Elizabeth Iorns at Female Founders Conference 2014

Dr. Elizabeth Irons:

Uh, is the founder and CEO of Science Exchange, a marketplace for scientific collaboration where researchers can order experiments from the world's best labs. So, as a breast cancer researcher, Dr. Irons became so frustrated with the process of farming out experiments that she started a company, uh, to solve her own problem. Dr. Irons was part of the summer 2011 batch.

Here's Dr. Elizabeth Irons. [Applause]

Great! Well, thanks so much for the introduction, and I'm really excited to be here today to talk to you all. Um, I think this is a really, um, great opportunity to see so many women who are really interested in starting their own companies. So, I'm definitely happy to talk to you afterwards and give any advice that I can about, um, my experience with starting Science Exchange.

So today, I really wanted to talk about nine lessons that I've learned over the last three years that hopefully will be helpful for you. So just a little bit of background about me. Um, so basically, I'm not at all a traditional startup founder. So, my background is actually as an academic researcher. I have a PhD in cancer biology, and I was working on breast cancer biology as an assistant professor at the University of Miami.

Increasingly, I found that it was very difficult for me, um, to actually get all of my research done effectively. And so, I decided to leave three years ago to start my company, Science Exchange. This was obviously the first company that I founded, so first-time startup founder.

And just to give you a little bit of background to what Science Exchange is, it's a marketplace where you can order experiments from the world's best labs. This is really about creating a network of research labs. We have more than 800 labs from across um, the world, but we're very concentrated in the United States. These are labs from some of the best, uh, research institutes like Harvard, Duke, UCLA, Georgetown, um, probably all of the major medical schools, and places like, um, biotech companies and incubators.

This means that other researchers can basically find and access the technical expertise and instrumentation that they need to get their research done effectively.

So, I'm going to talk about the nine lessons that I've learned with Science Exchange. The first is to solve your own problem. This is a quote from Paul Graham: "The best problems to solve are the ones that affect you personally." I definitely believe this is really true because you have a deep understanding of the problem that you're trying to solve, and you're really passionate about finding a solution to that problem.

So, with Science Exchange, this was really about my research and how I realized that the research landscape was changing dramatically. It was just no longer possible to do all of the experiments that you needed to make significant breakthroughs in a single lab. This is really something that has happened very recently in the scientific world.

Um, and what I found was that really the incentive systems in place and the infrastructure in place didn't allow researchers to effectively work together with technical experts. So, I realized that by creating an online marketplace, we could solve both the infrastructure problems and the incentive systems to allow researchers to find and work with technical experts more effectively.

So, another way to think about this is to think about what startup you wish existed and then build that. I also think a really good benefit of solving your own problem is that it creates a really great founding story. For me, almost every VC meeting, every press interview, every employee that I've interviewed has asked me the question of why I decided to start Science Exchange.

I think it's really compelling when you're able to talk about how you solved your own problem and you care about this vision for what you're going to create. This really allows other people to buy into that story, and I think that's actually a really compelling way to effectively, um, raise money, get press, and, um, build your team.

My next lesson is to solve a real problem. One thing that Paul Graham used to always say at Y Combinator was that it's really, um, it's really difficult to found a company, and it's basically as difficult to found a company that's going to solve a small problem as it is to solve a big problem. So, you might as well look for a really real big problem to solve.

This is a quote from Aaron Pzer, the founder of Mint, and he said, "What set us apart from 95% of other startups is that we served a real need." I think it seems obvious that you're going to be solving a real problem, but what we actually heard some examples today where you can actually meet people who seem to be working on things that may not actually be a problem.

So, they can spend a lot of time working on these um, startups, and then really they need to think about whether this is something that people are actually going to need.

So how do you know if a problem is real? This really ties back to solving your own problem because at least if you're solving your own problem, you are solving a real problem for yourself. But, um, I think more importantly, you don't want to just solve a problem for yourself. You want to go and talk to potential users as soon as possible and figure out if, um, this is going to be something that is a real problem for them as well.

Do a lot of market research and think about the size of your market, the competitive landscape for your potential solution, and also what is the status quo. So, how do people solve this real problem at the moment? Because maybe they're actually already happy with the solution they have.

Then, obviously, launch a minimal viable product as soon as possible so you can start getting real-time feedback that you are solving a real problem and that your product is an effective way to solve that problem.

My next lesson is to build the right team. Obviously, you're going to need a great team in order to build a successful company, and most importantly, they can't just be great people—they have to really share your vision for what you're trying to solve.

This is a quote from Scott Hyman, the co-founder of Meetup. He said, "You need a team that's going to care about this thing as much as you do." This is some of the Science Exchange team, and I'm happy that a couple of them are here today.

Basically, what we've found is that it's not just amazing people that you need who have amazing sets of skills to come together. You also need people that really care about the vision for your company and believe that what you're doing is really going to solve this problem that matters to them.

So, my other tip for this is mixing with people outside your field. A lot of the time, the people you know are actually really similar to you. For me, I was a scientist; almost everybody I knew was other scientists, and that probably would not have been a great way to start Science Exchange initially.

Um, so you really have to think about different skill sets that will be required to build a successful company. One way to do this is to go to a lot of entrepreneurial events. Things like this event are a great way to meet other people with different skill sets, and also, obviously, there's Meetup and other um, online places where you can find out about these types of activities.

My next lesson is to focus on company culture. So this is something that I think people don't think about at the beginning but is incredibly important. So, it basically will determine whether or not you're able to build a great team, whether you're able to retain that team, and whether or not you actually want to work at the company that you end up creating.

So, it really is something that you have to think about right from the beginning. At Science Exchange, we actually have a series of values that are really important to us, and we, um, comprise them with this acronym FORCE, which stands for Fearless, Open, Respectful, Curious, and Entrepreneurial.

These are the values that we firmly believe every team member must possess, and we actually do a lot of activities to emphasize FORCE in our company. But, um, one of the great ones that I love is that every month we actually have this little statue that is awarded based on nominations for the team member who's displayed one of these values.

This is just an everyday thing that reminds people how important these values are to our company as we grow. So, you need to really think about what your values are, and then only work with people who share them. This really ties into getting the right advisors and investors for your company.

So, we heard a little bit about investors before. I think investors are definitely not just a source of money. So, investors, if they believe in your vision and they share your company values, they will be incredible assets for the growth of your company.

So, this I think is a very important quote: "Investors are employees you can never fire." We made sure to pick investors that thought like us, and I really think this is a great example because, for us, we've been so fortunate to work with Andy Wiseman from Union Square Ventures, who's part of our board.

This is actually a fake Twitter account for him called the Cuddly Sage, and this really represents him in many ways because he's so wise, but he's also so welcoming and nice, and he really shares so many of our values at Science Exchange. It's been such a pleasure to work with him; he's not only been a source of money and advice, but he's actually genuinely shared our values for growing the company, which has been incredibly important.

My next lesson is to get done. Obviously, with building a startup, there are so many things that you need to do, but you have to move so quickly because you have to show traction and progress, um, and actually move fast so that you don't fail.

This is actually Andy's co-founder, Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures. He said, "If you want to create something great and do it faster than the competition, you need to be action-oriented."

So, we actually use a framework to help us with being very action-oriented at Science Exchange. We use a quarterly planning meeting where we decide what our goals are for that quarter, and then we use an agile framework where we have a two-week sprint cycle for both the product team and the business team.

So, this is a common way that people work for products, but it's less commonly used for business. What we do is we actually have, at the beginning of the two weeks, a meeting where we talk about all of the tasks we want to achieve for that two-week cycle. Every day, we move um, very briefly through what you've achieved and if you have any issues that you need help with.

I think what this does is it really creates that openness within the company. Everybody knows what everyone else is working on, which is really important for us because it's one of our values, but also it creates a sense of momentum, and that's really important for making a lot of progress quickly.

So this is basically a way to get done. I think, um, this is only, you know, obviously you don't want to just focus on getting done; you have to actually get the stuff that matters. So you have to be really focused on what things you should be doing to really grow your company successfully.

So another way to think about this is to do fewer things. At Science Exchange, we're about building a marketplace for ordering experiments from the world's best labs. Obviously, there are many components to our software that we could build ourselves. We have to have a payment processor, we have to have, um, our infrastructure hosted, we have to do A/B testing—all of these things we could build ourselves, but we choose instead to make use of the community that's available to us.

So one thing we have in common with all of these companies is that they're also YC alumni, but what's great about them is that they help us build our what we call our software and our um, startup stack without investing a lot on things that aren't really the core focus for Science Exchange.

My next lesson is to do things that don't scale. I think the best example of this is from Airbnb, who are often um, associated with doing things that don't scale in a very effective way. So, Brian Chesky said, "Do things that won't scale because it will teach you."

I think a great example from them that I've heard is the founders actually going out and taking beautiful photographs of the apartments that were listed initially on their site. It's a way to test the theory that by enriching their marketplace with very high-quality beautiful images, having that as a defining feature, that set them apart.

Definitely, they found that this was the case, and it became a really important component of what made Airbnb so successful. So, another way to think about doing things that don't scale is to focus on your first 1,000 users.

This really means that you build a deep relationship with these first 1,000 users, and you make sure that your product is really going to be something that they love and that they really care about. Because once you've built something that really works for them, this will hopefully solve a problem for your next million users.

This is some of the Science Exchange team, and they're actually visiting one of our labs. I think what we've really focused on is building deep relationships with the labs that are part of our network. This is something that has been a huge competitive advantage for Science Exchange—having these verified labs that we have a deep sense of trust and a deep understanding of the actual expertise and infrastructure that they have available.

So this has been really important for us. Another part is being amazing at customer support. So, I think that most startups can do this very, very effectively and much more effectively than large companies can, and this can be something that you use as a competitive advantage.

For us, actually, the bar was even lower than for most other industries because in science really there isn't a big focus on customer support or very friendly user interfaces, and so we've really focused on both of those things to try and um, create a great experience for our users. I think this has been something that's been very effective for us.

My last lesson is don't give up. I went to a talk about actually startups failing, and um, one of the co-founders said there's really only two ways that startups fail: you either run out of money or you give up. So don't run out of money, and don't give up!

Even Steve Jobs said, "Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith." So, I definitely think that founding a startup is incredibly hard. We've heard that from almost everybody who's spoken today, but it's also incredibly rewarding.

With Science Exchange, when we first launched, we were actually proclaimed as the "eBay for science," which at the time we were like, "Yeah, that's pretty cool." But, um, it turned out to be a very negative thing for us.

The science community really saw that as tech outsiders kind of coming in and telling them how to run their labs and do things differently, and we had to work very hard to overcome that. We had to show that we were actually scientists too, and we really cared about making science better—making science work in a way that was going to make research much more efficient and better quality.

So that took us an incredible amount of persistence, but that really helped us to build these relationships with the labs that now are core to what sets us apart. So, don't give up.

So, these are my nine lessons: Solve your own problem, solve a real problem, build the right team, focus on culture, get the right advisors and investors, get done, focus, do things that don't scale, and don't give up.

Thanks!