An Unpredictable World: a Co-founder Story

Atrandi Biosciences co-founder Karolis Leonavičius on building things, and leaving the future open

Karolis Leonavičius helped invent the technology at the center of our company, and he is the last person who will make it sound like a stroke of genius. There was no "the" moment, there was no late-night breakthrough by a single person, and no day the world tilted. There was accumulation of a thousand small things falling into place and hard work by talented people, until the technology simply worked.
The co-founder and CTO of Atrandi Biosciences distrusts the neat story of invention, possibly because he has spent most of his life making tools and knows what it really takes.

The kid with LEGO blocks
Long before any of it, before the Semi-Permeable Capsules (SPCs), before the instruments, before Atrandi was even an idea, there was a kid taking things apart. "I used to take things apart and build them back together, play with LEGO… a lot" Karolis laughs. "You could say, that I was probably one of those kids who sits in the corner, building something, while the others are off talking and playing in groups."

He grew out of that corner, but the instinct underneath it did not. What stayed was interest in systems, in how parts combine to produce behavior that none of the parts contain on their own. "You assemble some components and you get properties, and unpredictable consequences you can’t see just by thinking about the sum of the parts." And Karolis has a phrase for it: emergent properties.

He did not arrive at biology through loving the subject from the start. He arrived sideways, through chemistry, which he had chosen for an almost contrarian reason, because he couldn’t decide. "In school, two things interested me, chemistry and electronics, and I jumped back and forth between them," Karolis says. At that age, he says, you can’t see enough of the world to know what you actually want. So he chose chemistry precisely because it committed him to nothing. "I knew I couldn’t decide, and from chemistry you can branch into all sorts of fields afterwards. That’s what I liked about it." He studied it first in Vilnius, then at Oxford.

What drew him, underneath the subject, was a single idea he still holds – that one person can have a disproportionate amount of impact.

"With the ability to make things, comes the ability to improve them, to refine them, to bring some change into your own life and other people’s. That idea always fascinated me. It’s probably a trait of mine that’s still there," Karolis discusses.

The corners no one builds for
The turn toward building tools came during his PhD, while working with embryos. He found himself with one foot in academia and one in engineering, and was, in his words, shocked.

"The inefficiencies of academic research shocked me, specifically the products that dominate there," Karolis says. "It was obvious quite early on, that an enormous amount could be improved, and that the companies already doing it were concentrating only on the most commercially demanded, most scalable, most popular fields, while whole areas with real potential sat untouched."

Read the full story here.