Why 90% Of Drugs Fail

Clinical trial failure is roughly 90% so that's not good. But the number one reason that happens is because we got something wrong in the biology. I'm Jake Kerenville, Real, born and raised in Silicon Valley. And here to take you behind the scenes to show what it's like to be a startup founder. The journey to Ron, the problems I face, the products they build in an effort to make our lives better. I'm excited to have us today, LeRan Belanzan, co-founder and CEO of Bench Si. LeRan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to have you on. I know we've gone through a few months of trying to get you on. And you know, we had some things come up, little things like earthquakes and babies being born and all sorts of fun stuff in life. But you're finally here and you've got a great story to tell. So a little bit more for the audience. LeRan is an entrepreneur with degrees in commerce and law, who immigrated to Canada to pursue his MBA at the University of Toronto. There he co-founded Bench with three PhD students who are working to discover how AI could solve the declining productivity of drug discovery. Today, Bench Si is an AI-powered platform accelerating drug discovery who have raised over $170 million in funding and working with 16 of the top pharmaceutical companies and economic institutions globally. I love the background. I love what you guys are building and really the focus where you're at with AI and the niche industries that you're focused in. Before we jump in and talk about you and your story, were you joining us from today? Toronto, Canada. Okay, great. I love Canada. It's a lot happening there in the AI space. It was invented here. Yeah, and you're right in the center of it. So we'll talk a little bit about that. But I want to really kind of start from the beginning with you. Where did you grow up and what early experiences shaped the path you're on today? It's a deep question. I saw it as born in Israel almost 30 and 9 years ago. And I moved to Canada around 10 years ago. And for me, I guess what really shaped, reshaped, and my passion for entrepreneurship, which I think is very much tied to my character or values. This is the fact that so many generations of my family have been immigrants. Whether it's my grandparents, my parents, now me, my brother as well. The age of the states. I think the past three generations have immigrated. And someone once told me there's that immigration and entrepreneurship is very much similar where you start something new in the pursuit of a better future. And you have to deal with all the challenges that come with that. And usually, at least with my family, you do those moves without any resources. And you can go down as you go. So I think that perseverance, that type of culture, so growing up in Israel, should entrepreneurship and kind of figure it out, deal with what you have and pursue something. Better and really build something because it's relatively young country. And it's back then. All played a big part of that. Yeah, that's great. My first company I ever worked for in Silicon Valley was an Israeli-based company. And these are his words, the CEO, not mine. But I said, you know, it's great. You came from Israel to the US. Now I know you're in Canada, but he came to the US. And he was saying that, you know, Jake, I'm from Israel. And we really have two things in Israel and a lot of it. And I asked him, what is that? He's like, we have sand and we have brains. And we use both of them very well. So, okay, I want to follow you and let's see what we can build. So that was a long time ago. They had a lot of success. But. Well, I thought you were going to say war in Texas. That too. Anyway, talk a little bit about how you got started in the field you're in. And what was your big break there? For sure. So if you kind of mentioned my background, which is. No, I'm business. So obviously not a scientist or a technologist or an AI expert. So when I moved here, this will also be the founding story of the company. But I moved here also to pursue a bit of future with my girlfriend, the time who is my wife now and mother of my three kids. So we were doing long distance for a few years. She's from Toronto. I was in Tel Aviv. We did long distance for two years. Then I decided to move here to be with her. So I just started there and we saw the company. I came here. And it was really important for me to immerse myself in the culture. And learn more during local education with something that I saw valuable. So I did my MBA at University of Toronto. What I knew back then, and this was almost 11 years ago, is that after my first startup experience, which was just absolutely terrible, and probably did all the mistakes that you can imagine. And they were really painful. I knew that I never ever want to do this again. That was very clear for me. And doing my MBA, you kind of put you on track. How do you going to be consulting, which was terrible for, or finance, which I'm probably also not right for. So then towards my end of the first year at University of Toronto, of my MBA, I decided to join this course for second year students that is about entrepreneurship, but hands on entrepreneurship. Where basically you as an MBA student get a sign to a group of usually scientists have this wacky idea. And your job is to help them turn that idea into a business. And how will you do it? That's how you're graded in the course. But it's also a bit of real life. Because it's a course, but it also would be like, whatever real life company. So I was introduced to the team back then, which were a group of three-vacu scientists. I never met a scientist in my life. They're not a vacuum. They're very nice people. But for me, I guess I've never seen a scientist before. And I remember me in our chiefs-scientific officer, Tom, and Marco founder, and he was telling me about the problem and what they're doing. And I was blown away. Because I never heard of it. And in my head, I thought, how could this be such an important problem and I never heard of it? Because I think you go and think about the problems or solve the problems that you see or experience. Yeah. It also would be VCs as well, right? They invested sometimes in stuff they know. And I just never know that there's so many problems, drug discovery, and the decision need to be made, and data, and how it's done. And when I met him and the team, so I started working with them as an MBA student, but I just became obsessive over it, which is probably also a quality of founders and entrepreneurs. And back then, I don't know why, because I've never done this at scale. I thought I could really help the company raise money, or the team raise money, build it into a company, and do something around that, even though, again, I didn't understand AI or NOAA, or science, or drug discovery, and I had no connections with network here in Canada. Just get up the boat or the plane. Me and Mara for broke. It was like she was doing her PhD in clinical psychology. I was an MBA student with tons of debt. And I was like, another job offer, and I was like, listen, I really want to do this thing instead. We're down to the last $2,000 in a bank account. And you really want to, but I told you, I won't do it. If you don't think I should, because the cow will be going to pay rent. And she was like, if you really want to do it, do it and we'll figure it out. And yeah, now we're here. Wow. We've joined the team and we raise and continue, and then travel all around the world. And I think we've moved to Montreal for three months to get some money. And a bunch of stories along the way. It's amazing. Yeah, getting down to $2,000 is, you know, you want to think about, you know, how can you continue? But you've got to take those chances. It sounds like-- There's one month of rent back then. So it might have run away. A month of run away. I love that. Wow. Whatever. Ask about what a reward you're. Talked about the problem that you're solving now then today. I mean, let's fast forward a little bit. You have this idea and kind of walk through the inspiration of that idea. And what is it that you guys are solving? Yeah, I'll over simplify this. And I work, I guess, to simplify everything. That's kind of how I survive personally, such an intersection of such a complex space. When you develop drugs, there's really three things you need to get right. You need to understand how the disease works. And that's really the underlying biology. How does this thing even work? Like what's involved? Why? How? Then you have to develop the right drug to treat it. And then you need to make it work in humans. Those are the three kind of built in blocks. I would argue we're pretty good at getting drugs to work. We have like great hammers and different technologies and so on. Clinical trial failure is roughly 90%. So that's not good. But the number one reason that happens is because we've got something wrong in the biology. So getting the biology right or wrong is really the key contributor to the success of drugs working in humans and treating people who desperately need them. So unraveling disease biology and kind of make sense if you think about it. Because if you get the wrong target or you misunderstood something, you put all of your efforts and fix in that, then you come to the end and you're like, "Oh, that was actually not the thing that was causing the disease at all." Or there's something here that we didn't take into account. And it just wasted the decade of work and billions of dollars. So that's really what we focus. So how can we apply AI to really unravel and improve understanding of disease biology and at scale? So we can make as much impact as we can on the health of our society. So what's unique about us that we're doing that I think is different than other companies in our space. So this is our concept of tech bio, which are basically companies that are applying AI to drug discovery. So in the space of companies that are applying AI to understand disease biology, almost all of them are biotech companies. Meaning they're actually developed some sort of understanding of this biology, usually it's in a knowledge graph. And then they apply that with engineers to find the cure for specific disease. What we are doing is taking that knowledge we have that we build and productizing it. So basically putting in the hands of every scientist in the world and really acting as a co-pilot or a assist for them. So they can make the better, most efficient decisions as they're trying to navigate and unravel disease biology. So when we work with Vick from a pharmaceutical company, they will basically deploy our co-pilot with their scientists similar way that cursors deployed with engineers, for example. That's great. Wow. So as a co-pilot, if you're in R&D and a scientist and you're doing trying to figure out what's the next drug that we should develop for a specific disease. It takes a lot of man hours and strategy and frame power. Your technology, your AI, co-pilot helps them do their job faster, better. Better faster, cheaper. So basically what we did was we got access through partnerships and so on through the entire history of biomedical research. And what we did then was develop multimodally AI. They can basically go to all those research and pull out and then understand and connect all the evidence and all the insights that we're able to understand as humanity around disease biology. And then we connected everything on the knowledge graph with a really high level of erasity. And then through a deep understanding of the different workflow that scientists do, whether it's their formula hypotheses or planning experiments, doing risk assessment or trying to uncover novel relationships between how does this drug relate to this disease or vice versa and so on and so on. We're able to serve them either novel insights. There's no one has known before because the way we connected the knowledge graph or give them an answer immediately of something we'll have taken them two weeks to do or help them avoid going down different rabbit holes or even help them reduce the amount of money in the spending on design experiments. How big is a company today in terms of employees? Roughly 350. Okay. Yeah, 350 employees. I'm assuming maybe a large percentage of scientists and technologists. Yeah, 70% of the company I would say. Okay, great. The product is being built really from technologists and scientists insight and input. What can you visually kind of walk us through since we're not able to log into a screen like what it looks like? Is it just a web app that you can log in and see data and graphs and make sense of that or is it different? Yeah, there's different experiences but in the app there's GUI interfaces or GUI because the eye meets interface and that can be in the form of knowledge graph visualization. Pacific figures, a chat interface as well as one of our features. We've poured summarization to support decisions in the organization and the labels, hearts, whoever statistics want to basically understand the data and even look at the source data, which is something that's very important for us is traceability and expedibility. So everything that AR recommends or shares you can actually see the raw source data and that actually support that insight. That's great. Did you start this prior to chat GPT hitting the market in terms of just the visibility? Way before. We've been around for 10 years almost. Next year I think next year will be, that's it. We raised in 2016 and our first product about it in March 2017. So that's eight years. So we really kind of had to reinvent ourselves and go all in on Jeremy V.I. as a company a few years ago when it all started. And how has that changed the company? It changed our offering of the market. It changed behavior in the market, competitiveness in the market. It changed demand in the market. Everything went up competition, demand and so on. We had to learn obviously in our engineering team and so on in terms of how to apply this technology very early on and make the right decisions in a very fast moving pace. And I think with now for us as a company, obviously being a company that builds generative AI, we as employees are also adoptors of AI and we're really implemented in how we work. For example, this is not even me right now. This is a generative AI version of the company. So digital twin, I love it. This is one. I'm working but the logic is that we really try and implement it as much as we can to become more productive and make more of a new product. Yeah, that's really great. And we're seeing all sorts of changes in the world and politics and just in general industries. What are the changes, the macro changes that you're seeing influencing or impacting you are in the space you're in? For sure. So I think everything that impacts our customers impacts us. So our customers are from surgical companies and the ecosystem around us. Meaning things like tariffs, tariffs on pharmaceuticals and a lot of companies manufacturing in China and other places in the world. So that has a big impact. All the cuts for research funding, whichever reason that is, that's the encampments that actually impacts us as well because it impacts our customers and providers of our customers. Because if you don't do research, you don't spend as much money. The insets of those don't get to farm, but then in terms of your job discovery project, there is that. There's the entire FDA changes and the changes, vaccines, all of those as well. And of course, there is Jeremy VI that is a really amazing technology that he is used. I think by many, many people in non complex tasks, non complex, very complex fields and we're doing a translation of that technology to probably one of the most complex spaces in the world. So I think there are some move customer expectations, which are capabilities of technology. Probably the pace is faster than the technology itself. If that makes sense, we're trying to say. Yeah. Total sense. Obviously, a risk taker, you're down to $2,000 as you were looking to start the company and you've scaled it up and had a lot of success so far. There's challenges that go through in any company that's building and growing and you're an optimist. I could tell it just in our conversation. What's the biggest challenge of everything you just kind of shared that the company is going through today or you're working to figure out? What's the greatest challenge? I don't know if it's our specific challenge or something I think a lot about it's just focus, focus of everybody, focus of customers, focus of teams because there's so many things you can do with such novel technology that is so interesting and you can think things are so many different directions. Ideal and it's a thing we can do this about this and this feature, that feature and so on and so on because there's so many new tools and amazing things you can do, right? Yeah. That's like being focused in terms of what's the priority? What's going to drive the most impact to customers, even with our customers, but it's going to drive the most impact to their business as well. I'll answer a different question though. If I talk about not at Benzzi, what's the hardest thing about entrepreneurship? Just keep going. Just keep going. Especially if you've been doing it for a while now and I guess I'm going to keep place. I've been doing this for over 10 years and I guess more before I started Benzzi, it's just keep going because if you think about the past five years, not even maybe five years, I thought about the other day. Greatest pandemic in premature history. The biggest shift in work-based culture from in person to remote in history, I would argue the biggest technological innovation of all time with Jeremy VI and I know where we're going right now with all the tariffs and everything happening on a geopolitical stage, but it's kind of wild if you think about it just in the last couple of years, everything that's happened. It's really wild and doesn't seem like it's slowing down anytime soon. So if you think about the company that's one aspect, but how about your life? What's life like for you when you're trying to figure out the personal life balance and the work-life balance and is there a balance? Yeah, so I'm grateful. And not a thing that happened in Austin, I guess five and a half, six years is I have to be kids throughout the process. I wake up every day saying thank you for what kids really give you a perspective. I also come, I guess it's your first question about my childhood and values. My parents are Robert Soviet Russia, so I guess I was never allowed to really complain as a business as a kid. It's like, this thing happened. Well, this is healthy. This thing, we have a how, and this is our real. So my wife hates it because they never let it complain. It's like, "What?" "It's not good. It's so for me, I wake up in the morning and have a beautiful life. I have a beautiful kids and I'll manage everything else. It's okay." And I think it's so important. It's just things scale and things are really complex, especially when you care so much. It's really important to have a good life. It's important to have a good life. There's no balance. No, 50% of here and then 50% of them there. You figure out how you make everything works. And you take the wins that you can on both sides and you decide what are the non-negotiables and that you're not going to give up, no matter what. And for me, it's like the birthdays of my kids, my wife, they're booked in my calendar like a year and a year and a year's in advance and I know that that is their no matter what. I know that at some times I try and travel less because I live in Canada and it's the only time we can spend outside with my family. If I'm on the road for a long time, I have a crazy time at work and make sure I ask my eight to hit me the afterbook this day off so I can spend time with them. I take my kids to school every day, almost every day, when I'm here taking to school every day and like we have those mornings. But it also means I wake up at 5 am to do other stuff. So just try and balance everything or it's kind of a job of everything more than balance everything and also I guess I'm getting a bit older. But we talked about before why we couldn't meet so I had the money twice for the past four months and I was like, I guess like for me, even there's so much I can push in terms of how much I can work, which I think is different than it was when I started a company 10 years ago and just to understand also my limits and make sure I take care of myself like sleep. Yeah. I exercise when I can but I've learned that sleep is probably the most important thing and also trying to understand that it's not exactly hours that equal impact or hard hard you work and it really depends sometimes like the intensity that we're so high for raising money or in the ocean really big deal with a customer or going through a big change in the company and so on. Like the intensity is so high that the amount of hours you work are not comparable. So just really try and see what you're doing. to tune to everything that's going on in your life and take it pretty much week by week, especially I have three young kids, so it's like a week by week and then go from there. Yeah, I've got two young kids, so sometimes it's hour by hour, but yeah, I hear what you're saying. Now let's switch gears a little bit to the company itself in terms of the team. You've, you know, hired hundreds of people as an entrepreneur and maybe some lessons that you can share with other listeners that are also building their companies. Hiring a great team is essential for a great company. What's a lesson or some lessons you've learned about recruiting that you wish you would have known before you started your business? It's an interesting question. I think I've given a different answer depends on the stage of the company, but maybe I'll give maybe three insights if I did it all over again. When we got started, we hired like really inexperienced people, like the nearest graduate of school and we were optimizing for cost. So that was potentially a mistake. It depends on the space, but it was potentially a mistake that costed a lot more down the road. So maybe hire less, find the final gold deduct solution and the right solution between how much you want to spend in this, the seniority of the kind of initial client employee that you want to hire. That is one, two, which I think is it should be common sense in a known practice, which is hire people for the stage that you're at and maybe 18 months ahead, but don't get over your skis, because it's not about who is better. Who is better? See all that when a multi-billion dollar company or early run or someone who did hundreds of people. Neither of us is going to work for the other company. So even when you're small and usually it happens with sales, we got our first million, now we want to grow it to 10. This CIO is growing this company to have a billion dollars. They're probably going to suck at your company. The first question I would ask, when did they join? They joined in the 20 and 1, right? So you should make sure you hire the people that are right for you now, right? And have the right experience. And the third thing, so that's how those two advises, I would say probably the earlier stage from C to A. And then as we get to BCD and so on, and this is probably 2021, 2021, 2022 advice. So when everything was people with throwing money at startups, the scale of hiring, like we threw COVID went from like 50 people to 350 over two years. Wow. Yeah. And that was that was a crazy time because everything was remote. And Canada, Ocarona specifically was on lockdown, the longest in all of North America. We're not going for two years. Okay. So everything was remote. And it got to a place where somewhere new was hiring so many. And you completely don't even know who joins the company anymore. And you completely lose the initial culture and everything that happened. So and the thing is you don't see the impact that that probably had a few years in the future or many months in the future. And the reason that happened, something happened very long time ago in the past. So just when those things actually materialize that you consider as a problem and when they kind of make your way into your organization, those are the three key points for me. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's really valuable to understand where companies that in the life cycle of their growth, you know, starting as a startup or an infant and then all the way through becoming a teenager adult and, you know, retire and where the company is at in that's growth stage two or the early stage, they funded what do they need when and then being able to map that together. So I think that's that's really a smart way to do it. You talked about in those kind of mid years where companies, if you see firms are just throwing money at AI companies or just startups in general, easier to get funding today. It's a little bit different, but what would be your advice on founders that are looking to raise capital? Like what are what's what's your biggest insight that you've learned that has helped you succeed there? It's simple which is a very compelling story and I think there's a very clear format on how to do it and probably many do that right. But what I see so many people do wrong probably it's the most is they don't run a tight process and there's a way of raising money and it's not go talk to investors for six months and see who's going to bite. That's not how you raise money. I wrote a bunch of Black posts about this. It's something that became good over the years. One of the things, there's some good that which is the fundraising process itself. So I learned that from one of my investors very early on and it might be in this no reason why it should take more than three, four weeks to get a championship even in this environment if you run a proper process and do it properly. Yeah, that's great. A tight process is important. So we'll have to get your links on your blog to post a to dive into the details there. That sounds really valuable. As a company, it oftentimes either goes north or south depending on how you operate it and if it's going well, it evolves. As a leader, you also have to evolve too. What's kind of your big breakthrough as a leader that you've learned as you've kind of grown to be able to manage a 350 person organization today? I think it's different every year. I'm not the same person. It's very much tied to also which kind of person you are. It's hard to separate the two things and not bringing stuff that you develop in your person, have to work and skills the qualities developed and working your personal life. So it's just, it's easier to just merge it together than you have to do a bit to different people. I think it's always interesting as the company grows, as the complexity grows with it, of taking yourself to the next level. I think there's two ways to do that and I'm lucky to have both. One of them was advice I got from another founder which is every year he will write down how am I unrecognizable in 12 months from now? That was all. So I do that and the two is to have really great colleagues, board members and so on that really act as a mirror. Just call you out. Hey, you're not trying to properly or hey, to free stick yourself to the next level, here's what you need to do. I know I'm Israeli but actually listen. When people ask me if I'm asking my Canadian side now and I have just ability to implement those fairly fast where I lack sometimes maybe myself for where this is not good enough, but I can just make the adjustments fairly fast. But the interesting thing about leadership I think is sometimes maybe you have to act in kind of historical ways, change it up depending on the situation. Like people talk about wartime, this time CEO where things go up to the right, where they go south, where they go east, where they go west. So I don't think there's always one way at any time. I think it's probably some things that don't change. Don't lose it, be a person to be a good person, be the comb leader, be an energy giver, be positive, be the common destroyer and all of those things. But sometimes just different leadership qualities you want to bring depends on the context of the specific situation. Yeah. That's not that hard, right? That's what there's so many business books and leadership books. Yeah, adaptability based on a situation or circumstance. So yeah, I totally agree with that. You know, looking back now 10 years prior to starting the company, what's something you wished you would have known or someone would have given you some advice about that you would have had before you started the company. You thought what had been valuable. If advice is all that was necessary to avoid mistakes, then great, but it's probably that. So it's probably would have listed as well. Interesting. Hiring is one of them, but then she's staying close with just certain stuff that haven't stayed closer throughout the years. Holding hours more accountable from day one. That's I think kind of comes with being a younger founder when you hire more senior people. Right. That's probably some of the early mistakes. Potentially areas where we scale too fast that within any two. I think everybody's to blame on that in the past couple of years. Right. From small to big, from experience to inexperienced. Yeah. Those are probably the two biggest things. Yeah. We've gone through some of those ourselves, you know, as leaders and you bring on people and maybe they have more experience and you're assuming they can do what they can do better than anyone else and not calling them out, not holding them accountable, not managing the right way. All those things you learned from mistakes and you evolve, but ultimately you run a better company once you go through that. So of course, yeah, I agree with all those. As you look at 2025 or coming up to the middle of middle of that already, what's on the roadmap? What are you excited about as you continue to build your company? Yeah. So we're really all in on journey of AI. So we are kind of completing this wing on that, which is really excited and then taking that to the next level. We have some exciting partnerships that we're working on acquiring more customers and doing more deployments of our software and just seeing the impact that something that's really phenomenal. And then start thinking about what's next on the roadmap and where the world is going, especially with the AI, NTK, AI, agent ecosystem and really being a thoughts leader and a pioneer in our space. Yeah. Well, that's great. Well, excited to see what happens in the future and the drugs that are being created that are going to help protect and solve the problems that humanity has today. You know, you have a footprint in that process and excited to see the results as we continue to evolve as a world and as humanity and hopefully it'll be less disease and more solutions that help eradicate them. So excited to hear more in the future. If anyone wants to find you, Laurent, or find Bench Si, where do they go? Canada. In North, if you're in America, it can go on the website. It's Bench Si. Perfect. That's Bench Si.com. And the name is Lyruan at Bench Si. Very cool. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate sharing your story and hearing it and understanding where things are in the world with AI in different sectors and thanks to the listeners for listening. It means a lot to me. You spent your time with us today. I'm your host, Jake Aaron Villarreal, signing off for now, but can't wait to catch up with you all on the next episode. Until then, Laurent, the world, take care. If you like what we're doing, don't forget to subscribe. Leave a review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen and follow us on YouTube where we go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to be a startup founder. [BLANK_AUDIO]