“My parents are of Indian origin, and my co-founder, Sonny, his parents are of Vietnamese origin. And having parents of Asian descent, the advice we got was: ‘Stay in school, don’t skip class, study hard, go work for a big company.’ The absolute worst advice you could be giving somebody at that time, at that university. So we often joke about that, that if we hadn’t listened to our parents, we would have maybe ended up in Silicon Valley and done all that much earlier. But then I was really fascinated by academia. I wanted to be a researcher, I wanted to be a professor, I thought. So I had this wonderful opportunity to go to graduate school and I went off to Cambridge [University, U.K.] and did a PhD in bioengineering, and specifically in biological and chemical sensors. That way I could learn about life sciences and biology and still leverage my engineering double D background. And the work we did there, that was sort of the inspiration and basis for my first startup.”