five: the accidental cofounder

On the morning of April 20, 2011, I sat working in my apartment at my cramped Ikea desk… my first cup of coffee sitting on an uneven pile of papers next to my sleeping cat. The opening bass riff from the Flyleaf song “So Sick” played over and over in my head from the night before in lab where I blasted it on repeat. 

At 9:36am, a message from my sister in Seattle popped up in my Gmail. Odd, because she was not the type to casually e-mail me during the workday. I scanned the subject line and my heart dropped: 

“FW: CHRIS HONDROS”. 

I knew it could only mean one thing… our friend, Pulitzer Prize-nominated war photographer, Chris Hondros, was dead. 

Spinout

Official moves to launch my first startup didn’t happen until about a year after I quit neurosurgery residency. And in early 2010, I was still stuck, jobless in LA. I needed money to live, but more importantly, I needed preliminary data so I began to look north.

Determined to start my company in San Francisco—the birthplace of biotechnology—I landed the perfect postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF after happening upon the job opening in the journal Nature. I didn’t tell my PI (principal investigator, aka my boss) going in that my mission was to launch a company out of his lab. I don’t think it would have mattered much but I avoided the issue by mostly working nights, much to his chagrin. 

PHOTO: Covert mission, not so covert collar.

Seven months into the postdoc (December 2010) and psyched to be finally getting some positive data, I got accepted into a bioentrepreneurship course for UCSF staff and students called “Idea to IPO” determined to give this moonshot my best shot.

Laphroaig

Two months before I applied to the startup course, procrastination plagued me. I was all up in my head second-guessing what I was doing even as I had already made major moves (literal and figurative) toward my dreams. I hadn’t quite nailed the experiments I needed to support my hypotheses and I was getting very discouraged.

Fortunately, in my stall-balling, I opened an e-mail from my favorite single malt whisky distillery, Laphroaig, and saw they were hosting a special event in NYC: a FREE boozy, chartered trip from Times Square to Liberty Island. I loved NYC and I’d never seen Lady Liberty up close and so, just like that, I cashed in all my miles to book a flight. 

PHOTO: Origins of an epic evening in NYC with Chris.

I reached out to Chris Hondros on Facebook to see if he was in town and wanted to have drinks. He was and he did.

Tartare

Chris had covered many of the world’s deadliest conflicts as a photographer on the ground since the 90s. His work from the Liberian War in the early 2000s led to his first Pulitzer nomination for Breaking News.

Chris had drinks in NYC like it was an active warzone and we were delivering vital supplies for the troops. No sooner than we’d have one drink did he throw out the next place he wanted to take you… waaaay on the other side of town and unnecessarily driving like a complete maniac. He used his press credentials to park in ridiculous places. Like sidewalks. He even ate dangerously. The second bar we stopped at—The Half King (apparently the “Cheers” for photojournalists)—he had a burger, RARE. He offered me one of his fries, which were tinged pink and undoubtedly contaminated with E. coli. I politely declined, internally horrified, as I watched him shove several into his smiling face.

At the fourth and last place, a whiskey bar somewhere deep downtown, we took a shot of Evan Williams and a picture before he headed back to Brooklyn to meet up with his fiancée.

PHOTO: NYC whiskey stop #4 with Chris, November 8, 2010.

I remember being a little sore he didn’t offer to drive me back to my hostel by Times Square; he must have thought I was more like him and down to mix with the random locals at the bar. But I soon found myself smiling as I wandered around the mostly empty neighborhood streets at night casually looking for a cab and reminiscing on one of the most epic days of my entire life. 

[It would take me 45 minutes to hail a cab, lol. Uber was still just a startup in SF in 2010!]

Spring

After a rocky 10 weeks (due to my shitty leadership skills), our Idea to IPO team managed to win first place in the course (March 2011) providing the loose foundation for what was to become OncoSynergy. However, things quickly settled down and I found myself procrastinating AGAIN. 

In the cocoon of a very safe and warm Pacific Heights apartment (with an amazing view of Alcatraz), I found myself paralyzed... too scared to take the definitive step towards the dream of launching my startup. 

[Just to recap… at this point I had ALREADY quit my hard-won neurosurgery residency at Cedars-Sinai (including my own laboratory I was in the process of building), flailed unemployed in Beverly Hills an additional 6 months before moving to San Francisco which was somehow more expensive, broke up with my live-in English girlfriend who moved all the way to LA to be with me (great news, guys… she stayed in LA and is now happily married with chitlins), split my 1 bedroom SF apartment with a random guy I met on Craiglist to be able to afford rent, worked nearly a year of constant late nights in the lab to confirm my hypotheses, emerged the top team out of eight from a UCSF startup course, and STILL I hesitated to take the final leap?]

April 20, 2011, a mortar round struck the remnants of a cinder block building in Misrata, Libya killing Chris Hondros and his friend and colleague Tim Hetherington as they worked side by side exposing the brutal Khadafy military response to the Arab Spring.

Hondros

Chris taught me the only thing that could hold me back from my goals and passions was myself. Every day he negotiated safe passage through war zones, befriended locals who didn’t speak English, literally dodged bullets, and gave 100% to doing what he loved the most. What the fuck was MY excuse?

Just one week after his death my sister, a mutual friend, and I found ourselves at his Brooklyn memorial service—absolutely sobbing. The subsequent weeks, also dark, were quiet, but I returned to my corner desk immediately.

PHOTO: In the pews, at Chris’ Brooklyn memorial service on April 27, 2011.

I incorporated OncoSynergy in May 2011, in honor of Brain Tumor Awareness Month. And Chris. 

[Thank you, Brother. We miss you.]

[A documentary about Chris (Executive Produced by Jamie Lee Curtis and Jake Gyllenhaal) called “Hondros” premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017. I was honored to attend. It is available on Netflix and other OTT providers. See more of his legacy at chrishondrosfund.org ran by his amazing fiancée, Christina. Chris was post-humously nominated for a second Pulitzer Prize in 2012. He was 41.]