The Thing I Hated the Least

Who is Marvin Yan, if we strip away the “PhD student” and “co-founder” labels?

“I guess I am human, too,” he says and briefly stops, like he’s checking whether that counts as a real answer. “I’m still trying to figure that out. I know what I would like to be, or where I’d want to go. But I don’t fully know where I am, if that makes sense.”

It makes complete sense. Most origin stories — in longevity, but more broadly, anywhere — arrive pre-packaged around a wound that became a life-long mission or another kind of moment that rewired one’s existence. Whether real or constructed in retrospect, that narrative is so common it’s almost expected. Marvin’s doesn’t have such a moment. His path began with the most ordinary of calculations.

“I picked my undergraduate degree based on what I hated the least, which was biology.”

From there, the logic built itself, one step at a time. His pharmacology degree at McMaster University — a research-intensive Canadian university well-regarded for its health sciences programs — led him, almost by accident, to a book on aging. That one book led to more books. And those books led to a realization: if you’re drawn to aging, and your degree is in pharmacology, the natural intersection is drug development.

He followed that logic rather than a passion. Biotech companies were working on exactly that, so he interned with them — at Rubedo Life Sciences, a clinical-stage biotech using AI-driven drug discovery to target the aging cells that drive chronic disease, and at Cyclarity Therapeutics, which is developing treatments to clear atherosclerotic plaque buildup, one of the primary drivers of heart disease in aging. He liked the people there. The work seemed meaningful. That was enough to keep going — and still is, now as a PhD student at Baylor College of Medicine, one of the leading biomedical research institutions in the United States.

Interestingly, he didn’t opt for a pure aging biology track. His reasoning was that longevity infrastructure still needs needs to grow but that an education focused on drug development and discovery as well as independently targeting chronic diseases still has merit. While he still finds aging biology the most interesting question, he believes our fundamental understanding and approach to biology may not yet be advanced enough to address its complexity.

“Are there other careers where I could find joy or meaning? I’m 99% sure. But on the current track I’m on, I don’t see anything immediately wrong with it. And if I like it, why not keep pushing? The PhD is doing what’s current… what I’m skilled at, but doing what we do at LongX represents a part of me thinking about what’s next in the broader biotech sphere.“

Long before the PhD, Marvin and his close friend Sufal Deb had been building things together. In 2021, the two co-founded Im a Mortal — a longevity podcast, the name a deliberate play on “immortal” — as undergraduate students, interviewing researchers, bioethicists, and pioneers in the aging field. It was exploratory, interest-driven, and low-stakes. That willingness to start, without knowing what something would become, is something of a throughline in how Marvin operates.

In 2023, he joined LongX last, as a co-founder. He’s candid about how it happened.

“I didn’t even pick LongX, actually. I was the last person, as far as I remember. [...] Of course I cannot say no to Sufal on starting something cool.”

The program began with co-founders Denisa Lepădatu and Sufal Deb in conversation. Marvin came in because Sufal asked, and because they’d been doing projects together for years — the Imamortal podcast, education projects, media work. When Sufal starts something, Marvin says, there’s roughly a 50% chance he ends up involved.

His role, once inside, was equally unsentimental. He was, by his own description, the tech guy in the van.

“To plan a heist, you’ve got the person doing the stealing, the person making the gadgets, and the tech guy in the van. I’m the tech guy in the van. Optimizing scoring, optimizing applications, finding biotech companies for the program, website design, course design, all the nitty-gritty stuff on the back end.”

He says someone else could have done it too. That he picked it is a different question from whether he had to. He’s fine with that; he doesn’t need his work to be irreplaceable to find it worth doing.

Yet, why is he still doing it? He gives two answers, both true.

The externally-focused reason: it looks good. It’s something he’s doing while the work he wants to do in the future (drug development, biotech, things that operate on 20-year timelines) isn’t ready for him yet.

“Realistically, would you take a drug from me right now? Probably not. Biotech is a much longer game. I’m not in a rush.”

The internally-focused reason: it’s interesting. It gives him something concrete to work on now, something he’s well-positioned to do at this stage, something where being young and close to the student experience is an asset.

“If you’re a young person, you know what it’s like to be in this space, and you’re probably more willing to help other people along.”

Clearly, Marvin doesn’t dress it up and claim LongX is his life’s purpose. For now, it’s a good thing to do, it’s still interesting, and as long as both of those remain true, he’ll keep doing it. When they stop being true, he’ll move on, and that will be fine too.

His main takeaway from the journey so far?

“I think people emphasize too much about brilliance. Or this passion, this resounding strong feeling to do something out of nowhere. I don’t think you need any of these to do something. [...] Especially at the beginning, just doing anything will give you some amount of progress. Almost all the time. Year one is both the hardest and easiest — it’s hard to start, but every time you meet, there’s more progress. When you’re at ground zero, everything’s the next level. Everything has potential.”

Think of it like going to the gym. Optimizing your workout matters eventually, but in year one, just showing up is the work. The compounding starts the moment you begin. Marvin’s first year at LongX is evidence of this: with no particular expertise in education, community-building, or recruitment, he just showed up and did the next available thing.

The field doesn’t only need people who are certain and far ahead. It needs people willing to start before they reach that point, because the work at the entry level doesn’t require certainty.

Looking at the beginnings of LongX, what he misses most is the feeling from before any of it had started, when there were no obligations, no other people depending on them.

“We just had time to talk, to incubate something. There was no pressure on us at all. No commitment to other people. Just talking to people, seeing what seemed interesting to us. It was so interest-driven, just to explore the space, just to do whatever.”

That feeling is mostly gone now. Once you’ve started something, you can’t un-start it. Since LongX’s conception, there were periods of stagnation and changes in vision, but the stakes of it all produce pressure, and pressure changes how it feels to work together. It’s a trade-off he accepts — you can’t get the freedom of the beginning and the momentum of what follows at the same time.

Looking at the future of LongX, he is not sure whether to dream big for LongX, because he’s thought carefully about what that means.

The Xplore Program (LongX’s flagship initiative, which pairs young fellows with longevity education, mentors, and hands-on experience at biotech companies) may not exist in ten years. He’s made peace with that, because what he’s hoping for runs deeper than the program itself.

“I hope it’s because something more systematic or institutional has already been brought up, and there’s no longer a need for it. That would be the hope.”

He doesn’t need LongX or its initiatives to be the biggest or most prestigious. He doesn’t need to be the one who builds whatever comes next. Impact, to him, is defined by whether the thing that needed doing got done. You’ll often hear him jokingly measure success as the number of dinners he can share with Xplore Program alumni 10 years later.

“I hope we see some smart kid come from out of nowhere, who’s still interested in longevity. I don’t care if it’s from LongX or whatever.”

What Marvin wants, when he gets to the other side of all of this, is something fundamentally human.

“Eventually I would like more control of my life, personally and professionally. I think everyone talks about entrepreneurship in terms of their work, but I think there’s some part of it for personal life too. I just want to be able to have more freedom, to do whatever I want. But the one thing LongX has taught me is that whatever I do next, I want to do it with the right people because I couldn’t have asked for better co-founders.”

Marvin Yan is a co-founder of LongX and a PhD student at Baylor College of Medicine, where he focuses on aging and drug development. He previously co-hosted Im a Mortal, a longevity podcast, and has interned at Rubedo Life Sciences and Cyclarity Therapeutics. He studied Biology and Pharmacology at McMaster University.