The Biotech Startups Podcast

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, co-founder and CEO of Abalone Bio, Richard Yu reflects on how processing grief after losing his co-founder, Gustavo Pesce, brought clarity and renewed focus — stripping away the inessential and driving him forward at Abalone Bio. He unpacks the strategic thinking behind the pipeline, from developing CB2 agonist antibodies that reverse fibrosis and reduce neuropathy, to deciding which programs to partner versus develop internally based on value inflection points. Richard also reflects on hitting his 400th VC rejection, why the West Coast's frontier mentality fuels entrepreneurial resilience, how the rise of China's biotech ecosystem is pushing US startups toward novel targets as a competitive moat, and how AI has transformed once-impossible problems — from protein folding to natural language — into solved challenges that are fundamentally reshaping drug discovery.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Richard Yu, co-founder and CEO of Abalone Bio, reflects on building a company around a bold scientific vision — and the personal moments that shaped his leadership along the way. He unpacks the core insight behind Abalone Bio's yeast-based screening platform: that conventional antibody discovery optimizes for binding over function, like grabbing scissors by the blades. Richard also opens up about the devastating loss of co-founder Gustavo Pesce in a 2021 skiing accident, how the team and investors rallied with unwavering support, and how that crisis ultimately sharpened his sense of purpose and focus. From weathering hundreds of investor rejections to landing partnerships with Pfizer and Sichuan Pharma, Richard offers an honest look at running a biotech startup with a platform-driven, portfolio-management mindset.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Richard Yu, co-founder and CEO of Abalone Bio, reflects on building a company around a bold scientific vision — and the personal moments that shaped his leadership along the way. He unpacks the core insight behind Abalone Bio's yeast-based screening platform: that conventional antibody discovery optimizes for binding over function, like grabbing scissors by the blades. Richard also opens up about the devastating loss of co-founder Gustavo Martinez in a 2021 skiing accident, how the team and investors rallied with unwavering support, and how that crisis ultimately sharpened his sense of purpose and focus. From weathering hundreds of investor rejections to landing partnerships with Pfizer and Shichuan Pharma, Richard offers an honest look at running a biotech startup with a platform-driven, portfolio-management mindset.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, we continue our conversation with Richard Yu, CEO and co-founder of Abalone Bio, as he traces his path from academic scientist to entrepreneur—starting with the 2008 alternative energy boom that led him to co-found algae biofuel startup Green Pacific Biologicals and deliver a two-slide, science-only VC pitch that sparked a new sense of purpose. He reflects on shutting the company down in 2013 and realizing that scientific feasibility alone doesn’t build a business, then describes how joining QB3’s incubator immersed him in hundreds of therapeutics startups, taught him the business side of company building, and ultimately set the stage for founding Abalone Bio and entering Y Combinator’s March 2020 batch just as COVID-19 began disrupting the world.

"The magic is always at the intersections."
In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, we explore CEO & co-founder of Abalone Bio, Richard Yu’s journey from his Midwestern and New Jersey upbringing as the son of Chinese immigrants to UC Berkeley and Yale, tracing how living at the intersection of cultures and disciplines shaped his identity as a scientist and founder. He shares how a friend's pitch about “engineering proteins to eat dirt” pulled him from physics into biophysics, igniting a passion for treating biology as an engineering discipline. Along the way, Richard contrasts Berkeley’s sink-or-swim entrepreneurial energy with Yale’s rigorous East Coast culture, reflects on mentors who sharpened his scientific thinking, and explains how his early interest in systems biology and an unconventional postdoc path ultimately laid the foundation for Abalone Bio.