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First In Human is a biotech-focused podcast that interviews industry leaders and investors to learn about their journey to in-human clinical trials. Presented by Vial, a tech-enabled CRO with episodes launching weekly on Tuesday's.
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First In Human By Vial
Episode 51: Bogdan Knezevic - Co-founder & CEO at Kaleidoscope.bio
Embark on a journey through the intricate world of biotech with Bogdan Kezevic, co-founder and CEO of Kaleidoscope Bio, and uncover the revolutionary software shaping the future of scientific research. Bogdan's leap from scientist to entrepreneur has led to groundbreaking solutions for the challenges plaguing biotech. In our chat, he shares how data mismanagement and a disconnect in collaboration can cripple research efforts. With Kaleidoscope's software, teams can now navigate the complexities of their work with tools designed for clarity and focus, ensuring that the intricacies of science are met with a user-friendly interface.
First In Human is a biotech-focused podcast that interviews industry leaders and investors to learn about their journey to in-human clinical trials. Presented by Vial, a tech-enabled CRO, hosted by Simon Burns, CEO & Co-Founder. Episodes launch weekly on Tuesdays. To view the full transcript of this episode, click here.
Interested in being featured as a guest on First In Human? Please reach out to catie@vial.com.
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For the latest news and updates, visit our website: https://vial.com
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/VialTrials
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You are listening to First in Human, where we interview industry leaders and investors to learn about their journey to in-human clinical trials Presented by Vile, a tech-enabled CRO hosted by Simon Burns, ceo and co-founder. Featuring special guest host Miguel Testa, vp of Engineering For Season 2, episode 3, we are joined by Bogdan Kezevic, co-founder and CEO of GoliDiscope Bio. Learn more about the journey of creating innovative software solutions for the complex biotech ecosystem.
Speaker 2:Hello everyone, welcome to this edition of First in Human. Joining me today is one of the most innovative software founders I've seen, building these integrative layers onto the very messy biotech ecosystem with a really really nice product Really excited. I've spoken to him multiple times before, heard all about the product, saw the product, used a little bit of it and I cannot be more excited to introduce our guest for today, bogdan Kezevic. Hello Bogdan, how are you doing?
Speaker 3:Hey, miguel, doing great thanks for having me. Where are you calling from? Currently, I'm in Tromblant in Quebec, Canada. I'm actually Canadian Normally. I'm based in New York though.
Speaker 2:Go Canada. Definitely love the Canadian representation, particularly in the biotech ecosystem, speaking of which, your background is really rich A lot of science, a lot of business, a lot of everything in between. I saw you did a stint at some really great organizations that fosters entrepreneurship, like Entrepreneur First and CDL, I believe. Tell me how you got around to starting Kaleidoscope.
Speaker 3:Something that was unpredictable he asked me 10 years ago. I don't think I would say that I would necessarily have been in the shoes I am today. But just wanting back the clock a bit, originally I thought I was going to go down a very traditional route of science and undergrad, some kind of research and maybe medical school, and then move into practice, medicine being something that I was always interested in growing up. But I think just through lots of learning along the way, through actually being a researcher for a big portion of my life, through interacting with other people doing interesting things, I realized that I actually felt much more compelled to try and build something that solves a problem that I care about personally. I mean that that probably wouldn't be down to some traditional path, a job that I sequentially climbed some ladder for, and instead would be building something from scratch. So I'm happy to dig into that story from whatever angle is most interesting here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you mentioned obviously a problem that you care about, which is key to any successful entrepreneurial endeavor. For kaleidoscope. What was that problem?
Speaker 3:If I go back to probably my time in grad school is when I first started noticing this I did. My undergrad was in neuroscience. My graduate degree was genomics and preclinical drug discovery. So my PhD thesis focused on different ways we can bring in multilimic data and use that to inform what targets to go after or what targets are prioritized among a list of potential candidates. And what I found through doing that work was that a huge portion of my time it's hard to actually quantify, but maybe a third to half of my time was not actually spent doing science or thinking through experiments or even planning experiments. It was actually spent trying to figure out the context behind the different moving pieces we had in the lab, in the consortium we were part of.
Speaker 3:Who had done what in the past, why was that work done, where that data sat, these kinds of project or R&D collaboration questions that kept popping up. I started also noticing that we would make really expensive mistakes or assumptions. I remember at one point we were doing a project that involved collecting some samples and processing them and doing some expression analysis on them. Only a few months into that work did we realize that there was actually a dataset with these exact samples in a freezer somewhere and that data was marked in a spreadsheet on some folder on some drive. But there was no way for me to have known that ahead of time Just doing one of these experimental runs can be $100,000 to $200,000, and to actually do start to finish.
Speaker 3:I kept digging into this a bit more, initially just with my colleagues at the time, but then also talking to my co-founders, who I'd love to also elaborate on because they're really relevant to the story. But I kept coming back to this question of how often does this happen? Is this common? Is this something that is unique to academia, or does it happen elsewhere? Quickly, we realized that this is not an academic-only problem. This is not a tiny biotech problem. This is not a big pharma problem. It's really everyone everyone we spoke to told us this is a very common issue. We don't always know what work we're doing, where that data is, why we did it. People change teams, people leave companies and this creates a whole slew of problems, both in terms of efficiency and readers in the short term, but then also can quickly balloon to much more complex and expensive mistakes down the line when it comes time to file, to go to clinic or do something like that with the data that you've generated.
Speaker 2:If I'm hearing this correctly, this is a case of prevention is basically better than a cure, where you're preventing a lot of these organizations from making these costly mistakes by offering them a great suite of solutions in Kaleidoscope. Is that accurate?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that's accurate. I think there's a lot of work that can proactively be done, and that's something that we offer companies. So we try and, in this approach of the product, revealing its complexity as you need it. One thing that we realize is scientists want to be doing the science and they don't want to be distracted by software, and so our number one mindset going into it was we need to build product that is incredibly usable, incredibly intuitive and that you just almost forget about, and then, as a team, needs more complex, sophisticated tooling. Then the different functions and features that you have in the product reveal themselves to the users and let them do things in really interesting and complex ways. So we try and give people utility day to day and also proactively solve these problems from happening.
Speaker 3:If I wind back the clock to when we were starting Kaleidoscope, something that we wanted to make sure we were doing was not just building a tool that we thought needed to exist that's, of course, important that you believe in your own product but also that we were building things that people told us they wanted to have, and when I think back to all the conversations we had in the early days, a lot of people were telling us like these problems are important enough that we are either desperately looking for tools and kind of switching between different generic enterprise solutions out there because nothing really fits for R&D but we're trying to make it work, or the more expensive route which a lot of people are increasingly taking, which is I'm just going to hire or repurpose my own technical employees, software engineers, et cetera, to build our own trackers in-house, because we really need to do this.
Speaker 3:Well, and there isn't anything out there and I just have to build it. And so that when you look at it from a perspective of like, what should a biotech be doing? Anything that's not core to the IP that you're generating is a distraction, it slows you down, it becomes expensive to maintain over time, and so we saw this as a great opportunity to actually build that tool and save people resources from that perspective as well.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Let's talk about usability, because that's one of the big things that I feel makes Kaleidoscope at least from my personal perspective, really stand out. What inspired the product design, what inspired your prioritization of usability, and how have people responded to this? You know, especially like comparing it to your analog. I mean, it's definitely much, much more modern and akin to consumer-grade software tools. Can you elaborate more on that aspect?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, and I think it ties back to our deep belief that, when it comes to science, software should be a tool that enables people, but not one that now requires its own experts whose job it is to wield software. It should be a tool that helps you do the work that you're already doing just better, faster, more efficiently, easier. We had that assumption from day one, especially in a field like science, where we again, through talking with people, heard that it's not uncommon for scientists to just default to a worse solution because there's just too much friction and learning a new piece of software and of course, there's always education. No new piece of software is going to be immediately usable by everyone on the planet right out of walks, but it's about setting the bar to be as high as a simple app that you, as a consumer, might use on your phone and making it that easy to also organize your work when it comes to what you're doing professionally.
Speaker 3:The second part to this is also the founding team, which I alluded to earlier, so there's three of us in total. I brought the scientific context, and I was someone who struggled with this problem myself, and then my two co-founders Ahmed, who was an absolutely brilliant software engineer who's been an engineer everywhere, from startups, where he was the first entrees, through to companies like Google, including the first hired, a company Google actually acquired, and then the other co-founder, david, who is a really brilliant designer by background designer, who moved into product. The fact that the three of us got together to tackle this problem is another reason why we set the bar internally that we do when it comes to usability design, because I think it's one of our superpowers as a team, and I also think that it's something that's severely missing in the space. As you mentioned, Miguel, most software in the space looks like it was built 20, 30 years ago. Another thing I want to highlight here it's not just what it looks like, it's also how it works. And again, when we speak to people about the tools that they're using, they complain to us like look, science today is a complex collection of workflows.
Speaker 3:I am no longer doing a very simple thing where I just need to upload a file. I actually need to take five, six, seven, eight actions and I need to know where those buttons are. I need to know what certain features do or don't do. I need things to be snappy. I need things to work quickly. I can't sit around and wait for an hour on my machine to finish doing something because I have to get back to experiments or I have to get back to a meeting that I'm running with my team, and so we just really wanted to apply the lens of beautifully designed software that gives you those magical experiences where you just don't know how things work. But they do, and I'm really fortunate that my two co-founders have done that. They've built products that have been used by millions of active users each month, and so their bar for what a good product is is quite high.
Speaker 2:And I'm assuming that this brand new user experience that again stands out. This didn't scare anyone on your end user base, right? You didn't get any people like what is this?
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, we're always iterating the product when it comes to like the right way to implement a feature or like a new workflow, but in terms of the feedback we've gotten from people, when they see the product, it's almost the opposite. It's almost like wait, this looks really simple. It can track all these things. It just looks like a very easy, clean UI. I love that. I don't have to scratch my head to figure out what these buttons mean or do.
Speaker 2:Absolutely great. So you mentioned a lot about the team, which is obviously core to the existence of your company and your product, and your backgrounds of your co-founders absolutely still are. Again, on top of you being a rock star scientist, slash very broad experience of yourself. How did you guys get together? How did you guys meet?
Speaker 3:Sometimes I tell this to people and they get a little like scared for us, because we're actually friends from high school Ahmed and I are, and then David and all our colleagues right out of college. And so why I say people get scared is because often the question is like oh, can you work well with friends? And I think the answer for us is they're resounding. Yet I think not only have we been friends for a long time, but we've worked together in professional contexts and I think a big reason that startups are hard is because a lot of things come down to trust and a lot of things come down to who owns what and who delivers on why, and there's just a super amount of trust between us and it's very easy for us to understand. Like, okay, ahmed tackles all things tech, david tackles all things product and design, and Bogdan make sure that David and Ahmed could do their job well and does everything else. So, yeah, it's friends first, and then colleagues and then co-founders.
Speaker 2:That's great. Trust being such an integral part of the internal team sounds like again, this whole thing is founded on very rock solid foundations. That being said, obviously, with a trust being a key word, tell me more about how the industry has taken to basically you guys, particularly into early days, introducing this new tool, this new team, new paradigm, new way of thinking about things. Right now, you guys are already doing spectacular things in an industry making waves, but tell me more about the early days.
Speaker 3:It still feels early days to us, even though eight months ago we're just the three of us. Now we are like a full product edge team. We went from working primarily with design partners to now supporting paying customers on the platform, using us to actually kind of power the work that they're doing. So that's been pretty spectacular. It's always a challenge because we always want to make sure that we're working with the right early group of customers.
Speaker 3:We meet everyone's bar when it comes to are we doing exciting, impactful work, but the reality is that not every company is in a position where they can adopt a new tool or switch to a new tool at this moment, and for us, the number one thing we want to make sure we're doing is solving actual problems the scientific teams have, and the best way to do that is to do as little assumption making as possible and as much supporting of actual workflow that biotechs are trying to get on, and so for us, that means looking for customers that are very open to giving us feedback, that understand that the platform is awesome and as flexible and powerful as it is today.
Speaker 3:It will only be 10 times better if they actually tell us like, oh, I wish this was a little different, or do you have plans for this feature on your roadmap, and so we're very kind of responsive to those things and it takes a specific type of customer who knows how to interact with software teams to do that in the early days. Of course, if you fast forward the clock a few years from now, it becomes much more standard. We can tell people like this is the feature checklist, this is the price for this feature, here's the onboarding process. Click here to sign up. But in the early days, six to 12 months ago, we're being very careful with who we were bringing on so that we were learning from the best scientists about how they wanted their work to happen.
Speaker 2:It does sound more like these engagements are closer to partnerships than they are to, obviously, just a traditional transactional relationship, which is amazing, particularly in the early days. Yeah, and it seems like you're continuously solving a lot of people's problems and continuously growing with this great tool that you've basically already running. So now that you have the foundations, I would say, of a strong SaaS play here in the biotech space, what does it feature hold? What's the blue sky, greenfield vision that you guys have for the world or for the biotech space in general? It's a great question.
Speaker 3:I sometimes struggle to answer this without using cliche terms, so apologies for using a cliche term, but I really do think of Kladyspilp as kind of an operating system. In a way, I personally see just a continuation of the trend we see, which is biotechs will increasingly be doing less of the work in-house. People will be much more focused on their core competencies, which means a much higher rate of data changing hands. It also means a much more diverse set of the types of scientists that are working on any meaningful problem. I also think that we will be working towards a world where computation and wet lab bench science will be much closer and hopefully approach a world where we have these closed loop systems where what you're doing in your lab is informing what your computational team is doing, which is, in turn, informing what you're doing in the lab. So I think we've seen these trends, that these are not new observations that I'm making.
Speaker 3:People have known about this for the last several years, but it's only been increasing. What this for Kladyscope, in my eyes, means is that companies will increasingly be doing work and generating data that's spread across people, teams, tools, internal, external, et cetera. But the nature of biotech is that all of the most critical decision making is happening at the intersections of these things, and so the role I see Kladyscope playing is a framework for managing this decision making and tracking, so that you can pull all of the most relevant pieces from all these places in one spot and understand how the data you're generating ties the experiments that you're doing, ties to the mouse that you're chasing, because biotech is an industry's very mouse to a given, and it's very binary in its outcomes. So it really matters that you hit your next mouse on and you understand how you got there and why you're behind or why you're ahead, so that you can create that value, that therapeutic, that alternative food product, that alternative energy source, whatever it may be that your R&D team is chasing.
Speaker 2:So effectively. You guys are being the operating system for all things R&D. Is that the punchy one liner of vision?
Speaker 3:to the sky there. Yeah, I hate that I'm saying that, but yeah, I think that's it. I struggle because I think language matters a lot and I think terms get used a lot and terms get used loosely, but at the same time you need terms that just resonate with people and can click with people. So I think operating sensor for bio is the best way to frame it, until there's some other, more clever way that I can think of that's maybe not as frequently used.
Speaker 2:Speaking of terms, Kaleidoscope is a very cool name. How did you come up with it?
Speaker 3:We get asked that a lot actually, which I think I'm a little surprised by. But it makes sense because it is an interesting word and I think for us we wanted something that captured that childlike sense of wonder with the world. All of us had these very distinct memories as children of picking up a kaleidoscope and looking through one At the same time. We thought it was very evocative of this idea of chaos and messiness. But if you look at it in just the right way, or you apply just the right lens or you have just the right tool, it becomes actually a very beautiful pattern. I think it works well as an analogy for how R&D is. If this chaotic mess, it's kind of a wonder that things happen and that we're able to cure disease. But it's because of this perfect storm of things coming in together just the right way. I think of kaleidoscope as the tool that enabled that.
Speaker 2:Very beautiful. Lastly, looking back in retrospect through your journey so far, what would you say would be the one piece of advice that you wish you've gotten, as you kind of gone along in your journey?
Speaker 3:I have a lot of self-awareness.
Speaker 3:I think I knew going into this journey that I would likely feel this way, but I don't think that it was as apparent to me as it now is, which is that there's always something more he could be doing.
Speaker 3:The wins never feel as big to you as they do to people around you. I have so many examples whether it's when we fundraise, whether it's when we close their first customer, whether it's when we converted our first pilot to a paying customer Examples where it took a lot of effort to actually stop, pause and celebrate, because we were already thinking about, okay, what's the next thing we could be doing. It was only through conversations with people around me friends and family that when I'd share something we achieved, then I got the reaction of, oh, that's amazing, great job. That I would realize, oh yeah, we actually have come a long way. So I think just something that I wish someone had told me, or that I find tell founders who are just a bit earlier in their journey than me, is you're always going to be gunning for something bigger and more in the next step. So take the time periodically to just stop and celebrate the wind along the way, so that you also realize that you're making incredible progress and that you decrease the chance that you'll just burn out.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Well, bogdan, thank you very much for chatting with me today. I definitely appreciated all your wisdom, from the way you developed your team to your product, to how you look about the future, and also, again, your personal insights on how it is to basically be an entrepreneur in this space. Again, thank you very much for listening to our audience. This is First In Human Miguel signing out. Thanks so much, miguel.
