The Biotech Startups Podcast

In this part of the podcast, Nathan Clark explains how Ganymede approaches data integration and automation in life sciences. He discusses why lab instruments and workflows require customized connectors, how a developer platform can help teams adapt integrations quickly, and why moving data online is only part of the challenge.

Nathan Clark walks through his work at Benchling, where he managed the Insights business intelligence product and helped develop an early machine learning effort. He explains why operational wet-lab data is fundamentally different from omics data, and why the relationships between samples, programs, instruments, locations, and people matter as much as the experimental results.

The conversation then turns to product management. Nathan describes the discipline as understanding why a product should exist, grounding decisions in user needs, and translating research into what a team builds. His advice for early-stage founders is direct: stop coding until they've done enough customer research to understand the problem.

Nathan Clark reflects on the formative influence of his entrepreneurial father, who showed him that business and even home building are learned through research, effort, and execution rather than secret insight. Nathan also discusses his unconventional high school experience, his decision to study business and finance at the University of North Carolina, and the early interest in biology and futurism that stayed with him.

David Li explains how a research question about mischaracterized drug targets became the starting point for Meliora Therapeutics. He describes how CRISPR experiments and follow-up biology challenged the accepted mechanism for cancer drugs, and how the company uses AI and machine learning to connect chemistry, biology, biomarkers, and patient populations.