 I'm so excited to be sitting here with Jessica who's one of our top female founders in the ABC portfolio. It's so fun as a female investor to be sitting here with a woman who's solving such a big problem. And so I thought we'd kick off by talking a little bit about what that problem is and how Ubiome is solving it. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm really excited to be here too. I'm really grateful to the team at Slush and everyone here who's listening to the talks. I've heard some great talks here too. So what we do at Ubiome is we sequence the human microbiome, which are the trillions of bacteria and other organisms that live on and in our bodies. And you might think, well, why do we care about bacteria than our bodies? And isn't that kind of gross? And why would we care about that? And basically, bacteria are involved and other microorganisms live on and in us, all over us, in our skin, in our noses, in our gut, and they have a massive effect on our health. Every chronic illness is related to the microbiome. So everything from cancer and diabetes to more minor things like acne or dandruff. And also acute illnesses like those commonly studied infectious disease are also part of the microbiome. So what we do at Ubiome is to gather really large data set. We have the largest data set in the world of microbiomes. We do this in collaboration with over 200 researchers around the world at Harvard and Stanford and Oxford and all sorts of places. And we take all this data and we use it to make clinical tests, drug targets, and a lot of other things that can help us take advantage of this new emerging science of the microbiome. What's really exciting about this is that the science isn't very old. It's only about, you know, the word microbiome was coined maybe 15 years ago. The first studies of the microbiome were done maybe 10 years ago. So we're really at the forefront of commercializing this new technology and making it available to everyone. Can you tell us a little bit more about how big that data set is and how big the next largest data set is just to give the audience and everyone a picture of that? Yeah, so we have almost a quarter of a million microbiomes. If you think about the human genome, some of the largest data sets of the human genome are only about a million. And the human genome is about 20 years ahead of where the microbiome is. Some of the other data sets, they're in the several thousand. So at least 10 X greater, sorry, at least 20 X greater than the other data sets that are out there. And what this data allows us to do is apply some really sophisticated technology. You know, we have six issued patents, over 100 applied for patents. And we just don't love really interesting things with this data. We're using machine learning and artificial intelligence and some algorithms that we've developed to be able to better understand what these bugs are doing in us and how they can affect our health. That's a lot of poop. That's a lot of poop, yeah. So part of this gig as CEO of Ubiom is that I get to make a lot of poop jokes and we have a lot of fun around the office talking about poop. But, you know, all joking aside, it's really funny how we think of poop as sort of this waste product, which it is obviously, but it's also this goldmine of information that can help us improve our health. That must have been really challenging. And, you know, I was in obviously some of those pitch meetings talking to investors about this product and how it works. Yeah, right, to all the entrepreneurs out there, you think you have some tough pitches? You walk into a boardroom with, you know, 20 people in it, all very proper, all in suits. And then you start talking about poop with them. And it's, you know, it's an experience. But I think what investors see that's valuable is that this is a really important understudied area and that we were the very first company in the space. And what we can do is make some things that are really valuable and important, not only from a business perspective, but also from a scientific and societal perspective as well. So just pulling back to the launch of Ubiom, you launched this business off of a crowdfunding campaign. And there was, I think what's important, and I think you say a lot, is citizen science in Ubiom. And talk about how that crowdfunding campaign and citizen science tie in to this mission and how you sort of push Ubiom forward. That's such a good question. So for all those out there who are doing crowdfunding campaigns, I feel you. Crowdfunding is like the bungee jumping of entrepreneurship. You just all of a sudden you have a page and then you have customers and they all want things from you and they all think of questions and answers that you never would have, waste-user product, you never would have thought of yourself. So I actually really recommend it as a way of starting a company because it's a great way to see that if there is a market for what you're doing to kind of understand your customers and do customer development kind of on the lead startup model really quickly. We started that way because we weren't sure. I mean, at that point there was no such thing as commercialization of the microbiome. We were the very first company. So we just had no idea if anyone would want this or would care about this. So the NIH in the US, the National Institutes of Health, which is the big government scientific funding body in the US for health, had done this project, this $173 million project over five years. They looked at the microbiome. This was supposed to be the groundbreaking study kind of equivalent to the Human Genome Project and they spent all this money and they studied 242 people. And my background, I got my PhD at Oxford in data analysis, sort of computer science, focused on large social science data sets. And my thought was, well, what? I mean, how can you look at 242 people? What if you had 2,500 people? What if you had 250,000? What if you had 2 million? What if you had 250 million? What would you be able to do and what would you be able to learn? So we started the crowdfunding campaign, my co-founder and I, because we thought, well, let's see what happens if we gather, let's see if we can gather that kind of data set and if we can, let's see what we can do with it. So it's still online. If anyone wants to look at it, it's a little embarrassing now. So we showed it to some of our employees the other day and they were like, you look so young. And I was like, yeah, I did. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for that. That was amazing. So anyways, so we did this crowdfunding campaign and I really recommend it. We learned a lot from our customers. We had to grow really quickly as entrepreneurs and figure out all sorts of uses for our product, answer people's questions, customer support, pricing, all these things kind of flew at us. And it was really great. I think it was a really good experience. But it also is kind of grounded in the fundamental values of Ubiom, which are related to advancing science as quickly as possible. And the way to do that is by involving the public. So I'm surprised more companies don't do this because I think it's a really valuable way to not only find out if people want and like your product, but also really engage with the public and from a scientific and a societal sort of giving back perspective to involve the public in science. One of the things that really struck me about the way science is done, because my background's in academia, even if not in the biological field, was how long it takes for a scientific discovery that is peer-reviewed, that everyone agrees is good solid science to turn into something that people can use. And citizen science is one way of really accelerating that. So talk a little bit about the, you made this jump from, at that point when you were doing your crowdfunding campaign, you were still very much in academia. You were very much in your PhD still. I was still finishing my PhD, yeah. What is that, what's that jump from academia to being a founder like and how should other people really do that? That's a great question. So for anyone out in the audience who's a PhD, I sympathize, I've been there. I think the big difference is obviously involving speed, involving values, involving kind of engagement with the public in a way that you do as an entrepreneur, but you don't do as a, you don't, although I think you should, you don't commonly do as an academic. I think the most important thing that I learned in this transition was this kind of switch in focus from a publication and sort of resume focus that a lot of academics have where it's all about getting in the right paper, you know, getting the right paper in the right publication versus engaging with the people, with the public, with your customers, with your other stakeholders to give people something they actually want. And I think that it's beneficial to academic science in general to take a much more kind of democratized focus and try to better, try to see what you can do to make your science have an impact as quickly as possible. Susan Science is one way to do that. There are many other ways of doing that. But one way, Susan Science is one way to say, you know, let's involve the public, let's make the science go faster, and let's also, you know, make the science more useful. And you know pretty quickly if it's not applicable to people because people don't like it. If you do science, it doesn't actually help them or benefit them in some way. So how is speaking about that actionability and like creating science that does help the public in some way, can you talk a little bit about what you buy them? First, I guess, smart gut, and now newly minted. Jessica launched a new test, a women's health test that's really moving women's health forward, really exciting for all of us gals out there. What is the actionability of these tests? What does that look like? That's a really good question. So a lot of people who are familiar with this science say, oh, but the microbiome's not there yet. Wait another 10 years. Let's slow everything down and wait till we get there. But I think that in the meantime, people don't get the benefit of the science that's already been done and is already well understood. And as entrepreneurs, one of our roles is to accelerate the process of translational medicine, of moving the science from a peer review journal into something that people can use. So we did that fairly quickly. So we launched the company in 2012. We did the crowdfunding campaign at the very end of 2012. We had a product, which was a consumer health and wellness product in the market in early 2013. We still have it. It's called Explorer. It's available all around the world in order in Finland or anywhere else in Europe or anywhere else in the world for that matter. And it's to help you better understand how your microbiome affects your gut. How does the food you eat affect your microbiome? The probiotics you bought last week at the health food store? Are those actually in your gut? Are they there? But we realized that there were a lot of things that we wanted to be able to tell people, but we couldn't tell them except in a medical context because there are a lot of clinical applications of the microbiome and we wanted to be able to tell people about them and to actually make products that took advantage of that. So one thing, so we came out with our first product about a year ago. It's called SmartGut for people who have chronic gut conditions with IBD, IBS, Crohn's, leaky gut, things like that. And it's a way to distinguish between these conditions and then track them over time. And we have a new product we just came out with a couple of weeks ago. Super excited about this. So I keep getting this question, like why did you launch a product for women? And I'm like, why wouldn't you launch a product for women? Because we're not human beings. Are we not human beings? I don't know. Do we need healthcare? Yes. So the product is called Smart Chain. It's a women's health test. It screens for HPV, which is associated with cervical cancer, sexually transmitted diseases and vaginal flora, and does this all with a swab you can do at home. So it's way more convenient. It's ordered by doctors, so it's a clinical test, but it's really something a woman can use at home. It's, we get emails all the time from people saying, you know, this was embarrassing, but I can do it by myself. You know, I didn't want to have to go back to my doctor for yet another test. I did my regular exam, but now I want to do another test. I don't want to have to go back just to do a test, so I can do this at home. So we've gotten some really fantastic feedback. And I think that these are the first in a very long line on this platform of technology that we've built, of new clinical tests that make it so where we can do a test that used to take, you know, 10 different tests. We can do it all in one. We can do a test that you had to have at the doctor's office. You can do yourself in your own home and also building this kind of, you know, internet-like, you know, user experience, right? So you have a website that's informative and engaging and, you know, we've talked a lot. Everyone, I've heard some other talks in the healthcare field here at Hitslash and other places about how healthcare's just not designed with a user experience in mind. Like how many of you go to a doctor's office and you're like, this is an amazing experience. I recommend it to everyone. It just never happens. And our goal is to give our patients and our doctors a really good user experience, like the kind you expect when you log into any other online system where it's focused around you and the goal is to give you the experience you need. So we've done that with the two clinical tests that we have now and we have a long line of other tests that we're gonna be launching. We also have some interesting drug discovery targets and other things, but the goal is that we take this data and we use it to make things that are useful to people based, rounded very strongly in the scientific literature. Our tests have, you know, we have like 200 references on our smart get tests that really kind of clearly show, we show our work in terms of the science, but we try to bring it to people as soon as possible. Yeah. So one of the things that we're really excited about and talk about often at ABC is our bio IT thesis, kind of the convergence between biology and computer science. And you biome really puts a, you know, sort of exclamation point on our bio IT thesis. And I think it's true in you specifically because your background is really in math and your PhD, you know, is more on that side than it is on, you know, the sort of biology side. And so talk about sort of the importance of, you know, you started to talk about it earlier, but dig in to the importance of data and computation and AI in you biome and more broadly in science. Yeah, so that's a really good point. So yeah, when we heard your thesis, we thought, well, that's great, because that's our thesis too, you know, that's exactly it. Is this convergence that's happening? One of our other investors put this really well where he said that things that used to be impossible are now cheap, right? Like it's DNA sequencing, which used to be this, you know, amazing dream that someday we might have this and people would do their whole PhD thesis like 20, 30 years ago, trying to sequence one gene. And now, you know, it's way less expensive to do and really kind of possible to not only, you know, not only to make it cheap, but to make things that were impossible, like the bacteria that we just didn't know lived on our bodies, we can now analyze and for like $89, you can order and explore a kid and learn about them. So there's this tremendous convergence of these two fields happening because biology, as soon as you convert the sort of the atoms of biology into the bits of data, then you can take all the computer science skills that a computer scientist had and many people here have and use those same skills from whatever field on this biological data. So in terms of what we do with that, you know, we're using that to make these specific products that, you know, we find beneficial and have this clinical utility, but there are a lot of other applications that are possible for this. And I hope other people explore them because there's this tremendous ability to take technology that could be used to make ads serve better or, you know, things like that, that could instead be used to really improve human health and human life and really have an impact on the world. And that's why I got involved in this. You know, my background was not in biology, but I realized the same skills that I had could be applied in a field where I just, I go to work every day and I think like, wow, we're actually taking this science that people, first of all, it was like a new science that people just didn't even know about until recently and turning it into something real that people can use. Yeah, which is totally amazing. I mean, you could have really focused on any, with your background, you could have focused on any area of, you know, of science in general or any, you know, you could have focused on social media and those big datasets and really you chose this because it's, you know, you were really the pioneers in this industry, which I think is really exciting. Yeah, I'm excited about it too. And I think that, you know, to the audience, to anyone who's out there who has, I mean, a lot of computer scientists in the audience, definitely, this world of bio IT is so fascinating and, you know, get involved in it because you can really, you know, that the biology world cries out for computational skills. They're really impactful things that you can do. Yeah, absolutely. So what do you feel like as an entrepreneur, you know, you and I met through another amazing entrepreneur, Elad Gil, the founder of Colour Genomics and that's how we came to be introduced. I think great entrepreneurs and great scientists, no other great entrepreneurs and scientists. What do you feel like is really exciting right now out, you know, in the world beyond Ubiome that you're seeing sort of on the ground? That's such a good question. So I think there's sort of two, I mean, we're kind of at the convergence of two trends that Ubiome and I see other ways that those two trends can be applied. One of them is around DNA sequencing. Like I was saying, you know, you have this, you're turning all this information that was not previously accessible at all, whether it's the microbiome, the genome, the transcriptome, the exome, all the, all mix and also other, even just health IT data, even just data that's locked in electronic medical records and isn't well analyzed or pharmacy data or health insurance data, all those things are kind of available to now be analyzed in new ways. So there's kind of this sequencing leads to data and then other data leads to data and both those things, you know, you can apply these new computational techniques and then I'd say the other thing is democratization of healthcare. This is something I'm really passionate about, you know, the healthcare system used to be the doctor is God and tells you what to do and then you go do it like an automaton without any agency and then either you are compliant or you are not compliant and that's just not the way the world works anymore. You go on Dr. Google and you know more, you know, you can do your own research, you go on Dr. Google Scholar and you read the scientific paper yourself and you draw your own conclusions. So I think that this democratization of healthcare is the most massive shift in healthcare and I think it's a product of having more information so it's not going anywhere and there are a lot of new ways to relate to the customer who is now the patient rather than the doctor necessarily but also do that in the context of the regulatory frameworks that you need to work within the relationship with the doctor. So there are a lot of new things that are done in that space and I'm really excited about that. I think there'll be better outcomes for patients when we're treated like people rather than like, you know, just kind of units within the healthcare system. Yeah, a set of numbers essentially. Yeah, exactly, set of numbers, right? You wanna be, you know, we're active agents in our own health and I think that's really gonna lead to some great transformations in the healthcare system and better health outcomes, people will just be healthier. I bet you're a really annoying patient for your doctor. I'm so annoying. I mean, actually, I'm not annoying because I very carefully choose doctors who like it and who are like partners rather than doctors who are like, grar, you shouldn't know anything, don't learn about your body, stay ignorant. I'm the same, I get to my doctor and I have like a list of things that I feel like are going on. I'm like, this is what I think in the matter. Yeah, and you want a doctor and you know, you also want a lab testing company or whatever, whoever else is involved, a health insurer, a microbiome testing company, for example. You want a, you know, you want healthcare partners who encourage that and engage with you and say, oh, but did you read this study and oh, you know, here's another application of that rather than try to shut you down. So I think that the healthcare companies of the future will be partners rather than, you know, rather than kind of agents that just connect people together without keeping the agency of the people in mind. Yeah, so something I think that's fun that goes on inside of your office is people, you know, kind of do informal testing on their own microbiomes and you know, I even sometimes partake in this kind of testing. Like, I did 10 days of straight soylent and then tested my microbiome, which was a really interesting result. What are some of the weirdest things you guys have done? Yeah, we've done some interesting things. So we had one very dedicated early employee who went on a ketogenic diet. She ate nothing but butter for 10 days. I don't advise this for people, but this was- Don't try this at home. Don't try this at home. But it was really interesting because we could see the shifts in her microbiome fairly rapidly. It kind of, so the literature says, you know, after a few days of, you know, after a radical shift, your microbiome will switch over. It takes about two weeks or something that's more subtle, but if you make a rapid change, like you take antibiotics or you switch your diuretically to, you know, a totally different nutritional source, you'll have this change in your microbiome. And she did, she saw that. It was really interesting. After a few days, her microbiome shifted from carbohydrate-digesting bacteria to fat-digesting bacteria. And one of the things we have in our product is analysis the functions in the microbiome so we can say not only do you have this bug, but this bug also has these genes for this specific type of metabolism, let's say for fat metabolism, and you can see the shift. So it's really fascinating on, you know, self-experiment for like health hacker types to do it. But it's also useful in a medical context to say, wow, that's really interesting. You know, your microbiome is more correlated, for example, with pre-diabetes and obesity because of the type of bacteria that you have in your gut and what functions those genes have. Wow, that's butter for how many days? Butter, it was 10 days of butter. I felt really bad for her, but she was very dedicated. Yeah, the meat. And I'm very impressed with her in a lot of ways, not just in that way. That's so funny. So just in general, I think there's, you know, I'm often getting the question as a, you know, kind of founder shifting into investing and you get this question, you know, as an academic shifting into being a founder. But as both women, I think we often both get the question around what is it like to be a female kind of in our field where, you know, they're super male dominated and, you know, your pitching is mostly, except for, with the exception of me and maybe a few others, all male investors. Very true. And look, we're almost out of time. No, just kidding. What's that like? Give us a point on that. I think that there's a, I mean, that's a much longer conversation, I would say, but I say that there's a, there are some advantages to being a female founder and there's some disadvantages, but I think the, I think the most important thing is to, is to lead with being a founder, right? Like if you have, you know, the strength of your idea and you have the work that you've done, like don't discount that as a female and try not to be intimidated by some of the environments that you're put in, but that's a much longer discussion and we will have to discuss it slash another time. And we're doing Q and A in the, Yeah, we're doing Q and A. So if anyone's curious about that, I'm happy to, happy to answer. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Thanks, Jessica. Thank you so much guys for listening. Thank you everyone at Flesh.