00:00:00 · Helmy Eltoukhy, Mark Jacobstein
[00:00:00] S0: Mission statement is conquering cancer with data. Every great advancement in medicine has come from seeing something that was once invisible. What's the most optimistic scenario? Non oncology applications, basically using our blood test as a sort of everything test to detect hundreds if not thousands of diseases. Diagnostics is a tough business. In most other areas that are not regulated, you build it and you ship it. Here it's you have to build it, you have to validate it, there's regulatory approvals, reimbursement. You have to kind of understand the space you're playing in. [00:00:34] S1: I'm Mark Jacobstein. I'm one of the partners here at South Park Commons, but for today's conversation I'm also a former Guardant Health employee and I used to work for Helmy, have a lot of very fond memories as he was helping to build what has become one of the canonical companies in the history of molecular diagnostics, arguably the most important company in molecular diagnostics probably ever. For those of you who don't know very briefly, Helmy is now the co CEO and chairman of Guardant Health, a $20,000,000,000 molecular diagnostics company. But really interesting career journey starting as sort of deep nerd, Double E, PhD. I want to start with some questions about the path because it's not obvious as you go, you were Double E undergrad as well, yes? [00:01:14] S0: Yeah, I was in. [00:01:15] S1: Yeah, like how you, like the path from Double E into biology circa, I don't know, 2,006? How did that happen? Walk us through through Avantome and to Guardant.
00:01:15 · Mark Jacobstein, Helmy Eltoukhy, Steven
[00:01:15] S1: Yeah, like how you, like the path from Double E into biology circa, I don't know, 2,006? How did that happen? Walk us through through Avantome and to Guardant. [00:01:30] S0: I was always, I think, drawn to healthcare somehow. I remember looking at something I wrote in like kindergarten where it said that, you know, what do you want to be when you grow up? And it said, football player or neurosurgeons. So I think I was drawn to the fact that biology just seemed like very poorly understood. The brain was obviously a very complex sort of structure and really being able to help people sort of, [00:02:00] S2: you know, and when you
00:02:01 · Helmy Eltoukhy
[00:02:01] S0: think about like healthcare and a healthcare journey, if anyone's been through one, it's one of the most sort of frustrating things you can imagine, like not knowing what's wrong with your body, not knowing what's going happen next. So I was, you know, I loved math, I loved science, I loved physics, but there was always, I think, sort of a yearning to do something that is more directly helping people sort of one on one. I flirted, I think, with pre med in undergrad, but like most people, I don't know, I just didn't find it. Wasn't my cup of tea, I would say. I preferred electrical engineering for computer science. Then it was actually fortuitous during my PhD program. I loved circuit design, device physics, but frankly I couldn't compete with all the people who were like super geniuses from Sharif University in Iran and some of those other places, and I saw this project that was essentially combining DNA sequencing with semiconductors, and so it was a sort of slippery slope, and I was always good at biology, and it just sort of married those two things, and I think in retrospect, I say that the valleys between two well trodden sort of peaks and well trodden disciplines are where a lot of the opportunities lie, and that's exactly what's it was fortuitous, I didn't plan it, but that's sort of what sort of happened over the coming years is looking at where can you steal ideas from one area and apply them to another field. That is, I think, the easiest way to innovation. I was at there's this meeting that happens in Lindau, Germany every year called the Lindau Nobel Prize meeting, and I got fortunate enough a couple years ago to get invited to that, and essentially they invite all the existing, all the living Nobel Prize winners to that meeting and they do all this God bless you. Somehow me, but there's like hundreds of students there. It's like 500 or 600 people and they're essentially giving lectures all weeks. For a week you're back, you're a student, you're hearing these amazing lectures from these Nobel Prize winners. And I think Stephen Chu said that basically, he said he's a Stanford Nobel Prize winner in Physics and he said, Yeah, the easiest way to win a Nobel Prize is to take something from one field and apply it to another one. And I think that's true just in general.
00:04:25 · Helmy Eltoukhy, Mark Jacobstein
It's like if you can pattern match between two different areas you can, I think, really make a lot of progress? [00:04:33] S1: I love that in part because I think you're literally giving like the SPC pitch here, which is to take as many bright people from different fields and stick them in a place together and sort of see what comes out of it. But I'm curious to sort of a little bit more about that path because you started with so you got the interest in biology, you did the postdoc work, and then immediately out of the postdoc, started of Avantome. Say a little bit more about that path. And I'm curious how did you end up with Mustafa? So Mustafa Ronaghi, your co founder, ended up as the CTO of Illumina. So how did this all happen?
00:05:03 · Helmy Eltoukhy, Mark Jacobstein
[00:05:03] S0: Yeah, have to give him a lot of credit. He really was the pioneer who was thinking about recruiting students from engineering to solve some biological problems. And so he recruited myself, he recruited my co founder, Amir Ali, at Guardant and a bunch of other sort of electrical engineers. And we were there before bioengineering, before biox, so this was a very early group of sort of weird misfit electrical engineers who were thinking about biology and solving sort of technical problems there. I would say that I didn't know that when I was doing my PhD in semiconductor sequencing that I would start a company. Doing that I actually had this cursive period where I looked at starting like an e commerce company, like a bunch of other things, a search engine in The Middle East, and I found that sometimes that uneasy sort of period of exploring many different opportunities, almost like a simulated annealing kind of where you're looking at a bunch of different things. And then I did that. So during my postdoc I was exploring probably five or six different other opportunities, and then I finally came back to the PhD work and said this actually makes the most sense to commercialize. And there was another thread. So, when you do a PhD, obviously the path that a lot of people think about is becoming a professor somewhere, staying in academia. So that was one path I thought about. My dad was a professor at USC, I said, Oh yeah, maybe that's [00:06:41] S1: Although also an entrepreneur.
00:06:41 · Mark Jacobstein, Helmy Eltoukhy
[00:06:41] S1: Although also an entrepreneur. [00:06:43] S0: Yeah, so he also left that after a year and started a couple of companies in the valley here. So, I said, Oh yeah, that's a good pathway. Especially I looked at all the professors at Stanford, they had one foot in the door and a bunch of startups. It seemed like a really good place and I looked at it for a while and I just said this is tough. It's like all of the challenges of a startup. You have to raise money, you have to get a bunch of students with the bureaucracy of a 20,000 person organization as well. I said, yes, maybe that's not for me. So I said, why don't I just join a large company? I'll learn kind of the ropes and so on. And then, or I maybe just start a company. And then I thought about it for a while and I sort of had this Pascalian kind of wager, which is like, I said, well, I'll start a company, and even if it fails, I can go join a large company later, but at least I have CEO on my resume, and I'll probably get a higher place in that company than I would have a year earlier. So it was in some ways I think we overestimate risk for some decisions. I mean, I think that's the thing that