17 years at McKinsey and Board Member at Foot Locker & The Vitamin Shoppe

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom podcast. We have Gil Marmol with us today. Gil is CEO at Prozon Therapeutics, very prominent background. So I read here Harvard Business School. Gil is from Cuba, so immigrated to the US in what, like the '50s or '60s? And yeah, previously member, uh, board of directors at Foot Locker and a bunch of, uh, prominent organization. Vitamin Shoppe is another one I, I've personally used. So Gil, welcome to Bond. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you're building here.

Well, great to be aboard this morning. Um, we can talk about my background, but let's get started with Porozome Therapeutics, which is my current mission, my current calling, my current purpose. Um, Porozome Therapeutics is a early-stage biotechnology company dedicated to developing new drugs that address longstanding health issues in our society. Uh, it's built on an enormous foundation of scientific work, and I think if I had to distinguish our company in some ways from others is that that's one of the principles that we believe in, specifically that the science has to be strong. And the building on strong science gives you better results. The, uh, beginning of the, the study of the porosome, which is a universal secretion device of the human cell and it's responsible for cellular communication and for keeping us all healthy and happy, uh, began in 1996 when our co-founder Banu Jena Charles Cormier, one of the great cellular biologists in the world, discovered this organelle in his laboratory at Yale University Medical School. He studied it for 30 years, published hundreds of papers on it, is universally regarded as the leading light on this topic. And then 5 years ago, working with me and others, decided that we were going to translate that knowledge into new therapies. We've advanced our work very significantly, particularly in cystic fibrosis and Alzheimer's, and we believe that that's only the beginning because failures of the porosome, in our opinion, can account for as many as 100 disease indications.

Fascinating. Uh, yeah, let's start with your background, right? Because I see your engineering and applied physics in 1971, then Harvard Business School a couple of years later, 17 years at McKinsey. That's a long time. Tell us a bit more about yourself and how you came up to this business world.

So let's begin with the college. I studied engineering and applied physics at Harvard, or in the engineering and applied physics department. I think of myself as being a little bit of a man before my time because Most of the work I did there— of course, I took physics courses and chemistry courses and so on and so forth, but most of the work I did was in applied mathematics, econometrics, economics. So basically, I was studying decision theory, and I think that that's kind of topic du jour these days, and data analysis and decision theory is topic du jour these days. So that's really where I focused, and that interest took me— I had a choice to make. I could go on in the sciences or I could go in the— into the business world, and it was that interest in decision theory, along with the fact that I thought I could do well, that decided me to favor the business world. I applied to Harvard Business School as one of the relatively few people in those days that was admitted right out of college. Normally they wanted you to go get warmed up someplace else before they let you in. I negotiated and got granted the option to spend a year at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., which I thought would be interesting and turned out to be tremendously so. And then I went into the business school, graduated, and signed up with McKinsey and Company.

And Cuban immigrant, right? And Harvard, like, isn't that like zero to one in a very accelerated time frame?

Yes, actually it was. I got to the United States in 1961. I was 8 years old. I went to high school— well, pre-high school and high school in Miami, Florida. Harvard took an interest in me mostly, I think, because I had an unusual background, certainly for those days, and because, as you may be familiar with, Charles, there's these standardized tests that are now quite controversial, but at the time were considered pretty robust. And Gil Marmel did exceptionally well, uh, because Gil is smart.

Gil is very smart.

Uh, so they, they decided, look, man, if this, uh, Cuban immigrant that can, uh, can test this well, he's probably got an engine under the hood. Um, and, uh, they decided—

you were CIA material back in these days. That was their plans, like get into the CIA or something.

Yeah, well, I don't know about that, but they were open-minded about what I could do. And, you know, I did well at Harvard. I did well.

Where you came, like, where does that brain come from? Like, who was your dad? Who was your mom? Like, why are you that smart?

Um, well, that's a good question. My father, uh, was an attorney and worked in private practice most of his life before we came to the United States. In the United States, he worked for the Bacardi Rum Company because that was one of his clients when he was in private practice in Cuba. If I was to say who in the Marmel line indicates that there may have been some IQ genes floating around, it would be my paternal grandfather who was an extremely highly regarded physician in Cuba, among the very best. So I think I got some of that from him and from my father.

Plus some desire to prove yourself, right, as an outsider.

Yes, and you know, not everybody in my— well, Very few in my graduating class— it was a reasonable graduating class from a Catholic high school— very few decided that they were going to step outside of the world they lived in. And I did. And that was in part because I thought that I could do more, and in part because I wanted to see something different, and in part because I didn't know how cold the winters in New England were, which I later discovered.

Yeah, that's a shock. Um, so 17 years at McKinsey, and McKinsey, like, I, I think these were the, the heydays, right? Like Wall Street, uh, high-paid jobs. Tell us about the 17 years there and the stories, the adventures, uh, at your time there, and what you learned ultimately.

So there were a couple of steps in, in that, uh, in that, uh, McKinsey history. Um, I began with the office, McKinsey office in Mexico City, did quite well there, took a tour of duty in the United States. Unfortunately for me, the Mexican economy took a cosmic nosedive, and that meant that Gil Marmel needed to find another option. And I did. I was fortunate to know some of the partners in the Dallas office, and so I transferred there. And at the time, uh, Charles, you'd be surprised about how small McKinsey was in Texas. By how small, let's try 22 people or whatever, 22 consultants or something like that. And, you know, like entirely different planet, if you will. And so I had the role, the demand, the need to prove myself and to show that I could grow that office, which needed desperately to be grown. Um, and so I set about doing that. Uh, you know, McKinsey is not, uh, particularly fond of our disclosing our clients, but one of the, one of the clients that I served which I'm very proud of, uh, is, uh, was the Frito-Lay company. And I still believe—

I thought you were going to say Coca-Cola, which, uh, is still like Sabritas, verdad?

Yeah, the Mexican subsidiary. I serve, by the way, uh, I serve Sabritas also, uh, but they, you know, uh, the PepsiCo world, these companies operate, these divisions operate rather independently. But, uh, well, the reason, one of these reasons, Mexico, very successful.

They're everywhere, even in the tiendas. They're everywhere.

Well, Frito-Lay, in my opinion, uh, was then, and I'm sure continues to be now, one of the best managed companies I've ever run across. And they had what I believed was then true and probably still is the leading, uh, direct-to-store distribution system in, in the world. Sabritas does the same thing, for the record. Uh, a direct-to-store, as you know, means that you don't, don't deliver your product to a warehouse. You take your products directly to the shelf in the supermarket. And we spent a lot of time working with, uh, with Frito-Lay on further improving what was a world-class system to begin with. And, uh, and that, that I think was a learning ground for me, honestly, uh, to see the very best and to try to make them— work with them to make them still better. Uh, and, uh, so that was important.

And then 3 years at, uh, Perrot System, they were acquired by Dell. What was the deal here?

So at one point it became time for me to get out of the chair on the advising side of the table, get up, walk around the table, and sit in the doing side of the course. Um, and I had met and worked with a fellow named Mort Myerson, recently deceased, uh, but a very interesting man, I must say, who was a CEO of Perot Systems. And I talked to him and let him know that I was interested in finding my way to the doing side of the table, and he leapt at the opportunity to have that be at Perot Systems. Literally, as I came on board, we were in the midst of a negotiation for what at the time— it's not true today, but at the time— was the largest outsourcing contract in the history of the outsourcing industry. It was with SBC Corporation in— SBC Bank in Switzerland, now UBS. And Perot was not a very big company. So for a company that had a few hundred million dollars of revenue to sign a pathbreaking agreement like that, shall we say, caught the world by surprise. And certainly caught our competitors by surprise. So I spent a lot of my time, A, making sure that that contract was formalized, finalized. And got off to a good start. Uh, and then I did a whole array of different things in my role as chair of the operating committee at Perot, and one of them was to acquire a company called Nets, N-E-T-S, Nets Inc. By the way, a great name for a company. Um, Manzi of IBM fame was the CEO, and they were, they were at the very beginning at the very beginning of digital marketplaces. Uh, it's remarkable how primitive we would see what they were doing then, but of course it wasn't primitive then. At the time it was kind of innovative. Um, and so I saw that as an opportunity. I saw the internet as an opportunity and I decided to take a leap into the internet opportunity.

And what was Luminant after that? CEO and director?

That was, that was, that was the, that was the internet opportunity. Uh, so finishing off on Perot, we tripled the revenue size of our 3-year period, so I consider that a huge win, and laid the foundation for its, uh, not long after IPO. Uh, Luminant was a professional service firm dedicated to the combination of business consulting, advertising, and media and digital technologies around internet solutions. And in order to create a company that had the scale necessary to take it public, I ran around the United States and collected up 8— 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 different companies that were dynamic in that space but were smaller than they needed to be to have the scale, and then brought them together and took them public. I wouldn't recommend that, Charles. It's a— it was rather a— it's a free hard venture. Yes, it was very grueling, grueling process. But we, we did very well, uh, at the beginning, uh, and the company was worth a billion dollars shortly after its IPO in 1999 and 2000. And then, as you and, uh, everyone listening to this call knows, uh, the internet wave crested and the internet went bankrupt. Well, actually, we sold— uh, Luminant was sold to a to another, uh, similar digital company who then proceeded to go bankrupt.

You see parallels between the internet boom and bust and the current internet, uh, AI, uh, revolution in which we're in right now? Because internet was solid, right? And it always provided value, it always been sound, but it still got bust because I feel some finance bros got involved, right? And they, they just over, overinflated the bubble and the current state, uh, of things as they were. Do you feel there's something similar in the current AI state of things?

I think about that a lot, Charles. One thing that is obviously very different is the scale. The scale of these AI investments is Honestly, mind-boggling to me. I mean, I don't think the world has ever seen investments in a single industry in a short period of time at the scale in which those investments are going into the AI world. The question about whether you're going to earn a return on that investment is something that the investment community has finally decided to wake up to and begin to ask about, as you know. And I'll be honest, Charles, I don't know. I don't know. But if you do some simple back-of-the-envelope arithmetic and you say, if you're investing this many trillions of dollars, boy, you had better expect a very high return or you're going to leave some of those billions of dollars in the dust.

Right, well, there's always that back sentiment that investors investing in Anthropic and OpenAI, that they're gonna unlock limitless values of superintelligence. But I feel that superintelligence still a bit pie in the sky because the current, uh, economics and metrics of these companies, yeah, don't make sense. But at the other end, as you know, there's almost like limitless VC capital on one side and metrics take time to catch up, right? So we won't really know what works and what doesn't till some time. And then these companies have so much capital that— and everything, just value generally speaking, is overinflated, especially when you go retail, right? Like, as you know, like the public stocks, you know, it's just like people thinking that it's something— it's not like fundamental calculations when you look at, I don't know, the GameStop, um, retail degenerates that revived that company out of nowhere, right? Like, there was no fundamental behind GameStop. It's just people crowding together and be like, yeah, let's, um, let's make this happen. And I also think psychologically, that's the story of humans, right? It's having grandiose visions that don't make any sense on paper, but ultimately they some of them materialized through sheer will. What do you think of that?

I think that when we look back, AI and this AI wave that we're in the middle of will be transformative. I really do believe that.

Well, it's already super transformative. It's incredible.

Yes, I mean, it's just unbelievable. I mean, the speed at which you can get access to information and data and answers and analytics is, is amazing. I mean, in some cases— well, you know, it is, it's, it's measured in seconds, uh, and so I don't think we're gonna put that back. I mean, that's going to change the way all of us live our lives and the way the world operates. Whether or not people are going to earn a return on their trillions of dollars of investments is a somewhat different question. Some will, I expect that some will, but I also expect that some won't, you know. And as you know, one of the curious questions out there is whether our Chinese competitors are— what are they going to do? Because they are going to be offering AI solutions at much lower cost and scale with similar scale, right?

So Why can't you say Charles Raiders? Like, um, because there's this AI arm race thing right now. It's like US vs China, but— and sometimes feels like US vs the rest of the world. Like, can't there be like more competition, or is that naive? More cooperation. Sorry, more cooperation.

Oh, I think there should be. I definitely think there should be more cooperation. I don't think there's enough cooperation now, and I think there should be more cooperation.

But game theory says that there shouldn't be much cooperation, right?

Yes, but humanity says that there should. Uh, so it, it depends on where you want to put it.

We're gonna blow ourselves up, bro. Well, I mean, not literally, but there's gonna be damages if like corporation co-op, uh, corporations don't cooperate more. Uh, the Chinese way also has been open source, but I mean, there are strategies behind that as well, right? Like, what do you think of all this as a guy that studied, uh, decision theory, game theory, and all that?

Well, I think the Chinese are, um, executing their historical playbook, right? I mean, they have in non-AI industries, as you know, um operated— created huge scale cost advantages and basically dominated a large number of global markets. We don't need to go into them, there are many and you know them. But I think they're doing something very similar in AI. They're making the investments, they're making them, I think, or they claim, and it looks as if they are, largely more efficiently, lower cost. And then they're making them available. And to the extent that those available models get used, that will, that will increase, uh, their competitive advantage because those models learn, uh, and so, uh, I think US innovation is so hard to beat.

Like, you can copy-paste improve a product, uh, all you want, but in my opinion, innovation and sheer brainpower always wins, right? Like, I mean, there is one, I don't know, 2% of my strategy in business is copy, paste, improve, right? Like, I study my competitors, I try to reproduce some of what they do, test it faster, get data back, but ultimately, it's the sheer innovation that usually drives the a core value.

No, I agree, I agree. But don't under— I wouldn't underestimate the acceleration that you get from being able to do work that took 3 months in 2 days, uh, you know.

I mean, but the experience is unparalleled, in my opinion. Chinese, the— I mean, China can copy-paste improve stuff, and yes, we've seen them build buildings in like 2 days. That's impressive, but it's like, it's structural. It's not like very much on the innovation front. And I think ultimately, if superintelligence is the number one goal, you, you need drastic innovation. It's not by copy-paste improving something, uh, or scaling something that you will get there. So these are my thoughts. Also, um, American entrepreneurs, they can move way faster and break more things. They're under less stress than most Chinese entrepreneurs. It's like, it's a bit— it's like being in a pressure cooker being a Chinese entrepreneur, because you need to please the CCP at one end and then try to innovate at the others. It's like, you can't really innovate, right? Because there's always like a CCP ceiling that prevents you from taking more risks. Do you agree with that?

I, I certainly agree. The part that I wholeheartedly agree with is that the Chinese have a fundamental problem, and that problem is kind of what you alluded to, which is that they are very— they have very— the Communist Party has very mixed feelings about entrepreneurs. And one day, one day they're, you know, talking about how great they are, and the next day they're smashing them in the face. And I agree, Charles, that doesn't work very well because if you're the entrepreneur, you get out of your— you open your door in the morning and you wonder which day is it going to be, you know. And they've done some destructive things to some of their leading companies which have had impact. On the other hand, they've also made investment capital available and so on and so forth. But I do agree that the fundamental advantage of the United States over China and everybody else for that matter matter is the freedom that its entrepreneurs have to build and fail and build and succeed and to lay new groundwork and find new roads without having someone, you know, knock them on the side of the head with a crowbar.

Yeah.

And that, I think, is a fundamental advantage.

Although the U.S. government has been doing just that with tariffs, right? Which were, in my opinion, terrible, that they've created massive confusion and chaos in, in that sector of things. Reshoring was smart, right? Um, but I feel tariffs were terrible. What were your thoughts on that?

I think it was a cosmic mistake, to be honest. I mean, about as big a mistake as a government set of government policies can be. Uh, And they were these untargeted tariffs, as you know, sort of spread across the entire planet. And there were whole arrays of businesses in the United States that depended on their supply chains, which were fundamentally ruptured. And then I think to make it worse, Charles, is you have this seesaw. You know, one day they're on, one day they're off, one day they're on, one day they're off. So we're, we're a little bit in the Chinese Communist Party mode. We have to read the posts by Donald Trump to find out, you know, whether—

which is the worst source of information.

Yes, whether it's going to be a good day or a bad day, you know.

Uh, I'm so glad I'm not in like any physical industry, right? Like me and my last guest were talking about that. Let's continue on the AI front and Porzom, right, which is, uh seems like a huge breakthrough. It's interesting that it's '96, right? That, uh, I mean, that was what, like, I was 3 years old when that discovery happened. Um, that's, that's a long time ago. Why was that theory of potentially curing Alzheimer's revived right now today, and how are you leveraging it, leveraging AI to scale it?

We have used AI engines, um, to assist us in accelerating the identification of certain drugs. And in specifically, you asked about Alzheimer's, uh, we have identified 4 peptides which we believe can make a fundamental difference in the disease. We also have a small molecule which is even better and a biologic which can be pretty impactful. But to the specific question that you asked, using AI over a short period of time, meaning a few weeks, we were able to identify 4 peptides that we believe can be significant in impacting the disease. I'll say something about 1996. Science doesn't move at afternoon pace. If you look at mRNA and when that was first developed, it was decades before we had an mRNA vaccine, literally decades. And as I said earlier at the very beginning, Banujena, who is the architect of the science in our company, spent an awful lot of time, of his time, and his colleagues' time studying the porosome. And it's only very relatively recently, and I think very importantly, that he has changed his direction and gone from studying the porosome to translating the porosome into, uh, impacting the world. But it's not unusual for a new science to take a long time to develop. That's actually pretty standard.

And there's like a race to cure Alzheimer's. That race has been going on for quite some time, with like 15 years or plus. Um, my first company was a nootropic. We were working on, um, on a potential natural product, interestingly enough, that could help with that, in collaboration with INRS, which is a leading university in Quebec back then. Um, My grandmother passed away from Alzheimer's, and there's so many people that do lose their cognitive capability. It's like a very sad extinction. What makes you think that you have a potentially successful path to curing it? What makes Prozome special?

Well, two things. First, I actually think— I'm not picking on it, but I think it's actually more closer to 2 decades that people have been working at scale on Alzheimer's. Most unproductively, Charles, for the record, most unproductively. And I think we believe that the principal reason for that is that Alzheimer's, of course, creates a beta amyloid plaque and the associated tau protein tangles in the brain. And those decades' worth of work were targeting the elimination of the plaque on the assumption that if you get rid of the plaque, you get rid of the Alzheimer's. Uh, well, uh, we know that you— that that's not true. We know that that's not true. Uh, if you get rid of the plaque, there may be some impact in the progression of the disease. There's a Lilly drug that that solubilizes the plaque now, that has that impact. But the plaque and the associated tau protein tangles are a progression of the disease in our mind, a progression of the disease, not the cause of the disease. They're part of the disease, obviously. You look at an Alzheimer's brain and the first thing you see is that it's covered in plaque. So, The reason that we believe that we have something different is because in our cell line, in vivo mice studies, and human brain organoid studies, we have demonstrated the ability to reverse, reverse the condition, not just slow its progression, but reverse the condition. And so, of course, we need to now take that preclinical work and translate it to the clinic and show it in people. As one example, we were working with the Sony Corporation, and the Sony Corporation, which as you know is for the most part not a biotech company, uh, the Sony Corporation has developed a chip, and this chip can read the activity of a cell. So they— we were one of their beta sites, and they came with their new technology to our laboratory in Beverly, Massachusetts, and we used it. We— the way it works is you have a human brain organoid that sits on— that you sit on top of the Sony chip, and the— in our case, we were monitoring the firing of the neurons firing.. And we showed that— well, as is always the case with this, you have a control, right? So you start with a control. And we showed that an Alzheimer's-impaired brain organoid had about half as much neuron activity as the control. And then once our therapy was applied, the activity was restored to normal. So that's what we mean that we believe we have the ability to restore normalcy, not just to slow progression.

I see a mechanism on your website, but what's the therapy itself concretely? Is it a drug? Tell me a bit more.

The, the— well, we have, as I said briefly earlier, we have 3 different modalities. One is a small molecule, second modality is peptides, and third one is a biologic. Just so you know what the biologic is, we believe and we have demonstrated it that we can implant healthy porosomes into cells that have deficient porosomes, and that the healthy porosomes will—

Like in the brain Neuralink style, or like—

Yes, yes. How do you do that? Well, the body takes care of it. I mean, if, if, if you want an, an easier to understand example, uh, you can do it with the, uh, epithelial cells of the lung. You inhale a, a, uh, concoction of, uh, uh, healthy porosomes, and they, they, the porosomes will take the, the responsibility, route it to the brain, and yes, yes.

So they cross the blood-brain barrier? How so?

Yes, they do. The small molecule and peptides are both small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier. There's no problem. The porosome in the brain is 15— 1.5 nanometers. It's microscopic. It's really very small. We believe that, and we are focused on using the small molecule, uh, A, because it has shown probably the most efficacy of the various modalities that we have, but second, uh, because it's a, it's a form of therapeutic form that is very familiar to large pharma companies, right? They've done a lot of work with small molecules. And so, uh, it's a lot easier conversation to talk to them about a small molecule that we can think or know that has its efficacy versus suggesting, uh, the implantation of porosomes. Because if you talk to them about the implantation of porosomes, uh, you can imagine, Charles, that that creates a lot of questions in their minds.

Um, yes, I like the website, though. It's pretty illustrative. The priorities this year, is it raising capital and then 4 years to get approved by FDA? Is that the plan? 5 years? 5, 10 years?

Well, one of the, one of the big developments in our company that we're very proud of and we're pursuing very aggressively is the announcement that is on our website as well, that of our partnership with the Government of India. So one of the priorities for the Government of India is to take a pharmaceutical industry which is at scale, if you will, in India and provides drugs to the entire planet. But that industry is heavily, very heavily centered on manufacturing generics. I mean, you know, that's really what they have done very successfully. The government doesn't want them to remain there. The government wants them to— in fact, we were talking a little bit before about China. China was, 6 years ago, was not very advanced in new drug development and now has taken very large steps in new drug development. Indian government wants to do the same thing. And we are— they have announced our partnership. It's on the website. And so we believe that over the course of a 2 to 4 year period, we can bring these therapies to market in India. I don't want to say the same thing about the United States because we would then have to engage with the FDA in the United States. But I will assure you that when— I shouldn't say if— when we demonstrate that we have an effective Alzheimer's therapy, there will be enormous pressure to bring that therapy to the world. My wife has Alzheimer's, uh, and it's a monstrous disease, um, and, uh, there is actually a working group in the U.S. Congress around Alzheimer's, and if we have a therapy that works, the pressure on everyone to get that therapy in the hands of people who need it will be enormous.

So you're using India as a beachhead to fast-track the approval process, deploy it in that market, would that facilitate or accelerate the improvement, the approval of the FDA in the US after? Is that the strategy, or—

Well, we believe it will, in part because in order to get approval in India, we have to do a lot of the basic toxicity testing, stability testing, you know, all of the basic hygiene requirements associated with new drug development, and we will do those there. And so those were— and those will be done at, uh, global standards. Uh, so part of it is that we are— I will— will be able to go faster in India. Part of it is that we will be able to go forward at lower cost in India to complete those studies. Um, but yes, once those studies are completed Once clinical trials are completed and have demonstrated their results— and I'm not suggesting for a moment, I'm not, that the FDA is going to look at that and say, good work, we're going to approve your drug. But I believe firmly that they will be very open-minded about what steps we need to take to get approval in the United States.

Interesting. Well, Gil, thanks for being on the pod today. Where can people find out more about you?

Well, I would go, go to porozome.com or Porozome Therapeutics and send us a message, and we will be happy to respond. We're very eager to tell our story, and we sincerely appreciate, Charles, sincerely appreciate your welcoming us to your, to your program.

Yeah, yeah, my pleasure. So I was