The Biotech Startups Podcast

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, we dive into Sujal Patel's bold decision to leave RealNetworks and co-found Isilon Systems, a distributed storage company built to solve a problem he witnessed firsthand — enterprise customers spending millions on storage systems that simply couldn't handle media files. Sujal shares how a pair of scissors on his desk became the unlikely symbol that pushed him and co-founder Paul Mikesell to finally take the leap.
Sujal recounts the harrowing experience of launching a company at the peak of the dot-com collapse, watching his RealNetworks stock fall from $100 to $8, and still managing to close an $8.4 million Series A as the only such deal in Seattle that year. He walks through Isilon's early growth, landing marquee customers like Kodak by overdelivering on impossible timelines, and the painful but necessary decision to fire both the CEO and CFO of a public company — all while his wife was pregnant with twins — on the same day Lehman Brothers collapsed.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Sujal Patel — co-founder and CEO of Nautilus Biotechnology and former founder and CEO of Isilon Systems — takes us back to his upbringing in suburban New Jersey, where his engineer father and an older brother's love of computers set him on a path toward a life in tech. From self-teaching programming on a budget Apple II clone to building operating systems from scratch at the University of Maryland and contributing to the FreeBSD open-source project, Sujal's early career was defined by curiosity and bold moves — none bolder than demanding his boss's job just three months out of college at RealNetworks, a decision that nearly turned out very differently thanks to one unanswered phone call.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, we follow Roy Maute’s journey from the Gilead acquisition of Forty Seven Inc. through COVID-era corporate life—where he spent over a year at Gilead without meeting colleagues in person—to co-founding Pheast Therapeutics in 2021, clarifying his passion for early-stage company building. He unpacks how he, Amira Barkal, Irving Weissman, and Ravi Majeti rallied around CD24 as the next macrophage checkpoint target, explains PHST001 and why macrophage checkpoint inhibitors could form a new class of immunotherapy, and reflects on building a lean, 34-person clinical-stage company, navigating a tougher post-COVID fundraising environment, and charting the road ahead as Pheast generates pivotal clinical data.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, we dive into Roy Maute's journey from academic scientist to biotech entrepreneur, exploring the founding and acquisition of Ab Initio Biotherapeutics and his subsequent roles at Forty Seven Inc. and Gilead Sciences. Roy reflects on the lasting influence of Irv Weissman's hands-off, trust-driven lab culture at Stanford and how it shaped his philosophy on building teams.
Roy shares how he co-founded Ab Initio with colleagues from Chris Garcia's and Brian Kobilka's labs, navigating early-stage challenges like seed funding, a Pfizer collaboration, and managing a lean team of 10. He explains why the company ultimately chose acquisition over raising a major round, and how Ligand Pharmaceuticals' interest in their directed evolution technology brought that chapter to a successful close. Roy also discusses stepping into a biomarker strategy role at Forty Seven Inc., and what it was like to witness the company's $4.9 billion acquisition by Gilead — all as COVID lockdowns began.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, we follow CEO and co-founder of Pheast Therapeutics, Roy Maute’s graduate school journey in Riccardo Dalla-Favera’s demanding Columbia lab, where he dives into genetic rearrangements in B-cell lymphoma and chooses intensity over comfort to accelerate his growth alongside clinician-scientists. He shares how brutal weekly Friday lab meetings, where imperfect work was publicly dissected, built his resilience and rigor, and what it was like to live through the shift from Sanger to high-throughput sequencing that reshaped cancer research. Roy also reflects on why he never wanted to become a professor and how a mentor’s advice led him to Irving Weissman’s famously hands-off Stanford lab—a stark contrast to his PhD environment, but equally formative for his scientific career.