Two Chip Engineers and a Drug Hunter Walk Into a Tapas Bar

The StarDrop Story with Matt Segall, Optibrium

In 2001, Matt Segall joined Camitro. The idea that would become StarDrop was born there. It moved through ArQule, Inpharmatica, and BioFocus before Matt and Ed Champness took it independent in 2009. We talked about how the idea survived, the buyout, and the marketing that actually worked. Episode notes page [https://open.substack.com/pub/zudans/p/episode-2-the-stardrop-story-with?r=56tust&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true]. Chapters * 00:00 — Cold open and introduction * 01:26 — Cambridge to Camitro * 09:11 — ArQule: the ethnographer, BlackBerries and the glowing molecule * 22:54 — Inpharmatica: someone else's compound fails * 40:13 — Galapagos, BioFocus, and the first answer was no * 50:27 — Conferences and the marketing you cannot measure * 53:38 — Reading Kahneman: marketing that wasn't marketing * 1:01:31 — Scientific value vs. business value * 1:03:23 — Close Matt on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-segall-19228a4/] Imants on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/zudans/]

Two Chip Engineers and a Drug Hunter Walk Into a Tapas Bar

The founding story of Pharmacelera. How two Intel chip designers, a pharma industry veteran, and a quantum mechanics professor built a drug discovery company from scratch. Enric Gibert talks through the whole journey: what they built first, how they got their first clients, and where the company is heading next. Episode notes page: https://substack.com/home/post/p-192460577 [https://substack.com/home/post/p-192460577] Chapters * 00:00 — Introduction * 00:36 — A Decade at Intel * 03:38 — The Monday-Wednesday Shutdown * 08:10 — Finding Drug Discovery * 17:54 — The Pharma Box Mistake * 25:33 — Crossing the Desert * 29:23 — First Customers and Benchmarking * 34:40 — Selling to Scientists * 41:28 — Product-Market Fit * 48:21 — Ten Years and Beyond * 55:25 — Closing Enric on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/enricgibert/]