YC Alumni Lightning Round
All right guys, we uh we got a break coming up, but just a few words in closing, okay? Before we will hear from some amazing alumni and then head to our um happy hour on the roof.
Today we were lucky enough to hear from some of the very best VCs in the valley. Thank you guys for that great conversation. We were able to hear what strategics look for in startups, and we heard some incredible founder journeys. I really, really hope that if any of you were sort of on the fence of starting a company, that at a minimum you’ll reach out to me at serbia@ycombinator.com so we can discuss it further. I hope that today you’re inspired to take the leap of faith to build something people need.
Thank you so much for being here, Mr. B. Okay, for this very last session, you’re going to get to meet some of the alumni we have here in the audience. We have about 20 alumni who are here today, who are going to introduce themselves briefly on stage. They’ll have just 30 seconds or less. It’s like a mini demo day almost.
While we didn’t have time to have every single alumni in the audience, I think Serbia and Jared mentioned there are about 100 alumni here today. All alumni who are here have a purple badge, so when you are at the happy hour upstairs, you know, take a look at everyone’s badges and if they’re purple, please feel free to introduce yourselves to them. I’m sure they’re happy to talk about what they’re building. If you have questions about their YC journey, or you know, if you need some advice on starting a company, I’m sure they’d be happy to chat with you.
So alumni, if I emailed you, please make your way to the right of the stage and we will pass the mic down the line. Each alumni who will come up here will share their name, their two-sentence quick, you know, YC pitch, their description, and a one-sentence bio that will talk about what they were doing prior to starting their company.
All right, so let’s have the alumni get started. Let’s get started with Reshma.
"Hi everyone! I’m Reshma and I’m a 10-year member of the YC community as part of winter '13, a visiting group partner, and now I’m here repping summer '22 with my company Medplum. Medplum makes an open-source app building kit for life sciences and healthcare. As you folks in the audience might think of us as it helpdesk. We’re really great at integrating with lots of systems and we are open-source. I'll leave you with three parting thoughts: Medplum, open-source, we can help you save many, many years of engineering time."
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"Hi everyone! My name is Orianna and I’m the CEO and co-founder of AOA. At AOA, we are developing the first blood test for the early detection of ovarian cancer so that we can quickly and accurately catch the disease at the onset of symptoms. Today it takes about nine months in a very invasive surgery to diagnose ovarian cancer, which leads to about 80 percent of cases being caught when it’s already stage three and four. And often that’s too late. My background: I’ve been in the diagnostic space for the last decade, working at two previous women’s health startups with both of my co-founders. So, either we’re good friends or crazy for doing this again, and our essential mission has been to bring to market diagnostics with our last two startups going on to successful exits. Thank you!"
"Hi everyone! I’m Marco Loba, CEO of Katena Biosciences. At Katena, we’re doing for proteins what Ginkgo did for cells. We turn peptides and whole proteins into modular building blocks that we can attach to antibodies and cell surfaces, using only native amino acids. We’ve got two partnerships going on that we’re starting to develop with major pharma, and I did my PhD at UC Berkeley in the labs of Matt Francis and Jennifer Doudna, where I discovered the technology behind Katena. Thank you all so much!"
"Hello everyone! I’m Patricia Bubna, and at our billion we make meat, we make lab-grown meat or cell-cultured meat, the most delicious meat you’ve ever eaten. We start with Wagyu beef, and we just recently partnered with a big meat company because that’s what we do, and we were able to slash the cost by 98% with our high-density cell culture platform and organic technology. I did my postdoc at UC Berkeley and then worked in biopharma building teams in process development, so we know how to build effective cell culture companies. Thank you!"
"Hi everyone! My name is Jocelyn, I’m the CTO and co-founder of No Text. No Text automatically creates visit notes with billing codes from doctor-patient conversations. Our software captures natural conversation, identifies relevant medical information, and then generates a pre-filled structured note with codes for doctor review and sign off. Before No Text, I worked as a medical scribe in orthopedics and worked at five different startups, leading AI and ML teams."
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"Hi everyone! I’m Catherine Quant at Engage Bio. We’re developing mRNA therapeutics to turn tumors into factories for immunotherapies. Our approach results in better efficacy and less toxicity, enabling us to safely cure solid tumors. Before Engage, I did my PhD at UC Berkeley studying protein engineering, worked on antibody development at Bayer, and then spent five years at Harpoon Therapeutics developing bispecific T-cell engagers. Thanks!"
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"Hi everyone! My name is Kunj Patel, founder of Safe Beat. We make machine learning software that powers hospitalization at home. We target the 2 million new patients each year diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, who have to go to the hospital just to start oral pills. Prior to founding this company, I trained as an interventional pain physician at Harvard and started a private practice from scratch. Happy to chat with you all afterwards!"
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"Hi I’m Daniel Kivatinos, I’m a co-founder of a medical records startup called Dr. Chrono. Dr. Chrono has thousands of physicians and millions of patients. We were doing billions of dollars in medical claims, and we just exited, so it was a big exit, and I’m here to see everybody here. Awesome, thank you!"
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"These YC pitches never get easier. We haven't exited. My name is Danny Kranick, I’m the CEO and co-founder of Bristol. We analyze the oral microbiome to help people detect the earliest signs of oral diseases or cavities, gum disease, bad breath. We leverage that data to pair them with personalized care plans and develop new products. Cavities and disease are the most prevalent diseases on the planet and they’re entirely preventable. Thanks! My background is in biochemistry and I worked at Illumina for four years."
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"Hey everyone! I’m Ravi Pamnani, co-founder and CEO of Intact Therapeutics, winter 2019. We are developing novel therapeutics with thermal hydrogels to improve drug delivery to the gut for disorders of the GI tract and certain orphan diseases. We just completed phase one for our lead candidate in inflammatory bowel disease, and early next year we’re looking to do our series A finally and also expand our clinical programs. I was originally an engineer, then I moved over to the dark side. Last, I worked for an ophthalmology startup and I led marketing and business development, and we were acquired by Novartis, so I’ve seen a little bit of that side as well. So thanks so much!"
"Hey everyone! My name is Akash Bakshi, I’m the co-founder and CEO of Your Choice Therapeutics. We’re developing next-generation contraceptives for both men and women. The lead asset is a non-hormonal pill for men that prevents men from getting women pregnant. It’s the biggest deal in contraception since condoms came out in the 1860s, and it’ll improve the health and well-being of women because, you know, let’s be honest, men are not great at wearing condoms. The only reversible male contraceptive has an 18% failure rate, so looking forward to changing the world. Thanks everyone!"
"Thank you! Hi, I’m Ritu from Genie. At Genie, we are developing next-generation therapies for rare diseases and inflammatory diseases, especially those with huge health inequities in the country. We are now a phase two-ready company with 21+ novel compounds, an AI platform, and we are developing therapies for three different diseases. The first one is ARDS, a horrible disease with no treatments, and the lead cause of death for influenza as well as for COVID, so we’re excited about that. My background is I’m a pharmacist by training and have taken three medicines from discovery to FDA approval, and as you would say at demo day, this is going to be the fourth. By the way, all of this was accomplished right after demo day, so about three years or so, and we spent about 7 million dollars, so what typically takes 10 years and 100 million, so we hope to maintain that. Please join in the journey with Genie!"
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"Hi everyone! I’m Alice, co-founder and CSO of Trestle Biotherapeutics. Trestle Bio is bioengineering kidneys to treat kidney failure. We’re doing this by combining stem cell biology and 3D bioprinting to make and grow implantable kidney tissues to supplement kidney function. Prior to starting Trestle two years ago, I trained as a developmental biologist at Hopkins and a stem cell biologist at Harvard University, and prior to this worked at Organovo, one of the very first bioprinting efforts to create 3D human living tissues. Thank you!"
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"Hi everyone! I’m Alex Federation, CEO and co-founder at Talus Bio. We’re developing first-in-class therapeutics for previously undruggable proteins called transcription factors, hundreds of which are implicated in cancer. We’re doing this with next-gen proteomics and we’re starting with some orphan pediatric cancers where standard of care is just chemo radiation and huge unmet needs, so excited to be here. Thanks for having us!"
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"Hey guys, so you probably know here: pain sucks. I’m Celine, I’m the founder of Flowley, an app for chronic pain patients. What we do is we are an app that collects your real-time heart rate and then we convert it into visualizations in VR that actually teach you how to control your nervous system in real time. By doing this, we can reduce pain by an average of 46%. We’re direct to consumer, but as of last month, we’re now partnered with one of the largest insurance companies in the United States. Probably, and usually for this crowd, I used to do development at Dreamworks Animation. I’m now principal investigator on NIH-backed clinical trials. Cheers!"
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"Hi, my name is Catherine Cross and I am the founder of Angel Health. I founded Angel Health in memory of my younger brother Andrew, who I named the company after. He had cerebral palsy from an ear drowning accident, and so my parents were looking into cord blood stem cells to treat him, but we couldn’t find a cord blood match. So Angel Health now helps pregnant parents keep stem cells from their umbilical cord and placenta via cryopreservation so they can use it for future disease treatment, and they don’t have to face the same pain point that my family did. So if you or someone you know is pregnant, we have a YC discount; you can use the code YCBABYLOVE, but yes, would love to connect with any expecting parents. Excited to be here, thank you!"
"Hi everyone! I’m Tuval. Just standing in line here, I realized the last time I did this was demo day and I realized how less stressful this is, so much less stressful. I was part of YC, winter batch of 16. I’m the founder of Loop Genomics, we’re a long-read DNA sequencing company. Before Loop Genomics, I was the founder of a synthetic biology company called Sin Vaccine. Before that, I did my PhD at the Weitzman Institute in Israel in synthetic biology. I spent the last six years building Loop Genomics together with a super talented team of scientists. We brought it to a place where we had a few hundred customers, a few million dollars in annual recurring revenue, and earlier this year, we sold the company to Element Biosciences, so I’m happy to connect with all of you to kind of tell you about the journey that we had in the past six years."
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"Hi everyone! I’m Lucia Huang, I'm co-founder and CEO of Osmind. At Osmind, we offer software and data for mental health clinicians and researchers. We were YC summer 2020 and raised our series B earlier this year. Prior to Osmind, I’ve been on the healthcare side of business for a number of years, on both investing and previously at a YC bio company called Verge Genomics. So thanks!"
"Hi everyone! I’m Tim Boyer with Veno Stents. There are over 5 million dialysis and bypass surgeries every year. They use veins as replacement arteries, but half of them fail. Veno Sense saves lives with a biosurround wrap that goes around veins during surgery so that they don’t fail by training veins to become like arteries. I did my entire PhD in biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt University developing this novel material and technology. We are Veno Sense. Thank you!"
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"Hello! So pregnancy is hard; having a high-risk complication is even harder. We are Malama Health and we’re improving pregnancy-related outcomes, starting with remote monitoring for high-risk perinatal conditions, specifically diabetes in pregnancy, which now affects nearly one in five patients globally. So far we’ve attracted nearly 200 patients and seen with these patients a 15% improvement in percent in range with our HIPAA-compliant app versus the typical logging methods, which are largely pen and paper. Today we just kicked off our first pilot with a large hospital, 100 Medi-Cal here in NorCal. We’re starting our first clinical study in December with Tufts Medical and we’re looking forward to engaging with more. My background is I led clinical product innovation at United Healthcare and Optum. We are Malama Health, improving pregnancy-related outcomes. Thank you!"
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"Hi, my name is Jose. I'm the CEO of Shasky. Shasky is the one and only company that has shown that click chemistry can be used in humans. Our scientific advisor Caroline Bertozzi just received a Nobel Prize and the press release from the Nobel Prize committee singled out our work, which was an incredible honor but something that could not have happened had YC not invested in an orthopedic surgery resident to start a therapeutics company in oncology. So thank you so much, YC! We’re now 15. We have raised more than 60 million dollars, we have a leading nationalism phase two and a growing portfolio of cancer therapeutics that we believe are going to revolutionize cancer care. Thank you so much!"
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Thank you, Jose, and thank you to all the Alum and the speakers for presenting today.
One last quick thing I wanted to say before we head up to happy hour is a big thank you to YC’s event director Lindsay Salvatel who made this happen. All right, thank you all, and we’re excited to meet you upstairs, so let’s head over to that PR oud.