Nikolina Lauc (#012)
Business without purpose is incredibly boring, and purpose and money work best in tandem.
Company: GlycanAge
Headcount: 11
Stage: Seed
Warm intro from Christian Facey (#008)
Tell us your story
If you don’t mind I’d like to tell you a short story of my parents.
Both are scientists: my mother a neuroscientist; my father a molecular biologist. One year when I was about 12 years old, they organised the first “week of the brain” in my small hometown of Osijek, Croatia. This was a week-long festival that held day-long educational lectures about the brain to the public for free. It has been held every year since.
At the end of the festival a Croatian bank approached the two of them and offered a donation of 10,000kn (£1,100) to each for their important work. My father happily accepted, pragmatic as always in his decisions. My mother declined her part, claiming she did not do it for the money, which completely baffled my father and made him quite upset. I remember their debate quite vividly, as if they were two polar opposite that could never come together. Yet they did, with three kids between them.
I understand both, and I am both. I understand my mother’s motivation in “not wanting to be bought” or to add a price to work that doesn’t have a price. And I also understand my father’s point that work should be paid for and that free work is pointless (maybe, particularly when there is a donation offer).
In my entrepreneurial journey I’ve always needed both. To run a successful business people need to be paid for their work, even if it is in equity at first. To start and scale a good business beyond just “financial comfort” you need purpose, a mission important enough to wake up for that you would even do it for free (or keep doing it after you’ve made all the money you need).
That’s me. Business without purpose is incredibly boring, and purpose and money work best in tandem.
Tell us a story that has really resonated with you
I admire relatively few people.
One person I particularly admire is Dame Stephanie Shirley. She came to England as a child on the Kindertransport train from Vienna that saved nearly 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi Europe. In the 1960s she built the first and only all-women software company, Freelance Programmers, scaling it to over $3bn and making 70 of her staff millionaires in the process. She wrote an amazing book about her story called ‘Let It Go’ and held one of my favourite TED talks.
“Who would have guessed that the programming of the black box flight recorder of Supersonic Concorde would have been done by a bunch of women working in their own homes?”
What can't you stop thinking about?
The women’s health gap. Working on a menopause related product over the last number of months, I cannot get over how wide the women’s health gap is. Although women account for 51% of the population and 80% of all household healthcare decisions, there is a lack of representation of women in research studies (where some drugs on the market have never been tested on women, but are regularly consumed by them) and a lack of funding for women’s diseases (where the average time to correct diagnosis of conditions like endometriosis, PCOS and perimenopause is 7-10 years).
During perimenopause (the first stage of menopause), 66% of women risk being mis-diagnosed with fibromyalgia, migraine, depression or IBS. Most of these women are mis-prescribed antidepressants. 71% of women have to take time off work to attend as many as 7 GP appointments, while 20% of women leave their job due to severity of symptoms.
Currently, there's no accurate diagnostic test for perimenopause aside from symptomatology, while there will be 1.2 billion women experiencing menopause by 2025.
If I could tell you just one thing…
Pick yourself!
When you are the first, or not the stereotypical candidate or you’re doing something that nobody else has done before, there will be a very few people that believe in you.
If you keep waiting for them to find you, pick you, or just for somebody to believe in you, you could be stuck waiting for a long time.
Take a risk on yourself. Start with you. Dream big. Keep at it.
If you could get a warm intro to anyone in the world, who would it be and why?
Azra Raza. She is a world-renowned Oncologist. I first heard about her on Peter Attia’s podcast and then got mesmerised by her book ‘The First Cell’.
Azra built her own biobank, with over 60,000 cancer patient samples during various stages of disease and therapy to help understand the disease and drive research for early biomarkers. She did this because nobody else had done it yet.
While 95% of funding is being spent on drug development for treating the disease with little to no success, less than 5% goes on early molecular diagnostics. All the while the majority of cancers have a better survival rate with early detection.
I agree with her criticisms of the animal model in research which has little translation to humans (particularly with respect to cancer), and the lack of focus on early biomarkers and early detection is clearly a missed opportunity. I’d love to explore collaborating with her on early biomarker research.