Boba & Biotech

Guest: James Taylor In this episode of Boba & Biotech, Armon sits down with James Taylor, co-founder of Precision NanoSystems, for a candid conversation about building a platform technology for nanoparticle-delivered RNA medicines from a PhD project into an 11-year journey that ended in an acquisition by Danaher Corporation, a leading global life sciences and diagnostics healthcare company.  They...

Guest: Jason Kelly In this episode of Boba & Biotech, Armon sits down with Jason Kelly, co-founder and CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks, for a conversation about what it takes to build a biotech company from scratch when no one will fund you, why platform business models in biotech are harder than they look, and where he thinks the biggest opportunity in biotech history is hiding. They cover how Ginkgo got...

Guest: Mark Dempster In this episode of Boba & Biotech, Armon sits down with Mark Dempster, Co-Head of Healthcare Investment Banking at Stifel, to pull back the curtain on what biotech bankers actually do and why it matters more than most founders realize. They cover the public vs. private financing divide, why the stigma around banks helping with private rounds exists and whether it still makes s...

Guest: William Pao  In this episode of Boba & Biotech, Armon sits down with William Pao, a physician-scientist who has run oncology R&D at Roche, served as Chief Development Officer at Pfizer, and is now CEO and Co-Founder of Revelio Therapeutics. Few people have seen drug development from as many angles. They get into the real economics behind why a single molecule can cost $600M to advance, what...

Guest:Sophia Lugo In this episode of Boba & Biotech, Sophia Lugo and I grab some delicious boba teas to explore her unconventional path into biotech and the realities of building a company at the frontier of genetic medicine. From her early experiences across Harvard, China, and the Gates Foundation to co-founding Radar during her time at Stanford, Sophia shares how urgency, ambition, and a belief...

Guest:  Adam Jenkins What actually makes or breaks a biotech startup - and why is it rarely the science? In this episode of Boba & Biotech, Adam Jenkins and I enjoy some delicious grapefruit-coconut sago from Heytea while we discuss the hidden dynamics shaping today’s biotech ecosystem. From the inside workings of incubators like BioLabs and LabCentral to the uncomfortable truth about “zombie” sta...

Guest: Klavs F. Jensen  In this episode of Boba & Biotech, I sit down with Klavs Jensen - professor at MIT and former chair of its chemical engineering department - to explore a deceptively simple question: why do some scientific breakthroughs become companies while others never leave the lab? As we unpack the messy journey from academic discovery to startup, Klavs tries his first-ever boba tea, a...

Guest: Soufiane AboulhoudaIn this episode of Boba & Biotech, over matching brown sugar milk teas (great minds, same taste), Souf Aboulhouda, co-founder of Nucleate, and I trace his journey from growing up between France, England, and California to pursuing a PhD in the Church Lab at Harvard - where he first stumbled into the world of biotech startups after watching labmates pitch to investors.  Wh...

Guest: Ileana Pirozzi  In this episode of Boba & Biotech, I grab a delicious mango-coconut sago with Ileana Pirozzi, a former biotech investor who’s stepping off the venture sidelines and into the founder seat. From growing up in Italy to studying biomedical engineering at Stanford and working at NASA, Ileana shares how venture capital became a crash course in scientific rigor and why it ultimatel...

In this episode of Boba & Biotech, I go for a tasty brown sugar milk tea with Martin Madaus, former CEO of one of the biggest technology providers in our field, Millipore, for a wide-ranging conversation on what actually creates value in life sciences. Martin traces his unconventional path from veterinary medicine to global leadership roles across pharma, diagnostics, and life science tools, and s...

In the pilot episode of Boba & Biotech, I try out a homemade milk tea with my long time friend and colleague, Shirley Mao. The goal of this episode is to invite listeners into my world - inside and outside of work - and to share the vision behind this brand-new podcast. It's also the fastest way to figure out if I’m boring or insufferable :) From an early interest in math and science, to Stanford,...

Biotech has a PR problem. It's messy, complex, and hard to understand from the outside looking in. That's why I'm starting Boba & Biotech. I’m Armon Sharei. You might know me from my cell cartoons on LinkedIn. I was born in California, grew up in Iran and Dubai, and somehow ended up spending most of my life thinking about cells. In this intro episode, I'll lay out my career - how I got to where I...