🧬 From Expat Kid to Founder: Science, Curiosity & the Long Road to Conviction | Alex Telford (1/4)

In part four, Alex Telford, founder of Convoke, covers the platform architecture and roadmap. He walks through Convoke's modular system—building validated structured datasets from trial registries, regulatory filings, and patents, then stitching them with workflow tools for competitive intelligence and document generation. He breaks down how pharma and biotech customers engage differently, why an "everything app" is a trap, and how Convoke is moving from reactive data storage toward proactive, predictive intelligence.

In this episode, Jon Chee sits down with Alex Telford, founder of Convoke, to examine why large pharma resists AI transformation. Drawing on seven years at Charles River Associates, Alex maps the coordination tax of siloed orgs, the tacit knowledge lost when experts retire, and why software efficiency is the wrong axis to compete on. His frame: factory electrification — the gains don't arrive until you redesign the whole org around the technology.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Jon Chee sits down with Alex Telford, founder of Convoke, who spent nearly seven years in biopharma strategy consulting before what he calls "AI psychosis" set him on a different path. Alex traces the arc from biochemistry at Bristol and synthetic biology at UCL to discovering consulting existed only after graduating, joining a boutique Swiss firm two weeks before it was acquired, and learning one core lesson: clients want a recommendation to push back on, not a data dump.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Jon Chee sits down with Alex Telford, founder of Convoke, who raised $8.6 million to build the AI-native operating system for biopharma. Part one traces his path from an expat childhood across Switzerland, Germany, and Spain — shaped by international schools, disappearing friendships, and a New Scientist subscription — through biochemistry at Bristol and into a synthetic biology master's at UCL that promised biological engineering and delivered toggle switches.

In this episode, Jon Chee sits down with Sabrina Johnson, President and CEO of DARÉ Bioscience, to unpack the founding arc of a company built on a singular conviction: women's health is not a niche. Sabrina explains the choice to go public via reverse merger in 2017 to access capital in a space where only 1% of private healthcare investment funds women-specific conditions, and breaks down the groomed trail philosophy behind XACIATO, DARE to PLAY Sildenafil Cream, a pivotal Phase 3 contraceptive, and an ARPA-H-funded HPV treatment—all with 25 people and $75M+ in non-dilutive funding.

In this episode, Jon Chee continues with Sabrina Johnson, DARÉ Bioscience CEO, tracing 13 years at Cypress Bioscience — from a hallway eavesdrop that earned her an FDA panel seat, to VP of Marketing, an "interim" CFO role held for nearly a decade, and COO. She covers a fibromyalgia Phase 3 that missed at p=0.058, the disclosure gap, and a hostile takeover that forced the sale — then shares the Monday resignation and elevator pitch that led to founding DARÉ.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Jon Chee continues his conversation with Sabrina Johnson, President and CEO of DARÉ Bioscience. Sabrina traces her path from a name-tag encounter that led her to Advanced Tissue Sciences to joining Cypress Bioscience in 1998. She unpacks pharmaceutical marketing regulation, the medical-regulatory-legal review process, and the gray zone of compounded GLP-1s — including DARÉ's decision to make its sildenafil cream available via 503B rather than leave women without a validated option.

In this episode, Jon Chee sits down with Sabrina Johnson, President and CEO of Daré Bioscience, a Nasdaq-listed biopharma advancing women's reproductive health. Daré's team of 25 executes the groomed trail approach — matching therapeutic gaps to FDA-approved actives — with a non-hormonal contraceptive in pivotal Phase 3 and $75M+ in non-dilutive funding from the Gates Foundation, NIH, and ARPA-H.

Martin Brenner, CEO & CSO of iBio, closes out his three-part conversation with Jon Chee by tracing the arc from Stoke Therapeutics to Recursion to Phenex — and into the reinvented iBio. Martin unpacks the resilience required when nothing works, the line-of-sight portfolio system he built to run 100 programs with 20 biologists, and how a team of opposites at Phenex became the most effective R&D unit of his career. He then dives deep into iBio's current antibody discovery platform — epitope steering, masked antibodies, and StableCube — and shares an unfiltered look at what it's really like to run a NYSE-listed micro-cap biotech.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Jon Chee continues his conversation with Martin Brenner, CEO and Chief Scientific Officer of iBio, tracing his career through Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Merck. From re-engaging demoralized scientists after layoffs to a Moderna encounter when the company was just eight people strong, Martin offers a rare insider view of what it actually takes to drive innovation from within Big Pharma.