The Biotech Entrepreneur’s Corner 

 

On this episode of the Biotech Decoded Podcast Series, Daphne Zohar, Founder and CEO of PureTech, and Brad Loncar, Founder of BiotechTV join Yaron Werber, Biotechnology Analyst to discuss their unique experiences as biotech entrepreneurs.     

Daphne discusses the innovative “hub and spoke” model she pioneered with PureTech. Brad describes his transition from biotech investor to communicator and his long-term vision for BiotechTV. They both showcase the benefits of taking an unorthodox approach, finding where differentiation can be leveraged to fill an unmet need, and having the conviction and dedication to actualize their goals.   

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Transcript

Intro:

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:

I’m Yaron Werber Biotech Analyst at TD Cowen, and I’m super excited today to be joined by Daphne Zohar and Brad Loncar in this episode called The Entrepreneur’s Corner to discuss entrepreneurship in biotech. Daphne Zohar is the founder and CEO of PureTech, a pioneer of the hub and spoke model for advancing new medicines. She also co-founded and hosts the Biotech Hangout, a weekly podcast that draws thousands of listeners each week and is a member of bio’s, emerging companies and health section boards and co-chairs the Strategy and policy committee. Brad Loncar is the founder of BiotechTV. Previously he was the creator of two NASDAQ listed biotech focused exchange traded funds. Brad previously worked at Franklin Templeton Investments, where he was a member of the management training program and was appointed to serve in a senior advisor role at the US Department of the Treasury. Brad is also a co-founder and host of Biotech Hangout. Daphne and Brad, always great to see you and thank you so much for joining us.

Daphne Zohar:

Thank you for having us.

Brad Loncar:

Thank you.

Yaron Werber:

So we have a lot to talk about. I’m really excited about this specific episode because this is really the Entrepreneur’s Corner, and you’re both great entrepreneurs doing different and innovative cool things in biotech, and it’s been great to be a guest on your Biotech Hangouts, so thanks so much for having us on. Daphne, let’s start with you. You and I met literally years and years and years ago when we were both babies, and you’ve done a lot since then. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey starting PureTech? What drove you to start the company? You don’t have a biotech background historically, and what’s the biggest learning so far from the experience?

Daphne Zohar:

I founded PureTech with the mission of advancing new medicines, with an unbiased disease centric approach, working with the leading experts in the field to advance the most promising science. And really the thinking behind that was a lot of new companies get formed by an entrepreneur who has a specific technology that they’re driving forward. And what we wanted to do is turn it on its head, so look at the best science in a field with a specific disease focus. And we’ve been successful. We’ve now co-invented an advanced 27 new therapeutics through both, our wholly owned pipeline and our founded entities, including two that have been approved by the FDA and a third Car XT, which just filed for FDA approval.

In terms of the learnings from the experience, one thing I’ve learned is that something that might seem very straightforward to me, for example, our model and strategy, can appear complex to others who aren’t familiar with it. So even though we have a lot of very smart people in the industry, there’s a huge reliance on pattern recognition and we didn’t neatly fit a pattern. And I think that might change as there are a few more companies with similar models to ours, like BridgeBio and Roy Band. So the advantages of the model will be more broadly understood.

Yaron Werber:

And as you think about, even in hindsight, the way you went about, just in talking about developing the strategy, hiring, articulating the pipeline and direction, what was harder than you thought? And what was maybe a little easier than you thought ultimately?

Daphne Zohar:

Sure. I think it was challenging because our model was unique, so we didn’t have the native shareholder base that a biotech company would have or a venture fund would have. So biotech company has its investors, venture funds have what’s called LPs. Our model was basically a biotech at heart, but had similarities to venture creation. So our early shareholders ended up being people who really understood the business, like CEOs of biotech companies and VCs investing their own money. So very smart money, but on a small scale. We then got some strategics and then we listed in London because there was no companies quite like ours at the time listed on NASDAQ. So overcoming the challenges initially, which were primarily funding related, basically led to the model where we partnered with investors to fund the programs, brought in non-diluted funding, et cetera. And the key for me in the early days was that I was able to get the top people in the world, the top scientists and others, and that helped to attract a critical mass.

Yaron Werber:

And if you had to do one thing over again, what would that be?

Daphne Zohar:

That’s an interesting question. I think that we learned a lot of really interesting things about this model and the model itself could actually be beneficial, more broadly in the industry. So I think that it would’ve been great and a lot more fun to start with a ton of money instead of starting with a $100,000 check. That’s what I would do differently, but I’m not sure that would’ve been possible. But I’m happy to talk about some of the advantages of the model, and I actually think it’s better to be cash constrained early on.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah, so talk about that. Many companies, at least during the boom three years ago, started with a lot of capital, scaled up very quickly, had very expensive labs or prosecuted multiple products at the same time, and of course the tap dries out and then they need to really downsize. So you did it the other way. What was the advantage of that?

Daphne Zohar:

Well, I think first of all, when you start with limited resources, you have to make choices. And so that forces you to be really tough about what you advance and what you don’t advance. The advantages of this model, by the way, one of them is that you’re less reliant on the capital markets. And let me explain how that is. So we created these medicines and we would put them into founded entities, and we still have the flexibility to do that, but we now have a wholly owned pipeline, which is quite advanced. So in putting them in founded entities, we have equity, we have royalties, milestone payments, et cetera. And we’ve now been able to generate over the last three years about $800 million from the sale of equity royalties and partnership revenues, such that we’ve been able to fully fund our wholly owned pipeline without raising money in the last six years.

So that’s one advantage of the model. Another advantage is the team is fully aligned with shareholders to kill programs early. So if you think about a single asset company, if you have mixed data, you might tend to look back on it and find positives where they’re a little bit harder to find. If you have choices about how you spend your time and money, then you’re more likely to be tough on yourselves and be more true to the data. And I think the other advantage is capital efficiency. So you have one team and we’re managing multiple programs and you can move those resources so you don’t have to build empires, you build one company and you’re moving resources based on what’s needed. I also think there’s some disadvantages to the model if you’re interested to hear what those are, but I think there’s a lot of advantages though.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah, I’ll come back to that in a minute because that’s going to be very important. Brad, you’ve had a very interesting career trajectory. Started in the financial industry and you’ve been doing a lot of very innovative things. Can you tell us a little bit of your personal journey and what were the key inflection points that got you to come now and start BiotechTV?

Brad Loncar:

Yeah, so I’ve always been both, a science nerd and a stock market nerd. And I actually, in college, I started out pre-med and my college pre-med was a weed out major. And I have to admit, I got weeded out, so I moved to the business school, but I always kept my love of science. And my first job out of college was at a mutual fund company. Fast-forward many years later, there was a big transformation, and it’s still ongoing, a big transformation in the funds business, where people used to invest in mutual funds and now they invest in ETFs. And it’s still a nascent industry that small players can jump into and make a splash. And so since I had mutual fund experience, I wanted to give that a shot. So I created a investment firm and created two biotech focused ETFs, one focused on cancer and one focused on China, and they traded on the NASDAQ.

And I think they were very innovative because before those, biotech funds were very broad and generic and hard for the average person to understand and get behind. And so I wanted to create therapeutic or thematic specific funds. So I did that. I managed that business for about seven years and it had some good points and I’m really proud of it, but it never really hit an inflection point. And so over the last couple of years that business was just treading water, and I’m the type of person that’s go big or go home. I don’t want to manage a business that’s mediocre. And to be honest with you, my investment firm was. And I’ve always been a big social media person and it’s weird because in real life I’m a total introvert, but for some reason on Twitter, I’m meaning business, I’m an extrovert.

And when Twitter started to allow videos, four or five years ago, I would just do them for fun when I was at a conference. Whether that was in San Francisco during our big biotech conference or at a medical conference like ASCO, I’d grab an analyst friend or a CEO friend and do a video. And back then Twitter only allowed two minutes and 20 seconds, and it’s really hard to do anything compelling in two minutes. And I would do these videos and people would just love them. I mean, some of them would get tens of thousands of views and great feedback and everything. And as an entrepreneur, I said to myself, there’s an unmet need here. Nobody else that I’m aware of in the biotech ecosystem was really doing videos like that. And based on the reaction, it’s clear that there was something there. And so in the back of my mind, I always had an inkling that this could be a business.

And so fast-forward to this year, my investment firm was just treading water, not doing great things. And I said to myself, “This is not providing any value to the world. And when I do these videos just for fun, it’s providing a ton of value to people.” They learn from them and appreciate them, and the numbers reflect that. So I took the plunge, and on June 1st, I turned what was a hobby, interviewing my friends in the industry into a real business. So it’s called BiotechTV, and it’s biotechtv.com, and we push out clips to basically every social media site, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, you name it. So right now I’m a one man show. I’m planning to scale it, but testing it out. With anything on the internet, you never know what type of content’s going to work and what type of content’s not going to work. So right now I’m testing all of that and figuring all of that out on my own. And then maybe we’ll scale it one day soon.

Yaron Werber:

It’s hard to believe that you’re an introvert because you and I met through all your work and then we struck a conversation, we were both following [inaudible 00:12:04] . We had so much overlap, you and I, virtually, and it became real. When you’re thinking about BiotechTV, what’s the vision? So three years from now, what is BiotechTV going to look like and which audiences are you trying to reach?

Brad Loncar:

Yeah, so if I could wave a magic wand, the awesome thing about our business, as you both know, is that it’s mostly in a handful of cities, Boston, San Francisco, San Diego, and New York. And so what I’d like to have is a correspondence, so to speak, in all of those cities, doing what I’m doing now, interviewing people. And I think there’s really two key things to why I think it’s creating value to the world. The first thing is, traditional TV can’t really cover the biotech industry. Going on TV today, because it’s a general audience and you can’t go too deep into the technical aspect of science. You have to be Pfizer CEO or Moderna CEO, to get on TV these days. And there’s hundreds of other biotech companies that have interesting stories and interesting news, who aren’t really participating in that.

And that’s a shame for our whole industry. And so I’m trying to be the financial news networks for the other 99% of companies. And then the other thing about video is, it just personalizes the news. You get to learn the people behind it and to hear in their own… One really important thing I try to do every day is not to inject myself and my opinions into what I’m broadcasting. The idea is to allow the experts in their own words, to explain their news and then let viewers decide how they feel about it. That’s a really powerful way of delivering the news, I think, because I have a lot of respect for all of the many news organizations in our industry. But if you’re reading something, a lot of times you’re reading a reporter’s interpretation of that news, and especially in an industry that’s as highly technical as ours, things can get lost in the process.

And so I think just putting a microphone in front of the news makers face and allowing them to explain things in their own words can be a very efficient and powerful way of educating people on what’s going on in the biotech sector. And the very last thing is, I don’t just cover news. One thing I’ve been doing lately that’s been really popular and a lot of fun, is just doing tours of biotech companies, behind the scenes. And it’s really fascinating because most people out there, even people who follow our industry closely, don’t know what a biotech company looks like. And it’s so cool to see the equipment and to hear the scientists talk and all of that. And so I just want to shine a light on our sector and show all the cool things the companies and researchers and everybody’s doing. And so I’m having a lot of fun with it.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah, I’m an ardent consumer of the video, so keep them going. I was in Boston on Friday and toured a couple of really, really innovative private companies that have really scaled up and these labs are impressive. And I think you and I literally visited the same company within two or three days, and it’s very impressive the level of automation that’s going on these days. It’s not the labs that I did research in 25 years ago, even more than that.

Brad Loncar:

Totally. It’s very educational. I consider myself an expert in this industry, though I have a lot to learn like everyone else. But just the amount of things I’ve learned just by touring those facilities over the last handful of months, I feel I’m twice as smart as I was three months ago. It’s amazing. And so I hope the viewers feel the same way.

Yaron Werber:

Daphne, back to you. So you mentioned all the benefits of the business model and what are some of the challenges?

Daphne Zohar:

Right. So I think some of the disadvantages of the model vis-a-vis single asset plays. So single asset plays have been traditionally more loved by investors, by specialist investors in particular because there’s a more clear understanding of the M&A story, and a lot of specialists also like to view themselves as being the ones to pick the programs that are going to be successful. So I think having a more diverse pipeline means that you’d have to find a specialist that has expertise across multiple therapeutic areas. I would caveat that by saying that, we’re in three therapeutic areas, for example, CNS, oncology and pulmonary. And there are seven big pharma companies that have all three and focus on all three.

And there’s a dozen more that have two of the three. I think ultimately data and alignment are what drive M&A, not the fact that you’re a single asset or not. I think for us, the biggest advantage is that we’re almost like a victim of our own success and that we haven’t raised money. So I used that as an example earlier, we haven’t had to raise money in six years. But we haven’t raised money even when we listed our ADRs on NASDAQ. So we haven’t offered up a transaction or allocated stock or anything like that. So the stock is very illiquid and we have a pretty concentrated shareholder base.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah, which is a catch 22. Can we talk a little bit about, you sent out, I don’t know, I’m going to call it a tweet, about your role as a CEO and how busy it is to be a CEO. And you’re obviously a woman CEO, and we’re increasingly seeing women in leadership positions in biotech. And even on the investment side, we just hosted TD Cowens Annual Therapeutics Conference. I remember sitting with another, well-known, mutual fund investor, and it was a woman, and we were looking around and at some point we looked at each other, we’re like, “Wow, it’s like 35, 40% are women.” That was unheard of 10 years ago. It was 10, maybe 15%. But when you started, there weren’t a lot of women. Was it lonely? Were you able to find mentors? Maybe talk a little bit about that journey.

Daphne Zohar:

Yeah, so the post that I made was just that as a CEO, you’re really busy and you’re focused mostly on your work. And when I have some extracurricular activities that are really unusual, so most people go and they are posting pictures from exotic locations, I’m doing Biotech Hangout and the BIO Board. And what I said was that it’s fun. That’s my social interaction outside of family because I get to interact with peers and we talk about the industry and think about ways to improve it and best practices and all of that. So that was what I posted. In terms of women, when I first got started, I was the only woman in the room. So I was the only woman in board meeting, I was the only woman at a lot of networking events.

I think that I was lucky in that I met some great mentors who happened to be men early on, including Bob Langer, Ben Shapiro, Chris Viehbacher, John Lamattina, Bob Horvitz and Raju Kakarlapudi. And these are world-class scientists, CEOs, R&D heads. I think that people at the top of their career sometimes are more open-minded to taking a chance if they can see a person or an idea and say, “I’m willing to bet on this,” Because they don’t have anything to prove to anyone else. So I was very lucky to meet people like that early in my career.

But I think the environment has improved vastly as you’ve pointed out. So now I have, for example, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, who’s A CEO that I’ve respected for many years and she’s on my board and we have a hundred biotech, CEO sisters. I actually think that it might even be close to 150 at this point, who support each other. I’m on the board of BIO, as I mentioned, and that organization has become incredibly more diverse. But I think you still put a focus on people who are good, and it’s just that you’re seeing those people more because you’re more open to looking for them. And because more women are on boards, they’re getting elevated within their organization. So I think it’s beneficial for the industry in general.

Yaron Werber:

And Brad, maybe back to you, as you’re thinking about, as you noted, BiotechTV is about four and a half months old now. We’re sitting early to mid-October. What are the biggest challenges at this point? Is it figuring out what content you want to deliver or is it also figuring out what’s the business model that’s going to be behind it?

Brad Loncar:

Definitely the biggest challenge is the business model and scaling it. So I’m where Daphne was years ago with that $100,000 check, but mine’s more like $1,000. I’m literally living day to day trying to make it work, and it’s actually going very well. I started out with one sponsor and now I have three. So it’s been nice to see that sponsors see the value in it. And the cool thing about video is you can get very creative about how you deliver value to sponsors, in ways that you can’t in a one or two-dimensional print world. So there’s a lot about that that I still need to figure out. The content I think I’m starting to get a handle on, because that was really my goal over the first handful of months that I’ve been doing this, is just to try out different things.

And so I think I’m starting to understand what works and what doesn’t. But for sure the key is scaling it. Like I said, right now I’m a one-man show and I’m trying to create a large media company. That involves not just having correspondence in different cities, but of course having schedulers and editors and people who have way more expertise in video production than I do. And so all of that takes money, and I agree 100% with what Daphne said earlier. I could raise money and hire a bunch of people and everything, but I think that would be a mistake. Especially if anything internet related, because again, you never know what’s going to work and what doesn’t. And so my plan right now, which could change, is to just grow it organically. And so we’ll see how that goes.

Yaron Werber:

And as you think about delivering value for sponsors, how do you do that? A lot of it’s viewership and obviously there are prominence within the content. How else do you customize it?

Brad Loncar:

Well, like anything else, if you succeed and you have a lot of viewers, what you become is a distribution channel. So for example, right now what I deliver to sponsors is three things. Number one, their logo is on our website. So every video you watch, no matter what page you’re on our website, you see the sponsor’s logos. On social media, every clip we sent out has something that says, “Brought to you by…” And those sponsors being visible. And then the third thing that I think is really special about video is we also do sponsored content. So I’ll go to one of their facilities and one of my sponsors, for example, is a real estate company that provides lab space and offices and things to biotech companies. And the cool thing about it is, I can go to one of their buildings here in Cambridge and film how awesome it is.

And that’s so much more dynamic and so much more valuable than reading about it. So that’s one of the cool things about videos. But if I grow enough viewers over time and I become a big enough distribution channel in addition to having long-term sponsors, I can run essentially commercials like a TV channel does. I always say sometimes companies will spend tens of thousands of dollars unlike a corporate video, and they’ll put it on their investor relations website, and the only people seeing it are the people that naturally go to their investor relations website. They’re trying to reach the whole world. I can become a distribution network to get you in front of, hopefully the whole world one day. So it’s going to take time to build that audience and to make that distribution network as valuable as I hope it will be one day. But I think that that can be a big foundation of the value that this delivers to people over time.

Yaron Werber:

You’re both the co-founder, so to speak, in the initial Biotech Hangout. How did you come up with this idea and what was the purpose?

Daphne Zohar:

So Brad and Chris Garabedian, I think, did the first show, and it was at the beginning of COVID. It was right around JP Morgan and I heard it and I just joined. Actually, what was really cool about it is you can see who’s in the audience. And so I joined and then they brought me up a few times, and then I just started joining on a regular basis. And I think I’d love to hear from Brad since he was the first one who founded it, and then maybe I’ll say a little bit about what I get out of it and why I do it.

Brad Loncar:

Yeah, I wish there was a sophisticated answer to this, but the truth is, this was when we were all locked in our houses during COVID. And it was initially on Clubhouse, the Clubhouse app, and that was the first time that most people knew of this format. So it was actually Chris Garabedian who found Clubhouse and really got into it and said, “Hey, let’s have a conversation.” And the first one we did was after JPM one year was like a JPM wrap up. So it was another thing that turned from an informal thing into over time, a formal thing. But first of all, I want to say, so Chris and I got sidetracked in our business and personal lives and couldn’t really give it the full-time effort that it deserved.

And I want to really say how much I admire what Daphne has done with it. I mean, she took a good thing and turned it into a great thing. And I think one of the cool things about it, and this is something that I’m focused on with Biotech TV too, is it gives you an insider’s view of our industry. In the past, I feel like, if you’re reading about the news or whatever, a lot of times you’re reading an outsider’s perspective. And so with the Hangouts, again, you’re hearing from news makers straight out of their mouths, or you’re hearing from BiotechTV is to give people a very authentic insider’s view of our industry. I don’t think that really existed in the way that Daphne is doing that through Clubhouse or through Twitter spaces now and what I’m doing through video before.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah, I think it’s super cool because really to your point, it involves mainstream biotech to Operators, to Wall Street, to board members. And so it crystallizes it. And to me, it forces me to look more broadly than what’s going on day to day in what we cover and think about how all the pieces are moving together, because you’re very topical. And the way you cover it, you see the entire industry transforming on a weekly basis, and you think about it over three months and you realize, “Wow, things really have shifted,” And you begin to see trends and I think that’s really cool too.

Daphne Zohar:

Yeah, and one of the things that’s surprised me is, we just get on a call, there’s a little bit of in advance, as you know, you’re on because you joined us a few times. We hone a topic list, but it’s completely unscripted, and we just get on there at the beginning of the hour, we record it, we stop at the end of the hour. There’s no editing, there’s no script. And what I think is surprising is we get 3000 plus listeners every week just on Twitter spaces, and then it goes on podcasts and Spotify. And I know Tim Opper saw me, people come up to him all the time. So a lot of people actually listen to it. And we’ve done really no promotion of it or anything. So to me, it says that we’re filling a niche that is needed and I agree with what Brad said about BiotechTV.

So one of the things that I really like about it also is, not everything goes well for all companies all the time, but the idea that when something doesn’t go well, you’re not just saying bad things about the management, you’re actually having a conversation about what could they have done differently? Was this anticipated? How could they have communicated it better? Maybe even getting that management team on. And also when there’s big successes, we had Jan Skvarka, when he sold Trillium with that perfectly timed deal, and we’ve had a number of CEOs post their big exits. Jeb Keiper, when they did the big Nimbus deal, and just many, many more. So I think that’s also pretty interesting, is the idea that it’s more complex. It’s not just this like, “Oh, you failed, you’re bad, or you succeeded, you’re awesome.” But there’s things that you can learn from both sides of that.

Yaron Werber:

And I always say between being good and being lucky, I think being lucky all day long and a little luck goes a long way as well, which is not always easy to script either. Let me ask maybe Brad, when you’re thinking about your transition from being an investor to a communicator, you’re a natural communicator obviously, but what’s been easy and what’s been harder?

Brad Loncar:

I don’t know that I would say that this is hard, but one thing that’s really important to me that I’ve strived to do that maybe not everyone will see, is I want to make sure that people know that I’m totally unbiased. I actually sold all… I don’t own any biotech stocks right now. I’ve made a real effort to show that this is 100% independent and all of that because people think of me as Brad, the investor, because that’s what I’ve been doing for the last dozen years. And so I want to make sure that, if I’m interviewing a company, they don’t think I’m promoting it or anything like that.

So I think that that’s something that I need to be cognizant of is people who know me understand that, but if somebody’s coming looking at this for the first time or something, they might not realize that. And so I think it’s really important for me to have an independent view. And the other thing too is a key to this type of thing is asking tough questions because that’s what makes it compelling. That’s what people want to see. And I always try to be respectful and not to be a gotcha type person. But asking tough questions is a really important component of this because if everything you do is just very… I don’t know what the right word is, but if you’re not asking tough questions, it’s not compelling content. And so I make an effort to make this educational and asking the tough questions is a way that you do that.

Yaron Werber:

So this is my favorite part of each podcast. A little something personal and a little bit of a touch of humor. Daphne, let me maybe go to you first. What’s your dream job if you could not be a biotech CEO?

Daphne Zohar:

Yeah. So the problem is I was racking my brain for something humorous to say here, but I think what my answer is going to be pretty boring. And that is that I often think about the fact that just by accident of birth and good fortune, we live in a way that’s pretty enviable. And in addition to that, we get to do, our main job is to do something that’s a good thing and can have an impact on the world. So imagine being a gun manufacturer or just developing a product that doesn’t add any value to the world. So if I could do anything, if I had more time or at some point in 10, 15 years from now, I think what I’d like to do is focus more on how to help people as the primary thing. So for example, particularly children who are suffering. And so outside of donations, that’s something I’d like to do at some point in the future.

Yaron Werber:

Yeah, it’s a noble cause. I think I can relate to that. And I think somebody else, another woman actually in this episode who was, I think it was Nina actually said something along the same lines. Brad, what about you?

Brad Loncar:

I’ve always wanted to work in sports. I’ve gotten into Lionel Messi now that he’s here in the US and with Inter Miami. And I was just thinking how much fun it’d be to be a part of an organization like that and working in the front office of a team or something. So I think I’d like to work in sports one day.

Yaron Werber:

When you make it in sports, can you give me tickets? The last time I saw a Barcelona game was admittedly like 10 years ago. It was the El Clasico, and I’m a huge Barce fan, and they actually lost that Clasico, and then it was at the end of the season, they lost the season. So I still need to see him in person again, winning next time. Maybe Daphne, to you, as you think about what’s your biggest strengths and which area you’re still mostly working on, whatever capacity it is.

Daphne Zohar:

Yeah, I think my biggest strength is that I will see a strong path forward or a solution when there are many options and there’s ambiguity and others might want to analyze the situation, I think I’m able to see that and help others to see it and get them to agree to trust me enough to follow that path. So I think that’s really good. I’m also, I think, good at getting really smart, amazing people to want to work with me. Which is good because the minute you’re micromanaging somebody, that means either you or the other person needs to go.

When you work with amazing people, you can empower them and they can do great things. So those are some of my strengths. I think my biggest weakness is in impatience. With just impatience in general with things that take longer than I’d like. And in particularly with bureaucracy and process, Chris V. Barker used to call, there’s this group of people that will say no to things, whoever it is that comes up with problems. And he used to call them the No brigade. So I have a lot of impatience with that element of what we do. That’s probably a big weakness on my part.

Yaron Werber:

Brad, what about you?

Brad Loncar:

I think I have two biggest strengths. I think one of them, and this comes into entrepreneurship, is, I have a big independent streak. So for example, when I created my investment firm and created ETFs, I bootstrapped everything and worked very hard. I could have worked for a large company and had a comfortable salary, and I would rather be living my own life and making my own decisions. Nobody told me to do BiotechTV. I just decided to do it one day and every single day I make all of my own decisions. And I think the other thing is hard work. I’m like in my forties right now, and I’m pulling all-nighters because I’m a one man show. And I’m not just doing the videos, I’m doing everything, the scheduling, the editing, traveling. I literally just got off a red-eye plane from a conference in Las Vegas, and I’m doing this podcast now, and in 30 minutes I’m getting on the subway over to Cambridge to film a video.

And it’s all just by my own volition. I’m like, nobody’s telling me what to do. I’m just making it happen. And I think that’s how you have to be as an entrepreneur. And I’d say my biggest weakness for sure is sales. Again, I think that goes back to me being an introvert. I just don’t have the salesperson personality. And I actually, looking back on it, think that it was one of the things that was a headwind for my investment firm because a lot of that is sales. And I always say, people don’t buy your fund, you sell it. Funds are not bought. They’re sold. And I was never really a great salesperson and so that’s definitely my weakness.

Yaron Werber:

Terrific. I don’t know. I think you are doing pretty well in such a short period of time [inaudible 00:37:41]

Daphne Zohar:

Amazing.

Yaron Werber:

… the huge exposure. Yeah, I’m a huge fan, and I know it’s getting a lot of traction, so congrats. Well, Daphne, Brad, great to see you. Thank you so much for joining us, and I’m your biggest fan. We’ll continue to follow closely.

Outro:

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

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