Talks with great people directly from Terra

• Kian Sadeghi discusses how Nucleus Genomics raised over $32 million from investors like Founders Fund and 776.
• He shares the story of Nucleus Genomics' logo appearing at the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight, reaching tens of millions of viewers.
• Kian reflects on the power of whole genome sequencing and AI in understanding health and genetic risks.
• He emphasizes the importance of following one's intuition, regardless of educational background, when starting a business.
• Kian recounts his journey from a Brooklyn bedroom to founding Nucleus, driven by a personal tragedy and immigrant determination.

In this podcast with Kyriakos the CEO of Terra, Kian Sadeghi shares how Nucleus Genomics made its mark with a bold marketing move at a Jake Paul fight. He delves into raising over $32 million and the art of fundraising. Kian also discusses the transformative potential of whole genome sequencing and AI in healthcare. Listen to learn about his journey from a Brooklyn bedroom to leading a pioneering genomics company.

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42,000 Tickets and Zero Ad Spend

Two days before the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight, we get a funny email from one of our investors. They're like, hey, there's a trainer that is working with the Jake Paul fight and he's interested, basically, in a sponsorship. I'll never forget this. Basically, there was a cut in between the different rounds and the trainer comes in. The trainer, Jay Leon, he leaned down and the camera was just live streaming Make America Healthy Again Nucleus. That was a defining moment for me because it says, well, if you can put your hat on the Jake Paul fight and whatever, tens of millions of people can see it, what else can you do?

This is Kian Sadeghi, founder and CEO of Nucleus Genomics, a company using whole genome sequencing and AI to help people understand their health and genetic risks. Under his leadership, Nucleus has raised over $32 million from investors like Founders Fund and 776. Fundraising's definitely an art. You raise money via emotion, principally, and understanding that investors really, by and large, they don't really have a good sense of anything, okay? They just don't.

Kian: You mentioned that if you are a founder, you are competing with Mr. Beast. Can you elaborate on that?

Kyriakos: You know, one time, one of our investors, he said to me, the only thing that matters for a consumer startup is...

Kian: Let's speak a bit about the lean startup versus the moonshot. How are you thinking about these things and how should people think about it?

Kyriakos: I think if you're a founder starting out, this is king.

Kian: Okay, guys, how was the workout?

Kyriakos: Hi. Nice, nice. So, guys, Kian promised that at the end of this interview, he's going to run and do the cold plunge. So, stay until that.

Kian: I will do the cold plunge after this, yes. I mean, I'm not really in the right clothes, but I'll do it.

Kyriakos: So, let's start with the first question. Kian dropped out of school. So, is it a requirement to start a big business to drop out of school?

Kian: Classic question. No, I don't think so. I think ultimately a billionaire startup is following your bliss, right? So, your inner being, I like to say, matches the physical plane. It's like a greater calling. And whether it's a college dropout, whether it's graduate, whether you're 40 years old or not, if you follow that intuition of yours, if you follow that bliss, I don't think it really matters whether you're a college dropout or not. I think the college dropout thing is all probably overblown as well in general for a lot of reasons. Yeah, so that's my perspective.

The Photo That Built a Flywheel

Kyriakos: Okay, and also we did a podcast before and you mentioned in the podcast, since there's a lot of people that are going to join the AI event of YC, you said that if you start an AI company after you heard about JudgePT, you're not going to make it. Can you elaborate?

Kian: He's getting me with the quotes. This is like a journalist, what they do. They find something I say and then ask me about it. I think that generally speaking, I mean, probably what's happening here with AIs, it's probably like the internet in the early 2000s. There's probably some sort of exceptional gold rush going on and people have to capitalize in some shape or form. I'm always a little bit skeptical of people starting an AI company if they didn't know what AI was. I don't think it's like a bad thing per se. I think it's probably on average a bad thing. But again, startups really aren't about averages.

I wonder whether like, I was talking to one of my friends who runs a pretty large company and he was saying how what they were doing is they were serving like a bunch of businesses and basically a bunch of restaurants. And through the advent of ChatGBT and AI, basically it completely accelerated what already was an existing product market fit. And there's almost like this two kind of schools of thought right now in Silicon Valley. One school of thought is about this idea of, okay, AI is going to predominantly help the incumbents. The other one is actually like everything's going to be rewritten. I think probably whenever there's two models that are competing against each other, both are true. Because I do see AI helping existing companies that have been running for four or five years and just absolutely propelling them to another stage. Not exactly kind of incumbents, but kind of later onset startups. And then I also see the parallel side where you see startups cropping up now, getting an insane amount of run rate, insane amount of revenue and traction that are kind of quote unquote AI native. And so I see both of these things playing out and probably some combination in between.

I wonder also whether with AI sometimes it takes almost a couple years before you can actually really understand and realize the promise of AI. Like if you just throw your hat in the ring now, is it too soon? It's still kind of muddled. There's too much like, there's just so much noise. It's hard to know.

Kyriakos: And before I even started about Nucleus, how many of you guys saw the Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson fight? Raise of hands. Did you see the logo placement of Nucleus on the cap?

Kian: Thank you, brother. Yeah. So it was that scene that in the biggest fight of the year, Nucleus had their logo into the middle of the stage. So how the fuck did you make this? That is still one of my favorite stories of all time. So what happened was that basically two days before the Jake Paul, Mike Tyson fight, we get a funny email from one of our investors. They're like, hey, there's a trainer that is working with the Jake Paul fight and he's interested basically in a sponsorship. And I thought, you know, we're never ever gonna spend a couple of million dollars on some random boxing fight. But you know, there was a weird thing that happened where because of like the time pressure of the event, it was in two days. And because of the nature of the deal, we could basically bring down the price dramatically. And the deal was very simple. It was, we're gonna give him a hat to wear with a Nucleus logo. And of course, never in my wildest dreams did I think that if I gave a hat, so what happened was that we had a couple of VIP tickets. We're on the boxing floor. And I remember that we had to smuggle in a bunch of, like a bunch of like Nucleus gear and a bunch of Nucleus DNA kits, right? And so we go there and I remember telling the security guard, I was like, oh, you know, we're like a sponsor. And they're like, oh, you're a nonprofit, right? I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're a nonprofit. I don't know. We walked right on in with the bags. The security was not good. And we're on the floor walking around. And I remember I walked right to where the Jake Paul team was. And you know, of course I pretended to say hi to some of the team. I didn't really know them. I was like, oh, hey, hey, hey. They're like, oh, hey. Something about when you're in the ringside, they just assume that you're supposed to be there. It's a really funny phenomenon. Anyways, and so then, you know, the Jake Paul team starts coming out and I see one of the trainers actually in the hat with the Nucleus logo and it says, make America healthy again. And of course we knew, you know, make America healthy again was gonna be a provocative kind of message. What I told the team internally was that you almost want to put a flea, which is Nucleus on the backs of an invasive species, right? The invasive species is make America healthy again. And then the flea was Nucleus. Because I knew if you put a Nucleus logo, no one's gonna remember that. No one has affiliation with the brand. And so what happened is he's wearing this make America healthy again hat. And I'll never forget this. Basically, there was a cut between, you know, in between the different rounds and the trainer comes in and basically Netflix, which was a sponsor of it, they, I don't know. I feel like it was almost staged. He, the trainer, Jay Leon, he leaned down and the camera was just live streaming make America healthy again, Nucleus. When I remember this, I was sitting on the side and I looked up at the big screen and I saw, I saw Nucleus, the logo in the big screen in this arena. And I'm thinking to myself, it was almost like this mind bending reality moment, right? Because I literally, you know, sometimes like, you know, have you ever seen stranger things where like the character like kind of gets lost and goes to the other world, right? Like, I felt like I went to that. I went to the other world. I saw myself, you know, five years ago in my bedroom, you know, dropped out of college thinking, is this thing ever, ever gonna work? And I could see the level of intensity and focus and how much the creation from my mind, right? Because before an idea comes to life, before it enters the physical plane, it exists in intellectual plane. And so to see kind of Nucleus kind of as a theory from five years ago, suddenly at the largest event of the year on the big screen there, that was one of the greatest, I think, just intoxicating moments. Because you realize intuitively, you realize experientially that you can basically bend reality to your will. And that's very powerful. And I think that that was a defining moment for me because it says, well, if you can put your hat, you know, on the Jake Paul fight and, you know, whatever, tens of millions of people can see it, you know, what else can you do? And you start realizing, not as an intellectual concept, but experientially, intuitively, that you can just shape and mold the world around you. And I think that, you know, on Twitter, I think it probably got 50 million plus impressions because exactly what we want to happen where people would take a picture of it, they would say, look, Jay Leon's, you know, making America healthy again. And then it would say Nucleus, not bad.

From Bedroom to Boardroom: The Genesis of Nucleus

Kyriakos: And let's go a few years earlier. What's the prehistory? How did you start? And then I remember that you texted your first investor to receive the first investment. Can you walk us through the idea generation? How do you think about it? Why did you decide to drop out of school? And how did you raise your first money?

Kian: Yeah, so I'm a first generation American. Both of my parents are Persian, I'm sure. How many of you guys are immigrants or first gen? Put your hand up. Wow, that's crazy disproportionate. Makes sense, right? So I'm a first generation American. My dad has sort of this proverbial immigrant story. He was kicked out of Iran because, well, he spoke badly against the government. They tried to murder him. He ended up in America. He was flipping hamburgers in McDonald's, literally, and eventually became an ophthalmologist, an eye doctor. And so I think I was sort of born with the determination of immigrant parents, with the opportunity of America. I grew up in Brooklyn. And when I was almost seven years old, my cousin, she unfortunately went to sleep and she died. And at the time, I asked my parents, I said, how does this happen? How does this happen? And they just said, oh, bad genetics. And it just didn't make sense. It just didn't make sense to me. And so I eventually started studying genetics. And what I realized was that disease isn't really like an inherent property of human beings. It can be viewed more as a problem to be solved. And I think that logic came from the fact that there were other 15-year-olds who were not my cousin that were alive. So it just seemed sort of like an arbitrary thing that someone dies and someone doesn't. And so eventually I started doing genetic engineering work, actually. So my initial foray into genetics is actually engineering different organisms. So I joined this do-it-yourself genome laboratory in the second floor of a warehouse in Brooklyn. And there we engineered yeast to make the luminae. We added bacteria to make them resistant antibiotics. This is like 2017. I loved the wet lab, but the problem with the wet lab is it wasn't very iterable. But the computer was iterable. In the wet lab, if you make a mistake, forget about it. You have to do the whole experiment again. It takes a couple weeks. On the computer, when you make a mistake, you just click the delete button. So I kind of liked that iterability. So I wanted to work at that intersection of bits and atoms. And so eventually I went to Penn to study computational biology. And I was there for about a year and a half until literally I was in a genetics class, Bio 221. And the chairman of the biology department brought up what is my favorite chart in the world, which shows the decrease in cost of sequencing a human genome. So if you think of your DNA as like a thousand page book, it used to be a billion dollars, one billion dollars to read all a thousand pages, right? And then in 2020, at the time, it was about a thousand dollars. And I thought to myself, well, obviously this price, if it's going from a billion dollars to a thousand dollars, is gonna converge on basically negligible price. Obviously there's gonna be a rapid exponential proliferation in this data. Someone's gonna have to build the application layer for DNA. And so I jumped out, I moved back into my bedroom in Brooklyn. Let's just say my parents were non-enthused. So I lied to them. Sorry, mom and dad. I told them I was working in a professor's laboratory. No professor's laboratory. And I got to work. I filled in 18 subject notebooks. I was basically like fanatically obsessed with this problem for a year. And I eventually remember, I was like, wait a second, I can build software that provides the most comprehensive assessment of someone's genetic risk for diseases and traits that's ever been available. And I remember I told my parents this and they said to me, okay, well, we're gonna kick you out of the home. Uh-oh, that's not good. And so what I did was, I found a, so there was a program. So who here knows what Z-Fellows is? Not surprising, a lot. See, look. So there was a program that actually just predicated Z-Fellows. It was called First Text. Who knows what First Text is? Wow, a couple of people actually do. That's pretty cool. So First Text, shout out to Corey. He had his phone number online on a webpage. And so I figured, okay, well, let me text this phone number. And so I said, hi, you know, my name is Kian. So you had his phone number online and you could text him? He, yeah, he had his phone number online. And so I just, it literally was firsttext.com. I'm not sure. How much spam is this guy getting? Oh, he would get a lot of spam, but he had two phones, I found out. So it's kind of like the, you know, that's how he bifurcated it. And so Corey, so I, you know, hi, my name is Kian, whatever, I'm building this company. That's probably, you know, what I sounded like. And then I remember he took like two weeks to respond. I'm like, these damn investors. Fake as mother. These damn investors, they're spineless, they're fake. You know, I remember, you know, this stuff. And then I'm like frustrated. Then he's like, oh, hey, yeah, let's talk later today. I'm like, classic. They come out, then they talk, let's talk today. You know, okay, whatever. And so then I'm in my Android phone, okay? And I remember I go on a walk and I'm waiting for his call. He never calls me, doesn't call me. And I'm like, these people, man, like what the hell? Why is it's like, you know, you would think you're building something, they don't care. And then I remember I went back home and he says, he said, oh, I'm so sorry, I have two phones. Who the fuck has two phones? And he's like, okay, like, let's call right now. So I go to the basement, I see my brother in the basement. I'm like, call me, his name's Kamyar. I'm like, Kamyar, get out of here. And he's like, what? I'm gonna get out of here. So I kick him out of the basement. And then I'm on the phone with him. And I only remember this, okay? 45 minutes, I go, Nucleus is, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh. Silence, just rip, rip, you know? Because it's like a year worth of buildup, of like emotions, of like statistics and all these things. And he goes, so it's a better 23andMe? I said, yeah, I should have started there, okay? God damn it, you know? Yes, it's a better 23andMe. He said, okay, then let me talk to my business partner and I'll get back to you. And then we do one more phone call. And then I remember maybe like 10 hours later, it's a rainy day in Brooklyn. I'm in my bedroom, I'm doing work. And then I get a text, I check my phone and it says, we want to give you $200,000. And I was euphoric, I was genuinely euphoric.

Kyriakos: So the guy never met you in real life?

Kian: No, and it's unusual, well, yeah, no, he didn't. But it's unusual because it was COVID during the time too. Like even Founders Fund, which we can talk about next, they almost never will invest if they don't meet. I think Z Fellows does a little bit differently as a general rule.

Kyriakos: Okay, speaking of Founders Fund, you also raised from Founders Funds. It's considered the best fund in the world. Can you tell us a story?

Kian: Yeah, sure. One of the things that's interesting and this applies, I was talking to someone who said he's looking to raise money for his startup. Fundraising is definitely an art, right? So sometimes people ask like, how do you raise money? How do you raise money? How do you raise money? You raise money via emotion principally and understanding that investors really by and large, they don't really have a good sense of anything, okay? They just don't. You have to teach them, you have to show them, you have to tell a very compelling narrative that, by the way, there are some friendly investors here. You can guys maybe close your ears for a bit. Sorry, investors. You have to tell a very compelling story because let me give you an example of Nucleus, right? Now people like I think generally in the kind of investor, Silicon Valley community embrace Nucleus quite a bit. That was definitely not the case in the seed round. In the seed round, we went, we pitched 40 investors, they all said no, all of them. And so imagine now, I've been working this for a year and a half, you have $20,000, you dropped out of school. Every investor who you, when you're beginning your kind of Silicon Valley journey, you're kind of like, oh, these people must know, they all think it's a terrible idea. And the last firm we were pitching was actually Founders Fund. And I mean-

Kyriakos: The last one.

Kian: Yeah, which is kind of crazy. And I remember that there's actually a lot of good lessons here, which is one good lesson is that, especially if you're doing a seed round and you're new, you should always have a quarterback to your financing. So you should find basically someone who's already an entrenched member of the community, and then who believes in you, and use them as the person that sort of, you know, quarterbacks your entire round. That's a good piece of kind of seed financing advice, primarily because the person who introduces you to the investor, I would argue, is just as important as your pitch. Because ultimately, investors will determine to invest by calling their buddies, right? That's ultimately what they're doing. So they're kind of getting a vibe check, because they all know each other. So be careful if you're telling one investor something, because you're telling all of Silicon Valley, right? So get the quarterback in the round, and then you have to, you know, to get a successful financing done, you have to line up a lot of things. One is you have to have this quarterback. Two is you have to have a very compelling narrative. The narrative should be something about how, and ideally it is actually this, how the thing you're building is the culmination of your life's work in some respect, right? And the thing is that authenticity is hard to fake, right? If it's real, everyone feels it. So remember that. So you have the quarterback, you have this, and then you have an investor that's already primed. Let me talk a little bit more about the last one. So I get introduced to Keith, who's now at Coastal Ventures, by the time he's at Founders Fund, and I got on the phone with him, and I never forget this, because I always felt as if when I was telling the story, I had to give the investor so much context to understand why is it meaningful, right? And so something I'd always say in the pitch is I would say, you know, there's an amazing decrease in cost of sequencing the genome. It's one of the most profound technological shifts ever, right, and I would show the chart and say, the billion dollars, now it's, you know, $1,000. I remember Keith, he said, yeah, yeah, I already know that. I said, what? That was the first investor that said that. Think about that. These are Silicon Valley investors. The first investor that said, I already knew that. And then he said, yeah, I just, I gave a company, you know, $300 million to actually keep bringing down the cost. So now he knows it, and he's investing in it. And I said, what? What company? Oh, it's Confidential. Who are you? I'm not gonna tell you. I said, okay, don't tell me. And so what I did was I found a patent. This is actually a true story. It's a crazy story. I found a patent of the founder of this company that was under stealth. His name is Gilad, and it was a patent for sequencing technology. And I figured, well, I mean, how many people are issuing patents for sequencing technology? It must be this guy. And on his LinkedIn, it just said stealth. And he was sort of this guy that is, I think he's a Caltech PhD. He had sold a couple companies. And I was like, okay, it must be this. And so I actually text him and I say, this is, hi. I say, hey, I'm good friends with Keith. I was not good friends with Keith. And I said, hey, you know, I would love to get up on the phone today. I'm building a secret analysis company. And he says, okay, sure. You're good friends with Keith. You sure, you know. And then we literally, and God bless Gilad for this. We get on the phone. It's a Saturday. We get on the phone and I start pitching him. And he says, this is an amazing idea. And then he says, where do you have your PhD from? I said, no PhD. So, okay. Then he says, you must have raised at this point, you know, tens of millions of dollars. I said, 200,000. He says, what the hell? How has no one invested in this? I said, you tell me. And then supposedly he actually went and called Keith then and said, hey, you have to invest in this company. And then on Monday I spoke to Deleon, who's another partner in Founders Fund. And then in five minutes Deleon said, we want to put in, you know, $1.5 million. And so the thing there to remember, the lesson to take from that in the seed round is there is this delicate mix of, I think, persistence, shamelessness, but also good luck. I mean, things have to think. But the lesson I would take from this is that, you know, Keith and Founders Fund more broadly is primed in that respect, right? You have to write, you have to, sometimes people will say to me, oh, I pitched 60 firms this week. I don't care. The 59 of those firms are not even a good fit for this business. You need to find the right GP at the right fund. And then you need to do anything and everything in your capacity to close that person. You need to go scorched earth to get them over the line. That's what you have to do. And so I think Founders Fund is a good example of that because they adopt the ethos, not only of their kind of contrarianism, but they had not just involved in the sense of, they know intellectually about the decrease in costs. They knew exponentially that, okay, the cost of sequencing is gonna keep coming down because they were the ones investing in it. And so you start seeing that he was primed. So when I came to him, then you have the founder investor fit, right? Founders Fund, you know, they like their dropouts. You have the founder investor fit. You have the kind of market ideological fit. And then you have the fact they're just like primed. And then you push them over the edge. And so Founders Fund came in. And then a couple of months after that, you had Alex Sohanian, brilliant investor, amazing man, just so smart. He came in and then put in another, I think, $15 million. That was a couple of years ago at this point. And so that's sort of our financing story because I know a lot of people are gonna be interested in financing specifically. That's our story.

Whole Genome Testing: Why It Matters

Kyriakos: If we go back to the whole genome test, and why does it matter? How is this different than the traditional testing from the likes of what 23andMe is doing with Ancestry?

Kian: Great question. So when 23andMe got started in 2006, the cost of reading all 1,000 pages of your DNA was about $10 million per sample, okay? So it was way, way, way too expensive to possibly actually bring what's called this whole genome test to market. So instead, they use a technology called microarray. Basically, what microarray does is look at a small sliver of your DNA. So if your DNA is 1,000 page book, 23andMe looked at one page out of 1,000, okay? And so what happened over time, though, is in 2006, it was $10 million, but then suddenly it became $1,000. And so why would you read one page of your DNA, right, for whatever, 200 bucks, when you can read all 1,000 pages, right? And what's the difference here? Well, the way you should think about the genetic testing market is it really today sequesters into five separate industries. The first is disease risk assessment, right? So for example, you might know about Angelina Jolie. She had a breast cancer marker that dramatically increased her risk of breast cancer, right? So that's a company that does myriad genetics, it's called. They do hereditary cancer screening. So it's one kind of genetic test. Then there's like genealogy, like Ancestry.com, 23andMe, a little bit more gimmicky, a little bit more kind of consumer, you know, does my pee smell like asparagus? And then there's another market for preconception testing, which is genetic testing for seeing if you and your partner are a match. In other words, if you're at risk of passing down a serious genetic condition to your children, you had another company, you had another industry, another application. There's pharmacogenomics, how your DNA affects the metabolism of different drugs, another application genetics. And then there's, of course, the one that we're most notorious for now, I guess, IVF testing, right? Analyzing embryos. So each of these, if you think about it, became disparate industries, why? They became disparate industries fundamentally because if you're gonna do a breast cancer test, the underlying assumption is that you couldn't read enough of the DNA to then also do a, you know, heart disease test, to also do a preconception test, to also do whatever pharmacogenomics, which is how your DNA affects the metabolism of drugs test. In other words, there were 70,000 different genetic tests that each looked at a different page in your DNA. But now, through the fact that the whole genome sequence isn't sufficient and cheap enough, you can combine these 70,000 genetic tests into just one. So what you're really doing here is you're combining every possible application of genetics into a single lab test. And so it's disruptive in every sense. And another thing that I think we did, which was unique, is that we realized this as a computational problem, not as a wet laboratory problem. If you think about it, if you build an application layer for DNA, it doesn't actually matter where the raw DNA, because what happens is the DNA, it's in atoms, and we translate it from atoms into bits, right? You collect your swab, it goes on a machine, the machine reads the DNA, it enters the cloud. You can almost think of it as like literally a text file, where we take this text file, complicated text file, and you analyze it. And from that perspective, you realize that the actual application layer of DNA is decoupled from the lab testing. So it actually doesn't matter who or what does the lab testing. And with that realization as well, we realized, wait a second, if we build this application layer, we can do some testing, sure, and we do some testing, but really actually doesn't matter who does the testing. Anyone who does any genetic testing is gonna end up in Nucleus's hands because we simply have the best application layer in the world. And so this is the kind of uniqueness. It's not just the fact that now there's whole genome sequencing cheap enough so you can combine each of these applications into a single lab test, but moreover, by building software first, you're appreciating genetics today for what it is, which is fundamentally a dry lab science, not a wet lab science.

Kyriakos: Small parenthesis, guys. Jaehoon, do we have teracups, hats?

Kian: Yes, can you give to everyone? That's nice. Guys, we're ready, you see?

Embryo Selection: Democratizing the Future

Kyriakos: So there is this secret running around in the Valley that you're not hearing in other places, which is the very wealthy usually do NPO selection, and they do NPO selection based on the DNA. So they would choose based on intelligence, they would choose based on specific characteristics. And this is something you've been hearing for the last six months in the Valley and so on. And I was actually surprised to learn about the new product from Nucleus, which is the Nucleus Embryo, that you are allowing folks to do this en masse. So you are allowing everyone to choose and select embryos. So first of all, how did you think of the idea to get this product out?

Kian: So it's interesting with Nucleus Embryo, and just to give people some context here, people who undergo IVF, they get a couple usually viable embryos, right? Embryo is the beginning of humans, right? We all come from an embryo, we all come from a sperm and an egg from mom and dad. And basically, you have a couple embryos, and usually today people implant one of these embryos randomly. So let's say you have two or three embryos, you would say, oh, I don't really know what the difference between they are, I'm just gonna pick it randomly. And the beauty of a thing like Nucleus Embryo is that now we give you information on each of the embryos, so you can. You see everything from its height to, you know, disease risk. But before I talk more about Nucleus Embryo, let me take a step back and sort of connect your question to what I was just saying, which is the fact that one time, and this is a crazy story, but one time I was, you know, whatever, sitting in my office and I get an email from someone and the email says, Hey, I have 10 DNA files because again, remember DNA now is just a string, right? I have 10 DNA files. Can you analyze it for me? And of course, you know, you're the founder CEO of a genetics company. You think to yourself, someone can only have one DNA file, right? Like that doesn't really make sense. Why do you have 10 DNA files? And he says, Oh, there are 10 DNA files because they're embryos. Can you analyze them for me? It's actually a great lesson. And it's kind of a classic starter thing where, you know, your, your folk, you know, I really believe again on this application layer, this idea that like, it doesn't matter where the DNA, you know, that DNA comes from, like fundamentally the models that you use to analyze embryos, they come from adults, obviously, right? Because you need to basically see, Hey, if these adults have this specific phenotype, which genetic markers are disproportionately associated. And so I remember what we did was, and this is again, a great lesson for startups in general, which is we served this customer, we gave him some disease analysis specifically. And I remember thinking to myself, well, you know, if you're building an application layer for DNA, if you look at a DNA file of an embryo and a DNA file of an adult, they're identical. And so I always knew from the very beginning on the first page of the first notebook I wrote, I always knew that I was going to build a platform that did something called generational health. This idea that you don't just build like genetic testing is the only lab test that doesn't just help you live longer and healthier, but also helps you have healthy children, right? Because like every single person, when you're having children, you're at risk of passing down some serious condition. And so you should do genetic testing to flag that. And I think the embryo analysis was sort of a kind of a further continuation of doing time always wanted to do, which I've always wanted to go full stack. I've always wanted to go from adults to embryos and then to birth and do the kind of testing. And so this sort of came to me, this opportunity, and I actually shelved it for a while because it's not the thing I wanted to focus on. I wanted to focus on adult testing. Eventually once we got our adult testing up and ready, I kept getting emails from different, I have to say wealthy individuals and saying, Hey, here are my embryo files. Can you analyze them? And I thought to myself, you know, to your point, I said, I'm a big believer that everyone anywhere should have access to the frontier technology to help themselves live longer and healthier and also help their children live the best possible life. And so it sort of came together. And one thing about this too, is I have to give a shout out to our partners, Genomic Prediction, because we obviously don't do the testing of the embryos. So we need an embryo testing partner. And so we started talking to Genomic Prediction about it. And then one thing led to another, and suddenly we have the testing layer done. We have the first, to my knowledge, public embryonic selection platform that's ever existed. And it's a great example for people who are building the audience to think, what is the thing maybe that actually is just as compelling, if not even more compelling than the thing I'm building right now. For us, it's a little bit different because, you know, we're building application layers that we accept DNA files so we can do any instantiation. But I do think you should always kind of have this like little ear for like these little signals, right? If someone's emailing you saying, Hey, can you do this thing for me? The number of startup stories of, you know, people being like, wait, that thing's actually even more interesting than the thing that we're doing. For us, again, it's a little different because adult DNA testing is never going away. Like, you know, that's going to be very valid business. Embryos be very valid business. And I actually argue that they're super interconnected. But still that listening to the quiet drum of the market, I think is very, very important. And so we built the first, in a couple months, actually, we pulled the team together, we got the embryo selection platform up, and we are bringing to people what used to be in the hush hush of Silicon Valley. And one of the things that really, really annoys me is that, you know, people will do IVF. And then they'll go to these like, really kind of private, confidential, hidden, like testing companies. And they'll give these like backdoor analysis of them. That's not right. Anyone, anywhere should have access to this technology to basically have their kid thrive. Right. And so what we've done is we kind of, we kind of broke the narrative ice, I think we, we just said, Hey, we think you as the couple has the right to pick an embryo that's smarter, that's taller, maybe that even has an eye color that you want, that has lower breast cancer diseases, lower diabetes disease risk. And this technology does not exist. This technology should not just exist in the ivory tower, it should not exist in the borders of Silicon Valley, it should exist publicly, openly, transparently, and for every single person in the world who's doing IVF for now to use. That's our vision.

Controversy and Conviction: Navigating Public Perception

Kyriakos: How many of you guys have Twitter here? Okay, if you head to the Nucleus page right now, and you see their last announcement, it was one of the most controversial posts. And it drew a lot of interest, a lot of comments. Can you speak to us about this? It was a super controversial topic, apparently. So how did you deal with it?

Kian: Yeah, well, it's funny because sometimes I go on Google, and I see a new article written about it. What I always find interesting is that I think you know you're onto something when two people write directly opposite stories about you. The ideological range of stories about Nucleus Embryo, it spanned from things like calling me all sorts of names, maybe pissing off the Christian right a little bit, to this is the coolest thing I've ever seen in my entire life, and this is the singular most transformative technology next to AGI, which I think is probably true. And those are things are actually complimentary as well. And so for me, it's weird, because the hardest thing I think that I've found is that one thing that's interesting is in a way like I always like to think about, I have a theory about founders and about Silicon Valley and about like Techstars, which is like, the thing that people do at the meta scale, when they have leverage that they do nationally, is also the thing that they do when they're alone in the bedroom. So what I mean by that, what I mean is that like, if you think about it, when I go way back into the beginning of my journey, when I was in the bedroom, there was just, honestly, there was a lot of very intense psychological abuse. It was it was sort of a weird kind of, you start like losing touch with reality a little bit, because, you know, everyone, basically, you know, everyone you love, everyone you trust is telling you that you shouldn't be doing this. And it's the sort of thing that is only told after the fact, which always weakens it a little bit, right? Everyone always tells this after they've made it to some extent, which I don't think we've made it, but to some extent. And so people always do this kind of post-accusation justification of like, oh, well, you know, it's so hard, but now look where I am. But I would employ people to go back, you know, you're in the bedroom, it's isolating the amount of kind of conviction you have to have just to keep going, just one step at a time, one step at a time, one step at a time. In a very real sense, it's the same skill set now, when I go online, and I see someone write absolutely something horrible, horrible, something I wouldn't say about, you know, my worst enemy, about me, my work, about Nucleus. And in the same way, the same sort of fortitude, the same sort of concentration, the step-by-step faith in the work that I'm doing, it pulled me out of the bedroom, and it's going to pull this technology forward as well. That's kind of how I think about how I deal with some of the blowback. I tell the company internally, you have to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons. And at that point, the only person that's going to judge you is God. There's really no one else. If that's true, if the sincerity of intent is there, and you really try to do great work, what does it matter what anyone says?

Kyriakos: And in the last discussion we had, and I'm pretty confident about the way that Nucleus portrays the story, it's one of the best storytelling machines in the world, if you'd like. In the last discussion we had, you mentioned that if you are a founder, you're competing with Mr. Beast. Can you elaborate on that?

Kian: Yeah, so I told Kyriakos, as I said, if you're a founder today, you're competing with Mr. Beast. And, you know, one time, one of our investors, he said to me, the only thing that matters for a consumer startup is eyes and ears. Some of our former interns might take this too far. Shout out to my man, Rory Lee from Cluelea. But maybe people didn't get that joke as much as I thought they would. But, you know, I think when you think about eyes and ears, it's an interesting point because now we're in a world where anyone can put their video camera on t

Founders and Their Narrative: The Power of Storytelling

Kyriakos: It's amazing how founders can now tell their own stories. You don't have to rely on The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times. You, as a founder, control your narrative. If you don't like what people are saying about your product or company, you can tell your own story. Generally, founders are good people trying to do good work. That's powerful in marketing. We tell our story, and we're proud of it. Sometimes, our story might be taken in different ways, but as a founder, you have to remember that you control your narrative.

Kian: I was saying to someone recently, maybe the first hire next to the founder should be a videographer. You're funny with technology, but you're also funny with narrative and marketing. If you view marketing and storytelling as important as technical skills, you can build a formidable business. Silicon Valley is embracing communications as a tool alongside technology to win. The best businesses combine technological alpha with marketing alpha.

The Lean Startup vs. The Moonshot: Which Path to Take?

Kyriakos: Let's talk about the lean startup versus the moonshot. How should people think about these things?

Kian: There's a funny tweet from Sam Altman about starting with lower stakes. Even Elon and Sam started with lower stakes. The number one thing is to get started. You don't need a lot of capital. Silicon Valley is like a glass dome with entry points like YC, Z Fellows, and a few angel investors. It's accessible for anyone who really wants it. Get your thing started, scale it up, make some money, and then maybe go for the moonshot. Nucleus is unique because I had a strong vision for a moonshot and a specific plan to start software native because it was cheaper. If you feel compelled by your moonshot, you'll go do it. Otherwise, building in a scrappy, customer-obsessed fashion is sensible.

Genetic Testing and Its Implications: What to Do Next?

Kyriakos: From the genetic standpoint, if someone realizes they have a bad disease but can't do anything about it, what would you recommend?

Kian: Great question. I categorize next steps into four or five main buckets. First is urgent and actionable, like long QT syndrome, where a beta blocker can reduce the risk of dying. Then there's the Angelina Jolie bucket, like breast cancer, where you can get a double mastectomy or more aggressive screening. Another application is if you're a carrier for a rare genetic disease, like cystic fibrosis, which doesn't impact your health but could impact your child's. We launched genetic matching to see if you and your partner are a match. If not, you can do IVF to screen out the disease. Another favorite is the genetic risk for schizophrenia. Founders tend to have a high genetic risk for schizophrenia. It's actionable utility. You can be high risk but still have low overall chances of getting the condition. Lastly, for something like Alzheimer's, knowing your genetic risk helps you stay informed about research and preventative measures.

Genetic Dating: A New Frontier in Relationships

Kyriakos: For some context, if you go to the Nucleus page, you'll see a dating profile with Kian. How did that go?

Kian: We go on genetic dates. It's lit. We released a video of me and someone from NSF going on a date to a longevity spa. At the end, we checked if we were a genetic match. If you're not a match, you wouldn't break up; you'd do IVF to ensure you don't pass down the disease. It's about empowerment, not breaking up relationships. In our case, Aurora and I weren't a match, so we didn't plan to date further. It's your choice. People already stalk potential partners' social media, so why not look at DNA? In some communities, like the Ashkenazi Jewish community, everyone is screened. It's a common-sense measure to ensure healthy children.

Schizophrenia and Intelligence: Making Tough Choices

Kyriakos: If schizophrenia is closely related to intelligence, how do you choose?

Kian: People think they can pick one trait like a silver bullet, but it's like a character-building game. You can only give so much strength without losing agility. If you want a kid to be exceptional, you might have to accept some risk of schizophrenia. Society will have to think about these trade-offs. Some geneticists might disagree, but intuitively, people who are a bit crazy tend to be high performers. It's true phenotypically and genetically. Parents will pick different things based on their values. It's about empowering couples, not dictating choices.

The Future of Genetics: What Will the Next 100 Years Bring?

Kyriakos: Assuming there is embryo selection through Nucleus for everyone, what happens in a hundred years?

Kian: Sequencing, analyzing, and engineering DNA will converge, creating a company as consequential as the largest AGI company. Sequencing a human genome will cost nothing, making it ubiquitous. IVF will become cheaper and less invasive. Artificial wombs are being developed. You'll be able to sequence any embryo, conduct reproduction entirely in vitro, and engineer DNA cheaply. This technology will be available to everyone, not just the rich. Genetic diseases will become archaic, and parents can make enhancements available to everyone. It's about making genetic technology accessible and ubiquitous.

Questions from the Audience: Trade-offs and Scaling

Kyriakos: How many of you have questions? Okay, five people. Anyone more?

Audience Member: What trade-off do you think is optimal for your child?

Kian: It's not about what I think; it's what the couple wants. Some traits might lead to intelligence or being a founder, but if you're too intelligent, you might be a bad founder. These things aren't silver bullets. People often pick traits similar to themselves. It's about the couple's value frameworks.

Audience Member: What about scaling around regulatory hurdles?

Kian: Nucleus is a clinical-grade test approved by CMS and the U.S. government. We comply with all regulations and want to help form regulations for genetic technology. Technology moves faster than regulations, so we need good regulations and sensible guardrails. It's about making technology accessible and not blocking future competitors.

Audience Member: How did you go from college dropout to the forefront of this technology?

Kian: Science is public. Anyone can read a nature paper and understand the intellectual frontier. If I wanted to build a company, I'd find the foremost paper on the topic, read it, and fill in the gaps. It's like going to the gym every day for 12 hours. You build an intellectual castle, and then you can independently derive insights. It's about productizing science and scaling it with capital and people.

Audience Member: What can Nucleus do and what can't it do in terms of IVF selection?

Kian: Scientists estimate the genetic contribution to traits like height, intelligence, and extroversion. Even with the best genetic model, there will be error. DNA is not destiny; there's always environmental influence. Nucleus provides analyses with substantial error bars. It's a tool to help parents, but the rest is up to free will and choice.

Audience Member: Could you touch more on the capital and labor aspect of scaling an idea?

Kian: You have the intuition and an idea to scale, but you didn't have the PhD or credibility behind it. It's about understanding the intellectual frontier and applying the startup model of capital and people. It's the same object, just different instantiation.

From Bedroom to Boardroom: The Journey of Building a Company

Great question. Let me elaborate more on that in the bedroom. I think the core question that one day I'm going to maybe write more about, because I really want to give anyone insight into it, is how do you actually go from a bedroom to building a company? Because there's a big gap there, admittedly. It's something that I've always struggled with communicating because it's such an involved and detailed process. It was at the very beginning of Nucleus. For founders, it's most important to understand how to take some sort of frontier thing and productize it.

Let's go back to this idea that there's this intellectual frontier, and you're building up your understanding to it. Intellectualization is good, having that understanding is good, but investigativeness is fundamentally not enterprising. They're very different skill sets. To productize something, to productize science, you need a team and you need capital.

Interestingly enough, when you seek and build the intellectual frontier, you identify scientists at the leading or bleeding edge of it. In other words, you're finding your actual future employees. Think about that. When you read that Nature paper, who wrote it? There you go. If you go to a scientist and say, "Join my startup and look at my bedroom," they're going to be like, "No way." But here's what's interesting: the scientist might have a PhD student or know someone. When you talk to scientists about productizing their work, it's such an unusual thing in academia. It's like music to a good scientist's ears.

For me, there was a scientist doing research on the frontiers of polygenic prediction. I started emailing him to help answer my intellectual questions on genetics under a pseudonym. We developed a relationship, and eventually, I told him I was a student at Penn because I wanted to buy his academic project, which we did. I put him on as an advisor. Notice how these things became inextricable. In doing the intellectual pursuit, you get a mind map of who the important players are. Then you do what is a Kian signature: you put them on the advisory board to then get them as an employee.

Great tactic because people won't join as an employee. But you say, "Here's a little bit of equity, go on the advisory board, use their name, use their credibility." Keep punching up, keep punching up to go back to them and say, "Look at this momentum, look what we've built, look how we're scaling fast." No scientist, when it's their baby, when it's their work, wouldn't want to get in on this. This kid really knows what he's talking about. I believe fully in this vision, I'm going to hop on board.

In a way, when you go through the intellectual maze, you end up solving both problems in one go. But here's the thing: the goal now isn't just to pick some random intellectual topic and go really deep on that because you're never going to make it. It's too hard, too long, too technical, too mentally intensive, too lonely. That's why it always starts with the most upstream thing: if I could do anything in the world, if I had all the money in the world, what would I do? Almost always, people say, "I would do this thing," and then they list a whole bunch of reasons why they can't.

You have to follow your bliss. There's a great quote I love: "The best way to save the world is to begin by saving yourself, and then you can save the world." I really believe that to be true. Those who enlighten, enlighten. From that perspective, even before you think about what intellectual maze to go down, it's a much better question to ask, "What is my bliss?" Then you can apply the theory of the maze and everything I described to you, but you have to get the most upstream thing right.

Because the reality is not all of us are going to build the artificial womb or weight lift for 12 hours a day because we don't really care about being a weightlifter. Solve the meta problem, and eventually, the world will fall in place for you. It's always been surprising to me that when I talk about genetics now, people come to me to ask about the frontier of genetics and genetics testing technology. It's kind of a weird thing because I began in my bedroom. It's a weird dissonance for me sometimes. But I guess no one has spent such intense effort, sincerity of effort, and productization such that when you rise with your company and your idea, the world isn't a fixed way. It just kind of gets out of the way for you.

It's a very interesting thing. You don't have to worry about if something's in vogue or not because by the nature of your curiosity, you make it in vogue. Thanks, guys.

Cold Plunge Challenge: A Refreshing Finale

One more question for you, are you doing the cold plunge?

Kian: Yeah. If you want me, I'll do it.

Kyriakos: Yeah. Let's go. All right. Guys, we're going to be serving, he is going for the cold plunge. If you want to see him.

Kian: Yeah. Yeah. Woo. That's gold. Ask questions now. Speed it up. What are your questions?

Can I ask questions?

10 seconds. 10 seconds. Good. Where are you going?

I was going to go a minute. How do you feel?

Kian: I feel fantastic. It's been a minute. Now, should I get out of here?

You can sleep. Come on, give me a round of applause.

Woo. Crushed it.