Evan Zhao - Co-Founder and CEO of Pacagen
The beauty industry has been selling women retinol and vitamin C for decades, marked up to $200 a bottle with packaging doing most of the persuasion. A Princeton-trained chemical engineer and his wife, a molecular biologist allergic to their own cat, decided that was unacceptable. Within two years of launching their AI-driven molecule discovery platform, they had built a hair-thinning serum generating $50 million in annual revenue at 25 percent margins, sold the company to Oddity for $76 million, taken that public company through its IPO, and were already working on the next problem: the 100 million Americans who are allergic to their pets and living with it anyway.
In this episode of What Fuels You, host Shauna Swerland sits down with Dr. Evan Zhao, co-founder and CEO of Pacagen, for a conversation that covers growing up between Beijing and Buffalo, bonding with the football team to avoid getting beat up, discovering ADHD in college and leaning into it as fuel, why a random guy in a fellowship interview turned out to be Google's former CFO, how a McDonald's app tip led to a co-founder relationship, and why he would genuinely love to make the world's largest consumer companies lose sleep at their own board meetings.
📋 Episode Chapters
| 00:00 | Opening: why large, lazy consumer companies are the ultimate motivator and what Pacagen is building to disrupt them |
| 02:00 | Rapid fire: scrolling his phone first thing, wanting to be Sherlock Holmes, hating the word "strategy" in startup interviews, Beijing then Buffalo |
| 08:00 | Diagnosing ADHD in college: how it shows up, why he mostly uses it as an excuse, and what he and Shauna Swerland share about getting to the bottom line fast |
| 13:00 | Growing up between Beijing and Buffalo: grandparents raising him, remedial English class, befriending the football and wrestling teams to avoid getting beat up |
| 22:00 | Social media, rage bait, and division: why he thinks the majority of Americans are not actually that divided and what algorithmic anger-optimization has done to public discourse |
| 27:30 | Grandmother as math tutor, non-tiger parents, and why the random late-night taco runs taught him more than high school statistics |
| 31:00 | Choosing Caltech: a chemistry Olympiad, getting out of Buffalo, and making friends with the nerdiest kids he had ever met |
| 36:00 | Why he pursued a PhD at Princeton: controlling light to toggle bacteria between growing and chemical production, and meeting his wife two floors above his lab |
| 42:00 | The Schmidt Science Fellowship: selected by the Rhodes Trust, working under Dr. James Collins at Harvard's Wyss Institute, and meeting Patrick Pichette in the interview panel |
| 48:00 | Founding Revela: his wife holds up a $300 La Mer bottle, AI-driven molecule discovery at a fraction of the cost, and inventing a new ingredient called ProSelenil |
| 55:00 | How Revela found its co-founder David: the McDonald's app, two researchers who were the only people showing up during COVID, and $50M in revenue in year one |
| 60:00 | Oddity acquisition and IPO: what it is actually like to be a public company, short sellers writing false reports, and why even Stripe has not gone public |
| 65:00 | Founding Pacagen: alpaca-derived nanobodies, neutralizing cat allergen Fel D1, dog allergens CAN F1 and CAN F2, and why the science works where antihistamines only manage symptoms |
| 70:00 | What fuels Dr. Evan Zhao: the pre-Tesla moment in consumer biotech, making large incumbent companies lose sleep, and building products that actually improve people's lives |
From Beijing to Buffalo: A Childhood Between Two Worlds
Evan Zhao was born in Colorado, sent back to Beijing for his first two or three years to be raised by his grandparents, then returned to the United States for good, landing eventually in Buffalo, New York, for middle school and high school. His grandmother tutored him in mental math every day after school. His parents were mostly relaxed about academic pressure, which he credits as one of the better gifts they gave him: he had time to hang out, experiment, and accumulate the kinds of experiences you actually remember. He does not remember the statistics he learned in high school. He remembers the late-night taco runs.
Being small, Asian, and one of very few minority students in a Buffalo high school in the 2000s meant navigating a social landscape that could get rough. He watched gay kids get beaten up before him and concluded that the safest move was to build relationships with the football and wrestling teams. He did, and maintains some of those friendships today. He describes the experience not with bitterness but with a kind of pragmatic clarity: you figure out what the environment is and you adapt. The same instinct, he argues, shows up in how he runs companies.
"I think I learned very early on I needed to like make some friends to make sure I wasn't like beat up. And fortunately, I was never beat up in school, but I had seen enough kids get beat up."
-- Dr. Evan Zhao
His first two years of high school were spent, by his own accounting, mostly fooling around. A meeting between his parents and his guidance counselor at the end of sophomore year delivered the verdict: Evan probably cannot get into a good school. His parents responded by signing him up for Science Olympiad, chemistry Olympiad, and every other academic competition they could find. He locked in. His chemistry Olympiad performance caught the attention of Caltech admissions, which was one of the few schools where that credential genuinely moved the needle. Buffalo winters did the rest of the persuading: four years of Southern California sunshine sounded very good.
Princeton, Optogenetics, and the Schmidt Science Fellowship
At Caltech, Evan studied chemical and biomolecular engineering, a choice driven by his parents' practical concern that a pure chemistry degree would not lead anywhere stable. Engineering was where the jobs were. He has some sympathy for the logic, even if the adjustment to a program that was mostly mathematics at one of the most mathematically rigorous schools in the country was a rude awakening. He did internships, applied to graduate schools partly because he did not know what else to do, and accepted an offer from Princeton based on one specific project that caught his attention during a campus visit: using light to control the production of chemicals inside living bacteria.
His PhD research in Princeton's chemical engineering department explored metabolic engineering, or what is now called synthetic biology. The project centered on a specific problem: bacteria engineered to produce industrial chemicals tend to get sick doing it constantly, like any organism forced to produce without rest. His approach was to use light to toggle bacteria between two states, a growth mode and a production mode, cycling them so they could recover. The concept was elegant, the science was published in Nature and related journals, and two floors above his lab was a molecular biologist named Siyang Han, who would become his wife and, eventually, his Pacagen co-founder.
After his PhD, he was nominated by Princeton and selected as a Schmidt Science Fellow, one of roughly 20 awarded globally each year by the Rhodes Trust using funding from Eric Schmidt. The fellowship placed him at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, working in the lab of Dr. James Collins, who splits his time between MIT and Harvard and is known for translating bioengineered research into company-ready technology. The panel interview for the fellowship included a question he could not stop thinking about afterward: a gray-haired panelist asked him why he was not doing his research in industry. He later discovered the panelist was Patrick Pichette, the former CFO of Google and, at the time, chairman of Twitter. Pichette became his first check.
"A PhD is the first time and the earliest time point in your life where you will have complete and utter control over your own destiny. There's no right answers, right? And you're when you're in school, you're so used to all these answers being right. But the other side is like, it's really exciting."
-- Dr. Evan Zhao
Revela: $50 Million in Year One and a $76 Million Exit
The origin of Revela, the biotech beauty company Evan co-founded and sold to Oddity for $76 million, begins with a La Mer bottle and a wife who was done watching the beauty industry sell women the same molecules it had been selling them since the 1970s. Siyang held up the $300 bottle and told Evan he was not starting a muscle growth supplement company. If he could invent something genuinely new that helped women, she said, he could charge $100 and it would be cheap by comparison. He agreed.
The technology behind Revela was an AI-driven molecule discovery platform that could run a discovery cycle for roughly $10,000, compared to the millions or tens of millions a pharmaceutical company would spend on the same process. The first product to emerge from it was a hair-thinning serum containing a molecule they named ProSelenil. They launched it in December 2022 at $98 per bottle, did the marketing themselves by watching tutorials from teenage YouTubers explaining Facebook and Google ads, and recruited Evan's high school valedictorian friend Enzo as their first employee. Within one year they were doing $50 million in annual revenue at 25 percent margins.
His co-founder, David Zhang, who became Revela's CSO and later head of bioengineering at Oddity, was found through a different kind of selection process. During COVID, when nearly all campus activity had shut down, the only food available at their research facility every day was McDonald's. Evan and David were the only two researchers showing up consistently enough to become regulars. Evan mentioned the McDonald's app to David, who had never heard of it. David later estimated that tip saved him roughly $20,000. That was approximately 5 to 10 percent of the reason he agreed to co-found a company together.
"I think it's infuriating that they sell the same stuff to women all the time. Like, it's vitamin A, retinol, it's vitamin C, and they're like $200 for serum. They'll like put some fancy science-washing language being like, oh, it's like a cool delivery mechanism."
-- Dr. Evan Zhao
Oddity, the parent company of Il Makiage and Spoiled Child, acquired Revela for $76 million in April 2023 and immediately put an additional $25 million into establishing Oddity Labs in Boston. Oddity IPO'd two months after the acquisition closed. Evan joined as Chief Science Officer and describes the public company experience candidly: short sellers writing false reports, roadshows spent reassuring investors that revenue numbers were not fabricated, and the ever-present awareness that information asymmetry, which once protected companies, now cuts the other way entirely. His takeaway is that going public before you are essentially bulletproof is a strategic mistake. He notes that even Stripe, which is a demonstrably strong and profitable business, has concluded the same.
Pacagen: Alpaca Nanobodies, Allergic Cats, and Biotechnology Applied to Everyday Life
The idea for Pacagen started with a cat named Miaomiao. Evan and Siyang adopted a British Shorthair, and Siyang developed severe allergies: itchy eyes, a runny nose, asthma. HEPA filters, air purifiers, antihistamines, nothing worked well enough. Evan, whose PhD had been built on engineering proteins to neutralize specific targets, thought the same logic that pharmaceutical companies use for targeted cancer drugs could be applied to allergens, which are also proteins. The spray Pacagen developed uses nanobodies, a class of single-domain antibodies originally discovered in alpacas, engineered to lock onto and neutralize specific allergens before they trigger an immune response. For cats, the target is the protein Fel D1. For dogs, the targets are CAN F1 and CAN F2. For dust, the targets are Der p 1 and Der p 2.
The company name reflects the technology's origin: PACA from alpaca, GEN from generated. Pacagen. The products are available at pacagen.com. For dogs, you spray directly on the animal. For cats, you spray on beds, couches, and any surface the allergic person will contact, because attempting to spray a cat directly is, as Evan puts it without much elaboration, inadvisable. The current formulation smells slightly of vinegar and protein due to the acetic acid buffer required to keep the proteins stable. A new fragrance version that masks the smell was in final development at the time of recording.
"If you think about cancer therapies, that very targeted therapy, we take that same idea and we just apply it to allergens. So instead of trying to neutralize a cancer motif, we're trying to neutralize an allergen."
-- Dr. Evan Zhao
Pacagen has raised approximately $30 million to date. Its board includes Jerry from Maveron, the consumer fund co-founded by Starbucks founder Howard Schultz; Alex from Coastal Ventures, who also backed Revela; and a representative from Digitalis, the life-science-focused venture arm of Mars. Beyond the allergen sprays, the company has 5 full-time researchers running 20 active R&D projects across the broader wellness space, with a firm rule: nothing goes to market until it has cleared clinical trials and shown head-to-head superiority against whatever the current standard of care is. Approximately 60 percent of projects will produce nothing useful even at the Petri dish stage. Of the 40 percent that show early promise, only a fraction will become a product. That is the math, and Evan accepts it without apparent frustration.
What Jim Sinegal Taught a Room of Tech Founders About Loyalty and Why Evan Took Notes
One of the more unexpected influences on how Evan thinks about building a company came from a dinner organized by Maveron with Jim Sinegal, the co-founder and longtime CEO of Costco. Evan had lobbied aggressively to be included. He was at a table with several successful consumer founders who were puzzled by Costco's model. The company caps its margins at 15 percent on any product. Its revenue numbers are not mysterious. And yet it consistently outperforms retail competitors that are trying to maximize every possible metric.
Sinegal's explanation came down to two things. The first was that a meaningful portion of Costco's current leadership are the children of people who started with the company. He asked whether anyone could name another major retailer where that was true. The second was employee retention. At Target, Walmart, and comparable retailers, warehouse turnover is constant and expensive. At Costco, if someone has been there more than a year, the retention rate runs at roughly 95 percent. Sinegal's point was that this is not an accident or a coincidence of culture. It is the direct result of a policy: Costco does not lay off people without finding them another role somewhere in the organization. You cannot ask for loyalty if you do not offer it first.
"You should never airdrop in leadership, right? You should never like be like, oh, by the way, you've worked for me 5 years. Here is this random dude that worked for a different company. He's your boss now."
-- Dr. Evan Zhao
Evan took from that dinner a concrete operational commitment: he spends the majority of his working time on recruiting and training talent, with the goal of developing his current team into the future leadership of Pacagen. If he cannot do that, he will be forced to airdrop in outside managers, which breaks trust and undermines the retention that gives a company its real advantage. It is, he says, the lesson he extracted from Sinegal's account of how Costco sustains something that most companies in its category cannot: a workforce that actually wants to still be there.
The Pre-Tesla Moment in Consumer Biotech and What Actually Fuels Dr. Evan Zhao
Evan Zhao had a brief period where he thought about retiring. He had sold a company, gone through an IPO, and had enough to step back. He did not. The reason he gives is not about money, which he describes as a tool and not a primary motivator. It is about a pattern he keeps seeing in the consumer goods industry and finding impossible to ignore.
The analogy he uses is Tesla before Tesla. Every major car manufacturer knew how to build an electric vehicle. They had the engineering capability and the capital. They were not doing it because doing so would eat into their existing business. Tesla disrupted anyway, and its market capitalization eventually surpassed every other car manufacturer combined. Evan looks at the beauty, wellness, and pet care industries and sees the same dynamic: large incumbents with the resources to innovate, no incentive to do so, and a consumer base that has been absorbing the cost of their complacency for decades. His goal is to be the company those incumbents mention at their board meetings and shareholder meetings when they are trying to explain why they are losing ground.
"I would love to make some of these large companies lose sleep. I would love to be a company that they bring up at their board meetings, bring up at their shareholder meetings. And when they're losing market share, when they're losing revenue, when they're losing profit, we did that."
-- Dr. Evan Zhao
He is also motivated, quietly and consistently, by the sense that consumers are being taken advantage of. The recycling example he raises is pointed: the recycling movement, it has since become clear, was largely a campaign funded by the chemical industry to shift responsibility for pollution from producers onto individuals. The beauty industry's use of scientific-sounding language to sell decades-old molecules at luxury prices is the same pattern in a different sector. Evan's response to both is the same: build something that actually works, prove it in a clinical trial, and price it so that the improvement reaches more people over time. That is what fuels him.
5 Key Takeaways
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Pacagen and how does its allergen-neutralizing spray work?
Pacagen is a biotechnology consumer brand co-founded by Dr. Evan Zhao and Dr. Siyang Han that produces sprays designed to neutralize pet and dust allergens on contact. The products use nanobodies, a class of single-domain antibody proteins originally derived from alpacas, engineered to bind to specific allergen proteins before they can trigger an immune response. The cat spray targets the protein Fel D1, the dog spray targets CAN F1 and CAN F2, and the dust spray targets Der p 1 and Der p 2. Products are available at pacagen.com.
How did Evan Zhao build Revela to $50 million in revenue in one year?
Revela, the biotech beauty company Evan co-founded with David Zhang, used an AI-driven molecule discovery platform to find novel ingredients at a fraction of pharmaceutical discovery costs, roughly $10,000 per discovery run versus millions in traditional settings. The flagship product was a hair-thinning serum containing a molecule they named ProSelenil, launched in December 2022 at $98 per bottle. Within one year, Revela was generating approximately $50 million in annual revenue at 25 percent margins. Oddity acquired the company in April 2023 for $76 million.
What did Dr. Evan Zhao learn from Jim Sinegal, the co-founder of Costco?
At a dinner organized by Maveron, Sinegal explained that Costco's enduring competitive advantage comes from two things: a significant share of current leadership are the children of original Costco employees, and the company maintains roughly 95 percent one-year employee retention by never laying people off without finding them another role inside the organization. Evan took from the conversation a direct operational commitment to develop his current team into Pacagen's future leadership rather than ever bringing in outside managers over people who have been there for years.
Why did Dr. Evan Zhao choose to found a biotech company targeting allergens rather than a pharmaceutical company?
Evan saw allergens as a problem ideally suited to the same protein-targeting technology used in pharmaceutical drug discovery but deployable as a consumer product rather than a regulated drug. Allergens, like cancer targets, are proteins. The nanobody technology originally developed in alpacas is exceptionally precise at binding specific proteins. By targeting the allergen itself rather than suppressing the immune response after the fact, as antihistamines do, Pacagen's approach addresses the source. The consumer product route also allowed faster commercialization without the decade-long drug approval timeline.
What is the Schmidt Science Fellowship and why did it matter to Evan Zhao's career?
The Schmidt Science Fellowship is awarded annually to approximately 20 early-career scientists globally by the Rhodes Trust, funded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. It provides a stipend that enables fellows to pursue ambitious research projects without depending on a supervisor's grant funding. For Evan, it placed him at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering under Dr. James Collins, one of the leading figures in translating bioengineered research into commercializable technology. The fellowship interview also introduced him to Patrick Pichette, the former CFO of Google, who became Evan's first outside investor in what would become Revela.
Evan Zhao - Co-Founder and CEO of Pacagen
The beauty industry has been selling women retinol and vitamin C for decades, marked up to $200 a bottle with packaging doing most of the persuasion. A Princeton-trained chemical engineer and his wife, a molecular biologist allergic to their own cat, decided that was unacceptable. Within two years of launching their AI-driven molecule discovery platform, they had built a hair-thinning serum generating $50 million in annual revenue at 25 percent margins, sold the company to Oddity for $76 million, taken that public company through its IPO, and were already working on the next problem: the 100 million Americans who are allergic to their pets and living with it anyway.
In this episode of What Fuels You, host Shauna Swerland sits down with Dr. Evan Zhao, co-founder and CEO of Pacagen, for a conversation that covers growing up between Beijing and Buffalo, bonding with the football team to avoid getting beat up, discovering ADHD in college and leaning into it as fuel, why a random guy in a fellowship interview turned out to be Google's former CFO, how a McDonald's app tip led to a co-founder relationship, and why he would genuinely love to make the world's largest consumer companies lose sleep at their own board meetings.
📋 Episode Chapters
| 00:00 | Opening: why large, lazy consumer companies are the ultimate motivator and what Pacagen is building to disrupt them |
| 02:00 | Rapid fire: scrolling his phone first thing, wanting to be Sherlock Holmes, hating the word "strategy" in startup interviews, Beijing then Buffalo |
| 08:00 | Diagnosing ADHD in college: how it shows up, why he mostly uses it as an excuse, and what he and Shauna Swerland share about getting to the bottom line fast |
| 13:00 | Growing up between Beijing and Buffalo: grandparents raising him, remedial English class, befriending the football and wrestling teams to avoid getting beat up |
| 22:00 | Social media, rage bait, and division: why he thinks the majority of Americans are not actually that divided and what algorithmic anger-optimization has done to public discourse |
| 27:30 | Grandmother as math tutor, non-tiger parents, and why the random late-night taco runs taught him more than high school statistics |
| 31:00 | Choosing Caltech: a chemistry Olympiad, getting out of Buffalo, and making friends with the nerdiest kids he had ever met |
| 36:00 | Why he pursued a PhD at Princeton: controlling light to toggle bacteria between growing and chemical production, and meeting his wife two floors above his lab |
| 42:00 | The Schmidt Science Fellowship: selected by the Rhodes Trust, working under Dr. James Collins at Harvard's Wyss Institute, and meeting Patrick Pichette in the interview panel |
| 48:00 | Founding Revela: his wife holds up a $300 La Mer bottle, AI-driven molecule discovery at a fraction of the cost, and inventing a new ingredient called ProSelenil |
| 55:00 | How Revela found its co-founder David: the McDonald's app, two researchers who were the only people showing up during COVID, and $50M in revenue in year one |
| 60:00 | Oddity acquisition and IPO: what it is actually like to be a public company, short sellers writing false reports, and why even Stripe has not gone public |
| 65:00 | Founding Pacagen: alpaca-derived nanobodies, neutralizing cat allergen Fel D1, dog allergens CAN F1 and CAN F2, and why the science works where antihistamines only manage symptoms |
| 70:00 | What fuels Dr. Evan Zhao: the pre-Tesla moment in consumer biotech, making large incumbent companies lose sleep, and building products that actually improve people's lives |
From Beijing to Buffalo: A Childhood Between Two Worlds
Evan Zhao was born in Colorado, sent back to Beijing for his first two or three years to be raised by his grandparents, then returned to the United States for good, landing eventually in Buffalo, New York, for middle school and high school. His grandmother tutored him in mental math every day after school. His parents were mostly relaxed about academic pressure, which he credits as one of the better gifts they gave him: he had time to hang out, experiment, and accumulate the kinds of experiences you actually remember. He does not remember the statistics he learned in high school. He remembers the late-night taco runs.
Being small, Asian, and one of very few minority students in a Buffalo high school in the 2000s meant navigating a social landscape that could get rough. He watched gay kids get beaten up before him and concluded that the safest move was to build relationships with the football and wrestling teams. He did, and maintains some of those friendships today. He describes the experience not with bitterness but with a kind of pragmatic clarity: you figure out what the environment is and you adapt. The same instinct, he argues, shows up in how he runs companies.
"I think I learned very early on I needed to like make some friends to make sure I wasn't like beat up. And fortunately, I was never beat up in school, but I had seen enough kids get beat up."
-- Dr. Evan Zhao
His first two years of high school were spent, by his own accounting, mostly fooling around. A meeting between his parents and his guidance counselor at the end of sophomore year delivered the verdict: Evan probably cannot get into a good school. His parents responded by signing him up for Science Olympiad, chemistry Olympiad, and every other academic competition they could find. He locked in. His chemistry Olympiad performance caught the attention of Caltech admissions, which was one of the few schools where that credential genuinely moved the needle. Buffalo winters did the rest of the persuading: four years of Southern California sunshine sounded very good.
Princeton, Optogenetics, and the Schmidt Science Fellowship
At Caltech, Evan studied chemical and biomolecular engineering, a choice driven by his parents' practical concern that a pure chemistry degree would not lead anywhere stable. Engineering was where the jobs were. He has some sympathy for the logic, even if the adjustment to a program that was mostly mathematics at one of the most mathematically rigorous schools in the country was a rude awakening. He did internships, applied to graduate schools partly because he did not know what else to do, and accepted an offer from Princeton based on one specific project that caught his attention during a campus visit: using light to control the production of chemicals inside living bacteria.
His PhD research in Princeton's chemical engineering department explored metabolic engineering, or what is now called synthetic biology. The project centered on a specific problem: bacteria engineered to produce industrial chemicals tend to get sick doing it constantly, like any organism forced to produce without rest. His approach was to use light to toggle bacteria between two states, a growth mode and a production mode, cycling them so they could recover. The concept was elegant, the science was published in Nature and related journals, and two floors above his lab was a molecular biologist named Siyang Han, who would become his wife and, eventually, his Pacagen co-founder.
After his PhD, he was nominated by Princeton and selected as a Schmidt Science Fellow, one of roughly 20 awarded globally each year by the Rhodes Trust using funding from Eric Schmidt. The fellowship placed him at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, working in the lab of Dr. James Collins, who splits his time between MIT and Harvard and is known for translating bioengineered research into company-ready technology. The panel interview for the fellowship included a question he could not stop thinking about afterward: a gray-haired panelist asked him why he was not doing his research in industry. He later discovered the panelist was Patrick Pichette, the former CFO of Google and, at the time, chairman of Twitter. Pichette became his first check.
"A PhD is the first time and the earliest time point in your life where you will have complete and utter control over your own destiny. There's no right answers, right? And you're when you're in school, you're so used to all these answers being right. But the other side is like, it's really exciting."
-- Dr. Evan Zhao
Revela: $50 Million in Year One and a $76 Million Exit
The origin of Revela, the biotech beauty company Evan co-founded and sold to Oddity for $76 million, begins with a La Mer bottle and a wife who was done watching the beauty industry sell women the same molecules it had been selling them since the 1970s. Siyang held up the $300 bottle and told Evan he was not starting a muscle growth supplement company. If he could invent something genuinely new that helped women, she said, he could charge $100 and it would be cheap by comparison. He agreed.
The technology behind Revela was an AI-driven molecule discovery platform that could run a discovery cycle for roughly $10,000, compared to the millions or tens of millions a pharmaceutical company would spend on the same process. The first product to emerge from it was a hair-thinning serum containing a molecule they named ProSelenil. They launched it in December 2022 at $98 per bottle, did the marketing themselves by watching tutorials from teenage YouTubers explaining Facebook and Google ads, and recruited Evan's high school valedictorian friend Enzo as their first employee. Within one year they were doing $50 million in annual revenue at 25 percent margins.
His co-founder, David Zhang, who became Revela's CSO and later head of bioengineering at Oddity, was found through a different kind of selection process. During COVID, when nearly all campus activity had shut down, the only food available at their research facility every day was McDonald's. Evan and David were the only two researchers showing up consistently enough to become regulars. Evan mentioned the McDonald's app to David, who had never heard of it. David later estimated that tip saved him roughly $20,000. That was approximately 5 to 10 percent of the reason he agreed to co-found a company together.
"I think it's infuriating that they sell the same stuff to women all the time. Like, it's vitamin A, retinol, it's vitamin C, and they're like $200 for serum. They'll like put some fancy science-washing language being like, oh, it's like a cool delivery mechanism."
-- Dr. Evan Zhao
Oddity, the parent company of Il Makiage and Spoiled Child, acquired Revela for $76 million in April 2023 and immediately put an additional $25 million into establishing Oddity Labs in Boston. Oddity IPO'd two months after the acquisition closed. Evan joined as Chief Science Officer and describes the public company experience candidly: short sellers writing false reports, roadshows spent reassuring investors that revenue numbers were not fabricated, and the ever-present awareness that information asymmetry, which once protected companies, now cuts the other way entirely. His takeaway is that going public before you are essentially bulletproof is a strategic mistake. He notes that even Stripe, which is a demonstrably strong and profitable business, has concluded the same.
Pacagen: Alpaca Nanobodies, Allergic Cats, and Biotechnology Applied to Everyday Life
The idea for Pacagen started with a cat named Miaomiao. Evan and Siyang adopted a British Shorthair, and Siyang developed severe allergies: itchy eyes, a runny nose, asthma. HEPA filters, air purifiers, antihistamines, nothing worked well enough. Evan, whose PhD had been built on engineering proteins to neutralize specific targets, thought the same logic that pharmaceutical companies use for targeted cancer drugs could be applied to allergens, which are also proteins. The spray Pacagen developed uses nanobodies, a class of single-domain antibodies originally discovered in alpacas, engineered to lock onto and neutralize specific allergens before they trigger an immune response. For cats, the target is the protein Fel D1. For dogs, the targets are CAN F1 and CAN F2. For dust, the targets are Der p 1 and Der p 2.
The company name reflects the technology's origin: PACA from alpaca, GEN from generated. Pacagen. The products are available at pacagen.com. For dogs, you spray directly on the animal. For cats, you spray on beds, couches, and any surface the allergic person will contact, because attempting to spray a cat directly is, as Evan puts it without much elaboration, inadvisable. The current formulation smells slightly of vinegar and protein due to the acetic acid buffer required to keep the proteins stable. A new fragrance version that masks the smell was in final development at the time of recording.
"If you think about cancer therapies, that very targeted therapy, we take that same idea and we just apply it to allergens. So instead of trying to neutralize a cancer motif, we're trying to neutralize an allergen."
-- Dr. Evan Zhao
Pacagen has raised approximately $30 million to date. Its board includes Jerry from Maveron, the consumer fund co-founded by Starbucks founder Howard Schultz; Alex from Coastal Ventures, who also backed Revela; and a representative from Digitalis, the life-science-focused venture arm of Mars. Beyond the allergen sprays, the company has 5 full-time researchers running 20 active R&D projects across the broader wellness space, with a firm rule: nothing goes to market until it has cleared clinical trials and shown head-to-head superiority against whatever the current standard of care is. Approximately 60 percent of projects will produce nothing useful even at the Petri dish stage. Of the 40 percent that show early promise, only a fraction will become a product. That is the math, and Evan accepts it without apparent frustration.
What Jim Sinegal Taught a Room of Tech Founders About Loyalty and Why Evan Took Notes
One of the more unexpected influences on how Evan thinks about building a company came from a dinner organized by Maveron with Jim Sinegal, the co-founder and longtime CEO of Costco. Evan had lobbied aggressively to be included. He was at a table with several successful consumer founders who were puzzled by Costco's model. The company caps its margins at 15 percent on any product. Its revenue numbers are not mysterious. And yet it consistently outperforms retail competitors that are trying to maximize every possible metric.
Sinegal's explanation came down to two things. The first was that a meaningful portion of Costco's current leadership are the children of people who started with the company. He asked whether anyone could name another major retailer where that was true. The second was employee retention. At Target, Walmart, and comparable retailers, warehouse turnover is constant and expensive. At Costco, if someone has been there more than a year, the retention rate runs at roughly 95 percent. Sinegal's point was that this is not an accident or a coincidence of culture. It is the direct result of a policy: Costco does not lay off people without finding them another role somewhere in the organization. You cannot ask for loyalty if you do not offer it first.
"You should never airdrop in leadership, right? You should never like be like, oh, by the way, you've worked for me 5 years. Here is this random dude that worked for a different company. He's your boss now."
-- Dr. Evan Zhao
Evan took from that dinner a concrete operational commitment: he spends the majority of his working time on recruiting and training talent, with the goal of developing his current team into the future leadership of Pacagen. If he cannot do that, he will be forced to airdrop in outside managers, which breaks trust and undermines the retention that gives a company its real advantage. It is, he says, the lesson he extracted from Sinegal's account of how Costco sustains something that most companies in its category cannot: a workforce that actually wants to still be there.
The Pre-Tesla Moment in Consumer Biotech and What Actually Fuels Dr. Evan Zhao
Evan Zhao had a brief period where he thought about retiring. He had sold a company, gone through an IPO, and had enough to step back. He did not. The reason he gives is not about money, which he describes as a tool and not a primary motivator. It is about a pattern he keeps seeing in the consumer goods industry and finding impossible to ignore.
The analogy he uses is Tesla before Tesla. Every major car manufacturer knew how to build an electric vehicle. They had the engineering capability and the capital. They were not doing it because doing so would eat into their existing business. Tesla disrupted anyway, and its market capitalization eventually surpassed every other car manufacturer combined. Evan looks at the beauty, wellness, and pet care industries and sees the same dynamic: large incumbents with the resources to innovate, no incentive to do so, and a consumer base that has been absorbing the cost of their complacency for decades. His goal is to be the company those incumbents mention at their board meetings and shareholder meetings when they are trying to explain why they are losing ground.
"I would love to make some of these large companies lose sleep. I would love to be a company that they bring up at their board meetings, bring up at their shareholder meetings. And when they're losing market share, when they're losing revenue, when they're losing profit, we did that."
-- Dr. Evan Zhao
He is also motivated, quietly and consistently, by the sense that consumers are being taken advantage of. The recycling example he raises is pointed: the recycling movement, it has since become clear, was largely a campaign funded by the chemical industry to shift responsibility for pollution from producers onto individuals. The beauty industry's use of scientific-sounding language to sell decades-old molecules at luxury prices is the same pattern in a different sector. Evan's response to both is the same: build something that actually works, prove it in a clinical trial, and price it so that the improvement reaches more people over time. That is what fuels him.
5 Key Takeaways
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Pacagen and how does its allergen-neutralizing spray work?
Pacagen is a biotechnology consumer brand co-founded by Dr. Evan Zhao and Dr. Siyang Han that produces sprays designed to neutralize pet and dust allergens on contact. The products use nanobodies, a class of single-domain antibody proteins originally derived from alpacas, engineered to bind to specific allergen proteins before they can trigger an immune response. The cat spray targets the protein Fel D1, the dog spray targets CAN F1 and CAN F2, and the dust spray targets Der p 1 and Der p 2. Products are available at pacagen.com.
How did Evan Zhao build Revela to $50 million in revenue in one year?
Revela, the biotech beauty company Evan co-founded with David Zhang, used an AI-driven molecule discovery platform to find novel ingredients at a fraction of pharmaceutical discovery costs, roughly $10,000 per discovery run versus millions in traditional settings. The flagship product was a hair-thinning serum containing a molecule they named ProSelenil, launched in December 2022 at $98 per bottle. Within one year, Revela was generating approximately $50 million in annual revenue at 25 percent margins. Oddity acquired the company in April 2023 for $76 million.
What did Dr. Evan Zhao learn from Jim Sinegal, the co-founder of Costco?
At a dinner organized by Maveron, Sinegal explained that Costco's enduring competitive advantage comes from two things: a significant share of current leadership are the children of original Costco employees, and the company maintains roughly 95 percent one-year employee retention by never laying people off without finding them another role inside the organization. Evan took from the conversation a direct operational commitment to develop his current team into Pacagen's future leadership rather than ever bringing in outside managers over people who have been there for years.
Why did Dr. Evan Zhao choose to found a biotech company targeting allergens rather than a pharmaceutical company?
Evan saw allergens as a problem ideally suited to the same protein-targeting technology used in pharmaceutical drug discovery but deployable as a consumer product rather than a regulated drug. Allergens, like cancer targets, are proteins. The nanobody technology originally developed in alpacas is exceptionally precise at binding specific proteins. By targeting the allergen itself rather than suppressing the immune response after the fact, as antihistamines do, Pacagen's approach addresses the source. The consumer product route also allowed faster commercialization without the decade-long drug approval timeline.
What is the Schmidt Science Fellowship and why did it matter to Evan Zhao's career?
The Schmidt Science Fellowship is awarded annually to approximately 20 early-career scientists globally by the Rhodes Trust, funded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. It provides a stipend that enables fellows to pursue ambitious research projects without depending on a supervisor's grant funding. For Evan, it placed him at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering under Dr. James Collins, one of the leading figures in translating bioengineered research into commercializable technology. The fellowship interview also introduced him to Patrick Pichette, the former CFO of Google, who became Evan's first outside investor in what would become Revela.
