Founder’s Lessons: Charlie Silver, CEO of Mission Bio
Charlie reflects on astrophysics, single-cell approaches to cancer, the lean startup, hiring, and Steinbeck
About
Welcome to the seventh installment of Tsingyuan Ventures’ Lessons from Founders series. Every week, we publish an in-depth founder interview, ranging from early-stage entrepreneurs to successful businesses. Our conversations cover their personal journeys, the lessons that shaped them, their visions for the future, and their failures. We also learn more about their companies and about the challenges they try to solve. These insights and lessons are applicable to any entrepreneur — current or future.
Read past interviews here.
Mission Bio
Mission Bio delivers targeted solutions for high-impact applications with the Tapestri Platform. The Tapestri Platform is the industry’s first and only single-cell multi-omics platform, enabling genotype and phenotype from the same cell and precise detection of heterogeneity in disease progression and treatment response. Application areas include blood cancers, solid tumors, and genome editing validation. Spun out of research at the University of California, San Francisco, Mission Bio is headquartered in South San Francisco, California. To learn more about Mission Bio and how it’s helping the community eradicate cancer, visit missionbio.com.
Charlie Silver is CEO and co-founder of Mission Bio, where he leads a team dedicated to solving complex biological problems with precision engineering, innovative biochemistry, and supported bioinformatics. Charlie has dedicated his career to commercializing next-generation hardware technology and scientific instrumentation at emerging ventures in healthcare and semiconductor. Prior to Mission Bio, he led engineering at Novelx (acquired by Agilent) and then served in R&D and marketing at Agilent. Charlie received a joint MBA from UC Berkeley and Columbia University, an MS in physics from UW Madison, and a BA in physics from Columbia University.
Why we invested in Mission Bio: Single-cell DNA analysis is the foundation for clinical precision medicine and part of the biggest potential market in life science. Mission Bio builds an end-to-end single-cell DNA analysis solution platform on top of existing sequencers, making it a turnkey solution for clinical use cases. It is at the center of our bet in this genetic sequencing cluster. Led by Charlie, Mission Bio has successfully converted the disruptive technology into a strong record of revenue growth.
Meet Charlie Silver
Interview edited for clarity and length.
“Go where your passion is, and go where your impact will be.”
Charlie introduces himself
I’m Charlie Silver, CEO and co-founder of Mission Bio. I’ve been with the company since the early days as we spun it out of UCSF, where the technology originated.
What’s on his desk
My son is nine years old and very into Legos. He’s always building these little pieces that he fidgets with during his Zooms for school. He gave me three awesome little characters that I keep on my desk. I also have a ginger beer bottle. My Chief Commercial Officer Darrin gave me a commemorative bottle as a present after we just closed the Series C financing. It says: tough times don’t last, tough people do. I’m really proud to have it.
His background studying astrophysics
I was born in Denver and spent my first 18 years there. I moved to college in New York at Columbia, and then graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. I studied astrophysics. I’ve always been curious and excited about how the world works, how we work, and how the world interacts with how we work. Astrophysics is the ultimate version of that. You look at what you can measure and understand here on Earth, and what you can measure in space — the faint signal you pick up — and you interpolate between the two to create a better understanding of what’s out there.
I worked on the early versions of a project that ended up on a later generation X-ray telescope that is up in space right now. And then in graduate school, I worked on cosmic microwave background, which is a way of looking at the far edges of the universe to understand what the first few seconds of the universe looked like. (I’m actually a dropped-out physicist; I started a PhD program and came out with a Master’s because I wanted to start building stuff.)
I’ve always been really excited about seeing deeper. That’s a thread that has carried me through my career. My last company was a scanning electron microscope to democratize electron microscopy. We took large workhorse imaging instruments and turned them into a little benchtop cube that was affordable, cost-effective, and had the same performance as the high-end ones. Any researcher would be able to see more deeply into their sample.
I’ve always been really excited about seeing deeper. That’s a thread that has carried me through my career.
That’s also what we do at Mission Bio. We help our customers see more deeply into the patient, into the patient’s biopsy, and into ourselves — to understand more deeply how we work and how disease works. These measurement tools help us understand how the world works.
Journey to starting Mission Bio
My last company was acquired by Agilent. I spent a couple of years there scaling that up and supporting Agilent’s build-out of the product. Afterward, I wanted to jump into something that really has an impact on human health. I also wanted to keep this element of complicated engineering and advanced systems that I’ve spent my career building.
I’ve been trained with breadth across different disciplines of science and how things work. That breadth rolls together into complicated systems. I’ve built systems that integrate the latest science and engineering, from software to hardware. At Mission Bio, I wanted to pull together the best technology and the top engineering minds to create an application that has real impact on human health.
Mission Bio
There’s a lot of expenditure in the U.S., and globally, on drug development R&D. We spend $60 billion in R&D money. But only about 3% of these drugs make it to market. About $10 billion of the $60 billion actually turns into a drug, and the other $50 billion dissolves and goes nowhere.
At Mission Bio, we believe there is room to amplify the $50 billion that doesn’t end up in a drug to make the next generation of drugs much more successful. That’s essential for our country because we spend so much money on R&D, and it’s essential because of the way health is delivered. It’s not a nationalized system; it’s really funded by the people. Technology needs to benefit patients, ultimately, and the best way to do that is to take that bucket of $50 billion that is not turning into drugs and use it to better effect.
We are very focused on bringing single-cell into real impact across cancer. Cancer is driven by the cell. Every cell is different and you’ve got to look at every cell, one by one, to really understand what the disease is telling you. We allow our customers resolution down to the cell.
Our platform is the best-in-class solution for cancer, which gives the ability to look at not just every cell, but every molecule that that cell has which tells you about it. We’ve purpose-built a platform to enable pharma drugs to come to market faster and to enable clinical research to happen faster.
Our mission is to enable our customers to eradicate cancer. Everybody is at the company to do that, and the technology is built to enable that.
How he leverages the “lean startup” in life science
The “lean startup” mentality is where you take the minimum investment required to quickly figure out what the market needs, and then iterate based on what customers are telling you. In life science, that cycle is more challenging, particularly with an advanced genomics platform. It takes a huge investment to get to the first minimum viable product, which we think of as driving the “lean startup.”
The way to short-circuit that in life science early on is to run services. With Mission Bio, we had a breadboard platform that we spun out of UCSF in 2014. We broadcast ourselves as a service business running real-world samples and quickly found out if there was a need for the market. So we could validate our hypothesis of what the market wanted, and then figure out which applications the market wanted to run on the platform.
By the time we built the first product, we knew what the market wanted, and we built exactly what it wanted. We’ve kept that for the platform when building out new applications. We start it as a service to find out whether it’s going to work on the platform and where the market really wants us to develop it. And then, by the time we hit the market, we know exactly where it’s going to play.
By the time we built the first product, we knew what the market wanted, and we built exactly what it wanted.
On choosing co-founders
The question of finding co-founders is the most important question a founder can ask himself/herself when starting a company. With Mission Bio, I was looking for a technology to spin out of the university, so the co-founders came with it. But I was looking for the right founding team and co-founders, who could either come into the company or continue supporting the company in an academic setting.
I have both a business and an engineering background, but I had much less life science background and I had little microfluidics background, which is the foundation of our technology. It was very important to align with co-founders who filled in those gaps in my skill set. That’s important introspection for any founder: where are the gaps that need to be filled as you’re building the company for the first few years?
That’s important introspection for any founder: where are the gaps that need to be filled as you’re building the company for the first few years?
On hiring talent
Number one is to find people who align with your mission. We are a very mission-driven company; we hire people who align with our mission of helping our customers eradicate cancer. Number two is to find people who have the experience needed in any specific role, to be able to really build it from the early days.
That doesn’t necessarily mean hiring people who’ve done what we’ve done exactly. With a startup, by definition, no one’s done it before. But we want to find people who are nimble and agile, who can learn from everything they’ve done, and very quickly apply it here. They can quickly learn what’s working, what’s not working, and how to iterate from there. We want to find people who not only know their experience but know what they don’t know and how they can fill in their gaps.
We want to find people who not only know their experience but know what they don’t know and how they can fill in their gaps.
Biggest challenge as CEO
Mission Bio is a platform, and there are a lot of applications you can run on a platform. Some of them will win in the market and are the largest market opportunity, some of them are urgently needed right now, some of them will have the highest impact, and some of them are frontier — it could be years before the market really needs it.
For our company leadership, the biggest challenge is to constantly pulse the market and match that with the capabilities of the platform and the talent that can build the platform. We need to figure out where the sweet spot is for the applications we’ll take on right now. And then also align the roadmap with applications that the market will need over the next 1–3 years.
The biggest challenge is to constantly pulse the market and match that with the capabilities of the platform and the talent that can build the platform.
As we launch products, we dive deep in one application. We pull in input as quickly as possible from KOLs and real-world samples where we validate before we launch. And then after we launch, we always keep a close hand to the pulse of the market. Did this work and deliver the impact we intended? Is this where we need to continue scaling long-term?
A lot of the struggle of any early startup is navigating that path of: where is the platform really going to win, where’s the first application that really sticks, and how do you continue building it from there?
Best advice for company-building and career
The best advice I’ve been given is: go where your passion is, and go where your impact will be. Every one of us has a unique history that enables us to have a certain impact. But there are a lot of different directions that impact can go. Where do you see yourself having your biggest impact in a way that aligns with your personal history and your experiences?
Where do you see yourself having your biggest impact in a way that aligns with your personal history and your experiences?
When starting a company, align the startup with whatever that passion is for you and wherever you see that impact headed.
This is also useful for thinking about your career. Think not so much about where you want your career to go, but think about the impact that you can have. Along the way, we’re given so many resources that it’s a matter of filtering through that and understanding who we are, who you are deeply as a person, where your strength is, and where you can serve the best impact. We’re all on this planet for such a short time. I think that’s a North Star to career decisions and company-building alike.
Impact of COVID-19
In the early stages of the pandemic, we were impacted the same as everyone: we needed to scramble to figure out how to react. But our market came back very quickly. We operate in a space where there is real impact with our tools. Cancer is not sheltering at home. Unfortunately, cancer is just as big of a problem as ever. It will be a bigger problem as people are not going in for routine monitoring and testing. The need is there just as much as ever.
After the initial pause to figure out the “new normal,” we found our customers are just as active as ever. We’ve responded by building out our operations to make our employees successful, so they can create and deliver that then makes our customers successful.
On reading
I’m an avid reader and voracious digester of all kinds of information. I’ve come back to that especially during the pandemic, where family is mixed with work. Reading builds some distance from everything else.
Steinbeck
In my life I’ve gone through cycles where I read through the entire Steinbeck work. I’m a huge fan. He takes themes that have been in Western literature for thousands of years and rolls them together into a more modern view which has influenced the foundation of our country.
Steinbeck lived not far from Silicon Valley. If you really dig into his reading, a lot of his views are very relevant to what we’re doing here, right now. Two of my favorites bookend his work: To a God Unknown, one of his earliest works, and East of Eden, one of his latest ones. East of Eden is one of my favorite books ever.
Podcast recommendation
Genialis is a really exciting company on the bioinformatics side of precision medicine. The CEO, Rafael Rosengarten, started a podcast series called Talking Precision Medicine which interviews people across the precision medicine space. I’ve been following it really closely and would recommend it to anyone. It’s an awesome broad view and also deep dive with CEOs.
His morning routine
Wherever possible, I make a commitment to have breakfast with my son every day. Even in full-on pre-pandemic mode, wherever I’m driving or traveling, I’ll always take the time to have breakfast with him.
Question he wishes was asked more often
What are you passionate about? Personally, I’m passionate about having an impact in cancer and enabling drugs that will improve cancer patients’ lives. And I’m passionate about my family.
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Tsingyuan Ventures is a $100M seed-stage technology firm. We back technical founders across software, life sciences, and frontier technologies. Learn more about our origin story and our approach here.
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