The Biotech Startups Podcast

"If you think about what we do as human beings, the vast majority of the value we create is through communication." We’re revisiting some of our previous episodes over the holidays this year. Our next re-release is this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, where Jason C. Foster, CEO and Executive Director at Ori Biotech, shares how his upbringing in Richmond, Virginia and his family’s deep roots in business shaped his entrepreneurial drive and leadership style. Growing up as an only child surrounded by adults, Jason cultivated strong communication skills early on, while paper routes, lawn care, and door-to-door sales instilled in him a bias toward self-sufficiency and finding creative ways to add value. Jason walks through his journey from studying government at the University of Virginia and working on healthcare policy in Washington, D.C., to realizing that real impact on patient outcomes often happens in the private sector rather than in government. He then reflects on his formative years at Columbia Business School in New York City, where exposure to a highly international, high-performing peer group—and to the chaos and energy of post-9/11 New York—pushed him out of his comfort zone and helped crystallize his aspiration to build and lead in healthcare and startups.

"If you can synthesize, then there's no such thing as too much expertise." We’re revisiting some of our previous episodes over the holidays this year. Our next re-release is this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, where Jacob Glanville pulls back the curtain on the “black box” of venture capital for biotech founders, sharing what he learned moving from pitching antibody platforms to pitching VCs. He explains how aligning with each firm’s investment thesis, simplifying your story, and using sharp visuals—while treating fundraising like dating, not a numbers game—can dramatically improve your odds without ever resorting to exaggeration or dishonesty.​ Jacob then dives into choosing the right venture partners, negotiating fair terms, and focusing on what real success looks like for both founders and investors. He shows how the best VCs act as strategic allies and “polishing engines,” and explains why he partnered with NFX and GHIC to help drive Centivax’s universal vaccine programs forward, from RNA-LNP–enabled flu vaccines to broad-spectrum efforts in HIV and coronaviruses, all powered by a village of mentors, collaborators, and family.​

"If you are capable of acquiring knowledge, of applying the knowledge, and you like it, you can succeed. It doesn't matter what it is." We’re revisiting some of our previous episodes over the holidays this year. Our next re-release is this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, in which Jacob Glanville breaks down how he built Distributed Bio from a napkin-stage idea into a full-service antibody discovery platform—without traditional venture capital. He shares how creative partnerships with USF’s biotech master’s program and a scrappy animal facility in Guatemala helped him access labs, talent, and proof-of-concept data, even as early setbacks with SuperHuman 1.0 cost him clients and sleep. The conversation then dives into the realities of scaling: squeezing into half a bench at JLABS before expanding into a 7,500-square-foot facility powered by smart equipment leasing and a growing team. Jacob also introduces his “Respiration Model” of leadership—open debate followed by uncompromising execution—and explains why rising competition and strong universal vaccine data led him to sell Distributed Bio to Charles River Laboratories and spin out Centivax just as the pandemic hit.

"Find the thing that gets you excited, that fascinates you, and then have the thing you love be something else." We’re revisiting some of our previous episodes over the holidays this year. Our next re-release is this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, in which Jacob Glanville discusses his transformative years at Pfizer's Rinat site and his transition to Stanford. He describes how an open, collaborative culture allowed him to roam across teams, trading his coding skills for scientific mentorship while building critical bioinformatics infrastructure for antibody discovery. Jacob shares how he converted a corporate laptop into antibody.pfizer.com, creating an internal web server that centralized analysis tools and enabled scientists to rapidly interrogate antibody libraries. Early access to deep sequencing let him dissect repertoires before and after selection, iteratively design better synthetic libraries, and publish influential papers—ultimately being promoted four times to Principal Scientist with only a BA. Despite this success, his burning idea for a universal vaccine drove him to leave Pfizer, pursue a PhD at Stanford, and simultaneously launch Distributed Bio. At Stanford, Jacob explains how he "separated church and state," keeping therapeutic antibody work in his company while focusing academic research on T-cell receptors and cytokine analysis. He reflects on navigating Stanford's tech transfer process and contrasts the priorities of academia versus industry, emphasizing the value of finding work that fascinates you.

"You don't always know at the time how something will be useful in the future, but if you keep following what fascinates you, those threads can re-synthesize into something powerful down the line."​ We’re revisiting some of our previous episodes over the holidays this year. Our next re-release is this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, where computational immuno-engineer and serial entrepreneur Jake Glanville shares how growing up in a Mayan Tzʼutujil village in Guatemala during a civil war shaped his path into biotech. He reflects on living amid limited access to medicine, navigating personal health challenges like asthma, and witnessing how simple interventions such as deworming transformed entire communities, inspiring his commitment to developing therapeutics and vaccines.​ Jake discusses the profound influence of his grandfather, a Rocketdyne engineer who worked on the engines that sent humans to the moon, and how that legacy lowered his sense of what is "impossible" in science. Watching his parents run a hotel and restaurant gave him an education in operations, resilience, and people management—skills that translated directly into building biotech companies. He also unpacks the negotiation lessons he absorbed from Mayan market culture, where the goal is sustainable, mutual value rather than one-time wins.​ The episode follows Jake's transition to the United States after his father's autoimmune disease diagnosis, his strategic decision to attend UC Berkeley, and how his self-taught programming background fused with population genetics to create a passion for computational immunology.