Lenny Teytelman, PhD, is the founder and president of protocols.io, a platform created to make scientific methods more accessible, transparent, and reproducible. Acquired by Springer Nature in 2023, protocols.io has grown from a small startup into a global community used by thousands of researchers worldwide. Teytelman completed his PhD in genetics and computational biology at UC Berkeley. In advance of his participation in QB3-Berkeley’s Professional in Residence Program in November, he sat down with us and shared how protocols.io got off the ground, what he’s learned as a founder over the past 11 years, and why open science continues to drive his work.
Leah Keiser: Can you tell us how you identified the need it fills for scientists, and what inspired you to start it?
Lenny Teytelman: It was somewhat accidental. It’s nice to paint it as though I had a vision and wanted to accelerate science, but actually my co-founder called me on January 7th, 2012, asking if he could build an iPhone app that would be helpful for biologists. I laughed and said, “What’s it going to do, pipette for me?” But then I called him back 10 minutes later and said, “It would be great if, instead of rewriting my protocols in a notebook, I could run them on a phone and edit the exact steps that I took.”
At first it was just that: a little app where you could put in your protocol steps, run them, and record exactly what you did. Around that same time, when I was a postdoc at MIT, I had struggled for a year and a half with a single-cell microscopy protocol. In the end, the issue came down to one minor tweak, which was just changing the amount of an enzyme. It wasn’t some brand-new technique; it was a correction of something previously published.
I called my co-founder back three weeks later as I was walking home, and asked, “If people are already keeping track of the adjustments they make as they run protocols, could we crowdsource a central place where scientists can share those corrections and modifications?” He said, “Sure, that should be easy.”
So it morphed from a little side project into a kind of Wikipedia-like resource that would be central for scientists to exchange protocol information. It wasn’t driven by entrepreneurial ambition, but grew organically given the experiences that I had as a scientist.
LK: protocols.io was recently acquired by Springer Nature. How has your day-to-day work changed since the startup phase?
LT: It’s a little bit wild, going from three co-founders in a basement to a 15-person company, and now we’re part of a 10,000-plus-person organization. In the early days you’re doing everything yourself; now it’s a lot more meetings and coordination. There are trade-offs, like more bureaucracy, less flexibility to radically transform the platform and add 10 new things, since a change that helps one person can make it worse for 200,000 others.
But there are big advantages too. Now we have people who know how to do user experience research, and a department for marketing that can promote our platform and reach out to people who don’t know about protocols.io.
Personally, I’m not a serial entrepreneur. For me, it’s always been about protocols.io itself. Today, we have over a million visitors a year, and more than 20,000 public protocols. But I dream of millions of users and thousands of new protocols every month. Being part of Springer Nature gives us the stability and reach to get there.
LK: What lessons have you learned about building a company?
LT: I was surprised by how well my PhD prepared me. There are moments during a PhD where you feel like the only thing you know about is the gene that you’re studying or the protein you’re crystallizing. But what was interesting for me was realizing that defending a thesis, presenting at conferences, writing papers, or handling rejection directly translated to my experience as a founder with investors and partners. I felt that I was an expert in yeast genetics and chromatin, but it turned out I was prepared for a lot more as part of my graduate training.
Building a product is like designing experiments: you don’t know what will work, so you test assumptions, add controls, and pivot. I didn’t go to business school, but the skills I learned in research translated surprisingly well.
LK: How did your time at Berkeley here shape your entrepreneurial path?
LT: Berkeley played a huge role. I was co-advised by Mike Eisen, co-founder of PLOS. PLOS launched in 2003, the year I started my PhD in MCB, so I had a front-row seat to the creation of an open-access journal and countless conversations about the need to improve how science is communicated. That experience was formative and deeply shaped my thinking and goals.
A former postdoc from Jasper Rine’s lab, my other advisor, had left a few years before me to start Bioprotocol.com, which had a very similar idea. I didn’t know about it at the time, but I was able to connect with him later, and he became an early advisor. Professor Rine himself also joined the protocol.io board and stayed on from 2013 until our exit in 2023. We couldn’t have done it without his help.
After moving back to the Bay Area, we joined SkyDeck, which gave us space, a network, and our first engineer. Our Kickstarter was boosted by Berkeley and UCSF researchers, and the Bay Area’s open science culture made it easier to gain traction. Stanford gets a lot of the spotlight, but Berkeley’s ecosystem and openness were critical for us. I actually wrote about Berkeley’s role in our success in a 2019 blog post.
LK: What do you hope trainees take away from your visit through the PIR program?
LT: I vividly remember imposter syndrome in my fourth year, thinking everyone in Berkeley was better than me, and wondering if I was good enough for academia and not seeing other options.
It was interesting for me to learn that society values scientists not for the specific topic or paper, but for transferable skills, like testing assumptions, working with data, and taking a deliberate scientific approach to problem-solving. That is why I respond so positively to what Berkeley is doing with the PIR program.
There are so many paths beyond academia, and none of them make you a “failed scientist.” There are many ways to thrive; it’s about finding what fits you personally.
LK: And looking ahead, what’s next for you and protocols.io?
LT: I am passionate about open science and improving research productivity. I am still excited about working at protocols.io, which I think is unusual after so long. I now have the ability to scale it up to where I thought it would go in a year when I was naive.
Before the acquisition, I realized that if I wasn’t at protocols.io, I’d enjoy working at a funding agency on policies to improve reproducibility. I don’t see myself jumping to another startup; I feel like I’ve served my time and enjoy more stability now.
Within protocols.io, it’s an interesting moment. There’s hype around LLMs and AI, but we’ve brought elements into protocols.io that help but do not replace scientists. We’ve integrated AI tools to automatically convert PDFs into the protocols.io format, and we recently launched translations in 36 languages. These are things we dreamed of for 10 years, and we can finally make them real.
Lenny Teytelman is the co-founder and president of protocols.io. He studied math at Columbia before coming to UC Berkeley for his PhD in genetics and computational biology and completing a postdoc at MIT. In 2014, he launched protocols.io to tackle the challenges of sharing, correcting, and preserving research methods.
Leah Keiser is a PhD candidate in chemical and biomolecular engineering at UC Berkeley in Jay Keasling’s laboratory. Her research involves engineering microorganisms for sustainable chemical production.