Christopher Pirie shares lessons from his ventures in biotech, highlighting the personal journey of founding a company, strategic pivots, and the importance.
Christopher Pirie shares lessons from his ventures in biotech, highlighting the personal journey of founding a company, strategic pivots, and the importance of translating deep science into compelling business narratives.
If you wanted to make enough rose oil for every woman in China to have Chanel number five, you literally have to cover the entire planet in roses. And yet, this incredible enzyme and metabolic and process engineering approach was able to ferment just a single acre of corn into a highly efficient manufacturing process for some of these ingredients. [Music] All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the Dealmaker Show. So today we have a an amazing founder, a founder that has done it multiple times and I think that we're going to be learning quite a bit about building, scaling, financing and you name it. You know, I think that the conversation is going to be quite inspiring. We're going to be talking about some of the ways that he thinks about al let's say alternative financing customer ccentric business models the history too of biotechnology as well as you know how he has been able to
deal with being impatient you know too through the journey of building and doing stuff on his end but again you know be prepared for a really exciting conversation today and without further ado let's welcome our guest today Christopher Perryi welcome to the show thank you very much pleasure to be here so originally born in northern in California. So, give us a walk through memory lane. How's life growing up for you? Oh gosh. Uh quite idyllic, I would say. You know, 5 acres of uh Soma Rolling Hills is is not a bad place to wake up every morning when you're a little kid. Just walk out the door, run around in the in the woods. But um yeah, it it was an amazing place to spend my early years, but also, you know, when I was uh a little bit older, we moved up to Seattle. And Seattle is is just equally a pleasant place to to grow up as a young person and also, you know, to to have the
educational foundations of this place. It's amazing. So, how did you get into uh problem solving and you know, all of that good stuff that eventually got would get you into MIT? Oh, man. Uh, as an undergraduate, you know, I I feel like so many um folks navigating the college experience, I went to a an undergraduate counselor and sort of look said, you know, I I'm good at math. I'm good at science. You know, what should I do with my career? And they said, "Well, you know, if you want to live in California, you should major in chemical engineering, and if you want to live in Seattle, you should major in biological engineering." And I just loved uh this city so much there at University of Washington. So, I joined the biological engineering department. And you know, there the undergraduate uh class is maybe 50% premed and the other 50% preh. And I found myself gravitating towards research.
And at the same time, I had this tremendous fear of becoming a doctor and having patients that I would see not listen to my advice and keep getting sicker and sicker. So I was I was quite scared of clinical practice. And so ended up, as I say, gravitating towards the research side of things. And when it was time to pick a graduate school, of course MIT is hard to say no to. I hear you. So now how did you start getting into the whole business side of things because obviously via the business school and and the access and the exposure that they gave you. You know it sounds like the venture world came knocking to you. Yeah. I mean this is uh I don't know if it's necessarily unique offering of MIT but you know when you're so close to the the business school and I think every graduates or most graduate students I should say have this experience uh along the course of their their PhD journey
of kind of realizing that they're they're not going to be in the academic regime for their entire career and they start thinking about things other than basic scientific research and for me that that led to spending time and taking classes over at the Sloan Business School and building some incredible relationships with MBA students who were there at the time and and who I continue to work with to this day. But spending time on both sides of campus, uh, you know, sometimes in the research lab, sometimes in the classroom, it gave me this cross-sectional exposure and and I had had some of that exposure when I was younger. My dad had started a couple of companies in the telecom industry and I had been around early stage venture and and the energy of that place and I always enjoyed operating at this sort of interface between the cutting edge science and the entrepreneurial journey and it
just so happened that uh towards the end of my thesis work um ended up connecting with a couple of other like-minded individuals and starting my first company. Well, let's talk about that. How do you get going with a first company? Well, in fact, it was in one of those classes where oftentimes they'll have researchers from across campus come in and present the their research and because they have the notion that perhaps there's commercial opportunity there. And as a student in those classes, you typically hear all the presentations and then you get to list off which you you'd like to work on that semester. Well, sure enough, I listed off one of these technologies as my second choice. And I didn't get my first choice, but I got my second choice. That second choice technology became the foundations of Manis Bio. And it was just through that semester of working with the inventor who
happened to be a posttock in the chemical engineering department. Uh we worked together for that semester and then in the weeks after the class was over, you know, I I sort of finish my work and I I move on. I thinking I'm going to just go back to my thesis research. And he he shoots me an email a couple weeks later. He says, "Hey, I think we should get together for a coffee. He sits me down with myself and a a Sloan fellow who he'd worked with in another class and he said, "Look, I think the three of us should go start a business together." And that became Manispio. And so the three of us, we kind of spent the first 6 months, 12 months or something like that, just hanging out around campus figuring out what we were going to build together and going through the early product market fit minations for what was a very academic technology at the outset, but would ultimately become the
commercial success that is Manispile. As you are looking back now, what do you think were some of the toughest things as a first-time entrepreneur back then? As an early career scientist, especially in academia, so much of your work is about demonstrating how much knowledge you have. You know, passing tests, publishing scientific papers, presenting it at conferences, proving to your peers and to the rest of the world how much you know. And I think for me it was fairly quickly after leaving academia and starting the company I realized how little that really mattered because at once you're a part of a broader crossf functional team that's trying to accomplish these grand challenges and at the same time your ability to communicate with people outside of your scientific regime or without any scientific training whatsoever and your ability to manage other people which is less about how much
you know and more about how you interact with other humans become much much stronger driving forces for your success as an entre entrepreneur and as a company builder and it I I certainly had my growing pains and have had over the last decade plus of of building companies but those were some of my earliest learnings as a first-time founder and I was fortunate enough to have two co-founders who had some practice in both of these areas uh to support me through that growth so what ended up being manos bio. Well, Manis Bio, you know, its foundations were really in a metabolic engineering technology modifying um microbes to eat sugar and produce flavors and fragrances. The many of which are natural products that would otherwise be sourced from plants and farming. And what we created was the potential for using fermentation, you know, the classical process that we've society has used to make
beer and wine and other things for millennia to produce some of these natural ingredients at scale in a much much more efficient manner. So, we always had these analogies about different uh plant ingredients like rose oil or something like that where if you wanted to make enough rose oil to for every woman in China to have Chanel number five, you'd literally have to cover the entire planet in roses. And yet this incredible uh enzyme and metabolic and process engineering approach was able to ferment just say a single acre of corn into a highly efficient uh manufacturing process for some of these ingredients. So they've been fortunate enough to go on to expand manufacturing capacity and go to scale and market with some of these early products um even after I left Jeff after just a few years. And the company just announced a merger, you know, raised over a hundred million. So, I mean, the
company has done pretty well. I…