WSO Podcast | E105: McKinsey Health Specialist to Lazard IB to BioPharma VC

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In this episode, Julie shares her winding path from studying Biomedical Ethics at Cornell to getting her MBA at Columbia, to joining McKinsey as a health specialist to her stint in investment banking at Lazard as an associate. Listen to hear about her triumphs and struggles as she navigated a move to London to join the venture arm of a large biopharma company to her move back to the states five years later, all while starting a family.

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WSO Podcast (Episode 105) Transcript:

 

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:00:06] Hello and welcome. I'm Patrick Curtis, your host and chief monkey, and this is the Wall Street Oasis podcast. Join me as I talk to some of the community's most successful and inspirational members to gain valuable insight into different career paths and life in general. Let's get to it. In this episode, Julie shares her winding path from studying biomedical ethics at Cornell to getting her MBA at Columbia to joining McKinsey as a health specialist to her stint in investment banking at Lazard as an associate. Listen to hear about her triumphs and struggles as she navigated to move to London to join the venture arm of a large biopharma company to her move back to the states five years later, all while starting a family. Enjoy. Julie, thanks so much for joining the Wall Street Voices podcast.

Julie: [00:01:00] My pleasure. So we put this together.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:01:02] It'd be awesome if you could just give the listeners a short summary of your bio.

Julie: [00:01:07] Sure. I consider myself a health care expert business person, primarily, but with a long interest in health care since before college. Also known as a, you know, not a doctor, but like to play one on TV and at home, I had always had an interest in business and medicine and started at Cornell with a major in biomedical ethics, then went on to work for companies that combine. The two went to business school at Columbia and then worked for McKinsey as a consultant really specializing in health care. They had a specialist track and worked. I was very fortunate to work with a partner who had a lot of work in the health care space, particularly with pharmaceutical companies. He left McKinsey to go to Lazard and start a health care practice or build upon a very nascent one, so I went to work with him. That was a great move for a variety of reasons, and I think not everybody suits this sort of investment banking culture or the consulting culture. But for me, it was a very good move and for him as well. He's now co-chairman of Lazard and remains a very good friend to me, and the family left there was very fortunate that they had started a venture group at Lazard. So I spent a year kind of dipping my toe in the water because I'd always had an itch for doing something in biotech and startups and then left there to run a dotcom for a year in London out of SoftBank Incubator and then left their missing health care. And so I went to the wellcome Trust and help them organize and invest in health care in a more systematic way. The wellcome Trust is a very active investor. Twenty six billion pounds under management at the time that I was there and I spent 10 years building up the health care investment practice for them, doing direct investments into startup companies and investing in funds as well.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:03:17] So and you're there for a while, you had a long run there in London.

Julie: [00:03:21] Yes, 10 years and then came back to the U.S. and worked at two health care information startups where I was a co-founder and really had a blast. So now I'm on my third, more entrepreneurial venture, and I'm happy to talk about that.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:03:36] Awesome. Let's go all the way back before we get there all the way to undergrad. And so you said you were always interested in health care, but was was consulting ever on the horizon? Did you ever think, Oh, you know, McKinsey, this is incredible, if I could get there? Or was it something more that you just kind of happened upon after graduation?

Julie:  [00:03:53] That was more after graduation and after a series of consulting experiences, one right out of college with the Wilkerson Group. The Wilkerson Group was a small consulting firm. They consult. They called themselves the McKinsey of health care. And at the time, I grew up in a family where my, my mother was an education, had been a teacher and administrator, and my father was more entrepreneurial in the insurance sector and we didn't really rub elbows with people who worked at places like McKinsey. So we I didn't know anything about that end of the business world. I didn't have friends or family who had MBAs. So most of them were more from doctors and lawyers sectors and had more professional track careers.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:04:44] So. So your first few years at a school like you're in your majoring in biomedical ethics. What's your first few roles at a school or was there or did you go straight to the MBA? Pretty fast.

Julie: [00:04:55] Well, so I was I was able to get a job over the summer with a company that specialized in an aspect of health care. They were based out of New Haven and formed based on research that was done at Yale on how to reimburse for health care. And that company was very small niche player that did coding for health care procedures. And so they published these books, which we still rely on very heavily. So I was getting to know how health care works and in terms of mechanics and went from there to the Wilkerson Group at right out of college. And that was sort of the as I described it, they coined that McKinsey of health care and learned a little bit about business.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:05:42] Was there a mentor that was like, You should definitely go get an MBA?

Julie: [00:05:46] No. In fact, there was quite the opposite. So John Wilkerson, who ran the Wilkerson Group and happened to also be Cornell and was very much a mentor to me and encouraged me to do some work while I was while I was working there for the company at a corporate level, helping with PR. Because while we served clients primarily pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device companies in terms of strategy and market research, which could get very technical, we as a firm needed to elevate our reputation. And so I periodically would be assigned to do research that would get published either in the news or maybe in a publication we did. We did collaborative publications with banks and accounting firms that like to do overviews of the biotech sector, for example. And I did a report for The Wall Street Journal, which was sort of the anatomy of a hospital bill, and 20 years later, they did the same article with the same research, and it's still looks insane. But that was really the experience base, so it was a little bit broader than just serving clients. I was very much in love with health care, but wanted to get an MBA because I felt that I needed more credibility in the business world. So I went to Columbia and continued to work for the Wilkerson Group on a part time basis because they were in Manhattan, which was really partly what drove my decision to go to Columbia. Then, while I was there, just kind of got through and

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:07:27] You partly financing your MBA with the will with it

Julie: [00:07:31] As well. Yeah, I was trying. Yeah, it was a combination of expensive loans and jobs piecing it all together. And in fact, I had explored the executive MBA option, which was a popular thing at NYU and Columbia, offered one as well. But it was really popular for the banks, which had lots of money to pay for people to get an MBA, but this is a relatively small consulting firm at the time. They eventually were sold to IBM, but that firm was in a position to pay for me to get an MBA. And in fact, the executive MBA program was double the price for really no reason other than the luxury of being able to take night classes, which didn't really appeal anyway. So they were very flexible. I got to sort of keep a hand in what was happening in industry and make some money. And when I left, went to work for the biotech division of Johnson and Johnson as an intern, first for a summer and then kind of extended that into a job. And ultimately after that got a job at a startup biotech company, which was what I really felt.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:08:40] This is right out of Columbia. This is your MBA.

Julie: [00:08:42] Yeah, yeah. So this is a fun story for for those who are exploring. I had an excellent professor, Professor Lowe at Columbia, who taught strategy, and I spoke to him. You know, you can just picture this right. We're in a sort of library ish setting with big leather chairs at the business school, and I said, I'm not really sure I should go to this biotech startup. I mean, they have some venture money. It's their only three people working there and some R&D based in Israel. I could go work for Johnson and Johnson, continue this role that I had as an intern and start on a management training path. What do you think? And his advice was, Well, what's the worst thing that happens if you take the risk of your job, you could be back. You're talking to me about the next thing, but at least you would have tried. And so he really encouraged me to go for that, which I did six or eight months later out of desperation because the person I worked for was really challenging. I decided that maybe I could do something else, and I responded to an ad in the Wall Street Journal for a job for health care specialist at McKinsey.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:10:06] Interesting. So you found the ads through the Wall Street Journal? Yes. That's awesome. And so you responded to an ad there and tell me what that process was like. Where so first off, that it sounds like it was a startup with three people. You just don't never know what you're going to get. It could be a dream job and skyrocketed career and everything. Or it can be a nightmare where you don't know what the person is really like once you start working with them. And so, yeah, we've all had those. Yeah, so you  end up applying to this, this health care specialist. What is this role and how did they sell it to you? And what was the interview process like to get into McKinsey?

Julie:  [00:10:46] Well, it turned out that there was just a really good fit between what I had done, primarily at the Wilkerson Group and after that, you know, there was very little in between other than business school and what they wanted. They were looking for someone in the specialist role in that track that they have at McKinsey, which I'm sure has changed quite a bit since then. They have specialists in different industries who provide guidance to teams that are serving clients. They have to remain somewhat neutral, but they also have to have mastery over the subject matter. The sort of industry dynamics and they kind of act like a tutor because McKinsey philosophy was to hire people with what they called raw smarts. And sometimes those people were rocket scientists, literally and sometimes physicians. But sometimes they were just very bright, motivated Harvard MBAs who knew absolutely nothing about the client that they were going to serve. So you would provide primers. And I worked with a small team, including a specialized librarian and a researcher in Switzerland, and we would put together educational materials both for a specific client or situation and for the firm in general, and we would run twice a year. We run international training sessions for people who like doing health care or had a lot of health care clients.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:12:12] So these types of roles, specialist roles within the the consultant large consulting companies are they typically is there one for like how many is there a lot of these roles or are they very kind of they're only like a handful of of

Julie:  [00:12:25] Like, you know, a handful, but they have some infrastructure

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:12:30] Like that or.

Julie: [00:12:30] Yeah, I couldn't. I couldn't put a number on it, but it's probably 20 to 30. It just depends on the industry, too. But people have taken on. I think as as the world has become more complex, people have specialized more because you need a certain amount of at least language to go into a client and they don't want to waste their time teaching you about their industry, right? So or their situation and, you know, extend from an R&D strategy to a sales force strategy. So you could really be all over the map, even just within health care. And I was only in the pharma, biotech and medical device sector as opposed to payer provider, which had a different team and a different specialist. I had to come, you know, it was a fantastic experience, despite the fact that when I arrived there, I discovered that the specialist track was also called the mommy track. And there was really OK. Yes, there was some sort of, you know, status issue there, but you

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:13:37] Weren't you weren't a strategy consultant. You were just a specialist that would come in and it was it wasn't considered like you're not client facing.

Julie: [00:13:45] Right, exactly. Yeah. So there was that issue. But because of the fact that a lot of people had transitioned into specialist role for lifestyle reasons, there were a lot of people who are highly respected in a client facing role who had then shifted into a support role or a specialist role, and some of them maintain client facing experience at times. I said that I wanted more client facing experience, so I got a little bit along the way, but I benefited from the rigour of how things are done there and made some amazing connections, which I still I still benefit from today. So the two startups that I worked at, most recently or when I returned from London, one of them was run by the head of the health care practice at McKinsey when I was there. Hmm. His name is Norman Selby, and just a couple of years ago, he's spun out a company from Sloan-Kettering and called and asked me to help him with the strategy and business planning and the pitch for that company to raise money. And that was a very, very hip fundraising for Page II, which is in the AI space in computational pathology. So so I'm still friendly with Norman. And he obviously had maintained some respect for me along the way, even though I was a specialist. So at the end of the day, it worked out just fine. But I think it's always challenging to manage your own ego in these situations. I don't, you know, it's very competitive and very lockstep to get a job at McKinsey. As a consultant straight from business school at the time, they recruited from a fairly narrow subset of of schools and kinds of individuals, so I probably would never have been considered in that track. And. This was an amazing experience away in, and I really did have a very deep understanding of how to how to do research and what the dynamics were in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry in particular that that I was able to share and leverage so. So it was it worked out.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:16:08] So your transition. Then three years later, after joining McKinsey to Lazard, this was mostly because you're your direct boss went and was starting a practice there

Julie: [00:16:17] For, well, he wasn't my boss in the sense that he was just one of many consultants who had a lot of engagements in the industry. So he was at at a senior level and able to specialize and had relationships in an industry which he wanted to leverage. And at that time, I think he was trying to progress his career and debated what the right move was and found that there was a place for him to build something. He has a very entrepreneurial bent. He worked starting up some biotech enterprises before and has an engineering background, and I think it was just a great move for him personally. And I like the idea of doing something else a little bit challenging. I was looking for something that I wasn't looking for the lifetime career as a specialist at McKinsey. That was the beginning. So for me, this was a chance to learn much more about other aspects of of the industry, which are really fundamental to their growth. I mean, you can't finance a company. You can't grow without finance.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:17:23] So you're coming into you're coming to Lazard. Tell me your role. What was what was expected to you coming, making that transition from McKinsey to Lazard? And what was your role in that group? Where you doing investment banking or were you doing research, support, client support? I'd love to hear what you did there.

Julie: [00:17:39] Well, because I had an MBA from Columbia, I was treated like any other associate that was brought in as an associate and did training. Their program was not as formal as it might be at a Goldman Sachs. So because it's a relatively small bank, and so I learned from people around me, I did some training, I took the required regulatory.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:18:07] Was it really tough to finance background? I mean, you had your finance MBA, but it's very different, right from the real world, right?

Julie: [00:18:14] It's completely different. But you know, I learned a lot along the way, and I think there's it's like any other profession. There's a language that you have to learn. And once you get that, if you have the right encouragement, it's not that hard.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:18:35] What about the lifestyle change? Because health care specialists, you said, was considered a more relaxed and then going not just from a consulting to banking, but supposedly better lifestyle section of consulting, right? The grueling hours of investment banking, especially an associate level where you don't have the technical background you're trying to manage unless you're trying to manage up to your VP's and ends. I mean, I can't even imagine that that culture or that culture shock or that just rigor that you had to go through. Can you tell me about that transition and how you even survived as long as you did?

Julie: [00:19:08] Yeah. You know what, I think I always like working hard. Maybe one of the things that that made my experience at McKinsey a positive one was that I really didn't mind working all hours and being highly responsive to people.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:19:23] You didn't treat the specialist job as if some sort of you really put in long hours anyway. So it wasn't as dramatic a transition to Lazard.

Julie: [00:19:31] Right? Well, I think that's correct. And also my peer group was more the consultants. So my friends at McKinsey were people who were on the consulting track. Traveling a lot, had a really intensive lifestyle, and I wanted to sort of meet them where they were. And so I would respond at any time of day, and I kind of enjoy doing that. I also spent a lot of time and energy. I was loved the information technology space, and it was at a time just to crack you up when they were adopting Lotus notes. Okay. So yeah, and so one of the things that I sort of took upon myself was to become more sophisticated about how we accessed and deployed information given the technology backbone we had at McKinsey. And it was really very, you know, it was very evolved because it was McKinsey and that was just how they operated. They're very well organized in terms of collecting and disseminating information across an international enterprise. So I kind of got spoiled and had a really high standard then for how to do that. And there aren't a lot of companies out there that do that as well as they did. Now it's a lot easier because of technology, but. That was kind of they always had that vision in mind, which I thought was really cool, so bizarre. They had plenty of infrastructure too is a little bit smaller. Yeah, yeah. And it wasn't as relevant in terms of work style, lifestyle. You know, we were a small team where there were just a handful of us. We worked very closely together. I did work from the sort of analyst level all the way up. It was kind of being me and Steve at the very beginning. And so we would just work til all hours when we needed to.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:21:19] And did you have an analyst under you right away or is it were you forced to do all the modeling and everything?

Julie: [00:21:26] I did a lot myself, and then I worked with analysts who were much better at the technical analysis piece or had done it a lot and learned from them because I needed to be able to check work. And yeah, I was I was able to rely on them, but I did have to do quite a bit myself. Yeah. And not all of it came naturally to me. I got to tell you that that was challenging.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:21:54] Yeah, not for me as well. And when I started, I came from a liberal arts background and I had no accounting anything. So it was a six months of pain for me when I started. So in terms of the transition, so it sounds like you had a few great years, you did. You had some great deals that you worked with in the health care space. You had some transactions that you got under your belt, sounds like. Yeah. So what prompted in ninety nine the move out to London?

Julie: [00:22:27] Let's see, well, you know, it had this sort of itch to do something more startup like and I had just gotten married, and so I'd spent a few months or just under a year working with the venture group that had gotten started at Lazard. So I, you know, I'd kind of asked Steve, Do you mind if I go do this for a little bit and try it out? And he at that time, the group had evolved quite a lot. And so I I tried that. It was really interesting. It was the dotcom boom moment. Yeah. And I learned from a very experienced partner and then got married right around that time and moved to London because we had an opportunity to do that. My husband had an opportunity to go to go to London with his firm, and it sounded like, what was he doing? A great thing to do. So he was at Goldman, actually in real estate. So we both sort of came up from a specialized kind of passion in a particular field. We were neither one of us with, you know, banker all the way kind of a person. Yeah. And so he had always like traveling. I love to travel. And we said, this sounds like a great opportunity. Let's go do this now. It's a great way to start a marriage. No family know mucking around. Yeah, really alone, right? We travelled all over. I talked to some friends who had been doing a lot of web design in New York from one of the firms that I had met during the course of my work at Lazard in their venture group, which was not health care focused at all. And so I got introduced to some people in London and ultimately to SoftBank's incubator. So they were starting up an incubator to roll out schemes that had been successful in the U.S. that they wanted to roll out in Europe. And they had this sort of cookie cutter approach, which made no sense in some industries and a lot of sense in others. And I was recruited to run law firm, which was Wasserstein Pirelli's American lawyer media version. And that was it was a wild ride. That model was based on content that was coming from American lawyer media, so the investor owner owned all that content. It was produced and published in journals in the New York Law Journal and the law journals for thirty eight states or something and siphoned into a website. So they wanted me to recreate that, but we had no content. So we built a news team and legal, hired legal news reporters, built a strategy around it, tried to syndicate it and built up relationships with some other content players in Europe.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:25:30] So this is early. This is like early 2000 when you were doing all this. Yeah. So then I mean, when did I'm trying to remember back? Was it like, Oh, one when everything started falling apart and tell me how you were, you were. It sounds like you were pretty heavily involved, even though this was at the head of health care investments. Or this was now a different thing before you.

Julie: [00:25:49] You were in London just before then. It was just one year. And yeah, it was a crazy, incredible experience. I kind of just showed up throughout the strategy how to plan for $250000 a quarter. We were going to spend and it was probably pounds. And we I worked with the head of the enterprise for the U.S. and we tried to build something where there was nothing before. And ultimately, I kind of went back to the CEO and said, This isn't going to work. The model doesn't work. You can't make enough money to keep it afloat.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:26:30] You know, advertising isn't going. Yeah, to pay for all the reporters and everything in the production.

Julie: [00:26:36] Yeah, yeah. And he said, great. I think I agree with you. And we've been exploring in the U.S. providing legal software online as on an ASP based platform. And I said great. And he said, I think we'll acquire a business in that area and morph the U.K. enterprise to be that kind of a business as well. And so I wrote to the head of the Ministry of Science and Health in the U.K. and said, I'd like to work for an organization like the Wellcome Trust. He was Lord Sainsbury and he was a Columbia business school grad and out of the, you know, I don't know where I got the idea, but the U.K. is a lot smaller than the U.S. I wrote him this letter. And I got a call in an invitation to meet with the head of investments at the Wellcome Trust and it was a really interesting I thought it was pretty interesting path, but what happened was the last work I had done at Lazard happened to be on the merger of Wellcome, Glaxo, Welcome and SmithKline. When when the companies merged, so I really knew those portfolios back and forth. So I understood every drug in development, what the cost structure looked like, how they were going to keep their eps up. I had enough fluency in that particular organization to really speak about it. And the head of investments at Welkom was dealing with the trustees trying to decide how to reallocate their portfolio, and they were thinking about how they were somewhat overweight in terms of welcome stock because it was part of the name, so they never wanted to sell welcome. It might signal something that they didn't want to signal. But when the merger was announced, the the name welcome was dropped from the company. It became GlaxoSmithKline. Yeah. So I mean, it's it's funny how these things get get going, but we started with a conversation. He asked me if I could help him evaluate the prospects for the the stock over the next couple of years. They're very long term focused, but and they don't want to do anything dramatic, and they didn't want to hurt the share price of the company, but they wanted to do the right thing for the Wellcome Trust, for the endowment. Yeah. So I did essentially a buy side assignment, and I worked very closely with this gentleman, Gary Steinberg, who was absolutely lovely and he and I presented to the trustees of the Wellcome Trust a recommendation to sell down the shares, and it was a right move. I looked like a genius. The stock price was never as high as it was at the time that I made that call, so it just said it was. It just happened to go in the right direction for them, and I also got sort of a window into what they were doing in terms of investment strategy.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:29:34] So you were brought in. So yeah, you were brought in almost like, like you said, a buy site engagement where you were responsible of. So the merger had already happened with glasses. So welcome was brought into that fold, but the name was dropped. So now there was almost like an ability to go sell some of those assets without it hurting the overall entity. Is that was that?

Julie: [00:29:55] Exactly. So the Wellcome Trusts base endowment was it was formed out of Welkom plc when it was a company taken public. So when they it was the Wellcome Trust actually that sold those shares into the public domain to create the public company Welcome plc, that company became Glaxo welcome and then GlaxoSmithKline. And it had just been, you know, a couple and

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:30:24] It was more was it more earlier? Was it focused more early stage life science type investments

Julie: [00:30:30] Or it was a combination. They had a pipeline of drugs in development, not preclinical, really, mostly clinical stage assets and a different therapeutic areas. And there was I think it was pretty transparent to me and I think to many analysts that they were going to be in a mode where there wasn't a lot of opportunity for growth in the existing portfolio and that in order to maintain their EPS growth, they would have to reorganize. They might be selling down some of their manufacturing plants and things like that, a lot of which happened.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:31:08] And I I'm reading here on your LinkedIn that you built a portfolio of 250 million in health care direct investments. So when was that so you came in? You helped kind of sell off some of the assets and then it

Julie: [00:31:19] Was basically a year of, you know, what's this stock worth? How should we manage it? We spoke to investment bankers about what a sell them process might look like. They approach Glaxo SmithKline to talk about a share buyback program or, you know, drip related transaction where we might structure a way to sell back the shares to them so that it wouldn't have a dramatic effect on the share price. And while I was there and I was really just doing that as a consulting engagement, you know, got to know the investment team. There were only about a dozen people there. They were all generalists. And yet they had significant stakes in a number of venture funds that were health care focused, and they had a portfolio of maybe 10 or so companies that they'd been asked to invest in as a venture investor. But they didn't really do any diligence. They just relied on their relationships with those investors and a lot of really high profile health care investors. So groups like Health Care Ventures and Ben Rock and Benchmark and Sequoia, who do some health care really prominent groups that knew a lot and have been pretty successful, but they weren't really in the business of. Making our portfolio look better and on occasion, and I think every venture investor will attest to this. You just need to get some more capital around the table when you have to do a refinancing or, you know, a down round. You might call upon the people who are your LPs and have some extra capital to help keep those programs going. If you think that if you don't want to kill them. Yeah. So that was where we were. We were contributing a little bit of capital. It wasn't moving the needle one way or the other, but I had suggested maybe we try to systematize that just because the Wellcome Trust is a medical research foundation. So while we were only a dozen people, there were 600 people doing making decisions about medical research grants that were really profound and had an impact on basic science, research and medicine. So they had experts all over the world in every subject area. And so I thought maybe we could tap into that. So I used that as a way to kind of field new ideas, diligence opportunities that were coming to us and just to systematize what we had. And with that, of course, came across a lot more opportunities for us to invest, one of which was founding a company straight out of Johns Hopkins, which was really successful and a lot of fun.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:34:03] That's awesome. Sounds like a wild ride. So you were in London this entire time, so almost 10 years.

Julie: [00:34:08] I was in London for five and then back in New York for the other five. Working just for them. Just for them.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:34:13] Very cool. And so when you came back to New York, was there a reason you wanted to get back? I mean, I think being in London, you're originally from the U.S., right? So maybe just want to get home closer to family. You had enough time alone with your husband where I was like, OK, now we've got to get close to family there.

Julie: [00:34:28] Done that. Yeah, we had had we had two kids while we were there and we travelled all over, some with them, some before. And my father unfortunately was really sick. He had lung cancer and it was it was, you know, it was a good time to be back for my husband professionally because I think at some point you need to make a decision in your career about the relationships that you're building and whether you want to build those relationships long term in Europe or the U.S.. And I think he felt that it was it was time for him and it was also for me personally. It was it was a good time. Most of our investments at the Wellcome Trust and most of the funds that we were LPs in were based in the U.S. anyway, so it didn't really disrupt my work, although I think one of the things we wanted to focus on is transitions. It was a lot harder and I appreciate this now to kind of stay in the flow when you're not part of an office or an entity. So that was a bit challenging.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:35:33] What do you what do you mean by that specifically? So like when you're not, when you're meeting, when you're over here in New York and more people are there, it is hard to stay up to date or

Julie: [00:35:43] Yeah, even though the people that I worked with, I had two analysts working with me at the Wellcome Trust, so I sort of had to coordinate with them. They were staying in the U.K., but I wasn't as much part of the flow of information, certainly locally. I didn't have as much face time. And I think professionally, if I wanted to maintain or really make the most out of it, I would have needed to be in London, maybe a week a month. But I had two little kids. Yeah, and I was about to have a third. And so it was not going to work for me in that regard. I have to say, you know, I chuckle at the idea was just was kicking around an idea with a friend of mine who's the chief medical officer for Kura Oncology, a very successful young biotech company. Mm hmm. And she's been a friend of mine since college. She's navigated medicine. She has an M.D., and she has navigated a beautiful career for herself and and yet her the thorn in her side is that she's viewed as technical, and she wishes that she could be viewed more as an executive. And I said, Well, you know, it's challenging to do everything right. I was very fortunate that I was able to work very much independently and I had an office, but I had a ton of autonomy. I was basically my own boss, so I was able to raise kids and be there for them and very involved. My husband's job involved some travel and a lot of time demand, so one of us was going to be, you know, on and

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:37:28] You have any help with nannies at all. Or I say with three.

Julie: [00:37:32] I said, yes, I had 10 years with the best nanny in the face of the Earth, who remains like family. We always joke that she's the family. We never had, but she really is family, and now my oldest son babysits for her baby. That's awesome. So yeah, but she was she was everything and really made things happen. It was very fluid because of her, but I think I ultimately, I think you make a trade off, whether it's conscious or not, there are a lot of demands on your time. I probably would have benefited from doing more networking and perhaps being more aggressive about transitioning, either from the Wellcome Trust to an established venture fund or corporate VC or something like that in terms of career path. But I was very interested in taking on an operating role. And I also really like the healthcare.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:38:33] Also, though, I mean, you had just come back, you know, you were back for five years, but you had come back. You had a good like you said, the autonomy is a big deal when you have young kids. It's a great it's a really big deal like I know, because if I didn't have this autonomy there, we would be really. We'd be in deep trouble. Like my wife has to go in and she's a doctor. And so she's going in all the time. Not now, but she was. And that flexibility of me being at home is just huge. So, yeah, I can imagine.

Julie: [00:39:03] So speaking of physicians, I think it's a really good comparison. When you're a physician or you have a profession that you're able to provide a service with, your value is pretty constant, you know, as long as you maintain your credentials. But for me, I felt at the time I'd really nailed it. I was able to manage a career and a family. And it's sort of like, nailed it. But now what? Because coming out of that, you know, I phased out after five years in the U.S. because there was somebody in London who had a lot of he was primarily responsible for the venture capital relationships. And so we overlapped a lot and

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:39:50] He was there. The great financial crisis that happened. You're not there. So yeah,

Julie:  [00:39:55] Exactly. I mean, it was kind of inevitable.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:39:58] Yeah, you can see that right.

Julie: [00:40:00] And so even though it was a great gig, it was, you know, it had its time. And so I had been a bit spoiled. And I, if I could do it again, I think I would have been. I would have benefited from having somebody with my with some of my experience or some similar kind of path to guide me about where to spend time, who to network with, how to how to think about what, what skills I want to keep up or what networks to keep up so that I could maintain my expertise in a way that I would be able to leverage that into a new position. Mm hmm. And what do you think

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:40:42] Those were for you? Looking back, if you had, what do you feel like you wish you had kind of kept up more besides the networking with certain people? Is there certain skills like actually the modeling and that type of stuff? Or do you feel like that wasn't really useful at the senior level at this point?

Julie: [00:40:55] Well, it was always very powerful to have a command of what was happening in terms of research trends in in science and medicine. So in the areas that I was interested in, there was probably some reading, maybe a few scientific conferences I could have gone to. I could have more aggressively spent time with some of the technology transfer people that I had come to know at Hopkins, at Cornell, where I had a relationship. And I think I would have stayed more maybe involved in some way as an advisor to a fund or at least maintained a little bit more closely relationships on a friendly basis with some of the people who were active investors in the sector so that I would just be in the know about what the transfer and that. And there are fads. I mean, right now, it's all about rare disease, and it's not necessarily the right move. I think venture investors are a little lemming like and I do also have to confess I was I was afraid to jump right into venture capital from the work that I had done, in part because I didn't have faith that. That all of those were great decisions that venture capitalists were out there making. It is dominated by men. There are a few wonderful women that I'd met along the way and I felt that in many cases their involvement with somewhat superficial and I really liked the sort of digging in deeper with each of the operating companies that I worked with. And I think when I speak to some people now about venture, there is a sense that investors make their money on sort of the beginning aspect, not necessarily picking the right, picking the winners for the long term and developing products to change people's lives. It's about picking the one that you can turn into a tech play and get a great IPO valuation for and then get out. Yeah. And that, you know, it's easy to to criticize, but there is

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:43:19] Quite I think that's why do you think that's happened, do you think? Do you think it's just the way that unit economics work and being like everything has to go to the software and Texas Tech play or the big data or A.I. every day AI or big data or.

Julie: [00:43:33] Right? Well, I mean, I think I am big data are very powerful tools, so I'm all for that. I just think, you know, they're always going to be tremendous pressure on generating returns. And in biotech, the returns take too long. And so the model doesn't really work for investors unless, I mean, for example, the company that we founded out of Hopkins, I got it got sold 15 years after we started that. So, yes, it was successful. But is that really what the investors wanted?

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:44:04] I don't know. What was their IRR? I'll tell you. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it depends. But yeah, no, I hear what you're saying. It's it's long incubation period.

Julie: [00:44:13] It can be right. And that was exceptional because it was just us and one other investors. So the return was spectacular, but it was, you know, we invested. Twenty six million dollars in the company, returned a valuation of over seven hundred million when it was bought. But it was like, I mean, that doesn't happen every day. And so many of these projects don't evolve as planned. And the venture model, as I said, it doesn't really work well for biotech. It works extremely well for consumer based products and tech where you can. You can at least visualize revenue sometime in the in the next, you know, within the time frame of returning capital to your to your investors. So one colleague of mine that I worked with at the Wellcome Trust went on to a very successful career in investing. And she was a GI and then is now starting her own fund. And her investment area is is in a field basically where they use technology to accelerate drug discovery and drug development. So there are a lot of ways to use technology in that, and the customers are pharma and biotech companies who have lots of capital and want to return faster so they can use this technology. So that makes much more sense for investors. So I think it was a combination of it's a challenging sector. There's lots of pressure to return capital or at least prove some value sooner rather than later, so people will find ways to do that even if it's not the end game question.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:45:55] Aren't there certain types of funds for like biotech? And I'm just not educated enough in B.C., where, like the life cycles of the funds or the capital, hold periods are just much longer or no,

Julie:  [00:46:07] Not really familiar with any. I think mostly these funds diversified into the two different sectors for that purpose, but I think it's always remained a challenge. So in the sector, funds morphed toward later stage or more consumer focused or OTC focused products, or there was a trend toward medical devices, then a trend away from medical devices because they're on a shorter regulatory path. So we've been trying different ways around it. But mostly what's happened is the pharmaceutical industry drives most of that, the cost of innovation. But they don't want to take on so much risk. So they want they don't want to license something until it's been developed to the point where they're fairly certain it's not going to kill anyone. And that really, hopefully it's going to work. But there's so there's really a gap in funding, really good early stage ideas out of academia, just mostly where they come from. What's happened in the industry now, just sort of a side story is the venture funds that have been really active and successful in health care have started sort of these skunkworks operations where they do very early stage founding of companies. So they have some of their own staff or people that are part of their immediate network. They license right out of academia and try to get programs funded and started internally. So flagships started flagship pioneering third rock has a group that does that. Atlas has been doing this for some time. I think it's not obvious that returns are so easy to get in in these projects, and I think they are part of the way towards solving the problem and

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:47:55] The problem being the just the gap in funding from the early stage of academia to something that's from the Big Pharma not even touching that stuff because it's just too far fetched.

Julie: [00:48:06] Yeah. And that it's a really inefficient model for funding these projects. So this kind of gets to what I'm doing now.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:48:12] But yeah, so yeah, tell us, tell the listeners what you're doing now and why and what's the value? I thought it was fascinating when you told me.

Julie: [00:48:20] Oh, great. I'm glad to hear that. So we've seen all these, these venture funds trying this new model out. And Bridget, who's as I mentioned, my friend since college, a physician and a drug development professional, had has also been an advisor at Yale for three or four years. So as an entrepreneur in residence, she's come across a lot of scientific projects that she thought were pretty cool. She's been on an award panel evaluating projects for a couple of years now. And out of those, she found a handful, four or five that you thought might be commercially viable. And the criteria that she set for herself, which was really when she approached me, was that these be projects that could be commercialized into a product within a reasonable time frame and that they could actually get to where they have data to support them within. That would be compelling to a pharma company within a three to five year time frame for less than $10 million. So those parameters are somewhat strict, but we weren't looking for specific therapeutic areas. When Brigid and I got together and started looking at the four or five programs, we we've picked two that we really want to pursue, and we're out raising money for those based on the ability for those projects to get funded. To get to attract pharmaceutical company licensing in the relatively near future, so they need to be in the right category. It needs to be a pretty big category. It needs to be a drug or product or platform that won't cost too much to develop because, you know, if it's a really expensive product, it's hard to profit and it needs to have some data behind it. That's pretty compelling. And the scientists that she's that Brigitte has gotten to know are really very impressive. A lot of them have serious accomplishments behind them. Either they're scholars in their areas of expertise or Howard Hughes investigators or other recognition that show that they're really at the cutting edge of their fields. They're highly recognized. They run good research.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:50:35] And so you're fundraising to try and try and raise that 10 million per per idia. Kind of.

Julie:  [00:50:41] I thought, Well, that's what it amounts to. But what we what we really thought was venture capital doesn't quite have this right that each time a company gets started based upon a license from academia, they're looking to to hire a team or maybe a small team, but they want a CEO or a chief medical officer. And some of these people are part time because it's one project with, you know, not too much to do at the initial stages. So you probably need a medicinal chemist to come help you figure out how to make the compound and you need to run a series of studies. A lot of which can't be done in parallel. You have to do some so many things sequentially, especially when you're talking about establishing proof of concept proof that the mechanism makes sense. So you might have different animal models you have to test in and then getting it eventually to humans. But in order to do that, you either end up and this is typical hiring a team of good people who are all part time. And so they're doing this for three or four companies at the same time. And this is actually what Bridget has been doing for the last couple of years until she was hired full time by Kira recently. So, so she really had a very up close and personal experience with this, and so did our CFO, Ryan. So he had been a head of finance at Alexion and another biotech company based in New Haven, which moved to Boston. He said, You know what, I got little kids. I'm not moving my whole family to Boston for this. I'm going to do some work like this, but for several companies until I figure out the next gig. Yeah. So the two of them had very similar lives and recognize that you end up with a really half baked product. You have you have projects that are all being run part time by different people. No one has the expertise they really need because they're trying to be a jack of all trades. Yeah, and also trying to conserve capital. And then if that project isn't going exactly as planned and the data don't look good, they're going to do whatever they can to keep that venture coming, that venture money coming until they find their next gig or figure out a new course correction to make that project work. So and if they fail, then maybe they raised 40 million, but they've got to give 20 of it back, or they don't do the second phase and they're all out of a job. Yeah. So the model that we've come up with is that our operating team has regulatory experience, drug development expertise and business development expertise, and we know how to run a project. Certainly, CROI are a very big part of this phase of development. But you really don't need a full management team for projects that are right out of academia that are still preclinical. So they're not in humans yet. And but you would like to have everybody on the same page. You want them all to be aligned, all to be incentivized, all to be working on the same three or four projects and really focused on maximizing the capital across these projects. So we thought, you know what? We should have a portfolio of projects. We should have a really high quality team. We shouldn't compromise on the quality of the people. We should just attract the best people, but keep them really busy with a handful of very attractive programs. And so that's the idea. It's really very simple. But and there are a few teams that are trying to

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:54:26] You're making sure you have enough projects to keep the best people busy in house all at once. And so that way, you're able to get some leverage from the from that pool of experts

Julie:  [00:54:37] Rather than if you're an investor in that rather than the next new thing startup. Yeah, that's being backed by. Iraq not to use them in a negative way at all, but if you great and really smart, but if you're doing that, you kind of got all your eggs in one basket and the management team also do so. They're not going to make the same decision about the allocation of resources that our team would, because if we start to see a signal, that's not what we want. Maybe it's time to shut down that project and allocate the resources toward something more promising. But in the traditional model, you don't have the flexibility to do that

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:55:16] Unless you have more at bats, basically in your model from the same of managers and experts.

Julie: [00:55:22] And when you consider a 90 percent failure rate in pre-clinical, like it just doesn't make sense to do it any other way, which is why venture funds invest across many projects. But there are some commonalities that, you know, allow for you to leverage one team against a series of projects if if you get them all at the right stage.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:55:42] So it sounds like throughout your career, you know you've gone more entrepreneurial now. And tell me a little bit about kind of any advice you'd give before we call it any advice you would give to your younger self. Now, looking back at everything that has transpired or to some of the younger listeners that are thinking of doing something similar, maybe interested in venture or they should do?

Julie: [00:56:04] Well, one thing I've always said about venture, which is just more general, is that I think it's very hard to contribute to a venture investment team without having some operating experience because I don't think you can relate as well. And I think you don't have the same gravitas, the same, you know, understanding underneath the hood of what needs to happen. It's not. It's not that different from the challenge I think consultants have when they're going out and consulting companies that sell products and they really don't appreciate the sales process. Being selling is the most important aspect of so many businesses. And yet being a salesman is not viewed as sort of the kind of thing that a Harvard MBA would do. And yet, I think it's such a vital part of business. So I think in the same vein, it's really hard to have any credibility inside of an investment organization. Pe is completely different in the sense that there's so much more analytical rigor and financial analysis associated with it. So that's a different career path, probably a really good experience for people along the same lines as sort of a banking analyst training

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [00:57:21] Anything you would have done differently. Besides, I remember you said earlier, you wish you had networked a little bit more. Anything else?

Julie:  [00:57:26] Yeah. Well, I think related to that on the venture side, if you're let's  say I started a company or was involved in a few and then became a partner in a venture fund. I think you would certainly want to have one type of seniority in a in a venture firm because it's really not fun unless you're helping to call the shots. You can't really call the shots if you haven't been there. And I think I would have taken a senior operating role like the one that I did at Ladki, but I think I would have done one in my sector before doing anything else. And the I don't want to call it a mistake, but I think I got drawn into the health care information space because of the opportunity that I had at the time, working with Norman and another friend and former colleague. But it took me out of the loop of what I had spent so much time doing. So I would have stayed closer to investors, I think, and to the trends in terms of where the markets are. What was getting funded, what technologies were hot and potentially going to contribute to the growth of the sector like I and maybe gotten closer to one of those one of those startups or funds who were investing in those. So I'm not providing a clear path, but I think you want to have expertise at a deep level. And when you go to work for one company, you're drawn into the trenches and your ability to kind of see what's happening around in the world is compromised. It's just you have to decide consciously, is that the trade off you want to make? And are you developing a skill set that you can then transfer to your next opportunity? So if you're running the company and you're doing the fundraising and you're successful at it, you're going to grow the company. That's one thing the startup that I went to work for didn't have a great, didn't have a great business model. It became a platform for the two founders to do consulting. And so I left, but I ended up doing something else in the health care IT space, which was fascinating, but also was really outside the biotech space, and I probably would have been better served to stay closer to that because that was where my expertise was make sense.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [01:00:03] I think it's always tough when you find an exciting or interesting opportunity that may be outside of what you've done. Traditionally, you can chase that and then get sucked into the trenches, like you said, where you don't really aren't developing the skill sets or whatnot. You're just kind of just day to day doing the work. And you look up five years later and you say, Wait a second, you know, it's time to do something new. And yeah, for sure. I feel like I fall into a little bit of that pattern as well here with W. So I've looked I looked up and it's 10 years full time on this thing. Look, it's going on now. Yeah, but it's fun. I am learning every day, so that's good.

Julie: [01:00:39] I think that's the best thing. You know, you can. If you can say that, then you're probably doing the right thing. But it's kind of comforting for me to hear that because I think, you know, you're also able to have the flexibility to spend time with your family. And that's important, too. I think no one can predict for you whether your kids are going to kind of need you in a certain way, whether it's being there for them physically or being there for them emotionally or, you know, helping them dodge a bad situation with a, you know, kid around the block. You can't really quantify that, but there is a lot of value to that. And I think the fact that you've spearheaded this and you've been driving it is really great and that in and of itself is an unparalleled experience, right?

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [01:01:31] That's fun. Yeah, I can't complain. Very lucky. So. Well, Julie, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to share your pass and your wisdom, and I think people will enjoy hearing about it. So thank you.

Julie:  [01:01:44] Thank you. It's really fun.

Patrick (CEO of WSO) [01:01:46] And thanks to you, my listeners at Wall Street Oasis. If you have any suggestions whatsoever, please don't hesitate to send them my way. Patrick at Wall Street Oasis dot com. And till next time.