Jun 25, 2026 · 43 min · 13 segments
Elo Life Systems: https://elolife.com/ Super excited to bring on Matt DiLeo of ELO Life Systems on today’s episode. Some of you may remember that ELO Life CEO Todd Rands was a…
Matt DiLeoGuest
Tim HammerichHost
And, uh, for me, like I loved the complexity of the natural world and I loved science in college, and I kind of had two paths in front of me.
One was to kind of double down on the kind of immunology, ultimately would've been a pharma path, and one was to...
It was actually a, a pr- a professor in my college who pointed out that this field of plant pathology existed.
And I always loved gardening, I always loved being outside, and it seemed like a really great opportunity to combine kind of the picky ecology and molecular biology with kind of the natural world and plants and growing plants, which I'd always found myself gravitating towards.
And as I kind of immersed myself in, in the field and study, like I loved, I loved the, the ability to really have application out in the world where you could use all this theory that you were developing to actually make better crops and better food and just something that we all benefit from.
Well, this will be my first time out here because I'm doubting myself in my head.
But, um, so, so prior to Elo Life, you said you were kind of on this search to apply this knowledge and interest in, in kind of technical expertise.
What areas did you find, you know, before Elo Life, which we'll talk about for m- majority of the interview today, what areas did you find and, and kinda how would you characterize your career before that?
You know, in a, in a technical field like mine, you kind of hit these touchstones over and over again.
And, you know, when I finished up my grad degree, I knew I wanted to do something applied.
You know, I remember sitting in a, a presentation where a professor was talking about this one protein they were spending their whole career studying and it really hit me like, "I can't study one protein my whole career." So, uh, you know, plant pathology seemed like the path to kind of get a job working in the seed industry.
Uh, and I wasn't able to get one right away, and so I thought, "Okay, well, where can I put myself to help me have the best chance of getting into the seed industry?" And at the time, that was work in the corn genetics lab.
So I ended up going to Cornell to do that, and it was pretty fortuitous because there were some kind of shifts in how the funding was set up.
And then I actually found myself doing a, um, uh, like a chemistry metabolomics project, uh, where we were studying the chemistry of all these different varieties of tomatoes and peppers and oth- other related fruit and using what were within some new kind of data science approaches to just sort through these thousands of different chemicals and try and look for associations with the biology we were interested in.
And I learned some, you know, kind of basic programming and some statistics and, and data science.
And, uh, for me, like I loved the complexity of the natural world and I loved science in college, and I kind of had two paths in front of me.
One was to kind of double down on the kind of immunology, ultimately would've been a pharma path, and one was to...
It was actually a, a pr- a professor in my college who pointed out that this field of plant pathology existed.
And I always loved gardening, I always loved being outside, and it seemed like a really great opportunity to combine kind of the picky ecology and molecular biology with kind of the natural world and plants and growing plants, which I'd always found myself gravitating towards.
And as I kind of immersed myself in, in the field and study, like I loved, I loved the, the ability to really have application out in the world where you could use all this theory that you were developing to actually make better crops and better food and just something that we all benefit from.
Well, this will be my first time out here because I'm doubting myself in my head.
But, um, so, so prior to Elo Life, you said you were kind of on this search to apply this knowledge and interest in, in kind of technical expertise.
What areas did you find, you know, before Elo Life, which we'll talk about for m- majority of the interview today, what areas did you find and, and kinda how would you characterize your career before that?
You know, in a, in a technical field like mine, you kind of hit these touchstones over and over again.
And, you know, when I finished up my grad degree, I knew I wanted to do something applied.
You know, I remember sitting in a, a presentation where a professor was talking about this one protein they were spending their whole career studying and it really hit me like, "I can't study one protein my whole career." So, uh, you know, plant pathology seemed like the path to kind of get a job working in the seed industry.
Uh, and I wasn't able to get one right away, and so I thought, "Okay, well, where can I put myself to help me have the best chance of getting into the seed industry?" And at the time, that was work in the corn genetics lab.
So I ended up going to Cornell to do that, and it was pretty fortuitous because there were some kind of shifts in how the funding was set up.
And then I actually found myself doing a, um, uh, like a chemistry metabolomics project, uh, where we were studying the chemistry of all these different varieties of tomatoes and peppers and oth- other related fruit and using what were within some new kind of data science approaches to just sort through these thousands of different chemicals and try and look for associations with the biology we were interested in.
And I learned some, you know, kind of basic programming and some statistics and, and data science.
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