The Biotech Startups Podcast

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Caitlyn Krebs, co-founder and CEO of Nalu Bio, traces her journey from tagging endangered sea turtles on the Big Island of Hawaii to leading an AI-powered company designing novel cannabinoid-inspired small molecules for pain, inflammation, endometriosis, and metabolic disease. She reflects on being humbled at Brown University, where she fell in love with data analysis while studying leptin and early obesity science, then recounts jumping into the Bay Area’s dot-com boom as the third employee at a startup before, at just 27, taking the helm of BayBio and managing a 26-person board of biotech leaders—along the way crossing paths with a 20-year-old Stanford dropout named Elizabeth Holmes.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Siren Biotechnology CEO & Founder, Nicole Paulk unpacks why being a first-time female technical academic founder CEO — "the worst possible thing you could be" — was actually the best CEO training imaginable. She breaks down how her scrappy academic mindset stretched a $6M seed round across three and a half years, why going all-in on unglamorous CMC optimization was Siren Biotechnology's most important early decision, and why capital efficiency is a company-defining mindset, not just a financial strategy. Nicole also opens up about the loneliness of the founder CEO role, the toxic culture of "competitive complaining" at industry meetups, and the profound weight of Siren's recent FDA IND clearance — and what it means to be on the verge of dosing the very first brain cancer patient at UCSF.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Nicole Paulk recounts her unlikely evolution from frustrated academic to biotech founder — driven by years of watching gene therapy companies wastefully rebuild the same tech stack from scratch, a pandemic lockout that barred her from her own UCSF lab, and a sneaky incorporation scheme that was less grand vision, more workaround to get back to the bench. She shares how a frantic three-day cancer grant, a fever-dreamed logo, and a Best Startup win at UCSF's entrepreneurship course led to a $6,000,000 Founders Fund seed with no board attached, and how Siren's unconventional early bet on unglamorous CMC manufacturing optimization — paired with years of deliberate stealth — became the company's most powerful and defensible competitive advantage.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, we continue founder, CEO, and president of Siren Biotechnology, Nicole Paulk's journey from small-town farm kid to pioneering gene therapy scientist. Nicole recounts how a Craigslist ad landed her in the lab of one of the most celebrated stem cell scientists in the country, Markus Grompe — blissfully unaware of his fame, she spent months calling him "Marky Mark," planting whoopee cushions under his chair, and filling donut holes with Sriracha, only to discover he was the stem cell adviser to the President of the United States. She reflects on her PhD years as the "golden, pure, best days" of her scientific life, then contrasts that with the culture shock of Stanford's relentless postdoc hustle, a world of constant CV-optimization and pressure to pursue academia at all costs. Nicole shares how landing a coveted K01 grant gave her the credentials to walk through any university door she wanted, eventually bringing her to UCSF just nine months before COVID would turn everything upside down.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, we sit down with Nicole Paulk, founder, CEO, and president of SIREN Biotechnology, a company pioneering universal AAV immunogene therapy to fight solid tumor cancers. Nicole takes us back to her roots — a scrappy, off-the-grid upbringing in the Pacific Northwest where a lumberjack dad raised her like a son and sports were everything, until recurring shoulder injuries ended her collegiate volleyball career at 18 and triggered her first identity crisis. She walks us through the hustle that followed; swim lessons, kickboxing classes, deli shifts, and crabbing in Puget Sound just to survive, and how she stumbled into science not out of passion, but out of a need for a paycheck at a small ag school. A summer treating patients in Kenya and Tanzania convinced her that clinical medicine wasn't her path, and one offhand comment from her chemistry professor set the entire trajectory of her scientific career in motion.