A Startup Story on How to Manage Rapid Growth
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Startup Success, the podcast for startup founders and investors. Here you'll find stories of success from others in the trenches as they work to scale some of the fastest growing startups in the world. Stories that will help you in your own journey. Startup Success starts now.
Welcome to Startup Success. Today we have Oriana Papine Zogbi in studio, who is the founder and CEO of AOA. Welcome. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk to you. Your company is doing something pretty remarkable with finding detecting ovarian cancer earlier, which is key, and we'll get into that in a little bit.
What is Oriana Papin‑Zoghbi’s background and how did it lead to founding AOA?
But if you wouldn't mind kind of walking us through your background and setting the stage and what led to the founding, I think that would be really interesting. Yeah, absolutely. I started my career right outside of college in an early stage women's health company before they were called women's health companies, diagnostic startup working on a test to be able to diagnose premature rupture of fetal membranes, basically when a woman's water breaks too early in pregnancy. And I was involved with that company from its early days until we were globally selling across the world and we got a And when we got acquired, we were acquired by a German biotech called Kyogen, and they offered me a role to move to Germany and work on sort of a more broad global diagnostics of women's health portfolio.
So I worked on all things like HPV screening, infectious diseases, women's health. So that was a fantastic experience. I'd gotten to see early stage to essentially acquisition. And then the part of the team at Amnesure was gonna spin out a new company and uh essentially I decided to join them again. I've I've never been a founder, so I wasn't a founder at the time, but I joined as a very early stage employee and was with that company until FDA approval and then we got acquired. And so at this point I overconfidently said, I know how to start a company. I worked at places where they successfully started companies, built really amazing products in women's health, successfully returned to the investors.
How hard can this be? I've seen it run. And I'd worked with my co-founders that entire time. So from amateur to kaiogen to parcigen, like we'd been working together for 10 years. So we came together and said, how can we continue to have big impacts in women's health? And we decided to co-found AOA with a lot of optimism, a lot of passion, and a little naivete on how how hard it actually is. But I always say
Why did Oriana choose early‑stage ovarian cancer diagnostics as AOA’s focus?
I'm really glad I didn't know how challenging it would be because it might have deterred us from from starting. And then once you're in it, you just can't turn back anymore. You know, I've heard that a lot. Sounders say, if I had known, I might not have, but I'm so glad I'm here. So why this product? I mean, first of all, let me just say your background is amazing and congratulations on all your success. So I think you're poised to do what you're doing right now. But so why this product? Like what inspired you all to look here? Yeah, absolutely. When we started the company, like none of us are researchers or academics. So we weren't taking our PhD work and deciding to just spin a company up. Instead, we looked at it from where are their big problems in women's health?
Specifically where a diagnostic could be part of a solution because we're never been in therapeutics, you know, hadn't done anything with digital health at the time. And so really we focused on diagnostics. And we mapped out a number of different health areas where the status quo was really terrible for women, diagnosing ovarian cancer, diagnosing endometriosis, diagnosing preaclantia, right? Amongst many things. And then we went to academic offices and tech transfers and research and poster publications and patent filings and we said, Where is there something really interesting and novel and groundbreaking that could help solve for one of these problems? And so we essentially ended up meeting Professor Saragovi, was introduced to me by one of my mentors, and we learned about his novel biomarker approach and how his early work had started in ovarian cancer.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:42
2
What is Oriana Papin‑Zoghbi’s background and how did it lead to founding AOA?
0:42–2:32
3
Why did Oriana choose early‑stage ovarian cancer diagnostics as AOA’s focus?
2:32–4:27
4
How did AOA raise its first capital and what was the incremental fundraising strategy?
4:27–5:17
5
What is the current development stage of AOA’s diagnostic product?
5:17–6:27
6
What people‑first philosophy does AOA use when hiring and why does culture matter?
6:27–8:08
7
How did AOA redesign its hiring process to balance technical and cultural fit?
8:08–9:45
8
What does ‘scaling consciously’ mean and how did rapid growth almost break AOA?
9:45–23:45
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