Elizabeth Iorns at Female Founders Conference 2014

Founder and Company Profile

• Dr. Elizabeth Irons, a former breast cancer researcher and assistant professor at the University of Miami, founded Science Exchange after recognizing inefficiencies in academic research collaboration.
• Science Exchange operates as a global marketplace connecting researchers with over 800 pre-vetted labs, including major institutions like Harvard, Duke, UCLA, and Georgetown, as well as biotech companies and incubators.
• Dr. Irons was a member of the Summer 2011 Y Combinator batch.
• The platform's core function is to allow researchers to order specific experiments from labs worldwide, addressing the reality that single labs can no longer perform all necessary technical expertise and instrumentation internally.

Strategic Lessons Learned

• Solve Your Own Problem: Founders should target issues they personally experience, as this fosters deep domain understanding and creates a compelling narrative for investors and employees.
• Validate Real Needs: Founders must move beyond self-identification of problems to conduct market research, analyze the competitive landscape, and launch minimal viable products (MVPs) to verify that a solution addresses a genuine, widespread need.
• Team Composition: Successful teams require individuals who share the founder's vision rather than just technical skills; recruiting should involve seeking diverse skill sets outside the founder's immediate professional network.
• Cultural Foundations: Company values must be established early to ensure retention and alignment; Science Exchange utilizes the acronym "FORCE" (Fearless, Open, Respectful, Curious, Entrepreneurial) and rewards employees monthly for embodying these traits.
• Advisors and Investors: Investors should be selected for shared values and vision, described by Irons as "employees you can never fire."
  • Science Exchange's board includes Andy Wiseman of Union Square Ventures, who has been instrumental in guiding company growth and culture.
• Execution Framework: The company employs a quarterly planning cycle combined with a two-week agile sprint cycle for both product and business teams to maintain momentum and transparency.
  • Daily stand-ups are used to track progress and address blockers quickly.
• Strategic Focus: To grow effectively, the company limits its scope to core competencies, outsourcing non-essential functions (e.g., payment processing, hosting, A/B testing) to a specialized "startup stack."
• User Acquisition Strategy: The firm prioritizes "doing things that don't scale" to learn and build trust, specifically by:
  • Directly visiting and deeply vetting the first 1,000 labs to ensure high-quality expertise and infrastructure.
  • Providing exceptional customer support and user interfaces, a significant differentiator in the science sector where these are often neglected.
• Resilience: Founders must persist through early setbacks, such as Science Exchange's initial branding as the "eBay for science," which alienated the academic community and required a prolonged effort to demonstrate the founders' scientific credibility.

Key Takeaways

• The primary causes of startup failure are identified as running out of capital or quitting; persistence is critical to overcoming market skepticism.
• Science Exchange successfully pivoted its narrative from an external tech solution to a scientist-led initiative focused on improving research efficiency and quality.