Dream Big Dreams to Solve Big Problems

John Hu is the CEO and co founder of Pepper Bio. And Pepper is a really cool company. It's a platform company that's working with AI and ML for some accelerated discovery and he's going to talk about that in our episode and they also have a clinical stage asset. But before that he had a really rich career in pharma consulting, venture capital and even some portfolio companies where he jumped in for an example as the interim CEO. And that all gave him a really interesting perspective on founding this company, which is a tech enabled company and it really puts to use his strong tech background. So we talk about that, we talk about the differences between tech and biotech and how the company is really mission driven and how he's approaching building this company from a talent perspective so that everybody is on board with that mission. This was a fun conversation. I hope you really enjoy it. 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 recredomics Consulting. Enjoy the show. John, thank you so much for joining us. I'm really excited about this conversation.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, absolutely. I always really like to start out with understanding a little bit about your background. So I go way back, what did you want to be when you were 7? What are you doing now and how did you get there?

When I was 7, I had just come to the US and actually even back then one of the main questions that you get asked is what do you want to be when you grow up? We would paste these answers up on the walls. And so if you were to be time traveled back to the classroom, you would always see something out there that said business owner. And so basically a year before that when I was trying to learn English, I happened upon a story about Bill Gates and his story of building Microsoft and basically just fell in love with the idea of eventually in that sort of spark of an idea that I could basically build into a company one day. Now I am a biotech entrepreneur, so I was lucky enough to be able to do that. We founded Pepper a little bit over three years ago.

I haven't actually heard that answer before. I would say that's similar to mine. I wanted to be a horse, frankly, but I also wanted to buy a horse. And my parents were both entrepreneurs.

I'd imagine one of them is easier than the other.

Yes, buying is definitely easier becoming. But they, they said, we're not buying evil horse ever. You have to buy your own horse. And so I actually started my first company when I was 7 in order to achieve that goal. But yeah, growing up in a family of entrepreneurs, it, I didn't even think about it. It was just logical. Like, of course I was going to own businesses, but that's really uncommon because most people don't actually get exposed to that sort of idea of owning businesses and being an entrepreneur. And it looks like you, you know, started down that path even professionally before Pepper. So tell me just a little bit about that and how did that set you up for starting Pepper and how you sort of thought about that process.

You brought up an interesting point, which is that you grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. I had a very different experience. So I am Asian and my parents were pretty traditional in terms of like first generation immigrants, Ruby and Asians. Right. And so the career paths that they wanted me to choose primarily led within either science or medicine. And so it was an interesting sort of journey for them to accept that I wanted to go into business one day instead of becoming sort of a scientist or a doctor. But yeah, so I wanted to be a business owner, obviously didn't know what that meant when I was like 6 or 7 years old. And so fast forward to about high school, I decided to conduct essentially a research project trying to understand what is going to be the next big thing in the world. Long story short, biotech came up on the short list primarily because of advances that we had seen in molecular biology and being able to understand sort of exactly what causes disease. And so I decided to go down that path. So in high school, read a lot of science books with a lot of biology, chemistry, physics even. And then in college decided to study biomedical engineering as one of my majors. But very quickly realized that I was much more excited talking about the potential impact of the technology than I was sort of like pipetting. And so post graduation, went down the business route. So started off my career at a consulting firm called Bain, then jumped into a VC firm called Guild out in Chicago. And it was actually at Guild that I basically got to see both sides of the startup world. So I spent about half my time as a traditional associate, but really the other half of my time jumping into portfolio companies to help out with operations. And so just as a quick example, spent about eight months with a company that we had invested in out in India as its interim CEO. It was an absolutely incredible experience. It basically made me realize that, yes, I absolutely wanted to go into the startup world.

That's really unique too, because not everyone gets to sort of try before they buy.

Yep.

And they got very lucky. Yeah, definitely. A lot of our scientific founders that we speak with, they found a company because they just had a really cool scientific idea and they really want to see it come to fruition. But the actual nuts and bolts of what you have to do as a CEO, that's very foreign to them. So you got to try it out a little bit. I love that.

Yeah, it was. It was fantastic.

And you have a really strong tech background as well. How has that contributed to this company?

I think a number of people have. Have talked about sort of the differences between tech and life sciences and including things like faster failure. And so I won't focus so much on that because I actually think the biggest difference going from tech to life science is in the level of. Isn't how bold you can be with respect to your ambition with the company. Right. And what I mean by that is, if you look at the missions of tech companies, whether you're talking about, you know, a long time ago with Microsoft and putting a computer onto every desk, or more recently, in which you get everything that you can possibly shop for online within one or two days, or to get a car, get a ride to anywhere that you want to go within minutes, these are all big dreams. And when you tell people that, they get very excited. But if you contrast that with the life sciences, where if you dare, for example, to use the C word, cure, then you basically get dogpiled on with like, how can you possibly say that? You don't understand how difficult biology is. You don't understand how difficult and naive that you are. And it's like, we've done it before, though, Right. And so by doing it before, you sort of prove that it can be done. Right. We've done it in infectious diseases, with hepatitis C. We've done it earlier in cancer with drugs like Levac. And so we know that it can be done. And yes, I realize that this will be hard, but that is not a reason to not dare to dream big. It is because it's hard and it is because it is worthwhile that you should dream big. And so that's a lot of what I wanted to bring into Pepper, which is this idea around, hey, you know, obviously when you're doing the actual experiments, you want to be very steady. You want to be Very tempered. You want to design very robust experiments. But when it comes to your goals of what you actually want to accomplish, both at Pepper and throughout your careers, dream big, be ambitious. That is what it's all about.

And it sounds like you probably carry that through the folks you're hiring and how you're thinking about building the company and the ethos there. You sound very passionate about that and I think that's fantastic because it comes from the top. That sort of, that dreaming big, that passion that's going to come from you.

Yep, absolutely. Whenever we hire people, alignment on vision is the most important things that we look for.

Excellent. How do you gauge that? What do you do to sort of dig into that with your candidates?

Yeah, you basically talk about times in which things were tough. You talk about times in which there were plenty of obstacles and you can very easily take the easy way out. But if you actually have a goal, if you actually have a vision and you're willing to work towards that vision, you will find a way to overcome all of these obstacles. Right. So if there's not enough funding, you go and get funding. If your boss's boss doesn't like it, then you talk to them and you build the cases around what it is that you want to do. So we basically talk throughout this entire process for what is it that you actually want to achieve and what are the major obstacles that you've overcome to actually achieve those milestones.

Sounds like you're a proponent of the behavioral based sort of interview questions where you're asking for stories and kind of understanding what they've done in the past to overcome things.

Yep, absolutely. I actually did a bunch of research on hiring and employees and predictors of success. And I think one of the things that has always stood out to me from the research is that generally speaking, especially if you're in like the hard sciences, you tend to gravitate towards trying to hire based purely off of technical skill. But basically what the research has shown is that that is actually the way to hire. That has the lowest likelihood of success. And what has the highest likelihood of success is actually alignment on vision, because that basically dictates whether or not people are willing to go that extra mile to learn new things or to figure out how to overcome obstacles.

It is so rare that somebody in your position has thought that deeply about the reason behind why people are successful, why hires are successful. And so I just really want to highlight that you're dead on. The research is absolutely unequivocal on that point. Anyone, especially scientists, think about how many things have you learned that you didn't know when you were born? Oh, yeah, right, exactly. So we have this ability to learn. And to your point earlier, the technology, you know, we've seen just such a massive shift in technology. I'm learning things every day. I got my first electric vehicle yesterday, and I have a new learning curve on that. Right. And I'm up for it.

Exactly.

So what actually drives us, that's what's so key.

Yep, absolutely. And yeah, you make a great point in that when we're born, we know nothing. Right. Nobody's born with a PhD in anything. You take the time, you spend the effort and the energy to get that PhD to become an expert in a particular field.

Yeah. And it's that process of learning to learn and loving that journey. That's, I think, what. What PhDs sort of bring to the table. I want every client that I work with to hear that we don't talk about it enough. And it's just so true. What is Project Optimist? Do you want to talk about that?

Project Optimus is part of a larger trend that society has had over the past little while of trying to focus more on. You can call it safety, or you can call it quality of life, but basically that aspect of it. And so you see that in physicians with this effort to deprescribe medications, basically to make sure that all the drugs that you're taking, there's actually a purpose for it. And the goal is to have a minimum amount of drugs within your system. And that's similar to what Project Optimus is. So if you look historically at what the FDA cared about, especially for fatal diseases like cancer, they essentially wanted you to push the dose to the maximum level that you can in order to maximize the probability of efficacy. But now what the FDA is saying through Optimus is, hey, why don't we take a step back on that? Why don't we actually try to figure out whether or not we need the maximum dose? Because in most cases, we actually don't. In most cases, we can take a step back from that maximum dose. We can maintain similar levels of efficacy while severely decreasing the amount of side effects that people have.

That's amazing. And so how is Pepper supporting this mission?

Essentially, what Pepper does is we are a clinical stage biotechnology company with our lead asset about to enter phase two for an aggressive form of liver cancer. We also have partnerships with multiple different drug developers, including one of the biggest pharma companies in the world. But everything that we do basically sits on top of a computational platform that tries to understand biological activity, so what's actually happening within biology, as opposed to just looking at what's there. So expression levels, essentially you can think of these as like cow of things that are there. And so by doing so, it allows us to create sort of this comprehensive map of biology that tries to understand what's happening and also why it's happening. So if you think about the platform that we have, fundamentally, we can answer one of two main questions. So the first question is we can apply the technology to a particular disease to understand what drives and what sustains that disease. But the second part is we apply it to a drug to understand at a global level all of the different impacts that this drug has when it enters into a patient. And from that we can start to predict things such as efficacy or safety. And so one of the main capabilities that we're trying to develop over the next couple of years is actually in trying to predict tox, it's trying to understand, hey, how do we link a particular drug mechanism to all the different potential tox effects that it can have? And then also with at what levels of dosing would we see or would we predict to see what levels of.

Different side effects that would be really valuable to have? So I'm excited you're working on that.

Yes, it is. It is a very, very, very hard problem, as we've unfortunately learned. But it is very, very exciting, especially if we can make inroads.

Yeah, absolutely. No, I assume you're leveraging all of the data that's out there as well. This is kind of the power of our current era of cloud computing and machine learning, right?

Yes, exactly. The amount of data that we have access to now is miles different from what we had access to even just 10 years ago. We're preparing for our phase two now and as part of that preparation, we are launching our series a Fundraise to support the clinical trial.

So how can we support you in that series a fundraise?

It can be either that you are an investor or, you know, investors who would be interested in sort of a next generation type technology for drug discovery, or it can even be on sort of the much more partnership side of things. So if you work at a company that is trying to create drugs and maybe you want a second opinion on one of your drugs or on one of the targets that you found, like, absolutely. Reach out. We would love to have a conversation.

In terms of your strategy with Pepper. You've got this platform, which is IP in and of itself, and you also now have a therapeutic target. Are you thinking about that in a strategic way as far as what the company looks like later? Are you going to think about splitting that?

Yeah, we've debated this as well. The current thinking is that everything would be in one company. And essentially the way that we view the platform is. The platform is the support tool that we use to drive all of our scientific decisions on our pipeline. But more recently, we have had discussions around, can we actually change that up a bit and change the structure? And what I mean by that is we'll actually have the platform sitting up top as the underlying sort of company that permeates through all of the additional child companies. And then we would have child companies that basically separates itself by therapeutic area. And so we would have the platform. And then underneath the platform we would have, say, like an oncology therapeutic area or like a neurodegenerative therapeutic area. And so it's still to be decided on what we ultimately go for. But I think regardless of what we go for, the way that we view the platform is that it does drive all of our scientific decisions because we are better able to probe biology using that platform.

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. One thing that I have learned in speaking with lots of founders is that we unlike the tech world and maybe you can relate to this a little bit. Biotech founders are not quite as connected about talking about problems and being really open with challenges that they're experiencing. So I kind of want to normalize just talking through what we've experienced. So can you tell us some of the biggest challenges that you face with Pepper and kind of how have you overcome them and what are the things you're looking around the corner at and worrying about?

It's actually funny that you Mentioned that when I first moved to Boston and entered the healthcare world, I noticed something similar, which is that people tended to be a lot more secretive than some of the other folks that I had met in the tech world. And so, yeah, it's very interesting and I'm glad that you're trying to take steps to change that a little bit because I think we can all improve by learning from each other. And I think a lot of the problems that everybody faces are pretty similar. So the biggest problem I would say that we've had to overcome so far in our life is this transition from a tech enabled platform that looks at drug discovery questions to actually becoming a drug developer with our own drug pipeline. And so if you think about the folks that we hired and the capabilities that we had when we first started the company, they were primarily around computational biology. Right. So we understood biology, we understood computation, and hopefully we understood how to combine the two of them together to drive meaningful clinical insights that we could then use to develop drugs. But those are a completely different set of skills than what is required to actually take a drug, design a clinical trial, get all the manufacturing ready, and conduct that clinical trial to figure out whether or not that drug works. And so here we actually sort of cheated a little bit in the sense that we actually just hired people who were experts in the field. Right. Because we also do understand that drug discovery is incredibly hard. It's very, very nuanced. There are lots of things to look at and it just wasn't feasible for us to learn everything that was required in a very short amount of time. And so our solution was basically to hire our chief development officer, Simon Fricker. And so he's had 25 plus years of experience within the industry. He's worked on four different approved drugs, and more importantly, he was also part of the founding member of a company that eventually got sold to Genzyme and then subsequently to Sanahi. And so he's gone through this path before. He's taken a drug from the early stages of preclinical and figured out how to basically shepherd that drug throughout its entire life cycle.

That doesn't sound like a cheat to me. That sounds like a really good strategy. Sound thinking. Yeah, that's great. I think you bring in the right person. And he sounds multi talented in terms of his development expertise and also the commercialization piece with hopefully licensing or selling. That's really key in this market.

Yes, he's been, he's been absolutely phenomenal to work with.

Yeah, he sounds great. Well, congrats. That's a great hire. This current market, speaking of markets, is really weird. So I am seeing some good rumblings. It's, it's feeling slightly better this year than it did last year. How are you navigating that?

I definitely agree that macro conditions now are significantly worse off than what it's been sort of historically, especially pre pandemic. But what I will say is that the one tailwind that sort of everybody within the space has is that one of the benefits from COVID is that it basically put a spotlight on health. Right. And so prior to Covid, I think a lot of people, including myself, we never thought about health. But then when Covid hit and we realized that, hey, at any point in time our loved ones or our friends could actually get sick, why don't we start to actually focus on health and to get the technologies out there that is required to react very quickly to whatever health problems come up in the future. And so I would say that's one of the biggest tailwinds. And so if you then layer that on with the, I'll call it subpar macro conditions, essentially what that means for us is there's still a lot of interest, there's a lot of interest from investors, there's a lot of interest from strategics. But I think what's changed is the cost structure that people prefer. So historically there were a lot of people who preferred you, for example, to have your own internal lab because it makes you a little bit more flexible, it makes you a little bit more better able to respond to significant spikes in demand that you can control yourself. But I think now it's basically shifted away from that because of macroeconomic conditions in which capital efficiency becomes sort of the name of the game. And so if you think about what that means for a biotech referred drug developer, essentially what that means is you should outsource a lot of the things that you don't need to bring in house. So for us as an example, we are primarily a virtual company. All of our experimental work are done through external third party CROs. And what that enables is it gives us the ability to essentially hit pause very, very, very quickly and to have no fixed costs basically going forward.

There are some really interesting effects of the pandemic and that's one that I have actually unpopular opinion. I think some good stuff came out of the pandemic. I actually think that we're faster now because companies are not having to build out all of their own things. We're more efficient. Yeah, the capital efficiency is really interesting. To watch. And it's creating new and interesting jobs. It used to not be very sexy to go work at a CRO if you're a scientist, but these days you're actually doing a significant amount of assay development at certain CROs because of companies like you that are completely outsourcing that.

Yeah. And actually, even if you look at some of the large pharma companies, a lot of them will also outsource particular things that they don't want to build in house. Right. So when I was at Shire, we had actually outsourced a number of different types of manufacturing or assay development, biology, chemistry, that before entering larger pharma, I was not aware of at all.

Yeah, absolutely. Do you use any Chinese CROs currently?

We used one. They did a lot of our animal in vivo work. But I think just because of political climate, one of the things that we basically have tried to do is to have a couple of different backups that can basically do exactly the same things, although they are a little bit more expensive.

Sure.

But they basically serve as contingency plans in case relationships continue to sour.

Yeah, it's really interesting. I'm talking to all of my clients, obviously, and then podcast guests about how they're thinking about planning for if we can't use them anymore or if we can. A lot of people are kind of wait and see right now. It's interesting.

But yeah, it's always difficult to figure out what Congress will do.

Yeah, yeah. I wish I had a crystal ball. So there are quite a few companies that are in this AI machine learning space. And how are you thinking about differentiating yourselves? Because to the layperson, it's hard to know the differences just by looking sometimes. Oh, it's another drug development platform or it's another discovery platform. Right. How do you differentiate?

Yep. I think the easiest way to think about what Pepper does that's different from everyone else is we focus on activity. And I think I mentioned a little bit of this earlier, but let me just elaborate on what that means. So if you go to any drug developer now, and if you look at the data that they have from their experiments, essentially the data that they have is on expression. So think of these as counts of particular things. So they count how much of a particular sequence of DNA that they have, or RNA that they have, or they count how much of a particular protein that they have. But if you think about what we actually care to know, we don't actually care to know how much of a thing is there, what we actually want to know is what's happening? What are these things actually doing? But as it turns out, finding this biological activity has actually been historically very, very difficult. And so to bridge that gap, we basically as an industry have made a simplifying assumption to bridge that gap from expression to activity. And we basically said, hey, look, the more of something that is there, right, the more of, say, protein X that you have, the more of protein X's function that occurs, knowing that that relationship doesn't always hold, but sort of hoping that that relationship holds for the particular question that you're on. And I think originally the thinking was that relationship should hold most of the time. But according to our own analysis, when we've actually gone through and looked at both expressions so counts of things and also activities of things, that relationship doesn't hold a lot. And depending upon the specific questions and the specific proteins or enzymes that you're looking at, sometimes that disagreement reaches up to over 85%, which is to say that at the protein expression level there is a statistically significant difference, either an increase or a decrease from two different scenarios. But when you then try to look at activity, does that increase in quantity actually translate to any increases or decreases in activity in the same direction as the expression changes? What you find is that over 85% of the time it actually doesn't. And so that creates then a huge problem. And so the way that we've basically gone about this is we've said, hey, why don't we start with activity, right? We know that there are different things that we care about. So say, what causes disease? And instead of saying, hey, which of these protein expressions drive disease? We say, hey, which of these proteins activities drive disease? And we start from the activity side and then we work backwards all the way back to genomics and DNA and we say, basically, hey, here's what's happening and here's why it happened, right? Starting from the blueprint level of DNA and at these three different particular stages, things changed. And so these three particular stages are what caused disease. But we always start with activity.

That's a really interesting philosophy. I really like that. And that is ringing all sorts of bells from my biochemistry work, where we were quantifying a lot of things and not necessarily seeing in vivo direct correlation of the activity. It is amazing how many checks and balances the body has on things. And so just meaning you flood, flood a bunch of protein into or enzyme into a system doesn't mean it's going to do the thing.

Yep, exactly. There are tons of feedback loops, tons of especially Negative feedback loops, basically, to maintain a stable system.

What is a piece of advice you wish you could give yourself just prior to founding Pepper?

The biggest lesson that I've learned is how important hiring is, right? And so I think before founding the company, before leading a company, I had heard people say things along the lines of hiring is your most important activity. But in my mind, essentially the rationale that I gave was, look, maybe that's true in something like tech, but in something that is as hard technically as the life sciences, that's probably not true. And what I originally thought was more important were things like technology or the drug asset themselves. But then as we started on this journey, what we quickly realized is that, no, actually, the hiring is the most important. And the reason for that goes back to all of the different obstacles that we'll face. Right? We're trying to do something that's pretty difficult. We're trying to go after diseases that are currently untreatable. And almost all of these diseases are highly aggressive, and they're extremely complex. And so the answers just aren't there. The methods to find those answers are also not there. And so we have to rely on the people that we hire to figure out both of those things. And so they have to be willing to go the extra mile to explore a bunch of different processes, figure out how to judge each process on the quality of the output that these processes have, and then figure out ultimately, at the end of the day, which processes we need to do in order to make it so that we can have an actual drug at the end of the day, and because there are so many of these unknowns, everything relies on the quality of the people that we hire.

Well, that's music to my ears. I love to preach that what is something that nobody talks about but you wish people would talk about in this industry?

I mentioned that I did a bunch of research historically on hiring, and one of the other lessons that I learned from that research is that sometimes it's pretty difficult to predict who will be successful at the role. So even the best interview processes will let things slip through the cracks because people basically train for these interviews. And so you essentially, instead of answering sort of, how well will these people perform in the job, Essentially what you're answering is, how well are these people at interviews? Which is something that you can practice for in order to have and maintain the best people. Unfortunately, what that means is sometimes you have to look at when it's time to part ways, and you have to have specific processes in place that essentially lets you Know when you should start having these conversations. Actually, when I was in business school, one of the more, I guess, interesting comparisons is if you look at the differences between the professors who have been purely academic versus the professors who had run large companies, one of the biggest differences that they have is actually on how do you solve these types of challenges. And so I think the pure academic folks tend to think that you can move people around and you can always move people around and find the right spot for it. Whereas I think some of the other professors who have led companies before. The quotes that you tend to get are more along the lines of if you think that you need to part ways with someone, you're probably like six months too late to do so.

That's really interesting. I think that's never talked about, so thanks for bringing that up. It's so uncomfortable. I'm going to jump right on this bandwagon and I'm going to. Yes. And you here because I absolutely think that we need to have more conversations around this. Is this a problem we can develop somebody into, you know, being better at xyz or is the company itself not the right fit? And the answer often to your point, is that the company isn't a right fit. And that's okay, because not every company is going to be right for everybody. And that's. We have to be more okay as employees and as employers saying, you know what? We have set them up for success in what will be the right role for them later. And a thing that people don't talk about a lot within this space is how an underperforming person affects the other folks in the company. And that is true. You know, I've seen many cases where we've had really good people leave companies because they wanted to be surrounded by really high performers and they felt that there were folks in the group bringing that down. And so you can lose people that are your absolute stars because there's somebody who's just not in the right seat.

Yep. We unfortunately did have to let go of someone earlier, and we ran into this exact thing where there was a lot of discontent amongst other folks who were amazing performers because they felt like one person was sort of dragging down the speed of progress.

Yeah. And I'm an expert in this. This is what I do. And I've still made this mistake in my own team. It's so, so hard to know when it's the right time to let go of somebody. And you like people and you want to develop them.

Exactly. And you've spent time with Them, you've worked with them, you've spent time outside of work with them, you got to know them as people. And so you want to believe that there's something that everyone can do to salvage it.

Yeah, it's a really important conversation, so thanks for being brave about bringing it up. So this question is more probably analogous to, like, what you want to do with Pepper, but what are your hopes and dreams for the next 10? What do you want to achieve?

I think what we want to achieve in the next 10 years is to treat at least 10,000 patients. Because fundamentally, at the end of the day, the reason why we started the company is to help patients. And actually, one of the things that I didn't mention in my intro is why I transitioned from tech to biotech. About the time that I was finishing Inventure, I unfortunately got a call from my mom where she basically said, hey, I just got off the phone with your grandmother. She no longer recognizes me. Can you please give her a call and see if she recognizes you? So, as you can probably guess, my grandmother had dementia, so specifically Alzheimer's here, and it had progressed far enough along that she basically couldn't do much of anything, so she couldn't do any of the normal daily activities for life, and she really couldn't even talk, besides to say one phrase in Chinese, basically on repeat, and it translates roughly to, let's all hold hands and go home together. And so that moment was when I decided that I really need to speed things up and come back into the healthcare world and see what I can do then, because I saw firsthand the impact that it has not just on the patient themselves, but also on the people around them. Right. So my grandfather was very fit, walked at least two hours a day, and in less than a year, you could visibly see that he had aged a lot in that time period. And so I, unfortunately know what it feels like to be completely helpless in the face of disease.

It's a story that's going to resonate with a lot of people. Well, that's a great reason for getting into it, and I really hope that your platform can provide some answers and treat some patients soon, because that is the goal. That's why we are all here.

The happiest day of my life will be when we have evidence that our drug has successfully treated our first patient.

I like to know what my guests are reading because you're all really smart people, and I love to build my reading list. What can you recommend to me?

I actually really enjoyed the book. Start with why because it talks about how to build alignment and vision and how you actually muster up the internal motivation to do particular things. But actually, one of my favorite books that I read recently is a children's book that I read to my daughter, which is what's to do with an idea. And it basically follows the journey of this kid with an idea, starting from, you know, I'm pretty shy. I don't really know if I like the idea. Like, people are making fun of me and my idea all the way through to embracing that idea, to sharing it with the world, and eventually to changing the world. It resonates with me a lot because it was a particular short story about a person with an idea that got me started on this particular journey.

Those are both really good recommendations. Good old Simon. He really knocks it out of the park with start with. Why, yes.

Fantastic book.

I love the children's book ideas because we've had a couple of folks recommend children's books, and those all really go over well with the audience because most of them have kids and, you know, it's just the simplification of a big idea like that or a big concept. It's fantastic. Thank you. That's great. Great recommendations. If someone wants to learn more about you or Pepper Bio, where can they reach out?

Yeah, just email me johnpper bio. It's the easiest way to get a hold of me.

Super. We'll link that in the show notes. And also, does Pepper have a website or is it on LinkedIn?

Yes. So pepper Bio is our website as well.

Perfect. I'll direct folks there in the show notes. This was so fun. I really enjoyed learning about you and Pepper and your big vision. So thank you so much for coming on the show.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I had a ton of fun as well.

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