Lab to Startup

About Lab to Startup

Hundreds of thousands of researchers around the world are working to improve life and address imminent threats to humanity. Often, the research ends up in the "Scientific valley of death" in the form of publications and patents that never see the light of the day. Welcome to "Lab to Startup" a podcast aimed at showcasing the effort needed to translate lab research to startups. The show has two main goals: 1. Sharing the stories of those scientists and engineers who have successfully founded startups based on the research at university and national labs. 2. Highlighting the resources and tools needed to help those aspiring to launch startups in the deeptech space. We also want this show to be a way to communicate those technology development stories to the general public (taxpayers funding the research) in the hope that they will continue to support such research and startups. About the host Naresh Sunkara, Ph.D. is a chemical biologist, entrepreneur and the founder and Executive Director of the Berkeley Postdoc Entrepreneurship Program at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been running this program for the past ten years that has helped graduate students and postdocs at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and at several other universities in the US. He was previously a postdoc at UC Berkeley developing lipid nanoparticles for delivery of mRNA based drugs targeting viruses and cancers.

Publisher

Naresh Sunkara PhD

Category

business · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

7 Sept 2021

Latest episode

15 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

13 of 67 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   15 Sept 2026TRANSCRIPT

   The Professor Behind a Generation of AI Scientists and Founders

   UPMC Professor Russ Salakhutdinov, PhD., shares insights into fostering AI innovation and entrepreneurship within his Carnegie Mellon lab in this interview.

2. 

   18 Aug 2026TRANSCRIPT

   Cage Bio- Delivering Therapeutics via Skin using Ionic Liquids

   Host [Host Name] interviews Nitin Joshi, CEO and co-founder of CAGE Bio, exploring ionic liquid drug delivery for skin therapeutics and building a successful biotech company.

3. 

   14 Jul 2026TRANSCRIPT

   Ending a 100-Year quest to replace toxic Hexavalent Chromium without sacrificing cost, speed, or performance

   Mehdi Kargar, Ph.D., CEO and Cofounder of Maxterial, shares how his company replaces toxic hexavalent chromium with an affordable metallic coating, overcoming a century-old challenge.

Inside a recent episode

The Professor Behind a Generation of AI Scientists and Founders

Published 15 Sept 2026 · Transcript excerpt

[…] It's a massive, massive scaling effort. It makes you feel like a lot of work that's happening in industry is, I wouldn't call it... A truly innovation work because a lot of it is like, okay, let's throw more data. The latest advances like recursive self-improvement, a lot of it is like creating these what they call loops and graphs and we'll run the model, verify the outputs, run it more, verify. You create these pieces, but these are all engineering efforts. Which is good. I think we need to push as much as we can. But I feel like in industry, there is a little bit less innovation than what we see in academia. […]

Who has been a guest on Lab to Startup

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Russ Salakhutdinov
• Nitin Joshi
• Mehdi Kargar
• Doug Crawford
• Robert Blazej

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

3 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

3 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 56 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

84

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

68

Contact Lab to Startup

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

Questions about Lab to Startup