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XMeet the Brain Surgeon Dropout Using Influencer Culture to Spread Awareness of STEM
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
When Shawn Carbonell dove into Instagram in 2014, he was already nose-deep in test tubes and petri dishes. His young startup, OncoSynergy, was looking for a cure for brain cancer, and Carbonell would frequently post photos of cancer cells he would come across in his research . His goal was simple: to document any discoveries that could lead him closer to a treatment for brain cancer.
“I don't think I'm a great communicator in person,” Carbonell told dot.LA. “I really have to think about it and try to use words that only my grandma would understand.”
But Carbonell apparently had little trouble communicating online. To date, he has 13,000 followers on Instagram. Even more impressive, his TikTok account, which he created in 2020, has already amassed over 450,000 followers.
OncoSynergy is still in clinical trials, but his experience on social media partly inspired his new startup: Brazen Bio. And now, as founder of the new bioscience startup accelerator, Carbonell has decided to put that social media savvy to broader use: In December 2021, Brazen launched a new program to help scientists take their research and start their own companies. Carbonell hopes his new program can help scientists—a group that can be taciturn when it comes to promoting their work—navigate the social media landscapes.
“We're just trying to encourage more stem creators to do science communication, talk about careers, talk about science in general and just sort of building up the community and ecosystem,” Carbonell said.
The Brazen Creators Program is funding STEM influencers on TikTok and Instagram who want to share knowledge about specific jobs, niche industries and navigating venture capital firms under the Brazen Bio name in exchange for equity in the company, networking opportunities, and access to office hours with Carbonell.
The initiative was in part made possible by lead investor Joe Rizzo, who invested $25,000 into the company after stumbling upon Carbonell’s TikTok account.
“You want somebody who understands the nuances of whatever scientific product or process that they're trying to develop and put out to the world, and then have those people also learn to be the marketers and the leaders running the companies that those products are generated from,” said Rizzo.
This is part of Carbonell’s goal with the creator program, to match scientists with entrepreneurs to create an ecosystem from often siloed and fragmented institutions in the bioscience sector.
“You have to build the content and then you have to distribute it yourself and build a community around that. And these are all things that social media does for us, and it's free,” Carbonell said.
The company is slowly collecting budding influencers, and expanding its reach into other parts of STEM like quantum computing, astrophysics and network engineers. To date, it’s enlisted three people: Ben Rein, a TikTok-verified Stanford neuroscientist who talks about the science behind ADHD, Alzheimer’s disease and pain; synthetic biologist Sean Jackewicz, who is a medical student at Mercer University; and cancer biologist and Duke University student Elizabeth Mendes.
“If I figured out this little thing that helped in my brain, I might as well just share and talk about it because maybe these other people are thinking this stuff too,” Mendes said.
For Carbonell, it’s another venture to build up Brazen Bio —a company that, in addition to this social media initiative, runs an incubator for early-stage bioscience startups and a venture capital arm investing in new scientific advancements for the human body.
“We want to help sort of create this ecosystem that will inspire people to go into careers in STEM, see what careers are available,” Carbonell said. “And oh, by the way, if you're interested in starting your own company, then we have an accelerator.”
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Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
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Activision Buys Game Studio Proletariat To Expand ‘World of Warcraft’ Staff
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Activision Blizzard intends to acquire Proletariat, a Boston-based game studio that developed the wizard-themed battle royale game “Spellbreak.”
VentureBeat first reported that the Santa Monica-based publisher was exploring a purchase, noting its ongoing mission to expand the staff working on Blizzard’s hit massively multiplayer online game “World of Warcraft,” which launched in 2004.
Proletariat’s team of roughly 100 people will be merged into Activision’s “World of Warcraft” team to work on its upcoming expansion game. Though there’s no release date as yet for the title, “World of Warcraft: Dragonflight” is expected to debut before the end of this year.
Activision did not immediately return a request for comment. Financial terms of the deal were not available.
This Proletariat deal is Activision's latest push to consolidate its family tree by folding its subsidiary companies in under the Blizzard banner. More than 15 years after it bought out New York-based game developer Vicarious Visions, Activision merged the business into its own last year, ensuring that the studio wouldn’t work on anything but Blizzard titles.
The deal could also have implications for workers at Activision who have looked to unionize. One subsidiary of Activision, Wisconsin-based Raven Software, cast a majority vote to establish its Game Workers Alliance—backed by the nationwide Communications Workers of America union—in May.
Until recently, Activision has remained largely anti-union in the face of its employees organizing—but it could soon not have much of a say in the matter once it finalizes its $69 billion sale to Microsoft, which said publicly it would maintain a “neutral approach” and wouldn’t stand in the way if more employees at Activision expressed interest in unionizing after the deal closes.
Each individual studio under the Activision umbrella would need to have a majority vote in favor of unionizing to join the GWA. Now, Proletariat’s workforce—which, somewhat ironically given its name, isn’t unionized—is another that could make such a decision leading up to the Microsoft deal’s expected closing in 2023.
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Snap Officially Launching ‘Snapchat Plus’ Subscription Tier
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Snap is officially launching Snapchat Plus, a paid subscription plan on Santa Monica-based social media company’s flagship app.
Snap is now the latest media company to tack a “plus” to the end of its name—announcing Wednesday that the new service will provide users with “exclusive, experimental and pre-release features” for the price of $3.99 a month. The first features available to paying subscribers include the ability to customize the style of app’s icon, pin a “BFF” to the top of their chat history and see which users have rewatched a story, according to The Verge.
The new product arrives after Snap confirmed reports earlier this month that it was testing Snapchat Plus—though the version that it has rolled out does not incorporate the rumored feature that would allow subscribers to view a friend’s whereabouts over the previous 24 hours.
Snapchat Plus will initially be available to users in the U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. While certain features will remain exclusive to Plus users, others will eventually be released across Snapchat’s entire user base, Snap senior vice president of product Jacob Andreou told The Verge. (Disclosure: Snap is an investor in dot.LA.)
The subscription tier introduces a new potential revenue stream for Snap, which experienced a “challenging” first quarter marked by disruptions to its core digital advertising market. However, Andreou told The Verge that the product is not expected to be a “material new revenue source” for the company. He also disputed that Snap was responding to its recent economic headwinds, noting that Snap had been exploring a paid offering since 2016.
Despite charging users, Snapchat Plus does not include the option to turn off ads. “Ads are going to be at the core of our business model for the long term,” Andreou said.
Snap is not the first popular social media platform to venture into subscriptions: Both Twitter and Tumblr rolled out paid tiers last year, albeit with mixedresults.Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Bling Capital’s Kyle Lui On How Small Funds Can Better Support Young Founders
On this episode of the LA Venture podcast, Bling Capital’s Kyle Lui talks about why he moved earlier stage in his investing and how investors can best support founders.
Lui joined his friend—and first angel investor—Ben Ling as a general partner at Bling Capital, which focuses on pre-seed and seed-stage funding rounds. The desire to work in earlier funding stages alongside someone he knew well drew him away from his role as a partner at multi-billion-dollar venture firm DCM, where he was part of the team that invested in Musical.ly, now known as TikTok.
Bling primarily focuses on entrepreneurs looking to raise around $1 million to $3 million who are often early in their careers as founders. Lui said Bling evaluates companies on characteristics that go beyond whether they like the founder or feel that the market looks good. Instead, he said they take a hard look at the available company data, and quickly respond.
“And we send it back to them and say, ‘Okay, this is what's working, what's not working’,” Lui said. “And then create the playbook for them on how to find product market fit and get to like, ‘These are the milestones you actually need to hit’.”
When considering companies, Lui said Bling looks at the founder, the market, the company’s current traction and differentiation while asking the founder the questions they would expect to get at Series A and Series B funding rounds.
“One thing that I really admire about what [Ling’s] built with Bling is the consistency and the processes and playbooks— everything from the way that we evaluate deals to the way that we work with our portfolio companies,” Lui said. “Everything is kind of around playbooks and operationalizing things and also iterating to do those processes better.”
As part of its work to support founders, Bling maintains an extensive product council, which connects tech executives with the founders in Bling’s portfolio. Bling also has created numerous self-serve resources for founders so they can easily tap into the fund’s network and shared knowledge.
“We have a bunch of playbooks that we introduce to companies around how to hire efficiently, how to negotiate with counterparties, how to think about the founding team, business development…We just have these different things that we start to train our entrepreneurs on,” Lui said.
dot.LA Editorial Intern Kristin Snyder contributed to this post.
Click the link above to hear the full episode, and subscribe to LA Venture on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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