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Hi, and welcome to the A16C podcast. Whether you're an academic seeking to move out of research

and into industry or simply interested in working at a bio startup, this episode of the podcast is for

you, from how to build a brand in the space when you don't have one, to identifying what the

problems that really need solving are and how to build a company around it.

This episode of the podcast is based on an event held at Andreessen Horowitz with Atul Butte,

a distinguished professor and director of the Institute for Computational Health Sciences at UCSF,

Daphne Kohler, founder and CEO of InCitro, formerly professor at Stanford and co-founder of Coursera,

and is moderated by A16Z Bio-General partner, Vijay Ponday.

So first I want to talk about, for those thinking about founding your own startup,

you know, how do you connect the dots from going from academia to a company?

A lot of times people have really amazingly interesting technology, but there's this big gap between technology to a company. A lot of times people have really amazingly interesting technology,

but there's this big gap between technology to a product and product to a company. What criteria

would you be advising people to look at to say, you know, this is something where I really

think I should turn into a startup. How do you reach that bar? So it's tempting to start

companies, right? The thing is, though, that especially in bio and medicine, we see so many superficial

companies.

One of the harder things, compared to just generic machine learning, AI types of platform

companies, in this field, you have to go deeper.

...