🧬 Product Thinking, Scientific Progress, & the Work of Building | Nathan Clark Rerelease (2/4)

🧬 The Biotech Startups Podcast is powered by Excedr: helping life science startups accelerate R&D and commercialization with founder-friendly equipment leasing. Skip the upfront costs, stay lean, and focus on breakthrough science.

As a TBSP listener, you can get exclusive perks through Excedr's partner network: special savings, promotions, and more. Explore these offers today: https://www.excedr.com/partners.

“The formative stages of a pre-seed startup are like no code allowed.”

Nathan Clark explains why he left Goldman Sachs for a technology-focused role at Affirm, where he worked across capital markets and product management. He discusses how financial mechanics carried over into fintech, while working with software engineers pulled him deeper into systems, data, and debugging.

The conversation then turns to product management. Nathan describes the discipline as understanding why a product should exist, grounding decisions in user needs, and translating research into what a team builds. His advice for early-stage founders is direct: stop coding until they've done enough customer research to understand the problem.

Nathan also reflects on the difficulty of measuring willingness to pay, the decision to leave Affirm, and his frustration with the slow pace of scientific progress. He explains why that frustration led him toward biology and Benchling, including an early attempt to build a plasmid editor, and why improving science requires more than simply putting money into the system.

Key Topics Covered:

If you enjoy The Biotech Startups Podcast, please consider subscribing, leaving a review, or sharing it with your friends. Thanks for listening.

Subscribe to the Podcast:

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-biotech-startups-podcast/id1679591994

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2PSL162R2s0zOwU5913Zv4

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thebiotechstartupspodcast

Website: https://www.thebiotechstartupspodcast.com/

Find our guest, Nathan Clark, at these links:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathan-clark-4b850134/

Website: https://ganymede.bio/

Find our host, Jon Chee, at these links:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonchee/

Learn more about Excedr:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/excedr/

Website: https://www.excedr.com/

Intro/Outro music:

OkKyojin: https://flow.page/kyojin

Resources & Articles:

Affirm: https://www.affirm.com/

ProductPlan, What Is Product Management?: https://www.productplan.com/learn/what-is-product-management/

National Center for Biotechnology Information, Drug Development: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK216501/

Benchling: https://www.benchling.com/

SnapGene: https://www.snapgene.com/

Machine Intelligence Research Institute: https://intelligence.org/

Companies, Universities, & People Mentioned:

Goldman Sachs: https://www.goldmansachs.com/

Affirm: https://www.affirm.com/

PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/

Max Levchin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/max-levchin/

Benchling: https://www.benchling.com/

SnapGene: https://www.snapgene.com/

Machine Intelligence Research Institute: https://intelligence.org/

Ray Kurzweil: https://www.kurzweilai.net/

Patrick Collison: https://patrickcollison.com/

00:00 Intro

02:04 The Finance Side

02:50 Finding a Technology-Focused Role

03:17 Capital Markets at Affirm

07:14 Explaining Point-of-Sale Loans

08:09 Moving Into Product Management

09:23 The Deep Mechanics of Loans

09:31 Data Products and Infrastructure

11:18 What Product Management Means

12:20 No Code Allowed

16:39 Testing Willingness to Pay

19:27 Leaving Affirm

21:13 The Pace of Scientific Progress

21:30 Why Biology?

25:13 Benchling and the Plasmid Editor

26:38 Outro

The Biotech Startups Podcast gives you a front-row seat to the business and science of building a biotech. Hosted by Jon Chee, CEO of Excedr, the show features honest conversations with founders, execs, and investors about their work, their companies, and how they got there. From scientific breakthroughs to startup lessons, each episode explores what it really takes to grow a life science company—from pre-seed to IPO.