's where the rest of my career has jumped off. I completed that startup company with an acquisition to a larger company, biomeru. I did a few consulting projects in interim years and then the CEO Mimi Healy was joining another startup company called Lasergen and she recruited me in. So I had so much fun the first time. I said, yeah, for sure, I'm doing another startup. So when I got there there were no customers because we were early development. So then I had to adapt the skills that I had learned in marketing and customer facing roles into a pre revenue company where I still worked on marketing, but targeted messaging to partners and investors. And then I still worked on product development, but trying to guess what customers would want based on the market information instead of having regular conversations with customers. And because I'm an engineer and I love processes, also the program management and how do we get our deliverables achieved. So that startup lasted for about five years before we were acquired with a $200 million acquisition to Agilent. And I continued to work there in the transition to make sure that our science and our team transitioned well to Agilent. And then I decided to step out and do some more consulting until Mimi and I decided we wanted to start something. We wanted to do another company, but we didn't want to do one technology. What we really wanted to do was help other startups succeed. What we've seen over our careers is a gap in the market where we have amazing technologies that don't make it to market. And not because the science isn't good, but because the business can be hard and overwhelming. So we started stimulus bio so that we could help people bridge that gap. And I would say most of our company, we kind of know what we're good at and what we're not good at. And we are not necessarily a therapeutic pharma company. We work with some firms, but that's not where we see our niche. We really are tools, diagnostics, and then we also have a solid therapy expert. So that's where we dovetail into pharma and therapeutics. But when we have people come to us with very specific therapeutic, we just recommend one of our friends and partners to them.

You have managed to marry so many critical business elements and I know that your PhD is not a typical, it's not like A Life Sciences PhD and so being able though to have that perspective and bring that engineering background, I think that's something we don't really see very often. But that engineering mindset is very different and also really critical, I think to building systems that just work.

Yes, I would agree. A joke around our office is oh, you're an engineer. And I'm like, oh, I'm not that kind of engineer though. Because engineering really is a thought process, sometimes more than a discipline. So it is very process oriented. And how do we think make things cheaper, faster, better and bringing that to a team of pure core life scientists who I have some bio background, but I don't have the in depth background they have. So how can I translate for them is a lot of fun. You know, one thing we've found in our career and with the team we've built is having diverse and interesting backgrounds. Everybody at our company has a very interesting background that brings something new in. So for example, our director of product management was in the Peace Corps in Africa, so she has a very different worldview than the rest of us. Our CEO, I mean, delivered donuts in college, so she has an interesting background. So I think that's what's really exciting about working in small startup companies is the diversity of viewpoints.

Yeah, I just want to highlight too, bringing it all back to marketing. I don't think we can ever escape marketing. I don't care. I mean, I work with a lot of really small companies and from day one, you know, these scientific founders, they're so excited about this idea that they have. And yes, it Absolutely. Could change lives. It will never change lives if nobody knows the story. And you have to start telling that story so much earlier than you actually think. But that's how you get funding, that's how you attract investors, that's how you get your next partners, and also how you attract really good talent, which people don't really think about. But it's a competitive talent landscape. And so I think about that a lot when I work with these baby companies. It's like, why do people even care? Even from day one, why do you care?

Right. And the, the audience is different. Who are you telling the story to and how do you tailor it? Because if you're hiring somebody, it's a different story than if you're trying to get money. It's a different story than when you're trying to sell something. So we work with a lot of people that, especially scientists, they love their data, they love their science, they're excited. And I also find that exciting, but not everybody does. And so trying to help them understand how do you position this a little differently so that people are interested in joining your team? Especially if you're a startup, it's hard to recruit good talent when you're very small.

Yeah, people are a little scared of the startups, but really, like you said, you can get in there and you have such an interesting group of peers in a startup. It's unlike anything else. So what are some of the key challenges that you have seen in transitioning companies from incubator to market?

While there are so many challenges, we cannot go through all of them. I could be here all day telling you. But I think the important thing about this transition, it's a really high risk time because it is a time when there is significant transition in the company. So the things that we see that companies have to go through are thinking about they're now in the. The transition from research to commercial often. So they use their time in an incubator to really get the proof of concept data to show that their technology will work. And they have developed a commercial plan and a business plan within the incubator, but then they're let loose. And there's a lot of difference between what are you going to do and how are you going to build it. So they're let loose right at this time where they have to figure out how to execute on all of the good work they've done in the incubator. So we see people that have to build a team and they don't know how to build a team. And A lot of people try to hire somebody exactly like themselves when they should hire somebody that fills their weaknesses and they have to find a facility. A lot of incubators house people in beautiful facilities. And then when you come out, you don't have any money. So you are like trying to find anything to scrape together that is good enough to work, especially in a lab. You've been working with lab equipment that is shared and now all of a sudden you have to buy your own equipment and you don't have very much money. So what auction site can you find? Can you barter with your friends? You know, one of the things we say is make friends with your neighbors because if they have a flow cytometer and you don't, you're going to want to use that. But maybe you have a QPCR and they don't, so you can switch time. So I think the challenges are really with scientific founders just not understanding business and all the ins and outs of business. And because of that it's very difficult to prioritize and focus because you get pulled in so many directions. So what we really try to do is help people understand what is the most important, what are the risks you're going to see and how do you avoid those and overcome that and prioritize yourself to get to the end goal. One of the biggest pitfalls that we see startup companies is not relying on experience. So they either try to do it all themselves. And not understanding that experience is hugely important in startup success. That's in the literature. They show that you have double the rate of success, if not more by second time founders than first time founders. Experience matters. But even us as long time startup people, we're in a new paradigm in our industry and we rely on experience, other experience, consulting people and get their advice. The caveats being that a lot of people do get advice. There's a lot of advice out there, but you have to vet the experience of the person giving you the advice. So they may have worked in the industry, but if they've never been in a startup and led a startup, they don't understand the unique challenges. Somebody that has run commercial for a big company has a huge amount of experience and some of that will translate. But you cannot operate commercial in a startup the same way you can in a big company. So it's really important to think about where that advice is coming from. And secondly, it's very important to listen to the advice that you don't like more closely than the advice you like. So you may, you still may not agree with it after you think about it. But if somebody told you something you don't want to hear, you need to think about that very hard because it might be exactly what you need to hear.

I like that a lot. That's really good advice. And so your consulting firm sort of comes in at that stage, Am I correct? Sort of that inflection point where they need to get it all together.

Yes. So we can come in at different stages, but if we look at where we think we provide the most value based on our experience, it is definitely at that stage. Stage where they're transitioning out of proof of concept and into. They now need to make a commercial product.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That's a very overwhelming time. And your operations background, too. I think change management is something that a lot of folks who come from an academic background don't really understand. And I have seen a lot of teams, I'm sure you have, too, where they're. They're going through that growing pains phase. They are starting to ramp up, they're starting to hire more people, build departments, and that change management is hard to manage and to communicate and to keep the team on the same page.

It's absolutely one of the hardest things, you know, one of the things we always say. It's kind of our many catchphrases. Science is hard, business is hard, and people are harder and trying to make them a cohesive team and understand the changes. And what do you have to give up? Because a lot of scientific founders have had control over every function and you have to give it up. And how do you do that? Extremely difficult for everybody in that position.

Hey there. Just a quick break. I wanted to let you know that.

If you're listening to this podcast because.

You are exploring careers in biotech, which it turns out quite a few of our listeners actually are, you might be interested in the Biotech Career Coach podcast. It is brought to you by our sister company, the Collaboratory Career Hub, which is our career development community. If you would like actionable tips on job seeking and career development, that is the place for you. It is a companion podcast to our Career Coach column that we write monthly in Biospace. But we go a little more in depth and sometimes we have special workshops and all of that good stuff. So if that sounds interesting, click the link in the show Notes or search for Biotech Career Coach on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts back to the show. I consider myself a fractional head of talent. Would you consider your team sort of that fractional chief operating officer, fractional operations team.

That's actually a really good assessment. So we see ourselves as a fractional operations slash commercial team. And the reason I say that is because we, you know, when you're in a startup and you're early, two of the most expensive positions are an operational person and a commercial person. And you need them early in the startup to understand what's going to happen ahead, to make a plan for that and to guide the path forward. But you don't need them all the time. You know, you're going to need a commercial person to come in early and say, are you building the right thing? Yes. Okay, move forward. But you don't need somebody there all the time. So we see ourselves as really being able to fill the gap in operations and commercially and even scientifically to a certain extent. Until you have the money, the resources, the time to hire somebody full time. Until it's the right time to do it.

Yeah, that's so valuable. I think post the big boom. I don't know what we're in right now. This correction period. It used to be that in the late 2000 teens, we would see these companies that were just shooting for big IPOs. They'd get a lot of funding and they build the heavy hitting team really early. Very, very early in the process. And so you would see a, honestly a top heavy company until we even filled out the bottom ranks. But they were building for commercialization from day one. Now we're seeing people, we're just not getting those funding rounds anymore. Right. We're not getting the mega IPOs are coming back. We're seeing a few of them, but we're just not seeing the number. And what I think is so valuable is that expertise that those top heavy companies have. Yeah, they were on the right path, they were doing things correctly, but it was expensive because they had a heavy hitting leadership team. So I love this emergence of these fractional providers like you, like me. Because it really gives everybody that opportunity to have that heavy hitting team. They should have to pay for the whole thing.

I, I absolutely agree. And I think there's the combination of the cost and also when you hire somebody. So for instance, like ahead of sales, you hire them and then if they don't have something to sell, they grow very unhappy very quickly, so they leave anyway. So if you're not in the right position for the right heavy hitting person, they're going to get frustrated because there are startup people and there are non startup people and it's a phenotype and if you bring somebody that is heavily not the startup phenotype in early, they get frustrated. I've seen that over and over again and they leave. And then you've made this huge investment in somebody who is talented but you weren't ready for them. So you have to match that and marry that. And your team, I'm sure you see this all the time. Your team grows and evolves as your stage of your company grows and involves to include the right type of people at the right time.

Yeah. Not only that, but I will tell you, I have had my firm for 12 years. I've worked with the same cast of characters over and over at multiple different startups. Sometimes I think one of my, one of my favorite people, I think I'm at their fourth startup with them. They will never not be at a startup. They love that early scrappy, figure it out phase and, and they're really well suited for that. And then once it gets to a certain point where it's a very structured, we're putting all of the organization in place, they're like, yeah, I'm going to move on to the next one. And I think that it's, that's great. And we, we know that those people are awesome in that space and the life cycle of the company needs people who have also vision to see beyond that. And not only vision, but also the ability to execute in a very linear, organized fashion.

Right.

So I think this gives the best of both worlds, honestly.

Yeah, yeah, it's very exciting. Startups are addictive. This is why I keep going back to them.

Me too. I just love them. So this market is really challenging right now and we're seeing some positive signs, but I would say we're probably in this for a little bit longer. So how do you balance the need for innovation with the practical? Just we need to get funding and we need to do it now. Requirements of your clients.

That was a perfect statement that it's been challenging and people say it's coming back, but when we talk to people in the trenches, they're not seeing it, especially early startups. So they really still are trying to bootstrap and trying to manage basically too much with too little. But that is the startup world. I don't think I've ever run a startup that is flush with cash and has all the resources they need. So, you know, it's a continuous balancing act to say, am I doing the right thing? Am I on the right path? I will say that in our experience, there's been times where once A week we've been in front of the whiteboard. You know, we consider the whiteboard our best friends. So once a week we'll be in front of the whiteboard, balancing the resources and saying, okay, who's working on what? What's getting done? Is this still the path we want to go on? Has something happened in the market that's changed it? I will say through all of that, there are two tools that really, I think, help startups, but you have to adapt them for startups. So one would be a roadmap, having a detailed roadmap written down on paper, not in your head, that says, what are you doing in three months, six months, nine months and 12 months. What are all the pieces you have to do? Not just science, but business, legal, ip, financial, all of the pieces. But you're a startup. That's going to change what you think you're going to do in 12 months you're probably not going to do, but at least you have that vision. The other tool that's been essential for us is objectives and key results. So there's a book, Measure what Matters, that talks about this. It's one of my favorite books, but we've adapted it for startups because the path they put forth in it is a little more adapted to big companies. So what we do is we say, what are the objectives of the company for the next three months? What are the tasks associated with those objectives and who's on the team working on it, who's leading the team and who's working on the team? And what I love about this construct. So here's a good example. The first time we did this, we went through and we realized we had an amazing software developer that was literally on every project in the company. And because she was such a team player and she's so good, she never said anything. But we looked at it and we were appalled that we were putting so much on her. I mean, I'm surprised she still even talks to us because we were loading her up. But we were able to say, you know, this person can't be on every project. Let's reallocate or let's take some projects out, because clearly we're trying to do too much. So it's a great tool to not only set forth exactly what you're trying to do and the goals you're reaching, but also manage your resources and understand how to make sure that you're doing the most prioritized thing at every given moment.

I don't think every biotech founder, when they get started knows what an OKR is or that there are such things. We don't really think about that in the academic world in the same way. And so that's a bit of a shock to do that planning and to understand how much just goes into things and what do we really need to measure that moves the needle.

Exactly. And then often when they do OKRs, they don't do it in an effective way. They read the book and say, I'm going to do it exactly like this. But then they turn it into an exercise and evaluation for employees. So then people are worried about setting their objectives. Where in our company we look at it and say, how many did we meet every three months? Our goal is that we meet 70ish percent of them because if we meet 100, we're not aiming high enough. If we're meeting 30, then we're aiming too high. But it's never reflected back on the employees performance. I see that as a failure in our planning, not in the employees. So I think that associating them with bad outcomes for people makes them ineffective. So I'm always very insistent that this is a planning tool, it's not an employee evaluation tool.

So you've had a couple of really successful startup stories in your background, which I know a lot of people look at that and go, how has she had two successful exits? That's really unusual just because of, you know, the failure rate of biotech is fairly high.

Like you said, we've been really fortunate and hopefully a little bit smart, but it wasn't a straight path to success by any means. So, you know, every day in startups there are many failures and many successes. It's like a roller coaster. You start the day excited and you might have a low point and then a high point. You never know. But I think our biggest challenge or failure in that regard was at a time in our previous startup when we were just on the cusp of needing more funding. We had planned, we thought we knew exactly what was going to happen. We were meeting our development goals and then the market came in and like slammed us. People came out, it was sequencing in about 2015, 2016, when all the technologies were emerging, long read sequencing was. And all of a sudden the investors are like, oh, your technology is no good. Look at these guys. That can sequence forever, right? We didn't have a response immediately. What are we going to say? We're going to lose money, what do we do? And so really we had to reevaluate and rethink our entire product development. And say, are we still building the right thing? What is the market really saying? Let's not get. Let's not get down by the hype. So then when we rethought it, we could really see that it was a lot of hype. And in the market, it shipped at the market and we had to reevaluate our goals and our endpoints, but it wasn't insurmountable. And so that was a point where I think we could have all just been like, we're going to go home. But we didn't. And we retold the story. We told the story to our investors. We gave them some examples of other industries where there's a lot of hype. But then when you really look under the hood, it hasn't changed as much as you want. And we were able to get funding and continue on, but by not anticipating that, it could have been a very large failure. Instead, it was just a mini failure that we were able to overcome. So I think that one of the keys when you're in a startup is risk management. You hope for success and you plan for success, but you also plan for failure. What's going to happen when that fails? You need to have a backup plan ready to go.

How do you help your clients to de risk and sort of peek around those corners as well?

I think a lot of that is our experience. Having somebody that has seen these things happen before and lived it is always helpful so that we can see that. So how we do it, one of the things we always bring up when we're talking to people is having a risk mitigation plan. What we've done is tried to design because especially for startups who don't have a lot of time and don't have a lot of money, we've tried to set up product services for what we think are the riskiest parts of development and do that in a way that they can early on solve some of the problems that they're going to have later. So that would be again, the market requirements document. Have you talked to customers? Do they actually want what you're building? Let's make a document that helps you build and your whole team build moving forward. And then you can see some of the gaps that you haven't thought about. A roadmap. A lot of the things I've just said, okrs and a system for okrs and data generation. Again, I think this goes back to what we said earlier. Scientists are like, this is really cool science. Everybody's going to want to use it. But they're only going to use it if you convince them through data. And the data that customers care about is not the same data that other academics reading a paper care about. So trying to help them understand if you gather the right data earlier, you can get investors, you can get customers and you can move your product forward much quicker.

That's been a really common theme recently. I've spoken with a few people who have talked a lot about how scientists gather. Sometimes too much data and it's all over the place, it's not as focused and that is just an artifact of the scientific method. It's all based on curiosity and you get an answer and then you logically, you ask the next question and the next question. In biotech those questions aren't always the ones that need to be asked. And sometimes we, we go down a path really far and nobody needed that data in order to de risk or reach the next inflection point or answer the investor's question. And I think that that's really where somebody who has that perspective, who's not the scientist in the lab excited about the next data point can come back and just rein that in a little bit. I think that's so important.

Well, and what we say a lot of the data that you need is not the scientifically exciting data. You know, it's what we call the abilities, it's stability data, it's reproducibility. Running the same thing over and over and over again, that's for a visionary scientist, that's boring, right? That you have to do it to show that it will work in customers hands over and over and over again. I understand completely the scientists want to solve the next interesting question, but that's not necessarily what customers want.

We talked a little bit about team building earlier. I love talking about team building. Curious your perspective on what makes really effective team building, especially at the stage that you like to come in, which is this kind of fast growth fun stage.

I think I said it earlier. Science is hard and people are harder and team building is really hard. And you know, I think a lot of startups get caught up on the pool table and the you know, fun things you see at like Google and while those are helpful, that's not really team building. So I would say our first challenge, and I'm sure you see this, and we talked a little bit about it earlier, is finding the right type of people for a startup. I think that's where it starts. Somebody that is interested in wearing a lot of hats, somebody that is okay with things Being a little chaotic. You know, I personally like it when I don't know what I'm going to do every morning, but some people don't like that. So I think it starts with finding a person, not necessarily a function. So a lot of times the way we hired Build for our team is we think this person would be great. We're not sure what they're going to be great at, but they're going to be great. And so we bring them in and then we. We test them out to see where they fit. And then I think being part of a startup in some ways lends itself to team building because everybody is so invested in the final goal. So you don't have a lot of silos, everybody has to work together. So that lends itself to team building. But I think probably one of the most hard things in startups is that it's chaotic. So really it's clear communication and clear goal setting and letting everybody know where the company is, how it stands and what you're driving toward, and just communicating, communicating, communicating. We take the stance that we don't like to keep things secret. We like people to know where we stand and what we're doing and what we're trying to do and the challenges that we're facing so that everybody can be a part of the journey.

I love that. So I hire for my clients, which is great. I hire for myself too, which is harder.

Right.

I. I think the, the perspective that I have, being a little bit outside of my clients, organizations, and being able to have the same conversation you just had with me to, to them, and then realize that I have not followed my own advice internally. And it's just so hard. Hiring is so hard even for the professionals.

So love to hear any advice you have because it is hard. I think it's the hardest thing.

It really is. I feel like I have so much better perspective working with my clients than I do internally. And I think I'm like, too close to it. This is where I really think, you know, a larger organization where there are layers built in and then you do have a little bit more impartiality. It's easier when you get a little bit bigger when you're small and everybody's, yeah, they're right, they're rolling up their sleeves, they're rubbing elbows. Like, it's hard to separate from that and make really good hiring decisions. And so I almost think it's essential to have an outside person interview people.

I would agree, because like you said, it's hard for you to Hire internally. We catch ourselves all the time. We'll be doing something at our company and we'll look at each other and say, you know what we would tell our customers. This is ridiculous. Right? Stop. You know, so we, we fall into the same pitfalls that we recommend our clients not. But that's because the outside perspective is so important.

Yeah, I absolutely agree. Can you tell me with what you're seeing? What, what are some emerging trends you're excited about in our industry?

The first one is funding. So it does look like there is a reemergence of funding coming. We all know it's been a lean couple of years and I think it's been lean from the small to the big. So I'm excited to see that. Although it is trailing with startups, so I'm hoping that some of the momentum they're seeing at later stage companies and investment there catches up with the early startups. In the meantime, we're trying to be creative with funding. So we work with a lot of our clients to look at like sbir STTR grants for non dilutive funding and thinking about ways that they can make it until the funding ecosystem turns back around for startups. The second is, you know, we're in Houston, which is not necessarily known as a biotech hub yet. I will say that when I graduated from rice 20 plus years ago, there was really not a lot of options here and I was confined to this location. So it was very difficult to find a job and to find a job in what I thought was my specialty. And clearly there has been a lot of work put into the Houston ecosystem with the Texas Medical center. The jlabs have come in, the University of Houston and Rice have really focused on innovation. So we're seeing that turn around, but it's still turning. This is why we wanted to have stimulus bio because one of the trends we've seen is there's a lot of new graduate talent here coming out of all our various schools. That there's not a lot of experienced executive talent in Houston. And that's why we thought it was really important that we stay in Houston and support the ecosystem. We clearly work with people in the Bay Area in Stock Diego and Boston, but we wanted to be local in Houston to help the ecosystem here. I will say it's been probably the last two or three years have been particularly exciting because we really have started to see that companies are moving into Houston now, especially with cell and gene therapy. We've always had a premium in oncology based on MD Anderson, but Now we're seeing in cell and gene therapy that we're having manufacturing companies come in and they're building world class systems here. So that's only going to increase our talent pool. And I really think we're kind of at the cusp of Houston taking off, which is very exciting because it's a great place.

That's awesome. I've got my eye on Houston.

Well, and I've been telling people for 20 years that Houston is a fun place and a cool place. And at least outside of biotech too. It's also people are starting to realize we have a great diversity, a great cultural scene, a lot of good food. It's a good place to live. If you take out July and August, it's a great place to live. It's a lot during that time. But otherwise the people are so great here. It's a beautiful city. So I'm really glad people are recognizing it.

So what do you want to do in the next 10 years? What are your hopes and dreams?

Build stimulus bio from a startup company to a, you know, lean mean fighting machine medium, at least medium sized company. But that's sustainable. It's not working completely as a startup. I think part of that is I hope that we have a string of client successes that we can show that the work we've done really has contributed to companies being sold or IPO'd or products being sold to companies and just showing that technology really has translated from the lab out into the commercial market and that it's making an impact on people's lives. That's why I'm in biotech. So that's what I would love to see.

Those are great goals. My guests read really good things. What's your book recommendation?

For me, going back to the science, Hard people are harder. I tend to read a lot of my nonfiction as organizational psychology and leadership. So I pretty much love to read anything by Adam Grant. The one that I've read most recently is Think Again where this concept of you may not like what you're hearing. You need to think about that and really think about is that right, is that wrong? And analyze things instead of pushing them away. But he's so data informed in everything that he brings forward that I really trust what he says and he always puts it in a way that is very easy and actionable to understand.

Adam is such a great organizational psychologist and I love his podcast. I love all the books. I agree that he's just so logical about the way he lays things out. And you don't always get that. And as a scientist, I think I discount things when I'm like, oh, that wasn't really clear, you know, or that was indeed driven. So he's great with that. Great book. For those who want to learn more about you or your company, where should they reach out?

So anybody can message me on LinkedIn and then our website is stimulusbio.com if you want to reach me directly. We're a small company still, so you can just ping in the contact form and it will get to me. But you can learn more about our products and we'd love to hear from you.

Perfect. We'll link all that in the show notes so people can click right through as well. Thank you so much. This was really great. I think what you're doing is so in line with my philosophy on startups and how to grow companies really logically in a data driven and cost based way. So thank you so much for sharing your expertise.

Yeah, absolutely. This was a lot of fun.

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