Enzyme was started to help companies get cutting edge, quality technology to patients faster. We strive to facilitate this for our customers by providing best-in-class information and tooling.
After spending a decade each in the medical device industry, our founders Jared and Jacob grew exhausted with the status quo day-to-day Quality Management System (QMS) activities and submission generation.
Jacob used a plethora of QMS software tools for routine tasks (i.e. different tools for the varied elements of a QMS), and many users either 1) had partial/no access to all systems or 2) had significant difficulty using many systems due to infrequent access. This resulted in delays to getting work done amounting to weeks or months for a single project and ultimately to millions of work-hours per year across an enterprise. Enzyme combines and integrates workflows to significantly reduce the work-hours necessary to accomplish project objectives.
Jared co-founded a consulting firm before Enzyme that specifically aided companies in submission generation. While doing that, he learned of the immense waste of resources that companies invested in submission writing.
Both Jared and Jacob share a vision of a unifying QMS tool that streamlines numerous workflows and assists in document creation through auto-generation via Machine Learning & Natural Language Processing features.
Too often good product ideas fail to commercialize due to what seems to be an overwhelming compliance and regulatory burden. The Enzyme cloud-hosted QMS application greatly reduces the work needed to accomplish the same deliverables. Per its namesake, Enzyme acts as a catalyst, or force-multiplier, to help get products to market faster.
Enzyme’s mission is to help life science companies commercialize faster without compromising patient care. We foster a culture of quality through modern software tools and expert guidance.
Our goal is to reduce the time and cost life science companies spend during the product development life cycle. Through our product, education, and support, we help companies commercialize faster.
- Founded: 2017
- Founders: Jacob Graham, Jared Seehafer
- Principal Investors: DCVC (Data Collective), GSR Ventures, Refactor Capital, Rock Health, SOMA Capital, Y Combinator
- Current Offerings: eQMS software, Quality as a Service, Regulatory as a Service
A SaaS application that encodes a depth of quality & regulatory business processes that is thoughtfully integrated & friendly to novices and pros alike.
A Full QMS set of procedures compliant to regulations & standards to which medical device companies must comply.
For strategic accounts, we offer Regulatory and/or Quality consulting services, or “RaaS” and “QaaS” respectively). Through the Quality services, we provide support to companies as they set up their QMS and train their users. We can also provide internal audit support to help ensure they are ready for FDA inspections and Notified Body (the FDA equivalents in the European Union) audits.
As part of our regulatory services, we can help companies prepare their pre-submissions and full submissions for the FDA or a Notified Body.
Enzyme is a Remote First organization. Processes and tooling are set up to ensure a high level of transparency and accountability across the organization, regardless of whether an employee is local or remote.
Employees can work remotely from home, a coffee shop, or wherever they are most efficient, provided their work is getting done.
For the 100% remote team members, they can work from anywhere during business hours as long as they are available online for calls.
- Each quarter the team will develop and publish OKRs
- Updates will be made as appropriate as the quarter ensues.
- All-hands meetings that are typically bi-weekly include OKR progress updates, announcements, discussions of hot topics, and an open Q&A forum.
As per best practices and quality system procedures Enzyme continuously assesses competence. This is a suggested agenda for routine 1-on-1 meetings:
- Review context:
- Personal context
- Key business updates
- Performance versus OKRs
- Feedback about organizational systems & processes (not shared in company retro meetings)
- Performance feedback for management; start/stop/continue
- Career planning; near-term & long-term
This will be summarized in an annual review.
- Enzyme HQ (headquarters): 611 Gateway Blvd Ste 120, South San Francisco, CA 94080.
- Everyone is working remotely since 2020
- We support being “in the zone” (deep focused work)
- We capture and track work in organized tasks
- We communicate openly in shared digital forums (Slack)
Our employees work varied hours from many global locations. This creates several asynchronous workflows that we strive to use to our advantage and allows great autonomy for individual contributors. Team and all-hands meetings are generally clustered during centralized ‘core hours’ so all who are needed can attend as per their normal work schedules.
We believe HIGHLY in the lesson of this cartoon by @detly
It’s far better for everyone’s concentration and sanity if we collaborate as though most things will get an answer eventually, but not necessarily right this second. The preferred first choice of action should be to post a message, a to-do, or a document about what we need explained or need to know. Then others can respond when they’re available.
There are exceptions. Extended, synchronous collaborations sometimes are needed. We use Slack, Zoom, and in-person collaboration when appropriate.
Teams that collaborate heavily should plan for more overlap. Async should bias for deep (aka Deep Work) concentration time, thereby improving productivity.
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Communication Norms We use Slack as our main tool for communication. During their respective business hours, all employees should be available via Slack.
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AFK (Away From Keyboard) Life happens, just notify your team on Slack and/or via the Enzyme Shared calendar that you won’t be available and for approximately how long.
Once in the summer and once in winter we all gather to build relationships and share key updates.
This is an important complement to our remote-first, distributed structure.
To successfully build our product, there are several tools we use on a daily basis.
Everyone
- Atlassian - Jira & Confluence
- Zoom - Video/audio conferencing for internal & external calls. For team meetings, please plan to have your camera on as much as possible.
- Slack - Used most commonly for daily communication within the team and some of our customers. In support of Remote-First, async culture, please be mindful to use appropriately scoped channels. Even conversations amongst people in the office might take place over Slack, as to record it for posterity or make available to remote teams.
- G Suite - We use Gmail and Google Calendar, and much of our documentation is hosted on Google Drive.
- Microsoft Office Suite - we use Word and PowerPoint for certain internal purposes and with certain customers.
Product Development
- Figma - a 2D design tool we use to create user interface mocks for our product.
- Github - Source control
- AWS - Everything is hosted on AWS
Customer Operations & Marketing
- Hubspot - Customer Relationship Management software & marketing automation
- Front - auxillary email client, allowing us to easily collaborate on responding to shared email inboxes such as support@ and sales@enzyme.com
- Intercom - chat tool used to manage leads on our website and handle questions in-app. Intercom also hosts our support center.
- Webflow - a web content management systems we use primarily for our marketing site, education portal & occasionally to prototype product user interfaces.
Enzyme provides
- Tools of the trade (laptop of your choice, monitor, etc)
- Competitive base compensation (distributed on the 15th & last business day of the month)
- Equity compensation
- Mental & physical health days (unlimited)
- 2 week vacation (minimum)
For US employees
- Medical, dental and vision insurance -- 100% premium paid for employee and 50% premium paid for dependents
- Life insurance
- 401k (contributions made every pay period)
- Enzyme IRL offsite location & non-work activities
- Flexible work hours, locations
- Personal gear stipend
- Team Lunch every month
- Annual conference/continuous improvement stipend
- New Year's Day (January 1)
- President's day (aka: Washington's Birthday) (Third Monday in February)
- Memorial Day (Last Monday in May)
- Independence Day (July 4) (Observed Friday July 3rd in 2020)
- Labor Day (First Monday in September)
- Veterans Day (November 11)
- Thanksgiving Day (Fourth Thursday in November)
- Day After Thanksgiving
- Christmas Day (December 25)
- The roughly two weeks spanning Christmas & New Years
- 2019: Mon Dec 23rd onward, returning Thur Jan 2nd
- 2020: Mon Dec 21st onward, returning Mon Jan 4th
- During this time employees are encouraged to be home or at a rejuvenating destination
- Employees will maintain access via Slack, laptop & WiFi in case of work emergency
- Key resources in Engineering & Customer Support may work full hours as needed