Leading your cross-disciplinary team, with Dr. Marinna Madrid of Cellino

Hi, I'm Jay Goldstein. I'm the CEO and founder of Founder2Leader, an executive coaching firm that specializes in equipping early stage bio and climate tech leaders for scale. This podcast, From Founder to Leader, aims to demystify what it actually looks like to build hard tech startups. Too often founders share their stories when there are newsworthy successes, the big raises and the lucrative exits. We want you to hear the real human stories that drive innovation, the crossroads decisions, the messy middle, and the practical know how. We hope that these conversations will help you as you take your ideas out of the lab and build scalable solutions to improve human health and our planet. Welcome to another episode of From Founder to Leader, the human stories behind bio and climate tech startups. In this podcast episode, we are demystifying what it looks like to build a hard tech startup from the ground up by sharing the real human stories behind the headlines, from the people and driving innovation. In today's episode, we're going to sit down with Dr. Marina Madrid, who is the Chief Product officer and also the regulatory officer and co founder of Celino. We are so thrilled to have you here, Marina. Thank you. Super happy to be here. So let's get started with just your journey to entrepreneurship. Like, when did it become obvious to you that this was a path that you wanted to take? Basically, not until I took it. So the story of my career, I'll start from the very beginning. When I first graduated high school, I went to NYU to study journalism, and it ended up being a terrible fit. I hated it. I dropped out in the middle of my first year, moved back home to California, and started over at community college. And that was really where I fell in love with science, especially physics and biology as well. And so I ended up transferring to UCLA to do a degree, a bachelor's degree in physics. And so at that point, what I really wanted to do was to become a community college teacher, because community college had had a really big impact on me and I just loved the environment there. It's very diverse. The teachers are. The professors are 100% focused on teaching. It was just so supportive. And to teach community college, you don't need a PhD. You just need a master's. But master's degrees cost money and PhD degrees don't. So so my plan was to get into PhD programs and then master out with a free master's, which is like, not what I told people when I was applying, but that was actually my plan. And I ended up getting into Harvard. And so I entered the Harvard PhD in Applied Physics program, basically with this plan in mind, planning to master out at some point and teach community college full time. But while I was there, I kind of fell in love with this project that my lab mate, Nabia Siklian was working on, essentially using lasers to manipulate cells. So. So at the time she was using lasers to poke holes in cell membranes to be able to deliver cargo into cells. And so I started working on this project. Really loved it. We had a great working relationship at some point. So this caused me to stay in the PhD program longer than I had originally intended anyways. But at some point she asked me if we should do a startup. And it's not something that I think she or I had ever considered as a career path before. I wanted to teach. I think she would have probably gone on to do a postdoc and work at a bigger company. But. But we had been collaborating with some biologists at Harvard and some of the professors there are highly entrepreneurial. George Church, Derek Rossi, this was also, you know, he's the founder of Moderna, but he was at Harvard at the time. And these professors had actually encouraged us to commercialize the technology. And it's not something we had ever done before, but when she proposed it, I was kind of like, well, let's just try it. If we hate it, we can quit after a year. It felt really low stakes and there's just been a ton of momentum. So that was back in. We incorporated in 2017, so it's been almost a decade now and we're still in it. And I think this is, you know, what we're going to be doing for the rest of our lives. I love that story and I love that you have teacher roots, much like me. Yeah. Okay, so you are chief Product officer and you have been so in like the various stages of growth. And I'm curious to hear how you think about this role and what are some of the key criteria that you've learned that help you drive product and really, like, produce results as a team? I think it's a really interesting question to ask, especially coming out of a PhD lab. So a lot of startups come from a PhD technology and it's almost like a backwards way to do a startup. Like the correct. And I'm using like air quotes, even though people can't see, like, the correct way to do it would be to identify a problem and then figure out, like, what is the best solution to that product problem, whether it's a product or a service. But when you're spinning out, when you're developing a startup that's kind of based on a PhD technology. You kind of have a solution that you think is a solution to a problem, but you don't understand the problem really well. You understand the problem at the level of a PhD student, which is to say like you haven't really done any market research and then you're doing the startup and you're trying to backfit the solution to the right problem. So it actually took us a couple of years at Celino before we even really decided what cell type we were working on. And what that required was like a very, very deep the industry. So my PhD was in physics. I'm at the point now where when I get invited to give a talk, it's at a bio conference. Basically it took a couple years to really develop deep expertise in biology and to be kind of respected as a leader in that space. So I think one of the really, one of the really important characteristics for someone who's leading product is to have kind of like one foot in the external facing world and then one foot in the internal facing world. You can't get stuck. I think it's easy for PhD scientists to kind of get, get very attached to their technology and to fall in love with a specific application, but that might not be the right application. It might not be the application that really has a market. So you know, just like as the very first example, when we were first developing the laser technology, we were using it to poke holes in cells to deliver cargo. We thought this was the killer application. And then we went out and talked to a bunch of folks in biotech and pharma, I. E. Like potential customers. And what they wanted to know is if we could use the laser to just kill cells. And it's not something we had thought about as PhD scientists because using a laser to kill cells is like a very easy problem from a laser physics perspective. It's almost like what, like it's so easy to do from a laser physics perspective. You know, working in a regulated environment, there's more that goes into it. Whereas like choosing the exact right laser energy to deliver cargo into cells, it's much more complex, so more Meaty for a PhD for a PhD program. But the point is like not getting too attached as a scientist to your invention or to the first application that you ch having enough of a presence in the external facing world to understand what problems actually need to be solved. And then how do you like fit your solution to that problem? I think is like the first step towards figuring out what Products actually matter. I love that. So just thinking back to the early days, the job looked really different than it does now. And you think of the big, like, phases of the job's development, and therefore your development that have allowed you to eventually become chief product officer of a fairly large startup at this point. Yeah, I mean, I would say generally in the early days, everyone was doing everything. So I was actually like, in the lab testing, you know, running laser experiments on different cell types. So the cell type we work on, I'll kind of like do a little tangent to talk about our cell type. We work on induced pluricon stem cells. The reason why these cells are so important is because every day as you age, your cells get a little bit older and a little bit more dysfunctional. And so there are a lot of diseases that happen are either not functioning properly, or they're degrading and they're degenerating and your body doesn't regenerate them. So in Parkinson's, you lose dopaminergic neurons. In diabetes, you lose beta cells. In heart failure, you lose cardiovascular cells. And so you can imagine if you could just replace these cells, regenerate these cells, and transplant them back into the patient, you could cure a lot of very important chronic degenerative diseases. And so that's what is special about induced pluripotent stem cells. They have the code within them to become any cell in the human body. So do is create a world where this form of regenerative medicine, this form of regenerative health, is like standard of care. Everyone can just have access to replacement cells, tissues, entire body parts on demand. Like, imagine you could just 3D print a new arm if you needed to. That's what we're trying to build. It took us a good couple of years just to even decide that we wanted to work on and focus on induced pluripotent stem cells. And in those first couple of years, you know, there was a phase where I was in the lab running laser experiments on different cell types that came up in con try and figure out, like, does our technology even work with the cell type? And then as the team grew, I came out of the lab. So we have a lot of, like, very highly skilled scientists who are in the lab running experiments. And I'm not doing that at all anymore. I haven't for many years. But now we're at the phase where we are building a technology that can manufacture these cells in a scalable manner. And we're getting close to being in the clinic. So what really matters is engaging with regulatory bodies. And again, like product is kind of one foot in the internal world, one foot in the external facing world. And so a lot of the work that I've done over the past couple of years has been to engage with different regulatory agencies. So I built a really strong relationship with the FDA, but also the EMA, so the EU's regulatory body, the MHRA, the UK's regulatory body, the PMDA, so Japan's regulatory body as well. And those interactions help guide how we develop the technology, because we're developing the technology to manufacture therapies that are regulated. Question. So your team that's actually producing your product, they come from many different backgrounds, right? You have some biologists, you have some physics folks, you have some laser folks. Like you have people with multiple disciplines, correct? Yes, absolutely. I think that's one of the most unique things about our team. So the founding team, we're physicists, we have kind of learned the biology on the go, but we have had folks, we have a very multidisciplinary team. So biology, laser, physics, engineering, AI, that's all represented. We've had folks in AI on our team who come from the drone industry because that's an example of an industry where they've had to look at a lot of images and do image analysis. We've had folks on our engineering team developing our fluidic cassettes for cell culture that are from the gas and oil industry because there are some super talented fluidic dynamics engineers there. So we have folks not just in different disciplines, but coming from super different fields. And I think that's been really important because I do like, one of my personal theses is that all of the biggest, most complex problems will be solved by multidisciplinary teams. Part of the value in bringing in people from other industries is that they're not burdened by the assumptions of what's possible. When you've been in one industry for a very long time, you kind of start to soak up these assumptions about what's possible, what's too difficult. I even see it in myself now, having been in self therapy for 10 years. And folks who come from different industries just aren't burdened by that. They're more willing to try new things. Which is, I think why my co founder and I even like got into this space in the first place, because we've chosen. Of all the cell therapy types we could have worked on, I think we chose the most difficult one. How do you functionally, I mean, let's get a little tactical here. They all speak slightly different languages of science. They all have slightly. And, you know, one word means one thing in a one discipline. It means something very different in another discipline. And. And they all have different ways. They've been trained ways mod operating. How do you actually get these very multidisciplinary team to produce something effectively together? Okay, this is a really good question because I think this is like a. There's a classic tension that can come up, especially when you're thinking about engineering and physics versus biology. Like biology, the experimental timelines are so long, we don't even have a fully operational mathematical model of the cell. You can't get answers in black and white. And engineers are more like, why is this taking so long? Why don't we fully understand this system? So there are a couple of things to it. I think it really starts with the hiring. Like, there's a type of person that can work really well with experts from different fields. Everyone at Celino probably has the most expertise in their own field and is working with people who have significantly more expertise than them in totally different fields. And that's a kind of unique working situation. And so I think one thing we really look for when we're hiring is humility and communication skills, like the ability to communicate cross disciplines to someone who doesn't have expertise in your discipline. It requires patience sometimes. The other thing that I would say, you know, technically, tactically, from the perspective of, like, structure of the team, I really don't like having disciplinary silos. So I've tried to avoid saying, okay, we have an engineering team, and then we have a biology team, and then we have an AI team. So on my own personal team at Celino, I have engineers and biologists and bioengineers. So I think to the extent that it's possible, structuring the team so that it's based around, like, a common goal as opposed to a specific discipline, really helps break down some of those disciplinary silos. And more and more, we're seeing really incredible candidates that are sitting at the intersections. You know, like, bioengineering is a more popular degree now than it was 10 years ago. So if you set up that kind of a structure where it's a really interdisciplinary team, who manages those people then? Because if you're not a content expert in their specific domain area, how can you help them? That's a really interesting question. So part of the way that I help them, and I do like to hire people who are more skilled or educated than me in specific domain areas, because then I feel like I can also learn from them. Part of how I'm helping them is just figuring out how to prioritize the work in the context of the company's overall goal and mission. So it's, you know, the way we've structured the teams right now, and you're going to laugh at the names, but right now we have three groups. And the groups are. And I came up with these names. The groups are Seed, Sprout, and Slay. And so they're not. They're actually not based on discipline. They're based on, how do I say this, like, level of scale. So seed is the kind of 0 to 1. These folks are inventing new things. They're showing that something is. Can work in a as possible for the very first time, and then sprout. So this is the team that I run, Sprout, I think of as like 1 to 10. So we know something works and we want to find product, market fit, test it out, run it at this, like, relatively small scale, but making sure that it's reproducible and then slay is how we're thinking of massive scale. You know, we're building these technologies ultimately because we want to be able to manufacture for hundreds of thousands of patients a year. And so that's how we're thinking about that. But you do need every single discipline represented in each of the categories. And I do think the folks running these teams, we're all multidisciplinary in our own way as well. But we do recognize that a lot of the individual contributors have more expertise than we do in specific disciplines. And that's actually something that we like and kind of look for when we're hiring. And if they have challenges, who do they go to for their domain expertise? For specific domain expertise? It really depends. So in terms of prioritizing the work, et cetera, making sure everything is aligned, that's definitely the team leaders. But we do encourage folks to kind of build their own network of folks who have domain expertise that aren't necessarily at Celino. And I have that for myself. I have folks that are at different companies that aren't necessarily competitive to Seleno, but close enough that we can kind of share expertise, especially on the regulatory side or on the product development side. I think there's, you know, we do try to encourage folks to learn not just from, like, folks within Celino, but to build a network. And that's just good career advice in general. And I would say I'm also learning a lot more from Reading and also from AI. These Days. Yeah. So you have this group of people, they're multidisciplinary, they're based on what sort of scale that they are operating with in Celino. How do you actually get them to do stuff together? Like do, do you have a meeting structure? Do you have a way that you like set goals? Like what are the ways in which you actually get them to produce outcomes? We definitely have structured goals, so we do use okrs. So that's something that's been very effective at our company for making sure that we have these defined goals that we're revisiting on a frequent basis. I would say we like to set very ambitious timelines and a lot of the folks at Soleno are highly self motivated. So we set these like very aggressive, very ambitious timelines and everyone does want to work together to, to make sure that they meet those. And then as far as meeting structure, it varies depending on the team and we go through different iterations of this. So we've gone through periods where we had a lot of like team meetings and one on one meetings. And then we've gone through periods where we experimented with cutting all of those and just making sure that we're all in office and can kind of go to each other's like desk very quickly to have conversations. So the meeting structure, I would say, you know, we experiment and every few months we, we switch it up based on how we're feeling and it feels more fresh. We like for folks to be in the office so that regardless of whether there's a meeting scheduled, it's very easy to connect with folks. We do rely very heavily on Slack, So meeting structure changes every few months depending on, you know, what we're experimenting with. But Slack has been a constant throughout Seleno's lifetime, since the very, very early days. And we do leverage okrs for staying aligned with certain goals. Yeah, what I hear you saying is communication is essential and it must be nimble and quick. And setting very clear and aligned goals is extremely essential. And then the meeting structure has to be flexible about what you're trying to achieve each quarter in achieving those big goals. Exactly, exactly. And you know, like one of the conclusions that I've come to with meetings is that I don't love meetings that are updates because updates can be provided in the form of written communication. I like meetings where there are decisions that need to be made and everyone who's at the meeting, you need them to help make that decision. So depending on where you are in a product's development or what's Going on. You would structure the meetings based on when you have to make critical decisions or troubleshoot something. You wouldn't be. How do you update people so everyone knows what's going on across the different people on the team? So a lot of our technical leads will provide written updates on Slack once a week. And these are super nice and you know, they provide updates on like, what progress has been made over the last week, but most importantly what's at risk and what risks need to be knocked down and how we're addressing those. So you expect that of people or it's just now a culture that people do it. So we have one bioengineer on the team who's a rock star and started doing that and everyone else started doing it because everyone could see how useful it is. So that's kind of the, you know, our team is so brilliant. Every once in a while someone will have something that they do that everyone else picks up because it works, Works so well. Yeah. So that's an interesting commentary on how culture drives product, right? Yeah, yeah. We are almost out of time and so I want to sort of start wrapping us up by talking about what advice you have for folks who are really interested in heading on this trajectory, like you in product, especially some of the earlier stage companies where they maybe don't yet have specialized roles. Yeah, that's an interesting question. So I would say the product role, it really requires you to be half external facing and half internal facing, and it requires you to be able to kind of make decisions holistically, looking at a range of parameters and not just based on like what your specific favorite cell type is or what your like, inventor bias leads you to. I think that's a trap that a lot of like, like PhD scientist founders fall into as far as actually developing the product and meeting timelines and meeting goals. I think a lot of this comes down to the team that you've built. And something that we've seen is that at all stages of Celino, we really need folks who are adaptable because timelines do change and goals do change. We have OKRs, but we revisit them often to see if we need to make changes to them, and often we do. So folks who are highly adaptable, I think are very important for the startup environment and then folks who are humble and really strong communicators. If you had one piece of advice to give to our listeners about anything that has been helpful to you on your entrepreneurial journey, what would be one nugget of awesome to share? I think this is a really good question. Probably the most important piece of advice. It's a little bit just reiterating what I've just said, but the most important thing is your team that makes or breaks your entire experience. And I say that to people also who are entering PhD programs. There are people who hate their PhD experience and people who love it. And I feel like it always has come down to who are they working with, who's their PI and who are their lab mates. I feel like the folks that you work with, that you're seeing on a daily basis, on a very regular basis, you know, I see. I see my. My colleagues more often than I see my best friends or the people that I'm dating. And so I think that that is super important. And so if you're, if you're founding a company, you're in a very privileged position because you are doing the hiring and you get to create that team. And I think not letting you know, not letting any insecurities drive the hiring process, like being willing and eager to hire people that are smarter than you in some dimension, can really elevate the team. That is fantastic advice. And I hear the theme of humility across so many of the things that you are mentioning. Just one last question. How have you found is the most effective way to test for humility in your hiring process? That's a real. So this is so tough because I think in the hiring process, everyone is, you know, giving the best impression possible. If you have a strong network, you can kind of, you know, you can talk to a lot of references and folks who have worked with that person, and that's probably going to give you the most, like, unbiased view. But I think asking folks about their failures or their weaknesses or something they've worked on and making sure it's not like some canned answer, like I'm too much of a perfectionist or I work too hard. Like asking them a question that leads them to actually kind of be vulnerable and tell you about something that was genuinely a challenge for them that they've genuinely had to work on, and that humility should shine through. That's great advice. Marina, thank you so much for joining us and for taking time out of your busy schedule to share some of your really insightful tips. Thank you so much. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you for joining. From founder to Leader. Full transcripts of the podcast are available on our website. Foundertoleader.com that's the word founder, the word to leader.com and if you're looking for more concrete tips, tools and guides to accelerate you as you build. Check out the TUFTEC Toolbox, which is a collaboration between founder to leader and the engine built by mit. You can buy a membership as an individual, as a team, or as an enterprise for your accelerator or portfolio. And if you're looking to skill up with a coach, please reach out. 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