The Biotech Startups Podcast

In this episode, Jon Chee continues his conversation with Mike Stadnisky, Managing Director of Thielsen Capital, on his transition from academic scientist to BD leader. Mike unpacks what business development really means in life science, why chasing "the decision maker" is the wrong frame, and how to identify the technical and business champions who actually move deals inside large organizations.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Jon Chee sits down with Mike Stadnisky, Managing Director of Thielsen Capital — a seed-stage life science tools syndicate. Before Thielsen, Mike was CEO of Phytonix (acquired by Thermo Fisher) and FlowJo (acquired by BD Life Sciences), and has taught at MIT Sloan. In Part 1, Mike traces his path from growing up with a chemical engineer father who gave him early exposure to business strategy, to studying biochemistry at Clemson, to working as a Red Bull Student Brand Manager — a role that shaped his enduring "care before you share" philosophy: meeting people where they are, not where it's convenient. He carried that mindset into grad school at UVA, where he joined Michael Brown's lab to study NK cells and innate immunity, fell in love with flow cytometry, and had his first (tearful) encounter with FlowJo.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, we dive into how Nalu Bio CEO and co-founder Caitlyn Krebs is harnessing AI and the largely untapped endocannabinoid system (ECS) to build the first nonhormonal therapeutic for the two hundred million women living with endometriosis, while running an ultra-lean company with no lab, no university royalties, and a fully outsourced CRO/CMO model. She explains why CB1 and CB2 GPCRs are among pharma’s most druggable targets, how Nalu’s platform has sped drug development by 5x while doubling phase one success rates, and why the ECS may be medicine’s most overlooked frontier amid a women’s health landscape still dominated by opioids, chemical menopause, and invasive surgery.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Caitlyn Krebs traces her path from a gut-punch company shutdown on maternity leave — which unexpectedly forged a key cofounder relationship — through the digital health boom at Rock Health, to her role as COO at Neurotrack, where an eye-tracking Alzheimer's test launched to 137 countries within days and led to selling cognitive risk scores to Japanese life insurers as the only woman in the room. She closes out her pre-Nalu journey at BlueStar Genomics, where hard lessons in capital discipline and the dangers of scope creep shaped the focused, founder-ready mindset she brings to building Nalu Bio today.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Caitlyn Krebs, co-founder and CEO of Nalu Bio, traces her path from building the Bay Area's biotech ecosystem to operating at the cutting edge of science and business. She shares how launching BayBioNEST taught her what it really takes—beyond great science—to build durable companies, before diving into her time at Entelos, where she helped pioneer virtual patients and digital twins nearly twenty years before AI became a buzzword, and unpacks what BD actually means in biotech, from navigating black-box skepticism to running "bake-off" pilots that let the data speak for itself. The conversation then shifts to Tethys Bioscience, where Caitlyn helped bring a prediabetes diagnostic to market—winning over physicians, employers, and major payers like Aetna, United, and Cigna—only to watch a single Medicare/CMS misstep shutter a well-funded company, and what every founder can learn from that hard-won experience.