The Biotech Startups Podcast

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Jon Chee sits down with Stephanie Sirota, partner and head of strategic partnerships at RTW Investments, to explore how a coddled yet cosmopolitan upbringing, years of elite tennis competition, and a humanities-rich education at Columbia shaped her mental toughness, leadership style, and approach to partnering with life sciences innovators. From sports psychology and coaching to the value of breadth before specialization, Stephanie reflects on the experiences that built her resilience and curiosity long before she helped transform RTW into a leading life sciences investment firm.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Jon Chee sits down with Fengru Lin, CEO & co-founder of TurtleTree, who is leveraging precision fermentation and a people-first culture to bring the high-value milk protein lactoferrin to market while reshaping how the food system serves both consumers and farmers. They discuss TurtleTree's strategic refocus from cell-based milk to commercially viable ingredients, the importance of business-centric leadership in biotech, and how thoughtful team-building enables faster execution, better fundraising narratives, and earlier commercialization.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, host Jon Chee continues his conversation with Fengru Lin, CEO and co-founder of TurtleTree. Fengru shares how rigorous sales training at Salesforce and entrepreneurial autonomy at Google Cloud shaped her approach to customers, investors, and organizational change—then traces how a cheese-making hobby, poor dairy supply chains, and exposure to cell-based meat and seafood startups led to TurtleTree’s founding, early patents, and strategic pivot toward precision fermentation of high-value milk proteins.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Jon Chee sits down with Fengru Lin, CEO and co-founder of TurtleTree, a biotech company using precision fermentation to produce LF+, the world’s first sustainably made lactoferrin, and ultimately reimagine how food is produced. Drawing on a nontraditional path into biotech—from Girl Guides in Singapore to sales roles in transactional security and global regulatory environments—Fengru shares how an early love of planning, operations, and people has shaped her approach to leadership and company building.

In this final episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast series, Jon Chee sits down with Mati Gill, CEO of AION Labs, to unpack where AI value is actually being created in biopharma—and what comes next. Mati lays out three pillars driving a post-hype phase of sustainable growth, explains why the industry is structurally conservative for good reasons, and shares how AION Labs is already preparing for the quantum computing wave before it arrives.