This week I had the pleasure of talking to John Lem, the co-founder of Spartan Bioscience, a $30M corporation reforming COVID-19 testing to be faster and more accessible. Additionally, he’s the CEO of Lobo Genetics which is enabling safer cannabis use through DNA analysis.
Society’s current method of pandemic testing is through sending your swab into a lab where a complex procedure known as RT-PCR is done, using bulky and expensive equipment — the time from sample to result being 3 hours. But above all things, this is known as the “gold standard” of testing due to its solid above 95% accuracy, which is why it’s still the most commonly administered test.
Spartan Bioscience is one of the leading Canadian-based companies in rapid nucleic acid COVID-19 diagnostics that has managed to shrink such a time-consuming and costly lab procedure into a portable Cube. The Spartan Cube — a genetic material analyzer which can produce results in 30 minutes, is accurate, and easy to use and deploy in decentralized areas.
I reached out to John after discovering this company through my own independent research into the improvement of pandemic testing. Not only did I want to discuss more about Spartan Bioscience and the issues COVID-19 in general but from what this entrepreneur has done, I knew he had incredible life advice and stories to bring to the table.
Below I’ve decided to share some of the most important topics that we dove into — it’s conversations like these which really get you thinking and make you realize the important of having intention behind everything. Enjoy :)
It’s not exactly the loss of lives which has fuelled the development to fight the pandemic, it’s the sudden rise of business opportunity.
Millions of people have died from COVID. Hundreds of millions are infected. This has caused a sudden rise in demand for scientific innovation to step up and save the lives that are being taken away by this virus. But with sudden accelerated scientific innovation also comes with great potential for companies to gain jackpots of money because in this world, ideas that solve problems that don’t have solutions are priceless.
Which makes sense because if everything was given for free during a pandemic, no one would put in the resources to develop vaccines, tests, and treatments because there is no incentivization. People invest their effort and resources often to generate an output, and it’s always the case of profit. So if there is no potential to earn profit and no economic growth, why bother?
This is why vaccines had come out faster than we expected and why the mRNA method was discovered so fast — companies were pooling all they got in competition to see who could figure something out the fastest, so they could be the first to begin distributing the vaccine and earn back the large sums.
The reason why we even got to this subject was because I was questioning why developing countries still weren’t getting proper tests despite there being so much innovation towards coronavirus testing. It was certainly not a lack of scientific innovation but was a matter of first world countries only wanting to manufacture tests that would earn them the most profit. And in this case, that’s the expensive RT-PCR method as it’s the most accurate and thus the most appealing, which developing countries certainly cannot afford. And so while there are other cost-effective rapid antigen tests which developing countries can use, they aren’t manufactured as much due to their lower accuracy and thus potential for financial success.
The best opportunities are the ones you make yourself
Everyone I know has been getting an internship or a summer job, but what I’ve come to realize is that while those are all great opportunities, they teach you how to follow people and work for other people’s ideas.
It’s easy to pipette a hundred samples or to write code that other people tell you to do. Everyone can do that. But what’s not easy is to figure out a way to solve a problem which has never been solved before and that’s exactly what adds true value to the world.
I bet you Elon Musk certainly does not spend his days writing lines of code. But the reason why he’s the second richest person in the world is because of how he’s thought of so many crazy ideas to massive problems the majority of the world’s population believe they don’t have the capability to deal with.
If there’s one thing you need to learn to do yourself, it’s to learn how to figure things out yourself. Figuring how to do things yourself is the way which you can not only test and grow your own ability and independence but the best way you can give to society. The world has too many problems and not enough people who have this skill to step into the vast and shaky world without seeking comfort in working a typical 9–5 job.
The smartest kids at school usually peak out in their 20s
Here, I’m specifically talking about the students who absolutely excel in school…but that’s all they do. And it’s not necessarily their fault. The education system is so flawed in that it makes us seem that our goal for the day is to finish that set of math problems and pass our exams so we can go watch Netflix. Additionally, learning about Shakespeare or the length of the side of a triangle with trigonometry simply cannot be translated into preparation of the real world.
And this is a problem because once you graduate, no one actually asks for your academics. Or if they do, you can find it at the very bottom of the list. Your value to society is now not based on the math questions about watermelons you can solve but about how you have approached real world issues.
So we essentially devote 15 years of our lives to the education system, and once we come out of it…we get close to nothing. We come out and we have absolutely no idea what to do because we’ve been so used to following a system where everything we need to do has been neatly laid out for us. We never learn what our purpose on Earth is or how to find it.
John himself began a business at 15 selling computer parts. No one asked for his school grades. In fact, success all came down to his own personal skills in forming this business and making it flourish in the competition of the real world. This is why people emphasize extracurriculars and personal projects. It’s not for that university application, please don’t think of it that way. It’s for yourself and so then you can get a real taste of the world before it’s too late.
Your potential is fully defined by your own inner ability — not by others
There will always been support around you: parents, teachers, mentors, sibling, etc. But at the end of the day, no one else has control over what you do but you. Yes other people may sway you one way or another, but what you accomplish is not defined by the choices and efforts of other people.
So yes, life really does test how well we can control this body and mind we were put into. And I’m not going to lie, this makes me feel powerful and more capable than ever. Yes, we can’t rely on other people but the fact that so many people have climbed their way to success simply from their own sweat and tears has made me realize that this means the only thing which can truly drag me down and leave me hopeless for the future is myself. And that’s something fully in my control.
If you start early and work three times as hard, you’ll live three lives
If you think about it, life’s shorter than we think. “Life’s short” is a phrase humans use all the time, but if you truly process how short of a time we each have on this planet, it’s slightly terrifying. Most people don’t live to 100, so that cuts out a decade or two out of our lives. And even before our deaths our minds and bodies slowly deteriorate, so that time of living an optimal healthy life is not that long. And that’s only to say we die of old age. There’s billions of ways people can die every single day.
As people get older their regrets turn from something they’ve done to what they haven’t done. There are no second chances at life, which is why it’s so important to recognize using your time well at a very young age. If you begin dipping yourself into the real world in your teen years as opposed to your twenties or thirties that head start will certainly pay its returns because you used the extra time in your life to further push the boundaries of your potential. As you grow older, that time will never come back and you never know when it will suddenly be cut off, which is why it’s so important to start early and make the most of the time every single day.
