They Built a Biotech Company From a Car and a Library.

Conventional wisdom tells you that it takes years in a lab, mountains of data, a university tech transfer office, and a spinout that takes well over a decade to finally materialize. Most people never make it to the starting line, and even fewer decide that while at a Cafe Rio.

Evita and Rachel were old friends catching up over lunch after years of staying in touch over long distances. They had originally become friends during their time at BYU, but their differing career paths took them in different directions. Rachel went to New Hampshire to pursue a PhD at Dartmouth, and Evita stayed in Utah, starting her career at Tolero and later at Sumitomo Pharmaceuticals. The friendship was kept alive the way scientists do: swapping papers, debating findings, exploring new vantage points on age-old questions.

2021 reunited them in the same state, with Rachel moving back to start her career at Thunder Biotech. Suddenly, they could catch up regularly, no longer over a Zoom link, to air work grievances and nerd out on science. One lunch meeting at Cafe Rio, it became clear that both were ready for the next venture. Evita was sick of building poison for patients, and Rachel was sick of building cancer cell therapies that were only available for a small group of patients. The solution was obvious: cancer needed an overhaul. Rachel and Evita shared the same vision for the next generation of cancer care. To start making it a reality, they decided to meet every Saturday at the library.

Build Something You'd Want to Take Yourself

The Saturday library sessions that followed weren't casual. Evita and Rachel came in every week, loaded with questions to help narrow their priorities:

• ‍What would I actually want to take if I had cancer?
• ‍What do we know now that we didn't know a decade ago?
• ‍How do we make sure this treatment gets to someone living in Peru?
• ‍How do we make sure patients get their lives back during treatment, not just after?

These questions led to design prototypes and attempts to reverse-engineer a product based on the problem. This meant getting creative with solutions and embracing new technologies, such as very early AI-driven drug development and scientific tools, to help speed up the prototyping process. Rachel and Evita, by their own admission, were ruthless in the prototyping process, oftentimes being their own harshest critics, scrapping whole ideas before the week was out.

"Cancer is the only disease where we make patients sicker before we make them better. We're never going to accept that as good enough. " — Rachel Garlick

Eventually, they built something they couldn't tear apart. A prototype for a small-molecule cancer treatment that was less toxic, deliverable in pill form, accessible to anyone regardless of income or geography, and designed to activate the immune system for lasting effects. No cell therapy complexity. No reimbursement ceiling. The day they couldn't find the holes in their prototype was the day they knew they had to pull the trigger.

No Lab Space

Here is what building outside a university actually looks like: no lab, no equipment, no infrastructure, no institutional knowledge to draw on. Just two scientists with a prototype and nowhere to run it. This is the first wall most people hit, and they often cannot find a reasonable way around it. Lab space in Utah is extremely limited outside research institutions and companies, and what exists comes at a premium.

David Bearrs, a trusted advisor and friend, helped the Eris team find their first lab space. It was tiny, but it cost only $1,000 a month and served as a launchpad for making Eris a reality. He also gave them a clear-eyed view of what it would take to build this thing for real: roughly $500,000 to reach meaningful proof points.

Problem Solved.

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No Reagents or Lab Equipment

The State of Utah was Eris's first outside believer, awarding them $5,000 through the UTIF program. Every dollar helps, but $5,000 does not stock a lab. Running real experiments to validate a prototype requires reagents and equipment that cost far more than any early check could cover. A serendipitous bit of luck was required, and it came in the form of Sumitomo announcing it was closing its Lehi location. Equipment and reagents were headed for the trash. Friends and former colleagues started passing along a simple message:

"The trash is going out."

Rachel and Evita showed up with an empty car, eager to see what treasures had been discarded. They sorted through what everyone else was throwing away, loaded up, and hurried back for another load. Soon, piles of equipment and reagents filled Evita's basement from floor to ceiling. Rachel called these spontaneous trash runs the science version of Christmas morning.

Everything got cataloged, added to an inventory list, and over time, the lab came together. Finally, the Eris team had adequate equipment to run real experiments and validate their technology. Some of what came out of that Lehi parking lot is still in use today.

Problem Solved.

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No Capital

Federal grants at the early stage go to university spinouts with years of data behind them, effectively closing that avenue for the Eris team. The only path forward was unconventional, required creativity, and needed to move fast.

The nudge came from an unexpected place. Evita's husband worked at Podium, a YC alumni company, and kept pushing her: "If you want to build boldly, that is where you go." They applied to Y Combinator. They got in. Within six weeks, they had given notice, packed up, and moved to San Francisco.

YC is the top accelerator in the world for a reason, and Evita and Rachel felt that immediately. The density of the network, the investor access, and the culture of backing big swings gave Eris something it could not have found anywhere else. This inspired the Eris team to continue pushing the envelope and learn valuable lessons from their time at YC, such as there is no playbook or no formula; it is often grit and hard work that helps grow these startups. Following the 3-month program's closing, Rachel and Evita faced a decision. Stay in SF or return to Utah.

Problem Solved.

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No Founder Community Back Home

YC encouraged the Eris team to stay and build in San Francisco. The data is hard to argue with: companies that build in the Bay are twice as likely to succeed and have access to deeper capital networks. But Evita and Rachel viewed it differently. In Utah, their capital would stretch further, and they had a network that had shown up for them when they had absolutely nothing. Small but mighty, and it included professors at BYU like Dr. O'Neill and Dr. Weber, who had connected them to investors and resources more than anyone else had.

The Bay Area has a particular energy when it comes to startups, and being surrounded by that level of ambition was a real trade-off. But family balance, longer runway, and being closer to the roots of where it all started won out. As Rachel put it, if Californians can make it to Utah for ski season multiple times a winter, they could make it back to the Bay just as often.

What they came home to find was a gap. Utah had real tech density, and the Silicon Slopes had earned their reputation. But outside of tech, there wasn't a life-science founder community for founders in this space. There was no central place where people were dreaming as big, moving as fast, or pushing each other the way the Bay had. They had come home to a place they loved, but it was time to find a way to fill the gap. 

Problem Solved.

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Enter Altitude Lab

After YC, Evita and Rachel came home to Utah and put their heads down. There was still a product to build and technology to validate. The community could wait. For the better part of a year, it was just the two of them, the science, and the work.

Eventually, they came up for air. With a validated prototype in hand and the next stage of growth on the horizon, they knew they needed to be around people again. Founders who understood the specific texture of what they were building. People who could push them.

That is when Altitude Lab came into focus. Kapil and Chandana had stayed in contact throughout that year, patient and persistent. When Evita and Rachel finally took the call, what landed was not a pitch. It was recognition. Kapil and Chandana articulated the pain points of building in Utah with such precision that they felt genuinely understood for the first time. The vision was aligned. The moment was right. Joining was not a hard call.

What they found inside was what had been missing: founders and scientists in the same uncertainty they were in, working through the regulatory questions, the capital timelines, and the science decisions that carry business consequences, out loud, together, every day. As Rachel puts it, you need that daily contact. You need people who are in it with you.

The Conditions Are Never Perfect

Eris Biotech is still early. The work ahead is hard, and the path is not guaranteed. But Evita and Rachel didn't start this company because the conditions were right. They started it because the problem was real, the options were limited, and waiting was no longer something they were willing to do.

The founders who build the next generation of life science companies won't all arrive through the expected doors. Some of them will come from a lunch at Cafe Rio, Saturday sessions at a public library, a minivan loaded with salvaged reagents, and a community that finally showed up to meet them where they were.

If you are sitting on an idea right now, convinced you need more credentials, more data, more runway before you can begin, Rachel has heard that voice before. Here is what she would tell you:

"I don't know a single founder who has regretted trying. I only know people who have regretted not trying. Forget the traditional path and build your own. Then fight like your life depends on it to make it happen." — Rachel Garlick

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