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Sajith Wickramasekara

Co-founder & CEO, Benchling · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveengineer@sajithw ↗LinkedIn ↗benchling.com ↗

Sajith Wickramasekara co-founded Benchling in 2012 while studying computer science at MIT, building a cloud informatics platform to replace paper lab notebooks and spreadsheets in life sciences R&D. Under his leadership, Benchling became a prominent biotech software unicorn serving hundreds of thousands of scientists across global pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

11statements → 6claims → 1claims resolved → 3.91/5average certainty → 2.27/5average debate potential →

0 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 5 not checkable as stated how the 6 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

6 assertions · 4 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 6 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 5 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Sajith argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

How they sound: speaking style how? →

258 words/min while actually speaking · 24.5 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Sajith Wickramasekara: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,386 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Sajith Wickramasekara said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wickramasekara: Clunky enterprise systems force pharma scientists to email sensitive IP
“A lot of these companies, they do have systems that exist, but they're quite clunky and not integrated. So the scientists resort to using email, and this is whatever email systems they have set up. Sometimes they're personal gmails as well.”
Sajith Wickramasekara Feb 3, 2017 ▶ 15:37 Drug Discovery as a Data Problem // Sajith Wickramasekara, Benchling (FirstMark's Data Driven)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wickramasekara: Advanced drug development lacks modern software and data infrastructure
“You would think that such deliberate advanced science would have a large amount of software and advanced data behind it as well, but that's actually not the case.”
Sajith Wickramasekara Feb 3, 2017 ▶ 2:24 Drug Discovery as a Data Problem // Sajith Wickramasekara, Benchling (FirstMark's Data Driven)
Insight
Wickramasekara: Curing cancer with Excel is worse than dev without version control
“They're literally trying to cure cancer using Excel. This is the equivalent of one of the companies you work at building software without version control. It's honestly probably a little worse, actually.”
Sajith Wickramasekara Feb 3, 2017 ▶ 6:01 Drug Discovery as a Data Problem // Sajith Wickramasekara, Benchling (FirstMark's Data Driven)
Insight
Wickramasekara: Applying standard data practices to life sciences requires little domain expertise
“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.”
Sajith Wickramasekara Feb 3, 2017 ▶ 12:51 Drug Discovery as a Data Problem // Sajith Wickramasekara, Benchling (FirstMark's Data Driven)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wickramasekara: Life science research still runs on paper, email, and Excel
“This is an industry that runs on paper, email, and Excel, and it's something that touches everyone.”
Sajith Wickramasekara Feb 3, 2017 ▶ 3:28 Drug Discovery as a Data Problem // Sajith Wickramasekara, Benchling (FirstMark's Data Driven)
Insight
Wickramasekara: Antibody drug discovery has no fixed deterministic formula
“For most antibody research. The discovery process itself is a work in process. There's no formula for spitting out a drug by going through some set of steps that's going to work.”
Sajith Wickramasekara Feb 3, 2017 ▶ 9:39 Drug Discovery as a Data Problem // Sajith Wickramasekara, Benchling (FirstMark's Data Driven)
Insight
Wickramasekara: Scientific research can largely be broken down into processes
“Science can sometimes seem like an art, and it is to some degree, but a lot of it can be broken down into a process.”
Sajith Wickramasekara Feb 3, 2017 ▶ 10:44 Drug Discovery as a Data Problem // Sajith Wickramasekara, Benchling (FirstMark's Data Driven)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wickramasekara: Most Benchling employees have no background in life science
“Most of our team actually has no background in the live science at all.”
Sajith Wickramasekara Feb 3, 2017 ▶ 13:05 Drug Discovery as a Data Problem // Sajith Wickramasekara, Benchling (FirstMark's Data Driven)
Disclosure
Wickramasekara: Benchling adoption spread bottom-up from grad school to pharma giants
“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…”
Sajith Wickramasekara Feb 3, 2017 ▶ 14:25 Drug Discovery as a Data Problem // Sajith Wickramasekara, Benchling (FirstMark's Data Driven)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wickramasekara: Expiring patents and cost pressures force pharma to adopt cloud
“The pharma industry's typically been wildly profitable, and it still is, but it's under cost pressure for the first time just because of patents expiring and that sort of thing, and therefore they're, as a result of economics, becoming more amenable to cloud s…”
Sajith Wickramasekara Feb 3, 2017 ▶ 16:51 Drug Discovery as a Data Problem // Sajith Wickramasekara, Benchling (FirstMark's Data Driven)
Assertion Partly supported
Wickramasekara: Antibody drug discovery begins with tens of thousands of candidates
“Creating something like Avastin actually involves starting with tens of thousands of candidate antibodies in the beginning.”
Sajith Wickramasekara Feb 3, 2017 ▶ 4:04 Drug Discovery as a Data Problem // Sajith Wickramasekara, Benchling (FirstMark's Data Driven)

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Drug Discovery as a Data Problem // Sajith Wickramasekara, Benchling (FirstMark's Data Dri Feb 3, 2017 15m
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