A Biotech Built on Culture & Community with Adam Thomas, Chief People Officer at Synlogic

Welcome to Building Biotechs, a podcast by Rekonomics Consulting. We're your hosts Karina and Allison and today we're joined by Adam Thomas, the Chief People Officer at Synlogic. And I know Adam personally and I can tell you that he has consistently showcased excellent leadership. For over the past six years. He has played an integral role in guiding Synlogic from pre clinical development into the clinic and also navigated going public, not to mention the pandemic. Adam's also had extensive experience working in larger companies including Shire, SC Johnson and Pfizer. So please join us as we dive into some insights with Adam about his experiences and the nuanced art of leading in the biotech domain. Thanks for joining us Adam. Welcome to Building Biotechs by Recredomics Consulting. We've helped over 90 biotech, life sciences and venture capital firms strategize and hire thousands of employees to scale companies that impact human health. We speak with those at the forefront of growing biotechs to learn their tactics on building these companies from the ground up. I'm Karina Klingman, founder and principal at Recruitomics Consulting. Enjoy the show.

Thanks for having me. Carolina.

Yeah, so first of all, we like to ask all of our guests, what did you want to be when you were seven years old and what are you now and how did you get there?

When I was sometime around the age of seven, I can't say it was definitely seven years old. I really wanted to be a lumberjack. I have no idea why, it was just something I really wanted to do. So sometime around 7, as a young child, I wanted to be a lumberjack. Sadly, that is not the career path I chose. Although who knows, maybe in the future I'll go back to being a lumberjack. But instead I studied law. Undergraduate in Edinburgh. I did a Master's in HR straight out of law, decided a career in law was to me, but went into a master's in hr, worked for an HR consultancy for a couple of years in London and then moved to join Pfizer in Kent in the uk, which is just south of London. And I worked about five years in Kent and then the opportunity came to move to the States. So I moved to the States with Pfizer, which was great. I was originally posted here for two years with the goal of going home and now that's 20 plus years ago and I'm still here. So show me that the plans you have can change. But I worked for Pfizer in the US for about seven years before doing an MBA at BU. After I graduated my MBA. I ended up leaving Pfizer and joined SC Johnson, where I was the head of HR for the R&D division of SC Johnson, the consumer products company. And I was living over in Milwaukee and working in Racine, Wisconsin. And then after that, my wife and I had our first child, decided we wanted to move back to the east coast and I got a job as the head of HR for R& D at Cheyenne. Had a fantastic run for about four years at Cheyenne. And then one day I got a phone call to see whether I'd be interested in joining SimLogic. And that was six years ago. And here I am. So that's kind of my potted career history in 30 seconds.

That's amazing. Yeah. So you kind of stuck here in the us do you think that that's going to be where you stay?

So I now have two kids and, you know, your priorities change a little bit. And I will never say never about going home, but I think as the years go by, it's increasingly not likely. I think the opportunities here, both personally, professionally, career wise, are significantly bigger because of the bigger country than Scotland. And once you've kind of settled and put down roots and had kids and stuff like that, it's increasingly unlikely. But I refuse to say I'm never going home because that. That sounds like too big a step to make.

Yeah. So, side note, my husband is Scottish and he is a lumberjack. So you should definitely, if you ever just want to come and you know, he has a sawmill and you can cut down a tree or whatever.

Yeah, I'd be worried. I'd chop off my arm or something. For me too.

I'm worried about that all the time. That is great.

Well, Adam, I have a question for you to kind of start us off as well. You know, those were big companies. A lot of your experience coming out of school, you know, SC Johnson Pfizer is Synlogic, the smallest company that you've, you know, initially started working at. And what was that like joining such a small company after coming out of these big massive organizations?

Yeah, I sometimes joke. Alice's. So Pfizer was between 80,000 and 150,000 when I worked there, depending on the day. SC Johnson was about 11,000. Shire was 5,000 when I joined, went up to 22,000 after we acquired Back Soldier, but certainly 5,000. And then Synlogic was 42. So I've been going progressively smaller companies after 42. I'm not sure where I go next. It's probably to set myself up as an individual contributor Somewhere just run my own business or something because you can't get much smaller than 42. But yeah, synlogic was certainly the smallest company I, I joined at the time that I joined. I think that there are many differences which we can explore, but certainly I found both big companies and small companies be very rewarding experience.

Yeah, I'd love to dig into that a little bit. So some of the experiences that you took from those larger companies, how have those translated over into synlogic? But what else have you had to learn on the fly?

Yeah, so let me just contrast FISA, the biggest, the synlogic, the smallest, Pfizer. I had a fantastic 12 years at Pfizer, loved working there. Great company, great people. You get exposed to so much because there are so many people doing so much stuff that as a relatively young professional going into Pfizer, I just learned a ton from incredibly smart people doing loads of different things. There is a department for everything, Pfizer almost and a process for everything. And some of those processes, many of the processes are really good practices, best practices. So as an opportunity to learn, it was absolutely fantastic. So that's a plus side. What, what people will often tell you is that sometimes in a big company you don't necessarily feel your contribution makes a huge difference on the company as a whole and that that can be true in 150,000 people. You can be a small part in a big machine. So you contrast that to simlogic which when I joined had very few or no processor systems. You're having to figure things out for yourself, make things up as you go. But certainly there's a far more direct correlation between your contribution and the overall success of the company, particularly if you're at a more senior level. So I think there's pros and cons to each. I think that you have different experiences in each and depending on what you're looking to learn and what you're looking to do, I think both can be great career opportunities. But you should recognize that eventually. Different.

Yeah, it must be interesting to get in, you know, such an early stage and I mean you're hands on responsible for building the culture. A lot of what synlogic is today, I'm sure is because of things that you put into place and different initiatives you started to drive that culture and to build the team that, you know, is what synlogic is today. How has that gone? What have you, what are some initiatives you've launched or, you know, experiences you've had that you've been particularly proud of that have really kind of made synlogic, the company that it is today.

So, I mean, first I would acknowledge those people who came before me as well. Allison, in any organization, even 42 people, there's already a culture that exists. And, you know, there's some great people and great work is happening, performing. So, you know, I, I appreciate you saying I, I've helped influence it, but there was certainly a lot of stuff done before I, I kind of, kind of got here. One of the things that was done before I, I got here was to really try to define the culture under two headings, of which we're called simlogic, and we talk about Human Logic and Science Logic and Human Logic. We have official values below it. But basically Human logic is collaborate well, get on well with people and be supportive of each other. And Science logic is get stuff done, deliver, achieve results, take on innovative science and drive forward. And those two pillars were defined before I got here, but have kind of been central to what we've tried to do every step along the way is balance that delivery and side with the people side and being supportive of each other and that type of thing. So I give a lot of credit to those people who came before me that did those. Since then, we've kind of built on those things. We try to have some fun here. We try and have a pretty robust, robust culture. And so one of the things that also predated me was that there was lots of Star wars memorabilia around the office. I can go into why. But anyway, we have all our conference rooms of Star wars planets, we have stormtrooper helmets over the office and that type of thing. And we've kind of built on that. So every year we do something we call the Star Awards, which the writing looks a bit like Star wars, where we have Oscar like trophies, which are the Star wars figurines, which relate to each of our values. But we, we take a vote from across the company are usually getting these awards. And you know, it's meant to be a bit of fun, but also reinforces some of the great work that people have done throughout the course of the year. So that kind of taking some things which are hallmarks of the culture and then trying to build out a bit of fun to over some of the things we've done. I think on the team side, we spend a lot of time getting teams together and supporting teams, which has been, which has been great. And so I think some of those things are elements that have kind of gone forward and carried through and will hopefully carry through beyond, beyond me as well. We give these statues out we get them back every year we engrave back on them so you can see that the previous winners from all the different games.

I love that.

That's amazing.

Something I've always really loved about synlogic too is you're really tightly tied to the community. I'm always seeing you posting about different initiatives that synlogic is supporting. And you know, we've supported the same initiatives at times our two different companies like the Gloucester Academy. So tell me about how that is influenced your culture.

I think it's really important to play your part as an individual and an organization in whatever the community is that you define different companies define their community differently. We don't work in oncology and so we're not really focused on the American Cancer Society. But that's a fantastic organization and you know, many oncology companies will view that as their community. So we're engaged with things like the PKU alliance because our lead asset is for a disease called pku and we've supported them through sponsorships and participation and attending events and that type of thing. We support local schools here. We've interns that come in from. There's a high school about 400 yards away from our office. We've had interns come in from there and we give them speaking engagements and that type of thing. Karina mentioned the gorse of Biotech Academy is fantastic program. I would encourage everyone to check it out. They generate a great bunch of interns every year who then go on become a great bunch of hires. And we've brought in a number of people who otherwise might not have transitioned into biotech who've made a significant contribution to the organization here. So that's great. And then on a personal side, I serve on a couple of boards which is very rewarding and hopefully is a personal thing to give back to the community as well. But I do think it plays a part and it also helps just reinforce the importance of doing what you're doing. I think one of the. If you speak to any biotech company, having patients in and speak is I think one of the most inspiring and rewarding thing you can do. We've been fortunate to have a great number of patient speakers for the diseases that we work in. And it really does help connect you to why you're doing something. Even from the earliest stage you could be working on the earliest pre clinical program. But if you can see that connection to the patients really kind of tell this is why you do it, this is why you turn up every day and it can really help connect you to the ultimate user of your product, should you be fortunate enough to we get a product market.

Let's get back to your journey at Synlogic. So, given your long Runway with Synlogic, can you share how things have changed? Because you have been. You were there before the pandemic, you were there during the pandemic. Now we're after the pandemic. And I do remember some of the challenges with, you know, being a clinical stage company at that time and needing people to be in the office. How has that evolved for you?

I think the pandemic is probably separate from the normal company evolution that would happen. You're a very different company if you're a late clinical company to a early pre clinical company. Those two things are very, very different. The people you have are different. The programs, the focus, the requirements for compliance, and lots of different things are very different than one versus the other. It's also the case being a private company to a public company has different challenges as well. So when you're private, you have a lot more flexibility than when you have the quarterly reporting schedule that's required of a public company. And so all of those things would have changed. It's the logic of my tenure here. Naturally, the pandemic was an interesting time for sure for everybody. And lots of people cope with it in different kind of ways. And looking back, it's amazing some of the things that happened. So, I mean, one of the things that we did was we were very keen. We, we had to keep lab operations going. And so we needed people to come in and continue to work on site, even at a time when we didn't know, you know, we were trying to make it as safe as possible, but nobody really knew the direction that this was, was going to go. And so we, we split the company in half. We had a gold team and a blue team. The, the gold team was C3PO and the blue team was R2D2. To stick with the Star wars theme, Allison, I know you've liked. And we split shifts. And so one day one group would come in, another day another group come in and neither group would be able to meet. We had to try and keep them completely separate because we didn't want to have a situation where we have infection in one side and that infects all the others. And the staff here did a phenomenal job of understanding why we're doing what we're doing and rising to the occasion. The productivity was, it was so impressive of people coming in really focused, knowing that rather than five days in a Row in the lab, they would have two or three, depending on where they were in the schedule. And people just clenched it out and we got so much done over that period. That's just a testament to the staff. Looking back though, splitting your company in two and nobody meeting is just crazy. It's a crazy thing to do. We did it even earlier in the pandemic. We couldn't find any disinfectant products, cleaning products, for love nor money. And we were tapping everybody in our network and all this kind of stuff. And one day it was about 11 o' clock at night, 11pm, and I was just running out of people to call. I called somebody and they said the famous words of I think I know a guy in Detroit. And we ended up getting cleaning products from some guy in Detroit who had shipped them in from China somehow, who knows how, but it carried us through because it was at a time when you were washing your shopping, you were bringing back from the supermarket, that type of thing. We had nothing to clean the office with and we finally managed to get this shipment in at some ridiculous cost. And again, the fact that some guy in Detroit saved us and kept us operating is just incredible. Yeah, looking back, that's been a bit of an odd one. Rolling forward to now though, I think many biotech companies, and we're no different here, are still kind of working through. What does hybrid working mean when you have a lab office environment? Because the lab staff need to be here many days, you can give as much flexibility, but most people don't have a lab in the garage at home, so they need to do a phenomenal job and come in and drive that. But maybe some of the GNA staff, clinical staff, are a different world. So how do you break the right balance of in person working and remote working in a hybrid environment? And I think we're still trying to figure it out. And it took three or four years for us to get into this through the pandemic. And it will probably take three or four years to really find our optimal operating model because things kind of, you know, things keep changing as well in the world around us. And so I think we're all still learning a bit around hybrid work and that type of thing.

Yeah, we've heard that a lot from our clients as well. We have seen that there's a bit of an inequity, if you will, between the people who are higher in the company, possibly the more senior, senior folks who don't need to be in the lab anymore, and their expectations around having to go in and so that's certainly a balancing act there.

Yeah, I mean, there's. You're right in what you say, Karina. There's also between functions as well. Your clinical is a very different piece from research, for example. And many clinical roles are now done remotely, primarily remotely. Reg affairs is one where lots of people aren't relocating for jobs anymore. They are where they are and they'll work from there in many cases. And so how you build a cohesive organization when you've got these different things, I think many companies are figuring out finally, the people I know that are happiest right now, I think with their working model are typically those people who are either all lab or all virtual. They're clinical only kind of thing. And it's those of us who are balancing many different things are the ones who are still kind of figuring out a bit more because all labs, easy, everyone's in your flexible working. But by and large, multiple people are in every day. And if you're a truly virtual company, it's again, you have consistency. But then everyone in the middle is still kind of figuring it out.

Yeah, absolutely. Are you finding that it's a difficult balance for creating the culture that once existed with this hybrid workforce?

I think that there are certainly things which are more challenging. We had a celebration today. We had a cake in the office. Very simple to do, more celebration. Half the people don't get to celebrate together because it was a day they're not in or they work remotely. All that kind of stuff doesn't mean you shouldn't do the cake. But you also need to find a way to bring people together. We started what we call hub weeks, where four times a year we'll try and bring everyone together no matter where they are. And we found those are a good way of reinforcing the culture and getting teams together and making sure that at least there's some touch points during the course of the year where people do come together and you get everyone together. But certainly we've not figured everything out yet for sure.

I like that. Hub weeks. Maybe we should look into that. Alison, I really like that.

I'm not sure anyone found a slide, but certainly we tried to do things. We, you know, we sent pancake making clips out of people's houses. We tried to do virtual events. Many people did similar types of things. You know, we sent cookies out. We had virtual happy hours and a bunch of other things. We did try to keep people connected. Some of those work better than others. We rapidly found that what worked in a Physical world didn't work in a virtual world. And so we had to adjust some things. But yeah, it was a challenging time and I think we're glad that hopefully we're largely through the back of it. Although I don't think we're completely through Covid yet, unfortunately. And you know, it's something which may rear its ugly head again at some stage in the future.

Yeah, I agree with that. And with any luck, at least we'll all go into it with a little bit of an idea of how to shift rapidly to bringing people to work from home. I mean, we've been a remote company since the beginning days, but the number of calls we got from clients saying, how do you do this? What do I do? Like, how do I get the computers home? What do we. How do we figure it out? I mean, it was, it was a terrible time. But I do like that they built it so the culture came home. They stayed on their team, on their team page with their CPO names.

That's cute.

I do think that hybrid work in some format is here to stay. Whether it's in its current format is one that I would, I would question. I think there's been this, this pattern that a number of people have settled into where companies want people in three days and employees are willing to be there too. And there's either open war about which one of those is the right position or they're in some. Everyone is just ignoring it. Hopefully the other person will give up. If that's where we stand, it's not sustainable longer term. And so I think we'll probably come. There might be some other version of this where we settle into some other different pattern. But it's going to take a bit of time I think, because we're still working through different things and I hope there's not. But if there's a big recession around the corner, that will change things again because it's not a stable. We're not yet at the steady state.

And that's another interesting thing, right? Biotech really as a whole is kind of volatile. I feel like we're always kind of going guns. Like it's always like full blown, everything's going great or oh, it's maybe recession or oh, the venture capital. And you know, we've seen that in the past, what, three years? It's just been up and downs. And so I think as someone who leads teams, that's also very challenging, especially when you are. Well, I'll let you answer the question, I guess. Is it. Have you experienced Those challenges being harder in a large organization or are they harder in a smaller organization to kind of navigate through and implement the changes and adapt to the ever changing markets that we see.

Yeah, since it's, I think there is in general young businesses cycle in general. I think right now for biotechs particularly clinical stage biotechs like us is an exceptionally challenging time. We have lived through what was probably, you know, people will tell you was a bubble. They, they will say there was potentially too many things funded in biotech that maybe shouldn't have been. And you know, capital was pretty easy to come by. We're now definitely in a contraction and it's very, very tough time. A number of our peer companies have unfortunately shut their doors or merged or disappeared. And it's just tragic to see some of the great science they were working on and no longer being pursued. And it's tragic to see some great people or the great people they had no longer working in those companies. I think it's very fortunate that the market right now has been reasonably robust. So people are landing in other jobs, which is great. But there have been a ton of different company failures and it's going to change the way that biotech works. I think I was speaking to somebody who works on the benefit side just the other day and they were describing a couple of years ago as a benefits arms race was the phrase that they used whereby everyone was just trying to out to each other on whatever benefits they could offer. And in their minds it was getting a bit crazy. It was ridiculous and some of the things were just completely over the top. I think those days have gone a little bit. I think there's far more value focus and far more cost focus in biotech right now, in many biotechs right now, because probably not universal. And so I think some of the changes that are happening right now are fundamental and not everyone's going to survive through this. So I think that that's a challenge. In a bigger company you typically are less worried about your organization going completely out of business. You may be worried of being acquired and then what happens post acquisition. I worked on the Pfizer side, so we acquired a number of companies, but I have a number of colleagues who knew that they might be acquired at some stage and there are some concerns about that. But you don't have the same concern that tomorrow we're not going to exist. And so that's a different type of thing. And we and many of our peers really have one lead asset that defines the success of the company. And that will be successful or failure. Whether that succeeds or fails defines whether the company succeeds or fails. Folks, when I was at PfFizer, we had 100 things in the clinic and Shia had 50. Whatever. And so if one doesn't work, it's less of a cataclysmic event. And so again, I think there are different profiles to why you may want to work in one versus another and what it means to work in one versus another. Certainly the we may not exist tomorrow is very different.

In a big company, we remember that arms race well. All right, so as Synlogic has progressed through its life cycle, I've noticed that you have cultured leadership from within a number of times that I've observed. And so I'm just curious, how do you identify those future leaders and what do you do to, you know, help them to nurture and evolve as leaders?

Yeah, I mean, thanks. Firstly, thank you for noticing, Karina. It's something that you can never do enough of is develop people. And we've had a number of successes and I'm sure there are a number of people who've moved to different roles who work different companies who would say that we didn't do enough to develop them. So. And I think that is a fair thing, right? You could, in a small company there's only a certain number of opportunities. And so as much as you try and invest in everybody, you can't necessarily do so. Some of the. You mentioned about how you identify people. I think some of it is that people will identify themselves. You will see somebody who is already leading teams informally before they're formally assigned to do that. You'll know somebody who delivers results. As part of our science logic kind of mantra is, you know, you need to get shit done and you need to be somebody who delivers results and you, you'll know the person who does that. So oftentimes you will identify people. You then need to have the right opportunity at the right time. And either you need to create that or it needs to open up. So some of it is timing wise and then we've invested in coaching and training and development and lots of other things. We've had some great partnerships. The state, through the Commonwealth Corporation have given us a couple of training grants that we've invested. We work with a coaching company called ASAP who have been very good. There are a bunch of different things we've done, but ultimately it comes down to on the job experience in many cases and giving people the opportunity and put them in a stretch role and supporting them in that. And then seeing them flourish in that position. And we've been pretty fortunate that most of the time, I think all the times where we've made somebody a stretch assignment and put somebody in post, they've risen to the challenge and they've done a phenomenal job throughout, which is great. And so I think in a small company, you have to recognize that there's not an unlimited number of opportunities. And so when those open up, try and see as best you can who can fit the bill. There's also some limitation to that, that the new opportunities that open as you go from research to development, for example, are typically different skills and so require different people. And we've had a few people move from research into development, things like that. But it is a harder shift because you're looking. You do need to buy experience at different times. And so I think you have to strike the right balance as well.

Hey there. Just a quick break. I wanted to let you know that if you're listening to this podcast because you are exploring careers in biotech, which it turns out quite a few of our listeners actually are, you might be interested in the Biotech Career Coach podcast. It is brought to you by our sister company, the Collaboratory Career Hub, which is our career development community. If you would like actionable tips on job seeking and career development, that is the place for you. It is a companion podcast to our Career Coach column that we write monthly in Biospace, but we go a little more in depth and sometimes we have special workshops and all of that good stuff. So if that sounds interesting, click the link in the show notes or search for the Biotech Career Coach on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts back to the show. Awesome. Can you give us a. Is there an anecdote of a time when you did nurture one of those leaders and they ended up being impactful in the company? No pressure if there isn't. But I'm just curious if there is a time that you could describe like that.

I can think of a few times without naming names, though. One that springs to mind is I think we had to offer somebody a job about three times because they kept saying they weren't ready for it, and we were convinced that they were. And in the end it was a kind of, no, no, we really think you could do this and you do a phenomenal job. And they just knocked out of the park every single day. We've never once regretted making that decision. And so I think there is oftentimes a gender difference and a reluctance by female colleagues to put themselves in a position they don't think they're qualified for, whereas oftentimes a male colleague may be more confident and say, I'm going to do it. That's. That again, is not a universal thing, but just in terms of patterns. And so I think I would encourage anybody who listens to this to not hold yourself back. You know, if a company says you're ready, give it a shot, you'll do a great job. You will learn a lot in the first few months and you might make some mistakes, but if the only thing holding you back is you, then it probably tells you you're ready, you should do it. We certainly have one, if not other examples where that has been the case for sure.

That's fantastic advice. I hope that is taken to heart by our listeners. To you, Adam, anything exciting, it's in logic you want to plug or talk about.

I mean, one of your questions was about vision and mission. I do think that how your mission changes over time as a biotech could be interesting if you want to go there. But I'm happy to go. I will go wherever the mood takes you guys.

So how did Synlogic's mission and vision adapt and pivot during the phases of your journey here, especially kind of during that IPO stage?

Yeah, we actually didn't go public through an ipo. We went public to a reverse merger. But that's a technical detail that we can cover. I think the fundamental place to start when looking at Synlogic and other companies like us is we're a platform company. Not every biotech is a platform company. Some companies focus products and lots of different things, but many, many will have some kind of unique platform. And ours is that we engineer living bacteria as biotherapy. So that's basically, that's why the company was founded, and that's all we've done. And what will happen in your infancy as a platform company is there's so many different places you could apply your platform that you go very, very broad. And we did exactly that. We've worked on immuno oncology. We've taken immuno oncology programs into the clinic. We've worked on rare metabolic diseases, other metabolic diseases. We've toyed with the idea of, do we become some kind of consumer products company? Lots of different things you could do with your platform. At some stage you need to back an idea and focus because you can't do everything. You just don't. You don't have the capital to move everything forward. And so we went pretty broad. We went to different places. We were pursuing both metabolic and immuno oncology programs at the time. And it became apparent that the initial applications for our platform would be better suited to metabolic programs of rare metabolic oral therapeutics for gut based diseases. And having made that decision, everything then aligned and fell into place. Unfortunately, it meant some people left because they were more on the oncology side of things and no longer invested in remission. But it allowed us to double down and really build a core expertise in rare metabolic oral therapeutics for gut based diseases. And that's really what we've developed. And that has then catapulted us forward to a stage where we're going into. We're in phase three now for our lead asset. We have a number of other things behind. If our PKU lead asset is successful, we can rapidly pull some other things through. But it really was that pivot from breadth to focus that I think was a key kind of strategic point. I'm sure. I'd love to see us back in oncology if we're wildly successful and we can raise all the money in the world, that would be great. But I think most or many platform companies at some point have to make that decision about what do you focus on and when do you focus? And I think that's a key inflection point for us as a company and many companies like it.

Yeah, that's fascinating. Can we touch on that reverse merger?

Of course.

I'm curious about that. I didn't actually know that.

Yes. So we were looking at going public. And obviously there's more than one way to go public. One is through a traditional IPO process. You're never 100% sure when you're planning it what the IPO market will be like. And so there is some risk that when you want to go public through an ipo, you're in a situation like right now where the market is cooled off. It's very, very hard to get through an IPO process. There will be a number of companies who were thinking about going public in the second half of 2023 who can no longer do it. And so we have the opportunity to. To go through a reverse merger with a company called Myrna Therapeutics. Myrna had had a clinical failure in their lead asset. They had, I think about 50 million at the bank, but they didn't really have enough money to restart and drag things through. And so what they did was they auctioned off their listing. And we were fortunate enough to take that listing, take a couple of their board members, take their Investors, we actually didn't take any of their staff or anything like that. We moved. They were a shell, and we kind of reverse merged into the shell. And so that it's. It is a quicker and easier way to go public, which is great. One of the things you miss out on, though, unfortunately, is you don't do the big IPO roadshow that most companies will do going through an ipo when you really market the company and tell the story and place your place, your company in the consciousness of investors and the investment community. And so one of the downsides of the reverse merger process is you then have to work a lot harder on doing those things after you're public. But you don't necessarily have exactly the same opportunity as an IPO would have given you. So there are pros and cons as with all these things, pros and cons of each. It's how we went public. We've been public for a number of years now. That has again, pros and cons in terms of public versus private. But we're happy being public. But that's the story of how we went public.

That's fascinating. Now, you would have been pretty prominent on that road show. So do you feel like you had missed out on getting out in front of some folks and talking about the culture, Culture and build?

I think you give me way too much credit. For you CFOs do roadshows. Chros are far less prominent than that. So I like to think I'd have played a supporting role. But I think the CEO, CFO are the prominent ones, are bringing that one home.

They certainly are. But I've seen several chros out on the road talking about the build and how important the culture is. So I think you're underselling yourself.

Well, thank you very much.

They would have wanted you to weigh in there. How are you now leveraging since you did go public through this reverse merger? How are you now finding sources of capital and things like that? And without that clout?

We're a publicly traded company, and so we follow the same types of processes as any other public company. At this stage, how we went public is immaterial. It was seven years ago or so. It's more around how do you then run in business? But we'll do the same, do roadshows. We'll go out, speak to investors. We're regularly in touch with different people about investing in the company. We're frequently telling the story at banking conferences. We're out discussing things with small investors, large investors. There's Lots of different conversations going. And then hopefully at the right point in time, we trigger a process by which you raise money, be it a private placement, a pipe or whatever else. There's different ways of doing it. So we're very hopeful that we continue to have positive feedback from the investment community. People continue to back the story.

Excellent. Yeah. And obviously positive clinical indications help that.

Absolutely.

Adam, I have a question about the internal, I guess the internal operations of synlogic. And as things change, you know, funding wise or clinical wise or whatever information you need to share. How do you do your internal communication so that your team feels that everyone knows what they need to know, they know how to continue functioning, what their impact on their job will be? I know, you know, companies do daily standups. They do all hands meetings, they do newsletters. What have you found that's really effective and that your team responds well to when you are in a period of time where you're sharing lots of information that does have a material impact on your team or the organization?

It's a great question, Alan. I've never been in a company where when you do an employee survey, communications are rated as one of the highest items. I. Maybe I've just worked at the wrong companies. But I think the. One of the challenges is always that communications could be better from the recipient's point of view. Right. There's always more. Something could have been shared sooner or in a different way or from a different person or whatever else. So it's always a journey and it's always a work in progress. We've had a regular oil company meeting that's called commensal. We work with bacteria, so commensal is, is both breaking bread, but also, you know, bacterial reference we used to do on a weekly basis. We've. We've now gone to kind of every other week given that the, you know, there was less kind of frequent news that we needed to convey. But it's still a good chance to get people together. For those people who are in the office, you know, we do a breakfast and that type of thing, but it's a chance to just update people on the progress and things that are happening within the company. We also do regular, we call them the Friday notes. But for something that's a bit more reflective, we have a member of the team here who writes a note to either celebrate success or acknowledge achievements or even just inform people with what's going on. Those have been pretty well received, particularly during the pandemic. Those were well received when people were at home and they've put more time on their hands and certainly we're reading those. We have a Slack, a system called Slack. Many companies use teams, we use Slack. So for quick hits and operational updates, there's lots of opportunity to share informal updates and post photos of your kids and that type of. We have a summer snaps competition ongoing at the moment where people are posting different beach photos and a bunch of other things to show what they've been up to in the summer. But that kind of helps build the community, but it's also an important way of conveying information. We also try and cascade things out through managers and teams to make sure people have the information that they need. And we have sharepoints and the like for kind of static information and the like. So there are lots of things that we do. Whether they are all successful depends on your perspective in life. But we certainly try and keep people informed and try to be transparent. I think one of the you asked about the difference between private and public. One of the big differences that we found between private and public is when you're private you can pretty much share anything with anybody at any time. Internally there's a lot, a lot of freedom. Whereas when you're public you suddenly have material non public information, which is different. And there's a certain timing and cadence to where it can be released. And so certainly in the early days of being a public company, we tried hard to communicate why we were sharing information at the time in the way that we did. You know, sometimes you have to share it concurrently with sharing with the public and it wasn't always well received or well understood that we were doing things for a reason. I think over time people now understand that certainly if it's a young company about to go public, really kind of setting the expectations of communications and what can be shared when I think would be important for sure.

I was hoping you'd have the silver bullet answer to that one about how to have great communication across the board. But I think it is. It's the constant battle, it's a constant struggle. And as technology evolves and it changes so frequently too, we're on Slack as well. Is Slack the best option? Is it XYZ and so many options out there.

But yeah, there used to be a thing at home where the people who smoked would have all of the best information, the quickest information. And so your communication was always could you communicate faster than the smokers? Because all the smokers would congregate outside the building and it was very cross functional, cross departmental. So if Department A had something Happening, Department B would find out through the smoking channels before anything else happened. And so I think that's the test is can you communicate faster than the smokers? Because it was a very, very efficient way of communication, that's for sure.

That's hilarious. I was raised by my grandma and she said that she was a smoker just because she needed to know what was going on. She said that that was the fastest way to know everything in the whole town.

Well, I can well imagine.

All right, so our closing questions are really some career focused ones because we do have a, a diverse audience and we are hoping that some folks that are maybe doing some soul searching about a career in biotech, you know, consider maybe going the HR route. And so I'd love to know, you know, based on all of your insights at Synlogic and the bigger companies, is there anything that you want to leave people with if they are thinking about jumping into biotech? Any career advice for our listeners who are maybe making that jump now?

I think biotech in general offers a fantastic career choice and I would encourage everyone who's interested in looking seriously at it. I think there's been so much written over the last few decades about purpose driven organizations and how you've got to find a company with a purpose. Every company in biotech has a purpose. We're all trying to help people and we're trying to treat diseases and there's no nobler purpose than that. And so if you're looking for something that you can feel good about doing, then I think a career in biotech is great. And it's a very, very diverse industry with lots of different careers for lots of different people from lots of different backgrounds. The other thing I would say is biotech tends to hire from biotech a lot. And so if you are thinking about jumping in once you get in and can really offer a number of great career opportunities and you'll tend to get hired again and again and again by different biotech companies. And it is a growth industry. So it's an area that's being invested in. Right now is a tough time, but I'm confident the industry as a whole will bounce back. Might take another 12 months, 18 months, unfortunately. But I do think that the growth will continue and so I would encourage everyone to look, look seriously at biotech. I think it's a great, it's a great, robust industry. I think it's got some great, great opportunities and, and I think it can be a great kind of place to learn and grow and develop and really kind of Hone much different skills for sure.

Yeah, I agree. There is so much great opportunity in biotech. I think we are already seeing the rumblings that things are turning a little bit here in the fall. We're seeing more companies posting job opportunities, we're seeing some funding. So we're telling our candidates to stay strong.

I hope that's true. Karina. Last week I bought eight resume books from eight different companies scaling back. So unfortunately we're not through the worst of it yet, I don't think. But hopefully the green shoots are there and companies are starting to get funded and we're spending the quarter.

Yeah, me too. All right, so we talked at the beginning a little bit about what you, you know, how you got to where you are and you had mentioned a little bit earlier about maybe your next steps. So where do you see your career going in the next 15 or so years? What's your ultimate destination, do you think?

Yeah, my hope is that Cenlogic is wildly successful, that we take our first product and PKU to patients and really make a difference in those patients lives and that allows us to then continue to move products through from our platform to a stage when we have multiple products on the market. I look at a company like how an island, how Nylam's a fantastic company. They've done fantastically well. They developed a novel platform, they had their ups and their downs and the number of times it looked like they might not make it through. But through perseverance and focus on great science, they're now doing fantastically well. They've got a whole bunch of marketed products, they're in a ton of different country countries and they are helping a whole bunch of different people. So I hope that is the story for simlogic and I hope to be a part of that kind of going forward. If that's not the case, you know, I'd love to win big on the lottery and end up on the beach or something like that. That might be nice too. But in the absence of my 1.5 billion dollar lottery win, that didn't happen this week. You know, I, I just turn up for work every day. Hope to see some logically successful.

I didn't win that one either.

No, if I did, I would share it with you both, but.

Oh, thank you very much.

Yeah, well, can't really help anyone out right now. I didn't win it. Adam, one of my favorite questions to ask people, what's the best book you've read recently? It can be fiction, nonfiction, anything you think everyone out there should be reading.

The probably most memorable one is I read all of the Harry Potter books recently to my daughter over a number of years. Actually took a number of years. But my older daughter's 10 and she loves Harry Potter now. She'd become obsessed and it was probably about six months ago we finished the last book and just having gone through the journey with her and seeing the joy brought me immense joy. So that's probably the most notable of them. And if you haven't read the Harry Potter books to a kid, it's a really good experience.

That's going to be the best answer we get on the show. That's awesome. I love that.

Love that. Well, thank you so much, Adam. This was really enlightening. We so appreciate you coming on today.

Oh, I'm delighted to join you. Thank you very much for the invitation. It's been a lot of fun. It's been great to see you both again.

Building Biotechs is brought to you by recrudomics Consulting. You can find Building Biotechs in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or anywhere else podcasts are found. Make sure to click subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes, and join our mailing list for a weekly dose of biotech news and a podcast overview. And if you need to install a recruitment engine that saves time and money for your growing company, reach out for a free strategy session. I'm always happy to share my expertise and show you techniques to simplify your hiring process and maximize returns. On behalf of the team here at Recruitomics Consulting, thanks for listening.