An early injection of cash for her startup has convinced one Harvard junior to drop out and pursue her entrepreneurial dreams.
Vancouver native and one-time neurobiology major Grace Xiao is a recipient of the Thiel Fellowship, a program that grants her company, Kynplex, $100,000 in funding over two years.
Xiao and co-founder Raul Jordan, a Harvard junior, envision Kynplex as a platform for researchers to host profiles of their labs and list the active projects in their group, as a first step to finding collaborators for scientific projects.
The founders bet the forum will be particularly useful to corporate R&D execs who are looking for academic collaborators, but the benefits could go both ways.
“Federal grants are harder to get, which is pushing more researchers to explore early partnerships with industry,” Xiao said. “We believe that if we bring the resources together on one particular platform it will encourage collaboration.”
Xiao and Jordan arrived at the idea after conducting their own hunt for a research lab their freshman year. Information about the university’s research groups was scattered across websites which made finding and comparing groups inefficient. The two surveyed local biotech execs, who agreed that a single platform with a good search function could fill a need.
“This is similar to personal resume sites before LinkedIn. I think it’s a big opportunity for them,” said Paul Bottino, a lecturer and director of the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard, where both founders have taken a class. The center trains students in the basics of launching a startup — ideally after graduation.
Xiao said that university research labs will have access to a basic version of the service for free; companies will pay to host profiles and search within the data base. Labs will get data about which projects are getting viewed the most, by what size and type of company. About 600 labs have created profiles already, Xiao said, and Kynplex is working with corporate groups to assist them in building accounts.
Existing services like Researchgate are suited more for individual profiles than whole lab groups. Xiao said a key differentiator on Kynplex will be a search function that will allow potential collaborators to search the database by broad categories such as the branch of research — genetics, population health — but also drill down to the level of, say, research on a particular protein.
Kynplex is currently backed by Rough Draft Ventures, Cambridge venture firm General Catalyst Partners’ student-led venture fund.
The Thiel Fellowship was conceived by PayPal founder and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel as a “grant for young people who want to build new things instead of sit in a classroom.” Up to 30 fellows are selected per year, and more than 100 young entrepreneurs have gone through the program so far, despite one controversial stipulation: College students must drop out for the duration of the fellowship, though some have returned to complete their degrees.
That didn’t phase Xiao. “It was a fairly easy decision to decide to take it because I really believe that with Kynplex there’s a need that’s not being addressed,” she said. “For me the Thiel fellowship was an incredible opportunity to pursue what I really cared about.”
Though Xiao’s immediate plans are to move to San Francisco to be closer to the resources and mentors that the Thiel Foundation provides, she does not rule out one day returning to finish her degree.
Bottino said Harvard supports students who decide to leave to launch companies. “Harvard is very flexible,” he said. “Mark Zuckerberg can still come back.”
Correction: Due to a reporting error, in a previous version of this story Paul Bottino’s name was misspelled.