We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Obdulio Piloto. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Obdulio below.
Obdulio, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear the backstory of how you established your own practice.
Being able to develop my own ideas and bring them into reality always had a strong pull on me. But how? When is the best time? With whom? What if it fails and I waste time, social capital, motivation, money, etc.? Can I really do this?
I still don’t have great answers to many of these questions, but the key is simply getting started and ignoring the many (rational) reasons not to. So that’s what I did.
After ~5 years of PhD training, ~1 year of post doctoral research, ~3 years in a pharmaceuticals company, and ~2 years in the C-suite at a biotechnology company, I took the plunge and started my own company. This was only possible with the support of two close friends and colleagues, Ian Cheong and George Huang. They complemented my skill set, and together we were able to launch a hard science venture that’s improving healthcare.
Key Lessons:
– Don’t be afraid of working with others and sharing the successes (and failures)
– You are never perfectly ready for a truly new venture… start once you have a vague picture in your mind and figure it out as you go
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
We are a team of scientists, engineers, and business development specialists that develop novel, impactful, and low cost healthcare solutions. We are inherently motivated to make a difference in the world.
One example of our team making a lasting impact on healthcare comes from Entopsis Inc., where our PCRopsis (PCRopsis.com) brand of life science products offer unique solutions to laboratory testing of viruses, bacteria, fungi, and human cells. These products simplify the testing process and thereby improve the testing capacity of laboratories; this proved critical during the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, clients are adapting PCRopsis products for routine testing panels as a means of providing faster results to physicians and patients, while increasing profit margins.
Our team is currently developing improved means of transporting clinical samples, further automating laboratory testing, and expanding beyond human testing to include animals and plants.
Other than training/knowledge, what do you think is most helpful for succeeding in your field?
Strong interpersonal skills are critical when leading an organization. To succeed, you need to understand and properly convey processed information to people, with diverse backgrounds, ages, experiences, insecurities, interests, levels of rationality, and motivations. You need to tailor your message and emotions appropriately.
After completing ~20 years of schooling, I’ve realized that the one-size-fits-all education model fails high achievers with an entrepreneurial bent.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
We started our entrepreneurial journey with no start-up / business experience and no idea how to raise capital, especially not for a company tackling the overly complicated and bureaucratic healthcare system. As you could imagine, many investors of all stripes turned us down; with good reason at the time. With every rejection, we honed our messaging and gained a better understanding of what type of company we wanted to build and what type of relationships we wanted to establish with investors. Luckily, we received an investment from Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs which provided the external validation that many investors need and a community of like-minded individuals.
We still faced numerous scientific and business challenges once the funding problem was solved. We were developing technology, both software and hardware, that didn’t exist and would take years to develop. Years later, we successfully demonstrated the capabilities of our OpsisDx platform using clinical samples. OpsisDx is capable of diagnosing numerous diseases, especially early stage cancers, from a urine sample; thus saving time and money, but most importantly, lives.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.PCRopsis.com
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/obduliopiloto/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ObdulioPiloto