How To Raise $125M Pre-Revenue and Why Harder Can Be Easier | Celine Halioua (Loyal)

if we're successful, I think we're going to have a multi-billion dollar dog longevity drug company, and everyone's going to be like, that's great, continue doing dog drugs, right? We, we have it unlocked, we know what the ROI profile is, like, we have the team. And I'm going to be like, that's cool, we're going to take this, you know, $100 million that we could go and build 5 dog drugs with and use it to make like the first half step of a human longevity drug that like most likely won't work instead, AKA we're basically just gonna set that money on fire. They'd be like, what the fuck are you doing? Right? Yeah. Like, no, no, go, go do more dog drugs. And so, you know, managing, like making sure I had, I have control of the organization was always very important to me in every aspect of our, of our fundraisers. And I, I, I have died on that hill a couple of times.

Welcome back to The Eric Ries Show. I have an absolutely fascinating conversation for you, one that I'm pretty sure will challenge how you think about startups, scientific breakthroughs, and what it really takes to build something audacious. My guest is Celine Halioua, the founder and CEO of Loyal, a company working to extend the healthy lifespan of dogs and eventually you and me. Loyal has raised an impressive $150 million to pursue this vision despite generating no revenue so far. This is deep tech at its core, a startup that required investors to take the ultimate leap of faith assumptions, what we call a two-miracle startup. Celine Halioua shares some incredible stories in this episode. She opens up about the brutal challenges of fundraising when investors couldn't wrap their heads around dog longevity as a serious biotech opportunity. She also describes the moment she realized her work could one day extend human lifespan, but only if she could first prove it. And that's why she started with dogs. And perhaps most importantly for founders, she explains why in the startup world, harder is often easier. How an ambitious, seemingly impossible vision can actually make recruiting, fundraising, and even navigating regulations easier than a seemingly safer and more incremental idea. If you've ever been around truly audacious, truly world-changing startups, you'll know this to be true. Harder is easier. If you've ever had the experience of having people literally laugh in your face when pitching your idea, this conversation's for you. And if you want to understand the people who are pushing forward the boundaries of human understanding, lifespan, and achievement, stick around. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Celine Halioua.

Hey, well, Celine, thank you for coming on. And I have a dog, and so I have a particular interest in what you guys are building. You know, I lost a dog to cancer myself. I've been through that experience. Yeah, it's a heartbreaking thing to experience.

Yeah.

And I remember thinking to myself, like, why is nobody working on this? For all the incredible advances in medicine, you know, ultimately, I don't know, I guess what I want to say is, when I first heard about this company, and we met, like, I think during the pandemic, when you were helping out with Curative, like working on COVID relief, like, I remember talking about this, like, really a long time ago. And it just, this company always struck me as like, so logical. Like, of course you would do this. And yet I've heard you say on multiple occasions, like, it's been an incredibly hard thing to raise money for. It's like people don't get it. And like, for me, I've always wondered about that disconnect. I always wanted to ask you if it's such— if so obvious, how come people don't get it? So like, why, why has this been such a hard thing to work on?

You know, it's, it's, it's funny. For some people, it's the most obvious thing in the world. For some people, you know, early in Loyal, when I would say the phrase dog longevity, people would literally laugh in my face. And I was like, oh, that's rude. But also I was kind of laughing at myself, so I got it, right? I think fundamentally the reason why it's so difficult is because there's a lot of things you had to understand about the world to understand why this was a good idea, right? You had to, at least in the early days, you needed to love dogs. You need to understand the love between a dog and their human. You need to understand the pet market. You need to understand the FDA. And you need to understand longevity. Right. And the, the high-level science of it and what it, why there aren't longevity drugs today. And it has actually nothing to do with the validity of the science and everything to do with logistical challenges for developing a lifespan exception drug for humans. Logistical challenges that don't exist when you bring us to dogs. And so what I always found is like, even if somebody who's a dog lover, they get stuck on the FDA, or if they were a human biotech investor, they get stuck on the dog market, right? Like people always got stuck on something. And even for myself, it was difficult to learn all the different facets of the company. It's a kind of continuous learning process for me because you just don't get trained in all these different disciplines from day one.

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The reason I wanted to have you on and have this conversation is, is when I was first trying to raise money for LTSE, I remember someone took me aside and said, listen, and most startups like you know, you need a miracle for them to work. And you're trying to raise money for a two-miracle company. Because not only do you have to show that you can get the regulations, you need to get regulatory approval for this, you also then after that, that's just after the years and years, all that money, then you have to show that there's commercial viability to it. And so two miracles have to pass. And I remember hearing this concept, I was like, oh, this is going to be a two-miracle company or more, because you have to show that this is viable in dogs, but ultimately your vision is to have an impact on human longevity. So I want to talk about like—

Sorry, was that Josh Kopelman who said that?

You know, it wasn't, but it is the kind of thing he would have said.

I'm pretty sure he said that to me verbatim.

Yeah, it turns out it's like among a certain very elite class of VCs, it's a concept that they talk about.

Yeah.

Like how many miracles do you have to believe in? And I used to think it— I never— I thought it was clear whether it was a compliment or an insult. I think it's a compliment. Because on the one hand, Yeah, it's very, very difficult to do this. But on the other hand, risk is correlated with reward. So if you can do something miraculous, like, that's pretty cool. So I wanted to talk about— I feel like compared to something like LTSC that's in finance and is kind of esoteric, here, although the science is complicated and the regulatory pathway is complicated, the product is actually exceptionally easy for people to understand. If you've ever met somebody who's obsessed with their pets, you shouldn't have a hard time figuring it out. So I wanted to kind of hear what the experience has been like from your perspective. Now, 5 years into a 2-miracle company, you know, what's been the hardest part of it? Start with that.

Jesus, what's been the hardest part? Well, it depends. Depends on which miracle we're on. I would say maybe— actually, I don't know how many miracles we have, but I would say the earliest on was So we had a hypothesis that, so backing up a little bit, dog drugs are regulated by the FDA. The quality that you have to hit, the regulatory bar is actually very similar to human drugs. So people often are like, "Oh, this is a hack 'cause you're not regulated." And we're like, "No, like we're still very regulated." And in fact, that was actually a feature, not a bug because one of the things I really wanted to prove is that, you know, people have been claiming for thousands of years that like, this supplement or this berry or this whatever will extend your lifespan. And I wanted to prove that, you know, this idea that sounds fantastical isn't. It's actually extremely boring, right? We say dog longevity, but really what it is is a preventative medicine for unhealthy aging, right? To reduce the risk and severity of age-related diseases. But instead of it being one disease, it's multiple age-related diseases. That's all it is. It's actually super, super dull in many ways. And so it was important to me for it to be very regulated. But you can't do it in humans today because if I gave you a longevity drug, I'd have to follow you for decades to figure out if your lifespan was extended or not. And I have to follow thousands of other humans to be able to calculate the lifespan extension that it does or doesn't have. And there's a million reasons why it doesn't make sense. But you know, maybe one that we, you'll especially empathize to is just like capital return periods. Right? If you're running a 30-year study, where's the ROI? Where's the patent? The patent expires while you're running the study. It's just like logistically almost infeasible if you're going through traditional biopharma. And so the idea was that, okay, a dog, it's still regulated, they're very biologically similar to humans, but they age much faster and they have a much shorter lifespan. And we started with big dogs, which have an even shorter lifespan, right? Great Dane lives like 7 or 8 years. And so if you could show that a big dog is aging at a slower rate and living a longer life, you can do that in about 5 years, right? 4 or 5 years in a period of time that's, you know, still long but much more feasible as an organization to fund, to underwrite, and to turn into a company, which unless you're independently wealthy, there has to be a path to a company if you're going to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to do science like this. And so I would say there's been a lot of hard parts. Maybe some of my favorite hard parts, one was figuring out, you know, okay, we think it's logistically possible, but how do you actually design a regulatory pathway, right? And come up with one that hits the needs of the agency and is scientifically legitimate and is operationally feasible. That was years of work. It's, the milestone we were just talking about was a huge kind of, green light for the path that we have worked on for years and the science we've done for years. Building a team was super hard. I'm a— I was a 24-year-old solo founder, you know. I worked for, you know, a one-person VC shop before, but it was basically my first job, you know. I had to build all these different skill sets. I had to hire executives who had children who were older than me, right? Like, that was all hard. Fundraising was hard, especially because halfway through the company, Zerp, imploded and suddenly everybody got risk-averse and nobody who just lost money on a crypto scheme wants to be like, oh yeah, here's our next investment, dog longevity. Um, and then it just also the rapid learning, right? So I came from a gene therapy lab at Oxford and, you know, it's kind of when you're scientifically trained, this thing, or really trained in anything, you, you'll have this tendency to be like hammer and nail. I have this tool and this tool is magically the best possible solution and it has nothing to do with the fact that I have a lot of context for this tool. And so when I started Loyal, and actually when I raised a seed round, I pitched that we were gonna develop a one-time gene therapy that reduced the levels of growth hormone IGF-1 production in these big dogs that extended lifespan. This idea being that these super high levels of these growth hormones is what causing these dogs to grow big in puberty, but also age faster and die sooner. And if you turn it down, that would extend their lifespan. And again, this was just me when I did this. Um, And then once we had the money, I started hiring a scientific team. And I think team member number 2 or number 3, like really early in, they pretty immediately were like, well, yeah, you know, that makes sense. But like, do we have to do gene therapy? And I was like, well, no, not really. Like all I really care about is getting a drug approved for lifespan extension. And I really think it should be big dog short lifespan for these reasons. But I wasn't attached. I was very clear. I wasn't emotionally attached to the other stuff. And they're like, oh yeah, well, here's this much better way to do it, which became LOY-1, became our first drug, our first drug to get this RxC approval. I never would have thought that in a million years. I didn't have the context. I didn't have the training. I wasn't— I'm scientifically trained, but I wouldn't consider myself a trained scientist, right? I'm not a career scientist. And so these people took the vision, took the general idea, iterated on it, and made it so much better. And so I think within 6 months we switched to this much better way. And it also made much more sense from a safety perspective, a COGS perspective, a price for the dog owner perspective, a development, like it was just better all around. And by the way, the team also did that for our second drug. So now our thesis is, you know, we started with big dog, short lifespan. That was really like, was gonna be the entirety of the company. Now actually what we really focus on is metabolic decline with age. Of which happens in an accelerated manner in big dogs, but happens at every dog's chronological age. You know jack shit about metabolic fitness besides the high-level caloric restriction studies that everybody in longevity field knows. That was another scientist we hired who was like, I really think we should have, you know, uh, a force in this race. And thank God they did because that program that he convinced me to invest in became Loy2, and that's a program that just got RxC a couple weeks ago, and that's the program that's on track to be on market first. And so I've really found that like strategic, like listening is really important. And I say strategic listening because if you just listen to what everybody says, you'll just like not work on the crazy thing because they'll say here's all the 10 reasons it doesn't work, right? You have to ask questions, you have to interrogate, but also knowing when other people are right and listening and learning and asking their questions and understanding their assumptions and why do they feel a strong way around this or that. Is how you build, in my opinion, a good company. And it's, it's led to so many— there's a million examples of this I could give you through the last 5 years of Loyal that came from asking really deep questions to experts who had spent decades in their fields to find that intersection point that neither of you would have found on your own. Now I'm thinking about commercialization and consumer marketing and like I was just in a meeting about e-commerce distribution. I'm just like, oh my God, like these are just like all these ever parts of my brain that I've like never touched before. So it's thrilling, but like I would say it's all pretty, uh, it's, it's like the world's longest ultra marathon.

Yeah, I was just counseling a founder the other day where I was like, if you can't learn to love the burn of it, it's not, it's not fun actually, because, you know, it's like a video game where you defeat the final boss of some level and then in the next level, like The boss is just a Goomba in that new level. Now you're, you just, you, your reward for successfully accomplishing one of these miracles is you get to go work on an even harder, more painful, more difficult problem.

Yeah.

That kind of never, never gets easier. And I feel bad telling people that because it's like, well, then you're like, well, what should I really become an entrepreneur? But that's, I mean, that's so the reality of, of what this work is like.

You have to love the mission and the vision of the future you're creating. More than you dislike pain, right? Like, I don't think I'd be willing to do this for a B2B— actually, I know for a fact I would not be willing to do this for like a B2B SaaS or whatever company, right? Because I just, I just don't care. I don't even know if I'd be willing to do this for another biotech company, but I'm like so like emotionally, physically, everything just like want this to exist in the world, and I'm willing to I'm willing to be like, oh, I suck at this, I better learn. And that gets— each level gets harder. But also I find it gets harder to grow personally at each level because at each level you're better, right? So it's easier to be like, I'm good enough, or it's actually too painful to realize I've been messing up X thing and it's caused these issues that I've been dealing with for years previously, right? It's so each time the growth necessary in addition to the problem are both harder. And you gotta want the vision more than you're like, than more than you're scared of that hurt.

Do you feel like that's true for your team too? Like you think because it's such an audacious mission, you're able to recruit, you know, exceptionally talented people that you couldn't bring with you on the journey to just do some, you know, relatively small-scale startup?

I would say recruiting at Loyal has always been relatively easy. Hiring the right person is not always easy, but getting people to be interested in Loyal has always been very easy. Because people wanna work on things that matter and people wanna work on things where, you know, their grandkid cares or their grandma cares, right?

Yeah.

And you know, dog longevity is one thing that almost everybody can get behind, even cat people, they can still get behind it. And so yeah, it's actually a huge hack.

One of my principles that is the most counterintuitive thing I think I've learned in all my startup journeys is that actually harder is easier. That if you're— if you trade in the convenience of, you know, doing something relatively straightforward for the audacity of something, you know, practically impossible. Yes, there's obviously difficulties with that, but you have all these really counterintuitive benefits. People are much more likely to want to come on the journey with you. Um, fundraising is totally different for this kind of, um, uh, product than, than it is for others. And the level of like mission alignment of investors is super different. I've seen customers, you relate to them in a totally different way. So I wonder if that concept, if you relate with that? Does that kind of consonant with your experience? And just talk about what have— we've talked about the pain of it, but what have been some of the advantages of trying to do something so, so something that everyone knows to be impossible, but if it could work, would in fact be miraculous? No, no exaggeration.

I think I've always felt that while Loyal is undoubtedly very difficult, we've always had huge tailwinds. Behind us. I've really felt like the world is rooting for us. And I think we've gotten through situations and been able to do things that maybe other companies wouldn't have been able to do because of that. Hiring is obviously one. Also things like fundraising, right? Like it's harder to tell the story, but when people want this to exist, they want it to exist. Um, you know, I mentioned the market crash earlier. Most companies died or took massive down rounds, just all this kind of structure in their deals or whatever. Um, you know, I couldn't raise from VCs for about, I think it was like a year and a half or so, but I was able to raise from individual family offices and individual high net worths, um, because people wanted us to exist. And yeah, they were like also hoping to make money, But, you know, every startup was hitting up these people's doors when this happened, and they were interested in Loyal because they were looking at their dog while they were reading the email from me. Right. And it's always hard to kind of pinpoint specifically where Loyal greased the wheels or the idea of Loyal. But I feel very, very much that it has. Also another maybe more tactical example is we get really good press. We get a lot of earned media, which really helps us spread the, the word and the vision of what we're doing. And I think it's because people are interested, right? Like I was on, you know, Jon Stewart a year ago. They literally DM'd me like, yeah, like that's ridiculous, right? Like normally you'd pay a PR firm tens of thousands of dollars. So like maybe architect that moment.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

And they reach out to us because they're interested in it, right? And so obviously these things can always have a double-edged sword, but I would just say there's lots of little things like that that I think added up over the last 5 years. And I wouldn't be surprised if it's helped us on the scientific side, if it's helped us on the regulatory side, right? I'll never know for sure, but I think people will work harder, you know, put more effort in if they— even if they're not a part of the company, they want this thing that they're in some way playing a role in to be successful. They'll, you know, put in that extra hour or double-check that data column or whatever it is. And we have felt that across the board.

I want to— I want to dig into that actually, because I call it mission transmission, that when you have— you're really aligned around some, some purpose, you know, in your organization, then it kind of leaks out to the other things that you touch. So, you know, yes, of course, your own employees are hyper-motivated. But, you know, it affects potential employees who are seeing that this is something they might want to do. It affects the people who you partner with. And I just like, I wonder if you could give examples of that, like how outside the company, like people getting excited about this mission. You know, I know you can't know for sure, but you just, when you talk about this company, I, what strikes me so much is not so much what you say, but how different it is from how other people talk about their startup. Like the things that other people find extremely difficult. You find easy, because Jon Stewart doesn't DM them. They couldn't, they couldn't— like, there was no pop culture tie-in for what they're doing. Nobody cares. And here you have something that like, because it's so audacious, it's a hook that people can latch on to and get excited about. I'm just curious, like, on the science side, on the regulatory side, I can definitely relate to that. You know, regulators have to do an incredibly hard job and are under so many cross-competing pressures. Like, when there's something that they care about that connects to them at a human level, like, yeah, I do think it opens up new possibilities. That a more boring thing might not.

Yeah, I agree. And I think also doing it in a way that's— I think one of the theses I had early on in Loyal is the aging field's really antagonistic as a whole. They're very like, man, we have all these longevity drugs. If only it wasn't for evil pharma, evil FDA, evil this, evil that, right? They're all blaming. Everyone around themselves. And this doesn't speak for the entire field, of course, but there's a very strong vocal contingency. And they also tend to make these like very outlandish claims, right? Things like the first person to live to 1,000 has already been born, right? Or, you know, it's very fantastical again in a, in a negative way. And so, you know, one thing I think Loyal did well is we have a big vision, right? We wanna get a drug FDA approved for lifespan extension in dogs. But then everything else we do is very sane. We're not trying to overpromise and underdeliver. We, you know, almost regulate ourselves as, you know, before we ever send anything to the actual agency, right? We never try to like pull one over them or like get past something or like shady science or whatever, right? We, if anything, we, I remember we hired a well-known regulatory consultant on the animal health side and I was like, are filing CDB 99th percentile. They need to be better than what Zoetis, an $80 billion pharma company, sends them. We need to have all the data. We need to, you know, not be like, oh, we want an exemption for this data 'cause we didn't feel like running it or whatever. Like it had to be, everything had to be excellent from day one 'cause the trust was important and the education was important and the empathy of, you know, in our case, safety is a huge thing, right? Nobody wants to give their dog a drug that is for a relatively healthy dog to be healthy longer that kills them the next day, right? And Lord knows the regulators don't wanna approve that. Lord knows I don't want that, right? But I think there's actually often, you know, sometimes these like weird business incentives that get mixed into it where people like hide data or not like interrogate things as well. And so we're like, no, we are gonna have like a package that's multiples better than what is required. Buy us legally.

Mm-hmm.

Um, will we do that till the end of time? Maybe not. But we really thought when we were trying to do something new, we wanted to take away as much of the risk as possible for ourselves, for dog owners, for regulators, for everyone we're working with, for vets. Um, and I think that's something that, again, I'll never know for sure, but it was very intentional and I, I do think it has, uh, at least contributed to our success to date.

Oh, I think it's unquestionable that that is true. A lot of our business culture has a real focus on like basically teaching people to do whatever they can get away with.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

So, 'cause like, 'cause we're so like, especially in certain fields, and obviously you mentioned longevity, but there's other fields where we have kind of entrepreneurs and innovators and investors and scientists like on the edge of something. And so yeah, we are really frustrated about regulation, really frustrated about that. People get angry about it and they think therefore it's already so burdensome. The way to respond to that is to do the minimum, to see what you can get away with, to do it, you know, to be as exploitative as you can, as tricky, as tricky as you can. And as a result, sometimes, I mean, sometimes it quote unquote works, and that you can actually, you know, you find a loophole, you can break the law and get away with it. But I kind of feel like that it misses the bigger picture, which is not what can we get away with, but what ought we to want to do in order to be trustworthy? You know, here you're asking people to take their loved one and give them a, you know, ingest a drug that you developed. I would think trust would be the top asset that you need to stockpile even ahead of any of the other assets that you focus on. I'm just curious, like, you've had that ethos from the beginning to kind of go above and beyond to do more than is required. Like, where does that come from? How do you sustain? I'm sure you've, I'm sure you've encountered situations where someone's like, look, why don't you just like, you're being a little intense. So why don't I just back off a bit? Like, why don't we just do it the easy way? Like, why does everything always have to be at this, at this in this more difficult way, like how do you sustain your commitment to really wanting to do it right? And how do you help your team understand the value of trust as an asset when so many people have been conditioned to see it differently?

It's funny because I think, I think the, I think you're totally right that it's something that's been conditioned in like business, American business culture. It's not as actually much of a thing in the scientific culture, like basic science culture. And so the team's actually super aligned because we don't really have pharma business people at Loyal, right? It's really been mission-aligned scientists, some of which who do business roles, right? But it's our scientists who are writing the regulatory filings. It's our scientists who are coming up with the strategy. Like, one of the other things we did is really early on, I actually pulled myself out of the science quite a bit. So I mean, I came up with the initial thesis, hypothesis, vision, whatever, like the architecture, um, was mine, but all the details are the team's and have been the team's since very early. And I've always made it clear to them, like, what are we emotionally attached to, what are we not? And we've always been emotionally attached to getting a drug FDA approved for lifespan extension. And so then I'm like, okay, what do you think is going to maximize our probability of achieving that goal? And yeah, like You know, we don't want it to happen in 15 years if we could have it in 5, right? I do push the team hard on timelines, but they also know that if there's a good reason, we can always delay timelines, and we have delayed timelines quite a bit, right? It just has to be for a reason and understood, not just because there's a 3-week buffer because we didn't ask the CRO about why there's an extra 3 weeks in the, you know, in the Excel sheet somewhere, right?

Oh yeah, I know that well.

Oh my God. Like, I feel like half my life. Was just like, can you break down this timeline to first principles? And then you find out, like, it's past 100%.

Tell me how you do it, because I think that I was shocked how often people would pitch me a timeline that has, like, tons of buffer time baked into it, or that just is just super slow because that's what people expect it to be slow versus, like, we need to go as fast as we can go. And I thought it was really interesting. People have so much PTSD. I mean, look, though, people, you hire people who are experts who are in, come from other companies and they've had such bad experiences. They've been so mistreated in so many places, especially by quote unquote business people. Like I remember having these conversations and look, yeah, from first principles, how long should this take? And they would hear, I'm telling them to go, sometimes I'm like, we need to go faster because we have finite resources and it really matters. And they would hear me saying, oh, I guess you got to cut corners. Speed means be slow. Oh, you're saying safety's not important anymore? Oh, you're saying, and it was like really interesting to me. It's like, well, can we review the transcript of the actual conversation? Let's go take a look. We didn't say that. Why did, why did you jump to that conclusion? Then often it would be like, well, my previous job, they didn't really care about safety. They were always trying to find loopholes and stuff like that. So, and actually for me, I don't know if you relate to this, but for me it was like a skill that I had to build. Like, how do you decide when to delay and when to stick to your guns? Like, how do you determine what is an appropriate timeline when, like, we're talking about multi-year timelines, you know, and it's very easy to say, look, look, this is going to take years. What is a one-week delay? Matter. Let's just take the delay. Let's just take the delay. But like, if you, if you could always delay at will for one week, like, you're never gonna get anywhere. So how have you figured out how to navigate that kind of like timelines and delays and figuring out like, what is a legitimate reason to delay versus what's an excuse?

Oh geez, that's such a good question. Um, I think there's a couple of things. So one, I think another thing that people do, at least in a scientific company side, is they kind of silo off their scientists and their manufacturing people and their chemistry people and their business people and blah, blah, blah. And we don't do that. It's very much lead with context. Everybody knows our timelines. We literally send them all our major milestones, our progress on them, what happened, the high level of why sent to the entire company every week, right? Everybody knows those dates. If we push, we explicitly call it out and we say we're adding one week because X, Y, and Z. Right? The team understands why the timeline matters, right? And why, you know, like, we literally today, we're talking about the team. We basically figured out a way for us to hopefully get efficacy approval for one of our other drugs here in development who doesn't have it yet, about 6 to 9 months faster. And that doesn't actually impact our go-to-market timeline because the go-to-market timeline is gatekept by something else. And so, there was a discussion in the team of like, why does this matter? And it's like, well, it's a lot of things, right? Like one is like just things go wrong that you don't predict. You end up having extra cycles, right? And so, it kind of gives yourself, it gives future you buffer, right? If you can control the knowns, then you're insulated against the unknown unknowns. And when you're doing something new, there's a ton of unknown unknowns. And so that's one reason, right? We're like, well, we'll— you kind of have this company history of like, oh, we— this time when we had an extra 6-month cycle of back and forth because we didn't anticipate X, Y, and Z, these are the reasons why, right? Or if we push this timeline, you know, it moves this milestone and it impacts the commercialization team, or it slows, you know, the fundraising timeline or whatever it is. And The team doesn't know like the exact like intricacies of how much money we have in the bank and burn or whatever, but they do understand that we are a pre-revenue company. I call us ephemeral, right? Like we're not like, we're default dead or maybe default acquired is how I would put it. We have created objective value at this point. And they understand that we have to get to these things within some reasonable time point. But the subtlety is so hard there, right? I've had to, I mean I've had to fire people because they'll be like you can't communicate a timeline delay to Slate and I'm like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no if there is a delay I need to know because otherwise I am misrepresenting our timelines to our investors to other people— Oh yeah oh it's really damaging your credibility super fucking damaging but like they'll take the pushing on the timeline at in the wrong light or if they've been in a company culture that had more toxic they're like "Oh because she can't say this she really means that" we're like no, no, no, no I really mean tell me it And I want it to be the ambitious timeline and I want to assume things go right. And then we have subcases if things go wrong, we map those out too. But it's never not possible. It's maybe optimistic, right? But it's certainly possible, in fact, even probable if we do our jobs well. And I think that subtlety is hard and you just have to be really careful with your leadership because one or two voices in the room can turn a healthy company culture around assessing first principles, pushing for speed, pushing to question assumptions quickly into an unhealthy culture where people are scared to talk about delays, scared to admit mistakes, not honest about timelines. And it's, it's difficult.

I went through an experience once where, you know, I would always tell my team the purpose of doing everything that we're doing. Is to learn whether or not customers actually want this thing. Which when we were years away from having customers, really, people thought that was kind of a ridiculous thing to say. Because it's like, well, not that the thing that we're doing right now seems like it's pretty closely tied to like this regulatory pathway or building this piece of technology. But like, this is one of the big insights from Lean Startup going all the way back. And it's kind of easier to see, I think, in like a consumer tech company or something like when you're in these, these long timeline, very difficult, harder is easier type companies, all of a sudden, it gets confusing. Well, what does progress actually look like? And hopefully, you'll never go through anything like this. But we went through this situation where we were like negotiating this, you know, critical partnership that we're going to need to, you know, qualify under the certain regulatory pathway. And we spent, I think it was like 6 months just to negotiate the contract to get permission to file the application, you know, where it's like many, many, many steps. And And to make a really long story short, I was constantly pushing the team. We gotta, you know, we gotta go faster, even if we have to give on commercial terms, even if we have to like not get everything we want. Our goal has to be to learn this important thing in any way. People thought I was totally nuts. We went through that whole process. We did the filing, we got approved, and then long story short, we get ambushed and the whole thing blows up and the partner withdraws. And it was like a whole, it was a whole giant mess.

Who ambushed you?

What's that?

Who ambushed you?

What do you mean by ambushed? Our enemies. Like you work on certain kinds of reform, you have actual enemies and they're really good at their job. So they, you know, like, you can't be mad that the ambush, you know, worked. It's like, they're good at their job. They did what they were supposed to do. And they were, they were like very, very focused on us not, not existing. Anyway, we survived it. But what was really interesting to me, and the reason I bring it up is, once we went through that process, the whole thing fell apart, all that work we had done on the contract and the technology and everything we had done fell apart. And I, some people came to me afterwards and said, oh, now I understand what you're talking about. None of that stuff mattered. This is what mattered. I guess it was really depressing, and I thought it was going to be a company-ending thing, and we did survive it. But when we did survive, we realized this is what we were trying to learn the whole time. We didn't even know. This is something we didn't even know we didn't know, that this is something that could happen. We had to flush it out. And so actually, the compromises that we made to go faster proved to be essential to eventually figuring out how to do this in a more robust way and to ultimately get the approval. And that was— it was interesting to watch people really go through that transformation themselves. That it started out as a very technical question of like, what is the timeline? Or how do you get this thing approved? And it became this much more philosophical thing about like, what is the purpose of the work that we do? And what does it mean to put learning at the center of the def— literally the very definition of progress in the startup? And those same people on the next filing were even more ruthless than I was because they're like, well, I don't want to go through that again, right? That's never happened to me again. So then the next new team members would join and be like, hey, we should add— you should add 4 weeks to get this extra contract clause in there. And they'd be like, over my dead body, we are not going through that again. Yeah, we need to know the truth as soon as possible.

Isn't it the best feeling ever? This happened recently at Loyal too, where now the team interrogates things harder than I would. Yeah, at least on the scientific side. And I actually don't even feel a need. I'll double-check. I'll ask some, you know, trust but verify type questions. But like, vast majority of the time, they've already nailed it down. So cool.

It's an incredible feeling. Yeah, it is. It's a kind of personal growth. And I'm glad that you kind of started with this question of like seeing the growth trajectory of the company as, as you talked about, as like as part of your personal growth to be able to accomplish something you couldn't have accomplished before. And as you get better and better, like, on average, the leaps have to be larger in order to, you know, to, to keep up, which I think is, is really cool. So I think— can we go back to the beginning? Because I think, like, there must have been an aha moment for this. And if I remember right, you know, you were, you were doing like a philosophy PhD or something, like something quite different than what you're doing now, on a very different It's called a Doctor of Philosophy at Oxford because everything has to be special.

Not a PhD. It's a DPhil.

I'm sorry. My terrible mistake.

I know. I know.

At Oxford. But like—

At Oxford.

OK. Everybody wants to go to Oxford, I assume.

Don't recommend.

Everybody who's on that as their life path, I think, would say like, you're already achieving the pinnacle of something exceptional. And like, if I remember, you were doing it not— it wasn't even in a scientific field. Discipline? Why wasn't it philosophy or something like that?

It was, uh, Health Econ.

Health Econ. Yeah. So like, somewhat, kind of, I could see that you could kind of see the tangential relationship here, but like, that's not a typical place to be like thinking about healthspan and ultimately like building a new kind of pharmaceutical company. Like, just help us understand, like, how did you get from there to here? Like, yeah, why did you start this company? And why did you want your life to go in this different direction?

Well, I can't say it was planned.

Certainly not.

It's that kind of thing where you look back and you're like, oh, this all makes sense, right? But it was certainly, I'm very thankful I actually was not exposed really at all to Silicon Valley until, you know, by Silicon Valley standards, later in my career, because I don't think I would've done all the things that I did if I had known about this world. So, the super high level is, I got— the first step was loving animals, which I grew up with like 15 cats and 4 dogs and vegetarian my entire life. And both my parents are vegetarian. And I just like the biggest— we used to like rescue wild animals, like whole thing, right? I've always— it's always been like a very defining characteristic of mine. Wanted to be a vet, then I was like, wait, being a vet is actually a really hard career. You're often putting down animals, having to deal with diseases you can't do anything about. So I was like, okay, I'm not gonna do that. So that was the first little puzzle piece. Second puzzle piece was the interest in the biology of aging. And that actually came— so I did my undergrad in neuroscience, and I did my undergrad in neuroscience because I became very interested in how do you treat neurodegenerative disorders. So think diseases like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's. And these diseases are really intellectually interesting because they're largely untreatable currently, one. Two, they're considered diseases of age and they are diseases that become severe with age, but you often are actually developing the precursors of them for decades. There's a lot of interesting papers showing that you start kind of developing the beginnings of Parkinson's when you're 40 or younger even sometimes, we don't 100% know. And so I had been working in a lab that was working on trying to basically replace the lost neurons in these patients who had this because at that point the brain's atrophied and that's what the symptoms is caused by. And I remember sitting in this lab thinking like, this is such a hard problem, right? We have this patient who's old, who's super frail, who has lost some significant portion of their brain. We're now trying to, at that point, stem cells, right? Trying to inject neuronal stem cells into their brain so that hopefully we can replace some portion, but then you have to make sure they don't die in surgery. That the stem cells, you know, survived, that they, you know, synapse to the other neurons into, in that person's brain, did they turn into the right type of neuron and all of these things, right? It was like the, like, you know, the Swiss cheese thing, right? Like all these little things had to go exactly right to maybe, maybe, maybe benefit this patient a bit. And I was like, why are we waiting until, you know, this is the intervention? Why can't we prevent this from recurring to this patient? Right, or reduce the risk that this happened to them, or slow the rate of disease. And so that was how I got interested in aging, right? It was never about immortality. It was never about radically long lifespan. I've actually never really been interested in that at all. It was about prevention. It was about having a more effective way to treat some of these terrible diseases, right, and not waiting until they've maimed the patient to try to do something about it. Um, and then also through that work, realized I didn't want to be in the lab. Cause I was working in a mouse lab and if, you know, you've ever worked in a mouse lab, you have to do a lot of mouse experiments. Vegetarian, don't really like doing mouse experiments. I was like, I can't do that. So that's why I did Health Econ and the Health Econ link was the economic incentivization of preventative medicine because that's one of the challenges was doing longevity in the human side is it's fundamentally preventative medicine and preventative medicine in the US is not, it just a gross simplification, but it's not actually that economically incentivized. And that was why I went to the UK because of the NHS and their single-payer system. They care about your health today, but they also care about your health 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 50 years from now, right? So there's actually a much more economic alignment between— for the idea of a preventative medicine for aging. Long story short, Oxford is great, beautiful, lots of smart people, also the most hierarchical place I've ever been to on my planet. And I was like, I can't do this. And so I left. Came to Silicon Valley, and I would say the aha moment for Loyal was kind of bringing together all these pieces. It was, one, I've always been a big dog person, and if you've been a big dog person, you know that big dogs live much shorter lives. So a Great Dane will live, you know, 7 or 8 years, a Chihuahua will live 17 or 18 years. So I was very aware of that problem. And then it was finding a paper that was talking about the genetics of dog size and the genes that control dog size are coincidentally very well understood longevity genes. They were in fact the lab that discovered that these are longevity genes was the lab that my mentor Laura Deming worked in when she came to Silicon Valley. And so she told me about the science, I found the paper, and it kind of was just like, oh wow, like big dogs don't naturally die earlier than smaller dogs, we've given them an accelerated aging disease, right? We've accidentally, in this quest to make a dog large, given them a disease genetically that causes them to age at a much faster rate and then die sooner. And so I just thought that was interesting. I just thought it was kind of like funny. I'm like, oh, I know how to make dogs live longer. Like, that's hilarious. And was sitting at a camping trip with a bunch of like founders who I didn't really know.

Long story.

This also actually was the start of all the curative stuff, which we probably don't want to go into, but it's funny how all these things interweave. And I was joking about this and there was an investor there who talked to an investor who talked to another investor at YC Demo Day and was like, this crazy chick's trying to make dogs live longer and convinced me that this was not only like scientifically interesting, but this was actually like a really good business. And he had invested in Ro, the direct-to-consumer drug company. So he had this whole vision that you could do cash pay drugs and that build a consumer brand or pharmaceutical product. So long story short, it was like, oh, I think this makes sense and I really love animals and this is a great hack, big air quotes because it's not a hack, it's fucking hard, but a hack to get a drug approved for lifespan extension and I didn't think anybody else would do it. And he gave me the term sheet and I sat on it for 2 weeks. Probably thought I was negotiating it, but I wasn't. I was just like deciding if I wanted to start the company. And then I was like, shit, I guess I'm doing it. And that was it. That was 5 years ago and I haven't stopped since.

That's an incredibly Silicon Valley story.

I know.

I know. I mean, and it's, it's really wonderful because honestly, like people look, like Silicon Valley's taken a lot of hits and we got some huge problems. So I'm not, I'm not, I don't mean to be Pollyanna about it at all. The criticism is well deserved. And especially lately we've had some pretty significant problems. But that really is like very few places in the world could you be surrounded by people who are like successful in the local ecosystem, pitching them such a ludicrous idea.

Yeah.

And have that, like, have them be encouraging you to take a swing at it versus like, why do you wanna do that again? And what about your career? And are you sure it's a good idea? Totally. How, how much time had elapsed between when you came to Silicon Valley for the first time and when you were at that camping trip?

Well, so it's a little complicated because I didn't actually like drop out of Oxford for a while. I actually flew back and forth because I didn't wanna drop out. You know, I'm, I'm a child of immigrants, right? I didn't wanna like, they were all so proud their daughter went to Oxford.

Oh, sure. Yeah. That's a real, that's a real thing.

So I would say like from the point of, I would say like employment in Silicon Valley, which was when I was doing this, probably like a year and a half, maybe two.

Yeah. That's, that's just incredible.

Yeah.

Yeah. It, it's, it's, It's really one of the, like, one of the things that, that is so important in any startup ecosystem. It's not really unique to Silicon Valley, but if you study startup hubs and Regional Advantage, for those that know that awesome book, I will link to it in the show notes. Like, this has been studied and is one of the most incredible things, which is that in most hierarchical economic setups, you have to pay your dues to be taken seriously. And so there's this like natural gatekeeping and hierarchy, and all that stuff is antithetical to this kind of progress. Because it's the new people with the outsider perspective. It's the new idea. It's the, you know, it's the boldness to try something different. And, you know, we've actually— there's parts of Silicon Valley that have ossified. I've been joking on this show quite, quite a bit about all these contrarians, you know, who are all doing the exact same thing.

And I'm like, well, wait, should we invest in a defense company? So we built drones.

It's very, it's very contrary. And it's funny how drones have come back around because I, you know, we have these hype cycles that we go through in Silicon Valley, and You know, I used to be like, yeah, it was like drones, and then there was Bitcoin, and there was this, and there was that. And that's like— and they come back around. So yeah, now we're back, now we're back to drones. And what's funny about it is, for people who are like excited to chase the latest thing, by the time it becomes the hottest thing on the planet, it's kind of too late.

It's too late, right?

Yeah, you needed to have— you needed to have done it while nobody thought it was a good idea. So that's why I'm always like, God save me from all these contrarians who are all making the exact same bet. Like the people who make money at it, the people who really like have like real impact, who are not just going to sell their company to a bigger company, get a payday and move on, who are really in it for mission reasons, are the ones who like have constancy of purpose over a long period of time. And you know, you've been at this for 5 years now, on the basis of, you know, a camping trip and someone saying, hey, you should do this. Like, I want to interrogate that a little bit. Because first of all, it's like a great harder is easier story, right? Like most people beg and plead for money, you know, raising their seed round is incredibly difficult. And I can't find anyone to take it seriously. And here you are, like, the company is birthed from a term sheet that you, you had to start with. And that's several— I know several founders that have had that experience. And I was just talking to one the other day who was like, when people come to me for fundraising advice, I can't help them. I don't know, the first person I ever talked to the idea about gave me a term sheet. You know, that's not really good advice. Very specific to that situation. But like, that is really like the power of a transformational mission. It solves all these unsolvable problems that people spend all their time complaining to me about. But I want to like, take me back to that scene because that is a very unusual situation. You know, you're a relatively young person, not by Silicon Valley standards, but by, you know, normal—

I know, I'm geriatric by Silicon Valley standards.

Yeah, yeah, you know, well, don't say that. What about the rest of us?

Good Lord.

Yeah, like we had, you know, this, we certainly are an ecosystem that has a lot of reverence for people who are young and is willing to overlook that. But even still, at 24, that's like, it's a lot of faith for someone to put into someone that they just met.

Like, just nuts.

Yeah, yeah.

Just like, what's wrong with you guys?

What was it? What was it like? And did you— would you have that feeling? Some people, they come to Silicon Valley, have a hard time acclimating because they're always like, what's the catch? You know, what is this? Is this real? Like, how did you— you know, you hadn't been here that long. You hadn't been around that many startups. Setups. Um, yeah, it was just— what was it like?

Once I kind of have conviction, assuming I don't learn new data, I'm like, let's go, let's do it, right? And I'll kind of like obsessively go and do something. And the difference with the other things that I was obsessively running down is that I eventually learned something, or I was like, oh, this isn't the thing I want to be obsessed about. Like, being a doctor was like my goal for a long time. Like, how are you going to help people? You're I'm gonna be a doctor, right? And then, you know, learned a lot about the realities of being a doctor and realized I didn't want to do that. Same thing with academia. And I think with Loyal, I wasn't even convinced by Loyal for a while, or the ideas that became Loyal for a while. I was convinced in the science, but not really anything else. But it just became really— like, Loyal there was some tweet going around saying like deals die in the diligence room. And I agree that's mostly true, but I do think Loyal is the type of company where if you dig into the details, it becomes more compelling, not less, right? There's all this like little, almost like magic, I would say, that like make this company make sense. And so I think once I had conviction that we were right, and I think I remember Fighting is too strong a word, but like, I was talking to some investor about how I was like, we're right. Like, I know we're right. Like, this is right. And like, we might fail for other reasons, but I know we are right. I remember saying that, you know, back in like early 2020 when we had no data, no nothing, no team. Like, I always knew it was right. I always knew our thesis was correct. I didn't know if we would execute on it. There was a chance we picked the wrong drug. Like, there's all these things, right? But I've always known we were right and there's nothing—

Where did that conviction come from? Like, how could you be sure? It's such an unknown thing. How did you know?

Because you can extend a dog's lifespan with a drug. There is undoubtedly some drug out there that will extend a dog's lifespan. Because we know people have done it with caloric restriction. Caloric restriction is the OG way to extend lifespan in animals, and they did 2-year lifespan extension. In Labradors, right? So, okay, you know the biology translates, you know there's plenty of drugs out there, you're sure at least one is gonna extend lifespan or probably many more. There's no reason to believe that dogs are that different from mice and rats where we've proven so many times with so many different interventions that you can extend quality of life and years of life. I knew that people wanted it and I knew that, it was theoretically possible to do this through the regulatory framework, right? Like, even— there's a bunch of different regulatory pathways that I can go into. It's interesting. But even if we just said we're just going to run a lifespan study, totally feasible. And so it's biologically possible and people want it and it's possible from a regulatory standpoint. Therefore, it was inevitable, in my opinion. But you had to kind of like— you had it. There was somebody, Michael Nielsen, like had this like really interesting take where it's like new low-hanging fruit becomes available once you've kicked past the low-hanging fruit to go to like the hard-hanging fruit, right? I think loyal is that way. Like if you had context for veterinary medicine and longevity and biotech fundraising dynamics and consumer, it's actually an extremely low-hanging fruit, but it's just that a lot of people didn't have that context and that was why it wasn't picked before.

I think there are a lot, a really staggering number of startup ideas that are in this category where actually if you understand what the science is and you understand what is possible, it's actually quite obvious that, like, once you have the idea, once you see that it's obvious, like, you kind of like, why, how come no one has done this before? That was definitely my reaction first time I heard about this idea. I was like, yeah, why, why haven't we done that? And you've laid it out, I think, really beautifully, and I want to kind of just slow it down for people because there are all these facts that are just, that are known. Like, we know that, like, lifespan is possible because we know from these caloric restriction studies that it can be done. And, and so lots of people I know have heard that fact, accept it as true, but haven't really, really thought through the implications of it. You know, you have to actually slow it down to be like, there must be some mechanism that controls overall aging in biological creatures such as us. But then when people think about that, they think, oh, but how would we— it must be so difficult to figure what that out is humans. But we already have, you know, there's a lot of, a lot of therapies, uh, you know, for— in medicines are tested on dogs before they're tested on humans. Like, there's this, you know, and everybody knows that dogs and humans co-evolved in the same environment over thousands of years. So like, it's, it's actually quite logical, but it requires you to interrogate these things that everybody knows and break it down into first principles. And, you know, you were— maybe, maybe we could hear your story and say, well, maybe you were in the right place at the right time. But I think it's more likely to understand it as like you've, you've been studying these topics for a long time. You've had this kind of inner drive to want to do something in this area, even if you didn't know what it was.

Yeah, I agree with that.

How would you advise other people? Like, if you have other people come to you and be like, I want to do something like Loyal, like, how would I come up with an idea? Like, do you— oh, what's your advice to people who like, who want to do this kind of thing, even if it's not this specific thing?

It's so difficult because it's It's— you have to go deep on something. I think that's fundamentally the biggest thing. And I think it's one of the fundamental flaws of Silicon Valley is it doesn't encourage people going deep. There's a lot of like shallow thinkers in the Valley who have like a baseline context and talk very declaratively about all these things. Right. And that's very much the antithesis of the scientific— I feel sorry, I just triggered you. I can tell.

So yeah. It's okay, it's okay. It is, it is a fact of Silicon Valley. Absolutely.

It's such a fact. And like, I, in some ways I'm like, yeah, like you go, like you go and have conviction and confidence because you kind of have to have stupid confidence to like go and honestly be willing to invest in a dog longevity company. Um, but I don't think it's, it's a recipe for having an earned insight. I think your recipe for having an earned insight is going really, really, really deep. In something, hopefully something that you have a deep passion for. And for— I didn't intend to like figure all these things out because I went really deep on Parkinson's and I went really deep on stem cell therapy and then I got frustrated and I started looking into early predictive biomarkers and diagnostics for Parkinson's. And then I found some papers on aging biology and the The aging thesis of age-related diseases and on and on and on, right? And it's like, it like kind of linked its way up that led to me, you know, studying, you know, eventually reaching out to Laura and going to work for her and then kind of getting more understanding of the biotech and Silicon Valley side a little bit more. And oh my God, all of a sudden there's this world where people are willing to write checks for amounts of money that I never have even like comprehended. Before, right? Because all these pieces had to come together for it to make sense. Like, I did not come up with this idea that, you know, dogs are good models of human aging. Like, there was like the Dog Aging Project at U Washington and all these things. But I think it was the intersection of— it's an objectively really fucking good business, which means we can get venture money, which means we can do science that you couldn't do really in any other model, again, unless you're independently wealthy. Right? And so you kind of have to have all these little pieces. And I at least didn't know anything about venture capital basically until I worked for Laura. Um, and most scientists don't know anything about venture capital until they, you know, I don't know, get screwed over by VC or something for some IP.

That is true. That is very common.

Yeah. So I, I think that's my biggest advice, is just go deep. But unfortunately, it's not very satisfying because if you do that, it's not very definitively pushing you towards running your company.

Yeah, I think, I think my experience is that there are some people who like want to run a company and therefore like, what kind of company should I make? But the best founders tend to be people who want to accomplish something. And then it turns out that a company is the best way to embody that mission, which is not always the case. There are lots of other ways to accomplish it in this world. But there are, there's a set of problems for which like a venture-backed company is a very, very good fit. And there's other things for which it isn't. And so if you presuppose that it's going to be a venture-backed company, then you've already kind of put yourself at risk that maybe the thing you care the most about, uh, isn't, isn't a good fit. And now you've kind of forced yourself onto the wrong path, and then it gets really hard and painful.

Like, it gets— you pay for it on the other side. You always pay for it.

Yeah, because either, either you pick a company that is not actually really what's deep, most deeply in your heart, like your heart's most deep longing to make a change in the world— that it's much better to pick that, have that be the thing that you're working on versus something else. That's quite painful. I've seen a lot of people go through that. Or you do pick the thing that is your heart's most longing, but then it's not a good fit for a venture-backed company. And now you're like trying to shoehorn it into the wrong structure, which is a big mess. And then leaving aside the issue that the default way we structure and build companies is not really very good for mission-driven companies. Have you looked at that? Have you, have you kind of put mission protective provisions into your company? Like, have you thought about becoming a public benefit corp or like Do you worry sometimes about investors having, um, you know, diverging interests from yours in terms of like the long-term ambition of what you're trying to do?

Well, I once got screamed at by a VC who will not be named for caring too much about control of the company, myself controlling the company. And that is exactly why I care so much about it, because I think our risk is if we're successful, I think we're gonna have a multi-billion dollar dog longevity drug company and everyone's gonna be like, that's great, continue doing dog drugs, right? We, we have it unlocked. We know what the ROI profile is. Like we have the team and I'm gonna be like, that's cool. We're gonna take this, you know, $100 million that we could go and build 5 dog drugs with and use it to make like the first half step of a human longevity drug that like most likely won't work. Instead, aka we're basically just gonna set that money on fire. And I think any rational, think not as much early stage, but like later stage investors, public market investors, like they'd be like, what the fuck are you doing? Right? Yeah. Like, no, no, go, go do more dog drugs. And so, you know, managing, like making sure I had, I have control of the organization was always very important to me in every aspect of our, of our fundraisers. And I, I, I have died on that hill a couple of times.

Oh my God, it's so, it's so important. Um, are you willing to talk about some of the mechanisms that you've used to ensure that, that that is the case?

Mhm. Yeah. Um, well, one of the most obvious is board control. Um, and I don't think it has to be, I think people when they think, oh, the founder has board control, it means it's not governance. And I don't think that's actually true. I've actually had board meetings since the first days of Loyal, like the first quarter ever of Loyal, we had a board meeting and I utilize my board a lot. We have a big board. I think it's like 8 or 9 people. Not all are voters, but like we have a lot of people in the room and I invite other investors and people sometimes too. And, you know, we use them as accountability and I'm very, very transparent about our timelines, who we're doing, right? So like the governance is there, but we don't actually like go and really vote on things, right? Like it's, more of a, we come, we have a discussion, I get feedback, they like rake me over the coals over a few things. I go back, I marinate, I'm like, oh, hey, you're right, or you're wrong, or you're right in this way, wrong in that way. And then we decide what's best for our organization, and then we have the feedback loop. And I think that's been really powerful because I've made it, I hope, and I think I feel accurate in saying like the board trusts me to like always represent things and like immediately say if something goes wrong, right? Like within like an hour, there's been a text or a call to everyone there. But I also, you know, control the board. And so that means like, I'm not going to allow like the installation of someone who's just going to go and like sell us the first time we get an offer to, from like, you know, Zoetis or whatever to buy us. So that's one mechanism. Next mechanism is more of a longer term thing, is the super voting shares. Are important. So basically, you know, this is, I think, like what like Zuck has and like all these other like founders who were founded like companies when they IPO'd have, where basically the my shares will have a higher voting. So the way we structured it at Loyal is my shares and then the previous, all the previous investors have super voting as they sell their shares. Once we, if and when we go public, those shares convert to non-super voting shares. And then over time I have more and more voting control. So that means that if we're voting on an issue, even though I, I don't own more than 50% of Loyal anymore, obviously, um, I will still have more than 50% of the votes, or most likely would have more than 50%. Or even if I didn't personally, we're gonna have the more mission-aligned, long-term-minded, uh, investors who are able to vote with me and to talk to me like the super short-term-minded, like, what's my like stock picking bonus gonna be at the end of year one, right?

Like, I call it tourists. The tourists versus the citizens of the Republic.

Yeah. Yeah. So that was another really important one. There's other like smaller things too. But I think maybe I'd say the meta thing is just like the culture, right? Like it's like I will always listen to feedback. I might not always like act on it, but I'll always listen to it. I'll always interrogate it. I'll always get multiple points of view. I always ask for feedback after every little board meeting instance, et cetera. And so I think you can balance that, like, control without— like, the examples I think people think of are much more— they can't believe— didn't care what anybody else thought. And I care a lot, but I care towards getting us towards this mission, which is building the aging pharma, right? And that's what we align everything towards.

Yeah, that feeling of alignment that everyone really is in it for this long-term outcome, I think that's underrated. As a source of trustworthiness because your customers actually can depend on the promises that you make. You're not going to be replaced by some other CEO without them having awareness of it. But also just, um, there's a really like, you know, basically the equivalent of, you know, a human being can be in flow state, so can an organization. When an organization truly has all of its pieces, including its investors, aligned to some outcome, it's, it's a superpower. It supercharges what you're what you're doing in a way that I think people who've never experienced that can't really understand.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

And so when people talk about what is good governance, I think it's crazy that in some places it's what you're doing is considered bad governance. When to me, I would say this is the height of good governance. What we're trying to do is create a high coherence, high integrity organization to achieve a purpose that if you do achieve it, is gonna make investors a tremendous amount of money. So what's the problem?

Yeah. And I think you just have to be you have to not, like, you just have to be high, hold yourself to a high, we just self-regulate, right? To bring it back to the earlier points, right? And never try to like pull things around. Like my negotiation style is very much like, this is what I need, here's why, here's what I would like, here's why, what do you need? And let's like figure out what works together. Yeah, maybe I like don't maximize our valuation or maximize this or maximize that, but it doesn't fucking, like, I don't care. Candidly, right. And I think it's actually gotten us to like much better outcomes. But that was— it's a very— I think, I think a lot of these norms are like very like, mass, like trad masculine coded, and I just have a different style. But you also do like, to be clear, it's like a company, like you do have to be aggressive in maintaining it. Like I, I have you know, ripped people off our cap table. Like, it's rare, right? But like, I have done things like that if I thought it was like extremely harmful to the company to not do so. Um, and so you have to have both sides. Like, people know that like if you try to fuck with Loyal, like, I'll fuck back. And they know that like I'm like not gonna pull that cord unless I really, really need to.

Yeah.

Um, and so it's, yeah, it's just the balance.

I appreciate you bringing up the gender coding of what, like, what, what kinds of leadership are valued and appreciated. Obviously, Silicon Valley, we have a huge history of issues around this. And you've been really open in your writing, and just have like talked about what it's been like to be dealing with these kinds of gender issues, you know, throughout Silicon Valley. Like, I see, it's interesting that you're talking about, as you say, like, control and kind of making yourself like the emperor for life and the absolute ruler of your domain. Like, there are certain and very masculine characters in Silicon Valley who it seems like that's really gone to their head and their ego is kind of— they've basically lost control of their own behavior and they're unstoppable because they put themselves in this kind of emperor, emperor role. You've been able to like take advantage of some of those structures, but without the apparent descent into madness. That we, we have seen other people do it. So far, seems like it. The signs to me are that you take accountability very seriously, you're very transparent in your dealings, you're focused on trustworthiness, and you think governance is important rather than a joke. That those seem like the attributes, um, you know, that, that some of these guys are, are frankly missing. So just, but like, will you, will you talk a little bit about what it's like to, to be trying to do things that are sometimes female-coded, sometimes male-coded, like the way different investors, they have different expectations, or just, you know, how, what, what has it been like to navigate this from a position where, you know, frankly, a lot of female founders have, have had real, real difficulty.

So one of my meta goals, I would say, of Loyal is I want to be and create a pattern, a positive pattern match for a female founder building an extremely successful company that isn't in a place that is classically considered a female founder's domain.

What do you mean by that?

Um, like femtech is a female founder's domain, and we'll have— or consumer, right? D2C is a female founder's domain. And there's obviously many counterexamples, but I wouldn't say there is a— like, all the pattern matches that people think of when they think of positive founders are men that I can think of off the top of my head. Like, I remember coming to the Valley and I was actually just like shocked when I first moved here about like the norms of how people communicate, what they look for, and what excellence looks like and all that shit. It's all just off of like the previous generation founders and like which ones were successful or not. And there's a lot of negative ones for women, right? Like, I have been implied very unsubtly that like, oh, is this like a joke? Like, are you Elizabeth Holmes? Like, are you making everything up? And da da da. And I've had to, Yeah, you know, tailor these things to ameliorate those concerns without outing the person that they're making a sexist judgment about me because I happen to be a woman building in biotech, right? Um, and so I think that's, that's an aspect of it, is like learning those pattern matches, playing to them, but also knowing when you don't have to play to them anymore. Like, I very much play in my style now Um, which is aggressive. I think I'm like, I'm very much a Silicon Valley founder in many ways, but it's also different. Like, I care a lot about my people. I care a lot about my team. I'm not trying to rip anybody off. Like, we put a lot of effort into, you know, people philosophy stuff. I negotiate in the way we talked about previously, and I'm also very willing to go to bat for Loyal. I would protect Loyal like it's my child. Um, and I, and I have done that before, and I, I, I I'm willing to be aggressive. And I think it's just, you just have to know that the expectation, if you're not the pattern match, is often perfection. And for a long time, I was pissed because I was like, I'm doing something so fucking hard. We're executing better than 99% of the like dude bro founders who I know. And yet I get like a 10th of the credit. And I think eventually you just have to decide, like, does it matter? Do you care? And play the game. And I learned how to play the game. I learned how to, you know, be the type of founder and leader I want to be. And, um, and I've executed. And so I think now people respect my style, even though it's different probably from the, the other founder types they have.

Yeah, certainly. Do you have advice for other women who are trying to follow in your footsteps?

Yeah, I mean, maybe my contrarian advice would be one, like, understand what you're working against. Um, so for me, for example, I communicated in a way that was not very, um, Silicon Valley, right? Like, Silicon Valley is all about you lead with your intelligence and you, you know, do certain things to pattern match, but you don't want to do it too much because then you're just a name dropper. Like, understand, like, what, what these games are. Um, because unfortunately, a lot of, like, traditionally feminine patterns are seen as unintelligent, which again is sexist. But like, are you gonna change that? No. And that's my second contrary advice, which is like, don't be mad about it. And I, I know, like, trust me, I'm like the queen of being mad about this shit. Like, I totally get it. But you just, you actually limit yourself and you limit— you don't change anything and you just get put into a box of like, oh, she's like the spicy female founder, like, better not touch her. If you like die on hills too early. And so I now am pretty careful about the hill I die on because I know the best thing that I can do for these kind of meta causes I care about is build a super successful company and build a pattern match of a young solo female founder building a deeply technical organization and building it in my own way and then sharing and communicating about it. So But you don't get to do that because you need, you need the people who are established and you need the people who have already done it to help you along the way. You can't do it on your own. There's just no way.

Yeah.

Um, yeah.

You said you have that as a meta goal. What are some of your other meta goals?

My other meta goals? Um, I think Silicon Valley being more active in, in deep tech, which is actually no part due to me, has become much more of a thing in the last 5 years, um, since I kind of initially set that. Um, I think biotech is still very under— Silicon Valley-style biotech, I think, is very underinvested, underappreciated. And I think there's a lot of companies like Loyal that you know, traditional East Coast biotech is never going to fund because it's dogs, because the revenue model is different, because there's not an acquisition, whatever it is, right? Like, it's just a very different founder thesis. Like, they certainly don't invest in 20-something-year-old dropouts, right? Like, that's not the model at all. Um, and there's— I think there's this gap for— it's a few different firms are now trying to jostle to become the leaders of, of Silicon Valley style biotech, right? Things that are real, very rigorous science, but also built in a more Silicon Valley way. And so I think normalizing that, you know, we are a lot of people's first biotech investment, their first experience with the FDA, their first experience with a regulated pharmaceutical product. And I really hope we're a positive one for people and show that they can make money, make markups, have a sexy deal and us not have revenue for 5 years. And again, this is becoming more normalized now because Space and a lot of the other companies work in this way too. Um, I think that's really good for the universe if that becomes the case. Yeah, I think it's a huge one.

Let me ask you about the no revenue thing, because I meant to ask you before when we were talking about two miracle companies. So one of the things that's extremely difficult in this style of company— I speak from personal experience— is you go for multiple years with no intermediate milestones being accomplished. And your investors get real antsy. Because, you know, if you make— if you invest in crypto, or you invest in some other, like, normal company, like, good stuff— I guess startups are stressful. Yes, bad stuff happens. But like, also good stuff happens, like, basically every day, the numbers are up and to the right, you make revenue, you have a partnership, you do a deal, you get good press, whatever. And here you have these— I felt like I was often like the black sheep in people's portfolio, where it's like everyone else in the portfolio is crushing it, especially, especially during the zero interest rate, you know, pre-2022.

Same environment.

Everyone's crushing it. Everyone's getting markups. And we're like, it's like, what's your update? Well, it's the same, same thing we do every night, Pinky. Like, we're trying to do this one thing and eventually we will achieve it. I remember like telling people, listen, we're really close now. And they're like, well, how close? I'm like, real close. You know, I don't know. How can I say? I don't know. Any day now, I think we might, we might hear it. Until you actually get— you achieve the milestone, there's no way to say that you're close to it. And I find that has a lot of very particular challenges, both with team morale. Because when you work on something like this, you're not getting that constant dopamine hit of positive reinforcement. So I— my experience is that basically everyone involved with the company at some point will have a freakout. Just one day they'll wake up and it'll just be like, oh my God, the existential angst of it will hit them. And they would come and come see me, you know, they'd be like, how do you know this is gonna work?

Yeah, I don't know.

Yeah, you've had that experience, right? Like, and so like, yeah, how do you curate I started to think of team morale as like a resource, a finite resource that we're trying to tend to and cultivate. Same with investor morale. And of course, like, we were very fortunate we never had to raise money during one of these progress droughts. That would have been, you know, basically fatal. But it also was why I was so focused on speed and so focused on runway and burn rate to an irrational degree, I think people on my team sometimes thought. But I could really see how, with no intermediate progress, there's no other— there's really no other way. Like, talk about what that's been like.

Yeah. Oh gosh. I mean, I think— well, I think you might have it worse than me. So— and I haven't heard of another company structure that's worse than developing a drug. So congratulations for finding it.

Thank you. I take it as a compliment.

Yeah, it's a something. It's definitely a something. It's definitely something. I think for Loyal, it was really It's a lot of education. And it's this weird combo of, you kind of have to interpret for people what are the milestones that matter. And the milestones that matter from a business company perspective, this is one of my biggest learnings, are often not the milestones that matter to you as a scientist. Like, I'll always remember, Yeah, I'll always remember when we got— we basically finished the data package for our big dog short lifespan drug, or we thought we finished the package, like we thought we had sufficient data. And I was like, "It fucking works." It works, right? And I'm like, "Hell yeah, why are we not worth a billion dollars?" Right? Like, it works. And We got like zero credit for that, very little credit for that. And I was like, what the fuck? And it turned out it was because that wasn't the milestone. The data readout wasn't the milestone. You know what the milestone was? It was getting a one-page piece of paper from the FDA almost a year and a half later saying—

I could have told you that. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I should have called you because that was a fucking milestone. And what I learned was, um, the previous one, for it to be seen as a milestone, required so much investor context, so much investor diligence, so much investor time that, candidly, we didn't get, right? Because they're like, these are not bio investors. They're like, oh God, like, they get to that level of conviction I had, they had to get some level of depth. And in getting— in trying to get to that depth, they realized how little they really knew. Right? And then they're like, I'm out, right?

Yeah, I think, I think frankly most investors don't have the self-confidence to form independent conviction on highly technical domains. Yeah, even people that they actually are smart enough to understand it, they just, they don't have the self-confidence for it. So then they can't make that part of their investment thesis.

And it, it's tough because if that's what you're underwriting, like, oh, Celine says that this data will earn the, uh, RxC, uh, approval, like they, they have to underwrite that, and so they have to dig into it. It's just too much. Then we had the paper, you know, however many years later. I was like, we've had this for ages. But, you know, they were willing to pay double, triple the value of the company because they didn't have to personally say, hey LP, I'm not a scientist, I tried to underwrite science and actually it was total crap and we were totally wrong. Yeah. And so that was a big thing to understand for myself personally. It was a big thing for the team to understand. It was a big thing also for our timelines. Like, it sounds so painful in retrospect, but we didn't even like think about these like fi— like we were all focused on the data. The filings were secondary to the data, right? So we didn't try to accelerate them 'cause we were like, that's not what we care about. What we care about, does it work, right? And are we seeing the data we wanna see? And now everything is about the filings because those are the movable milestones. And of course the science has to fit within it and we have to have rigorous science within it, but the timelines we anchor to, it's not the completion of the study date, it's the completion of the FDA filing because that's the milestone.

That's a really good segue to the fact that this is not science fiction anymore. You've actually now, I think multiple times, have gone through and gotten some kind of preliminary approval from the FDA. So just give us a sense, like I'm sure there's a lot of people who are gonna watch this episode who have dogs or dog lovers and are here not for the startup discussion, but they wanna know like how soon, how soon is this gonna be available? 'Cause I, yeah, everybody, I think, I think pretty much everybody who can afford to have this is gonna want it for their dog. So yeah, just give us a sense of like where you're at, how, how's it going?

Yeah. So, um, basically we are on track to, fingers crossed, knock on this fake wood in the sound pod around me, to have a product on market in the next year for where you'll be able to go to the vet and if your dog qualifies, be able to have your dog prescribed a drug that's use case is to give you more healthier years with your dog. And when you're, you know, this is a drug, right? This is a prescription product. So we can't sell it until we get FDA approval. And there's a lot of, lot of stuff that goes with FDA approval and I will not bore you guys with that. But at a high level, the three things you need to show is, is it safe? Can you manufacture it consistently and at scale to quality? And then something called, is it, there a reasonable expectation of efficacy? Is it reasonable to expect, what a reasonable expectation reasonable, scientifically trained person expect that this drug is going to do what you say it's gonna do, in our case, extend the healthy lifespan. And we've now earned that, that RxC, Reasonable Expectation of Efficacy, twice for two different drugs. So one of 'em's for a large dog lifespan extension drug, basically Acteasin. Yes, we believe it's reasonably likely that this drug will extend the lifespan of large dogs. And then we just did it like a, a week ago, um, for senior, our senior dog lifespan extension drug. So that's for dogs of, 14 pounds and up. And yes, we don't, we don't hate tiny breed dogs. We're working on a smaller dosing band too, but for now, 14 pounds and up who are already showing signs of age, um, to extend their lifespan. And so we still have to get the safety approval. We still have to get the manufacturing approval. Nothing is guaranteed, asterisk, asterisk. But you know, we have strong data, we believe, supporting those. And if it goes to plan directionally, there'll be a drug on market in a year, which is It's really kind of crazy cool.

That's really cool. Congratulations. Yeah. And really to your whole team, like this is hopefully just the beginning, but it's been, it's been really cool to watch this go from, from concept to reality. And I think, I think I was speaking on behalf of a lot of dog owners that we're, we're rooting for you.

Yeah. No, I mean, I have a senior Rottie, like it's, so the, the pro and con of working on this, pro is like, ah, I can do something. And the con is I think, I think about it. I think about the fact that she's is, you know, past her breed's lifespan. Every time I look at her, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's horrible. It's one of the worst things, and I, I hope we're able to make a dent in it.

I wanted to kind of do a lightning round if you're willing.

Let's do it.

Yeah, because one of my favorite things in doing these interviews is the prep, and I get to see— I get to listen to some of your other interviews and see things that you've written along the way, and I just like— oh, I, I noted a couple things I just wanted to ask you about just to— let's get your reaction. Okay, the first one is that when you, you talked about the mission of the company I've heard you say that this is about having empathy for all life. Why?

When you say lightning questions, I think it's gonna be fluffy, easy shit, and then you're like, here's this depth.

I want to know why.

I think so. There's a practical and then there's kind of the more philosophical, right? Practical is, you know, we really, we care about the micro and the macro when it comes to animal, right? We're working for all dog kind, all of humankind, but we also don't ever lose the vision of the individual dog, right? Whether it's a pet dog or a senior dog or dog in one of our studies, like we care about that dog's life and we don't devalue it in the scope of doghood. And that sounds obvious, but it's actually like very easy. And I would say like, in fact, like it can be culturally normal in some scientific fields to kind of devalue life in certain ways. And it can be very easy when you're working in longevity 'cause we think about mortality all the time. We think about mortality rates and is this dog alive or dead? What's the status? It becomes a binary number, right? And it's, it's, so it's really like always emphasizing that. And then I would say the more in-depth one is, you know, this, the reason we're doing this, like, yes, we think it's gonna be a successful company. Yes, a lot of people on the team and investors will be very happy financially if it works. but we're also doing it because we just think it's a thing that's like in the best interest for the dogs that are our children, right? And it's, it's, it's terrible what they go through. I mean, you, you mentioned your dog had cancer and died of cancer. My dog before my Ronnie had the exact same thing. She had, uh, uh, breast cancer. Um, and I did surgery and I did all this stuff and I ended up regretting it so much because in her case, She was in so much pain through the end. Yeah. And I was like, I'm never gonna do that again. And you know, I think a preventative medicine that gives a dog more time is like one of the most empathetic things we can do for them.

Yeah.

I can't, I gotta ask, do you feel like we have an obligation, especially those who do pure breed breeding of dogs, like to breed for healthspan rather than just for the physical characteristics? Of the breed?

This is a spicy topic, but I think there is a lot of— So we're going after aging, and that's one of the big drivers of, you know, dogs dying. Another big driver is just the lack of homes, like lack of spay and neuter. Another one is genetic issues, right? Hip dysplasia, breathing issues, and brachycephalic dogs. Certain, like, Goldens that get cancer at a really high rate. And yeah, I do think, you know, working on that and trying to, like, there's some breeders that were working on elongating the nozzle of these flat-faced dogs so they can breathe better. And I do think it's important. Like, a lot of these breeds came to be long before we understood genetics, long before we understood the qualms of inbreeding. And it's, you know, we don't need to go and like fall on the sword. But I think now that we understand these things, we should, and I think a lot of people are working towards making healthier breed standards.

You talked about the problems with social hierarchy. I think you said power lines are bullshit and hierarchy is a social construct. And I thought that was really interesting. You know, first of all, like, explain what you meant by that. But also, I was trying to think about, like, having that philosophy. Do you ever encounter situations where you have to, like, break down hierarchy or power dynamics, but you're also now establishing yourself as authority figure and have the power over your team, like you're in a leadership role. Like, how do you reconcile that? Like, how have you integrated that into your philosophy of—

I guess the way I think about it is there is hierarchy, but it's a— this word has become so charged, but a meritocracy, right? It's the value of your ideas. And I think the thing that I learned and the thing that made me believe that hierarchy is bullshit was, you know, some of the situations I had at Oxford where, you know, the people who were above me who had more letters behind their name had much worse ideas or much, at least in the stuff we were working on, like I thought less intelligent, um, less well-reasoned, but they were king because they had the letter and I didn't. And I was like, why the hell is this 4 letters behind your name? That's just a total human construct matter so much. And like the actual validity of the ideas matter so little. And so, you know, obviously I'm the boss, I decide shit at the end of the day, I'm responsible for everything at the end of the day. But I try really hard to have a meritocracy, right? Like where it's really much, you know, the lowest level scientist at Loyal is usually the biggest expert, is the highest in the hierarchy on whatever specific thing they're working on, right? Because they've spent potentially a decade or plus of their lives becoming an expert in this one niche thing, right? And it kind of goes up and up from there. And then, you know, the head of metabolic sciences is an expert on metabolic sciences, but maybe he's not an expert in like assay development. That's somebody underneath him. So that person's more senior than him on assays, but he's more senior on like the metabolic stuff. And so, you know, I'm the best at like having the broadest company context and the how all of this kind of plays together and how it intersects with financing and the organization running and all of these things. but it doesn't mean I'm the best at the science or the manufacturer, right? I'm not definitively. And so I try to really create this, like, meritocracy type of culture, um, which again, I really hate how charged that word has become, um, but it's, you know, what we've aimed for for a really long time.

One of the things I thought was really interesting is you've been really explicit about developing company values. And there were just a bunch of them that I really liked. I think you talked about learning by doing, which is one of my favorites, but definitely my favorite for sure is lean into moonshots. Why is it important to lean into moonshots? What does that mean?

Basically, that one came from when I started Loyal. We were like, okay guys, we're developing a drug to extend dog lifespan. First thing, uh, should we really go for lifespan extension? You know, nobody's gotten a drug approved for lifespan extension before. Why don't we start with you know, age-related disease, right? And then maybe like you can do it later. I was like, nope, nope, lifespan extension. And just like we leaned into that moonshot. And at the, like at time now it's like, oh yeah, there's like a path to do it. At the time that was like a huge risk, right? And a huge binary yes or no for the company. And I don't think we would've overcome that if we hadn't said no, like this is the hill we are dying on. We are going to develop a drug for lifespan extension for dogs and we're gonna figure out how to do it. We didn't notably die on other hills. And I think this is something that people get wrong. And so like, okay, we're going to do it. We're going to do it this way. And it's going to look like this and it's going to be like that.

Die on every hill.

Yeah.

That's what it means to be a great company.

No, no, no. Right. Because like a lot, like the initial scientific, you know, the big dog short lifespan ended up being what we did it for first, which was, you know, the thesis I came in with the company, but I thought we were going to be a gene therapy company. And then the team, I hired the team and they're like, actually it's a stupid idea, Celine, for X, Y, and Z reason. Here's like what we should do instead. And they were like, great. Well, they knew we were dying on the hill of a drug approved for lifespan extension. They knew I wasn't dying on the hill of gene therapy, even though I thought gene therapy was really cool. Um, and so that's what that really means is just like, you just put it all in there.

That's actually an incredible pivot story. We've been talking a lot about the success of Loyal. I mean, obviously it's been, been an incredible ride. There's been some pretty big failures along the way too. And I remember you talking about in, in the kind of 2022 era, going through some tough times. A lot of startups had a tough 2022, so you're, you're definitely in good company, but just talk about what that was like and how you got through it.

Yeah. So, you know, we're a, a baby of ZIRP, um, which means that fundraising was never particularly hard, even when, um, I wouldn't say Floil didn't ever not deserve funding, but I would say the amount of work it took and the amount of rigor it took was lower. For a long period of time. And that all changed when ZIRP ended, right? Um, when, you know, interest rates got racked up and all these VCs got slammed by these companies. When the water went out, you saw who wasn't wearing pants, or whatever the saying is. And the VC capital markets just shut down. And at approximately that same point in time, you know, we were spending pretty aggressively, very aggressively, much too aggressively, and with not enough discipline of understanding like, okay, this is the capital we need to spend to get to this milestone, and this milestone unlocks this. Like we did like this operating-based or milestone-based operating cadence, which I learned from Blake at Boom Supersonic actually in 2022. In 2023, we didn't have it all. It was just kind of like, take in money, plausibly we need this amount of money, and then go do all the things. And that didn't fly anymore, right? You needed to have very strict path. And in our case, you know, the— nobody was willing to invest in a doggone Revvy company. And so I tried to go do a Series B in Q4 2022, didn't get a single term sheet, didn't get a single offer, didn't get a single anything. Like nobody was keen. Yeah. And I was like, there'll be a flat round to Series A. Like, don't worry, nobody was keen.

Nothing.

Nothing. Um, and so I then, uh, had to go raise money for a totally different pool. And I had to cut our spending like crazy and we had to be super rigorous and we had to stop investing in all this bullshit that wasn't core to the company and really understand our cash to milestones. And I spent about 6 or 9 months, I think probably more like 9 months raising $7 million, which for context, before that I had once raised $7 million in a 15-minute phone call. Literally a 15-minute— like, got on the phone and he wired right afterwards. And I was like, I was like, this is definitely a scam. It's not a scam. He's a great guy. It was 30 minutes. Sorry, shouldn't exaggerate. But yeah, it was fucking— it was emotionally brutal. And like, I threw all the spaghetti at the wall. Like, I had— I'm gonna get in trouble. I bought a fake engagement ring. Because I had retained a group to take me around the Middle East to try fundraising out there. And I had read that unmarried women, like, in like certain like ultra-conservative parts of the country, like, they won't like shake your hand if you're unmarried. Um, like, I, I threw every spaghetti, every strand at the wall. Um, and it turned out we hit our milestone. That's when we got the RxC approval. Our big dog for lifespan drug, and I'm getting a term sheet in one day, and the next Series B was like the fastest Series B I've ever done. Um, but it was brutal, and I was the only one who could save us, and it was a grind.

It was a lot of pressure.

It was a lot of pressure. It was a grind. And it's also knowing all these people. I mean, again, I knew we were right. If we were wrong, fine, like, company's dying, it sucks, whatever. But like, I think the trauma of Loyal ever didn't make it would be the fact that we're right. And that's just like, then it's just like, it's an execution failure. And then in the end, it's my fault. Even if somebody else fucked it up on the team, it's my fault because I hired them. I didn't realize it was up. Like, what? It's always my fault. It's all me. And that's grim.

That is the blessing and the curse of being the founder.

Yeah, I love it. All the problems are solvable if you identify them in time, right?

If you live long enough, if you live long enough to find—

yes. Yeah.

Let me ask you one last question. You said that aging drugs should be boring. And you've also said that your goal in your life is to build the aging pharma so that one day, like, aging drugs would be as common and consensus as statins. So explain what you mean by the aging pharma and like, what, what's that aspiration?

It's just so before Ozempic and these kind of GLP-1 drugs, the most successful drug, um, you can argue in different ways financially. You can also argue in like life years saved, although vaccines actually probably beat, uh, statins. But at a high level, one of the most successful drugs we've ever created is statins, right? Drugs to reduce cholesterol, to reduce the risk, um, and likelihood of developing, you know, certain forms of age-related cardiovascular disease, um, saved millions and millions and millions of life years of humans. I mean, that's what an aging drug is, right? Like, what is a statin? It's a daily drug that's cheap and accessible that, you know, millions of Americans take to reduce their risk of a certain age-related disease. In this case, you know, cholesterol-associated cardiovascular disease. What is an aging drug? In my vision, it's a cheap daily pill that millions of Americans take to reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease and maybe also dementia, or maybe also osteoarthritis or sarcopenia or whatever it is. Like these diseases that are considered mechanistically unrelated today, but actually are very related because they're all driven by certain, um, kind of core aging pathways. And so that's why I think it's boring because a statin is boring. A vaccine is— well, again, in the current political climate, vaccines are less boring. But generally speaking, a vaccine should be boring, right? It's just a preventative that everybody is on, and it reduces your risk of getting this really bad thing that otherwise would be very terrible for you, right? Um, and I think that's what an aging drug is, you know. I think there's a lot of like fluff around, oh, we're going to reverse aging and take this old person and make them— by the way, the reason why people pitch that, besides there's obviously cool The reason they pitch it is because investors are often old and pitching them a preventative medicine is not going to fly as much as I'm going to reverse your aging and make you, 80-year-old man, 40-year-old man or 30-year-old man or whatever it is. Right. And again, they're doing cool science and it's a crazy town. Like it's way— it's like decades away versus I think this boring approach is where the first generation of aging drugs will come from. And by the way, I think it's also the most social benefit because I'm not trying to create another— there is obviously value in any pharmaceutical product that's developed that is effective against a disease, even like these half a million or million-dollar gene therapies, which that was what I was— one of the kind of classes of drugs I was working on. And I think if you want to maximize social benefit, it's something that's cheap and accessible that everyone can take. And that's really what I want to build.

Awesome. Well, I really, really am rooting for you. So, so many people want this to exist and are excited for you to take the swing. So thank you. Kudos for taking the big swing and congratulations on all the success you've had. And thank you for being really honest and vulnerable and sharing what it's actually been like to do a two-miracle company.

Thank you. I, I now kind of want to go and sit down and count, like, how many miracles are we actually? I think it's more than 2.

I definitely— I would believe it.

I would believe it. But 2's enough.

Yeah, 2 certainly, certainly, uh, is, uh, is plenty. Uh, thanks again. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, for sure.

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I'm your host, Eric Ries.

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