Cathy Tie would consider herself an artist. However, not oil on canvas.
The 26-year-old from Toronto, Canada, co-founded her first company, Ranomics, at the age of 18. It provides health risk predictions based on people’s genetic data and has now raised over a million dollars, according to Crunchbase. She founded her second company, biology coursea “Shopify” for pharmaceuticals and other companies selling FDA-approved drugs, at position 23.
For Tie, art and creativity are not exactly the same as writing in iambic pentameter or dancing at Lincoln Center. It’s about seeing the big picture in the different industries she’s in and “possibly interdisciplinary and combine concepts from different industries,” she said.
“I’ve always loved putting ideas together and seeing connections that other people don’t,” she says, like figuring out how science can thrive in the world of startups and building. Build the right business model. “I think it’s more of an artistic and creative process than something technical.”
This is How is an entrepreneur?now based in Los Angeles, has relied on its innovative, big-picture thinking to find success in fields like technology and science.
Tie sent cold emails to professors at the age of 14
Tie started learning about her industries right out of high school.
She said: “I have always loved science, especially biology and chemistry, loved building by hand, from a very young age. But she found that the science programs they were being taught at school didn’t include much hands-on learning. Instead, it is a lot of memorization from textbooks.
Always a big thinker, in her freshman year of high school, Tie decided to start sending cold emails to professors at the University of Toronto to see if they would allow her to spend time in their labs. , do some research and help them with a project here and there.
Her work at the university led her to publish her first paper in a peer-reviewed journal of immunology, involving the human immune system, at the age of 16.
It also made her realize that: “In research, especially in academia, you’re bound by an academic grant system,” she says. That is, if she wanted to continue her research in that world, she would be restricted. But getting funding as an entrepreneur gives her the freedom to do any kind of research she wants.
She was accepted into the young entrepreneur program
As Tie started connecting spots in a way that she wanted to make an impact through the startup world, she also started signing up for programs that could help her make this idea a reality.
Tie had the basic idea for Ranomics, a way of solving some of the problems companies like 23andMe had when it came to the accuracy of their genetic testing, back when she was a freshman. at the University of Toronto. She met her co-founder Leo Wan, a Ph. students at the university, through a startup competition, and eventually both were admitted to IndieBio, a startup program that provides funding and guidance to entrepreneurs in the science field.
Tie was forced to drop out of college and move to San Francisco to pursue an opportunity and become the CEO of Ranomics for the first three years. She was also invited to apply and was later admitted The Thiel Scholarship, gives young entrepreneurs who fail or leave college a $100,000 stipend directly (not to their business) over the course of two years.
“Throughout my journey of building Ranomics, I learned a lot about starting a business, selling to pharmaceuticals, how to build a profitable company,” she says. All of which will work in her next business ventures.
Start Shopify for Pharmaceuticals
At the age of 21, Tie was invited to be a partner at Cervin Ventures, a venture capital fund focused on enterprise services as software or SaaS, technology like Salesforce and Slack.
After a year there, she felt like rebuilding and decided to explore opportunities in the digital health space, combining SaaS and the scientific world she already knew. And Tie realized there was no simple way to build an online store for people who wanted to sell FDA-approved drugs in a compliant way, a Shopify for pharmaceutical companies.
“Shopify really has a problem when people have to build their websites, [customer relationship management software]process their payments from scratch and create a platform where you don’t have to be technical,” she said, adding, “We’re doing the same thing for the online pharmacy and healthcare industries.” health from afar.”
Locke Bio is currently backed by three venture capital funds in the US and Canada, according to PitchBookbut is not sharing fundraising details publicly.
‘When you don’t have time to reflect, you don’t really see the bigger picture’
Tie is excited about the future of Locke Bio and the various expansion products she and her team are planning. But the company’s success and all that came before it did not come without a hitch.
She said: “I think very early in my career I definitely hit the gas very hard and worked those harsh hours, like 100 hours a week. But, “I realize that’s not sustainable because when you don’t have time to reflect, you don’t really see the bigger picture.”
That’s where the artistry comes into play.
“Similar to how artists make music, inspiration comes at a random hour of the day. Maybe 2 a.m., maybe when you’re in the shower,” she says. But she has to make time for breaks so that ideas can flow freely.
These days, she will spend those long days in the weeks when required, but otherwise Tie guarantees to work at least some 40 hour week to get in there out of time.
“It’s about sprinting, working hard when I have to, and then being able to reflect on all the things I’ve learned,” she said.
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