Grit & Motivation: The Key Components for Startups with Joe Daccache & Carl Schoellhammer of DeciBio

We just had a really entertaining conversation and I think you'll really enjoy this one. You think so?

Allison yes, I've loved every one of our podcast episodes so far, but I've never laughed harder than I have than talking to Joe and Carl and I also learned a lot. So win. Win.

So today we had a really fun conversation with Joe decash and Carl Schoellhammer, and Joe is a project leader at desebio, which is a boutique precision medicine strategy consulting firm. He has a PhD in immunology from Harvard and he has been instrumental in OPER offering insights that fuel the precision medicine revolution. And Carl has been recognized as one of the Business Insider's 30 Business Leaders Under 40. And he's also a principal at Dese Bio and he also is the founder of Suwono Bio, which is a biotech transforming therapeutic delivery. These two have a lot of knowledge about what it takes to go into the strategy side of biotech and they were just a blast to talk to.

They are so fun, so nice, and also really have a lot of good insight into what you don't learn in your PhD and how that can impact early founders. And just as you build your career, things to be on the lookout for that you may not have ever thought about needing to know in your prior PhD life. So hope you enjoy the episode.

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I'm Karina Klingman, founder and principal at Recruitomics Consulting. Enjoy the show. All right, thank you Joe and Carl for being here. Let's dive in with we like to ask all of our guests what their career paths looked like. So if you don't mind both of you telling us what you wanted to be when you were seven, what you are now, and how did you get there?

I wanted to be something completely different. I was going to the first career that I ever thought about was being a pilot. The reason why I wanted to be a pilot was because I had the fascination of exploring places and things like I've never thought of or have never been. And the other reason is to just take people where they want to be and be happy to their family and make connections that did not come to fruition. And I'm in a completely different field now. I'm still exploring and do something, doing some exploring, but completely different. That was the first career that I ever wanted.

Did you like, go someplace with your family and think that's what I want to do?

No, I actually never was on a plane until I was at 19. So, yeah, I was just pure fascination with technology and how planes even function. The idea of the wind kind of carrying and helping a plane versus not, and how people just were very happy. And when I grew up, not a lot of people were. And I grew up in Lebanon. Not a lot of people had money to even travel. So it was like kind of more of a luxury considered back then. And it was just like a combination of really want to travel because not a lot of people are able to and also want to make people happy. And I want to explore the world. And I also had the fascination of just going to space. That's a different kind of pilot. But I want. I still wanted to go to space. And that was all, you know, if you want to go anywhere, you have to learn how to fly.

Yeah. Allison shares that, shared that dream.

Nice.

Well, I really wanted to be an astronaut. That was my big thing very much. Did not become an astronaut, so.

Me too. And I was like, that's. That's a far fetched dream. Let's just stay with a pilot on Earth.

Yeah, that dream totally died for me. So I didn't even become anything close to a pilot astronaut, anything like that. But okay, now I just follow like, you know, the NASA Instagram account and I live very vicariously.

Preaching to the choir.

Carl, what about you? What did you want to be when you were seven?

You know, I was thinking about it and like, I don't know, I wasn't one of those kids who was like, oh, I want to be, you know, blah. I like, I don't think I even thought about it, to be blunt, which I feel like everyone has the answer. Like, oh, yeah, I wanted to be like this thing or that thing. I'm like.

I was like, I mean, Karina wanted.

To be a horse. Okay, I like that. I like that.

Yeah, I don't have a good answer.

Like, I don't. I didn't really want to be anything. I kind of mean, like, honestly, I feel like if anything, I meandered in life. But it all worked out really well, so I feel very fortunate. But yeah, it was like a. It was a meander.

And you meandered your way into founding a biotech and becoming a biotech strategist. How did that happen?

Yeah, so, you know, it was just Part of kind of college. I had an internship in Merkin Company, the drug company. And that, that sort of cemented my interest in, you know, life sciences, medicines, that sort of thing. And so I went to grad school and not, not even because I wanted to go to grad school, but just, I'm my family, that's what you do, you go to grad school. So I went to grad school and I happened to work on, you know, very translational products or projects in my PhD. So specifically drug delivery because again I'm, I'm not like hardcore molecular biologist. I'm, I like to say I'm biology adjacent. So delivering a drug I can get, I can get my mind around and you know, the science just worked. We were trying to do effectively oral delivery of gene therapies, RNA based medicines, proteins, you know, in a formulation agnostic manner. And it just worked. And that's not the way science works, right? When you try science or try an experiment, like it doesn't work. And that's why a PhD takes five years because you're just figuring out the conditions to do the one experiment to publish on and that's your PhD. But for me, like it just worked. And it wasn't because some amazing scientists like it. Just so that's really what pointed, you know, me and you know, folks I was working with, I was like, okay, there's something here. Like this is just really weird. We could deliver rna, we could deliver DNA, we could deliver biology, we could deliver anything we tried. And so that's what set us down the course then of starting a company. So I kind of, you know, put my head down, all right, what do we do here? And raise money and everything else.

And Joe, how did you get to.

Be where you are switching from being an astronaut and a pilot to the biotech? I went through many phases of what I wanted to do, but really the switch was I was so, I was before even, you know, I was still in high school, even earlier, my grandpa had tongue cancer. So and it was like an overnight thing, he had no symptoms and then suddenly, you know, they discovered that he had tongue cancer. And it was extremely fast. Within six months it was a completely metastasized everywhere. And when I was trying to like engage with, you know, I was young and I was trying to ask all those questions about, you know, how can your own body just turn against you basically and why don't we have solutions where, you know, cancer is not like a new thing. It's been around for probably the beginning of time. Why don't we have those, you know, advances? And that's actually what drew me into science in the first place. So I really, you know, started on the biochem journey and then ended up doing a PhD in immunology. And I'm just like super excited about the immunology space specifically. You know, if one thing could save us is I think really strongly believe that's going to be the immune system and any disease, generally speaking. And that's one of the first probably breaks that are going to small malfunction in your body for any and any disease. So that's what drew me into biotech or actually science in the first place. And then getting into the immunology side and then why I got into consulting in the biotech specifically was, as Carl probably kind of alluded to, things don't work and you're trying to find those shortcuts to make it happen in a specific condition. But most of the time, you know, it doesn't work. And it's kind of an artificial environment versus and a biotech and more pharma. You actually have a little more consistent process. It's like competitive. So I want to kind of help that process and not really do the science. I wanted to do more of the thinking and behind, you know, a lot of times you have something that is worthy to be on the market and just doesn't make it to the market because the money is not there or there's no business or there's no market for it. But in my opinion, there's always a market. Right? You just have to go the right time, the right place or the right conditions and there's always a market. So I wanted to help the biotech industry in that way.

Now Carl and Joe, you guys work together in sort of a multitude of different ways and you both have your hands in a lot of pots. I guess the main one we should start off with is desibio. Could you tell us a little bit about sort of the mission behind it, a little bit of what decibio is all about and how you both work within their framework?

Destibuy is a strategy consulting firm focused in the life sciences. So we've always focused in kind of tools, diagnostics specific to life science, life science research. The firm started out over a decade ago kind of as a reports company. One of the founders was waiting for a job offer from Illumina. I think they closed the division then and were like, sorry, no job. So it didn't materialize. And he was loving writing these reports. So he started doing that more and more and this has really grown into full fledged strategy. Joe and I help lead the kind of the advanced therapy practice. So things that cover cell therapy, gene therapy, Zoligos mRNA, all that stuff, and still we cover the therapeutics directly, but also have a lens towards the tools aspect of that. How do you actually manufacture these therapeutics? What tools do you need? The bioprocessing, you know, these sorts of, these sorts of aspects which is really coming into focus, you know, today.

Excellent. And so can you tell us how your academic background influences what you do at Desi Bio? Do you specialize within that of those strategy arms? Have you sort of specialized internally? I guess so.

Carl did point to think part of the excitement for him and I specifically is really kind of the therapeutics like those next generation therapeutics. Right. So this is all coming from our knowledge as well. And PhDs or even before that working on those advanced therapeutics. Because the tools without the therapeutics is nothing and then therapeutics without the tools is nothing. Right. And even in the diagnostics, when you add the diagnostic side to it, that's even a little more complex. So my personal interest, for example, is heavily antibody drug conjugates, which those are antibodies that are conjugated to drugs and cell therapies. I mean, cell therapies are mostly, if not all or nearly all, because you have mesenchymal. But a lot of those types of cell therapies that are on the market or coming up now are immune. Immune cells. Right. So this is like most of the excitement that at least for me. And then you can't manufacture something without the tools. And that's something that we focus on. So that's how our background helped us and kind of more of an interest. But there are a lot of skills that you learn in your PhD that will ultimately help you. Right. So even if you're not using your knowledge 100% of your knowledge throughout your academic career, it still helps you. And you're running all those things at the same time. You're running all the work streams. You have to think about a team. You have to. There are a lot of skills that you learn, especially in a PhD that are honestly like just recipe for success in any career moving forward.

Yeah, that makes sense. Carl, Sort of the same question, but from your perspective, you also founded Subono and when you think about, you know, what your PhD didn't teach you, what are the things that you've had to learn on the job that are in addition to that academic background, I Think.

The academic background teaches you how to think. There's kind of the specific science you do. I'm not sure that's you know, too helpful to say consulting or these sorts of things, but it's how you think about a problem. How do you tackle a problem? What did the PhD not teach me a lot. You know, starting a company, right, you're the majority of that is kind of the business aspect of things. You know, how do you communicate to people what you're doing? How do you communicate why it matters? How do you communicate why they should write you like a seven figure check to do that thing? And especially as PH in the PhD, I think most talks you give are like pretty long, pretty technical and like really go off on the deep end. And I think you have to do the exact opposite in kind of the business strategy world. And so I'd say it's along those lines of thinking about the real translational aspects, the real marketability aspects. A lot of folks in academia, there's what I like to call kind of theoretical world problems, one of which can be adherence to medication. If you look in theory, adherence to medications, like a hundred billion dollar problem or some crazy number. And so academics say, oh, adherence, you know, that's a market, like we can create a solution here. It's $100 billion market. You're like, well there's kind of these downstream effects of non adherence that lead to this massive $100 billion number. But who pays that 100 billion? And they kind of look at you blankly and they say, well it's $100 billion problem. And you're like okay, but who feels the 100 billion? And if you go down the rabbit hole, the answer is no one. The answer is insurance providers maybe feel like a small fraction of that. So the market, you know, actual market, when you step out of the lab and want to start a company, maybe 8 billion or less, maybe hundreds of billions, it's small. And so it's thinking through the real aspects of, you know, when you step out of the lab, you're thinking about payers and policy, all these things you never thought about. You saw in the journal that oh, you know, non treatment cost, the health system, blah blah blah blah. No, those dollars aren't actually changing hands. And so now you need to think about actually like what actually changes hands. Who is seeing that? Who's your customer? Especially in healthcare, like the end user is generally not your customer. And that's a different mind shift.

Yeah, 100%. This is one of the biggest shocks maybe that after my career, after the PhD, where when I started looking at the business aspect of different career paths besides science, the only thing you can think about in the PhD, and this is at least for me, and that's why I'm kind of bringing it up, is the patient, right? We have something that's gonna work and patient will get it. It's 99.9% of the time the patient will not get it. At least not in the time that you're thinking about. Because there are all those complex systems and complex reasons why someone wouldn't do it. I mean, an example is something that's like always on the news, right? They should cut the drug prices. I was like, well, theoretically I would love to get a drug for a dollar or even for free, right? But then why would the company, even in the first place, invest in developing a program or a drug if they're not going to make the money back? And like something that people just don't think about is like it takes 10 plus, 20 plus 30 plus years to even get your ROI, right? It's not a return on investment, it's not an easy one. Someone is selling a drug and or when you look at cell therapies now, I mean one of the biggest things, or gene therapy, they're pricing at 1.5 million. Outrageous. This is not acceptable. The program took billions of dollars to develop. So those are still now at rare disease stages, right? Like those are conditions that are rare disease. So if you think about like the post patient population that is even eligible to get the drug, think about. And those are curative therapies, right? It's not like someone will get it more than once, often or most of the time. You basically, why would anyone develop a program for like 5 billion, 10 billion, $100 billion, they're charging a million five and they barely have any, you know, patient, well, barely quote unquote, barely any patients to get it. So do I see my money back in what, a hundred years? Is it worth pursuing or not? Those are things that just that people don't think about. And honestly I didn't even think about in my PhD, right? Unless you start looking. So like what is a different career path? What are the things that I don't think about in my PhD? So really just opening your mind early for those, even if you're not considering a business career, even if you're not considering moving away from science. I found it super helpful to think about those complex and different questions than my day to day on the batch. Those are things that are fundamental to understanding the biggest impact and bigger impact of your research is don't take that 0.1% narrow lens and look through it. Actually take a step back and think if my program and my research is successful, is it actually going to get to market and are patients actually going to get that drug or that asset? And most probably 99.9% of the answer would be it's probably not going to succeed. Right?

With desibio consulting, is this the type of thing that you would consult on these very early stage steps and this big picture thinking and you drill it down from there. When's the right time for someone to come to you and say I have this idea and how do you weigh in on that? I'm really curious, how do you decide who's a good client and what do you do if someone's not a good. I have so many questions, so many questions.

So we support, I mean desibios specifically and then you'll find it kind of common where consulting in general, especially us in the precision medicine space, the market is early, right? Those precision therapeutics are not going to be a Merck market most of the time, right? They're going to be really biotech, really academic, large academic institutions that have gotten a program to a late stage. So it's really important, not just like Desi Bio, it's really important to support those programs and support those companies. I think one issue is that companies don't think, especially when someone is an academic founder, they don't really think about the value of engaging an external entity for support. Right? Again, if you, even if you have something, even if you have created a company, if you have not identified your applications, if you have early on, like when you have a prototype, even before that, if you haven't really heard what people want from a tools or a therapy, right? Like if you don't look at the market, you're not going to be able to find to have a strong foundation for your program because most of the time it's a single program that you're starting with or even for your company long term, right? You're not setting up yourself for success. So what we say is like you have to engage also other firms really early on, really put a track for yourself. Success track, long term, successful track, right? You don't have to engage someone for the entire picture from A to Z when something is in your, in the market. But you can engage in phases, right? Engage in phases, get that external perspective. Because it's very easy, especially for academics to see Things from their own perspectives, which is honestly a recipe for disaster most of the time. Right. Like that's something that we, I also didn't learn in my PhD. Like you actually have to keep an open mind and like ask people what, how they see it. You're not the expert in your field and you're not going to get something to success by just following your incident and following your vision. There's a lot of stakeholders that are engaged or that are involved and have to be involved. And so it was a good sense check. Right. And this is just going to be important, like engage early. And that's what we tell people and we tell our clients. We love to engage with companies that are early stage because one precision medicine is still early. This is really still early stages. But also we help and we want to help early companies and early founders succeed long term.

I would, I have a slightly different answer. So as a consulting firm, we'll do all of this stuff. You know, you can think about landscaping, where should you focus versus not market sizing, you know, what's worthwhile to go after. You can think about the strategy. Are you like a build to buy? Are you a bolt on, Are you going to IPO? IPOs are kind of closed for now. You know, we can do all that. But I think, and as a firm, we like to really consider ourselves truly kind of industry participants. Right. Most consultants, right, they pass off a deck, they're, they're sidelined, you know, watchers. What happens, you know, what happens once they've done their work? You know, we really try and engage and work with smaller companies, figure out ways to engage with them, you know, where they, they might not have the budget typically to, you know, engage a firm like us or a consulting firm generally with our venture firm. So we do it in a lot of ways, but obviously still, you know, we're not the ones operating the company. So we're participants only to such an extent from a company standpoint, you know, for a really early company, I think there's no shortage of advice and feedback and ways to pressure test, you know, what you're trying to do in your plan. And I think consultants are probably the worst way to do that simply because again, it kind of goes back to the price and the grit. Like starting a company is the worst job you could ever choose, ever. It's an unlimited number of hours. It's super hard. Everyone's going to say no to you. Everyone's going to tell you you're, you're just you, you know, like I won't curse, but you're doing something wrong. Like it is a horrible job. And so like you need incredible grit and motivation, you know, to keep at it. So how are you going to just like if you have that grit and the motivation to learn what you don't know, you know, really go after it. That seems in my mind it's a little more of the founder hat on. That seems a little more, you can't really align that with having grit. You're like, well I'll just pay someone else to figure this out for me. Like how do you go to a venture? Like if you go to a venture firm, you're like, I want to raise 2 million bucks and a quarter of that or you know, fifth of that, whatever, it's going to go to this consulting firm. Like as a investor I'd be like, good luck. Like, you know, I'm not writing you that check. So I do think you have to be careful about how you engage. But as an early startup, there are so many ways to get feedback and to pressure test. You can find your own mentors, connect with people on LinkedIn, you can do accelerators. And there's no shortage of mentors in these programs who will happily give you their two cents. And I think there you just have to be careful about again as a founder, separating the signal from the noise. You'll hear a lot of early stuff on and it's scattered but you'll start slowly. The more people you talk to, you'll start, it'll start pointing in a direction or another.

Yeah. To follow up Karina Alison on one thing that Carl mentioned, I think we're a little unconventional as a company as well because Carl said we're participant. We really have a lot of ways to support people. And from that perspective, with a lens of companies need support and if they come to us, they want support but they don't have the money. We have different ways of helping to the fund, venture fund or through, you know, maybe like a cost price, like a cost per structure for us, for our projects, etc. We have flexibility and that's a little really unique to us. Honestly I haven't, maybe I'm too narrow minded and scope, but I haven't seen a company, I mean when you think of other consulting companies like okay, this is my amount of $, this is how much I would charge you to the project and that's it for us. It's like, you know, you engage with us in a conversation, especially if you're an early company and we want to support you. Again, we're players. We really want to. For you to succeed, we have different ways of helping. So I think that goes back to what Carlo saying is like, we're not just like, okay, you engage with us, pay me 60,000, 170,000 and we'll do a project for you. That's not the way we operate.

Yeah, that's really fascinating. 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 is, 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. Would each of you share maybe a little story? Sometimes this is really abstract to people who are not, you know, founders themselves or they're not in biotech, or they are, but they're at a later stage. Can you share a story? You don't need to name names or anything that paints a picture of how someone would engage with you and what the outcome of that engagement sort of looked like.

Going back to a success story or something like some story. I actually one of the projects that I've worked on and I can't name names obviously, but a project is like a product, you know, the market is in theory small. Things will not really change with the product that the company is coming with. And they were almost giving up. So they had this idea of like, why don't we engage with desubayo? And then that's the project that I worked on a year ago or so. And we're still engaging with the company because based on what we told them and what basically the voice of customer and our strategy that we came with and our conclusion, they're doing extremely well. I mean, they raised 40 plus million dollar, which was not feasible, etc. Etc. And the idea is again, just like an example, developing a product, the market is not really going to change. There's not really a lot of value, especially at the price tag that they were Coming with or thinking, you know, going to market with. So when we conducted the voice of customer research, we were able to narrow down specific applications of what they should go after. And even in an academic market where usually, you know, you don't really think about the academic market being like a big opportunity when you go to market initially or like as a main customer, but we were able to identify, you know, academics would actually get this product at this price tag and then with those value propositions or like this value that you're going to communicate with them. And then we actually took it a step further. We told them this product that you have is great, but it's not going to make you successful long term. So we gave them specifics of what people want to develop. And then now they're raised 40 plus million dollar and they're developing this version two of their product. And I mean they're really on an exponential growth curve, which was not the case when we first spoke to them. And they were struggling to raise money and they were struggling to even find a market for their product. And I think that was actually one of the best projects and most satisfying projects that I've worked with. And I'm still engaged with this with our point of contact at the company. I mean, we're still talking to them. And last week I was exchanging emails because they're raising an additional round now and you know, that was a satisfying project to work on.

That's a great example. I think that really shows the value that your, your whole team brings to that equation. Thank you.

Yeah, I mean, I would give a couple other examples. You know, we'll do a lot of work with private equity shops, for example. So doing diligences, you know, their success can be, yeah, you know, this seems like a great, great business to invest in or acquire or, or conversely like, hey, we, we found some fatal flaws here. Will do a lot of strategy road mapping. So thinking about what subsequent products should say, a customer, one of our clients, what subsequent products should they think about developing and launching. And so there it's very quickly triaging unmet needs across their potential customers and stakeholders to really help them identify, okay, you have this product next you should do B, not C, how you should launch it. Right. What do customers care about seeing from like a data validation standpoint for a new product? As an example, if it's a tool reagent, something like that, you know, pipeline prioritization for therapeutics, there's a lot of groups where it's just, there's a crowded space right you're going to be fourth to market in this indication. Like, maybe don't put R and D dollars there, but you can find that another sweet spot for them where it does make sense.

So, and those are things you don't think about when you're a PhD student. So I mean, again, like, re just really re emphasizing especially for people who are considering different career paths or listening, you know, academic background, PhD students. Those are things you just don't think about. Like, honestly. Right. The exact same. Like, don't put your dollar amount in this program or like in your pipeline or even in your program in academia. Like, just don't waste money on it or, you know, quote unquote, waste money on it. So, like, really just keeping an open mind on all those things is Joe.

Has feelings about what should or should not exist.

Well, I think it's an interesting point, though. I mean, we're laughing, saying that, you know, sometimes the answer is like, what are you doing here? Just like, shut down. But I actually do think there's a lot of value for people if sometimes your idea is like, so great on paper but it's just not feasible or there's no market for it. To your point, it can be so hard to see that if you're in it and you're invested, sometimes you need someone to say you're, you're so smart, right? Your time and money is spent elsewhere, you'll be better off. And I think it can be so hard to see that for yourself. So sometimes no is the value.

You tell them the baby's ugly.

And I mean, that's. If you want to really want to talk about, like the, the hard part of the job is when we go, we're talking about successful stories, but there are stories that, you know, in consulting, it's a success because you deliver an answer, but it wasn't a success for the company that engaged with you. Right? I mean, you're delivering bad news. You're not always delivering good news in consulting or to PE shops or, you know, sometimes, as Carl was saying, we engage with companies doing diligences where it's not the best answer when you're going to them and saying it's not even a good answer for the company that they're thinking of acquiring or investing in. We're telling them, you know, you should not really, you should not even invest or think about this company. Just look at something else.

Desi Bions. This is what you call desibio employees. Am I correct with that?

It is.

No, it's great. And it seems like you guys have a really strong culture that you're building and really into team building. Can we talk a little bit about sort of the internal culture and also what you see and advise startups when it comes to building their team culture and do you help them all get creative names for their teams as well?

It's really important, the culture. We have a great ops team that just does really focuses on this and not in kind of a bland way of like, oh, you have a happy hour, you know, once every other week or whatever. I mean, it is almost like indoctrination, for better or worse. So the team is really close and I think that matters because when you need to work long hours, when something's hard, you know, what else kind of keeps you motivated? You know, one of the pieces to our, to our culture, I'll tell a funny story, is our firm loves dogs. So we have like most of our dogs on the website. I personally have. Have two dogs, only one of which is office compatible. But the. One of the founding partners just loves my 90 plus pound dumb as a rock golden retriever. Like, dumb as a rock in a good way. A great dog. So he's on the website. One of the other partners has, I don't even know what the. Like a poodle breed. And his name is President Georgie Woofington. And we, we get a lot of spam as a firm, you know, you people, you know, and sometimes you get emails that are spoofing the partners. They'll say, hey, you know, this is Stefan. I can't chat right now, I'm on a call. But, like, I need you to buy some gift cards. Well, we recently actually got one that was, hey, this is President Georgie Wiffington and I'm on the phone. I can't. And I think, like, all the dogs also have titles. I think, I think President Georgie Wilmington's title might be like president or something. It's something like that. You know, the sign, like President Georgie Wimbledon. Like, you know, President Desi bio. And you're just like, oh, man, you guys gotta, you know, so the team had a pretty good laugh about that. But look, when the president emails you directly, you respond, you take action.

Yeah, we had, we took it seriously. I mean, we responded to the email.

You buy those gift cards or like.

Taking fun 30 gift cards to Petsmart immediately.

It is important, right? But you still, if you think about desktop, I was like, it is a fun environment. It's a good family. Ish, you know, but you have to be hard Working, right? Like, it's not. It goes hand in hand. Like, it's a business at the end where we work hard, but we, like, we also play hard. Right? It comes with the perks of you don't need to think about joining Desi Bio or even applying to Dusty Bio if you're not willing to put in the hard work. Especially when you think of precision medicine. I mean, this. This field needs more support than you can think. Or when you think about, you know, your Tylenol, just, like, typical drug is this space needs a lot of thinking, a lot of analysis, a lot of engagement, and honestly, like, more supports than any other field that you can think about.

We just had someone spoof Karina too, and text everyone on our team being like, you need to schedule this meeting immediately, and whatever. That story rings so true. And now all I can think is we should all just put our animals on the website so we know exactly when it's a spoofing situation. I'm gonna laugh about that all day.

It's insane when you think about the bots, like, how advanced they've become. It is just. I mean, we get, like, one every week at least. It's like, things that they say. I mean, I got. I get even text messages. Not even emails, like, text messages to my personal phone. Like, recently, I got a text message from our founding partner, Stefan. A message saying, hey, I'm, like, on the road. And he was actually on the road, which makes me, like, really freaking out. On the road. We really have that. We really need to talk. Our client had really bad reaction to our deliverable. And the funny thing is, like, I mean, I didn't even have Stefan's, like, personal number at that point. So I took it, like, really seriously. I messaged back, and the responses that I got back is, like, pretty crazy. It's like the immediate response, like, within, like, a minute, like, really responding. I was like, yeah. They didn't value our approach and communication. Transparency.

I was like, okay, like, Joe, that was Steph. He was texting you. That's why, you know, that's.

I know. And then at the end, I was like, got sketchy. I was like. And it was like a, you know, number from California, like, zip code or so. Yeah, like the call code. And I was like, you know what? This is getting too serious. And I can't even tell if this is right or not. So I just went on our Slack channel. I was like, hey, Stefan, can we have a Google Meet to discuss what you're just texting me and he's like, testing you. And then I was. And I was exchanging text messages for like five minutes. And it's crazy, like, if you think about how advanced they've become. I went on a ramble, rambling thread here, but it is insane. We just, everyone needs to be careful. Including my comments.

I think that was President Woofington just messing with you.

Oh yeah, I know.

I did every sentence. You know, dog paw emoji.

And you're like, I actually think it's a really interesting topic because we, part of our business, our sister business, is working with people who are moving from academia into biotech. And this is such a common thing, but it's not, you know, trying to be a good employee. And you're like, oh, I'll respond to this text. And like, it's actually, it's a big problem. And we've seen people, you know, have really big security issues at biotechs based on these, these spoofing attacks.

So actually, I'd love to put a note about that. Like, the one thing I'd pay for when you're first starting up a company is it. And it doesn't have to be expensive. I mean, there's like virtual, you know, IT folks who will, you know, set up your computers, have VPNs. Like, you know, they don't have to be. It's not like a person you hired. It's just like some firm that's outsourced. But that's critical. Like, I mean, for whatever reason, the last, I don't know, two months, even at Sono, like I get every day, I'm getting six, seven, eight emails that are all like, oh, you're, you know, your Microsoft account password, this, that, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like someone, it feels very targeted. And I do know actually of startups that, you know, have had, you know, raised quite a bit of money and were targeted and did actually lose some money due to some of these things. So even as a small startup, small company, I think just invest in it, get an external group. They handle your virus software, your firewalls, all that stuff.

Yeah, that's a good point.

What piece of advice would you offer someone on the cusp of launching their own biotech venture? Which could be a really good question.

I'd say the biggest piece is you have to, you have to figure out and know what you don't know. You have to have some amount of conviction, but make it smart conviction so that if your idea doesn't have legs, you can just kill it. But the final piece is the majority of your communication is going to be on slides, right? If you're raising funding, blah, blah, blah, blah. Everyone's going to ask you for the deck and you're going to say, hey, I want to talk to you. And they're like, do you have a deck? Send it over, please. For like just please like review your deck. Have a friend who's not in engineering or science review it. I think that's another, you know, again, like the PhD of these slides that you present. It's just like so dense here, like succinct. Try and make it visual if you can. And like within 10, like 10 slides total and you got to tell me what you do. No roundabout data, like, tell me what you do. Because I'm looking at that deck and I don't have a lot of time if I don't know what you can like what you do, I'm not going to take the call to try and figure it out. And you would be. So I was surprised like how many decks you'll get where you're. You're like three quarters of the way through and you're still just like, what do they do? Like, it's not a rare problem. So like craft your deck, have some, have a friend who's not in your area, like look at it. And then it'll be good practice for getting beat down because that's all you do as a founder.

So I definitely would believe that. How often you probably get wildly inefficient decks because we look at resumes all day long and maybe 1 in 300 resumes gets right to the point and tells me what's your value proposition and why should I care? And that is all that anyone really wants to know. At the end of the day, I don't care if you are trying to get funding or you're trying to get a job. Just tell people what they need to know.

And don't tell me you know how to use Microsoft Office. Like, yes, for goodness sake. That is not a skill we have.

Everyone cut that out. Absolutely.

That's a basic and need now like in anything you want to do. But honestly, like it's that, that advice that Carl was saying we're just discussing or giving, it is not just for building your own biotech. It is just anything you're considering away from science. You need to know how to be system and stay to the point. And really just communication. I think that is where it goes to communication, right? Studying yourself, setting what you're thinking, studying your conviction. I think that Skill you do not learn in your PhD. You can, you, you know, and you learn how to communicate your science on a very heavy slide. But it's not how you sell yourself. And that's not how you even, you know, build your own biotech or. And that's only, I mean, honestly, that's like an issue that is sometimes happens when like PhD students and they're starting even consulting or VC and they come with, they're working on their first deck and it's like full of words and data and graphs. I'm like, no, no, it's just like one graph, three bullet points. Give me what is the situation, why is it the case and what does it mean? Like, this is all people care about and this is everything you need to know. And even when you're studying yourself on your resume, what did you do? Why did you do it? What are your skills out of it? Right?

Absolutely. I love those answers. Thank you. Okay, this is Allison's favorite question, but I get to ask it this time. Could you both of you guys tell us what your last or maybe favorite fiction or nonfiction book was? We're basically compiling a book list and this is really selfish for us, but we want to know what you like reading.

I do not read fiction. I have a. I even like watch movies that are really kind of towards the fictional side. Well, I contradict myself. 99% of things I watch are non fictional and read are non fictional. I really kind of read books that are more self building, sometimes metaphysics related, etc. But recently the most recent one have been, and I adore that person, Brene Brown. She is absolutely my favorite person in the world and I've been reading her, her books and her podcasts and she has the most amazing HBO shows that is at us of the heart. I mean that's a book. But also if you haven't seen the HBO, whoever is listening, the HBO show, five parts, 30 minutes each. It teaches you things that in your personal relationships with other people are important in your day to day management. Kind of realizing how you're feeling and how you communicate that feeling as well could apply to clients, to friendships, to your relationships. I mean, I tend to like read those kind of books too. And honestly not even to learn myself, but part of like us, I mean Carl's level and my levels, we have to also manage teams. And if you don't, if you can't see that perspective and if you cannot communicate efficiently and if you cannot understand where people are coming from and how to mitigate what they're saying and understand them and communicate properly. This is a recipe for disaster. You need to learn those basic understanding. And a lot of, I mean leaders or founders of biotechs, you know, they don't know how to communicate, they don't know how to team to build a effective, comprehensive, really intertwined and healthy team. And I think that's pretty important.

Yeah, we love Bernay around here. We love a good rumble. So.

And Ted Lasso. I mean, I cannot stop talking about Ted Lasso.

So I don't read a lot. Well, I read a tremendous amount but like for work and news, I don't read like for fun. And what fun reading I do, it's on audio, it's audio books. So I'll say that up front, but I'm a little different. I like reading about people who did really hard things. That maybe like sounds weird, but I find, you know, that kind of like inspirational interesting. It makes me like want to, want to do more things. So I'm going to go with two. And they're like, they're weird. These might be a little off putting, but one is called Tap Code. I just, I had. And this is why Joe had to go first. I had to look back at the names. This is like a year ago because my, with the pandemic, my commute's gotten shorter, my audio book listening has gotten less. But so Tap Code about this Air Force pilot in the Vietnam War. He was in captivity for like, I want to say like years and years, maybe a decade or more. And he developed literally like tapping on pikes and like taught this communication. So you learn it like basic training, but only he remembered it. And so he had to like reteach it to all the other like POWs and like you're in very poor conditions the least. And so like just, just incredible like how he just survived. And the second one, again, little weird. It's called Surprise Kill Vanish. It's on the history of basically like the development of COVID ops. That one is amazing. It is like a little freaky, but it's like we need this thing across the world like to not exist tomorrow again. And you're like, how did we develop that capability? Also another cool fact. There's a. There's Gray berets in the military. I don't know why I'm going to like the military so much. They're weathermen. They're basically like Navy SEAL weathermen. And they go in before anyone else to basically tell the weather where you know, we need to land like a ton of Troops and equipment and stuff to make sure the weather's okay because apparently historically, like, we've tried to land somewhere and like a windstorm came up and like everything was destroyed. And like, you can imagine you're like the first and only person there. Like, you gotta be able to take care of anything and everything. Like, there's no backup. I don't have a lot of things for that, but I definitely don't have like the, you know, wherewithal with the right term for that. But I'm like, that's pretty amazing.

No disrespect to weather people, but they're not always that accurate either. So can you imagine having to be like, you better get this right or else.

This is.

Love that.

So we'll wrap up with where the audience can find the two of you. We are going to link in the show notes, your LinkedIn and anything else that you want us to put in there. So what's the best way to get in touch?

TikTok.

TikTok. Okay.

No, me too.

LinkedIn. Yeah, great. And Georgie Wilfington, you know, he takes my calls.

Yeah, I'm not on TikTok. I mean, it's like on our. Actually that's bio page is pretty good for like the team we have. Everything is linked to the LinkedIn or some of the content that we even put if you want to reach out for specific content. But most of the time actually it's just like LinkedIn. I'm not on Tick Tock. I'm not on a lot of the social media channels. I. I don't even know what you know.

Your dog has an Instagram. Don't. Don't try.

And my dog has an Instagram. But like, I don't have Tick Tock. I don't. This is too young for me. I'm old. I don't do TikTok.

Same.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much. This was absolutely fascinating. I loved your perspective on coming into this from, you know, from your PhD. I think a lot of people will find that interesting and I think we learned a lot about, you know, things that people don't think about as they're in their PhD and beyond. So thank you.

And this is the first time I have laughed doing this yet. And so thank you so much.

Thank you.

This has just made my day. This was great.

Thanks for again, I think you found Joe, but, you know, thanks for having us.

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