Category: NSF Bay Area I-Corps News

Another strong cohort this month with teams from across the Bay Area (UC Berkeley, UCSF, Stanford, SFSU) and beyond, including UNR, Harvard Medical School and three Yale-affiliated teams!

One standout team that’s well poised for Nationals is KovaDx. The team was also recently award a summer-long Blackstone LaunchPad powered by Techstars Fellowship.  KovaDx is developing a quick and affordable diagnostic for rapidly diagnosing sickle cell.  Led by
Yaw Ansong Jr., a PhD student in BioE/Biomedical Engineering at Cal and Tim Adamson, a PhD student in CS at Yale.  The pair learned through their 20 interviews over seven days that sickle cell disease sends patients to the ER often (more than
one patient per day at Yale New Haven Hospital).  They also learned from interviewing patients that they often feel misunderstood because of the
challenge of communicating pain.

What’s next? More customer discovery and National I-Corps!

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The Bay Area Node took the show on the road…metaphorically speaking, to train sixteen UC Davis teams in a special edition of NSF I-Corps!

Technologies ranged from machine vision for seed sorting to a specially-engineered supplement mitigating methane emissions from cows.  Teams ranged from a Chemistry professor working with tea plants to grad students using developing rapid imaging solutions for veterinarians.

Everyone reached their goal of at least 15 customer discovery interviews, reporting multiple instances of “asking for 15 minutes” and going well past an hour.  Bonus moment included a proud mom (also a professor) who reported that her teen daughter was captivated by the

Can’t wait to see what these teams do next as they continue on to the National program and improving our world.

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The Biodesign Immersion Experience (BIE) is an NIH-sponsored 8-week summer program focusing on the critical aspect of translating bioengineering innovations from the lab out into the world. Fellows include top UC Berkeley undergraduate/graduate students and clinical clients from UCSF.

Leading the program is Amy Herr–rock star UC Berkeley BioE professor and entrepreneur (Zephyrus Biosciences, the company she co-founded, was acquired).  Dr. Herr is also an NSF I-Corps alum, so it was a natural fit to partner with her team to deliver a series of classes and workshops to the Fellows throughout the summer.

National instructors Darren Cooke and Rhonda Shrader led students through journeys that included surprises, pivots and profound “aha’ moments for projects ranging from automated sutured devices to wireless solutions for measuring intracranial pressure.

How did the teams progress? As the teams honed their skills in customer discovery, some decided to pivot radically after not finding a “hair on fire” problem for their target customer segment.  Others pivoted their solutions after finding larger, more profound problems in their target customer segments.

Regardless, all students developed impactful skills and a healthy respect for why placing the customer at the center of every conversation matters most.

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This #FemaleFounderFriday, we celebrate UC Berkeley BioE alum Charvi Shetty and the value of persistence!

Aluna (formerly Knox Medical Diagnostics) was one of our early UC LAUNCH Accelerator teams and has been steadily building through multiple grants (NSF SBIR/STTR) and other accelerators (CITRIS Foundry, IndieBio, Plug&Play, QB3, MassChallenge).

The company’s device received FDA approval in March for asthma and in June for diagnosing and managing coronavirus.

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Recent Berkeley Haas Student Venture Fund awardee NorthStar was a standout in our June NSF I-Corps course.

NorthStar’s team came together through Kurt Beyer’s MBA295A: Entrepreneurship course. Team members include Omonivie Agboghidi (MPH 20, 3^rd yr MD student), Phil Walker (4th yr MD/PhD student) and Lucas Kabs Yin Kim Sea (MBA/MPH 21)

NorthStar is a mentor management platform serving students, physician mentors, and medical entities. It provides a solution for diversity program administrators to interface with diverse student populations and connect their employees to students in order to assist with recruiting, matching, managing, and measuring mentorship impact.

While their initial customer segments stayed the same, the team’s 18 interviews yielded deeper insights around the unique value propositions associated with each segment.  For example, they learned that actually managing the process as a one-stop-shop for mentors was of high value.

When asked if they will pivot or persevere, they were an enthusiastic persevere! Stay tuned for more news as they build their MVP, identify key partners and continue customer discovery.

 

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What happens when a Chemistry PhD student from Jennifer Doudna’s lab wants to explore entrepreneurship?  Why, he heads up the hill to Haas, of course!

Marco Lobba had heard about Kurt Beyer’s 295A Entrepreneurship course and showed up for the first evening with a stunning idea using new techniques from UC Berkeley-UCSF’s Innovative Genomics Institute. He detailed a way to produce vaccine candidates in two days…10X faster and cheaper than other existing methods.

Marco quickly found three Haas MBA students as partners (Geo Guillen,  Isabel Dougherty, Victor Gorrachattegui) and the team completed the course in April.  They received a coveted Berkeley Haas Seed Fund grant and in the recommendation letter, Kurt stated: “Of all of the recommendations I have written, this one cannot be more important or timely given current Corona crisis.”

Although the team had initially explored a licensing model in Kurt’s class, they used this month’s  one week I-Corps course to explore the possibility of spinning out a company, instead.  The conducted 16 interviews with individuals in various pharmaceutical companies to narrow in on their optimal customer segment.  They experienced the usual hurdles and rookie mistakes all teams make as they master the art of the customer discovery interview.  Their concise insights are universal and worth sharing:

• Leading with benefits of technology but not really understanding scientists’ pain points
• Failing to secure next connection / did not follow up soon enough
• Conversations at the wrong level of the company (Business Development) + expectations not being set properly at the beginning of the meeting
• Expecting companies to provide us with use cases on how to use our new technology

In addition to identifying the exact role to target for further discovery, they identified associated value propositions and even some additional use cases to explore.  They discovered that slipstreaming into existing certifications and workflows will be key for both consideration and ultimate adoption of their solution, regardless of the form.

They also secured enough data points to pivot away from their initial go-to-market plans as a platform provider.  What’s next for this talented team? They’re applying to the National I-Corps program and will see where evidence from 100+ more customer discovery interviews takes them.

What can our one week course do for your STEM idea or startup?  Apply here by midnight, 7/3 and find out!

https://airtable.com/shrGKNj1dEdeQ9tfA?prefill_Short+course=Jul%2021,%202020

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This #FemaleFounderFriday, we celebrate Berkeley Haas #EWMBA ’20, Rory Stanton, founder of Aila Health! 

​Aila Health brings AI-driven precision health to patients in their homes. The need for remote management has grown exponentially, as patients and health systems self-manage COVID-19 and other conditions at home.

Rory is a case study in grit and resourcefulness as she has bootstrapped her vision using resources/classes at both UC Berkeley and UCSF, along with a Berkeley Haas Student Seed Fund grand and 100s of customer discovery interviews. 

Originally conceived as a platform for chronically ill patients, she has pivoted fearlessly, using extensive feedback from payers and pharma players to uncover adjacent markets for the best go-to-market strategy. 

“As a non-technical founder, I did not expect I would be so involved in building the product. I have learned new software tools to build wireframes in Figma, created technical specifications documents, created a software architecture plan and hired a development team with the right mix of skills to execute it.”

The team was awarded a $30K NSF I-Corps customer discovery grant and will be participating in the National program this summer with the goal of applying for a Phase I SBIR grant ($225k) this Fall.

What can NSF I-Corps do for your STEM startup? Apply for our next one week course by end of day today! https://cutt.ly/YyGxINI

More about Aila Health’s journey here! https://youtu.be/bpiD7tZNTEc

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Blockchain, AI & Faculty research from across UC Berkeley (BioE, I-School) were the big themes for this month’s cohort.

20 teams from Cal, Stanford, MIT, UCSC and Johns Hopkins brought their A-games and were rewarded with some stellar insights worth sharing:

Stanford’s Biodock AI: “Interviews are equally if not more important than building the MVP…our MVP will be very different based on the interviews we’ve done.  It has saved us months.”

Instructor Chris DeNoia: “The entrepreneur decides what’s minimal.  The customer decides if it’s viable.”

MIT team Tellus (degradable plastics): “Don’t give up.  You should expect that your initial idea won’t be the best one.”

A UC Berkeley undergraduate team that conducted a whopping 26 interviews during the 7-day course stressed the importance of doing more interviews rather than less and said that getting interviews was “challenging, but possible and ultimately, easier than we expected.”

What can our one week course do for your STEM idea or startup?  Apply here by midnight, 5/29 and find out!
https://cutt.ly/YyGxINI

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Incoming Berkeley Haas MBA students are already embodying the Defining Principle of going #BeyondYourself. 

When we announced a special COVID-19 Startup Marketplace project with UC Berkeley BioEngineering Professor Kevin Healy’s lab, three Haas admits from around the quickly answered the call.

The team is being led by UCB-UCSF Masters in Translational Medicine candidate Annam Quraishi, aka “Lean Queen” after her three years of service to the UC LAUNCH Accelerator and TA for Lean Transfer.

Hailing from Istanbul (Bora Güner), Beijing (Aileen Lu) & Seattle (Abhishek Gupta), the team is going through this month’s NSF #ICorps training…along with 17 other teams from across Berkeley, Stanford, MIT and CMU. Their competitive advantage? 24/7 availability for customer discovery, thanks to global time zones.

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