Editor's note: This year we honored some of the brightest young minds in the Bay Area innovation sector as part of our Inno Under 25 feature. Check out all the profiles from this year's honorees here.
To say that Alfredo Andre are Kenny Workman are driven would be an absurd understatement. For the past year the pair and their small team of 15 people have been toiling away at LatchBio to develop a product that it is their ticket into the enormously complex yet lucrative biotech industry. Two college dropouts, they have managed to get get their foot into the typically highly credentialed sector through Workman's past lab connections at UC Berkeley and Andere's business acumen, alongside their other co-founder Kyle Giffin (who got held up in Barcelona and missed the Inno Under 25 interview and photoshoot). Asked about their hobbies, both replied: Work.
Alfredo Andere
- Age: 24
- Title: CTO and co-founder of LatchBio
- Residence: San Francisco
- Education: UC Berkeley (dropped out)
Kenny Workman
- Age: 22
- Role: CTO and co-founder of LatchBio
- Residence: San Francisco
- Education: UC Berkeley (dropped out)
About LatchBio
- What the company does: Develops software that enables biotech labs to more easily store data and collaborate in the cloud.
- Funding: $32.8 milion
After you both dropped out, did you start a company immediately?
Alfredo: We were originally just working on projects together and trying to make something useful for biology. It wasn't until we actually had to get funding that they were like, 'oh, you need to incorporate.'
Kenny: We're still navigating the idea maze of biotech. So we had a website with a very vague idea around depth tools for computation biologists without like a clear product at that point.
How did you come up with your final idea for the company?
Alfredo: We had worked on a bunch of projects with bad ideas in college and didn't want to make the same mistakes. So we talked to 200 people, so we know what people want. So after talking to people over the next three months, we had like six people that were willing to pay us for an app for the idea that became Latch.
Who are you inspired by?
Alfredo: I'm going to be generic and say Steve Jobs. When I was 14, I read his biography. And it's what inspired me a lot and showed me that these companies that I like were made by pure persistence and hard work and innovation. I'm from Mexico, so that concept to me was really, really wild. And it's what inspired me to come to Berkeley and what inspired me to want to start a company.
Kenny: John von Neumann, just because he was a digital mathematician, an early age, but then applied a lot of different fields in very practical ways. As you get older. He was instrumental in helping to build the atomic bomb by using all these crazy ideas, both from new domains of math that he invented and also worked on early forms of computers to simulate how a bomb would explode.
