Kevin Lustig: [00:00:00] So we literally have a press release [laughs] from September 15th, 2008, you know, saying they were launching this platform, and we hoped it would be as consequential as, you know, Darwin stepping out 165 years ago this day onto the Galapagos. [laughs] Because what ended up happening was crickets.
Announcer: [00:00:24] Welcome to Two-Sided, the marketplace podcast. Brought to you by Sharetribe.
Sjoerd: [00:00:28] Hi, I'm Sjoerd, CMO at Sharetribe, and I am your host. In this episode, I speak to Kevin Lustig from Scientist.com, which is a marketplace for buyers and sellers of scientific research services. This was another of those gigantic B2B marketplaces that serves a trillion dollar industry that I had never, ever heard of. This has been one of the cool things, actually, of this podcast, that I get to discover all kinds of fantastic companies that serve industries I have no idea about in ways that I haven't even thought of. And this is also the case for Scientist.com, as you will hear.
They call themselves an enterprise gateway marketplace, and indeed, they do have an exceptional model. We talk about that, and we talk about the long journey they have been on since they got started 13 years ago. And basically, we talk about all things that have to do with how to build a marketplace for enterprise customers. This was another great talk, and definitely some very interesting stories, so, enjoy.
Hi, Kevin, welcome to the show.
Kevin Lustig: [00:01:40] Great to be here.
Sjoerd: [00:01:41] Hey, before we dive into the marketplace rabbit hole with Scientist.com, can you tell us, the listeners at home, me, a little bit about what did you do before you started Scientist.com?
Kevin Lustig: [00:01:53] Sure. I was essentially a, what we call in the United States, a lab rat. I spent about 18 years in the laboratory doing experiments with my own hands, developing new technologies, trying to make new discoveries. After that, I went into biotech, joined a company called Tularik, which was the first company spun out of Genentech. After that, I went off and I founded a company called Kalypsys. Which was a small biotech company. And it was really my experiences at Kalypsys that led directly to my and, uh, two other fellows founding Scientist.com.
Sjoerd: [00:02:29] All right. And could you tell us a little bit about what is Scientist.com?
Kevin Lustig: [00:02:33] Sure. Scientist.com is a two sided marketplace that connects buyers and sellers of complex research services. So just to give you an example, if a biotech researcher wants to make an antibody for the coronavirus, you know, in the past, they may have spent a year on their own time making that antibody. Today, what they do instead is they go outside to laboratories all around the world who actually do it for them, and they do it better, faster, and cheaper. So we're really a marketplace for medical research. And our mission is to empower and connect scientists and to make it possible to cure all human diseases by 2050.
Sjoerd: [00:03:17] All right. Wow, that is possibly the most ambitious mission we've had on the podcast so far [laughing] but that sounds really fantastic.
Kevin Lustig: [00:03:24] We're thinking very big [laughs]. We're thinking big.
Sjoerd: [00:03:26] Yeah. So you're saying, connecting scientists with scientists, in a way? So basically, you have supply and demand, someone could have two roles on your platform? Do I understand that right?
Kevin Lustig: [00:03:35] Yes. In fact, some people do. Although they're pretty rare. On the supply side, there are tens of thousands of research laboratories spread out all around the world, and they're often called contract research organizations.
Sjoerd: [00:03:50] All right.
Kevin Lustig: [00:03:50] And they do typically very sophisticated experiments. The average order value on a marketplace like this is typically in the tens of thousands of dollars. So when somebody's buying something, they're not going out and buying something for $50 and moving on, or coming back later to buy it again. They're basically buying a six month study that's gonna test whether their drug is active in an animal model for Parkinson's disease, as an example.
Sjoerd: [00:04:17] Yeah. And so you already gave one example, you know, someone would like to make a vaccine for the corona endemic. How does that work? Can anyone sign up on your marketplace?
Kevin Lustig: [00:04:28] Yeah, they can. Most of our business comes out of enterprise marketplaces that we build for large pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
Sjoerd: [00:04:37] All right.
Kevin Lustig: [00:04:37] But we also do run a public facing marketplace that's available to the little biotechs, that's available to academic researchers, that's even available to citizen scientists. I mean our goal, way back when we started this 14 years ago, was to help democratize science and make all of these sophisticated tools that are available today available to anyone that had ideas about how to use them.
Sjoerd: [00:05:04] Okay. So actually, I would like to still stick back a little bit 15 years ago, when you said, um, was it 15 years ago that you started this?
Kevin Lustig: [00:05:11] It was, it was 14 years ago, yes. I had the idea 15 years ago. So yes, about 15 years ago.
Sjoerd: [00:05:15] Yeah. So about the idea, how, could you tell a little bit more of, okay, I can understand the environment in which you got it. But can you tell me a little bit about how did the idea come into existence? Did you experience this pain point yourself? Did you talk to others? Can you tell a little bit about how did you move from, let's say, idea to validating the idea?
Kevin Lustig: [00:05:33] Yeah, absolutely. I had founded a company called Kalypsys, this small biotech company based in San Diego. And we had been very successful in raising money, we were very successful in doing business development deals that brought in money to the company. We built a building, you know, to house all of our scientists. But what we found was that despite all that money, our research wasn't going much faster than it had before we had the money. You know, we could do a little bit more, but not that much more. We became increasingly frustrated with the pace of medical research.
And then one day, we realized that there might be a completely different way to approach this problem. And, and that we really needed to turn the entire process upside down. Up until then, we had this philosophy that outsourcing was bad. That real scientists do the work in their own laboratories with their own hands. And we had really bought into that. And then one day, we realized that that was just completely wrong headed, and that if we could turn it upside down and perhaps create a platform that would allow a scientist to outsource everything but the genius, and that became our tagline over the past 15 years.
Sjoerd: [00:06:48] Yeah. So the idea's really that you take a very complex process, like an entire research timeline, I guess, like a ... sorry, I'm obviously not a scientist, as you will hear in the next couple of seconds [laughing]. But where you take your first idea or your first hypothesis, and then you go to some stage of testing, another stage of testing, third stage of testing, for example. And the idea is that you can sort of split that now up, you can sort of chop up the work and then outsource it to other people who are faster, better, have better material, et cetera, to it. Is that correct? Is that what you're doing?
Kevin Lustig: [00:07:17] That is ex- you got, you got, you hit the nail on the head. Right? When you think about the scientific method, it's about having an idea. The next step is doing the experiment to test that idea. The third and final step is analyzing the results of that experiment. And of course, based upon the results of that experiment, you've ...