Noah Craft has a useful test for an impending argument: will this still matter in three days? If the answer is no, he would rather save the breath. Belinda Tan taught him the rule when they started dating. They have since had rather more opportunities than most couples to put it to work. They are married, they are parents, and they have founded two companies together. There is plenty of scope for a difference of opinion.
At People Science, Craft and Tan share the chief executive title. That arrangement puts a familiar question inside an unfamiliar organization chart: how do two people make a decision without turning every disagreement into a referendum on the partnership? Their answer begins with deciding who has the final call. The conversation can then have a purpose beyond producing a winner.
It is an unexpectedly domestic entrance to a career that runs through Brown, UCLA, software businesses, scientific publishing, and venture funding. The degrees and job titles are real. So is the practical problem of getting along with another human being while trying to make something complicated happen. Craft’s story becomes more interesting when those two strands are allowed into the same room.
Will it still matter then?
Maine, UCLA, and a road out
Craft grew up in a small Maine town. College introduced him to research and the possibility of turning scientific questions into a working life. At Brown University, he studied biology, receiving his ScB in 1993. He went on to UCLA, where he earned his MD and PhD in 2000. The clean sequence of institutions and dates conceals an interruption.
During graduate school, immersed in laboratory work, he began to question the purpose of what he was doing. He stepped away and traveled through Mexico. Eventually he returned to his studies with renewed conviction. The trip belongs in the story because it complicates the tidy version of professional ambition. Craft did leave the path. Then he chose it again.
That distinction matters. A résumé records the completed degree and moves on; the person doing the degree must decide whether to keep showing up. His journey allows room for uncertainty in an occupation that is often introduced with a row of confident initials. The later entrepreneur did not begin with an uninterrupted certainty about where all this effort would lead.
At UCLA, his research mentor was Charles Sawyers. His doctoral work sat within molecular biology, with training in microbiology, immunology, and molecular genetics. These were years of detailed questions and specialized methods. Long before Craft was explaining a company to investors, he was learning how to frame a question that could survive investigation. That scientific apprenticeship preceded his work as a founder and executive.
The first company, and the second
Craft and Tan met in UCLA’s MD-PhD program in the mid-1990s. Their collaboration developed over years, encompassing scientific work, business, and family life. In 2014 they co-founded Science 37. Craft served as CEO through 2019; Tan was its co-founder and chief medical officer. People Science, founded in 2019, gave them a different arrangement at the top.
The first business brought together software, remote communication, research operations, and digital media. Its NORA platform combined functions including video conversations, electronic consent, and data collection. Bringing those activities together was an organizational undertaking as much as a technical one. Different kinds of expertise had to meet inside one company and deliver a coherent experience to the person using it.
In April 2017, Science 37 announced a $29 million Series C. By then, the idea had traveled a considerable distance from a founding conversation. Funding introduces a new audience, a new set of expectations, and more people whose work depends on decisions at the top. The headline number is one way to describe that stage. The more revealing question is how the founders handled a growing organization.
By 2017, Craft’s scientific record included more than 45 peer-reviewed manuscripts and multiple patents. Company building had joined an established record of scientific work. That gives his career a particular shape: the entrepreneur arrived with experience of producing knowledge, then took on the separate task of organizing people, money, and technology around it.
The pottery in the office
Among the objects in Science 37’s office were irregular ceramics made by Craft and Tan. Both are potters. They also spent time outdoors, thinking about business in mountain cabins and campsites. Those details offer a welcome change of texture. A pair of founders can be serious about their company and still make things that would look quite odd in a spreadsheet.
Craft described his approach to leadership as providing people with guidance and tools, then giving them room to explore. As his responsibilities grew, he said he had learned to listen to more perspectives. Science 37’s hiring process also put weight on character, with its people leader interviewing each candidate. Technical qualifications were part of the assessment; how someone would work with others mattered too.
The handmade objects are a small detail, but they keep the portrait from becoming entirely institutional. Craft’s interests extend to backcountry camping in the High Sierras. Here is a founder whose public professional history contains both patents and pottery, an organization chart and a route into the mountains. Neither hobby needs to become a management theory to deserve its place in his life.
“I tend to listen more and try to appreciate a lot more perspectives.”
Noah Craft, 2017
Two names on the door
The move to People Science made co-leadership explicit. In their account of the business, Craft and Tan emphasize trust, adaptability, and talking directly when a decision needs to be made. They also describe renegotiating agreements when circumstances change. Those are ordinary words for demanding habits. A shared title leaves both people responsible for practicing them.
The partnership has its own comic vocabulary. Craft’s nickname is LoVac, short for Low Velocity Chaos. Tan’s is IMF, the Invisible Massive Force. He describes himself as overflowing with ideas, with Tan helping bring prioritization and follow-through. He also makes room for the roles to reverse. The nicknames are affectionate shorthand, rather than a permanent allocation of imagination to one person and discipline to the other.
There is an appealing modesty in admitting that a person can generate more ideas than a working week can accommodate. A second founder can ask which of those ideas deserves the next hour. A shared history gives that question a different weight: these two have already built something together, and each knows what the other brings to the task.
A platform has to earn its place
People Science brings that partnership back to a problem Craft has pursued through company building: making scientific participation more accessible. Its software, Chloe, connects people and research teams. The company describes its ambition in terms of participation, transparency, and inclusion. The organizational breadth is visible in its team, with responsibilities spanning operations, product development, engineering, research, sales, and customer success.
Craft’s earlier work included executive roles at VisualDx and DirectDerm, along with an academic career at UCLA and work at what is now the Lundquist Institute. The sequence shows experience across both software businesses and scientific institutions. He has worked inside institutions as well as businesses, and his current company draws on both kinds of experience.
In describing Chloe, Craft puts particular emphasis on the individual’s relationship with their data. He says participants control sharing and can withdraw their data. He also describes returning results in visual form so people can see their own information in context. Those details reveal what accessibility means in the product: participation should produce something intelligible for the person who contributes.
“If consumers don’t trust us, it’s over.” The sentence is short enough to fit on an office wall. It also puts an obligation on the organization. Trust has to survive the interface, the explanation of permissions, and the experience of receiving information back. A company asking people to participate has to remain understandable after the invitation has been accepted.
Still asking who gets to take part
In January 2023, People Science announced a $5.3 million second seed round led by Acre Venture Partners. Later, investor Supply Change Capital described a business working with more than 40 customers. These are company milestones, rather than a personal balance sheet. For Craft, they mark another round of the work that follows a founding idea: finding partners, serving customers, and keeping a team moving.
He continues to argue for broader participation in science. His October 2025 essay, “Inviting consumers into the lab,” made the case for research that is more democratic and transparent. The title is revealing on its own. It treats the boundary around scientific work as something that can be opened, with consumers contributing to the process rather than simply encountering a finished claim.
That ambition connects several versions of Craft: the student drawn to discovery, the traveler who paused to reconsider his direction, the executive assembling a company, and the co-founder who shares authority. The connection is a recurring interest in how people enter a process and what they can do once they are inside it.
At the center remains a partnership with a practical sense of its own limitations. Some questions need investigation. Some decisions need an owner. Some disagreements will have evaporated before the weekend. The three-day rule leaves more room for the work that lasts. In a life crowded with credentials, companies, and questions, that sounds like a useful bit of space to keep.