The Biotech Startups Podcast

In this episode, Jon Chee sits down with Sabrina Johnson, President and CEO of Daré Bioscience, a Nasdaq-listed biopharma advancing women's reproductive health. Daré's team of 25 executes the groomed trail approach — matching therapeutic gaps to FDA-approved actives — with a non-hormonal contraceptive in pivotal Phase 3 and $75M+ in non-dilutive funding from the Gates Foundation, NIH, and ARPA-H.

Martin Brenner, CEO & CSO of iBio, closes out his three-part conversation with Jon Chee by tracing the arc from Stoke Therapeutics to Recursion to Phenex — and into the reinvented iBio. Martin unpacks the resilience required when nothing works, the line-of-sight portfolio system he built to run 100 programs with 20 biologists, and how a team of opposites at Phenex became the most effective R&D unit of his career. He then dives deep into iBio's current antibody discovery platform — epitope steering, masked antibodies, and StableCube — and shares an unfiltered look at what it's really like to run a NYSE-listed micro-cap biotech.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Jon Chee continues his conversation with Martin Brenner, CEO and Chief Scientific Officer of iBio, tracing his career through Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Merck. From re-engaging demoralized scientists after layoffs to a Moderna encounter when the company was just eight people strong, Martin offers a rare insider view of what it actually takes to drive innovation from within Big Pharma.

Jon Chee sits down with Martin Brenner, CEO and CSO of iBio, an AI drug discovery company building immunotherapies for difficult-to-treat cancers. Before biotech leadership, Martin built one of pharma's most unconventional careers—electrical engineer in Stuttgart, vet medicine at LMU Munich, PhD embedded at Eli Lilly, youngest scientist to lead a 20-person team there. Part 1 covers his formative years: the family that shaped him, the vet clinic that changed his path, and the professor who lit the match.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Jon Chee sits down with Mike Stadnisky, Managing Director of Thielsen Capital, a seed-stage life science tools syndicate. A veteran of four-plus M&A cycles as CEO of FlowJo and Phytonix, Mike walks through the mechanics founders most often get wrong: when to call in partnership favors, how shared customers become acquisition seeds, what IP and cap table hygiene should look like before a deal, and why a rigorous financial model is your most powerful negotiating tool.