They Pay Me To Do This? Travels in Academia and Industrial Chemistry
I was asked to pen an article about entrepreneurship in science. This is because I am a relatively rare example of an organic chemist who has not only traversed both the academic and industrial side of chemistry, but who has also co-founded a biotech startup company, BioVerdant, where I currently serve as the Chief Executive Officer. So I have done a lot of different things in chemistry and performed a variety of roles, which has given me a fairly broad view of the scientific–industrial complex. And therein lies a tale.
I was first exposed to chemistry when I was 16 but didn’t know about the hold it would have on me for another 4 years. After getting an undergraduate degree in chemistry at University of California, Irvine, I attended graduate school at University of California, Los Angeles, and studied under renowned alkaloid chemist R.V. Stevens, which was Lucky Break #1 for me. I then did a postdoc with pioneering marine natural products chemist, John Faulkner, at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA, and got to travel extensively, indulging in various scientific pursuits. That was Lucky Break #2. After that, I got my first real job as a professor in the Department of Chemistry at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. After earning tenure in 1992, I moved back to San Diego and started a process chemistry group at tiny Agouron Pharmaceuticals for Lucky Break #3. I stayed with the company as it merged first with Warner-Lambert in 1999 and then Pfizer in 2000. Suddenly, I was in Big Pharma, leading a group of about 70 of the brightest people in science. In turn, I married the perfect woman for Lucky Break #4. I have to say that my experience in Big Pharma was reasonably good, and I learned a lot. In 2005, my entire group was let go from Pfizer in a downsizing that sent reverberations throughout the SD biotech community...Lucky Break #5. Which leads me to the point of this article: How did a card-carrying, according-to-Hoyle SCIENTIST who knew nothing about the investment community manage to start a venture capital-backed company in San Diego?
First of all, I didn’t do it alone. Working with two of my co-workers, Junhua Tao and Tony Tibbetts, we hatched a plan to create a biotech company in San Diego based on some expertise we had acquired over the past 5 years—devising manufacturing synthetic routes to drugs based on the strategic application of biocatalysis in synthetic organic chemistry. The three of us made a commitment to learn as much as possible about the mechanics of biotech startup and the investment community. We bought a dozen or so books on biotech startup and venture capital. We talked to a lot of people in San Diego who were involved in biotech startup and got their opinion on our ideas and business plan. We spoke with numerous people in the pharmaceutical industry as well. We met three or four times a week at our houses in the evenings for about 4 hours and worked out exactly how the company would operate. After many weeks of planning and countless M&M’s, we had worked through all the issues and details of running the business and created the three main documents we knew we would need to talk to investors—a detailed 8-year budget based on our business plan, an executive summary of our business plan, and a PowerPoint presentation. Then, with a few key introductions in the venture capital community and a lot of study of prospective investment firms, we hit the road to talk to investors.
Things became really crazy for us for about the next 6 months. We hit a very busy stretch of time where we were talking to investors, recruiting and assembling a world-class research team, and looking for a lab facility, as well as looking after our families (the three of us collectively have eight kids under the age of 10). We also started searching for a business development expert, a position that we knew would be very important to the company’s success. We eventually convinced Sandy Madigan to move from a local biotech firm to our new company and become our VP of Corporate Development. Sandy was a great addition because he brings a lot more than just business development skills and expertise, possessing more than a decade’s experience in SD biotech startup. With our management team completed, we ramped up our efforts to secure a Series A venture capital financing—that is, the first amount of investment needed to run the company for 2 years. Fortunately, our backgrounds and business plan resonated fairly well in the venture capital community and several VC firms showed interest in our plan. After 7 months of work and a few bumps in the road, we secured a Series A commitment of several million dollars from two VC firms in San Francisco to start the company. BioVerdant opened its doors on May 22, 2006. And the most fascinating ride of my life began. Every single day is a blast. Working with 15 of the best people in science is immensely satisfying, but more important is how much I enjoy working with these people on a daily basis. That said, I prefer actually doing chemistry over just about anything. I love reading chemistry, thinking about it, talking to people about it, and doing it in the lab more than almost anything else. The stuff I do now is very interesting and quite challenging, but nothing beats exploring the ins and outs of hard-core chemistry.
So how did my science background prepare me for this venture and the other highly varied aspects of a science career that I have experienced? I have no doubt that training in science—analytical skills, the ability to analyze information and synthesize ideas, respect for the written word and mental discipline—can enable prospective entrepreneurs to do pretty much anything they set their mind to. You just have to decide to do it. But the biggest career upside to science is the aspect of fun. What other profession allows you to thoroughly exercise your mental faculties, to satisfy your curiosity about the way the physical world works, allows you to mingle with the smartest people in the world, and, on top of it all, pays you do it?
