Founder Stories: Daphne Zohar, Founder and CEO of PureTech Health

major challenge for you guys in the future. You have a question, but it's 10 o'clock. Anything I say pales in value to what Daphne Zohar is going to say. Daphne, I'm just going to get you up on the screen so that people can see you. Welcome. I am going to turn this on.

There we go.

Hi. Good to be here.

You see the class?

You can't see the class.

I can see the class, yeah.

You can see the class, beautiful. I'm going to say very brief introduction. Daphne Zohar is somebody I wanted to have in class for forever. She is an incredibly dynamic CEO of a biotech company in Boston. She is a fascinating person. And Daphne, I just want my class to hear your story. So let's welcome Daphne. I start every, every talk off the same way. Not very long ago, you were sitting where they are, and I would love to have you share how you got from there to where you are now in whatever way you want to tell your story.

Yeah, um, thank you so much for having me. I wish that your course existed when I was in college. I mean, it just, uh, Can you hear me okay?

Yeah, now we can.

Okay, yeah, I just said— I was saying I wish that your class existed when I was in college. It sounds like it's really, really cool. So, uh, and I enjoyed just the few minutes that I heard right now before, uh, you introduced me. So, you know, I'll tell you about PureTech and how I got started. Um, really, my history is really one that could only happen in the U.S. My parents are immigrants who came to the United States with, you know, basically the clothes on their back and not much else. My father is a research scientist and my mother a nursing home administrator. So, I grew up around scientists and my personal passion has always been around entrepreneurship. So, when I was in high school, I was starting companies and, you know, I started my first company when I was a senior in high school at the age of 16 years old. So, in my early career, my entrepreneurial efforts were somewhat eclectic. They were We were, I guess you could say, financially successful, but I really wanted to do something that could have a positive impact on the world. And what I was thinking a lot about was how much breakthrough science coming out of academia could impact human health. And it struck me that there were a lot of inefficiencies in the way that academic research was translated. So, you know, for example, you know that significant amount of NIH funding goes to fund basic research, and it gets to the point where a breakthrough happens and there could be translational work that could take place, but there's a huge barrier to that initial translational work, and usually that is overcome by entrepreneurs, individuals who will take that work and convince others to, to put in the money to advance those breakthroughs. But the problem is that there's really a disconnect, because in the earliest phases there's not a lot of capital, there's a lot of skepticism, there's a lot of questions, and usually the, the funding tends to go to people who've already had success in developing new breakthroughs. Now, so this is kind of like an interesting problem. And if you're an entrepreneur early in your career and you haven't yet shown that you can do something, how do you sort of overcome those initial barriers? So when we were forming PureTech, we basically— I basically had all of those barriers. I was a first-time sort of entrepreneur in the life sciences. I did not have a scientific background. I hadn't sort of come up through the ranks of apprenticeship, which is typically what happens in venture capital or business development and so on, where you're working closely with somebody who's very experience, and I was, I was in an area where it's really hard, where there's not a lot of funding, and the work is hard. It's not like the easiest part of the value chain to do the early academic translational work. So, and when we first formed PureTech, we started with about a $100,000 check from an angel investor, and even that sounds easy, but that took a long time to get to, and what And I'll just say like where we are today, and then I'll come back and talk a little bit about the journey and how we overcame those barriers and things that I learned that might be helpful to you. So what we've done with PureTech, initially we had very limited resources. So what we would do is we would take the intellectual property we were developing and put it into subsidiary companies, what we call founded entities. So the idea was we were advancing an idea together with a scientist, we would create a subsidiary, And then we went to venture capitalists and other investors to help fund those technologies. So we didn't really have any money on a pure tech level in the beginning. Slowly, as we proved ourselves and developed a track record, we were able to raise a little bit of money on the pure tech level. And actually, eventually, we're able to generate cash from partnerships with pharma companies, from grants, and also from the sale of equity in some of these founded entities. And along the way, we were able to raise more capital on a PureTech parent company level. As time progressed, we decided we were going to maintain the ownership of these programs ourselves, and we've been developing our own wholly owned pipeline. And that's now in advanced clinical development. Since we founded PureTech, we've now invented and advanced the underlying platforms that have led to 25 new therapeutics and therapeutic candidates of which 15 are in the clinic and 2 that have advanced from inception at PureTech through FDA and EU regulatory clearances. So I'm really proud of what we've accomplished. It was a tough journey to get here, and we've— we're now in a really fortunate position where we have cash, we have all the resources that we need, really exciting pipeline, and our founded entities, we like to say they're almost like kids that have grown up and are now taking care of their parents because we're able to generate cash from whether it be equity or royalties or other means through the founded entities, and we don't have to raise capital as much in the public markets. So let me just pause for a moment and see if, David, you have any questions or direction or if the class has any questions.

Let me see if I can stand in the right place here.

Uh, here we go.

You talked about that first $100,000 angel check, and the area that we really focus on in the class is the day you decide to start the company through those first really formative steps. So can you kind of take us through the year or months leading up to that and the idea that you started with how you rounded up people to work with, how you got that initial funding, and kind of where the direction that took you to.

Yeah, absolutely. So the way that I sort of backed into this was that I met a couple of scientists that had interesting work. One of them actually was a scientist at Mass General Hospital. His name was Misha Pepisov, and his work actually led to the development of Mersana, which we we founded at the time, believe it or not, even before we founded PureTech. And as I was working with Misha and with other scientists, the idea was to help them to advance their work. So writing a business plan, doing all the things, putting together a PowerPoint presentation, thinking about applications and indications. It was a drug delivery technology. So what are different applications that one could develop it for?

Where were you in career at this point?

Yeah, I started, um, I had been involved in starting companies since I was in high school. I started, um, a few different companies. I studied entrepreneurship and new venture creation at Northeastern, and actually it was one of the only programs that where you could learn entrepreneurship. And so, you know, I'd been involved in a couple of businesses, one of which was sold to a public company, one of which I sold to another entrepreneur, and another one that was not successful, which actually preceded PureTech immediately. In that one, I had raised about $300,000. I actually decided when founding PureTech that I was going to give those investors shares in PureTech because I didn't like the idea that somebody had invested money and wouldn't make money. So they all got founder shares in PureTech from that last company that wasn't successful. So I had been, I had been a CEO of a startup company. I had been involved in the senior team of other companies. And one lesson I would say, by the way, is that when you're getting started, just being at the table is really important. Sometimes somebody will come and say, I want a certain package. The people who joined us and weren't as concerned about what their package was actually did really well. Just the ability to be in the room is really important. That was what I did before founding PureTech. I was helping these scientists and The idea was, as I was working on a couple of these projects, one of them we were doing due diligence and sort of relying on people that I knew, calling up people and trying to do due diligence, trying to do all the different things that an entrepreneur does. Like you're starting a company in life sciences, you have to be able to look at the IP, file the IP, work with patent attorneys. If you don't have money, it's much harder to convince people to do things for free, for example. So was working on all of these different things, and what really struck me was that there's no sort of institutional version of an entrepreneur, right? If you think about a VC, it's kind of like an institutional version of an angel investor. You know, I mean, think about it, there's people that do different tasks. There's people who, you know, do the due diligence. There's, you know, you have a bunch of resources that you're relying on. And so the initial idea or concept or inspiration behind PureTech was to create almost an institutional version of an entrepreneur. That was the idea. And what I wanted to do was then take those initial— those scientists I was working with had some, you know, they had granted me equity as a co-founder. So I had like 2 or 3 scientists and We were working on their business plans and things like that. I say we, a couple of people sort of were helping me out at the time. And what we did was we were working on all of this, and then I said, well, why don't we create this institutional version of an entrepreneur, take all the equity, put it in this institution, and then we can grant equity to other people that help us. If patent attorneys want to help us, they might not get paid on one thing, but they'll get paid on others. And so this whole concept of creating almost like an ecosystem a company that does this was the inspiration. And then I tried to think about how I would raise money for it. And the person that everybody kept saying, you got to go talk to, was Bob Langer at MIT. And he is an institutional version of a scientist entrepreneur. So I went to Bob. I found somebody who knew him. And he was very kind and gracious and met with me. And Bob basically agreed to join PureTech as a co-founder. And to me, that was kind of a seminal moment because up until that point, if I was calling somebody up and saying, you know, would you like to meet with me? We're, you know, we're starting this company called PureTech. It was a little bit harder, but, you know, just mentioning Bob or asking Bob if he could make intros was very helpful. And in the early days, I was really just having a lot of meetings with people. I didn't really know anyone in the life sciences. I had come from like a different— the businesses I started were more in the consumer area. So, and I went to, you know, people like John Zabriskie, who was sitting on boards of companies. He had done— he had been an EVP at Merck. He had done the merger of Pharmacia and Upjohn and was the CEO of that company and was now sitting on boards. And I went to him and said, "Do you want to come and do you want to invest?" And he actually, because he was really impressed with Bob and he was interested in one of the specific programs we were working on, he agreed to invest and also give us a day a week. So he joined us and he was sort of like our, he'd come on the road with me like to meetings with investors and that was really helpful. But all of that took a long time and we got a couple of students, business students to work you know, for equity. And just, it was kind of a slow slog, you know. And we raised the first $100,000 from— right before we met John Zabruski, we raised $100,000 from an angel investor who did really well. I mean, we're like a $1.3 billion company now. But, you know, and she came in when we were just getting started. So she did really well. And we say we raised the initial money very, very slowly. Started in the house, like living, you know, working in an office in the house, which is not too different from what we're all doing now. But built the company really, really in the early days, it was just really hard. So, you know, what are their learnings? I think one learning is that when you're starting something initially, There's different elements that need to be in place, and they're all attracted to each other, and they're all repelled by the absence of the others. So what are those elements? One element is money, another element is people, and then the third element is technology, or sort of like the invention. And in our case, you know, we had the invention— we had a couple of inventions that we had identified, but that wasn't really what helped us create PureTech. What really helped us create PureTech was the people. So when you have really great people, they attract other great people, and you kind of have to bring in these elements little by little. So you have people, then you bring in a little bit of, you know, better technology, and then you bring in money, and then kind of build on that. But initially, it's hard because you have to overcome the inertia of not having anything there. A second point I would say that I learned from that process is the ability to sort of take in skepticism and negative feedback without taking it personally. So when you're— I remember being your age and I remember just my own sense of self was really like, it was always about me, like feeling, you know, what do they think of me? Am I going to convince them? What does that mean about me? Like, so that this sense of yourself is really big, you know, and It's not big because you're full of yourself. It's big because you're worried about stuff. But that inflation or inflammation is painful, just like any inflammation. So like, you know, if you get negative feedback, it's really painful in the early days when you're trying to build your career, when trying to prove yourself. But really, I think a really key point is to not take things personally, to be able to say, okay, this person is holding up a mirror They're telling me what's missing. How do I get those pieces in place? Like, don't take it personally. If somebody's telling you something's wrong, something's missing, what do you build around you to address the flaws and the missing pieces? And, you know, I think that was one thing that I was able to do was to sort of not pay too much attention to negative feedback and to be persistent in a way that's a little bit different than one thinks of with persistence. So for example, people often say be persistent and you think, okay, that means I have to keep bugging this person who said no. No, if somebody said no, leave them alone. They're not the right target for you. Persistence is about keep, you know, talking to more and more people, learning what you can do to find that pocket, the people that are gonna really believe in you. And then once you find those people, you can find others like them. You know, whether it be, you know, in our early days, it was early, it was angel investors, but then it was actually people like John Zabriskie, CEOs of companies that saw something, saw a spark, and were able to put in their own money, you know, and that was really the source of our funding initially. So, angel investors, but really sophisticated entrepreneur angels that put in the money. And we figured that out after, you know, getting nos from venture capitalists, for example, who didn't want to put money into PeerTech because it sounded a little bit like what they were doing. And eventually, you know, people ask us, why did you list in London on the main market of the London Stock Exchange? The reason was that there was a similar model where there was a parent company that was public and subsidiaries that, that were public or private. It was— it came out of the universities like Imperial College, and there was an investor base that was investing in public companies that had a parent company and were advancing academic research. So we, we raised a bunch of money from Invesco, and then we, we, um, after that we did an IPO on the main market. We're now FTSE 250, but we're also listed in the U.S. But initially And at the time, there weren't any companies quite like us in the US. Now there's BridgeBio, there's Syntesa, there's Royvant, I think is kind of similar to us as well in some ways, the hub and spoke model. And we've also evolved our model where we have our wholly owned pipeline. So let me pause for a minute. That was a lot, and just see if you have questions. Can you hear me okay? I can hear you very faintly.

I can speak louder. So you just said that there's other companies like you that have been founded recently. How do you continue to differentiate yourself from those companies and attract your own group of scientists?

Yeah, I think the key thing is to differentiate on the specific programs and indications that you're developing. So I don't see them as competitors, but more as comparables. So in the initial days, there wasn't any company quite like PureTech. We weren't a venture capital fund and we weren't a biotech company in the traditional sense. So that actually made it much harder because investors didn't really know what category to put us in. We didn't fit a pattern and investors really like a pattern. That's another thing that's important to note is especially sort of patterns of success. So if they can put you in a category of another company that's been really successful, that is helpful. But with us, we weren't like anyone, so it was harder for us. And now there are comparable companies, which is helpful to some extent. In terms of competition, I think whenever we're developing something, we're really starting with the problem, with the disease, and looking at the landscape of technologies that are out there. We're not starting with one specific platform technology. And I think that enables us to be more honest And, you know, really look at what's differentiated in the space. And then we're looking to bring in and build on technologies that have a true differentiation. Questions?

So one thing— can you hear me?

Yes, very faintly, but I can hear you.

Okay.

Um, so one thing that I was curious about, when you're talking about starting this company that's a new type, I think it's a lot less clear who the right people necessarily are to talk to. Um, other than word of mouth, what sort of personal indicators and personal decision-making did you use to figure out if you're talking to the right person or pivot to figure out who the right person to talk to was when you were developing this model that didn't exist yet?

Right. So in the early days, I almost thought of it like surfing the internet. You're going from one conversation to the next, and you're trying to find a nugget in each meeting. So I was meeting with a lot of people. And I got a lot of people who said, oh, I can't really help you, but you should go talk to this person. And, you know, and I go and talk to the other person and I try to get out of every meeting either some insight or learning or another connection. You know, if I couldn't get that person to give me money, for example, or, you know, whatever it was that I was looking for at the time, you know, one of the things I was really desperately looking for was money. Right? People that would back the idea because I needed to pay people to work for me. And initially, you know, everyone was working for free, for equity. So, and we needed money to do experiments and to file patents. And, you know, you can only do so much by convincing people to give, you know, to get equity or to get a deferred payment. So I was very focused on getting money. And I think, you know, people were pretty nice. Like, they'd meet me and they would say, you know, here are all the reasons why I'm not going to invest. And some of those reasons were, you know, were like I said, they could be kind of, to a young entrepreneur, they could be kind of, you know, not the opposite of motivating, right? You know, so you could, you know, you hear things like, oh, you, you know, you've never done this. You know, why do you think you would be successful? This is such a hard business. You know, things like that, and you try to take from it the nuggets of what would work. So, you know, how do you know if you're meeting with the right people? Well, you know what, just meet with people, and, you know, I think that also this sense of community is something that is great in biotech, is people help each other, and if someone's willing to give you time, which is very precious, then, you know, whatever they tell you or give you is a gift, you know. So even if it seems like a total waste of time, it's not.

Hi, can you hear me?

Yes.

Okay, perfect. Um, so you said the company just before PeerTech failed. Um, I was wondering, how did you— at what point did you decide you no longer wanted to continue with it since you were saying that with PureTech it was really difficult at the beginning. So how do you kind of decide you're at the point of no return?

Yeah, it's, it's, um, it's really, it's a dilemma because on the one hand as an entrepreneur you need to be determined, um, and on the other hand you want to, you're, there's an opportunity cost because your time is precious and you can only spend it on, you know, a limited number of things. So, um, the company that I founded before PureTech that wasn't successful was developing sort of like a veterinary product or sneaker for horses. And this was a technology that was developed by an inventor, which we licensed. I licensed into a company that I started. And the way I got to it was because one of my family members is an equestrian trainer and loved the product. And so, and it was doing really well in Germany. So I licensed it into the US and started a company around it and raised money. And the idea was that this was going to be, you know, something that would be on not just on Grand Prix showjumpers, but on, you know, all, you know, a lot of horses. And the thing I think I didn't— that we didn't— and obviously, again, when you're early on and you're working on your own, you're maybe not doing as much diligence. But The thing I didn't realize was that in the U.S., you know, there's a lot of people that ride horses and, you know, it's much more of a hobby, the broad market. So the market wasn't really there in terms of high-end, you know, hoof care. So I think, you know, after going at it for a couple of years and talking to all the opinion leaders, the the, in this case, was veterinarians and what they call farriers or horseshoers, realized that there wasn't, you know, really a base of support for the product. So, you know, the sales, you know, weren't picking up, and we tried all kinds of things, you know, including, you know, endorsements from leading writers and things like that. And we were getting close to running out of cash. And the question was, do we try to raise more cash or do we fold it? And at the time, I just wasn't convinced that this was something that was going to make a difference. And honestly, one of the things that I had felt, because after I'd been involved in a few different businesses, was like, is this going to make a difference for the world? Yeah, it might be good, but is this something really important that I could be doing with my life? So those are all the decisions that went into it. And the hardest part of it was really that there were some investors that I was going to disappoint. And so the way I dealt with it, as I mentioned, was I gave them equity in PureTech when I founded it. But it took a little bit of time between those two things happening. So that kind of weighed on me. I don't want anybody to ever invest or give me money and lose money. So thank you.

Yep.

Hi, thank you for coming today. So my question is, based off of that, would be, since you started PureTech after your failed business, what do you think that are the main learnings that you experienced in your failed business that you applied to PureTech to make it successful?

Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest thing was actually right before founding PureTech. That was when I was working with the scientists, and I had this déjà vu feeling like, okay, any one of these ideas, you know, I'm doing some diligence, but I'm not looking at, like, looking at it and thinking, is this the best idea that one could advance in this space, you know? And the thinking was, wouldn't it be better to start from the opposite direction? So to put that level of scrutiny to say, what's the best— not, I don't know if you could say the best, but what is the one of the what is one of the better ideas one could advance for a given problem or indication? So starting with the problem and scrutinizing the entire landscape, not sort of drinking your own Kool-Aid. And I think that's one of the biggest issues with biotech entrepreneurship is people, either a scientist or an entrepreneur, will get really excited about something. And if they're very compelling, they'll raise money. And then you've got a bunch of these companies and they're doing, sort of binary publicly traded science experiments. And the, the idea behind PureTech was we were going to look at a landscape, and one other important thing was we're going to do the killer experiments as early as possible. So try to do the experiment that has the potential to kill the project really early. And you'd be surprised how much resistance there typically is to doing that, because if you've raised money and you have a team and you're working on one approach doing an experiment that could kill the project, that's, that's a big responsibility because it could mean that you have to dismantle everything. And often scientists don't want to do the experiment that's going to kill their project because, you know, obviously that would reflect back on the work that they've done for the last 10 to 15 years. So it's something that you have to do very carefully. You have to make sure that you're involving, for example, the key inventor. But doing that killer experiment early on, it saves you a lot of time and you can move resources to other projects. And the way that PureTech is set up is we have other projects to move the resources to. So there's no one project that is indispensable. We want to— we only want to develop those that we believe in. And so there's no problem doing that experiment early. So those are two learnings, you know, looking broadly, not sort of coming from the lens of one technology. And then the second lesson is to try to think about all the things, all the flaws in your idea, and test those flaws early. You know, you'd rather find out that it's not a good idea early. So if I were to reflect back on that, that business I started before, the major flaw was not understanding enough that the market in the US was different than the market in Germany and not doing enough market research. We did some market research, but we again believed our own Kool-Aid. We went and talked to people that liked the product and amplified those voices over the ones that were really skeptical and said, "Nah, I don't need it." You mentioned you started with the 3 scientists, um, and now your idea is more about screening the landscape and looking for the best solution.

But what made you pick those 3 different ideas or those 3 different landscapes to start the first few subsidiary?

Yeah, I mean, initially it was really, um, not, um, it wasn't as— it wasn't sort of that thorough approach. It was, you know, the scientist was, you know, somebody that was impressive. They had an idea that made sense, you know. So it wasn't like the way that we do it now. The way that we do it now is that we work with the leading experts in a field, and we spend a lot of time with them saying, you know, what's been tried, what's failed, what's the most interesting coming research coming out of academic labs, you know, recent papers that are about to get published, grants, former postdocs, and importantly also what are ideas that were developed but had some flaw that held them back. So they had a lot of promise, but they had some issue that held them back. That's how we came to, for example, Karuna and the CAR-T platform was we We were working with schizophrenia experts, and they all kept coming back to this initial work with muscarinic agonists, in particular xanomeline, which had been developed by Eli Lilly. And they all thought that that was really intriguing efficacy results they had seen. And it wasn't developed because of some tolerability issues, some GI tolerability issues. So we knew that that was the problem we were trying to solve. Now, pharma companies have tried to solve it by doing chemistry, but a couple of members of our team came up with a different idea of coupling xenomelanin with a muscarinic antagonist that doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier. So the idea is that you get the efficacy in the CNS, but you wouldn't get the side effects in the periphery. And that was an idea that our team came up with. But we came at it from, you know, first a review of the landscape, understanding that this was a really intriguing approach, looking at the problems of the approach, coming up with an idea, and then actually we did the killer experiment. We showed that by doing— by bringing these two together, you could address the tolerability issues and reduce them significantly. And then we were able to, you know, during this process, get Steve Paul, who had been originally at Eli Lilly, head of R&D, to join the company as the CEO. And he had been initially developing xenomelanin and obviously was really excited about this. So By starting with the problem and looking at very broadly and working with experts, you identify things differently than if, for example, you say, oh, here's a cool technology. It's a new target in schizophrenia. Let's do some diligence on it and advance it. So those first three scientists were more like that. Like, this is interesting science. It has application. Let's look at the IP. Potential, the competitive landscape, and all of that. But when you start with, you know, with no bias initially, I think you come to really interesting ideas. And that has led us to ideas that are really outside the box that, you know, at the time when we started them, they sounded a little bit off the wall.

Um, I guess, would you mind going a little bit deeper into kind of how that conversation with Bob Lefkowitz played out? Kind of how you went to him, the negotiations surrounding how it was getting him involved early on, especially as a co-pilot? That's really fundamental, I think, to success.

Yeah, um, excuse me. So one thing, you know, I would say is that sometimes, you know, there's a tendency to go to somebody who's like not at the very top because you think it's easier to get somebody who's not at the top of their career, or you think that might be easier. But I have to say, I found that I was most successful when I went to people that were sufficiently well-recognized and successful that they didn't feel like they had anything to prove. So they weren't worried about reputational risk as much as somebody who, you know, may be up and coming or, you know, may have moderate success. So somebody like Bob, I found somebody who knew him and that person introduced me and came to the meeting. And, you know, I have to say with Bob, if you sent him an email, he'd probably meet you just because that's the kind of person he is. But I met him and I think that something about this concept of an institutional entrepreneur resonated with him. The idea that there's different activities that you do in starting a company and that certain people might have specialization in different aspects of that, that it would make sense to share that work as a team as opposed to having, you know, one or two people do that each time sort of individually. So I think that really resonated with him. You know, he asked for compensation. He asked for a lot of equity, I thought at the time. And that was the question. It was like, do you give this much equity to somebody who's not going to be day-to-day involved? And he's a tough negotiator. We basically gave him the equity he was asking for. So I think, you know, having, thinking about whether you really, if the person really is going to bring the value that they're asking for, I think is important. One thing, one mistake I think I made in the early days of PeerTech, there was a lot of people helping me, like, you know, I mentioned, you know, business students, consultants, you know, and, you know, they were giving their time for free, but I was a little bit too generous with the equity. So, you know, what ended up happening was I had a pretty small piece of the cap table, you know, by the time we were out there, you know, kind of with significant money. So, you know, it's a question of— and I think we did, you know, obviously after the first year, we tranched things and, you know, tranched the vesting of the equity and things like that. There's this tendency, like you used to say, you're 3 people, let's all split the equity 3 ways. I would be really careful about that initially because the likelihood that all 3 are going to bring the same amount of value, the same amount of work, that's not clear-cut. And so just thinking through that very carefully initially. Now, In all likelihood, the first couple of businesses you start aren't going to be hugely successful, so it's probably not critical. But to the extent that you can just be careful, especially with consultants and others, not to give away too much equity early on, it's probably a good idea. Or at least vest it based on deliverables.

Daphne, I've got a question. Clearly, you have entrepreneurship in your DNA. Like, it's something you've lived it, you studied it. Something that those of us who know you from business know in addition is you have a superb knowledge of science, both basic, applied, and into healthcare. How did that second core, you know, core competence come about?

Well, you know, I think that, um, one thing that's great about the work that we do is, you know, there's so much specialized expertise. So, you know, even people who have a deep, you know, science educational background, once you're getting into a specific area, you know, whether it be whether it be an area of biology or whether it be part of the drug development process, there's experts in each area that are really domain experts. And I think that making sure you have those people involved at the right time is really critical. But I've been, I think, lucky because we have all these experts and how better to get educated in different areas of science in different areas of drug development than to be around people who are really— who are the experts. So like our R&D committee, we have Ben Shapiro, who ran R&D at Merck, and John Lamattino ran R&D at Pfizer. And just by being in the room and listening to the questions that they ask and really understanding how they get to the core of a problem, I think those kinds of conversations, or when we're doing a project in a specific area of biology, these are people who are really pioneering the field. And just being there, I think you are able to learn in a way that's probably different than you would in a more traditional setting. With that said, I know how important it is to know what I don't know and, and to make sure I have people around me who are experts and, and also push back on all of the assumptions and everything that we want to believe. And I think one of the biggest issues is we all like when you're working on something exciting, you really want to believe the good stuff and you don't want to believe the bad stuff. So trying to make sure you have enough people around who will push back and really be skeptical without killing the motivation of the team members. I think we've got that balance on the team. Thank you very much for saying that, David. But I think that I wouldn't be presumptuous to do what I'm doing if I didn't have amazing scientists around me because I think it's just, you know, there's so much complexity in everything that we do. Thank you for saying that.

I'm going to follow up with one other question. This is something we asked most of our guest speakers as well. You know, we had Chip Clark here earlier this year and asked him, you know, what skill is— do you most value that you don't see often enough, like real core competence. And he said it was statistics. A few years ago, I had Ankit Mahadevia from Spiro asking the same question. And he said he went back and relearned all his chemistry because he needed that facility in that language. What area— I always put everybody on the spot. If there's a specific area that my class should go out and they have time over the summer, and bring themselves up to speed? Is there anything that you, uh, that you just wish there was a greater knowledge of in the people you're meeting and the people are coming to work for you that you would encourage people to study?

Um, it's really interesting. I mean, I think that, that, um, it depends on what, you know, if you're talking about a skill that's like you know, something you can learn versus a skill that is, you know, maybe one you can practice. So in terms of skills that you could learn, you know, I think in starting up a company, I'm going to give a few business examples. I think a lot of, a lot of people don't understand sort of the process of funding and, you know, what a term sheet and cap table and all kinds of things that can really influence your ownership over time. So there's a real fundamental misunderstanding about valuation. And there's things like, for example, option pools, a whole bunch of other parameters in a term sheet that could be liquidation preferences, things like that, that that could be much more impactful. So, you know, I think you guys teach some of that stuff, but like be able to build the cap table off of a term sheet and change different parameters. I think that's a pretty important skill, you know, on the business side. And then sort of a skill that you can practice is just listening to people and trying to understand what their problems are. And trying to figure out how you help people solve their problems because that is like a lot of what an entrepreneur or CEO does is, you know, whatever the problem is, if it's a problem that has to do with them not wanting to invest money or if it's a deal that you're trying to strike and there's some barrier, really listening and trying to understand what the barrier is so that you can help to solve that problem. Is a skill that I use like many times each day. And that's just a skill to practice. I don't know if it's something you can go learn. You know, it's not like something you need to learn. You can just try it out. Questions? Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't hear you. Oh, um, a whole bunch of different ideas. Um, one of them was a watch company, um, so it's like fashion watches, um, and, you know, just kind of bought the watches and sold them to stores, um, and actually created like, um, a, uh, a series of watches, um, that had a certain like brand, um it had a theme around it, and then developed kind of the customer base and so on. And then there was somebody else that was interested in getting into that business and bought my inventory and my customers. And so I made some money off of that. Another idea that I started after college was I came up with an invention for consumer goods packaging product, and I licensed it to a company. So I filed the patent, licensed it, and actually that ended up enabling us to have a down payment for our first house. And then what else? So we had— those were the two. And then the big one that I was involved with, which is actually I met my husband who's also an entrepreneur, was an olive oil company that we founded together in Israel. And we grew that to be about 50% of the market in Israel and we sold it to a public company there. So that was also kind of consumer food industry.

Daphne, your story is— I could talk to you here this whole day. It's so inspiring and so multifaceted. And thank you so much for sharing with my class.

Thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation, and I wish you all, you know, the best of luck. You're, you're, you're really fortunate to have such a wise teacher, um, and, uh, you know, to be able to, um, you know, be in this industry, I think. And, and, um, you know, I wish you all the best of luck, and thank you for your time. Thank you. So I'm going to sign off. I assume that's okay.

Please.

Thank you.

Thank you.