In 2017, I founded a company called Ikigai. The idea was to sequence a person’s DNA & RNA and match them with the best clinical trial for Alzheimer’s disease. With enough sequencing data, we would develop a drug that would cure Alzheimer’s. After 2 years of working on it, the company failed and it was one of the most painful experiences of my life. If you’ve ever been a startup founder that worked relentlessly on a startup with nearly 0 traction, you’ll know the pain. I was quite depressed during this time and still have PTSD. Oddly, it put me on the path of being a founder.

Ikigai was born out of a desire to build a meaningful company that would have a positive impact on the world. It was born out of genuine intentions, but my mistake was that I didn’t have a unique insight on how to tackle the disease. In hindsight, this was a naive attempt at building a company. The unexpected gift was that I learned a lot about sales, how to generate unique insights for businesses and recruiting. It was this experience that ultimately led me to found my first VC-backed startup BasisBoard (YC S19).

Here is Ikigai’s story.

🔥 Interesting highlights

Things I’m proud of

• I decided to pursue Alzheimer’s disease even though I had no biology background.
• I made incredible progress by sheer willpower while working full-time at Uber (partnerships, investments, YC).

Traction that surprised me

• 2 billionaires met me to discuss a potential investment after I cold-emailed them
• 2 universities partnered with me to offer access to their Alzheimer’s patient data
• YCombinator offered to invest in Ikigai (Summer 2018)
• I joined the Pfenning Lab at Carnegie Mellon University as a part-time researcher

Blog posts

• Alzheimer’s Definition
• Amyloid Beta

👘 Product

Our product was a diagnostics report that would match patients to the best-fit clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease based on their DNA and RNA profile. To this day, there is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease so the best you can do is match someone with the right clinical trial.

📅 The painful story of what happened

• While at Uber, I had a desire to build my own company
• I wanted this company to be at the intersection of AI and healthcare because I thought this was noble
• I started teaching myself biology and medicine through MIT’s OpenCourseWare (Biology 101)
• After 3 months of self-study, I realized this was too slow and I’d never find a unique insight in biology, while working full-time at Uber
• What do you do when you want to start a company, but have no idea?
• The next weekend I walk over to Carnegie Mellon University and the computational biology department
• I knock on each professor’s doors and ask “can I join your lab and work for you for free to learn about biology?”
• Every professor said “no”, except 1 (Andreas Pfenning, Neurogenomics lab)
• He worked on using DNA/RNA sequencing to understand epigenetics of Alzheimer’s disease
• I joined the lab as a part-time researcher and learned about the disease
• After 8 months of part-time research, I asked Andreas if we could start a company to commercialize the technology
• He agreed, and so Ikigai was born (in hindsight, the decision to start a company was borne out of my desire to start a company rather than a unbiased determination of whether or not this technology was ready and feasible)
• I cold-emailed investors, 2 billionaire investors responded (Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber, Eric Lefkofsky, Tempus), but things didn’t work out
• I continued to push the idea of Ikigai by cold-emailing hospitals and pharma companies for partnerships
• I got 2 data-partnerships with hospitals and an LOI from Denali Therapeutics
• I applied to YC and was accepted to the Summer 2018 cohort with this traction
• My cofounder (at the time) and I broke up the day after YC accepted us
• YC rescinded their offer to invest in Ikigai
• I continued to work on the idea for another 3 months, with no progress
• After an Alzheimer’s conference in Chicago, I quit because I no longer believed I was the right founder to truly take this idea forward.

📬 Shutdown letter

This is a letter I sent to everyone who supported me when I shut down on Oct 21, 2018 6:59 PM ET

Dear Enablers,

If you are receiving this email, then it means you have touched my life and I want to communicate the sincerest, most heartfelt thank you that I can possibly express with words.

My name is Andy and up until very recently I tried to build a computational biomedicine company (called Ikigai), focused on developing machine learning technology for diagnostics / drug-discovery in neurodegenerative diseases.

My background is a bit untraditional. While starting Ikigai, I was a machine learning engineer working at Uber ATG (Advanced Technologies Group), Uber’s R&D division for self-driving cars. When I started this journey, I had never taken a formal biology course nor have I worked in drug-discovery. Out of pure serendipity, however, I learned about the disease and it broke my heart so I decided to pour my soul into trying to contribute my part. To do that, I found creative ways to learn about Alzheimer’s and the pharmaceutical-industry. I convinced an amazing professor at Carnegie Mellon University to let me join his lab as a part-time researcher; this lab focuses on understanding the epigenetics of Alzheimer’s Disease. I also wrote a number of cold-emails to investors and CEOs of Alzheimer’s pharmaceutical companies. Each response and conversation provided additional clarity into the challenges of developing a drug for Alzheimer’s.

This hustling led to some results.

YCombinator offered to invest in Ikigai (Summer 2018).

Ikigai obtained datasets from National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center and started to discuss a collaboration with the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center in Pittsburgh to develop preliminary diagnostics technology.

In August 2018, I decided to quit pursuing Ikigai because I no longer felt that I could lead a company that would realistically accelerate progress towards a cure for neurodegeneration. It turns out it’s pretty hard to start this type of healthcare startup for a first-time entrepreneur who is also an industry outsider. My attempt may have been naive, but I now have no qualms about not trying.

You are called enablers because you enabled my dream in the most powerful way possible – by entertaining its possibility. I approached each one of you to be customers, advisors, investors, cofounders and early employees of Ikigai and each of you decided that my ideas, as unlikely of success and as crazy as they may be, were worth listening to. In this way, you affirmed that a young, self-driving car engineer with ambitions to contribute to Alzheimer’s through a computational biomedicine startup might be an unlikely scenario but certainly not an impossible one. Because of this, I developed an unshakeable confidence in my ability to succeed at my wildest ambitions. One of those ambitions is to lead a technology company that impacts the world in a profoundly positive way. And if I once doubted this ambition, that is certainly no longer the case. For this, I am incredibly grateful.

As for my next steps, I am stepping away from Alzheimer’s temporarily because I am convinced I can make a larger impact on this disease if I first build some more career capital. Initially, I thought this meant working at a computational biology startup to develop more domain knowledge. After long reflection, however, I realized I’ve fallen in love with entrepreneurship and I intend to build career capital by starting another company. To that end, I’ve started to work on the second problem I care about – waste management. It’s been about a month, but I think I’ve landed on an interesting concept and I’m just about to negotiate a contract with our first customer. I am very excited!

I am not sure how the story unfolds from here, but I wrote this email to express my appreciation for playing a part in my story.

With immense gratitude,

Andy