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Startup Portrait #3: Science Exchange

Startup Portraits is an ongoing series of visual stories about the founders of Bay Area startups, their visions, and what they’re learning. In early October I met with the Science Exchange team at their office in Palo Alto, and then two days later met with OncoSynergy, a company that makes heavy use of the Science Exchange platform. For the interview below, I spoke with Elizabeth Iorns and Dan Knox, the married co-founders of Science Exchange. I’ve edited the conversation for length and clarity. Learn more about Science Exchange: Company homepage, AngelList profile.

What does Science Exchange make?

Dan: Science Exchange is an online marketplace for science experiments. Essentially we are a services marketplace that makes it easy for scientists to get research done by collaborating with other scientists using market based mechanisms. Elizabeth: Our new tagline is “Order experiments from the world’s best labs.”

What’s the most delightful experience a scientist can have on the platform?

Elizabeth: I think for scientists it’s about seeing the possibilities of what they can do with their research. We definitely have amazing use cases where people have used facilities they would never have had access to—at Harvard, at Duke, at amazing universities. They've been able to make really profound breakthroughs.

At a 10am morning standup, the team gathered in a circle. Each person said what they did the day before, and then briefly outlined their upcoming goals. Dan (left) and Elizabeth (center), the company’s married co-founders, gently nudged the conversation forward.

Brianne Villano, who wears the customer development hat, sits between science-themed pillows at one end of the office’s main room. Everyone works within shouting distance of one another.

Building a product like Science Exchange requires some foresight. Can you tell me if you're anticipating a certain future? And is it potentially one that you see and others do not?

Elizabeth: We definitely do. We think the way scientific research is being conducted is dramatically changing and we think we're at the center of that change. We've already had considerable foresight in seeing how labs are moving away from individuals doing all their experiments themselves in a single lab, and moving towards these teams that are comprised of many people working across multiple institutions. Already the data is starting to support this. You see the rise of multi-author publications, where in 1980, no publications had more than 10 authors. Now 60% of publications are co-authored by investigators from multiple institutions. So as that happens, those traditional ways of collaborating through social mechanisms start to break down. You really have to get what we call ‘market driven collaboration’ in place, which uses very clear incentives, through payment, and makes expertise available in a very transparent way through a marketplace.

Can you clarify the social mechanisms that aren’t working or don't scale?

Elizabeth: Collaboration is currently based on your personal network as a researcher. You find somebody who can do an experiment for you and you collaborate with them by essentially asking them to do a favor for you that you will repay in the future. That’s not very scalable and it really breaks down when you need 10 different people to work together on one project. It’s also not a very good incentive for getting the best expert to help with your project.

The engineering team met in the conference room to discuss a frontend refresh. The conversation quickly turned into a debate about Bootstrap, the popular development framework. There was a push to rewrite most of the frontend, but after a few minutes of hype, Nick (center) paused the conversation. “We know this is a big deal, yes? I mean, can we break this down into smaller parts?” Everyone soon agreed it’s smarter to transition the site page-by-page. (Here, the team is reflected in a hanging photograph of an aquatic worm.)

Would you point to any cultural shifts that are influencing your ability to succeed?

Elizabeth: Science right now is undergoing a massive cultural shift. The research system is really, really broken. To think that you can make these little tweaks, and they're going to change all the problems, that’s unrealistic. There’s been the realization that the culture really does not promote good, quality research. It doesn't promote happy people who have satisfactory jobs and lives. It’s a mess—there's extreme exploitation of young people; there are no jobs. There’s tremendous pressure to publish low quality research. There’s no incentive to do things cost effectively. But that’s changing because there are basically no jobs and there’s no money. But there’s momentum for change. I never would have dreamed that we could start a company two years ago, with now 10 people, and then have the NIH talking about implementing independent validation. I think that, this can be at least partially attributed to us starting the Reproducibility Initiative.

Almost every day, the team eats lunch in their building’s front parking lot, where two picnic tables have taken over one of the spaces.

Independent validation? Can you tell me about that?

Elizabeth: So we started looking at the quality of research, which is a huge issue. Basically seventy to eighty percent of biomedical research that’s published cannot be independently replicated. So if someone tries to take that result, which pharma does—pharma uses all of the literature as the basis from which they develop drugs—and they say, OK, this new breast cancer treatment is really effective so we'll try to see if it works in our lab and make a drug around it. Seventy to eighty percent of the time they can’t get the same result that was published.

Wow, I didn’t know that.

Elizabeth: It’s really, really shockingly bad. Dan: It really came to a head early last year. A couple of scientists at Amgen and Bayer came out and announced some of the stuff that had been going on for years, but no one had really talked about. And the Wall Street Journal and New York Times wrote about it, and a congressmen said “This is crazy,” and called Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, before a committee to say, “Well, why are we giving you $30B a year if $23B of that is just going to wasted research?” Elizabeth has always been passionate about this particular area. She started really thinking deeply about what you can do to change this. They've got systems in place to catch fraud, but we're not really talking about fraud. We're talking about poor quality research and the wrong sort of incentives. And she came up with a really savvy way to address that through the Reproducibility Initiative, which is an effort to get results validated by independent third parties—who we have thousands of on Science Exchange. Then researchers get a stamp of approval that says, basically, “This research has been double checked. We're confident that it’s of high quality.”

And this is because of Science Exchange?