In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Jon Chee sits down with Mike Stadnisky, Managing Director of Thielsen Capital — a seed-stage life science tools syndicate. Before Thielsen, Mike was CEO of Phytonix (acquired by Thermo Fisher) and FlowJo (acquired by BD Life Sciences), and has taught at MIT Sloan. In Part 1, Mike traces his path from growing up with a chemical engineer father who gave him early exposure to business strategy, to studying biochemistry at Clemson, to working as a Red Bull Student Brand Manager — a role that shaped his enduring "care before you share" philosophy: meeting people where they are, not where it's convenient. He carried that mindset into grad school at UVA, where he joined Michael Brown's lab to study NK cells and innate immunity, fell in love with flow cytometry, and had his first (tearful) encounter with FlowJo.

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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