The Co-Founder Test: Don’t Sign Until You Ask This One Question | Clara Bernardes | Biorce

Shamil Malachiyev: Good morning, everyone. My guest today is helping companies shorten the time it takes to bring pharmaceutical drugs to the market. She's now two years into building her startup. Please welcome the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Biorce, Clara Bernardes.

Clara Bernardes: Thank you so much, Shamil. And thank you for the effort of actually pronouncing my last name correctly, so congrats on that as well. And thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

Shamil Malachiyev: Well, we do our preparation for this podcast, so we think through the names specifically. And glad to have somebody joining us from Spain, too. You're in Barcelona, I'm in Valencia. Could you give us a little bit of insight into what you do at Biorce, to give our listeners an overview?

Clara Bernardes: So at Biorce, like you said, we're almost two years old; we'll be two years in January. What we do is we have a harmonized platform, AI-based, to solve all the pain points in the pharmaceutical industry. We focus mainly on study startup, so we only work on the clinical side: no preclinical, no little white mice in labs, and no post-market. That's what we do, essentially trying to decrease not only the timelines but also the costs. Because the less it costs a pharma to get a drug, a treatment, a device out there to the patients, the less it will also cost the patients to access it.

Shamil Malachiyev: And just to give a general understanding of the real pain and the extent of it in the market, because a lot of people listening to this might not know the intricacies of how long it takes to get a drug out, how much testing there is, the stages that are implied: could you tell us in general how many years it usually takes, and how much money has to be spent, to get a product out there, FDA-approved and on the market?

Clara Bernardes: Yeah. So currently it takes around 11 years, more or less one, depending on the type of indication, meaning the type of medical area where you're doing your research. Cost-wise, it will depend, obviously, if you're a smaller company, like a biotech, or if you're a big pharma, like the ones we all got to know more and more from COVID, with all the vax situation. It's definitely in the dozens of millions and it takes 11 years, which is a long time. And our goal is to decrease that to a maximum of five to six.

Shamil Malachiyev: So currently it's almost impossible for somebody new to join the market and have enough runway for the next 10 years. You have an idea, a concept, a lab that says, we found this really cool substance that could help with that thing, and it takes 10 years until you're able to make money selling it on the general market.

Clara Bernardes: Yeah, and don't forget that after you apply, you actually only have 20 years of patent to use it. So if development takes 11, that means you'll only actually be able to utilize nine years of that 20-year patent, which for pharmaceutical companies is obviously not great, because there are always competitors. There's always someone trying to get ahead. By the time you get to the 20-year mark, there will already be someone completely ready, fully funded, with crazy great ideas, ready to tackle whatever it is you've spent 11 years and X amount of millions to build and bring to market. You only got profit and revenue for nine years, and now there's someone able to essentially take your research, do something different from what you did, maybe better or not, and make profits from it. I'm not going to say from day one, because they still need to get things approved to be able to market them, but it's definitely faster for the ones that come after.

Shamil Malachiyev: So you don't need to prove there are no side effects again, when you're copying?

Clara Bernardes: You do, you do. It's just, yeah, because you can't really copy exactly. For example, take GLP-1, the Ozempics of this world. You had Ozempic, and now you have Wegovy, you have Mounjaro, and I don't know all of them. You still need to prove safety, because the active substances within the injection are different, so they might cause different reactions in people. Even the same Ozempic or Wegovy or Mounjaro might still cause different effects on different people, because our bodies are completely different from one another. It will probably have a completely different effect on me than it would have on you, for example. I'm a woman, you're a man, you're probably much taller than I am, I'm assuming. Body-composition-wise, everything would have different results. So you definitely still need to test and prove safety and efficacy. But in a way, you already have half of your job done.

Shamil Malachiyev: And from your perceptions of what the life of a founder was going to be like, from discussing it with your co-founders and deciding this is something we should do, to now running this for two years: have your perceptions come true? Has anything changed in the way you evaluate how difficult this journey is?

Clara Bernardes: Yes. So, for context, there are four co-founders. One of them is our CEO, then I'm the CSO, then we have the CTO and the CPO. And for full transparency, and you already know this, we've spoken before: the CEO, Pedro, is my husband. And Pedro had already founded a company before, a CRO, a clinical research organization, which is essentially a service provider that pharmaceutical companies outsource the conduct of their studies to. So he already had that experience of building a company, having to deal with the funding, having to deal with finding clients, having to deal with managing a company. I hadn't. This was a stone-cold experience for me. I'm very thankful for his existence and his prior experience, because he was definitely able to guide us a lot, and when I say us, I mean myself and two of my other co-founders.

But it wasn't at all what I was expecting. Although, to be quite fair, I'm not sure I knew what to expect from it. It was definitely an amazing experience, and it still is. From the day we decided to start the company to today, we've definitely hit some roadblocks. We've definitely had to change what we were focusing on, and just redirect, or take three steps back to be able to take one or two or three or four forward. So it's definitely a different journey than what I had imagined at the very beginning, when we set out to do this.

Shamil Malachiyev: And if you look back at your life, as a younger Clara in school and university years, do you notice moments and challenges that prepared you for this part of the journey?

Clara Bernardes: Oh, that's a great question. My goal in life when I was a little girl was to be a doctor. My mom was a surgeon; she was chief of surgery at our hometown hospital. And I always looked up to her and thought, my God, I want to be her when I grow up. And just to stress this: my mom got to the peak of her career when women in medicine were still maybe a novelty. She graduated med school in the '70s. So that gives context on why it was a wow for me, and it always was.

Unfortunately, I had some health situations when I was a young girl, and I focused on my health and on getting better. I completely lost focus on school and studies, and I missed my chance to get into med school. And I thought my life was going to be over. That was a roadblock, a hard thing in my life, that I obviously overcame. And I do think that the hard thing that, for an 18-year-old Clara, was the end of her world definitely gave me some hard skin, in terms of: life doesn't always happen as you had imagined. Yes, I was a straight-A student. Yes, I had this feeling inside, like when there's something in you that says you would be a great doctor, but you still have to accomplish a certain number of parameters to get there. So that definitely created some hard skin.

And, as we also mentioned before, when we spoke: I think losses in life always prepare you for the unknown, for novel situations, especially when they're unpredictable and they happen from one moment to another. We spoke about this regarding Pedro's father's situation, for example, which is actually why we built Biorce. So yeah, a couple of examples, one a little bit more chilled than the other, in a way.

Shamil Malachiyev: Yeah. And can you tell us, maybe, if it's okay to be a little vulnerable today, about that experience with Pedro's father, and how it served as an inspiration to try to affect the industry?

Clara Bernardes: Yeah, of course, happy to. It became our mission, so I'm very proud to speak of it, and I know Pedro doesn't and wouldn't mind. Pedro's dad was diagnosed with melanoma, unresectable melanoma, stage four, in July 2021. He was in Colombia at the time. He went to his dermatologist, who told him, hey, let me call my oncologist buddy. We were living in London at the time, and all of a sudden we got a call from his dad saying, hey, I've just been diagnosed with this, and the doctor said I have three months to live. And we were just completely, what? What do you mean? This is completely ridiculous, this makes zero sense, et cetera, et cetera.

We both already worked in the industry; this was four years ago. So we started reaching out to all of the connections we had, everyone we knew in the oncology space, and we were eventually able to find a study that was testing a new combination of drugs, immunotherapy with radiation, but a new type of immunotherapy that was very specific: you had to have a specific marker, which was the B-R-A-F, the BRAF marker. And they weren't recruiting or including patients in Colombia. At the time, we were not able to bring him to Portugal or to Spain, and we are originally from Portugal, hence the mention of Portugal.

So, we work in this, it's what we do, you know? And with a lot of connections and a lot of requests and a lot of favors and a lot of everything, we were able to get his dad on the study under compassionate use. However, the thing about compassionate use is that yes, the treatment is released for the use of patients that need it, once efficacy and safety are proven, but you still have to pay for it. The treatment was about $15,000 a month. And as you can imagine, that is extremely hard to support. At the time we went on TV; we even set up a GoFundMe situation. Eventually we got there, and he was able to come to Portugal.

And those three months that he was given in July, he surpassed them beautifully. He did pass away, in August 2022, but we still had over a year with him. We were able to bring him to Portugal, to get him to a physical and mental state where he could almost have a normal life. Those months that we were able to get from the treatment provided time for us to say goodbye, time for him to come back to Portugal, to see his parents, to see the people he loved, to spend time with them, to eat amazing Portuguese food.

And after everything, we kind of paused in life and thought: for a normal person who wouldn't have had all of these connections, who wouldn't have known all of the short paths that could be taken, and who, for better or worse, wouldn't have had the money to cover the treatment for the time we had to cover it before the Portuguese government covered it as standard of care, this wouldn't have been possible. Why? Because this study took a ridiculous amount of years to be conducted, and the treatment was not released or available for the patients that actually needed it.

So, working in the industry, we thought: okay, how can we solve this? How can we make it better for people like that? When we created Biorce, we created it to be one product, a product that would elevate, automate and ease the life of the people who write protocols for a living. Instead of taking six, ten, eighteen months to write a protocol, have it approved by the FDA or EMA and actually start conducting it, whether it's phase one or whichever other phase in the clinical space, it should only take a month, two months. Because if you're able to do this, you're already cutting time. And if you're able to replicate this, then you're compounding it. So we started the company, we started doing case studies and use cases, and we developed the first product, the first MVP, let's call it, because the first product was really just a black terminal. And the patient we always used for the case studies was the case of Pedro's dad. Patient zero was that.

For a while we used it, and then, saying it was out of respect is a little weird, but out of not wanting to pass the image that we would be using this experience forever, we eventually dropped it. But the experience and what we had to go through with Pedro's dad led to the creation of Biorce, and to the mission of wanting to be better, wanting to do better, and wanting to be able to provide to all people around the world, regardless of how they live, regardless of possessions, regardless of race, of gender, of whatever it is: just because you're a patient and have this diagnosis, you should have access to the treatments you need. At a fast pace, not on an 11-plus-year timeline. So that's essentially why we created Biorce.

Shamil Malachiyev: What I notice is that a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to find the motivation, trying to uncover what it is that brings the fire in them. And as we get older and we're faced with the passing of people who are dear to us, we start realizing life is finite. Has this caused you to reevaluate the sense of life, the meaning of life, your motivations, your trajectories, how you want to live?

Clara Bernardes: I wouldn't say so. I would say that it definitely gave us a purpose, a very strong reason why we wanted to do what we're doing. For some people, like you were saying, it takes time, and sometimes they never find the fire, the thing that makes them get out of bed. We have that, and it came easily to us. Pedro is my husband, he wasn't yet at the time, but Pedro is my husband, so I shared a lot of that pain and that grief. I loved his dad. And our other two co-founders were already very close friends of both of us, so they shared that pain first-hand as well.

And everyone else who eventually joined the company, and we are currently at fifty-something, 52 I think, it's easy for them too, because there's always someone you know, someone you care about, someone you love, who is going through something or has gone through something. So it's a very relatable mission that I think gets the fire going in people. But I wouldn't say it changed how I see life. I can only speak for myself. I don't do things quicker because I've seen people part around me. I don't do things irrationally. I just make sure that whatever I do has a meaning and a sense to it. So it's a yes-and-no kind of answer.

Shamil Malachiyev: On motivation: there are days when you wake up and you just don't feel like doing anything. You think, today is just not a good day, maybe I'll pause for today and pick things up tomorrow. But when you're one of the co-founders, you basically don't have that privilege anymore. You have people working for you, meetings that are set for today. In your experience, how often do you have those days, and what is the frame of mind you use to pick yourself up and get on with it?

Clara Bernardes: Wow. It depends on the stage we are at as a company. I definitely have more of those days in stressful times, like when we're raising, or preparing to raise, just because those are very stressful times. But then, like you said, we have added responsibility. When you're a co-founder, when you're C-suite, the mission is something very personal to you. So the days are still there, but sometimes it's just, okay, but a lot better; it's one of those things where you don't have a choice anymore, because people are counting on you.

And I mean, I speak against myself here, and I'll come clean: I had to reschedule our podcast session, and it was actually not because of work, it was because of a personal situation. Those happen. I might not want to get out of bed because I'm too stressed at work, because there's a lot to do, because there's something going on in my personal life. But, and I also like to touch on this point, I'm very lucky to have my husband as one of my co-founders, because we get to share the pain, and we get to share the hype. I guess that in the end I have fewer of those days than, I would say, some of the rest of the co-founders in the world, because I have someone to share that pain with who is literally there every single day.

Shamil Malachiyev: And I know that a lot of founders, when they come back home to their other halves, are broken. They've been fundraising, they've heard 30 investors tell them no in a day, and they're anxious, worried, questioning themselves and the whole mission, the time and energy they've spent. And when the spouse doesn't understand the realities of being a founder, it's really hard to find understanding in the house. With both of you being co-founders of the same startup, could you tell us what you've noticed are the pros and cons of working on something together?

Clara Bernardes: I'll be very controversial and say that I don't think there's actually cons to it. Because, to be fair, the only con that I see is that I kind of lost the ability to speak to my husband about a lot that is outside of work. And the reason why I say it's not exactly a con for me is that we both absolutely love what we do. We're both completely passionate about what we were able to create, about the company, about the mission, about where we're going next and how far we've already come. So it's not really a con to me.

The people around us usually ask, oh my God, don't you ever get tired of only speaking business with Pedro? And I'm like, no, actually, no. Like you were saying, he understands. We share the stress, we share the hypes, we share the, oh my God, we just raised money, or, my God, this client is being a pain and I cannot fix this for the life of me. We share all of those things. But also, he's the CEO, I'm the CSO. We have different functions. Yes, they cross, and we do speak during the day, but there are days when I don't speak with him until the point where we both get home. So we still have things to share with each other that are not common knowledge. I'm guessing that you get home and you tell your better half, hey, this happened, or, hey, I'm frustrated, or I'm happy, whatever the feeling, because X, Y and Z happened to me today. And that will still be different from what Pedro experienced during his day. Because yes, we share a company, we share a working space, we work in the same office, but we still have different functions. We're not even in the same department. It's not like we're both tech people, or both very product-oriented people who have to deal with each other 24/7 through the whole working day.

So we still have news to tell each other. I still go to Pedro and say, hey, I had this idea, I was speaking with my team about this, what's your two cents on it? The same way he still tells me, hey, I had this really hard day because I was speaking with X, Y, Z person and the conversations did not go as I was expecting. So I don't see a lot of cons. I actually don't see cons. Yes, we work together, yes, we share a company, but we still have different functions, so we're still able to have that normal kind of conversation at the end of the day where we just share what happened.

Shamil Malachiyev: And building a co-founding relationship is very similar to building a marriage. You have to know the person, because you're in this for the long run, hopefully until the very end, be it an exit or a sale or deciding to stop the company. And you want to know that you can behave in an argument and still respect each other. How have you and your co-founders navigated that space, to know, okay, we're a good fit? Were there moments where you thought, this is what makes us a really good team?

Clara Bernardes: A hundred percent. And I'll share a story, if you don't mind. We are in hyper-growth, as I think is easy to understand, and we were hiring a chief of staff, and we found the perfect fit. We invited this person to come to the office to get to know us, so that we could introduce ourselves individually and she could actually get a sense of it. And I've already said "she," so I might as well keep going. She visited, and that was literally one of the first questions she asked. She was like, so you're married to him, and you're married to her, and the other two founders you're best friends with. How am I going to fit here? Am I actually going to be able to manage these already very rooted relationships?

Shamil Malachiyev: You can marry this guy or that guy, there's the choice. Don't touch Pedro.

Clara Bernardes: That would have been a great plan B, you know? But she's already married, happily married with kids. It was really easy to answer, though. We asked all of the rest of the management team to come and speak freely with her, and we completely left the room and went our ways. And when we came back, she was like, oh my God, I'm so chilled and so confident now, because these guys really calmed me about how the dynamic works.

I think from the very beginning we had these lines put in place. We each have a responsibility, and then we have a responsibility to one another. I have a responsibility towards my CTO: getting the product properly reviewed and properly validated, in order for my CTO to be able to deliver his responsibility towards our CPO of having the product actually built, for them to be able to design it. And we all have a joint responsibility to Pedro, our CEO, who kind of goes after us when we're not doing stuff.

We've always had this dynamic, and I'm not sure I can put into words how it actually works. But yes, we've gotten into arguments. Yes, we've gotten into, I don't agree with you, and let's agree to disagree because I'm not going to change my mind, or, no, this does not work. And afterwards, we would just go to dinner like nothing happened. I think that also comes from having a previous relationship with all of them. I've known our CPO for over 10 years, and it's going on 10 years with our CTO. It comes from a place of being comfortable with them, of being able to tell them off, to be fair, or for them to tell me off, because I missed a deadline, because I didn't do something that was meant to be done in a certain way. It comes from a place of comfort, being able to be honest and still know that afterwards we're still friends.

There's Pedro the CEO, there's Pedro the husband, and there's Pedro the friend, for the rest of them and also for me, obviously. And there's the CTO, the CPO, the CSO, and then there's the group of friends. And don't get me wrong, we take any and all opportunities to speak about work, but that comes from loving and really understanding the impact that our work might bring to an enormous industry.

I know I'm not really answering your question in a proper way, but it's really because I don't know how to properly describe how we built this dynamic. I've never worked with the CTO or CPO before. I did work with Pedro before, but Pedro was senior to me, and I reported not to him directly but to someone under him in the hierarchy of the company. And even then it worked very well, and we always understood the dynamic: there's work, and there's home. But at that time it wasn't our company; we didn't have this very big connection. Having never worked with the CPO and CTO, and I'm just going to put names to them, because it's really weird otherwise: it's José, the CTO, and Diogo, the CPO. I've never worked with them, but I've been friends with them for so long that I just have this comfortness of, hey, you need to do this in X, Y and Z ways, and then we can speak again. The same way they are comfortable enough to say, hey, you f'd up on the task I asked you about a week ago and I still don't have it, or, whatever you sent is incomplete. And I'm like, my God, what is incomplete? We just have that openness to sit together and resolve issues. I actually think the previous relationship we all had made it easier, in a way.

Shamil Malachiyev: It's a very controversial topic, because my father would always tell me: if you have to choose between business and friendship, choose friendship, and you'll always find people to do business with. And there are people who say building things with your friends is the best thing you can do, because you know somebody you can trust. And there are other people who never build things with friends, because it might ruin the friendship. The question I want to get to, to better understand the dynamics: how would you generalize the culture you have at Biorce? Maybe it's not official, not on a piece of paper, but when you hire new people, what kind of behavior do you expect, because that's the culture the four co-founders have set?

Clara Bernardes: I can almost cheat on this question, because we actually just set up our values, to integrate them into the hiring process and everything else. We've done a great job so far on hiring people that fit amazingly into the culture. And the culture that we are building is an unspoken family situation, where it's not family, but you do make friends within the company, and we all respect each other. We all know each other's places and responsibilities, but we also all understand the long-term mission, the long-term goal.

That was, and still is, a very important part of our hiring processes: understanding, apart from your capabilities, apart from how good an engineer you are, or how good a scientist, or how good a designer, who's behind that person. Who's the person? What do you like to do? Where do you see yourself in five years, that very usual question in interviews, but on a personal level. Do you have a partner? Do you intend to get married? Do you want kids? What do you feel about animals? What's your favorite animal? What do you like to do in your free time? Almost a speed-dating of sorts, on how to make friends. But essentially you're not hiring friends; you're just hiring people that have the same cultural fit as all of us.

Because I do feel like, in a way, and I know Pedro doesn't like me to say it...

Shamil Malachiyev: We can cut that part out if it's going to be a secret.

Clara Bernardes: No, no, no. I'm actually very curious to see how he'll react once the podcast comes out. But I do believe that we built a Biorce family, in a way that we all have the same values as people. We don't all have the same opinions, or the same political directions, but we are all able to discuss whatever topic it is in a healthy, respectful way. And I think that's extremely important, to be a person in general, but also in the people you work with. We have so many people that started working in the company, became friends, and now they're inseparable. Or people that came to the company as introverts and started doing stuff in the Biorce clubs that we now have a few of. Probably, if I look out at the sea, I'll see one of the clubs diving into it, because they created this thing where once a week during winter they run to the sea and just dive in, because it's good for your body, with all the cold-plunge situation.

So it's the culture we're trying to raise, with the overall values of excellence, ownership and purpose, because that's all connected to one main goal, which is our ambition to do better for the industry and for people.

Shamil Malachiyev: As a founder, when I was just starting to build companies back in 2014, I would always go, oh, I'm building a family, we're a family here. And I thought that would bring people together. But as we started to grow, I was faced with situations where the company was growing but certain people and functions weren't, and there were people who were underperforming. From a business perspective, I knew I had to replace them. A friend of mine told me: everybody knows who the weakest player on the team is. The whole team knows. And when we had to make the decisions on firing, that's when it hits: you don't fire family members.

Clara Bernardes: That's actually one of the questions the chief of staff asked Pedro: would you be able to fire Clara, if needed? And the answer was yes, because once again, we cannot jeopardize the overall mission that we're trying to accomplish, which is so much bigger than one individual. We simply cannot.

And Pedro is actually the first person to say this, which is very curious. The first time he told me, I was like, what? He's the first guy to say: one day, I will not be the right person to be the CEO of this company. And when that day comes, I'm happy to be replaced, because I want what's best for the company. If it comes to the point where I'm not the best, and our board members and our investors see it, I am happy to be replaced. And I was like, what? Why wouldn't you just try to be better? And it's like, it gets to a point where it's impossible. With time, I've come to agree with him: it gets to a point where more experience is needed, more capability of leading, of dealing with different types of people in the industry. So we may well get to a point where that happens.

And it's funny that you raised that point, because that was one of the questions the new chief of staff asked during our meeting: would you be able to fire Clara? She's your wife. Would you be able to fire Diogo or José? They were best men at your wedding, they're best friends. Would you be able to? And the answer has to be yes. Because yes, we do love the people we work with, and that's the reason why Pedro hates it when I say we're a family. Because it can lead to that feeling of comfort. And when people get too comfortable, and people start underperforming just because of comfortness, then either you shake them up and coconuts start to fall, or you have to do something else. You cannot jeopardize the entire company for one rotten member of the family, in this case.

Shamil Malachiyev: And maybe to your point, when you talk about getting to the level where more skills are required: what I've noticed is that oftentimes it's not just the skills. Some people love the process of building the company up, finding the product-market fit, getting the initial funding, getting the team together. And then, when they come to the point where it's like, okay, now we need to put in processes, create extrinsic motivations, they're like, now I'm in a loop, now I'm in a cage, I don't like this. Give me something new, a new product, a new direction. So they hire somebody from the outside to do that. Because I believe everybody should be doing something they love and that the company benefits from the most. And if you get to the point where it's not exactly what you want, there are always other people building companies where you can be utilized as well. I can see it's so great that these questions are getting asked in the company, that you've created a culture where it's okay to ask them. So many startups break because they couldn't talk about these things early on, and when it all builds up, four years in, you have that conversation and it's like, we had different ideas.

And in our previous conversation, you mentioned a couple of stories from your fundraising, which, just to show the founders listening to and watching this, that the journey...

Clara Bernardes: Anything can happen.

Shamil Malachiyev: Anything can happen, and it's part of the job. It's part of your life as a founder to be prepared, to expect these things and know how to react to them and move forward. Could you tell us about your pre-seed fundraising experience?

Clara Bernardes: Yes, of course I can. It was a very fun situation. Obviously not. But: we had two co-leads for the round, and then we had some small investors, followers. And we were meant to sign everything on a Thursday, and then we were going to fly to Germany to go to Oktoberfest, because one of our co-lead investors is German, and they had invited us to come. They always have a table at one of the tents: it'll be really fun, you've never come, we always do this thing where we put the full portfolio together, come and celebrate. And it was even amazing, because it was the day after we sign. Okay, amazing, let's go.

So we get to the airport, and Pedro gets a call. He's like, give me a second, I really need to take this, it's X person. And I was like, okay, probably asking for details to get everything signed. And Pedro gets off the call, looks at me and says: we're f'd. This guy just decided to drop. And I'm like, what?

Shamil Malachiyev: And what part of the overall pre-seed investment was he?

Clara Bernardes: It was a follower investor. But it wasn't one of those with the smaller pieces of the pie; it was a respectable piece of the investment round. And I looked at Pedro, and I remember, like, what? We're literally at the airport, an hour and a half away from boarding, going to Germany to celebrate something that is meant to be signed in a couple of hours, and this guy calls you and says he wants to drop. He provided his reasons, his rationale. That investor had come highly recommended by other investment funds, by other VCs. And I say "he", because in my language investor is a masculine noun; he may or may not be a male. And I remember thinking, what the hell is happening? Is this a normality in this world? I was freaking out, and Pedro was like, okay, we need to find a way.

Immediately, we passed through security, and we were almost kicked out of the airport, because security was getting pissed at us for being on our phones trying to fix the situation. The security guy was like, you cannot be on your phone. And we were like, there's nothing saying we cannot be on our phones, we're still 20 people away from actually going through the machine. But: no, you cannot be on your phone. Okay, amazing, but I really need to be on my phone right now. So we kind of hid ourselves and continued our calls, and then we saw the security guy coming back, and we're like, okay, let's not get into trouble.

We passed security, and from that point until we boarded the plane, we called all of our investors. We called, first and foremost, our lead investors. We spoke about what happened, and one of our lead investors said: okay, we'll cover that investor's part.

And this is also to bring awareness to how important it is to pick your investors, and not just take anyone's money just because. Just because it's money, don't take it. It's always important to see what's the relevance, what's the hands-on that that investor will have, what's the trust you'll be able to have with them, and what kind of relationship you'll want, and feel, before even signing the funding agreement, that you want to have with them in a year's time. Because in a year's time you might be raising another round. Will you want them to have pro rata? Will you go to them to speak about the potential new round? Will they be the right person to support you with the raise of a new round? All of these things. And we were very, very lucky, and very thankful, because both of these co-lead investors gave us enormous support. They also kind of put that investor on the blacklist, like, what the hell?

And mind you, this was the morning of. It was mind-blowing to me. First-time founder; Pedro had already had this kind of experience, and I think it was easier for him to deal with the emotions, to deal with the panic itself. Because it is panic. It's absolute panic.

Shamil Malachiyev: You were thinking, okay, this one dropped, maybe another one's going to drop now. Maybe it's a standard thing that everybody drops at the last minute.

Clara Bernardes: Yeah, but at that point in time we already had all of the agreements closed, all of the percentages, the final amount. Because, and I don't have to explain this to you, we had the set amount for the round, and if it gets lower, it has implications for our valuation. It's a snowball. So Pedro was composed and poised, and I was like, what? I was this close to going on a rampage and just losing my mind, and Pedro was like, don't worry, we'll be able to go around it. And we did. This was September last year. And after that we raised the seed round, which thankfully went very smoothly, with no surprises.

But it really opened my eyes. We were fortunate to have a lot of investors and to be able to pick and select the ones we actually wanted, not that we didn't want to work with the rest, but the ones that would bring added value to the board and to the overall round. And we had chosen that investor over someone else. Obviously that was a huge mistake, but at the same time, it was eye-opening for me. Money just because it's money is not worth it sometimes. Sometimes it's better for you to have fewer investors, be able to negotiate your round, be able to negotiate your valuation. Instead of closing the round now, close the round in a month, if you're able to, obviously, because you might not have the runway for it, but in an ideal world, rather than having to rush to pick investors that might be a headache a year down the line.

So yeah, that's what happened. We had this very fun situation, and we were able to find a way to fix it before we boarded the plane. By the time we landed in Munich, the situation was with the lawyers, to redact papers, to rewrite papers. And by the time we got to Oktoberfest the next day, we had everything signed and we were able to celebrate. I do realize there might be, and there will be, a lot of experiences that don't have this happy ending, with other founders and other rounds being raised, and that's really unfortunate. It only tells us founders, and should tell investors, how important it is to pick the right people to work with, from both sides. So that was a fun one.

Shamil Malachiyev: And it's just so easy to go for the first money you get offered. Thinking back to when we were young, early twenties, working on something for the first time: you have a lot of pressure from your friends, from your parents, who are like, get a job, get something stable. And you're like, no, I'm going to risk it, this is going to work. And then you start fundraising, your first time, you're young, you're pitching, you have your rainbow glasses on, like, this is going to be a unicorn in two years. And after a while, one of the investors says, okay, I'm ready to run with you. And most people just say, okay, let's do it. They're giving money, and you have a chance to tell everyone, look, somebody believed in me, I've raised some money. What would you advise? What are the red flags those founders should be looking for when picking an investor to go with, and what is the value-add you were looking for in investors, to prioritize them?

Clara Bernardes: The red flags are actually really hard to get. I can tell you, from that experience: we did not see one red flag. Before that telephone call, we did not see or experience any red flag from anyone on that investor's team. It was a shock. We were like, haha, April Fools in September. But no, it was an actual thing.

The red flags are really hard to find, but I would say: like I was saying before, try to imagine what kind of support you would want from the investors you're getting, what kind of knowledge. And that also goes to the other part of your question, the added value, which is the knowledge. Do they have more companies in your space in their portfolio? Are they able to help with advisors, for example? If not, are they themselves able to provide me with practical, real-world advice, should I need it? Will they be people that will listen to me if I come to a point in the company, even if I still have a lot of runway, where, to move from just paying the fund back to a unicorn, I should raise X? Will they listen to me, or will they just focus on getting their money back and paying the entire fund?

So: get investors that believe in you and in your mission, rather than just believing you can make it. Because believing you can make it, if you have a good product and there is a market for it, it's really hard not to make something, to be fair. You can make it a little less, or you can make it a lot more, but you will make something out of it, if it's a good product fit. So it's easy to believe in you. But it's different to believe in you and actually believe in the product, in what it can be, not what it is right now.

And that goes towards the added value. It was really important for us to get people that had their heads in the right place, that had their hearts in the right place, that were able to help us, support us with questions, with moving within the space. Because we're raising in a medtech space, in a very traditional industry; the pharma industry is one of the most traditional ones in the world. They like to do this like this. And for them to move from this to that might take a lot of time. So: will they be able to help us navigate the industry? Will they have that long-term vision to understand what it might take to go from here to here? Not without asking questions. I want those questions. I want all of those questions, because those are the moments where, in discussing, in brainstorming, you actually get to the point where you're like, eureka, that makes so much sense, why haven't I thought of it before? Well, that's why they exist.

Red flags are really hard to get. But looking back, and looking back while I was doing all of this speech: in a way, like what you were describing, when it's too fast, too quick, too easy... And now I'm speaking against one of our own co-investors, because we literally went from first contact to term sheet in about a week, seven, eight days I think. But also go with your gut feeling. There's something about it: when you speak with them, it might or might not make sense. You are able to tell from the start whether they will be a good fit, whether they will be able to help you, and you're able to get that from the way they speak with you during their DD. At least that's been my experience. During DDs they're always either very formal or informal, or they can be informal while still asking the right questions. If they're asking the right questions with me, I know they'll ask the right questions with anyone else. And when it's just, I'm doing my DD to understand if you're worthy of my money, it's completely different from, I'm doing my DD to see if we're a good fit to work together for the next X amount of years.

Because, like you were saying, when you set up a company, you don't set it up thinking, let's do this for a year and then next year I'll change business. I mean, you can, there's nothing wrong with it, but...

Shamil Malachiyev: Investors might not like that.

Clara Bernardes: You know, it's one of those things where I think investors might think like talent-acquisition people in that way. You might be a serial founder, and it's great to be a serial founder when there's mission, there's vision, there's purpose behind whatever it is that you're founding, and you continue to found because you did so great, you exited, and now you're building something new because you just don't like to rest. You continue to bring something new and good to the world. That's completely different from creating something and then, yeah, it didn't work, what's next?

But it's really hard. And we were very lucky, we are still very lucky, with our seed round, with our pre-seed round as well. We have great investors. They provide support, they're open, they listen. And they are also listened to, just in case anyone's wondering. We also listen a lot; they're investors, they've been working in the space for a while, and we don't know everything. There's nothing wrong in discussing and brainstorming. The best ideas come from discussions, right?

Shamil Malachiyev: And what are you personally most excited about for the next five to ten years?

Clara Bernardes: Well, I would be a liar if I said that I'm not incredibly excited to see how what we're doing will, in a way, implode the industry from within, from the inside. Sorry. Because I've been working in this industry for so long, and I've seen and been through so many pains. I've seen so many studies go wrong because someone took a wrong turn and there was no one else to check. And I've also experienced them with Pedro's dad. And not only that: I've had friends, and friends of friends, that reached out because someone in their family, their kids, whoever, has an orphan disease and needs help, and can you help?

I'm so excited for the moment when the industry just refers to us as the standard of quality and automation for those exact things. I cannot wait for the moment where I'm like, ha, five years ago this would have taken me a week to do, and I did it in 20 minutes. And I'm excited for what that means in practicality, what all of this speed, all of this automation, all of this changing of scenery in the industry means for research, and what it means for patients. Because that's really what we want, right? That a patient, instead of having to wait 11 years to even see something on the market, and still having to pay a ton of money for it, is able to get it in six years, and maybe even before.

Because obviously, if you are a pharma company, the less you spend to build something, the less you can charge for it while keeping your margin. Sometimes when we speak with people, they have a hard time understanding how, so let's do this: if it takes me $20 to build this really big Apple charger, I'll have to sell it for $80, and I think it's even more expensive now. If it only takes me $5 to build it, then I can charge 10, well, 12 bucks, and still have more or less the same percentage in profit. And 12 bucks is affordable for...

Shamil Malachiyev: A lot more people.

Clara Bernardes: Probably a lot more people. And especially in the US, with all of the insurance situations that we see, it's very unfortunate that a lot of people do not have access to proper treatments, to proper healthcare. It's exciting to be working on something that can be a solution for not only one problem, but several problems. And the bigger it gets, the more problems you will solve. Even if you don't go from a hundred problems to a million problems, even if it's just from a hundred to five hundred, those five hundred will probably be much bigger problems, and I'm fine with that. Because if I can get other families what we were able to get Pedro's dad, which was 15 more months of life, to come back to Portugal, to say bye, to spend time with us, to meet our, well, now he's not a puppy anymore, but our puppy dog that we had at the time, to be able to celebrate another birthday... I mean, who in their right mind would say no, you know?

That's what gets me really excited, and that's what gets me out of bed on those days we were speaking about before, when I really, really wish I could just stay a little bit longer. That's it. In 10 years, I want to look back, and I might not even be involved with Biorce anymore, but I would love to just hear someone say, yeah, I'm going to use Biorce to QA my entire study before submitting it. Reading about it, and seeing the world impact that we're working to get.

Shamil Malachiyev: And we all want to live to 120, 130. We all think it will take some amount of time, and hopefully with Biorce that time comes quicker, and with other efforts, like DeepMind with AlphaFold.

Clara Bernardes: No promises! But yes, there are a lot of startups working on that, on getting to 120. Still healthy, I agree. At 120 we might get to the point of, you know those days where I wanted to sleep a little bit later? Maybe they've come.

Shamil Malachiyev: I think 120 is going to be enough. Mars is going to be the next level: after 120 you can just go to Mars, start anew and have another 200 years. Clara, I want to thank you so much for coming to the show, bringing your most real and authentic self, and so many stories that are going to be incredibly useful to all of the listeners. I want to wish you, from the podcast, all the best for Biorce. We'll be rooting for you and following your progress. Thank you for taking the time.

Clara Bernardes: Thank you. Thank you very much for the invitation. Once again, it was an absolute pleasure. I know it was more giggling than serious at times, but I think that's sometimes also needed. I do hope that some of this might be helpful for a lot of people out there, and curious for some founders. So again, thank you very much. I'll definitely continue to keep a close eye on the podcast and everything that you do. Thank you so much, Shamil. It was a real pleasure to be here.

Shamil Malachiyev: Thanks, Clara.