Benchling

“They never had a churn line. Never reported it. For the first of, like, six years that I worked with the company. So then they got seven years of churn in, like, 12 months.”

“Today we work with about 1300 biotech and pharma companies scientists at over 7000 academic institutions, universities, all, all around the world. And our software powers, you know, household names like Moderna and Sanofi and Eli Lilly and Regeneron, but also …”

“And so we've released this deep research agent. It works similar to the deep research agents from Anthropic and other foundation labs. But what it does is it works over Benchling data with the context of the Benchling data model.”

“We had a customer that was getting ready to run some mouse studies, and they were looking at 20 different mouse models, and they used a deep research our deep research capability to look at all the historical mouse studies that they had run, and it turned out …”

“While I would love for that to happen, and I'm maybe more optimistic on a longer time scale, we will get there. I think in the short term, I'm next one to two years, which, you know, already feels like an eternity in AI time. I'm a little bit more bullish on s…”

“I think we're like, we've got GPT, but there's no chat. Like, that, that's kind of how I think about it. Like, I think the chat, and I mean chat metaphorically, like, that was the interface that made things really take off in, in software. And I don't think it…”

“I think it's unlikely, it's possible, but it's unlikely that sort of, hey, they're just gonna remain pure model companies who just do deals with pharma, where pharma, you know, pays them a hundred million dollars upfront or something like that, and they have f…”

“But now with like AI, one, I think the benefits are a much more immediately obvious to everyone. And so that's going to be this amazing tailwind to try to like do better here. And I think it will convince a lot of people who might have been skeptics in the pas…”

“I feel like the power of being a co-founder is actually just in moral authority”

“If I was only hiring like software people who knew bio, I would have like exhausted the pool 10 years ago. It just doesn't exist. We have to take the software people, take the science people, make them sit together.”

“We are, 800 people today. We, I think about 40% of our team works in R&D, probably spend a hundred million dollars a year on, on R&D.”

“The last time we kind of ran one of these benchmarking exercises was that For our customers, 60% of their instruments are not connected.”

“If you had told me when I was 21 that I was signing up to do like enterprise sales to big pharma, I'd have been like, absolutely not. I'm not starting this company.”

“I think it took us a year to crack a hundred active daily users.”

“Enterprises are not buying for the present moment. They are buying like Multi-year.”

“Going from kind of zero to one was a hundred times harder than one to N.”

“Well past hundred, but still very hard.”

“We've started to get our foothold in, in development. Like, someday we'll be in parts of manufacturing.”

“I think if you looked at Realized, it would probably GitHub or Segment. If you look at Unrealized, maybe Benchling or Monzo,”

“One of the investments I, like, actually, multiple investments I regret not making, so Benchling, Rippling at the A, right?”

“In fact, over a year after they'd graduated from YC, BenchLink was still not making any revenue, though they did have some enthusiastic grad students as free users, and the product continued getting better. It took them almost another year, that's now two year…”

“Companies like Loom and Chime, Coinbase, Benchling, Gem, Fair, Afterpay, all of these companies, many of which are our clients, have leased office spaces in the last six months.”

“If 10 people or a hundred people Were totally addicted to the software. Like that was a really good sign. Like, cause what are the chances that we found just the exact hundred people who would be completely addicted and there'd be no one else after that? So I …”

“And actually though, at first, like we really like struck out trying to sell anything to these companies. Like scientists have used Benchling in school. They liked it, but they weren't going to buy it. The business, like the value wasn't there. And that's when…”

“And so we heavily employ services. We sell services with every deal we do.”

“We have another company called Benchling that has just done a phenomenal job executing in this kind of biologic space, which again, there was a current that they saw that other people didn't see that was creating this really, really big market, but in the begi…”

“Creating something like Avastin actually involves starting with tens of thousands of candidate antibodies in the beginning.”

“Using quite standard data practices we were able to make a big dent in a really high impact field that touches everyone and it doesn't require a ton of domain expertise.”

“Most of our team actually has no background in the live science at all.”

“It started with the younger folks. It started with folks in grad school who are going to adopt a tool out of their own volition just because it makes their lives better, and you go to the small biotechs, medium biotechs, and eventually the large companies, the…”