The Exchanges

Q How do you act, like, actually try to break down how you went about that process? You basically gave yourself a PhD in a year.

A Yeah, so I think the story, like, to do that... One has to understand kind of the story of my life and the way it's kind of, you know, culminated into Nucleus, because I really think Nucleus is a deep expression of my soul, right? To me, it's art. Um, so if you go all the way back, I think the story of Nucleus begins, very unfortunately, with a personal tragedy. My cousin actually went to bed one night and didn't wake up the next day. You know, she, she died in her sleep. Um, I was around eight at the time, you know, I asked my parents, you know, how does this happen, how does this happen, they kept saying, oh, it's bad genetics. Didn't even know what that meant. Eventually, I started studying genetics, and that actually led me to a do-it-yourself genetic laboratory in Brooklyn. I think it was one of the first in the country. So, it's on like the second floor of this warehouse, right, there's centrifuges and pipettes thrown everywhere, and basically we had a bunch of biohackers, right, genetically engineering yeast to make them illuminate, you know, editing bacteria to make them resistant antibiotics, And it was just such a beautiful thing for me to be able to, like, actually, like, kind of hack biology, and I loved the beauty and the richness of biology. The one problem I had with it was that I, I wanted it to be more iterable, right? And the thing with programming was it was …

AI assessment note: “to do that... One has to understand kind of the story of my life”

Q the questions that you didn't have an answer to, that you needed an answer to to push forward your business, and what you actually did, like, literally what you did to get answers to those questions. Like, what I mean by that is, like, was it reading, like, seventy-page academic papers? Was it, like, Getting in touch with a geneticist at a lab. Like, what did that actually look like?

A Yeah, that's a great question. So, all right, let's go back. Let's see. The first thing I wanted to do was I really wanted to build up an elemental understanding of it, right? So I, I was a big believer in, like, kind of being able to independently re-derive everything, which is, like, how do I go from what is a probability to here's a genomic model of analyzing DNA? That's the level of depth of understanding I wanted. I didn't want anything to be superficial because in my mind, I wanted to kind of Have this, um, bark, like this, like bark as a foundation, right? And then all the branches that, that kind of stem from that, um, you know, you can then figure anything out, right? If the fundamental, if the intellectual fundamentals are strong enough, you can re-derive anything.

AI assessment note: “I really wanted to build up an elemental understanding of it”