🧬 From Expat Kid to Founder: Science, Curiosity & the Long Road to Conviction | Alex Telford (1/4)
The Biotech Startups Podcast · 2026-06-01 · 22 min
Episode notes
The Biotech Startups Podcast is powered by Excedr—helping life science startups accelerate R&D and commercialization with founder-friendly equipment leasing. Skip the upfront costs, stay lean, and focus on breakthrough science. As a TBSP listener, you can get exclusive perks through Excedr's partner network—special savings, promotions, and more. Explore these offers today: "We don't understand biology. It's so complex that it's not engineerable, really, in any useful way." In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Jon Chee sits down with Alex Telford, founder of Convoke, who raised $8.6 million to build the AI-native operating system for biopharma. Part one traces his path from an expat childhood across Switzerland, Germany, and Spain — shaped by international schools, disappearing friendships, and a New Scientist subscription — through biochemistry at Bristol and into a synthetic biology master's at UCL that promised biological engineering and delivered toggle switches.