There is no respectable career map that begins with an octopus, wanders through Madagascar, pauses at a venture fund and ends at a Los Angeles biotechnology company. Scott Gies followed one anyway. The route looks eccentric only if a career is supposed to proceed like a laboratory protocol. His has behaved more like field research: notice the odd thing, move closer, ask a better question.
Today Gies is the CEO and cofounder of Zoe Biosciences. The title is tidy. The apprenticeship was not. He studied neuroscience at Dartmouth College, then biotechnology at Johns Hopkins. Along the way came epigenetics and genomics work in the Sharp Lab at Mount Sinai, computational research, marine conservation in Madagascar and a Dartmouth project on octopus cognition. There were also stretches in scientific diligence, investment advising and business development. The biography reads as though several curious people agreed to share one name.
What connects those chapters is less a subject than a habit. Gies has repeatedly worked where an observation must be translated into a decision. In a lab, the decision might be the next experiment. At a fund, it might be which scientific claim deserves capital. At a startup, it becomes a chain of choices about programs, partners and priorities. Curiosity opens the door; judgment decides whether to walk through.
The scenic route, compressed
The octopus in the footnotes
A charming item on Gies's research resume returned in June 2026. Current Biology published a paper with Gies among its authors on whether octopuses could use mirrors to locate a reward outside their direct line of sight. The work had roots in the Tse Lab at Dartmouth, where he had helped with what a public biography calls the “mirror project.”
The experiment had the clean absurdity of a good children's book. Three California two-spot octopuses faced a mirror. A virtual crab appeared in reflection while remaining hidden from direct view. To earn an actual reward, each animal had to leave a small chamber and navigate to the side aligned with the reflected prey. Across the trials reported in the paper, the animals chose correctly 73 percent of the time.
Mirrors are simple objects that create complicated information. A reflection is visible, but the thing it describes is elsewhere. The octopus must stop treating the image as the destination and use it as a clue. It is difficult to find a more elegant early training exercise for someone who would later build a company from scientific evidence: do not chase the shiny picture; work out what it points toward.
The mirror problem
Learning the second language
Science was only one half of the education. Gies worked on scientific diligence at OS Fund, the deep-tech investment firm. He later advised Sergey Young's Longevity Vision Fund on biotechnology investments. These roles put him on the receiving end of other founders' arguments. A technical claim had to survive examination, but so did the plan for turning that claim into an organization.
Then came the Flow Research Collective, an organization focused on the neuroscience of peak performance. Gies led Business Development and Strategic Partnerships. The job supplied another form of translation: a research idea has to become legible to people who were not present at the experiment. Partnerships happen when two parties can see the same possibility clearly enough to act.
Put the roles together and the sequence becomes practical. Research taught him how evidence is made. Diligence taught him how evidence is challenged. Business development taught him how evidence travels. A founder needs all three, particularly in biotechnology, where the distance between an interesting mechanism and a durable company can be measured in years.
His fieldwork adds a wilder coordinate. Gies's official biography notes marine conservation research in Madagascar. Public accounts do not supply a diary, and none is needed. The detail matters because field conservation strips research of its flattering conveniences. Weather ignores calendars. Animals do not respect agendas. The place itself gets a vote. Anyone who later builds a preclinical company will recognize the arrangement.
The company around the founder
Zoe's public leadership roster makes another part of Gies's operating style visible: he builds through specialists. Vaughan brings decades of physician-scientist work and serves as chief scientific officer. Layton Smith, the vice president of drug discovery, contributes expertise in the company's second research pathway. The scientific advisory board reaches into antibody development, epigenetics, clinical research and chemistry. Gies sits in the middle of that collection without pretending to replace it.
The connections also trace backward through his career. Investment work introduced the discipline of outside review. Partnership work trained the mechanics of shared projects. Academic labs demonstrated how narrow expertise can combine into a paper with a long author list. The 2026 octopus paper names sixteen authors, a small parade of initials behind one result. Biotechnology runs on the same unromantic truth: consequential work is usually plural.
That makes “cofounder” the more revealing half of his title. Founding suggests a beginning; cofounding admits that the beginning already contains a relationship. Gies's public career is full of these joins - science with finance, research with operations, one institution with another. His job is not simply to possess a thesis. It is to make a group capable of testing it.
A company built around a clue
Gies cofounded Zoe Biosciences with Douglas Vaughan, a physician-scientist who serves as chief scientific officer. The company's public story begins with human genetic evidence and asks what can responsibly be built from it. The scientific programs are specialized, but the founder's task is recognizable: keep an ambitious thesis attached to testable work.
Zoe is small. LinkedIn lists a company size of two to ten employees, and the supplied company record counts two. Its public leadership page pairs that compact core with physicians, scientists and advisers. Such a structure turns the myth of the solitary founder inside out. The CEO is less lone genius than switchboard operator, connecting academic expertise, laboratory work, intellectual property, finance and outside partners without dropping the call.
A 2023 assessment by VitaDAO showed that network in unusually public detail. Gies and Vaughan were listed as project leads. Reviewers included scientists, biotechnology investors and business specialists. The proposal set out two preclinical programs, academic and technical collaborators, financing goals and risks. The process ended with an approved investment proposal. More interesting than the vote was the exposure: the company placed a technical plan where strangers could inspect it.
“It is our job to decipher the downstream effects ... and how we can bring this advantage to a broader patient population.”Scott Gies, 2023 interview
Gies's public remarks have the scale expected of a founder, but they usually return to the work. In a 2023 interview, he described the evidence behind Zoe's thesis as a natural experiment. He described the company's role with an active verb: decipher. The word is revealing. It does not promise that nature has handed over a finished product. It suggests a message whose meaning must be earned.
That distinction is the daily substance of early biotechnology. Human data can point in a direction without eliminating technical risk. A promising target can survive while a particular approach fails. Timelines move. A program must become specific enough to test, fund and eventually hand to a clinical team. The founder's optimism is useful only when it remains on speaking terms with the experiment.
The advantage of not looking inevitable
Founder profiles are often edited into prophecy. Childhood interest becomes destiny. Every old job becomes a deliberate stepping stone. Gies's story is better without that varnish. An undergraduate octopus project did not inevitably lead to Zoe Biosciences. Neither did Madagascar, Mount Sinai, a deep-tech fund or a peak-performance organization. Their value is cumulative, not prophetic.
The cumulative skill is knowing how to enter an unfamiliar room. Gies has moved between bench scientists, investors, business partners and academic collaborators. Each group has its own tempo and its own evidence threshold. A researcher may want another control. An investor wants to know which uncertainty can be retired next. A partner wants to understand where their capability fits. The founder has to honor each question while maintaining one coherent plan.
There is personality in that pattern, though the public record wisely leaves private life private. The professional choices show an appetite for subjects that do not yield quickly. Genomes hide their effects inside enormous systems. Octopuses are uncooperative colleagues. Conservation fieldwork removes the illusion of control. Drug development makes all three seem punctual.
Gies has said the end goal is to help hundreds of millions of people. The number is large enough to sound almost architectural. The work beneath it remains granular: one target, one experiment, one decision, then another. That is where the scenic route earns its keep. It has given him repeated practice in moving from strange evidence to a shared map.
Back in the mirror tank, the clever move was not toward the visible crab. It was away from the reflection, around the barrier and toward the location the image implied. The octopus had to trust a relationship it had learned. Founders are often asked for vision. Gies's career offers a more useful version of the word: see the clue, understand the geometry and go where the evidence says the real thing might be.