Owning It In The Biotech C-Suite

In this episode of TD Cowen’s Biotech Decoded Podcast Series, David Epstein, CEO of Seagen, and Laura Hamill, former EVP, Global Commercial Operations at Gilead Sciences and SVP & General Manager of US Commercial Operations at Amgen, join Yaron Werber, TD Cowen’s Biotechnology Analyst on this episode.

David and Laura discuss owning their roles as C-suite executives, accountability, and being biotech company leaders. They offer insights on the difference between being a functional area leader vs. being a company leader, and what it means to think like a CEO. They also highlight key traits of successful management teams, including clarity of purpose, willingness to prioritize, making tough early decisions, and fostering a cohesive and communicative company culture.

Press play to listen to the podcast.

Transcript

Speaker 1:

Welcome to TD Cowen Insights, a space that brings leading thinkers together to share insights and ideas shaping the world around us. Join us as we converse with the top minds who are influencing our global sectors.

Yaron Werber:

Thank you for joining us for another exciting episode in our biotech decoded podcast series. I’m Yaron Weber, biotechnology analyst at Cowen, and I’m super excited to be joined by David Epstein and Laura Hamill in this episode, owning it in the C-Suite. To discuss owning your role as a C-suite executive, accountability and being a leader in biotech companies. David Epstein has over 30 years experience as the CEO of Seagen and Novartis Pharmaceuticals and was an executive partner at Flagship Pioneering. In his career, he oversaw the development and commercialization of over 30 new drugs, including several blockbusters. He sits on several biotech boards.

Laura also has over 30 years of global commercial experience as executive vice president global commercial operations at Gilead Sciences, and senior vice president and general manager of US commercial operations at Amgen. She was chairperson of Amgen’s Senior Women’s Leadership Council and currently sits on several biotech boards. So David and Laura, thank you so much for joining us. It’s great to see you both.

Laura Hamill:

Thank you.

David Epstein:

Happy to be here.

Yaron Werber:

So we spoke David about two months ago and then Laura, we kind of got to know each other about two months ago when we were writing the big report on the biotech executive. Since then, David, I think you’ve been a little busy selling a small company called Seagen. So congrats on that outcome. It’s great to see it.

David Epstein:

Thank you. It’s actually really good for patients. It’s perfect combination. These two companies of Pfizer and Seagen.

Yaron Werber:

I was really happy that you both accepted the invites because you both are very complimentary, you really have very different backgrounds that are very synergistic and you’ve both been very successful as executives in global pharma and frankly biotech and you both sort of have both of those areas. Maybe David, to you as you think about your background what really made you stand out in your role?

David Epstein:

I still wonder if I stand out in a good way or maybe not so good way. Continuing to learn every day. If I think of my most recent roles, generally it’s this combination of being able to align people around the big picture and deliverables while at the same time understanding enough of the content that I can really pressure test the detailed plans to make sure that we can deliver what that big vision is pretending to provide. As a leader, I like this idea of living at this intersection of science and commercialization, and then rallying the right people around delivering breakthrough medicines.

Yaron Werber:

Because it’s making the right decisions, ultimately being very patient focused.

David Epstein:

Yeah, but I think it’s knowing where you want to go and getting people into a setting which allows them to be high performing. If I remember correctly, I hope I don’t quote the wrong book, but I think in Alice in Wonderland there’s a line, it’s probably the Mad Hatter or somebody, but there’s a line that says, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” I think it’s pretty important to figure out where you want to go. There might be more than one road to get there, and you might have to make some detours along the way, but you really have to have clarity on what the goal is.

Yaron Werber:

Laura, what about you?

Laura Hamill:

I totally agree with what David said. I think there is a recipe that is absolutely critical around being successful because everything that we do in our pharma, biotech industry, and I think in many industries requires a very large group for success. There’s usually not one single player, and as a matter of fact you can have success in one area, but if the whole organization isn’t aligned you can fail. So I think that what I have learned over my years in terms of standout roles is take as much as you can from every role and learn as much as you can from every role. And I would say this to people that ask me for advice on their career, take your time to build your building blocks because at the end of the day I’ll have a very deep building block around the commercial organization or maybe my experiences from living in different parts of the world.

But somebody else will have different experiences from the R&D side or from the finance side. And I think what’s so wonderful about being in this industry is the collective wisdom of many is what really rises all the boats. And being in the industry for 35 years, I never ever was bored and I always felt like there was another mountain to climb, another opportunity to conquer, another breakthrough to make a significant change in mankind. And I feel grateful to be in such a wonderful industry.

Yaron Werber:

So it’s important to figure out where you’re going to go, right? First of all, as you’re crossing the ocean do you want to go to Liverpool or do you want to end up in Spain? There’s oftentimes perhaps disagreements about which road gets you there, right? Not many people can just zoom out to the satellite and zoom back down so maybe David to you, that often time is one of the hardest things to get right. Do you agree or is it really what’s so hard to get right is having the actual knowledge base to get you there?

David Epstein:

Yeah, and part it depends upon if we’re talking about leading a relatively small organization or a big complex one. I would argue the bigger the organization the more complexity and it becomes even more important to have clarity around where you’re going and the guardrails to get there and having in place the processes and systems to support all of that. When you get down to a smaller company, it can often be clearer what you’re trying to accomplish unless of course you happen to have, for example, a new modality that you’re working on which could have applications in many, many different say therapeutic areas or in different ways. And then making a decision and focusing sometimes can be difficult.

It can also be stress inducing because you don’t know that much about the modality yet. And I say the other thing to get, which we haven’t discussed at all, but we’re living through a pretty horrific time for biotech funding, particularly for small companies, is being able to also make sure those decisions you’re making and the path you’re on are supportable by whatever the financial requirements of your organization are going to be. It was a lot easier to do this two years ago than it’s today.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah, everybody was super bright and everything was super promising about two years ago. The bar or the skepticism I should say is a lot higher. Laura, what is being a leader on the executive committee mean to you? I’m not sure it always means the same to different people.

Laura Hamill:

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think that, and to David’s point, it also is significantly different if you’re in a large organization versus if you’re in a small organization. I think when you’re at a very large organization, you need to manage up across and down, and you need to make your group however big it is, whether it’s 2000 people or 100 people, you need to make them feel like they are in the driver’s seat, especially your leadership team. And when I say leadership team, sometimes it’s not direct reports, it could be cross-functional experts that are part of your team. So how do you bring everyone together? But I would say that the most important things that I’ve learned over the years around being part of a executive team is that you need to think and act at the enterprise level. So while we all have our functions, how do you make sure you wear your functional hat, what allows you to be successful with your function?

But at the end of the day, it’s really the enterprise that we’re all supporting once you’re at the executive level so it definitely goes beyond and requires you to stretch. I also think that making sure that I would say corporate strategy comes from the top. Usually the executive team will be accountable for building that, but at the end of the day you have to be able to roll it up and down. So the reason why we do five-year plans at the corporate level is so that then the functions can do what is called sub plans underneath that so we’re all supporting, underpinning the success of the company. So I think the executive needs to be able to wear multiple hats to be able to fulfill the aspirations of the corporation, even if it sometimes means functionally you have to do something that may not to be optimizing what you would like to do and we’re working together for a bigger purpose.

David Epstein:

Yeah, I think that was really well said. It’s all about thinking about the enterprise while your function deliver is whatever it’s supposed to deliver. And frankly in our business, very little is done within a function. We run through project teams, we run through brand teams, it is a team-based industry. One little trick can be imagine you were the CEO and ask yourself, what does that person need to organize all of us and how can I contribute? Can I help with the thinking on strategy? Can I help with the thinking on culture? Can I help look out a few years to make sure that we’re doing the right things now so that we’ll be well positioned? As soon as somebody in an executive team says that’s not my job you know you already probably have a problem and that person’s not living up to what’s expected of them.

Yaron Werber:

So David to that point specifically, you’re talking about being a company leader as opposed to being a functional area leader. And Laura, you touched on that too. In smaller companies, big decisions carry significant connotations and bigger companies as you mentioned, you have a lot of coordination and a lot of bureaucracy or politics to kind of navigate. So it’s a question of taking risk for your own career on behalf of the greater good. How do you navigate those two and how do successful people navigate those two?

David Epstein:

I’ll just answer part of the question because it hits a sore spot. There were several times in my career, particularly when I was back at Novartis, when I didn’t put my career on the line to help the company make the right decision. So I brought an idea, for example, about an acquisition and as you can imagine in a big company there are lots of people that say no. And at the end of the day following you get to the chairman and the board and you make the pitch and they don’t do it, and now of course it’s easy to look back and realize that those acquisitions would’ve been transformational for our company. I learned from those deals. There was another deal that we did actually do, and I’ll tell the little story. I flew with a guy named [inaudible 00:11:58] who you know because he is the CEO of Insight and a fellow named Manny Litchman who you may know, he’s a CEO of a smaller biotech company.

We flew down to Delaware a couple of days before Christmas one year to meet with Insight Corporation. They had a JAK inhibitor, they had a c-Met inhibitor, had some other products. I was very interested in that JAK inhibitor bringing into the Novartis portfolio. I had learned from my previous experience of not putting my career on the line when advocating for a deal and I said this time I was going to. Went through all the process, proved the science was good in my opinion, the market was there, the price we were going to pay was reasonable. And at the very end, the CEO of the company said to me, “I’m not going to approve it.” And so I said, “Why?” And he said, “Well, my gut tells me it’s not the right deal, it’s not a good deal.” And I said, “Well, that’s interesting ’cause my gut tells me for the following three reasons it’s the perfect deal for us.”

And we went back and forth for a little while and then finally he could see obviously that I was adamant that we had to do this deal. And he said to me, “Fine, you can do the deal, but if the drug doesn’t work I’m going to cut your head off.” Those are the exact words from he was the CEO and chairman of Novartis at the time. It was a big learning experience for me, as you know it’s turned out to be a blockbuster medicine and it all worked out. But if I would’ve done that more often in my career I probably could have added even more value for the organization. And what it comes down to is just having enough confidence that if they don’t like what they’re going to hear or if you really get your bosses upset, maybe they’ll fire you and you’ll have to go work somewhere else. And if you have enough confidence, maybe that doesn’t matter or maybe that’s even better in some ways.

Laura Hamill:

I was going to comment on that. I think that’s a very interesting perspective and I think we’ve all walked that tightrope where you feel like should I be the one that speaks out when no one else is? Everyone else is looking down at the table instead of putting the elephant in the room on the table. And I probably have been more the one to lean in on that. That doesn’t always get friends and people excited, but I think it’s important to be able to do that. Now, I did not take such a risk as you have, but I say that I think that’s things that should be celebrated because when a organization doesn’t allow for some failures, you are going to limit your successes because you’ve already told the organization that we’re putting you in this box and this is how we’re going to reward people.

And so I truly believe you get what you reward, and it’s important to tell people if you want to be on the edge and you want to look for opportunities and when I say on the edge, not from a compliance perspective, but from looking at deals and things that could go either way. You have to say sometimes they’re going to go our way and sometimes they’re not, but let’s get our best shot. Don’t be conservative because you’ll never do anything risky and then you’ll, like you said, miss the really big opportunities.

Yaron Werber:

So there’s two sides to risks, right? There is getting it wrong, and perhaps not being diligent enough to get it right or not having the right value set to get it right or not holding people accountable to get it right. I think it’s all part of the same coin. What’s the hardest thing to get right in the executive committee and really make sure that people are really working diligently to make the right decisions?

David Epstein:

That’s a big question. So I think as a leader of an executive committee or as an executive committee member, you do want to make sure that the culture of the company is one that’s fact-based and science-based, and a little bit to Laura’s earlier point where people speak up if they have an opinion that happens to be different from the rest of the group. I mean without that, you’re almost bound to fail. It’s not sufficient, but it is required. And I’ve always tried to create that type of environment and that’s going to come from asking good questions, it’s going to come from thanking people for bringing up alternative points of view, it’s going to be from seeing someone doing high quality diligence and rewarding that team and having another team that did a sloppy job and pointing out what they missed and the errors in the approach.

And getting better with each and every time you do it so that you set a very high standard. To me that’s critical. Then there’s a whole thing called there’s judgment and portfolio construction and how much risk do you want to take on any one given project given wherever you’re going on that road that we spoke about earlier. And frankly there’s a lot more judgment in that, at least from me.

Laura Hamill:

Yeah, I think that people way under call the impact of culture and values. I think everyone focuses on strategy, strategy, strategy, and then of course execution and tracking. We’ve all heard that expression, if you don’t have the right culture and values people will get their lunch eaten. And it’s really true because what you end up seeing is someone could have a wonderful plan and it’s very clearly articulated, but there’s what I would call an undercurrent. And the undercurrent could be what I would call the values and the culture that drag everyone down and slow the organization down or avoid the organization taking some risk, et cetera, et cetera.

So I think that it’s a multifaceted thing that has to happen for an organization to be successful. Have the right people, have the right assets, make sure you have a clear strategy so people know where we’re going so we all can march the same direction, but encourage values within your organization and really nurture and foster a culture of inclusivity. Where people are rewarded for raising the things that need to be raised, but also try to build a relationship with their comrades so that people want to come to work there. They don’t stay there because they have to.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah. And so Laura, I think a lot of it in the many interviews some people talk about the importance of everybody staying in their own lanes. Other executive talks about the importance of not staying in your own lane. Other people talk about being a gym rat, being around all the time so you’re sort of totally in the loop and you can make changes along the way or you can have some influence along the way. And I think that some people really welcome feedback and didactic discussions and some people are like, look, I’m the domain expert, I’ll handle my lane. And it’s not that easy to get it right always, so how do you get that right? And I don’t know, I know it’s kind of a very broad question.

Laura Hamill:

Yeah. So I’ll give you an example of when you’re leading. For example, I’ve led big regions and I’ve led regions internationally long distance. I’m sitting in California and the regions are thousands of miles away. I’ve had the opportunity to work abroad, and so how do you work in a different direction from different cultures? But I say fundamentally the most important thing, the most important thing that you see that makes the difference, the secret sauce I guess, is that you take the opportunity to understand and build relationships with people that you need to work with this way. Your peer group that you have to get things done with, their teams are working with your teams and so how do you have a shared reality of what needs to happen?

But then when you click down, I’ve always treated my teams that supported me regardless of where it was or what regions, and I knew for sure they reported to a functional leader, but when they were part of my team we really worked very hard to make sure that all the functions felt like they actually were part of that team. The team that led the US organization, the team that led the intercontinental region, the team that led whatever the region was called at that time, right? They dotted to me maybe, but they were solid to someone else and the goal was to make that invisible. That we had such a sense of community and such clarity around the strategy and what I needed from them and their function for us to be successful that I felt like that really makes a huge difference because it’s no longer then about roles or titles, it’s more about what is it?

One for all, all for one. We’re all in this together and we will get praise or we’ll get the eyebrows up together and so let’s just all work and have fun. And I think when you encourage that environment and that clarity, what I find is functional barriers go away and who you report to goes away because people want to be part of something that’s exciting and feels like we’re building something together.

David Epstein:

So if I can just add something to that to go back to the original question, I love people that are domain experts. I do not working with people that think they’re such experts so they can take no input from anybody else and that they can’t work with others. And so the real challenge becomes whoever’s leading the team, whether it be the project leader, whether it be the CEO, whether it be the region head is can you get a group of really excellent people to work together in a high performing way? And that is one of the main elements of the job, of the leader, of that team or that organization. And it takes time and energy to make that work. And some people try to do that and others don’t see any value in it. And I think if you don’t see value in it, you will get just so far and that will be it. You’ll never be great.

Yaron Werber:

And David, one of the things you talked about also was a lot of times it’s about in small biotech you need to get it right. You’re a race car, you’re not in an 18 wheeler. In a big company you’re an 18 wheeler, and it’s a question of getting the right speed to be fast and getting it off the highway at the right time. But in large companies, and Lauren you and I talked about it, also oftentimes the final product that gets delivered from development it might not live up to the expectation of what commercial needs to ultimately make it successful. So there’s again, I really need to get things right at the right time and make decisions in a hard way. So David, you talked about how do you oftentimes run teams to make sure potentially two different function areas are really attached at the hip.

David Epstein:

Yes. So it’s all the functional areas being attached to the hip and it’s all of them asking good questions, all of them contributing. And while it’s not a great analogy, the best analogy I can choose is just pick a basketball team. People have their own lanes, they have their skills, they have different heights, they have different speed on the court. Some dribble better than others. Some conduct the ball, some play defense better, some are offensive. But it’s getting those teams to really work together that makes all the difference. And I think we know from the NBA, if you have a team of several very good players they can go win an NBA championship and beat the team that had a superstar or two that didn’t play well together. And that’s a little bit about I think what we’re trying to accomplish here. I’m not sure if I really answered your question Yaron, but I hope that helps.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah, you did. I think we’ve also talked about how you oftentimes put two executives to own a problem or ultimately come up with a with a decision and co-own it. Can you talk about that?

David Epstein:

Yeah, so it was interesting. So when I inherited the pharma business at Novartis, I inherited an organization that had accomplished a lot, but it was very, very functionally driven. And whenever something didn’t work out, the marketing person blamed the development person and the development person blamed somebody else. And we obviously didn’t hire, ’cause HR didn’t do… It was finger pointing all over all the place. I restructured the whole place basically into teams. Therapeutic teams where there were basically two in a box. It was a commercial development person who co-led and co-own the decisions. And then the territories, basically the countries were organized exactly the same way and connected to headquarters. So it was very clear who was responsible for what part of the business. And people ask me, well, what does success look like?

And you can do all the blah blah, blah, where we’re going to launch more drugs and we’re going to hit our revenue target and we’re going to make certain profit. But I said there’s another way to know if we’re successful and they asked me what that was. I said, when there’s a presentation being made, if I don’t know who the commercial person is and I don’t know who the development person is, when you stand up in front of the room and you make the presentation, I’m still not going to know who’s who because you both co-own the strategy and the plan. And they were incentivized that way and it worked.

Yaron Werber:

Laura, what about you? What have you seen?

Laura Hamill:

I mean, I would say I agree 100% with what David said. And I think that goes even beyond the medical and the commercial person, because it depends on how you even break your functions down, right? Some companies break down value and access into a subfunction and then you’ve got government affairs and public policy and advocacy. And then you’ve got medical. You’ve got all these different departments. At the end of the day, there’s very few parts of the organization that don’t have to be at the table for most conversations because there’s such an interplay in our industry of success. You can get the development program right. You can get the label right, but we can have a coverage problem or a policy problem and you get stuck. So at the end of the day, I think the more people that are rowing in the same direction cross-functionally and that, to what David said, we all have our very strong subject subject matter expertise.

We all are experts on a particular thing, and that should be celebrated because actually we need to go deep and we need to go wide. So no one person can go as deep and wise necessary in our industry. So I think of of it around how do we link arms in our functional depth so that we can bring that power collectively to the problem at hand, to make sure? ‘Cause at the end of the day, we know why we’re doing this. We’re doing this ’cause we’re trying to make a difference in the world, and we’re trying to make a difference for patients that are suffering. And so our inability to not do that, shame on us. It really is we need to get over it and figure out how to work together. So the things that matter, I think at the end of the day go back to the basic things of people are people and take the time to understand where someone’s coming from so that you can get over that hurdle that may be blocking you.

And sometimes when you’re really busy, that’s hard because you’re working 12 hours a day and you have been away from your family for a week and blah, blah blah. But at the end of the day, grab a cup of coffee and ask somebody if they want to have dinner every once in a while because those things will pay spades.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah. So Laura, when commercial you’re always the last step in the long process and you ultimately got to deliver the results, but it takes a lot to build the pyramid, right? You don’t just put the crowning on the top. And a lot of times you’re trying to put the crown on the top and well, the pyramid’s not going to quite hold up. And sometimes you begin to see things along the way that this is probably not going to turn out quite the way we want it, but there’s been years and years of work and it’s very hard and not all organization are willing to have the hard conversations along the way. David, you might be on the right path to Liverpool still. Look, you wanted to go to Liverpool, but Liverpool’s not looking so interesting anymore and very few people want to start having a discussion three days before getting to Liverpool should we even still even bother getting to Liverpool?

How do you have those discussions? And do companies really have that during phase two? And I’m not talking about when a product clearly fails, but when you begin to see competition coming down, and it’s not totally obvious that they’re going to be better, but you can start really making the call that they’re going to be better. Maybe you can talk about that ’cause with us on our side on Wall Street, this is what we do for a living and we begin to see all the planes coming and all the ships in transit. And our job is to make those calls. We’re not going to get those right all the time, and of course when we don’t get those things right it’s a part of a big portfolio. In some companies, the portfolio might not be quite that big, right? It might be a lot smaller and getting that right is critical.

David Epstein:

So maybe I’ll start. I think adjusting one’s direction, adjusting one’s speed makes all the sense along the way. You have to be awake and alert, paying attention to competition, better understanding patient needs, seeing how your compound is evolving in terms of looking at data sets, and you have to be willing to make changes. And if you wait until three days before you get there, you probably haven’t done it justice. The two classical times to make those adjustments, but of course, one could do it any period either there is new data generated, you have a phase two data set, you have an interaction with an FDA, for example. Or because you’re doing a portfolio review and as a company gets bigger and bigger, you’re going to be making more and more choices about what you work on and what you don’t work on. One of the first things I did with the team when I joined Seagen late last year is we did a portfolio review. We prioritized assets.

And the assets at the bottom were not programs that we stopped just because we didn’t think they were going to work, we just thought they were going to be less valuable given the context of where we stood on our timeline, what the competitive set looked like, what the market looked like, that those wouldn’t be the first things that we would prioritize. So we went out and prioritized a bunch of assets that we thought had blockbuster potential where we had global or near global rights. We told that story at JP Morgan and people started to pay attention. So you can be rewarded for actually doing less sometimes if you prioritize and you’re not going to get it right necessarily, and you may have to adjust again and again. Now obviously if we take it the other extreme and you’re changing the plan every week, you’re not going to go anywhere, right? Because it takes a while to develop a drug or come up with a launch plan for a drug or actually launch a drug. It’s a big effort. But please don’t wait till three days before you get to Liverpool.

Laura Hamill:

Yeah, I would add a little bit onto that in terms of, I think about it from three different slices or segments. One, what’s happened with the product? And we refer to this in the industry as the TPP, the target product profile. What’s happened with the competition? ‘Cause the competition is constantly moving too. They’re not standing still, right? So is their company investing more money than you anticipated? Has this product become more important, less important? So what’s going on with that? And then what’s going on with your company? Because companies will also change racehorses. Where are they at along those lines? So I think you constantly have to look at how competitive I am from the product profile perspective, because we all put our best foot forward and want everything.

And then as David said, sometimes those things don’t show up, but if you get the top three, maybe you’re still in the game. So it’s a constant assessment, but we don’t control everything. We only control ourselves, right? So really making sure we don’t lose sight of what’s happening in the environment, both with competition or let’s say some crazy thing has happened on reimbursement. All those things have to be continually checked as you’re moving a product along to make sure that at the end of the day we’re assessing the true overall value of the asset.

David Epstein:

So Yaron, just to add onto what Laura just said, she said maybe something crazy just happened on reimbursement. The IRA as one example has fundamentally changed a lot of things about which drugs companies are going to develop, how many indications each of those drugs are going to have. It goes on and on and on. If you haven’t taken a re-look at your TPPs and your portfolio construction since that law came out, you better do it soon.

Yaron Werber:

And ultimately, one of the things we’re really worried about is in the catastrophic phase when the PBMs are on the hook for 60% of the potential fees. It might not be the best product that’s going to win out. It might be the most economical product to them at that point. And that sadly is one of the things we’re learning in biotech. When you’re going up against a big pharma, you don’t have to just win, you’re going to have to win by a lot.

Laura Hamill:

Yep. The discounts, unless that starts to change too, discounts that go into the PBMs which then ultimately supplement health insurance is a big deal that people don’t understand. The government doesn’t understand. It evolved over a decade and it’s not the best situation for great outcomes.

Yaron Werber:

So Laura, actually maybe the next question to you ’cause we touched on this a little bit. And David we touched on this as well, investors always have their questions and they don’t really spend a lot of time probing the management team and really trying to understand the management team. And it might be because that’s not something that they oftentimes can really have the tools to really better understand how that translates into value over time. What three questions would you recommend investors really probe on when they meet with management teams to understand are they doing a good job?

Laura Hamill:

So I would probably start off with what the plan is, what is the core strategy for the organization? And get into the details. Sometimes if you stay too high, you never get the answer ’cause you didn’t ask it. So I think that it’s really important that if product A and B are the 90% value for the organization, make sure you understand enough about the strategy and the annual deliverables that go along with that so that you can ask those core questions to see if something’s going off the rails or something substantially has changed. So what’s the plan? What are the issues or advances that have happened with the plan? And if something’s off course, what are you going to do to correct it?

David Epstein:

So the management team’s very, very, very important for a whole bunch of reasons. To Lauren’s point, if it’s not an experienced management team, they’re probably not going to put a great plan together. If they’re not experienced managers or if they’re just not great managers, they’re not likely to hire excellent people to work for them. The kinds of questions that we don’t get typically asked, but they probably should would be what have these individuals actually delivered before? There’s probably about 2000 people that have invented every single drug in our industry, but who’s really done the work? How do they work together? How do you incentivize people to really work together? What’s the magic sauce? And if you just tell me we all have, have equity in the company, that’s probably not really the answer I would be looking for. Ask the management team to explain how they make some hard choices, ’cause they’re going to have to make lots of hard choices.

Some of those early stage company presentations I’ve seen these new modalities or these new drugs will treat everything, and we’re just going to figure it out somehow along the way. That just tells me these are people that well, they might be good people. They’re probably not highly functioning together as a team and when there’s a crisis it will be a problem. But if they’re a very good team, it is why you see sometimes the same team of people make more than one drug. They go place to place. They’re a very good team and they work well together. A lot of the things that we talked about earlier, which will be asking the hard questions, having a discussion around the TPP, understanding competition will be discussed earlier and the team will find a way to adjust and come out with an end product at the end, which still creates value for the investor.

As opposed to we’ve hired a whole bunch of people who are doing something for the first time and just ’cause we like the science and we’re hopeful this is going to be the next mRNA construct or something like that. But it is hard. It’s hard as an investor to really get to a level of depth with the executives and these teams to really know. Now there are some investors who just have a sense, right? You sit in the room with them, they ask you a couple questions, they have a way to pick out people that are likely to deliver versus people that are not. I’m not sure exactly how they do it, but there are those investors out there and I think it’s a real skillset.

Laura Hamill:

And the other thing I would add to that is also use other… So you’re going to ask the team and I’m sure, a lot of the investors have smart people on their teams that can ask questions. But also stay engaged with the physician community especially if you’re an investor in a particular area. Keep your toes in the water around, let’s just say if it’s oncology, make sure you’ve got the top oncologist in that area that you’re connecting with so that you’re not just your filters are full of rich information as opposed to old information or what you want to hear information.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah, a lot of times it’s important to read the room. It’s important to realize and assess are people aligned? See how people react when their colleague makes a comment. We oftentimes ask clinical financial questions or commercial questions when their colleagues are not in the room just to see how they answer. It’s a sobering to see sometimes what you hear, sometimes they’re completely walking back and not wanting to own anything that their colleague is in charge of. There’s a lot of volume goes right there through that alone. So let me go to what I like the most about these podcasts and learning to get to know the people a little bit more personal. So maybe to you, Laura, would you rather climb Everest, ride the Tour de France or compete in an F1 race with a caveat though that you have to finish it?

Laura Hamill:

Yes. So you’ll learn a little bit about me through my answer with the first thing being, I’m not a big fan of cold weather, so that eliminates climbing Mount Everest. So I would pick the Tour de France because the ride’s beautiful, great exercise. The only request that I would have that would be the seat would’ve to be a little bit more padded.

David Epstein:

You’re right. Of those three I would definitely choose F1. I can’t think of anything more exciting and at least from my experience, driving cars on a track. There’s a couple of things that are clear. While you’re in the moment, it requires absolute focus otherwise you’re going to be driving off the track. You have to have a strategy because the F1 race there are many laps and how you finish is relevant. With each lap or each race, there’s this idea of continuously getting better. Whether it be versus the people you’re competing with or just yourself, just improving your own skillset. And there’s a lot of teamwork. The whole idea, we talked earlier about high performing teams, you see them come into the pits, get fueled up, get the tires changed, whatever it may be.

Making that teamwork work magic is is extremely rewarding. So for me that would be it. I got to tell you, being on a racetrack is one of those few moments when you’re able to shut out the entire rest of the world, ’cause things are going by so fast and you have to look so far down the track to be successful. It really takes you out of the here and now and puts you into this forward thinking place I’m trying to get to. That road I’m trying to drive down with that destination. It’s big fun. So sign me up for F1.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah, so I’m big fan of F1. I’ve never been in a race car, I have to admit. I am a biker and I got to tell you, so for me it’s between Everest and the Tour de France, and in my own mind, I’m not sure which one is harder to be honest. I know for sure that I will not be able to finish the Tour de France. I don’t know what I’ll be more worried about, the climb or the descent. That descent going 60 miles an hour with cross winds going down descents in Aspen with 30 mile an hour crosswinds, that’s life threatening. So I’m probably going to choose Everest because I’ve seen other people can finish it and I can feel like I can finish it. But so much of it depends on the weather, obviously.

David Epstein:

Well, you gave us three extreme sports to choose among, I would imagine all three of them are extraordinarily difficult.

Yaron Werber:

I can tell you my wife is not signing me up for Everest. She’s still going to sign me up to the other two. Better chance of returning. If you had to change one thing in your childhood, what would it be?

Laura Hamill:

I would learn a second language. I would want to learn a second language. I would tell my parents at a young age, please get me to learn a second language. ‘Cause having moved abroad and our girls were young when we moved, the impact of being able to learn a second language at a young age just wires your brain very differently. And it makes the second language, the third language, just makes you more versatile. And I think communication is so critical to bond with people. And so as you travel around the world the ability to be able to communicate in in their language is just a plus, plus plus. So that’s what I would want.

David Epstein:

So mine will overlap quite a bit, it would be travel more. I grew up in New Jersey. I’m not sure I really left New Jersey and maybe New York until I was probably 20 some years old. And I joined Booz Allen and started doing assignments basically in Europe. And when the world started to open to me, I just became even thirstier for knowledge. It fueled all my curiosity and I believe living overseas has made me a better person. So if I could change that, I would.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah. So I moved here when I was 13. I grew up in Israel, so we learned Arabic in fourth grade and then English I think started at fifth. And I have four sisters, so I would vote for having a brother too. That’s the one thing I would change. Well, great. Lauren, David, always great to see you. This was really, really insightful. I really appreciate it and I think it’s going to be very well received by both executives and investors. I think it’s really going to be a great mish mush and combination of both. So really thank you. We appreciate it.

Laura Hamill:

Thank you. David, nice to meet you.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah, thanks Laura. Thanks Yaron. Thanks for having us. For everybody that’s listening this is a terrific industry. We do things for patience in this industry that practically nobody else can do. It’s a privilege to work in it. Some could argue the times could be a bit better. They will get better. In the meantime, we’re going to work hard and make new medicines.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for joining us. Stay tuned for the next episode of TD Cowen Insights.

---