“As a part of my series about “Lessons From Inspirational Women in STEM and Tech”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Radhika Dirks. Dr. Dirks is co-founder and CEO of XLabs, a next-gen artificial intelligence (AI) company that mines nature’s algorithms to find breakthroughs and launch moonshots to solve the world’s highest stakes problems, such as cancer, drug discovery and digital addiction. Radhika holds a PhD in quantum computing and a Master’s in nanotechnology. Prior to founding XLabs, she was CEO & founder of Seldn, an artificial intelligence predicting global socio-economic disruptions (‘black swans’). Radhika has also co-led cleantech deals as a founding member of Shell’s $500M venture capital group and was COO of Rotary Gallop, a game theory-based fintech firm.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
During the third year of my PhD studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, I was staring at a poster for the $500,000 Lemelson–MIT Prize, which recognizes individuals who translate their ideas into world changing inventions. As I was wondering which of my three PhD projects would be the most suitable, I realized that there seemed to be two kinds of interesting people in our midst: 1) The tech genius — people who are capable of coming up with fundamentally world-changing technologies, like a completely new kind of computer that mimics nature, but stop at showing the proof of their possibility by publishing a paper, and 2) The business magnate — people who can scale very successful businesses and make themselves and others a lot of money doing so. Everything about them — their skills, the way they think, even their personalities, is very different. Here I was at the #1 school for physics, with some of the smartest minds of this century and yet, we received no training in building or commercializing some of the biggest breakthroughs happening right in front of us. We had no applicants from UIUC to the MIT prize that year, from a school that housed the most Nobel Prize laureates. If that isn’t a gap, I don’t know what is.
From there, I realized that for future technology to make a meaningful difference in the world and manifest some of these tech possibilities, we would need people who could dance between these two worlds. In the past, we had geniuses like Edison and Tesla, or we had Bell Labs and Xerox Parc, who commercialized the findings of geniuses. We still only have very few companies that do both, which is why I founded XLabs. It was this realization that sent me on this very non-specific, in-retrospect, career path. It’s not for the faint of heart and I would mostly caution against it.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company?
In December 2018, XLabs was invited by the executive team at the World Bank to keynote and advise at its South Asian Regional Retreat. They were exploring how the World Bank should adopt disruptive tech to help developing countries….