Why you should "start with the science," with Mark Johnson (Zite, Descartes Labs, Gallup)

​Most product playbooks start with “the customer problem.”
But some of the most important companies of the last 20 years started somewhere else: a scientific breakthrough.

​In this conversation, Mark (product leader and 3x CEO) shares what it actually takes to commercialize science — based on a career building companies spun out of research labs (including startups originating from Stanford, Xerox PARC, university research, and Los Alamos National Laboratory).

​We’ll explore:

• ​Why “start with the science” can unlock entirely new product surfaces

• ​The core risk: investing in a science thesis without a market thesis

• ​How to narrow from “this tech can do a million things” to a real product:
  capabilities → constraints → markets → use case → revenue

• ​The consulting-vs-product trap

• ​What modern AI commercialization teaches us about the same pattern today