"Don't be encumbered by history, just go out and do something wonderful."
– Robert Noyce,
Founder of Intel
Bryan Rice, PhD
Founder + President and CTO
Bryan Rice spent decades in the semiconductor industry. He saw an opportunity to leverage those technologies in the healthcare space, where he viewed the industry as being in a time machine moving backwards thirty years. Rice was shocked at the initial reception he received.
“People in these healthcare companies had a ‘not invented here’ mindset,” he says. “They felt that they knew everything and didn’t need any help. But I had a vision of what could be. After getting the door slammed in my face so many times, I decided to strike out on my own.”
This strike was also personal.
Rice recalls getting the news that his mother was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer. “She initially presented with difficulty breathing, because a tumor was pressing against her diaphragm, and the prognosis obviously wasn’t good,” he explains. “The doctors did additional diagnostic tests and came up with a treatment plan that reversed the disease progression. That was five years ago. My mother is living life healthy now. This is what science done right could look like, and that’s the kind of difference I know we can make with the technologies we are developing.”
Rice, who holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Duke University, was drawn to the role as Chief Technology Officer at EXOKĒRYX to “literally start with a blank sheet of paper and apply fresh thinking on how we can solve some of these problems. We are not going to beat cancer and other serious diseases ourselves, but we can put tools of early detection in the hands of very smart people so that they will beat those diseases.”
“Let’s give people the freedom to make mistakes, learn from them, and create new ideas from there.”
It’s a simple leadership driver to foster breakthroughs that Rice and others on the EXOKĒRYX executive team live by. “Failure is okay, as long as you can learn from it quickly and create as many learning cycles as you can,” Rice says. “That’s what drives transformation and innovation, not pithy slogans on the wall meant to motivate people.”
