We discuss James' and Deniz's careers from how they first met to founding Seven Bridges and Totient and now building AbSci after Totient was recently acquired. With experience leading teams in the 100s spanning genomics and SaaS to drug development and even paint from James' childhood entrepreneurial pursuits, both have an incredible amount of wisdom on scaling technology companies. We touch on AbSci's unique model of accelerating and lowering the barriers for biologics development and talk about the finding the right platform-partner fit. Some favorite quotes of mine after this conversation are: during any negotiations, "competition is highly important for deals" and Deniz's experience of "seeing the future early but unevenly distributed" just as sequencing costs began coming down outpacing Moore's Law.
Axial Podcast