Founder Mode: Sajith Wickramasekara, Founder & CEO, Benchling

Benchling's Mission and Impact

• 💡 Benchling provides modern software for scientific progress in biotech and pharma, serving 200,000 scientists at universities and companies.
• 🔬 The software helps scientists design experiments, capture data, analyze results, and share information, addressing the archaic technology (paper, spreadsheets) prevalent in life sciences.
• 🚀 It aims to improve the success rate and accelerate the development of new medicines, which is typically a $2.5 billion, difficult process with a 90% failure rate in clinical trials.
• ✅ During COVID, companies using Benchling were able to develop monoclonal antibodies in record time, demonstrating the platform's ability to speed up critical scientific work.

Early Challenges and Growth

• ⏳ Founded 13 years ago as a brand new company by Sajith Wickramasekara, then a junior at MIT, after going through Y Combinator Summer 2012.
• 📈 Despite initial skepticism from investors who saw biology as a small market and biologists who didn't recognize the need for software, Benchling persevered, raising $600-700K after many meetings.
• 🏢 The company has grown significantly, now employing 600 people with offices in the Bay Area, Boston, and Europe, evolving from a startup to a large enterprise.

Defining Founder Mode

• 🔑 Sajith defines founder mode as having an ownership mentality and a pervasive feeling of responsibility for everything at the company.
• 🎯 It involves being comfortable operating at multiple levels of the business and showing personal care for every detail, no matter how small.
• ⚠️ A key aspect is not letting anything below one's standard go unaddressed, as doing so implies acceptance of subpar quality.

The Importance of Customer Connection

• 💬 Sajith experienced a period where senior leadership became disconnected from customers during rapid headcount growth, which he identified as a significant mistake.
• 🧠 He emphasizes that senior executives, especially in customer-facing roles, must engage directly with customers to maintain ground truth and cultural standards.
• 🤝 Sajith personally talks to 10-15 customers weekly and models this behavior, ensuring that customer insights are integrated into company discussions and strategy.

Lessons in Leadership and Ownership

• 💡 A crucial lesson learned was the need to act quickly to address problems, particularly when hiring executives who may not be the right cultural fit or replicate past behaviors unsuited for Benchling.
• ✅ Sajith developed more confidence in his intuition and in pushing back against established norms, especially when they conflicted with his core belief in direct customer engagement.
• 🤝 He stresses the importance of modeling desired behavior as a leader, stating, "Don't ask people to do anything you're not willing to do."