Figuring it out

Career stories have a way of sounding more deliberate in retrospect than they actually were. Someone asks how you ended up doing what you do, and you tell them a version where each step connects to the next, where the logic is visible, where it sounds like you knew what you were heading toward, and most of the time it’s just made up. Our brain loves to connect ideas and in retrospect, put everything under a “hidden logic”.

I don’t really have that version. What I have is a series of decisions that made sense at the time, in a context I no longer fully remember, made by a person who was working with incomplete information, which is to say, the usual situation.

Where this starts

I grew up in Girona, in Catalonia — a mid-sized city an hour from Barcelona that most people know, if they know it at all, from cycling stages and since a few years back because of the football team. I did my undergraduate and master’s degrees there, at the University of Girona, in biology and molecular biology. I do remember why I chose biology. It was the subject that seemed most alive to me. Scientific but messy, and the one where I found myself most willing to keep thinking past what the exam required. My teachers actually pushed me to do chemistry. In retrospect, both would have been great.

The specific interest in proteins came later, gradually. Not a revelation, just an accumulating sense that this was worth understanding better. How do these micromachines control live and yet, I know so little about them. And then comes the first time you see it in a computer and can play with it, and the WOW moment. That was it for me. Proteins all the way.

Leaving

The first real “figure it out” moment was applying for a PhD at the University of Nottingham.

Moving to another country for a degree is the kind of decision that is easy to describe and not entirely easy to make. You don’t know what the city will feel like. In fact, I didn’t even know where Nottingham was precisely. UK, sure, but not much more. Great though, it had a direct fligh from Girona. And then come the worries about the work itself. Whether you’ll like the lab culture, whether the project will go anywhere, whether you’ll find people you actually want to spend time with. You go anyway because the alternative, staying where it’s comfortable, felt too safe.

Nottingham turned out to be great. The PhD was in chemical biology, working on enzymes in ways that pushed me toward the biocatalysis and immobilization questions I’ve spent most of my career on since. I defended in 2019 and moved to Bern for a postdoc, which was itself another iteration of the same pattern: an opportunity that seemed worth taking, a place I didn’t know, a project I couldn’t fully evaluate in advance.

The startup years

inseit started not as a plan but as a question I couldn’t let go of: if the analysis I was doing by hand — and eventually in CapiPy — could be automated and systematised, could that become something more than a research tool? Could it become a product?

The honest answer is that I didn’t know. I still don’t know, in the way that anyone in the early stages of building something doesn’t know. What I did know was that the underlying problem, making enzyme immobilization predictable and scalable, felt real and unsolved. And working on it as a spin-off would let me push harder on it than another postdoc position would.

What followed was an education in uncertainty. Grant applications that might come through or might not. Prize competitions where you make it to the final and then don’t win, and then try again the following year. Conversations with investors who are interested, then less interested, then interested again. The feeling, persistent and not entirely comfortable, that you are operating at the edge of what you know how to do.

This is what the funding rounds and competitions actually feel like from the inside: a long succession of moments where you don’t know yet, and you keep going anyway. We won prizes . We’ve been backed by grants and investors. Each of these felt significant when it happened and was immediately followed by more uncertainty about what came next.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion to offer. The path from Girona to a biochemistry PhD in Nottingham to a postdoc in Bern to a startup in the same city wasn’t drawn on a map in advance. It accumulated, one decision that felt right at a time. That’s probably true of most paths that go somewhere interesting, and I couldn’t be happier to have walked that path. I said multiple times, what I value the most are the opportunities, and all I have is gratitude for them.

Still figuring it out.