Networking, Collaboration, and the Dynamics of Business Growth with Padma Kodukula, Chief Business Officer at A-Alpha Bio

Padma Khadakula is the Chief Business Officer at A Alpha Bio and she has a fascinating career journey. But what I took away from the conversation was a lot about her passion for mentorship and her passion for helping companies to really figure out how to sell themselves, whether they are selling a product or just who they are to initial investors.

Padma has a really interesting career history and she brought so many cool insights to the table. If you are someone who loves networking, Padma also loves networking and she really brings that energy into this conversation.

She has the real extrovert energy going. I wish I could just bottle some of that. It seems very useful.

Yes, absolutely. So anyone who's interested in being a chief business officer or wondering about how business development gets done in a biotech, this is really your episode. We dive pretty deep into a lot of what she does on a daily basis in that realm.

Welcome to Building Biotechs, a podcast by Reeconomics Consulting.

We've helped over 75 biotech, life science and venture capital firms strategize, hire and retain thousands of employees to scale companies that bring life saving drugs to patients.

We speak with those at the forefront of growing biotechs to learn their tactics on building these companies from the ground floor to the C suite.

We're your host, Karina and Allison. All right, well, Padma, thank you so much for joining us today.

We start all of our podcast episodes.

Pretty much in the same way, which is by asking what, what did you.

Want to be when you were 7? What are you now?

And how in the world did you get there?

Yeah, when I was seven, I wanted to be a teacher. I was enamored. I was inspired by some of my early teachers. I loved school. And then as I moved on for high school, I loved education. So I wanted to learn more and hence my journey to do a bachelor's and then a master's and then a PhD. And so I wanted to study as long as I could, go as high as I could, and then I think five years of PhD ultimately got the realization that, okay, I've studied everything that I could and this is going to be a lifelong process. It doesn't have to be degrees, but I will be studying and learning all my life. But I don't think I want to do bench science as much. It's a very lonely field. And I came to the realization that I enjoy being in teams more right than doing my own research by the bench for years to come. And so I really moved right after my PhD into a postdoc and really moved and back in the day, in the 1990s, that was a big deal. People did postdocs, people stayed in academia. You didn't move to industry. But I decided that I was going to move to industry and not do basic science or research and really jumped into project program management and have been teens. And then from there I moved to this dev. So it's been a long journey. But my, my love for science, my love for education has remained with me always.

That's great. We hear a lot of awesome career journeys and none of them are linear. So I think that that's a real takeaway is, you know, there's a lot of things that we. And our company is also like this. We are science adjacent.

Right.

We're still very close to it, but we're not at the bench anymore. There's so many career paths that can be like that. How did you end up then in business development? That does seem like a little bit of a shift from project management to business development. Can you walk us through what happened there?

So I started again from my PhD where I was defending my own experiments and designing my own experiments to really a technical services scientist where I was defending other people experiments and supporting them with their experiments. But there for a year really gave me an opportunity to see all technologies and all programs within the company. And then I picked one of the programs to become a program manager for that company. I was there for 10 years and that gave me a phenomenal opportunity to really take multiple ideas from early stage to launch. And you know, I am talking research reagents which were very quick. You could put them out there in six months to diagnostics which took two to three years to put out there. And therapeutic. Right. I was part of Sutent, which was just finishing its Phase 3 clinical trial at Pfizer and was being submitted for a therapeutic product for renal cell carcinoma. So I was part of that team. So really saw that trajectory. So I was very excited about all. You get to see the whole multitude of departments and functions that have to come together from marketing to manufacturing to R and B to quantity to everybody else to take a product from idea to commercial. And so that was all very exciting. Did that a lot. Did it across multiple industries and multiple companies. And then I was fascinated with business development because you represent a company with the technology and you go make deals. Deals were very fascinating for me. And I liked the ability to take all the science and represent the company for partnerships. And I was actually managing. I went from project management to doing alliance management and alliance Manager does where I work closely with BD and once they signed the deal they would put it with me and I was responsible for executing that deal. So that was my connection between project management to BD and alliance management, you know. Yeah. I started itching more and more to do the deals myself. Right. Rather than execute on a deal that was done. And so the last 10 years I've been doing BD and so now you.

Are the chief business officer at a alphabio. Can you walk us through what like maybe a day in the life looks like in that job? I'm sure every day is different but on a standard ish day how would you describe what you do?

We wear multiple hats. I wear Multiple hats at AlphaBayo and it's all about value creation for early stage companies and you do that with science. And so I am very involved with the chief Technology officer with the R and D scientists to really understand what science we are to explore where else we need to go. And so I'll sit in many R and D meetings to soak in the science, to give them feedback on what the market needs and where are we going down rabbit holes and what is very relevant. I also do a lot of outside like market intelligence, business intelligence to know what are my competitors doing, what deals were signed today. I certainly link it in quite a bit to understand all the science and all deals that I made. So that's market intelligence, business intelligence and then I'm always connecting with my baby partners in pharma companies, small biotech companies. Maybe at any point in time I'm looking at 40, 50 companies that I want to connect with. And so part of my days also, you know, reaching out to some of these, responding to them. We may have multiple early stage discussions which are always ongoing. So a lot of follow ups. Right. And connecting with R and D to get me stuff, connecting with my external BD folks, planning meetings, strategically planning areas and planning meetings. So I would say my day is usually meetings. I would say three, four meetings. A lot of thinking and strategizing for the future do that and lots of follow ups stuff that you know, maybe they need to be pinned one more time. They were supposed to get me something and right or planning for. So I like it because it's actually, I would say equal parts strategy and equal parts implementation.

That's awesome. So can you give us a high level overview of Alpha Bio? I am so enamored by the synthetic bio space and so if you could tell us a little about what you know, the company does.

So we are a spin out of University of Washington Institute for Protein Design. And we have a wet lab platform and a dry lab platform. The wet lab is a yeast platform, a synthetic biology platform where we can measure quantitatively millions of protein protein interactions in a single experiment. And this is again the synthetic biology that allows you two weeks or less to look at such a large scale of protein interactions. And then we can take all that data, put it into machine learning, our dry lab platform, to train machine learning models, validate them, and use them to predict additional biologics or protein structures or protein sequences. So yeah, and you can do multiple iterations of the wet lab and the dry lab. And we have our own internal. And so we work in two spaces, two major areas. One is biologics, which includes antibodies, which includes immunocytokines, and we have an internal pipeline for immunocytokines. And we also work in another area called targeted protein degradation, or tpd. And there we are doing a novel target discovery and that can be used for small molecules. So we have signed deals in both of these, in molecular glues, as they call it, for targeted protein degradation and biologics.

And when you're doing deals and thinking about partnerships. So I'm assuming these are with mostly bigger companies. Are they with academic institutions? Kind of. What's the makeup of your deals and who you're working with?

Mostly bigger companies, bigger pharma companies, the deals we have done. We also work with academic or nonprofit institutions, like we have worked with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We are currently working with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. But big pharma, we are also very interested in working with biotechs and, you know, same sized companies. I mean, they have synergistic complementary technologies and we can work together to co develop something. So we are pretty open with, you know, the type of partners that we can work with.

So on a personal note, I'm really interested in your answer to this.

One of the things that we talk.

About sometimes is networking and the importance of networking. And I feel as though a large portion of your job has to be just putting yourself out there and networking with a variety of stakeholders. Does this come naturally to you or is this a skill that you've honed over time or have you always just been like, I'm totally cool to meet everyone, it's fine? Because a lot of people find networking so intimidating.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It comes naturally to me. And which was one of the reasons I felt I couldn't sit at the bench and do my own research. I was more a people's person. I wanted to be part of teams. And so right after my PhD, it was a conscious decision because of my personality to move and be in such an extrovert and enjoy so much being in teams and companies. So networking comes very naturally. I get a lot of energy going, going into a room, not knowing anyone and you know, shaking hands, introducing myself and making 15, 20, 30 friends, new contacts and then following up with them. And my project management skills over 10 years have really taught me how you want follow up and get organized. So networking comes naturally because I'm, I'm an extrovert by design.

Well, I think that's a great way to phrase it though. You come out with like 15 to 20 friends. That's like the best way to think about going into a networking event. That you're just like make it new friends. Everyone thinks of it as like, oh, it's a business thing but like you're just relationship building. I love that.

And I really, truly also believe in building relationships. You don't go into a room because you want to make a deal. You go in there to have fun and to make friends and to give and to want to help them. Right. And then along the process there are so many contacts and we have been in touch for two, three years and nothing has come out from there. No deal have come out. And then now I also, you know, again with being coached and you know, I now find I really look to see how can I help these people, you know, maybe the 30 minute call or you know, something else I can do. Make a, help them connect to somebody else and who knows, you know, all good you give comes back.

Yeah, I think that's a fantastic point. We have a candidate education platform where we help candidates with either transitioning into biotech or getting that next job. And we did a little ask a recruiter event yesterday that was all about networking. And so I have two follow on questions for that. I am not an extrovert. I'm actually quite introverted. The definition of that for people who maybe don't know is exactly what you said. You get energy from going into those rooms. I come out really drained. It's not that I don't enjoy myself, but it's a bit of an energy suck for me. But just psych myself out to go into those rooms. It is hard for me still. And so I remember when I finished my PhD and I started this consulting firm, I knew I had to network. So my secret weapon was I joined women in bio and I Volunteered to be a chair of one of the committees because that gave me almost a platform where I, I had to network but I had a reason, I had an agenda.

Right.

We were planning events and we were doing all these things. So I had to reach out. So I see that you're involved with Women in Bio too. It's a fantastic organization. Do you find that your networking is easier because of that and having that bit of a platform? And I'm the chair over here, so I have to talk to these people.

Yeah, no. Platforms are very, very helpful and I love women in bio. You know, I'm the so called chair for the executive Women in Bio and I completely agree with you. I'm also part of Boost by biobreak where again we come in with a common purpose, common theme and networking is easy, much, much easy there. And you know, similarly when we go into, you know, receptions or whatever, Genentech let's say is bringing together, you know, all their partners, everyone together, it easier because you have a common life sciences talk. So certainly the platforms make it so much easier for networking. The big thing is to put yourself out there to become members of these organizations. Right.

And there are just, they're fantastic. You do have to sort of live in a hub where for some of these, there are some online ones, but women in Bio particularly, there's a lot of in person events and they're sort of in those science hubs, but fantastic group. And so my second follow on was about, you're coming at this from a place of service, not from a place of what can this person do for me, but how can I be the facilitator? And we talked about that a bit yesterday too. So can you outline, you know, you said making connections for people, having calls with people, what are the sort of ways that you offer up your service during those networking so that you can make those connections genuine?

People know my trajectory and where I have gone. So I will have a lot of young women who are like, wow, I like the career transitions you have made. Can I talk to you for like 30 minutes? Like more mentoring type of a thing. So career mentoring, whatever. I have done that. On the business side, people will usually say, all right, can you make a connection? I'm trying to reach so and so person in this company. And so, you know, that's a connection that I would do. On the strictly BD side people will also say, you know, I'm trying to do this deal and you know, how do you navigate terms for this deal and without revealing anything confidential, I can still have a good conversation with them. So multiple different areas in which you know, you really can. I'm aligning with a lot of people now in for women who are looking for board role and say okay, how do you navigate that? And I have gotten from people who are way more experienced and veterans and you know, and as I go through and understand this process, I am happy to share the same on that topic for women who are just joining their journey. So multiple ways that you can totally give something, you just have to talk for 10 minutes and you can figure out all right, this is what's in common and then open up a little bit more and you will know what they need and then you know, you focus on that. And certainly I'm, I'll always put myself out there and say okay, this is what I am looking for or I'm not able to get access to so and so company or how did you do that? So it's a little research to see all right, where they have gone, how they have gone. LinkedIn is a beautiful resource and then take it from there. The follow ons are good, you know, take time for a coffee, happy hour, whatever we need to do. We are all busy but hopefully more in person is coming up. If not, zoom is always good.

I love a good in person meeting. I think I'm somewhere in between the two of you. I find a good event is like just rejuvenating enough. I can't do them all the time, but I do love getting out there to network a little bit. So I see so many people who have been or they are active on boards and if someone wants to join a board, how do they go about that? What is the process for getting on some of these boards?

It depends. Public company boards versus private company boards. I can speak more for private company boards but a lot of it really comes from your network, right. What skill sets you have, what are they looking for, what's the synergy that is always important. And after that they're looking for people within their network to see what value they can bring. So it's always your experience and what you have to offer and how it is applicable to what they need. And you know, as early stage companies move through their journey, even in the first three, four years, you know, their needs change dramatically. So at some point in time maybe you're looking for connections for get VC funding, then you're looking for connections to get some partnerships done. You need connections or you need ability to go back and forth. You need a sounding board to talk about your technology and what products you want to put. Like, you know, your roadmap, your technology roadmap. So depends on what the company needs. And then they will put a skills matrix and say, okay, these are the skills that I am looking for. And then they look for board members and some use consultants and recruiters. But many a time from what I have heard, it's usually through your network. And again, your network can be, you know, your first level, second level, you know, you know everybody within like three levels or four levels.

Anyway, with that, how have the needs of boards changed today versus just a few years ago? I know we've gone through a lot, lot of changes globally and also with funding now. What are you seeing?

Boards certainly have changed. You know, certainly with the diversity. There is a lot of recognition for diversity and this is gender, age, ethnic groups, race, all of those. So definitely diversity wise. I mean public company boards have even mandated that they meet so many, you know, women representatives and other diversity classes included. For private company boards, certainly there's enough research and enough studies out there to show that if you have a diverse board, it's a more productive and efficient board. I see a huge increase also in independent board members. So you obviously have your company executives, your founders, co founders who hold board seats, your investors who will hold board seats. And both of them have vested interests for what they want to do. And so there is a big role for independent board members to really bring in a complete outside perspective and then the value of the board and you know, how they can really bring and the whole board governance from what I see and hear has been formalized a lot more. Right. Boards used to run for meeting sake once every quarter or whatever. Now they are more diligent. The expectations from board members is more the way board meetings are run are different and very methodical and very efficient to get the maximum value out of it. So I believe because of diversity, because of independent board members and just the way board meetings are held, boards are a lot more efficient for companies.

Kind of switching back into talking about.

Sort of the more day to day aspects of your job. I'm curious about how you market a bioscience company. When you are pitching to investors, do you have any tips or tricks that you could share with everyone about some key things people should know about when they are ready to get to the point of selling or getting investors interested in their product?

Yes, it's all about the science, right? So it is. What's the technology? You may not have a product. Right. You're too early to have a product, but what's the science? And it's all about the product and the market fit. So what is your product, your hammer and what are you going to solve? Right? And so the product market fit and showing that is super, super important for the investors at the very earliest stages at the feed round. This is my technology, here is the competition, here is how I'm better differentiated compared to the competition. And this is what I'm going to do. This is a problem in the world that I'm going to solve, right? And I'm making a diagnostic that will, you know, detect something earlier or detect something in a different stage. Or I have a research technology that will enable all these big pharma companies to discover this or you know, sooner or faster or something like that. So you need to have your value prop, right, Very, very clear. And the value prop will ride on your technology, it will ride on your differentiation and what problem you're going to solve. So I think those are the critical. And then after that, of course, how much money you're going to raise, how are you going to use that money, how long it's going to take you, really a very good execution plan. And what point will you reach before you need more funding? What will you deliver? What milestones will you hit from a science perspective? You know, from taking product testing, whatever your milestones before you made the next round of funding, Investors do not want, I mean they want to see very crystal clear these things. They do not want to see markets where you say, oh, this is, this market size is like a trillion people. They want grounded and well thought of, backed up by research, backed up by studies, backed up by data, so key slides. But what your science can do, how you're going to make it a product, what you're going to solve, how much money you need and what you're going to do with the money.

So deep, deep clarity.

Deep clarity, yeah. And you want to go multiple, multiple iterations. Your first one is never going to be the best one. I have known business plans and industrial decks which have started with a one idea and completely moved over upon discussing with a few investors because they were trying to solve a wrong problem. You know, your science hasn't changed, but what you were trying to, you know, direct it towards was not the best one. And upon feedback, consistent feedback, like, you know, what we were picking was not really right. We got to do this and then it's immediately makes sense and you know, and so I would suggest going to a few investors that you do not your Very first slide decks to go to investors. You don't expect to make deals. I wouldn't want to go to the ones that you are expecting because that may be a lost cause there.

Well, that's really good advice though, to anyone listening to this. Like, don't be disheartened that your first ones are kind of not great. But also maybe don't pitch them to like your dream team.

Don't pitch it to. Yeah, I wouldn't say don't pitch it to your dream team and certainly don't be, you know, disappointed because you'll be kissing a lot of frogs.

We've interviewed quite a few people who look at decks from, you know, VC folks to consultants that work on the strategy side. And the universal complaint is that slide decks are pretty much always terrible when they start out. And it's so important because that's really the thing that has to tell your story. Yeah, you might get the luxury of standing up and telling your story alongside your deck, but a lot of the time it needs to stand alone.

It needs to stand on its own. And I would also say, and I know that's what co founders that I work with at Alphabayo and also previous companies have is surround yourself with mentors, surround yourself with advisors. You know, scientific advisors, business advisors, legal advisors, any type of advisors that you can surround yourself because that will. It's such a steep learning curve and it is so worth it. Right, because you will continue, you learn a lot. And so I think advisors, I mean, I live and die by mentors and always my entire career I have, I'm gonna have two, three, up to six mentors at a given time. Always surround yourself with advisors.

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.

When you talk about you're gonna have to kiss some frogs and expect that the first ones aren't gonna be great. I think the really important thing here is that you've had a really successful career and you have done some absolutely incredible things. But everyone does have some failures, right? I mean, it happens to the absolute best of us.

So do you have any thoughts or.

Advice for people who are facing failure right now?

Yes, I think. Unless again, yeah, there are epic failures maybe, but most of the failures will teach you, right? You come out of it. I mean, I have had places or roles that I wasn't super excited about and I hated it during the time. But when I came out of it, I felt I would go back and do that again to learn what I learned and to better understand for myself what I like and what I don't like. Right. So I don't think anything is really failure failure. But you make the best judgment at the time that you are in. But every failure teaches you so much more on how to know, how to navigate. So you just have to go through it. That's what I tell my kids. You just have to go through it, come out on the other side and you will be so much wiser.

That's good advice.

Yeah, you either win or you learn.

That's right. A lot of hard knocks always.

It's so true. So when you're thinking about collaborations and business partnerships and mentors and things like that, where are you thinking about getting those and what stage are you thinking about getting those mentors and collaborators in your startup journey? So if you have a really, really new startup, when's the right time to bring in that expertise?

So you are starting from day one that you incorporated a company or even before, Right. So you are, you have a technology coming out of academia, you are already looking at collaborators and partners. Now you haven't had a dedicated business development person at that time, but you as the co founder and I can say that for our co founder and CEO who had the BD hat and he continues to have the beady hat together with me at this time. But you are thinking collaborations and mentors even before you are thinking of incorporating a company. Then you need to decide how much is collaborations and DD part of your company strategy. Are you going 100% partnerships or are you doing internal development and part partnerships or are you not gonna do partnerships and really focus on select therapeutics or products you wanna build internally? And I'm talking more about a platform company then majority of the people will come in prior to a series A or right after a Seed round. Sometime between seed round and a series A, that's when a dedicated BD person can come. But BD efforts are starting way before you even started a company. Because BD collaborations will do a couple of things. One, they will de risk your platform, right? So they're doing one work. It's an outside party. They will validate your platform, right? They will give you the awareness you need. You can publish together, you can do press release. So they do so much that you could be drinking your own kool aid for 10 years. Right? So that's what collaboration brings. And of course they bring in revenue, which is always good. So Beatty starts very early.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I don't think a lot of founders coming out of academia really are thinking in that way. So it's really good to hear that articulated in that way because people think of business development as like a really late stage thing a lot of the time. But it's so true. You talked about alliance managers earlier on, and that is a career path that a lot of scientists don't really know about. But that sort of gets you exposure to that partnership aspect. More academics actually really should think about what are the partnership aspects that are ed in nature.

That is so true. Because they really think if I do cool science they will come. But that's not true. You know, you can do cool science, but you do have to talk about your science. You have to build those networks and those relationships before they will come. You have to wear the two hats. You have to keep doing your science, as we say, you have to build your plane, you have to fly your plane, you have to sell your plane. Got to do them all at the same time.

Well, let's pull that thread though, for anyone who's listening, who might be like, wow, that actually sounds really cool. Like I'm a scientist and I think business development sounds neat, but like, how.

Do I get there?

What would be the best steps for someone to maybe start exploring or to take if that is a potential career path that they want to go down?

I love scientists going into bd and more and more so in life sciences, you would see most of the people in BD come from a science background. So I have a PhD, I have an MBA. I think I consider my PhD more valuable than the MBA because I interact with scientists on both the sides in here as I develop the value proposition on the other side as I understand the needs of my partners. So for all scientists, it is to take your science and socialize that with potential collaborators. And this may be academic collaborators, these may be VCs, these may be pharma companies, they may be other biotech companies. There are so many ways to make a deal, but it all starts with you talking about your science and your ideas with the partner and then understanding what they need. Many a time, the science we do comes from ideas or needs that the former partner want. You know, you call it the voice of the customer. So it is super, super important for the scientists not only to do the science and communicate what they're looking to do with the outside world, but also to have those discussions to really understand what is it that the companies need, the collaborators need, and then see, oh, can I change something here to address that need? Right? And if I do that, can I make a partnership or a collaboration or a deal with this particular company? You have to go both ways. Super important.

And as you're thinking about building your team internally, whether it's in BD or your adjacent verticals, are you looking for those scientists that are kind of up and coming? How are you thinking about building that team?

Yes, I do like scientists. It's easier. They spend so many years, they know the science, it's easy for them, even if it's not the same field that they did their work in for them to quickly pick up technology and science. But mostly I'm also looking for do they have the drive, do they have the, you know, fire on the belly? Currently I have alliance management that reports to me. I also have communications, scientific and marketing communications reporting to me. And both these teams are very driven in science and are really passionate about what they do.

Is a healthy bio, are you fully remote or hybrid or are you all in one location?

We are all the above. So we are based in Seattle and we have a large team that comes to work five days a week, you know, because they're involved in lab work. And we have a portion of our company that does hybrid work. So many of them would come in at least three days a week. And usually Wednesdays are our day where pretty much the whole company comes together. We have lots of internal meetings, everything, happy hours. And all of that happen on Wednesdays because majority of the team will be there on Wednesday. And then we have few, a very small fraction of employees who are remote. And they will come in at least twice a year, if not more. I love that we have two on site events, one in January and one in July when we get entire company together for a whole week and we celebrate, we strategize, we develop objectives, and those are our Two on site weeks.

Oh, that's awesome. That sounds like a really cool culture.

Yes, yes. Oh, I love our culture here.

We like to talk about communication on this show a little bit as well. And so you said your communication team reports into you, so that's kind of perfect. But with the teams that are hybrid, on site, remote, all of those things. Do you have any communication strategies that have worked particularly well for internal communications?

Yeah. And again, we are very proud of the culture we are building at AALPHA and how we want to continue to maintain this culture. We have weekly all hands meetings, so, you know, our CEO will drive it. And we go over our values. We give kudos to people when they want to give a shout out to somebody for living up some of the values. We have announcements for birthdays, we have any business updates that we want to do once a month. We have objectives, how we are progressing across our company and department objectives. We call this OKR meetings. So we have the weekly meetings, we have the monthly business meetings. We also do social events to get everybody together, you know, and communicate happy hours once a month. But internal communications slack is a great tool. We use that and we have so many channels and, you know, as we grow so quickly. Right. You know, we were like, I was employee number 15 or something like that two years ago and we are 50 people. So we have grown quickly. So the communication is very key and it's very intentional. Right. You have to think about communicating.

That's fantastic. So for investors, like, I know we talked about being super clear and everything, but I guess one of the things is like, could you take us through kind of like what that sometimes looks like from start to finish, like you do your initial pitch and then you know, what happens from there. I think people, you know, we talk about a lot. I don't think we provide a ton of clarity into like what really goes on behind the scenes when you're structuring a deal.

Yeah. So for a VC for funding, you know, different from like a partnership deal, which are, which are different agreements. But you first need to know your plan, how much money you need. And this is down to putting your entire budget together. Let's say you gonna take 24 months to go from point A to point B. Right. And you want money in point A and you'll get to point B. You really need to know, and this is called use of funds. And you really need to put a very detailed plan to know how much money you need and how you're gonna spend it and where you're gonna get. And so that is like your background Excel that drives the dollar value that you are looking to raise. And so you need to have that. And then you put it down in deliverables and say, okay, I need so much money to get to these three milestones. And so you do your science, you talk about the market, you talk about how great you are from a market differentiation and all that piece. You talk where your competitors are and how you're good. Then when it comes to money, you have done your homework to know, to keep your lights on to everything. You know, your research budget, to how many people you're going to hire and what they're going to cost, what levels. It's a very, very detailed way by which you have estimated how much money you need. Obviously you're going to put some buffer to that because things change. And then you get your number to say, I need so much money for me to get from point A to point B. And what I'm going to deliver to you if you fund me with this is I'm going to be at this stage, I'll have an alpha version or I'll have a beta version, or I will sign two partnerships where they will have validated, you know, my technology or I will have finished this animal studies, right, to take this candidate so much further. So depending on whichever area, be it diagnostics, research technologies or therapeutics, there are very clear milestones that you need to move to know what you're going to do. And all investors know because they are sitting in either one of these portals, right? They're either in funding platform and research technologies or they're into diagnostics, or they're after therapeutics or they are about services or whatever it may be. They know exactly what this pipeline of events looks like and you have to be as good there and speak their language. So if you say I need $5 million and I'm going to X, Y and Z, they're like, yep, makes sense.

It's really interesting. I think a lot of people graduate from their PhD and they have a great idea and they want to found a company. But what does that roadmap look like? And without experts to help you understand all of those different costs, what we see often is that there are some incubators that are attached to schools often like MIT has a pretty well known one and they'll give a bolus of funding but not a lot of parameters around that. And so we've got first time founders sometimes that are a bit adrift and they think I have all this money, it's like, well that's not very much money. We have to actually really plan out what is your next step and you need to have that in place. So I think experts, you know, like you and folks that can really understand how do we craft this message, how do you get that budget, all of those things. That's so essential at the early stage.

It is so essential. And I'm proud of several universities who have commercial arms with amazing business advisors. I know UW does, right. Who can help you with that. They have programs and there's creative destruction labs. Who has multiple sites. I mean I sit there as a business advisor. There are resources. You have to go out and you know, seek many of these business advisors and take your Excel and then say does it making sense? Is it making sense before you go to even your first investor?

Yeah, it's such a path. It is really interesting. And the number of hats you have to learn to wear as a biotech founder, it's staggering.

It is amazing. Yeah, it is staggering. It's an amazing, amazing growth curve. I have a lot of respect and a little bit of envy that I was never that co founder. I sit right behind the co founders always and I enjoy my role, I love my role. But I have so much respect for co founders coming out of academia with their PhD thesis and Pharmaca company.

Well, I'm curious if you had to talk about a couple of contributions that you are the most proud of and things that you think have just been the coolest things you've done in your career.

Could you highlight a couple of those for us?

Yeah, a lot of it was, you know, I'm more excited about my work in early stage companies than at the Pfizers or the Big Life Technologies. One of my very earlier companies was bd. Huge company but there was part of portfolio management where we went into a whole new area and wanted to launch like 250 research reagents. And so I'm very excited. This was many, many years ago, but discovered the literature. We made a deal to get access to those antibodies. They were very novel. We did the R and D we needed to do, put it into manufacturing production. That was all my project management role. And within six to nine months we had 250 novel antibodies we put on the market for research. This was for research used to enable pharma and all that. So that was one of my very earliest projects. I still speak very fondly about at Precision Nanosystems where I was, I am very proud of being able to get about $40 million in funding from the government of Canada. And this was part of the as part of the COVID pandemic, Canada was looking for more, you know, in country establishment and to nurture technology. So we did two separate deals with the government of Canada. One to build a manufacturing facility, the other one was to move a particular technology and product forward. So I was very excited to be able to secure that funding. And at Alpha Barrio I'm very excited to have been able to do three big partnerships in this market environment with Big Pharma, bms, Amgen and Gilead.

Yeah, this is a tough market. I would definitely be proud of that too. Well, we have a few closing questions so we always like to kind of bring the career question full circle. You've done some awesome things and so what's left for you to accomplish? What are you really excited about maybe doing at some point?

I love business development, I really do. I like working with co founders, enabling technology, roadmap strategy and building company value. Love this. I don't think I'll ever go back to big pharma ever to work and going forward I think I'm looking forward more to give and the the field. As an advisor. Right. As a mentor I'm certainly interested in board service. Right. For again early stage companies. So I think next journey while I continue my work, I'm really looking for some board roles and I can see myself there where I can really enable and impact so many more companies than just in the company that I'm employed.

Well, everyone who listens to the show knows that this question is coming because we ask it to every person. It's my favorite question, what is your favorite book or a book that you think everyone should read?

My favorite book I'm in sell two books. One that I would like everybody to read and the other one is my personal favorite which is also a good book to read. The book I read this last year and it is Let my people go surfing and this is the book by Vaughn Schwingard. I think he's the founder of Patagonia. I love the book, loved the book and just his career trajectory and just the way oh a reluctant business person as they call him and he just went on to make the dick est a sustainable company from something he needed for himself as he wanted to go mountain climbing and so phenomenal book. Really, really loved how he passionate about adventure and what he wanted to do and then he needed the tools which nobody had so he started a company to do it. Then he expanded for all the adventurous stuff that he liked to do and then go beyond and then made it a massively profitable company and then donated it all to foundation and said this is all for the good of Earth. I am so impressed. I love that book and I've been following him since. So that's one book, the book that I really do recommend for everyone, which is also one of my personal favorites. It's called the Present. It's an old book, it's an easy read. I cannot even remember the name of the author, but you can look it up. It's just called the Present. So phenomenal book of how you want to think yourself about the past, the present, the future. So it's an easy read, like a 30 minute read. But it's a book I keep going back to every time I'm feeling no or anytime I want a little motivation. I know the whole book but I still enjoy the, you know, going through the book and just how beautifully it's written. It's a beautiful book.

Oh, those are awesome suggestions. I haven't heard of either one of those and I'm definitely going to check both of them out.

Thank you.

Where can people reach out to you if they want to learn more or if they're looking for a mentor or to chat or anything?

I'm always on LinkedIn. It's my newspaper in the morning. I live in San Diego, you know, the company is in Seattle, so I'm in all the networking thing, but easiest way is just hit me up on LinkedIn and I would love to connect. Awesome.

Well, thank you so much. This was so much fun.

I learned a lot. Yeah, I did just well.

No, this is great. Thank you, Karina. And thank you, Alison.

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