Founder Mode: Sajith Wickramasekara, Founder & CEO, Benchling

0:00Today, Carolyn and I are here with Saji Wikramasakura, the founder and CEO of Benchling. Welcome, Sanchi. Nice to see you. Nice to see you, too. Thanks for having me. We're delighted to see you. You went through Y Combinator's summer 2012 program. That was a long time ago. So we go way back. 13 years. 13 years ago you founded this company. And this is a special episode of The Social Radars. We are here at the Y Combinator founder mode retreat. And we are surrounded by all these amazing founders. and we're trying to explore the idea of what is founder mode because we know that founder mode by definition is doing things as a founder ceo that a hired ceo couldn't or wouldn't do but we we don't know what that is in practice we want to collect examples so we'd love to talk to you about any experiences you had in founder mode in the history of benchling but we first want to hear What is Benchling for our listeners?

1:06Sure. So yeah, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Benchling. We went through the summer 2012 Y Combinator batch, and you can think about Benchling as we build modern software for scientific progress. So our customers are biotech, are scientists at biotech and pharma companies. It's about 200 ,000 scientists at 7 ,000 universities and 1 ,300 companies making medicines that use Benchling. And our software helps them design their experiments, capture the data and analyze it and share it with each other. And you wouldn't believe it, but life science is making a medicine is an incredibly hard, difficult process.

1:43It costs about$2.5 billion. 90 % of medicines fail when they're in a clinical trial. And the technology that powers this industry is a mix of paper and spreadsheets and email. So it's pretty archaic. And so technology is like a really important way to improve the success rate and bring more medicines to people faster. Wow. My sister works in an industry. And so I am sort of familiar with how expensive and complicated it is. It's probably easier to put a person on the moon than it is to make a new medicine. Yeah. Literally, yeah. There's like four phases of clinical trials, too. So it's just like the whole process is lengthy and expensive.

2:21Have you been able to quantify the dollars that your software saves in this$2 billion process? Yeah, it's definitely, obviously, that's, you know, we'd love for, at the end of the day, for customers to feel like, oh, I buy BenchLink, I get my medicines to patients faster. And I think the way we can do that is to break down different parts of the problem and how we can speed them up. the different parts of the scientific process where we can measure how much actually science can get done, how many turns of a certain workflow can get done in a period of time, or how many people are needed to run a certain process.

2:53And so we have ways of breaking down the problem into smaller pieces and showing that they can be done way faster with our technology. Actually, during COVID, there were a couple of the monoclonal antibodies. Before we had vaccines, a couple of those antibodies were actually made by companies who did all their science on benchling and you know no way obviously there wasn't like an a b test of one of our you know non-customer not using benchling versus the one that did but uh they were able to like get these things out in record time and you know accommodate you know there's scientists in the lab were doing the hard critical work those are the people in the trenches but like that plus robotics plus software like benchling allowed them to go way faster than everyone else and how many people are you now because you've been around 13 years long time uh yeah we are about 600 people um based in the Bay Area, but we have offices in Boston, which is obviously a huge biotech hub, and then also in Europe as well.

3:41600. 600 is a lot. Yeah. It's a big company. So you've been running this from the very beginning when you didn't know anything. Didn't know anything about anything. Well, by the way, did you start at Y, when you did YC in summer 12, brand spanking new company? Like you just. Brand spanking new company. I was, I was a junior at MIT. I studied CS, but I worked in a bunch of bio labs. And it was always weird to me that all the software people, which was one of the crowds I was with, they had great tools for working together. And then the bio people had just, again, paper notebooks. Yeah, it was crazy to me.

4:15Right. I remember we were very excited about that idea. We love when programmers also have, you know, medical kind of knowledge and that kind of thing where they can bridge that gap. It's a cool crossover. Yeah. YC was the only people who believed at the time. Really? Had you been to other investors? No, but even after YC, we were, I feel like I, nowadays, I feel like some of the YC partners, they bring me back to talk to the batches to remind them it's okay if you're not successful after demo day as long as you stick with it. Oh, we should quickly touch on that. What were you able to accomplish by demo day and how did your fundraise go?

4:49Yeah, we had lots of users at universities using our tools. And actually, PG gave us really great advice of, you know, it was like, hey, the people who are, if they are living and breathing in your software, and these are the people who, like, work with biology, like, someday that will, like, be really important. if you are the de facto tool for them. And so we had lots of users at universities using their early versions of our software, but we were making no money. And every investor was like, ah, biology, that seems like kind of a small market. And all the biology people were like, oh, this is really cool, but we make drugs.

5:17We don't know like software. And so we were kind of in this weird place. And we were very lucky. Like you took about 100 meetings. We raised six, 700K of money. I don't even tell our valuation cap to the founders now. They wouldn't believe me. And that was enough for us to get off the ground and we stuck with it and eventually built a great business out of it. So over the years, you've grown. You've had to have turned into a manager. Sometimes, yeah. Tell us a story that you can think of that has to do with when you've had to go into founder mode. Yeah. Yeah. I think like to me, founder mode, I sort of think of it synonymously with just having an ownership mentality and that's the big difference.

6:05And so hopefully it's not something people at the company also feel like, you know, I hope people at the company feel like they can also have that, have that in them. Being an owner to me means acting, sort of being comfortable operating at a lot of different levels of the business and feeling a lot of personal care over every detail, no matter how small. I think like as founder and I'd want my senior leaders also to feel this way of like, yeah, you're obviously a steward of the company strategy and vision, but you're willing to edit copy on the press release. Or you're going to notice when a pixel is off in some design, and you're going to say something about it.

6:37And it's kind of like anytime you see something that's below your standard and you let it go, you're sort of saying that's okay. And so to me, it's that ownership mentality that represents founder mode to me. And there have been periods of time where I got away from that. And those were the worst parts of the company. Okay. Tell us about one of those times when you felt you were away from that, like being so detail-oriented. I think there were definitely some periods of faster headcount growth. And I had hired, as we've grown, we have hired senior leaders. I think hiring executives is a kind of controversial topic, especially at this conference.

7:14And I've had great executives who have been transformative for the business and I've had executives who haven't been the right fit. And I think one of the trickiest parts is trying to, when you hire a new executive, trying to understand what is something that represents the domain expertise or the unique skills you hired them for and what's the culture of the company. So just give you a specific example. At a point when we got bigger, there's a period of time where like I and senior leadership got kind of disconnected from our customers. Like these days, I, and even when the company's getting off the ground, And I talk to customers like every day.

7:48I talk, some weeks I talk to 10, 15 customers. Like I'm constantly visiting our users, the executives who buy our software. I'm spending a lot of time getting my own ground truth. And there was a period of time though where kind of I felt like I had a sort of senior leaders who were more focused on kind of building a machine that could talk to customers. And you can like from a theoretical sense here, you could say like, okay, well, maybe like me talking to all these customers by hand was like not a scalable thing. And now that we're bigger and trying to, you know, reach this new height, like it's just not going to work anymore.

8:17So you can kind of rationalize like, okay, like maybe they don't need to be that close to customers. But the thing is like, I think people like the behavior of the senior leadership reflects, you know, the whole company becomes like that. And so I ended up at a point of time where like, I had like multiple layers of people who just like didn't talk to customers. And I was like, how can you run our customer facing organizations if you don't talk to customers? Like, and it's like, that's the kind of thing where it happens slowly and over time. And like, I learned to sort of assert more of what I expect out of senior leaders and kind of dictate the cultural standards.

8:48When earlier, I think I was confused for like, oh, this must be just how you do things when you get big. Like you have teams of people who do that for you. And it was totally wrong. Was there like a day where you're like, you know what, this needs to stop today. Like today, I'm going to go to these senior leaders and be like, we're talking to customers again, boots on the ground. Like, do you, was that like a moment in time? I was wondering the same thing. Ooh, I definitely, I think there were many moments where on the inside, I was going, oh shit, like this is not good. But you, when you hire a senior leader, you've run these long searches, you've had a rigorous process, you've done all the references and like, you kind of know in 30 to 60 days if they're going to work.

9:25And I think the worst part is, you know, I think in the situations I didn't act fast enough and I was probably lying to myself of like, oh, I just need to like coach them and I'll be able to steer them the right way and so forth. That's not to say they were bad executives or something. I think people replicate the behaviors that made them successful at their past company and you have to be a good judge of do you need those behaviors at your company right right so i had many oh shit moments i unfortunately didn't do anything about them fast enough um inertia is powerful i think that that's one of the biggest lessons that people who are at sort of later stages in their company um can learn which is people don't act quickly enough to address problems and by the way like i i think as founder of ceos like you're probably Like people on the ground know what's up.

10:09People at the company know it's happening. Yes. I would agree with that. You have to assume that the bad news is all. People have figured it out down there. And like you need to go find the ground truth and get it from them sometimes. Like you can get a little bit isolated from that. If you have too many layers of management. Yeah, if you have too many layers, like everyone knows when that's happening. You're often the last one to find out. So do you think benching right now, would you call it a flat org? That's a pretty dramatic word. Yeah. We're definitely not flat. We have layers. I have senior leaders.

10:35I think it's much more that I'm way more comfortable trusting my gut on what I expect a senior leader to do versus I'm a lot less willing to accept just this is how it's been done before. This is how I've done it. And sometimes I will, but I'm going to be much more comfortable asking why about five times to really understand. And there's some stuff that's non-negotiables for me. If you're going to be a senior executive, you've got to talk to customers. That's just my way of being, and I'm okay with that. And how do you gauge if they're actually talking to customers? You have to be willing to model the behavior yourself, obviously.

11:07It's like I'm talking to customers all the time. When I run my staff meeting, my weekly updates are always involving things I learn from customers. So I should be learning from my senior leaders about their customer interactions, just like they should be learning from mine. So I think it's hard to ask for a behavior you're not willing to model. And I can totally believe for another type of business where maybe you have a million customers or a consumer business and everything's statistics. I can totally believe you don't have to do that. But we have 1 ,300 paying industry customers, and some of them are really big.

11:34and like I know the names of the people who signed their orders on the contract, the admins who, I know what their kids' names are. Like it's very specific. Sounds very Ronco to me. Yes. Yes. That's from the Ronco playbook. Yeah. Sounds effective though. Clearly effective. I don't ask them to do anything I wouldn't do. Yeah. And maybe that's one of the best takeaways is don't ask people to do anything you're not willing to do or that you don't know how to do because you really should know how every part of your company runs. I try yeah and then I also try not I don't let them tell me not to do things now like that's again oh you shouldn't be doing that or like we have people teams who can do that for you like I think it's that's a place where I don't want any sort of someone coming in from the outside to change how I want to run the company so do you think over the years you've just developed more confidence in your own intuition and confidence in pushing back if someone's not doing sort of something the way you want.

12:30I think so. I'm still not, you know, I'm not a super conflict happy person. I think it's like a learned skill to be like ready for conflict. And actually the first couple of executives who hired the company were like really great and helped kind of take us, you know, to a different level. And so as a result, I was a little spoiled that when I got my sort of next management team at some point, like I wasn't used to sort of people who might come in with a different playbook than we know what would be required to take us forward. Well, awesome. This was really interesting. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us.

13:05And we look forward to having you come back someday for a full episode. A deep dive. A benchling deep dive. A benchling deep dive. Thank you. Bye.