The Achieve Podcast - Pulak and Priyanka Sharmas (Kazmira)

Welcome to another episode of the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs who are building meaningful businesses, shaping their industries, and having an impact. I'm Taylor Baker Baker, your host, and excited to join today with Pollock and Priyanka, the Sharmas, and you can find them at Kazmiratx.com. Now give us the backstory real quick with what you guys have been doing and what you have working here with the niche you guys have developed. How did you get into this space and who are you serving?

Sure. So first of all, thank you for having us on the podcast, Taylor Baker Baker.

Thank you.

So, uh, we started Kazmira back in 2017, and both Priyanka and I, we come from chemical engineering backgrounds, specifically purification technology, purification science. So the industries we were in were in the oil and gas industry Okay. And in the oil and gas industry, you know, we got very— you're used to large-scale systems, right? So we use that experience in our oil and gas industry and dived headfirst into building a large-scale FDA-auditable manufacturing system for the business that we're doing in cannabinoids. And looking at the cannabinoid space itself, it was very obvious early on to us that the industry was missing something fundamental, and that was standardization, right? The market in the, you know, 2017, 2016, 2015 timeframe was the Wild West. There was no quality control, no consistent supply chain. No discipline on manufacturing principles. So we really focused on building that foundation first, and this was the kind of our north star, the fundamental truth that we knew had to be solved. And fast forward to today, we have kind of evolved into a vertically integrated platform. You know, we manufacture the pharmaceutical-grade CBD as an active pharmaceutical ingredient, and then we compound it into a personalized prescription-based medicine through our pharmacy. And ultimately we're serving patients who need clinically guided cannabinoid therapy and physicians who want something that they can actually trust and prescribe with confidence.

I love that, the standardization of that, because now you know it's not the garbage that can get mixed in. With some of the things that are, are not in the legal realms and regulated.

That's right. That's right.

And now with the team right now, how big is the organization?

We probably have 20 people, um, between the manufacturing, um, engineering production side and also what we call our clinical team. So these are medical advisory, nurse practitioners, as well as of course we have the pharmacists from our pharmacy operations. We also have front-end operations, which is our, um, the sales organizations and things like that. So we have a pretty lean team, but because we've invested heavily in automation and our tech stack We're finding that that's, you know, able to, to guide the team to success.

Yeah, those new tools can— you can do twice as much work with the same team.

Yeah, that's right.

It is amazing. Now, what would you say is actually driving growth for the business right now?

Yeah, I think there's one main, um, you know, market dynamic that's occurring in our industry, which is the shift from the retail commoditized CBD to a true prescription and what's the medical models where CBD is being integrated into. The retail market has been so fragmented and inconsistent and this is the 10th year almost of the CBD industry and the whole consumer base and even different stakeholders like regulators and legislators, they're leaning towards forming this as the model for the future for CBD. So that's one of the things that's driving the growth. Another thing, and, you know, Pulak will talk about this more, but we're in an inflection point of telehealth combined with compounded medication coming from pharmacies. And, you know, I tie it even to— it's just real-world data that most pharmaceutical drugs that have been approved, they're tested on a very narrow population. And right now in the US, we have the most diversity that we've had ever, ever, ever in our country's history. And so it actually makes a lot of sense that there is so much need for personalization of these medications, and CBD is able to disrupt that. Market right now?

Yeah, I think if you— so these are all big macro trends, Taylor. If you think about what's happened, if you go back even 15 years, the 3 big things that we see that have really transformed, uh, in our view, healthcare— number 1 is the rapid adoption of EHR and EMR, right? So in 2008, EHRs, electronic health record platforms, only 1 out of 10 clinics or hospitals had them in 2008. In 2016, that number jumped to 90%. Wow. In less than 10 years, right, almost full adoption, which is remarkable. So that really accelerated that, this online, right, having electronic health records instead of paper records, which allows for better patient care. The second big, big macro trend is, as Priyanka mentioned, telemedicine, which was accelerated because of COVID Yep, right. And many states across the country said, hey, this is a vital thing that patient populations need to have access to, specifically populations that are in rural locations, right? So it's become more and more important because those places have very few doctors. A third one is, and it's a back— macro trend, the, the amount of physicians in the United States, the actual providers It's increasing, but at the same time, it's not keeping pace, right? It's just getting harder. They have to go to school for so long, and it's just a very complicated, cumbersome— they're constantly doing paperwork. They're not able to actually do care. So these are all big macro trends that are pretty heavy hitting. The last macro trend we think is really important is the compounded pharmacy model itself, right? With the rise of personalization medicine, it's become so critical that you saw this with GLP-1s where they are compounding it as a personalized medicine. You get, you know, for example, if you want semaglutide, it's 2 milligrams for you and somebody can else get 1.7 milligrams, right? So That's a big, big shift that has been accelerated, just personalized medicine, I would call that. And that the infrastructure of that is compounding pharmacy, right? So we are playing in those, in that component.

That makes sense. And you guys serve all 50 states and nationwide?

Our pharmacy is slowly expanding to serve more states, but right now we're in just a few of them.

Okay.

Yeah.

So now, as you guys, if you look back at your path, what turning points, positive or negative, have molded the way you think about running the organization?

Well, I think the first is the 2018 Farm Bill, where Donald Trump, who was president at that time, signed the Farm Bill and removed hemp from the Controlled Substances Act so that was the, like, fundamentally where the industry had taken off in the US. I think the other thing that also, you know, occurred that, that year was the FDA, you know, commenting on the fact that a Farm Bill, you know, approval of hemp as a crop that could be cultivated does not equal a regulatory pathway. So I think, you know, those things are, you know, sort of the crux of why we are here as an industry 10 years later almost and lack of FDA regulation. That's what's one of the biggest, you know, turning points that have caused our company to keep shifting in the direction of pharmaceutical and standardized products.

Yeah, I think, you know, both things can exist at the same time, Taylor Baker Baker, right? Is on one hand, there's no regulatory, there's so much regulatory ambiguity on cannabinoids that it makes it very difficult for big industry players to want to participate because they need an infrastructure that will give them the right to distribute in all 50 states, right? So especially if you look at CBD to enter as a supplement, they need that absolute assurance that CBD is approved by the FDA as a supplement for them to play in the market. But on the other hand, you can have entrepreneurs that find a way to get product-market fit, and, you know, they're going to keep playing the game until either they're told by regulators that what you're doing is not allowed, or, um, or so disruptive that Hey, the market already exists. The model distribution pathway has been well-defined and you're welcome to enter that pathway should you choose. So for us, we did not want to play the game of whack-a-mole. Okay, we're gonna try CBD as a supplement. We're gonna convert CBD into hemp-derived THC and see where that takes us. No, I think we, again, going back to fundamentals, we understood that you have to build assets for the long term. And we realized very early on that those assets should be leveraged for, you know, scale pharmaceutical products of virtue and not products of vice.

Yes, I like that distinction, right?

That's what we really, really emphasized, um, and now it's starting to bear fruit. But we've had some very dark days. It's now we're starting to see, you know, the, the success come through. But it's, it's been, it's been a long road to stay true to the fundamental that, hey, you know, try to make it towards a pharmaceutical lens.

Mm-hmm. And out of curiosity, my own personal question, are there certain formats as far as distribution that you find are more effective, more accepted, you prefer? You mentioned the edible or taking the oils or the different ways that you process these.

Yeah, right now our pharmacy is also producing an oral sublingual product. So those are known as tinctures. Sort of the, the retail name. But we're also quickly moving into other product formats that are smaller, and they're ingestible as well, but, you know, dissolvable tablets or lozenges. So those are the things that we're focused on now to be able to offer different experiences to patients for CBD.

Oh, that's wonderful. Yeah, I will definitely be keeping tabs on that myself because night and day difference. So you mentioned the very beginning, filtering through and standardization of quality versus, yeah, just some of the garbage that's out there. So it's nice that you're putting that on there. Now, as you guys try to grow and expand, what have been some of the biggest bottlenecks or obstacles that show up and get in the way?

Um, I think one of the things is this industry, even though it's been around, like I keep mentioning, for 10 years, we haven't had the opportunity to work with traditional ancillary players that would have normally been able to participate in this industry, whether it's from a software perspective or whether it's from a technology perspective, engineering or chemistry, analytical.

[Speaker:JOSH] Yeah.

Even to the farming side, they, farmers haven't been able to partner with organizations that they would normally if they're growing something else than hemp. And so as our industry becomes legitimized, a lot of problems that I think are going to be faced by the companies that are going to withstand this regulatory ambiguity now is is hiring people that are able to offer their experience into the space. I would just generally say that people have been locked out of participating in this industry till now.

So a couple of real tangible examples of that, Taylor Baker Baker, that you may not have even considered. You know, we have a medical advisory team on board and they constantly remind us that, hey, you guys have been in the industry for nearly 10 years, but doctors have never been trained on the endocannabinoid system.

Wow.

Yeah, it's not in textbooks. Yeah, right. So we have to create education platforms to get them to understand. Okay, working with our MDs on, okay, what are the exclusionary criteria for CBD? As a prescription medicine, what are the prescribing protocols, all these things that for them, you know, doctors in the United States, they just don't know, right? That's a very tangible example. A second one that we also went through was when we brought on the pharmacists on board, they looked at us of, you want me to compound? I don't know what that is, because they're used to putting bottles, putting pills in bottles.

Yeah. So we had to find pharmacists that were familiar with compounding, and then we had to get them familiar with how to deal with cannabidiol because even as an industry of pharmacists and even in their curriculum, they just haven't had chance to, um, even work with these types of plants and extracts. So we had to transfer that knowledge over. So thankfully we were able to, to find the best fit for our pharmacists, but we've definitely run into that because at a retail pharmacy, they're not familiar with compounding.

Yeah, these are all analog things, you know, digital is a whole different ballgame, right? You have to convince, you have to have education with Facebook and Google and explain to them that, you know, what CBD is, because CBD is— oh gosh, forget it. It's a, it's an awful field to market. And, you know, they, they treat it worse than Schedule 1 substances, or that, that's what they classify it as today. And from a marketing perspective, and from a marketing perspective, right, is, is nearly impossible. I'm sure, you know, you'll have other people on your pod that talk about challenges on marketing for other products. You know, guns, obviously you can't do that, but CBD is pretty high up on that list too. It's very challenging.

I hope I challenge that. Now, when it comes to your messaging, your outreach, your marketing systems, what's been working well and where do you feel the gaps and frustrations?

Yeah.

Well, I think Right now we're able to lean into the credibility behind what we bring as a company, especially in this atmosphere right now where we're approaching a significant reform of our industry, whether it's states putting in new legislation or the federal government is changing the definition of hemp. We're able to leverage all of the assets and infrastructure that we've built to bring that into messaging. But what is still the biggest gap is the education to healthcare providers. As Pulak mentioned, they will tell us themselves that their only, you know, knowledge so far of CBD is that if they see 20 patients in a day, 5 or 6 of them are probably taking CBD, but they're not telling their provider. So just imagine now going from that to having to educate them on not only the endocannabinoid system, but how do you have a clinical observation of a patient that is taking CBD?

Yeah, about the transparency, man. Now, one question I have, kind of shift gears slightly with AI and automations. Where have you guys found ways to utilize it internally? Maybe with your marketing messaging, with the systems? What have you found that works and where do you still see opportunity for that?

Yeah, I think we're still, look, we're very early in our journey, Taylor Baker Baker. You're right. CBD is something that people are very familiar with. So I think that's really— it's been, you know, people have been consuming CBD products for 10 years and that works very well in our favor. They know what they want to use it for, right? Pain, anxiety, those type of issues, chronic pain. But where the novel part is that we are not treating it like a supplement, we're treating it like a medicine, right? It's a prescription product at the end of the day, right? It's not an OTC supplement that you go buy at King Soopers, right? It's, it's actually prescribed by a physician and it's compounded by a pharmacist, uh, personalized just for that patient, right? So that's what's really novel and developing a lot of the clinical workflows in conjunction with our MDs who have real-world experience because they see patients every single day. That is where we believe AI has potential is what they're coming up with on how do you prescribe this safely to a patient How do we marry that with AI tools so that it can help us develop the workflow that would be valuable for a nurse practitioner to know so that, you know, we can also educate and create modules for other medical professionals to be able to prescribe this medication safely and, and effectively.

I love that. That is so good to know how to, to know how to not just self-regulate. Ah, I feel this, I'm just going to do it myself. No, no, this is how you do this intentionally.

That's right. Because we think that that's on the provider side. The, the other very valuable aspect of AI is going to be on the real-world evidence data capturing is once we have, we've started collecting real-world evidence on patients, but once we're able to get a lot more output, then we'll be able to build our own model to see, okay, what is the, be able to have that as real-world evidence that we could potentially submit to like the FDA as an example that, hey, this this product at this dosage for this long has this therapeutic benefit and is improving patient outcomes.

Yeah.

And it very much ties to what is happening with CBD today, where they're talking about CBD being introduced as Medicare Advantage. You know, talk about that a little bit.

You know, introducing something like that to track outcomes, um, of Medicare patients when it's never been available before or even tracked. And so I think those tools that are being offered right now for healthcare specifically for, for AI be very useful there.

Wow.

I could see a lot of applications. That's amazing. Now, when you guys think about your journey and the business, what are you most excited about? The next stages?

Yeah, I see that I see this year as being a reset for the industry in many ways. We get to, we get to have one more shot at delivering the best product to consumers. And now there's regulatory guardrails and there's frameworks and there's acceptance in a different way. And I think we're all responsible in this industry for, for doing that because it's not that often that we get a second shot.

Yeah, I think it's— look, I mean, you know, we again, we come from the engineering background, Taylor, so we apologize if we are sounding, you know, kind of dry. But for us, it's all about, you know, when you are running engineering systems, right? You have one standard, one industry standard that everybody has to conform to. right? In, for example, in dairy production or in oil and gas industry, there's this industry standard that you have to follow. Well, that did not exist because there were no rules.

Yeah. Hemp, in 2018, when the Farm Bill was signed, it was like, it's a 75 to 80 year prohibition of hemp and ended then, right? So to some degree, we're still integrating this back into society.

Yeah, right. Right. People are still finding their footing and there's still so much, honestly, meat on the bones for cannabinoids, right? With rescheduling lingering in the horizon for botanical cannabis. As well as just how do we integrate a molecule like this into healthcare. So what we see this is, this is a new industry standard that's being set.

Mm-hmm.

And it should lift all boats.

Yeah.

A lot of businesses won't make it. But that is just— that is how it works.

And it's a fundamental shift.

Yeah, it's a fundamental shift in how the industry has operated so far.

And so there will be consequences of that.

Yeah, there will be fallout.

And consequence of that is that patients across the US will lose access to products that they thought were just hemp, but they were medical cannabis.

Gotcha.

So what is the responsibility of the industry to start filling those gaps? I think we have one solution. For that. But, but that's, you know, that's where we're most looking forward to, is there's, there's excitement from all different people in the supply chain of how we're going to do this right. We look forward to being a part of that.

That's awesome. Now, when you guys look at your own personal journeys, the wins, the mistakes, what lessons stand out to you, and what do you wish you understood sooner?

Gosh, I mean You know, I don't want to sound like we're doing a TED Talk. I think the biggest lesson for us, because we've been at this for nearly 10 years now, is a lot of times, Taylor Baker Baker, we've been told, you know, go, go do this, chase this next hype, or chase this next thing that is going to fundamentally make your business better, or, or, you know, shiny object syndrome, let's call it. Yeah, there's been a lot of shiny object syndrome, uh, and for us the biggest lesson has been focus, um, and that was build the infrastructure, the manufacturing capability, making sure that we we are acting from a position of, you know, helping cannabinoids move towards virtue and not vice, and keeping that North Star, keeping focus on that vision instead of chasing the next shiny object. That is so easy to do. It really is.

So easy.

So easy.

No, and in terms of what lessons stand out, um, and you wish you had understood earlier, can probably offer some, some things there. What I think one of the, one of the lessons that it, it keeps coming back, um, you know, how, how you network and, and how intentional you should be about that if you're an entrepreneur. You know, you'd be amazed at how many people you end up working with, and it's somebody you met 3 years ago.

Yeah.

Or it's somebody that you reached out to on LinkedIn 5 years ago that just happens to know somebody that can help with this thing that you're dealing with. There's so many people that I'm connecting with now that I connected with 9 or 10 years ago, just because I am in healthcare now and I wasn't before. But just staying in touch is, is super, super important. I would say that's one of the biggest lessons that, that's, that stand out to me.

Well, and so never say no to a meeting.

No, should never say no.

Never say no to a meeting. That I would say both her and I, you know, maybe didn't understand earlier, but now, my goodness, I mean, just being curious and not assuming that you have everything figured out, always taking a meeting, just never know what you're going to learn and what serendipity can allow to happen.

Yes, it's a pretty small world.

Pretty— it really is. That's exactly right. That's so true.

Wow. So last question. If you guys had to pick one constraint to focus on and solve over the next 90 days, what would it be?

One constraint?

Yeah.

That's a, that's a good question. I, I think that the one, the constraint is something maybe I'm dealing with personally, which is how quickly these AI tools are getting updated. I thought I was doing the needful by every 3 months dedicating a day to learning about Claude Pro or learning about ChatGPT or Gemini, but the rate that they're getting updated and what you can unlock, it's kind of bothering me that there isn't a class or something that I can take because I guess I'm just used to that. Okay, get me into a class. But that's definitely a constraint is like, where do you find that information? So that you can arm yourself with, with the data that you need to, to make decisions, not feel like you're missing a piece of the puzzle.

I love that. That is so good. That is so good.

Pollock, any, anything you want to add to that?

I think for me, Taylor, you know, we're building a, uh, we're building a telemedicine platform. And for us, how do we focus on a very seamless patient experience that has been missing in cannabinoids for a very long time? I mean, since the beginning, that I would say is a big problem that we're really trying to solve.

I can see that. Well, thank you so much for coming on. And sharing your story and giving more clarity to this questionable, to me, clear area. Like the need is there, the value, it's a great service, great product. It just has to be regulated properly so it doesn't get abused. As you've mentioned multiple times, going from vice to virtue. I love that concept. Like that is beautiful. And for those who want to reach out— Say what?

That's trademarked.

All right, we'll make sure. That's it. So vice to virtue, there you go. You should get t-shirts and hats. I would wear them. I would definitely rock that. And so LinkedIn obviously is a good place to find you guys. Yeah. Um, at the website, anywhere else you want to send them?

I think if folks are interested, uh, the telemedicine platform, you know, we We do. We— it's not ready yet, but it will be close. We're thinking by May 1st.

Yeah, you can stay tuned for updates on that.

Yeah, maybe we can do another, another interview or something like that if you're interested.

Absolutely. Absolutely. But until then, Kazmiratx.com.

Yes.

Yep. And so reach out at the Sharmas and the team and they will help you with any questions you had. If you enjoy this episode, share it with a friend, with a a colleague. And thank you to today's sponsors of the episode, Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executive leadership for growing businesses. And so again, if you enjoyed the podcast, share it with an enthusiast, share it with somebody who has questions in the area, and reach out and get those questions answered. And we'll see you in the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.