Okay, closer to 4.5. But still. Here are some stories and personal reflections, from HackerNews to an acquisition :)

A little bit of my background: I studied biochemistry, did liver cancer research at the National Cancer Institute, applied to med schools (didn't get in), and instead of doubling down, decided to pivot into tech.

The reason was simple: I could feel the entrepreneurial energy everywhere (maybe it was just Shark Tank?), and I wanted to find a way to work on problems I saw in research -- reproducibility issues, blatant fraud, stifled innovation, and more -- from the outside.

So, after a few odd years working at Capital One and at a corporate travel startup called Upside Business Travel, I stumbled upon this post on HackerNews.

Getting hired

I understood it immediately. And my background was perfect. A new citation index had so much potential, especially around issues of reproducibility I faced doing cancer research a few years before.

I wrote an email expressing my interest and got a quick response. My first call was with Josh (the CEO) and Milo (the CTO) and was pretty brief (maybe 10 minutes). I spent way longer preparing for it.

They scheduled a quick follow up with me to meet the rest of the team (Dr. Yuri Lazebnik & Dr. Sean Rife), we had a good conversation, and I had a consulting agreement signed shortly after.

Consulting was for two reasons:

1. it gave us a chance to move forward and try each other out
2. more importantly, at the time, scite wasn't monetizing and had been funded through a two phase SBIR grant. They were getting ready to submit the update to get the second tranche which would fund my position

I got setup as fast as I could and added a few features (I think it was a password reset and email verification flow) to ramp up on the codebase. And was it a beautiful codebase! Milo wrote code like it was a book (he reads quite a bit), so it was a total pleasure to poke around and piece everything together.

A few things changed and I managed to convert to full time faster than expected (we had parted ways with a previous hire who joined just before me, so we didn't need to wait for the grant).

The timing really was strange. My partner was finishing medical school so we wanted to travel for a few months. I wasn't sure how to navigate that with the new job and discussed it with Josh. My plan was to work remotely, but thanks to the pandemic, I ended up canceling everything, staying at home, and building.

Pandemic Years

Before I joined, the founding team had a tradition of meeting up in a city that started with the letter 'B'. Of course, once I started, the pandemic wrecked all of this.

For the first two years, I focused on building. At this point, Dom joined the team, so he, Milo and I were constantly tinkering in some part of the system.

My time was split between terrier, an internal service that fetched full text research articles, conducting user interviews, and some other adjacent work outside of general coding.

Here's a fun observation: it was outrageously easy for me to get user interviews scheduled (with show ups) for no monetary reward during the pandemic. Why? People wanted to socialize.

Thirty minute calls would go to an hour, or more. I'd leave a buffer to include social time, and the payment was a focused block of usability studies or feedback on new concepts we were working on. Many participants left their video off because of their "covid hair", but I've since met many of them at conferences years later!

scite wasn't really making money. We were launching features, but also had enough in the bank from our SBIR grant. At some point I began organizing calls to periodically review our burn, financials, and come up with ideas on adding revenue. It was tough knowing what ideas would stick and what wouldn't. But we kept trying. And Josh was really great at coming up with ideas to experiment with.

At this point in the company's history, we were in the Season 1-2 of Silicon Valley phase and I identified most with Jared.

scite Summit 2022

Well, vaccines rolled around. By now I was living in Chicago. Things were looking up. It was time to actually meet everyone, in person. Roughly two years after I joined.

We had to pick a city that started with a 'B', and Sean was getting his passport renewed, so we opted to stay domestic and grabbed a cabin in Bozeman, Montana.

Did I mention I was in Chicago? This was in February of 2022. It was freezing and snowing like crazy. My flight was set to leave at 7AM, so I got up at 4AM to see how the weather was outside. Awful. Tons of snow without any plans to stop.

My Lyft driver showed up around 5AM with way too much energy. She had just bought an SUV and was excited to try it out in the snow. The entire ride to O'Hare she told me there was no way my flight was going to leave.

The airport was totally empty. What was I thinking?

I got to my terminal and it was me and one other person who was visiting from France and unimaginably determined to see Yellowstone.

We walked over into our seats, and the flight attendants from United awkwardly reminded us that because we didn't pay up, we had to stay in our designated section in Economy. On this flight with just the two of us.

So there I was, debating whether I should just go back home and sleep. I concocted a number of lies to tell everyone about why my flight was canceled.

Oh and our pilot? He chimes in saying: "So folks, I was just in Florida and it was so nice there. Total crapshoot here, as you can see. So uh, we'll see how this goes."

I tried to focus on whatever book I was reading to stop my brain from hatching plans to get off the plane. Of course, even the book had a reference about going to Montana (or not). It was so ridiculous I took a photo of the page, and tried to sleep.

There are times you feel the universe is trying to be funny. This was one of them.

After de-icing for about an hour, we took off. It was nice and sunny within 5 minutes of leaving, and we made it to Montana without any trouble.

I finally met Josh and Milo at the airport (they were taller than I thought, especially Milo who looked so tiny in his webcam!), and Dom and Sean joined us later. Our first stop? Costco.

We found our cabin, relaxed from our flight, and played around in the snow.

This was not a work trip at all. We had a ton of fun, got to finally meet each other, and the highlight was a tour of Yelowstone in the winter.

You thought it was closed? Not if you rent out this monster truck.

The best part? I was so busy messing around taking photos that they ran out of seats in the back... so I got to ride shotgun and take even more fun photos. I have to dig up the rest but here are a few.

One of the best discoveries was that our tour guide, whose name was also Josh, went to the same high school (or neighboring high school) as our Josh!

And of course we managed to squeeze in a couple group shots.

You know what I loved about this trip? When I was in high school, I used to play video games like Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike, and DotA. Especially with TF2, we'd compete in leagues like ESEA, say dumb things on forums like gotfrag, and watch some of the more serious folks travel to LAN tournaments in Dallas and elsewhere.

It was also early-ish days of YouTube and I have vivid memories of watching these folks I played with and spoke to online post vlogs of their travel to these tournaments. They'd all meet up, get a hotel, and compete for pizza and online cred.

Maybe it was just high school me, but I was enamored with the idea of meeting up with folks in person like that. Especially a team that I was working on something with.

Of course, this is almost the standard these days (and my now default mode of operation), but our scite Summit was the first real time I got to experience this fully. Boy was it worth it.

ChatGPT, scite Assistant, and M&A

A year passed since Montana. There are some pretty fun stories from that time - from conference crashing and raising money - but you'll have to ask me about those in person :).

Around March 2023, I went to Japan for 2 weeks. When I came back, everyone was talking about ChatGPT, and Dom, who led a lot of our AI efforts internally, launched an initial version of scite Assistant that was built on a question answering prototype he built before.

At the time, I was thinking of leaving scite to go off on my own. I'd spent a few years here and had an itch to start my own company. We were also having high level discussions of an exit, and a part of me was worried about what that future looked like. I knew what larger companies were like and the general uncertainty gave me pause.

Well, Milo beat me to the punch. Seriously. All because I was on vacation.

He told us that he was planning to step down, in part for similar reasons, and to take some time to travel. And I'd be stepping into his role.

This changed my thinking a little. At a startup, these titles don't mean too much. I was already doing a ton of jobs. But in my view, this could make the acquisition process go differently, so I was willing to play it out and see what happened. Worst case, I learn a bunch of interesting things about selling a company.

For the next 9 months, it was primarily me and Dom focusing on product, engineering, and infrastructure. To say we were spread thin is... an understatement.

I tried to have some fun with it though. As we were growing, we got flooded with user support requests, and I tried to make the most of the random ones that came in.

I also put on my CFO hat (AshishFO!) to present our financials to the acquiring company and take some of the burden off of Josh in the M&A process (there was an incredible amount on his plate too, between legal, other due diligence, and doing all the founder / CEO things).

This was a really interesting 9 month period, for three reasons:

1. scite was experiencing tremendous growth, largely driven by Assistant and marketing / funnel improvements we made
2. the acquiring company's previous CEO (who, by chance, I met in person during my trip to France) started a proxy fight to take over his company during our M&A conversations
3. there were general distractions, like the SVB collapse (which we were banking with)

M&A was taking up a lot of time, the proxy fight added uncertainty in the middle about how things would land, and we had this product that was experiencing hockeystick growth that we weren't able to fully double down on.

People aren't kidding when they talk about how much of a time (and focus) sink due diligence is. Even if you have everything organized, every small (and big) thing will derail your ability to get anything done.

I think we were lucky that we launched a product at the perfect time and had the right pieces of the funnel in place. We weren't really jeapordizing our growth by focusing on our M&A conversations; it would have been infinitely more stressful otherwise.

But I do wonder what we would have done differently if we launched Assistant at a slightly different point, without M&A or fundraising conversations happening in parallel.

We didn't have another scite summit since Montana, and the only person I'd seen was Josh when we met up for in person M&A talks, or attended conferences together (is it really a startup experience if you aren't sharing hotel rooms?)

Acquisition

By December 2023, the deal closed and scite joined Research Solutions.

I had an okay exit, but when I consider the actual skills I gained in that 4 year window, it was a total no-brainer with respect to the investment in my own career.

At this point, scite was still continuing to grow, and we were focused on integrating our two remote companies. The time sink of M&A was gone but was pretty quickly substituted with ramping up a new organization on scite (sales, marketing, etc.).

This was more manageable and we started to get things done again. But at this point, that voice from before started coming back and telling me to do my own thing.

I thought about this for a pretty long time.

The hardest part with startups is that your identity gets wrapped up in the thing you're building, and it becomes unreasonably difficult to separate the two. Pile on the fact that you're friends with everyone on the team, it's never an easy decision to leave.

I framed it to myself along the triad of a Visionary, Craftsperson, and Operator. In my mind, I identify as a Craftsperson and can do the other two moderately well.

Here's how I saw it:

1. Josh is really killer as a Visionary type leader and was especially perfect during our 0 to 1 phase. Reality distortion field and all.
2. With my personality and background, I could do well in an Operator role, but it's not what I wanted to do right now.
3. I love building too much to give up the ability to function as a Craftsperson.
4. I wanted to continue playing Craftsperson, but grow as a Visionary next.

With the acquisition and the new trajectory of the company, I wasn't entirely sure it lined up with where I wanted my own career trajectory to go. I thought about it for weeks and eventually made the tough decision to step down and start a new adventure.

What a wild ride it's been.

What's Next?

When I put my notice in 6 weeks ago, I was planning to travel and figure out what I wanted to work on.

Especially with how difficult it was to pull the trigger and step down, there's a part of me that wants to build a product studio or company that's focused on a theme rather than an individual product. Hopefully that setup will make the inevitable growth and potential exit of a product within that studio a bit easier, so I don't feel like I'm giving up a part of myself.

When I eventually start that path, I think there are a few things I'd borrow from what we did at scite:

1. We never raised a lot of VC money, and I'd follow that approach again, either with non-dilutive funding or by bootstrapping. It was a great decision that didn't create pressure on us to grow or force us in one direction.
2. Remote first. Between scite and a few consulting engagements I've had, I've seen how effective this is, especially with fractional work and the global talent pool.
3. In person meetings every now and then. The pandemic was unfortuate timing, because when I joined, I only had one real team meet up in 4 years. Especially when taking a remote first approach, it's nice seeing everyone in person.
4. Leaning into intuition more: this is probably the single biggest thing I learned and tried to improve on myself.

And maybe I'm a bad capitalist (to borrow what my friend Philip recently said), but I'm leaning towards build something without the pressure of growth or an exit. Like the Basecamp / 37signals model.

But I have another adventure in the works that I came across a bit more recently, so we'll see how those conversations go first.

For now, I'll share this fun photo that we drew in a Jamboard session at scite. It was my profile picture in Slack, so it's pretty much how I see myself when I think about scite :)