So you climb into caves as a hobby.

Yes, we find holes in the ground. And then I always did that. Explore them. And it kind of feels like maybe what Neil Armstrong felt like when he first stepped foot on.

That's Cindy Woo, the founder of Jelly Labs on Maureen Taylor, and this is think like a founder. Cindy founded Jelly Labs as a way to share knowledge, data and ideas in the scientific community. As I've gotten to know Cindy over the years, what always amazes me is her drive drive is the life blood of a founder. It's not really something you can just pick up or learn. You have to come out of the womb being mission driven. The more drive you have, the more you reach for the impossible. And Cindy truly believes in achieving anything. If someone tells her it can't be or won't be done, that only seems to motivate her more to find a way to prove them wrong. Cindy fell into a career in immunology, as she says by chance,

I started working in immunology when I waas 21 maybe maybe 20. I had applied to a grant or a scholarship funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that was specifically designed for undergrads that didn't have any experience in science. And I applied and they said, Okay will fund you and 19 other kids at the time. So I went around the university and just talked to professors about different kinds of research projects, and I ended up working in this immunology lab where our goal was to design a universal vaccine that could essentially cure anything.

It may sound like science fiction, but the very fact that it seemed impossible is what drew Cindy to the project in the first place. And it may not be as far fetched

as we think I can take out your white blood cells and teach it that this is cancer. Teach it that this is tuberculosis and put it back into your body and your body will recognize it as foreign and you'll be immune and headed to go. I ended up publishing one paper out of that project and that technology, not the technology that we developed. That technology is used by a few biotech companies, one that develops a prostate cancer immunotherapy. So this is coming. It's a reality It's just very

expensive. Cindy's work has always steered towards the improbable. She told me about a project she worked on for the U. S military that aimed to cure anthrax in a very unconventional way. And it started with, of all things, free pizza.

So me and my co founder, Denny, we would always go to these free pizza events because, as undergrads, you always looking for free pizza. So Denny and I decided to join this team of biology programmers, and we participated in the largest synthetic biology competition that happens at M I. T. Every year called I Jem. And the project that we presented was we use a grant from the U. S. Army to design a Andrex therapeutic using a protein folding video game

using video game elements outside of a normal gaming context is called Gamification. Here, Cindy tells us more about how it works.

There's a video game called Foldit that's designed by a computer science and biochemistry team at the University of Washington, where anyone can go online and play this game. How it works is you can visualize that protein and change out different parts of it to change the functionality and how we used that game is We took a specific protein from anthrax and changed out different amino acids in that protein to try to create this new reaction. And we took 87 of those models that we created and then tested them in real life in the lab, and two of them were. That's incredible. I think the most surprising thing was that the person that did most of the work ended up being my little brother, who was only 18 years old at the time. That experience, specifically experience of my brother publishing a peer reviewed scientific article in the Journal of Biological Chemistry as an 18 year old, made me question whether or not you have to get a PhD to do real science. And that influenced US starting experiment, which is a crowdfunding platform for scientific research that allows anybody anywhere with a good idea to control their own destiny. If you have an idea, you don't have to wait for people to say yes or wait for people to tell you that you're ready. You can present it online and people contribute money to you. And if you get enough money than you do the work and you share the process and the research with the world.

Cindy started experiment in 2012 and has been working on it for eight years. As is the case with any start up with any business, there were plenty of ups and downs.

We went from two kids working in a research lab to teaching ourselves, had a code and building a website, then not really knowing what we were doing. A year later, we raised $1.3 million in tender is and then hired a bunch of people. And I think throughout the entire process, I think every day I woke up and I was like, I have no idea what I'm doing. When we first started experiment, everyone was like, This will never work. No one is ever gonna give money to random strangers on the Internet. I mean, there's not much I can say to them directly that would change their minds. I usually just listen to what they have to say, but we try to change their minds in other ways by showing that they're wrong using real world examples. And I think the only way that you can convince people otherwise is you build it and then you show them that it's actually happening. So that's our strategy.

Cindy and her co founder, Denny, have been on quite the winding road they were in New York. Then they went to Seattle to San Francisco, and now they're both living in Hawaii. She's been there only a few months, But even in that amount of time, the island thinking has made its mark on her.

It's a really special place, and I think being in Hawaii helps me make our software kinder. Why? Because everyone in Hawaii is kind. It's almost like if you don't have aloha spirit, people will get mad at you or

call you on it. Cindy tries to imbue the software she helps create with Aloha Spirit. That's just her way. Maybe it doesn't make sense to everybody, but that's because it's visionary. It takes passion to be like that, and Cindy's had passion since she was just a kid. I asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, and she said, I don't know, because she just wanted to go wherever her drive took her, for example, like exploring caves so you climb into caves as a hobby?

Yes, we mined holes in the ground, and then I always did that. Explore them. You, like, go into this hole in the ground, and then you travel for miles and miles and miles. And then you come across this fork in the road and you talk to the people with you, usually 3 to 4 people and everyone's like This isn't on the map. So then we nominate one person. Let's just say that prisons me to go explore that route and you go in there and there's no footsteps. There's nothing. And so I like, might be the first person to have ever stepped foot in that route. And it kind of feels like maybe what Neil Armstrong felt like when he first stepped foot on,

and actually, how you live every single day because you're trying to do something that nobody has ever done before. So your hobby is a little bit of a physical metaphor to your whole life. I only really thought about it that way until just now I thought you were just delightfully crazy. But having that as a hobby is definitely parallel to what you're doing in your

work? I think so. I've noticed more perils recently as well.

You've been through the ups and the downs and continue. And what is it that keeps you going?

I don't know if there's anything that keeps me working on. It's almost like I have to. So one of

the things that as a founder myself, not nearly like you in science, I so admire what you and Denny are doing. One of the things that I've recognized is sometimes founders are like artists. They can't help it. And that's what you

just said. I feel like there's this thing inside of me that has to get painted. But I am not a painter, so it gets painted as a website. I feel like there's this. There's this alternate universe that exists, and I know that it's better. But other people don't know that it can exist. And so the only way for me to convince other people that this alternative universe is better is I have to make it with my friends.

That's what gets you up in the morning. That's a tall order, and that's a lot. Do you ever doubt yourself every day, How do you get over that? And how do you get to think of founders of some kid who has an idea or a dream or that feeling of a paintbrush and not knowing what they're painting? How do you get through people telling you know when it can't work and not believing you?

You draw the first line. I think it gets easier over time because the first time someone said, no, you disagree, and then you make the thing and then they're wrong. And then the second time someone says no, you do it again and then they're wrong again. And so you learn this pattern of Yes, everyone says no or everyone says it can't be done, but then it gets done. So then you realize anything can be done. That's something that I'll learn very slowly is to trust myself.

And you do. Now.

I trust myself, but I don't necessarily think other people should always trust me. Why's that? I don't always believe in rules, but rules are there for a reason, especially

legal rules. Oh, that's right. You are a little bit of a revolutionary, aren't you? But anybody who's trying to do something out of the box. You're not doing anything that hurts somebody. You're not doing bodily harm or stealing from anybody but to go past borders of the nose. And what is known isn't that part of discovery and part of doing something that hasn't been done before?

Yes, When you think of rules, all rules are made by humans, and then the rules get modified by future humans. So if the rules today are not serving us, then us as humans can modify them to be something

else that does serve us. So when you think of that cause that'll ring true with a lot of people listening. What's a rule that that you have broken that has been modified or that you think is going to be modified?

The obvious one is that anyone should be able to read any research paper that's publicly available at any time, and there shouldn't be. These told roads that exist, like knowledge isn't owned by somebody, isn't owned by our corporation. But I

think a lot of people would disagree with that. But just like the democratization of information which everyone thought was wacky, which you're saying is, knowledge should be open as well, it's open versus locked away. Is

that right? I think the problematic thing is that there are people and organizations seeking rent on knowledge for personal gain,

a nest richer against. Yes. Do people see that you're right? Because the idea of democratizing information to was very negative people were like, No, there's no way for similar reasons. A lot of people will

tell me privately that they agree with me but aren't ready to say it publicly. There are also people that disagree with me, but I don't think they necessarily disagree with the idea of knowledge being open. They just don't know how we get there is. You can't just blow everything up and start over. You have to chart a path to this new world, but it isn't my job. It's a job that can only be done if we work collectively as a scientific community.

Cindy does not believe that you have to pay your dues before your ideas can get out there. That was the inspiration behind experiment. But as the years went on, Cindy had to make a difficult decision. Stepping away from experiment

so I chose is definitely from experiment about a year ago, and at that point we had maybe like 8 to 10 profitable months. So that doesn't mean we're, like, extremely profitable. But the platform was making more money than it spends. And I think that was largely a choice that we made that was encouraged by both you and my co founder. I think both of you tried to encourage me to just make a grocery store before you try to make anything bigger. And I'm really grateful that we did that, because after we did that, I realized that experiment now has the freedom to be whatever it wants to be. And so we can now let it run for a very, very long time without very much of my involvement. But

your dream. Waas to open source science, just like your brother that no matter what, you don't need a PhD to have an idea and to be able to bring it to fruition is your vision, right? I mean, that's what you believe in. Yes, in making science equitable and all of the things that you're up against Europe against the academic world, pharmaceutical companies, regulations, law, patents. All of these things are set up to protect people, but also to make it really, really hard to get someone's idea

out there. I don't think it's hard to get your ideas out there because you could post a block Post online. But a Block post isn't respected by the scientific community. What's respected by the scientific community is a version of a block post that is pure reviewed by other scientists that are qualified. And I think that's what separates science from all the other content that is online. And it's extremely difficult for someone outside of academia to published in a peer reviewed journal.

Academic institutions have a tremendous amount of credibility. The research and design and rigor of the process is what gives validity to the findings. Why does she feel that academic institutions are strict?

That's because academic institutions were created and we didn't have the Internet. Any organization that was built in a time where we didn't have certain technologies have certain quirks and strength and flaws, and the academic institution itself hazard inhabits that just aren't compatible with the Internet. There is a hesitancy to letting people advance as fast as their potential allows them. It's almost like you have to do your time before you can do your best

work. Her new startup, Jelly Labs, allows people to access decentralized scientific content online. Kind of like a get hub for science. It's a vision that pulls from all her past experience everything that's influenced her or shifted her perspective over time.

This idea that we're working on, we're spending all of our hours working on now was an idea that we came up with the year that we started experiment. And it was inspired by my experience of quitting my job in the lab, not being finished with my research project and giving all my notes over to my professor knowing that no one could reproduce my work. And even I today if I looked at those notes, could not reproduce what I had achieved. That's not an uncommon problem in science, and because it's not an uncommon problem, we waste a bunch of time and a bunch of money producing half big projects and not passing the baton to the next scientist that's coming along. So what we're doing now is building a collaboration tool for scientists to keep track of all their stuff privately so that they can pass the baton off to the next person or to their future self, to be able to reproduce the work and start exactly where the last person left off.

If you were to give a message and say, This is a platform and the scientific world was listening to you, what would your message me

that nothing ever changes from the top down? It always changes from the bottom up. And so if you are an individual voice and you feel like you're one voice doesn't matter. It does, and we're only going to see change if everyone speaks up or everyone changes their behavior.

That sense of unity is what defines Cindy's mission. She's committed to it, and more importantly, it fulfills her. Near the end of our conversation, she shared a remarkable story with me about surfing and how it made her realize that contentment she has with

her life. So I started surfing because my co founder, Denny, really likes to serve, and every time I go out, I get tumbled by the waves, and this moment where I feel like this might be my last moment on this planet, and it's this calming feeling of Oh, maybe it's okay, I think. Ever since I turned 18 I've always felt like Cindy, like if you died tomorrow, it will be okay. And it's not because I want to die, but it's because I feel like I've lived a full life. But if there's more time left for me, that's also

exciting. And so then I asked Cindy, If she's not afraid to die, then what is her biggest fear?

I think my biggest fear is that my life wasn't meaningful to someone somewhere on some timeline.

I've known you now for three years, and I'm very committed to your mission and to you as a person. So I am so grateful for you being on the program, talking about some of the things that you're going through and what you're trying to dio, and I'm sure that people listening will respect and want to know more. So until next time, Aloha. Mahalo. That was Cindy Woo, co founder of Jelly Labs. She and her co founder they have a mission trying to provide scientists with a platform to share ideas, experiments and data. This is to make it easier for their work to advance and succeed next time on think like a founder. Greg Co Burger founder and CEO of Read Me, tells us about the difference between a CEO and founder, his inspiration from Disney and how his ideal role is Chief Winds E. Officer All Maureen Taylor.

And this is think like a factor. Thanks for listening. Think like a founder is produced by S. N. P Communications in San Francisco, California Learn more by visiting us at S n p net dot com or connectors me, Maureen Taylor on Linked in to continue the conversation. They're serious Producer His Rushing Hunt Sound Design by Mark Greene. Creative producer Eli Shell. Content and Scripting by Mike Sullivan. Production coordination. Natasha Thomas Thanks also to Selina for Siani Shell, John Hughes and Ren Vera. This is think like a founder.