BioCompute Turns 2

And the big shift coming with it

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it”
- Donna Tart, The Secret History

In 2024, I had a crazy dream. Make data storage and compute infrastructure as space and energy efficient as biological systems are. Step 1 being DNA data storage, and the final frontier being biological qubits at room temperature.

That made the 22 year old me quiver with excitement, nervousness and some (steely) resolve. BioCompute was born.

Over the last two years, I put together an incredible team, raised money, set up our own lab, ran thousands of iterations, built a prototype, partnered with great collaborators, and proved that we can encode data into DNA at costs that are several orders of magnitude lower than the leading players in the space, and that customers are excited about what we are building (and want it yesterday).

We are the first lab in India to go after the audacious problem of DNA data storage, and have leveraged the resources in India over the last 2 years to get to an end to end prototype.

And now it’s time for a step change.

As we start assembling the V1 of BioCompute chips, we are relocating to San Francisco to leverage the capital, talent and customer risk appetite of the world’s startup capital. Here is a quick video that Vyom made to tell our story.

While India is now starting to invest in deep tech through RDI fund and the likes, we don’t think the ecosystem is ready for a product like ours. India often likes to play safe, looking at what has been built in the West and adapting it to our socio-cultural and economic landscape. But what we need to build a new age data storage hardware company, and take on Goliaths like IBM, is an ecosystem that is built on abundance and takes high-risk-high-reward bets.

That unfortunately means having to let go of our most valuable asset, the team here in Bangalore. These are folks who have spent most of their waking hours thinking, building, troubleshooting and most importantly enjoying the challenges that come with having a once in a lifetime opportunity to shape data infrastructure.

Their exit interviews were perhaps the hardest conversations of my life. I needed to call up three of my best friends for reassurance the night before I let the cat out of the bag.

And yet, the strongest signal that we have great company culture is that all of these conversations (as shocking and sad as they were) were reflective, generative and most importantly kind, compassionate and optimistic (about the future of the world, and our individual futures). All of them ended on ‘we would like to work together again someday’.

Some of these folks are now looking for their next thing. I am happy to introduce you to them if you are looking to hire.

It’s an exciting (and nerve-wrecking) chapter ahead as I head out to San Francisco and build on the product development we have done in the last few years, and take our first chip to customers. If you made the move recently, I would like to chat about all things relocation.

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Some of my learnings from year 2 of company building:

1. Get a competent ops and partnerships person very early on, it’s exhausting for the founder to be involved in everyday ops

2. Fundraising doesn’t depend on tech progress alone, it’s a game of storytelling, marketing, and (many a times) FOMO.

3. FOMO can only be generated if relationships are built and nurtured. Meet people where they are, try to become friends with them, share updates regularly

4. Founder health == company health. Getting a health coach and being consistent with workouts (even during travel) was the highest ROI thing I started last year.

5. People, regardless of how high agency, require a sense of direction; and want the founder to put their foot down and make a decision in times of uncertainty. Decision making authority needs to be clearly emphasized.

6. Kindness is an underrated superpower.

What I am looking to get better at in the next year of company building:
1. Tell the most compelling stories about the vision of the company

2. Be more consistent with communicating with external stakeholders

3. Spend more time on hiring, fundraising, general direction setting and outsource more repeatable tasks

4. Trust my intuition a lot more when it comes to people, processes and decisions

If you have resources on these/some takeaways from experience, hit me up. I am all ears.