Meaningful objects
A collection of personal objects founders shared in their rooms and on their desks
We surround ourselves with objects that tell stories, reveal memories, and encompass our values and hopes. The desk is often a strictly utilitarian space; we keep gadgets and devices for work purposes. Even so, a few meaningful objects usually slip in. We asked startup founders to introduce themselves with an item on their desk (or in their office) that’s meaningful to them. Their personal stories are quite unique.
Charlie Silver, CEO of Mission Bio
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 gives some of them to me. So there are three awesome little characters he made that I keep on my desk and fidget with once in a while, just like him.
My Chief Commercial Officer Darrin gave me a commemorative ginger beer 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.
Dr. Gabriel Sanchez, CEO of EnSpectra Health
My desk is packed off; normally I have pictures of my wife and kids, that’s definitely the most important. But I do have something here that’s relevant to our era of COVID. We call this Project Galileo. We have a mission patch and masks. Our motto is “innovating across social distance.” We’ve developed an ethos and attitude to hit milestones and work remotely. This means a lot to us right now and is our rallying call.
Dr. Robert Devlin, CEO of Metalenz
I have on my desk the first set of lenses that we made with one of our high-volume manufacturing partners. We make our lenses on a glass wafer rather than molding the lenses out of plastic. There’s basically a 12-inch diameter piece of glass and 10,000 of our lenses on that piece of glass.
In a PhD, you’re very focused on your aspect of research. You have some collaboration with other people, but it’s not clear how that collaboration comes together to make something much bigger than your research. But this lens took the work of a ton of different people at Metalenz interacting with a ton of people from other companies.
This is why I especially love being at a startup. Very quickly, the seed of an idea grows way beyond yourself. You get to work with a bunch of amazing people to make something real. In my entire PhD, I made probably 100 different devices. But in one single shot, with the help of all these other people, we made 10,000 of these lenses.
Dr. Jayanth Gummaraju, CEO of Banyan Security
I can point to a tree. With work-from-home, you can work outside with all the plants. If you wait for a few minutes, maybe there will be a hummingbird that flies by. There’s a lot of nature around, so that’s my new office.
Ed King, CEO of Openprise
I have a waving cat (maneki neko.) It’s meaningful to me because my parents both passed away between March and December. This cat was on my mom’s dresser for a decade. It’s a nice reminder of them.
Dr. Pamela Contag, CEO of BioEclipse Therapeutics
I have two boxes of photographs I keep on my desk. I also always have a mug. My mom, who would have been 100 this year, had a mug collection. Every morning, I go get coffee and choose a different mug from the collection. Now I’m starting to have a favorite mug.
Akilesh Bapu, CEO of DeepScribe
It’s not on my desk, but I have a half-marathon finisher’s shirt from sixth grade. That was my first big accomplishment where I spent a lot of time working towards something. Some people told me to focus on 5K’s or do shorter distances and not exert myself too much. But I stuck with it, and so that’s an object that’s special.
Dr. Changming Liu, CEO of Stellar Cyber
I have a calendar from 2006. The title is “always believe in your dreams.” I got it from my kids. 2006 is when I started Aerohive (my previous company). I talked to my family, because when you start a company you need family support. My kids were six and nine at that time. They gave me this calendar as a gift, and I’ve kept it for 14 years. It’s very special for me.
Dr. Kiana Aran, CSO of Cardea Bio
On my table, I have my notebook from last year when we started developing our first commercial product. It’s my favorite object. Sometimes I go back to one year ago and think: wow, the way I was managing! I was doing things super differently. Just over a year, I’ve learned to manage and lead better. When I read through I can see who I talked with and met, how I designed a project, and so on.
It’s amazing just looking through this notebook. You see how much you’ve learned and grown as a person.
Dr. Lisha Li, CEO of Rosebud AI
An object that’s sort of hidden on my desk is my iPad. I love drawing on this, because it’s simple to setup. I can use the Zen Brush app to do Chinese brush paintings or watercolors.
I really enjoy that. It’s a tactile activity aside from all the emailing or coding or sales work I’m doing.
Jonathan Tan, CEO of Coreshell Technologies
I’m not a very object-oriented person. I usually prefer adventures or projects or experiences. But a few years ago, my fiancé and I got matching suitcases because we love traveling. We found a perfect 1–2 week suitcase for going on trips, and it’s been with us to Vancouver, Cuba, and Bali. I’m hoping that soon we continue on one of these adventures.
Dr. Albert Tai, CEO of Hypercare
I have this mini chili. I love spicy food and Sichuan pepper. It makes me happy to eat spicy food. Make everything spicy! Except maybe not drinks.
Dr. Maryam Ziaei, CEO of iSono Health
My favorite object is my Kindle. It has a lot of books and I read at night before going to bed.
I also have pictures of my family on my desk.
Dr. Joe Choi, COO and Chief Medical Officer of Hypercare
I have a photo of my old boxing gloves. I gave the gloves away as a best man gift for my best friend, who used to box with me. Those were the first boxing gloves either of us owned. It reminds me of what we’ve gone through, starting from a beat-up pair of boxing gloves as kids, and fighting through everything in life to where we are now.
Dr. Hui Tian and Igor Ivanov, CEO and COO of Axbio
Hui: This is a 3D-printed model of a protein and a DNA molecule together. I was trained as a physicist, while biotech involves lots of chemistry. This model gave people a very good view of how biology works. When I was studying physics, I saw chemistry and biology as really hard to quantify. I thought: you try this, try that, and eventually something works. But you can actually make a protein work the way you want, you can mutate stuff and change the kinetics and engineer the protein. I’ve always thought that’s amazing.
In my view, what we’re doing is really a marriage between integrated circuits and molecules. The molecule is a bio-engine that can work with our chip to generate signals.
Igor: You take hundreds of atoms and make something amazing, and there’s a life.
Hui: There are a million of these colors and shapes. Why do they behave the way they do? It’s part of evolution. Nature makes something that is pretty hard to predict. So far, with this kind of biomolecule, the best ones are still based on nature. If you invent something totally new out of your own imagination, generally it works less optimally than the nature-based ones.
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