Get Out There and Find Out: My Conversation with Sujal Patel
Sujal Patel is the co-founder and CEO of Nautilus Biotechnology (Nasdaq: NAUT), and previously founded Isilon Systems, the data storage company he took public before EMC acquired it for $2.25 billion. Over his companies, he’s raised over half a billion in venture capital.
You’d think that in order to run Nautilus, a company that is building a next-generation platform for protein analysis, you’d need a strong background in biology and biotechnology. But before founding Nautilus, Sujal Patel had never worked in the bio space. So he did the thing an expert founder does when he needs to learn fast: he found the tutorials. He pulled up introductory college-level biology and chemistry lectures on YouTube and watched them at 2x (his default speed for everything.)
Every day, he wrote down what he still didn’t understand. He called it his “Dumb Questions of the Day” list. Then he’d call his co-founder Parag, Stanford faculty, a proteomics expert, and read the list to him. Sometimes it took twenty minutes. Sometimes three hours.
That was ten years and thousands of research papers ago. Sujal’s name is now on the company’s patents.
People around him have a name for what that habit built. Bill Richter, his former CFO at Isilon, calls it Sujal’s “dancing bear routine” — the ability to field any question, on any subject, without breaking stride. It reads like a personality trait. But actually? It’s a finely tuned practice.
Here’s some takeaways you can start acting on, today:
1. Do the homework no one’s checking anymore
A decade into running a public company, Sujal still opens his competitors’ SEC filings every single day. Not because anyone requires it, but because he wants to know why his numbers look different from theirs. Twenty-five years in, he still does the unglamorous work most CEOs delegate the moment they can afford to. He never cashed in that option.
2. Playtest your pitch when the stakes are low
Sujal never brings his most important investors in first, second, or third. He works a dozen “throwaway” meetings before the ones he actually wants money from — and he doesn’t run the same pitch twice. Six meetings in two days, six deliberate variations, testing what changes the room. By the time he sits down with the investor he actually wants, he isn’t guessing anymore. He’s already run the experiment.
3. The people are the point
At Isilon, in a storage market so new that every investor’s first question was “how big is this, really?”, Sujal didn’t build a market-size slide out of guesses.
He went back to the customers he’d watched struggle at his previous job, RealNetworks — paying a million dollars for his old company’s software and four million more to a competitor whose product didn’t work — and told the story the way those customers had actually lived it.
Twenty years later at Nautilus, facing the identical question about a technology category with no market report to cite, he built the answer the same way: not from a spreadsheet, but from a running tally of every scientist he’d talked to who told him it mattered more, not less, than the adjacent category investors already respected. Neither number came from research he commissioned. Neither number came from a model. Both came from going and asking.
Watch Sujal closely enough and you can find the arithmetic behind his charisma. He isn’t just smarter than the other founders that VC met this month. He’s also never left a gap open long enough for it to cost him. Every “dumb” question he closed out on a call with Parag, or a night inside an SEC filing, becomes an answer he owns cold the next time someone asks it.
Investors aren’t underwriting your vision when they write the check. They’re underwriting how fast you close your own gaps, live, in the room. Sujal’s been buying that speed one “dumb” question at a time for 25 years.
Stay Sharp,
Ben