Selling and Scaling at a Startup

Jeff Ehrhardt chuckles before describing the early days of starting a biotech. 

As chief operating officer of biotech startup Shreenika, there are many stories Ehrhardt could tell to describe his various responsibilities. But with a grin while visiting Northwestern Engineering's Master of Biotechnology Program (MBP), he decided to simplify his role as best he could. 

"I'm the guy who scales and sells," he said.  

That wasn't always Ehrhardt's focus. When he and co-founders Sandeep Singh and Nikki Arora Singh launched the company in 2023, the responsibilities of each team member were broad and varied.

"In the early days of a startup, everyone chips in to do whatever needs to be done," Ehrhardt said. "That could mean driving a cargo truck, hiring employees, touring lab spaces, shipping customer samples, or performing R&D at the lab bench. In a small company, there are a lot of hats being worn." 

The trio launched Shreenika to help address what they saw as three major challenges facing industrial biotechnology: high costs, long timelines, and scale up challenges. With Shreenika, their mission is to deploy biotechnology to make sustainable and affordable chemicals for virtually any market.  

It's now up to Ehrhardt to share that goal with clients and get the company's products out into the world.   

He discussed this challenge and the excitement that comes with it at Biotech Nexus, an annual event hosted by MBP that brings students, alumni, and industry professionals to learn from and network with one another. 

Biotechnology reduces reliance on fossil fuels, minimizes pollution, and enables eco-friendly production of chemicals and energy using renewable resources.  

Shreenika is scaling new biotech processes to manufacture sustainable chemicals for a variety of customers across the specialty chemicals landscape.  

"There are many inspiring success studies where biotech has transformed a market, but the timeline biotech has taken to move the needle on sustainability has been too long," Ehrhardt said. "We asked the questions: How can we build more quickly? How can we make biotech that can grow organically, not have to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, and build products directly answering a market need?"  

Ehrhardt said his company has benefited from observing the successes and failures of other biotech companies. One lesson he and his colleagues built around was the importance of digging into customer problems and creating solutions that address them directly, rather than producing a new technology and then searching for someone who could benefit from it. 

"Many times an R&D campaign starts with a technology innovation, rather than a product, and the resulting product doesn't always fit with market demand," Ehrhardt said. "We've become much more integrated with our customers. We don't build technology unless we know there's a need for it."  

With that integration, Ehrhardt has come to understand what potential clients look for in biotech products, and he's also learned how he and Shreenika can help continue moving the industry forward. It's exciting to create something new, he said, but it's important to understand how that innovation will be received by other organizations, collaborators, and customers. 

"There's so much risk in biotech, and if you don't control it at every step, you're likely to fail," he said. "Can I engineer an organism to make a molecule? Can I purify it? Can I scale it? Will people actually buy it? If you already confirmed the market fit, you've reduced so much of your risk in terms of generating value from technology innovation."