Embracing Identity & Curiosity: Being Different Fuels Innovation | Aaron Edwards (Part 1/4)

Intro - 00:00:06: Welcome to The Biotech Startups Podcast by Excedr. Join us as we speak with first-time founders, serial entrepreneurs, and experienced investors about the challenges and triumphs of running a biotech startup, from pre-seed to IPO, with your host, Jon Chee. Our guest today is Aaron Edwards, Co-founder and CEO of KiraGen Bio. KiraGen's mission is to eliminate solid tumors with AI-driven, multiplex, gene-edited CAR T-cells by advancing cell therapies that break through immunosuppressive tumor barriers, enabling effective and durable cancer control. This is achieved by combining advanced AI with deep understanding of biology to develop targeted therapies that promise to reshape oncology care. With a decade in cellular immunotherapy experience, Aaron has driven advancements in CAR T and TCR-T therapies at Bluebird Bio, Beam Therapeutics, Eli Lilly and more. Armed with a Harvard MS/MBA, blending science and business, Aaron guides KiraGen Bio's development of next-generation cell therapies, overseeing strategy, fundraising and partnerships. With deep expertise in cellular immunotherapy, gene editing and biotech leadership, Aaron offers a unique perspective on advancing next-generation cancer therapies, making this a conversation you won't want to miss. Over the next four episodes, Aaron Edwards shares how curiosity, conviction and challenging convention led him from the lab bench to co-founding KiraGen Bio. He reflects on the experiences that shaped his leadership, lessons from therapy and collaboration, and how he and his co-founder developed a differentiated approach to CAR T-cell therapy. Aaron also shares the realities of building from scratch, raising early capital, running lean and staying focused, while tackling glioblastoma by rethinking how we address immune suppression in solid tumors. Today, we are diving into Aaron's upbringing in Kentucky, the early curiosity that sparked his love of science, and how a state-funded STEM academy helped him see a future beyond the traditional path. He shares how growing up with pharmacist parents shaped his thinking, why he walked away from pre-med, and how his first wet lab experience with butterfly genetics opened his eyes to the possibilities of research. We'll also explore the role athletics played in his identity, the importance of visibility, personally and professionally, and how early internships in cancer research laid the groundwork for a future in biotech. Without further ado, let's dive into this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast.  

Jon - 00:03:19: Aaron, so good to see you again. Thanks for coming on the podcast.  

Aaron - 00:03:22: Thanks for having me, Jon.  

Jon - 00:03:23: Yeah, no worries. No worries. And I've been really looking forward to having this conversation with you. You know, I think ever since we, you know, kind of crossed paths at Nucleate, I was really hoping for an opportunity to really dive into your guys' origin story, both on the KiraGen front and kind of like you as well as a leader of KiraGen. So, you know, when we're in traditional podcast fashion for us, we always like to turn the hands all the way back and really just like learn about, you know, a couple of things. What were some formative moments that, you know, got you into science? Is there anything that kind of, I guess, sculpted your business philosophy and leadership style? So take us all the way back. Like, what was your upbringing like before the KiraGen era?  

Aaron - 00:04:01: Yeah, absolutely. Wow. It's always good to have a blast from the past. So I was born, raised, and I say partially educated in Kentucky, not because the educational system, but I came up here to finish my education.  

Jon - 00:04:13: Yeah, yeah, yeah.  

Aaron - 00:04:14: And was raised in a really small town in Kentucky to two pharmacist parents. So science, I had some nurses in the family, you know, science was always somewhere in the conversation. Not necessarily you have to do this or it wasn't on the research side, but always had that sort of logic around like, you know, this is what a pill can do. Because, I was just used to hearing talk about drugs at the dinner table, right? And that really led me being pretty curious about life. I was that kid, 100%, that asked... Thousands of questions. And so my parents loved that and they encouraged a lot of curiosity, right? But it really became a almost obsession or really passionate of mine for science when they no longer were able to answer questions that I had about, you know, why actually is the sky blue, not just, you know, what color is the sky? And then they sort of diverted a lot of that inquiry then to my teachers. And I was really fortunate, not just early on, but through every stage of my educational career to have what I always call my Ms. Frizzle's of education. And for those that don't know, The Magic School Bus was a really formative cartoon for a lot of people growing up, was crazy, crazy, had science teacher that would have a Magic School Bus and you would learn about the body system. And I really do claim to have many Ms. Frizzle's in my life that sparked that passion. And I think that was really the catalyst for what kept me motivated to pursue some sort of science that could be get behind and try to build someday.  

Jon - 00:05:46: It's really interesting that you brought up kind of like... The point at which your parents, like they have to like open up the books and kind of learn things themselves. And like, I don't have children, but I can imagine when you get to that point, you're like, oh my God, how do I do like this type of algebra? I can't remember.  

Aaron - 00:06:04: Yeah, a hundred percent. And there wasn't ChatGPT at the time. And I, you know, the internet was, well, I don't even, it wasn't hardly in existence because I dial up. And so that really is where these teachers serve a foundational role. I did also have some family members that were in school systems. And so in a small town, I had close connections with teachers from an early stage where my first school was down the street from my house.  

Jon - 00:06:29: Very cool. You know, I'm imagining as you're starting to get into high school, college. Did you always gravitate to biology or was it more of a, you know, broadly kind of interest in STEM?  

Aaron - 00:06:44: Definitely on the biology medicine side, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to be. I think a lot of people jump on sort of that pre-med train, not knowing where it's going to take them. And part of the story of also why I came to Boston, we can address that later, but is the visibility of career paths was pretty limited for me and not in a bad way. My parents and my community and my school system did the best they could to keep me challenged and really do what they needed to do to make sure I had the knowledge and skills to succeed. But sort of traditional paths in Kentucky, especially at the time, what I saw, not that they didn't exist, were go become a doctor, go to medical school, become a doctor, get a PhD, and go teach. And a lot of the science, you know, unsurprisingly, there's a strong agriculture, you know, or sort of life sciences sort of on the bug or macro side. And I knew that I was engaged in science, but I didn't know exactly where that was. So, yes, I was always interested in the sort of bio or life side of things. I was really good at math.

Jon - 00:07:51: Oh, that's a rarity. Yeah.  

Aaron - 00:07:53: I didn't like it, but I was really good at it.  

Jon - 00:07:55: That's so funny because like, there is that like kind of stereotype that people at the bench are not good at math. Yeah. By the way, I fit that that stereotype. Like I was just like, my dad, my dad's a structural engineer. So he was just like, I feel like he was just like, he would, he's like, I can just tell he's disappointed that I wasn't as good as math and physics as him. But I was like, I think I would go this way.  

Aaron - 00:08:18: Yeah. I really tried to touch anything and everything growing up. We had two of these, I don't know what they're called now, but we had like a gifted and talented sort of program that exposed us to even different types of STEM stuff. I took like logic and debate classes early. I homeschooled. I homeschooled early on for a year because I skipped a grade and then I just had a lot of exposure and my parents were really supportive during the time. So fortunate to at least feel like I saw the spectrum of where I could go and maybe macro levels and then really knew long-term that I wanted something on the biology side, more likely medicine. I was always engaged, but I didn't want the retail side of pharmacy. I knew that, but I had a gut feeling on the medical side that interfacing with patients and that day-to-day probably also wasn't for me. But there was something and that's a theme in my life. There was something else there that I needed to keep searching for.  

Jon - 00:09:13: Absolutely. And I think something that stands out to me about, you know, kind of you're talking about like exposure, breadth of experience and, you know. Sometimes where you're located can kind of limit that exposure unless you go seek it out like proactively. I always think about how right time, right place can really like, and it's not like, sometimes it's just completely out of your control. Like I was just so lucky to grow up in Berkeley and that's really formed my worldview and exposure to a bunch of things. But I can imagine like growing up somewhere else, I would be on a completely different kind of path. Just whatever is in that proximity. And it's almost like a lottery. It's like a complete lottery. 

 Aaron - 00:09:53: It really is. I think it's a continuing theme. I mean, probably not anymore now that I'm sort of done with school, hopefully.  

Jon - 00:09:59: Yeah, yeah, yeah.  

Aaron - 00:10:01: You know, Kentucky is a great example. Until I moved up to Boston, I didn't know what sort of private school and all these academies, I'd never heard of that type of like boarding school, even in media, you know, you see some representations of it, but you don't understand it until you actually come up to New England or wherever it actually is. And people have it in their dialogue from an early day. And I think it was great. You know, the public school system served me really well. And part of that journey that really led to sort of my explosion in STEM happened before college. So there was, and we can fill in gaps later if need be, but the Kentucky at the time, I was part of the first class of a Science and Math Academy for students in Kentucky. So it was a publicly funded, essentially boarding school for nerds. It's now two years, so your junior and senior year, you actually live on Western Kentucky University's campus. And so they renovated like two dorms that we live at. And since I was in the first class, it was just my senior year, but it was the biggest sort of move of my life at the time of stepping away from my sort of small town, going to now live on a college campus technically during high school and getting that exposure, right. To what science could be like around a lot of other people that also liked science and math. And I think that that really sort of was the catalyst for me to see bigger things.  

Jon - 00:11:24: Very cool. I guess, talk a little bit about that experience. Did you have like a wet lab experience?  

Aaron - 00:11:29: Yeah. Yeah. So that was the first place where I had my exposure to what like a wet lab really was. So part of your experience, you get matched with somebody to do some sort of research. And I was in a biology lab that was studying the evolution of butterfly color, like spot patterns. And, you know, that had a connection to other things, but all I recall, one was walking into a lab and, you know, your first exposure to lab, you're not doing much, right? You're, you know, someone is teaching you how to use the pipette. You are looking at things. I got to see what GFP was for the first time. But the cool, the thing I remember that was really awesome. I didn't maybe understand all the stuff about spots and evolution and how it related to everything, but we did these micro injections of GFP into butterfly larva. And you could track, you could see where the GFP was going into the butterfly's wings. Eventually, once they hatched, and grew. And that was what, I think that was that first transition of, oh, this is wild. You can do, and now I remember, that was my first exposure to what GFP was and what you could do and the tools that were probably rudimentary now thinking back to it, but the concepts of what you might be able to accomplish in a lab and starting to have a little bit of that translation to, does this relate to humans? Or is this just really cool grant work that's discovering biology that might, you know, be able to shift into the human spectrum someday?  

Jon - 00:13:01: Very cool. Unfortunately, I'm jealous that whenever people have like these early wet lab experiences, because like I didn't really get it until like a couple of years into college. And it was like, I stumbled into it. I just like, it was pure luck, but really awesome that the university set up a program like that. Cause I think whenever I talk to my parents, their conception of a lab is like CSI. Like- 

Aaron - 00:13:26: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.  

Jon - 00:13:27: It's just like, oh, that's a lab, right? Like that's, that's what you do. I'm like, it's kind of like a little bit.  

Aaron - 00:13:35: And this is a great example, right? Of, it doesn't need to be this one model of saying, do it like private boarding school. There's nothing against that system, but it can be done differently in other spaces. And for Kentucky, it made a lot of sense for this to be a publicly funded academy on a public university that had a lot of great resources around education. And so then we had this, we had this chance not only to get exposed to great science and research happening, but be in this community of, of like-minded nerds. But also if you wanted to stay on campus and continue being a student, if you started as a junior, it was two years off of your undergrad. And you likely got a lot of scholarships as well. So it was a good recruitment tool to keep these really talented students in Kentucky, or you just had a, you know, maybe a better chance to succeed and kind of going out there and like I did and kind of leave the nest, so to speak.  

Jon - 00:14:31: Yeah, totally. So talk about as you're starting to spread your wings and, you know, deciding to leave, what schools were you looking at? How are you thinking about it? Bring, like, put us in the mind state.  

Aaron - 00:14:40: Yeah, so something I didn't mention earlier, probably important to some stories going on. Visibility, in a lot of ways, was really a critical theme in my childhood. Not only visibility professionally, but I grew up gay in a small town, Kentucky environment and city. And I knew exactly where I wanted to go to school at one. I also swam super competitively. And so part of my story of there's this book that a lot of people in our communities read called The Velvet Rage, where this tension that a lot of people have when you're in a marginalized community, I always felt like I was other. And some of the other was being a nerd. I was just always very different than people. And you don't always have words around it. But the other also happened to do with me being a gay child in Kentucky. And so a lot of my efforts, I don't want to say thanks to the sort of defensive mechanism, but a lot of my efforts went into school, but also into athletics. I competed at a very high level throughout high school and decided to go to where I thought was my dream school at the time, which is Kenyon College in Ohio. And they're a Division III school. I intentionally chose them because they only had sort of a Division I level swim program, but they very much did not have athletic scholarships. So that was a transition for me of not only knowing I wanted to continue being known as a student, but I didn't want these incentives to take me to a school where they would be misaligned with me wanting to succeed academically, but also be able to continue things athletically. So I went to Kenyon and I had to set that up because it was a big culture shock for me. It was my dream school. I was not ready for the exposure of not only getting out of sort of the Kentucky bubble. You know, I was away from home. It was extremely expensive. But I started becoming actually still being known as an athlete because I was a swimmer on campus. There's nothing wrong with that at all. But I specifically recall a moment for me where I had always taken a lot of pride in being the nerd, you know, at home. And I was being recognized as a swimmer on campus. And there's some disconnect there. And so after a semester, I came back to Kentucky to Centre College, which is another small school, but similar in academics, and then finished my schooling there. So I got the continued swimming at the level that I felt comfortable with that could make a balance between, you know, this academics and athletics, but also still give myself a little bit of time to figure out what was going on inside of me. I didn't know, still didn't have words around it at the time. And there was lack of visibility. So visibility professionally and personally was very, very limited and still struggling with that. And so that didn't help when I went to this other school for a semester. And I think through these experiences, not just during school, but then in my research experiences during the summers in between, I didn't do any research during school, but I did during the summers. And that gave me more and more exposure to what, at least professionally, getting some visibility of what I might want to do or really might not want to do. And then eventually led to me coming up to Boston. But that's sort of the big picture summary of it, of how, you know, sort of spreading my wings a little bit, coming back to contract, but then eventually coming up to Boston where I could be in this kind of epicenter of biotech.  

Jon - 00:18:02: Very cool. And there's a bunch of things and a bunch of directions I kind of want to go. So first, I commend you for balancing academia with athletics because I couldn't do it. I have colleagues that did and excelled at both. And I was like, how? I'm like. How is this possible? Like, how is this actually possible? I'm like, do you not sleep? Because, like, in order to do all these things, you almost have to not sleep.  

Aaron - 00:18:30: Yeah, you know, I mean, I think the, I don't want to say I look back at it fondly, to be honest in some ways. But the honest truth is that it still was this theme of, I didn't put a lot into my personal life. I just, I had bandwidth. You know, I had friends, and don't get me wrong there. But the, I was really putting bandwidth that most people put into maybe evolving deeper friendships and relationships during school into sports and athletics. Because those are the things that compensate. That's kind of the theme of Velvet Rage, that compensates for what you think is a demerit. Eventually, when people find out who you truly are. And so that allowed me to focus on it. I didn't know anything else, because that's how I grew up. It was a mechanism I had really built in. And now I've been able to take advantage of some of those skills, you could say, that were defense mechanisms at the time, that now actually have turned me into what I hope to be a better leader today.  

Jon - 00:19:27: Absolutely. And I think there is something about athletics that there's a level of discipline that athletics kind of forces, especially if you want to compete at a high level, that is hard to replicate and hard to experience anywhere else. So like, I think about like, I play like collegiate lacrosse. And there's so many times that I think back on those experiences of like how much, like I carry those lessons to this day to Excedr. But almost more a bit more subconsciously, more than anything, it's kind of like woven into my DNA now. Like team building, like team dynamics, people have different egos. Every teammate plays a different way. How do you accommodate different play styles to, but still under the banner of one team? These kinds of things, I don't think I could have really innately understand, or I guess I probably wouldn't have been able to internalize it as well, unless I played competitive team sports, I think for me and sports and athletics, it's like a give and take. Like there's a lot of sacrifice that you kind of have to make and everything is, you know, kind of a give and take. So I totally hear you. Like, you know, kind of that balance can be difficult. But so talk a little bit about when, you know, okay, you're now doing schoolwork during the year and athletics, and you're now doing, you know, internships. Talk a little bit about those, those kinds of internships that perhaps taught you what you wanted or you didn't want.  

Aaron - 00:20:50: Yeah, so I was a biology major at Centre. And small, liberal arts, you didn't have 10 different sort of science majors. It was biology or there was a biochem, a molecular biology major. Most of the pre-med people went this BMB route. And it was funny. I intentionally chose one biology because I felt it wouldn't limit me to sort of the micro level of science. I knew that's where I wanted to be long-term. But there, there horror stories that, you know, all the juniors and seniors talked about of learning, you know, the sort of the, you know, about metabolism and all the cycles you have to memorize. And, you know, that scared me.  

Jon - 00:21:27: The Krebs cycle.  

Aaron - 00:21:27: Oh, the Krebs cycle. It's like, you know, it's the triggering thing that all scientists have to go through of learning about the Krebs cycle and all that. And I felt, you know, biology just allowed me a little bit more flexibility. I could take some of those classes I really liked. Immunology, you know, virology, but still sort of have a bigger picture view of science. It also introduced me to one of my Ms. Frizzle's, although I guess Mr. Frizzle at Centre, who saw something in me and really continued this excitement around science. You know, I got to take one of his intro genetics classes and he just made it fun. You know, I don't know if I loved a lot of the things we might have gone over in class. You have to learn the basics. But the way that someone can make things exciting makes you dig deeper. And he definitely made everyone think more critically. It wasn't about memorizing things. They were the hardest little quizzes I've ever taken at the time because you were thinking it was thinking critically about stuff. And just making the connection now, learning about genetics also still continued this theme around how we were learning more and more about ourselves and our lives. And even learning Mendelian genetics about how you could- You had the power to change outcomes, whether or, in flies or plants, he also was, you know, I got to go take a class on cave ecology. And in Kentucky, one of the largest underground cave systems in the world, Mammoth Cave, is in Kentucky. And one of the field trips you go and we got to go spelunking in caves and learn about cave ecology. So that was a really cool experience for me to not continue to only take these sort of molecular biology classes I liked. But then that also freed me up. Instead of having research during the year, I was really fortunate to get my first taste on what I'll say the human translational research aspects were with my summer internships. So the first two summers of my undergrad were at Moffitt Cancer Centre in Tampa, Florida. And she will still claim to this day she had nothing to do with it. I had an aunt that worked there for a while in the business side and had just knew that I was looking for opportunities in science and recommended I apply and said, I will not talk to anybody about this. But here you go. We'll leave the rest to fate. And I moved in with them for two summers to work at Moffitt. And now being able to not just do things in butterflies, but actually have human patient samples and learn about drug interactions and proteins. It was very molecular. And I'm telling you, I can do the best Western blot that you've ever seen in your life. But I tell people, and for everyone watching this, it's sort of when people, I'm getting some recollections of when people learned what the floppy disk was and the symbol for save. Western Blots, you used to have to transfer things to membranes that always didn't transfer. And then I went to a dark room. I went to a dark room to develop my Western Blots with these X-ray films where you would close it. You would wait 10 seconds and hope when that thing came out of the developer that it looked good. And I run back to my mentor having no idea what I was looking at in van saying, does this look good?  

Jon - 00:24:44: Tell me, what does it mean?  

Aaron - 00:24:46: And it was hours in these dark rooms. And so that wasn't really a great experience. But looking back on it, it was very great. Because when we started looking at all this hardware that can now automate Western Blots and do things, I'm telling you what, it was like moving into Star Trek for me. I cannot tell you how many Western Blots I ran manually. And maybe I learned the basics, which is great. And now I have a graphing calculator essentially for Western Blots.  

Jon - 00:25:13: I had the same exact experience. When I think back on it, I'm always like, how did science actually progress? Because the tools we had were so manual and so much room for human error and also just like error, just broadly speaking. I'm like, how can we derive insights from these tools that are just like exactly what you said. You're like praying the band show up.  

Aaron - 00:25:37: That's also relying on people knowing what they want to see. You have to know what that banding pattern looks like that you want to see. And I mean, if you're doing discovery work, maybe you don't know. I mean, and I do go back to think not only the ability to, what if you didn't know it was going to go in a certain pattern and you just never picked it up? You know, like all those like what ifs you never saw. And this was the big shift for me. That was a fundamental time to learn the basics. I was seeing, I got to treat drugs or, you know, use cancer drugs to treat these certain cells and human samples and see how it changed protein-protein interactions. Cool. But the important part is seeing how that could then translate beyond. And now looking back on it, what kept me in the lab for so long was because tech has evolved. By the time I actually got to Boston and to some of my first biotech jobs, you were no longer developing Western Blots in a darkroom. And it really did feel like I walked into Star Trek every day of work. Maybe I didn't love the day-to-day long-term of executing lab work, but like, those were fundamental experiences that made me really appreciative as I walked into really fancy labs in Boston every day. I mean, they were really, they were well-developed labs also at the time there. They were just using really basic principles and tools that I'm really thankful for. Moffitt was a really cool place for me because I had never been exposed to a cancer Centre. I mean, the whole hospital is a cancer Centre. And everyone thinks, I want to be a doctor someday. I want to cure cancer. But you don't really know what it looks like. And as a researcher, you also could go to Grand Rounds and you could see people talk about their science. And that was very fundamental for me. I went to every seminar not only to get free food, but also to listen to what sort of stuff was out there. Because I was a sponge soaking up, looking for that visibility I never had. I was filling in a lot of gaps for where I wanted to go. I knew it wasn't doing Western Blots and doing protein-protein interactions, but something was there. I could connect what we were doing because they were doing clinical trials literally in the hospital associated. So they had a research building and then, you know, the hospital next to it. And I think just knowing that that interface could be there in existence was fundamental in how I thought about what I wanted to do when I grew up.  

Jon - 00:28:05: Yeah. And I think something like that really stood out as you're describing that, I think it's, this is broadly even beyond science, but it's like being able to connect one's work with some sort of impact, whatever it may be, you know, for us, it's like patience, but like, you know, you can imagine you can be in any industry, like you can be in the food industry and seeing that perhaps you're in the kitchen, but then seeing like a customer's reaction and that happiness you bring someone is critically important. But like when you're kind of like siloed and you can't see it, it makes it so much harder to like get to like bring morale.  

Aaron - 00:28:41: Oh, for sure. It's every step of the way. It's not just in research, but if you're really, it's siloed, it's a great word, just heads down doing your job. It's hard to know how your role really fits into everything. And so, you know, I had two summers at Moffitt. My last summer was actually in Nashville at Vanderbilt doing, I was a National Science Fellowship working on drug delivery systems. Now this was an organic chemistry lab, like actually trying to do really complex delivery. And I tell you what, I definitely knew I didn't want to do organic chemistry, but again, what you don't want to do is just as important as learning what you might want to do when you grow up. And so that was a great time too, because it was a, it was a local kind of residential internship program. But going back to what you said, that theme around, the connection, you know, not just connecting to another grant, but what I found in some of my early biotech roles here, what companies did a great job of is making sure everybody, it's not just the researchers, it's the finance team, it's HR, it's everybody making sure they knew how they fit into the equation. Because just because you're not doing the hands-on developing of the drug, you play a very important role in making sure that the wheels keep turning, the lights stay on, like everybody. And I really look back fondly, and my co-founder Ryan does as well, really starting from the bottom. I think that there is something special that I, at the time, did not think it was that special, but starting from the bottom and seeing how companies ran, you know, and there's not a judgment or value statement here, but some people, when they come, when they go straight into management, you never see that. And so knowing how companies run, who is really keeping the data flowing, what are the sentiments on the ground level, make me now realize, how do I, just as you said, how do I make sure everyone knows their role, and how they're contributing to what we do, and having that scale as we, you know, grow the company.  

Jon - 00:30:40: Thanks. Yeah, absolutely. I'm a big, big, super big believer in knowing what's going on in the micro. And I'm not a micromanaging type person. I just sweat the details. I let people do their thing. But I just, one, I'm really interested in the details, but two, it's critically important because it's hard to be a leader if you don't actually know what's going on intimately. How can you manage something you don't understand? I'm not saying you need to have PhD-level understanding of every single thing in your company. That's not what I'm saying, but you should know your way around at least a little bit. 

Aaron - 00:31:13: Yeah, 100%. And that's something we can continue to fill in gaps, but really diving in deeper here about the best leaders that I saw. And I can only do this by looking back. At the time, I wasn't saying, oh, it was a lesson I was learning. But the best leaders were those knowing what they don't know. And you don't have to know every single thing. You don't have to be a PhD-level gene editor, immunologist, virologist. You don't have to do that. But you should surround yourself with people you trust that do. And I think that gave us a lot of confidence when we were down in KiraGen of just knowing what we do know, but also being willing to admit what we don't know and filling in those gaps with other people and expertise was really critical. And I think both the teams at Bluebird and Beam were really great at that kind of exposure to thinking about the patients and thinking about how to grow teams. And then really diving in on as companies grow, how can leadership actually get a sense of what is going on at the ground level? That's a huge, huge challenge.  

Jon - 00:32:19: Yeah. So, you know, I think a lot about how do you not lose touch? Like in the micro, as things get larger. And like, what is a optimal kind of like organizational structure to keep that like, cohesiveness, and just like kind of ability to, because I think the best leaders too are they have the ability to micro and then macro, kind of toggle in and out, and I don't have the answer for it. I think Bezos talks about like, teams being like, the size of like how many people could share lik,e a large pizza.  

Aaron - 00:32:49: Yeah. Well, and I don't, I don't think there is one model. Right? I think the, you know, one depends on the type of company, depends on the market. And what the market is allowing the company to do and scale, and raise. And you know, Bluebird was a really great example of this, where I moved and we skipped maybe one experience there, but the Bluebird was my first really significant biotech experience, I would, say long term especially where I met my co-founder Ryan. Um, this was one, the markets were frothy and freely flowing, uh, and as an employee, great place to be. There was, what some used to call it very cultish obsession around patients, and calling everything bird names, and it might have sounded corny, but when applied properly, it was electric. Like, the feeling inside was electric, and even as we scaled, we scaled with patients in mind, and it was in the DNA. It wasn't just sort of a, a meeting around. Do we think about patients? You just felt it. Everybody knew about it, and you know going back to this sort of organization scaling, there wasn't a rule book, you know, this is one of the first companies that was doing this type of gene therapy with flinty virus, and there was not a rule book for how you scaled, you know, now that I'm on the leadership side, someone doesn't hand you a playbook, and say, this is when you need to get this tool. Or this is how you scale good teams. But one thing that they did do a good job of I continue to think of, is how do you maybe have you know, breakfast with the CEO, or how can people tap in to new employees or people that might not have engagement with them every day, to try to give them a chance to communicate this. Maybe it was flawed in some ways, in execution. But this is something I think about a lot, and um there's a researcher at Harvard Business School here named Amy Edmondson, that does a lot of work on psychological safety. And I think, not saying Bluebird didn't have it it's something that's important for me, thinking when we are trying to apply these principles of psychological safety, and I'm going to check in on people, how can I make sure the environment is safe for them to speak up. You know, because it's not, it's not just having great teams that are motivated to do really good work, it's also having spaces where, when something isn't going right, it's not masked by culture, it's not bought away, you know, it's not paid to fix, someone is saying something. And people are listening to them, and taking action because the errands, well I'd say, you know, the Aaron and Ryan's, who were, trying to do that in the past, we got lost in translation, a lot. I think it's really important to figure out what that sort of, sight line is for every company as they grow, and that's something that keeps me up at night. Right. Is how do I, create spaces. Where as we grow, and I'm not seeing ,the five other people at the company every day. How can they or their team, communicate with each other, and somehow, it get back to me because you can't be everywhere. Right. Like, the CEO can't or whoever it might be can't be everywhere eventually, so you can't micromanage, you have to just hope that you've created systems that operate, to be able to feed back information to you about how things were fixed or problems that we need to solve.  

Jon - 00:36:01: Absolutely. And I think I try my best and I'm now just speaking for like Excedr. I'm not speaking for like, this is going to work for other companies, but I'm like always a big proponent of like having regular one-on-ones. I know it's very in vogue right now to be like one-on-ones, like whatever, they're a waste of time, just get work done, whatever. Like I disagree, but that's okay. And you can set the frequency, whatever's appropriate for you and your company. But I always think they're super important. For me, one's like a kind of work, kind of like professional kind of like aspect. And then there is the personal component too, because at least, and again, I'm speaking for Jon, I'm speaking for Excedr. I don't know if your mileage will vary, but I always think it's hard. Like you spend a lot of your waking hours working. How can it not be personal? Like, yeah, right.  

Aaron - 00:36:52: A hundred percent.  

Jon - 00:36:53: I don't live in severance, right?  

Aaron - 00:36:55: Yeah. 

Jon - 00:36:55: I don't live in severance world. I am one Jon. There's a personal aspect to me and there's a professional aspect to me, but there's still one Jon. And I'm going to imagine. Other human beings in a work environment might feel similar.  

Aaron - 00:37:09: 

Yeah. And, you know, I think something I learned that resonates a lot here as well of even at these well-funded and sort of well-organized companies, there are still a lot of learnings that we take on things we might not do. You know, they didn't have, they couldn't seem to the future and seem model that may or may not be working at the time. But one of them was now explicit one-on-ones that discuss personal professional development. Because what I learned, not the hard way, but like not everybody, including your manager, is always thinking about you and your career development. And that's okay. But it's a lesson to learn that one, you should know that you should be thinking about your career. But it's also okay to start asking questions about what can I be doing to get to that next level? And that conversation shouldn't be uncomfortable. If it's uncomfortable, there's a systemic issue there that someone is not creating that space again. So it's all of these themes around how do you create space where you importantly carve out? So one-on-ones are no work. Like for us, we can set up meetings to discuss sort of functional stuff. And there will always be some cross-pollination there. But it was so easy, as you said, like to one, I guess for scientists, when we had these one-on-ones, all we would talk about was our work and these projects. There was never enough time to discuss that. But then you found that in that 30-minute meeting, you never talked about you. You never talked about your problems. You never talked about career development. And it was easy to sort of sweep that under the rug. And so we've tried to separate them as much as possible. I don't know how it'll scale, but to make sure that there's some time carved out, at least either maybe at the beginning. So I will say, we have 15 minutes or whatever it might be. And if you don't have anything to discuss, we can move on and fill the rest of the time with work. I think that sort of discussion is very important for us now. The second thing to add to is the, you know, I know there's all this discussion around not having one-on-ones or don't have any meetings because you can just work, work, work, work, work. The lesson learned, especially as I went through HBS and saw, there was not one model. One size does not fit all. One way to fundraise does not fit all. It's really context dependent, not just on the company, on the market, and on the dynamics of your team. Same with these meetings. When someone talks about AI and drug discovery and says, you don't need any wet lab data. Well, you know, maybe that will work for them. And for what we're doing, it absolutely doesn't work. And that's okay. Actually, it is fine to have different models and to say, this is just one way of doing it. I think that exposure piece of not only having time pre-business school to see how different companies could run, that from the outside maybe looked pretty similar because there were these platform companies doing a lot of stuff and really well-funded. But then going to school and learning about case studies of, this is one way to lead this company, or this is one way that this leader decided to do that, but it's not the only way. And I think that was really an important sealing the deal, you know, tying the knot, so to speak, on that concept, as I think HBS tries to get their students to think critically and know this was a great way, but to never say, this is the only way to do stuff.  

Jon - 00:40:24: And I sometimes think in the zeitgeist, there's always like trends where the people are like, this is the way to do it. For anyone listening out there who's trying to think about and be kind of like deliberate in like culture setting and company building, it's just like, just. Don't worry, there is no one way. There really isn't. And to bring it back to like athletics, the Warriors play very differently than the Lakers, but they can be successful in their own way, right? It's just like, it's exactly what he said. Like, who are the people on the team? How do they like to operate? Some have really, really kind of like top-down businesses. And that's okay. Like some orgs work really well that way. Or it can do like the gaming company, Valve Corp, which is like completely flat. Like 100% flat. And that's like a, that's one way to run your business too. But it's kind of like, you gotta be very intentional and be, you need to know your audience, know your, like, who are you bringing into the team? And are they gonna thrive in this environment? And if not, you know, perhaps, you know, you gotta figure that out.  

Aaron - 00:41:28: This is also a great plug. We should definitely talk more about the times before school, but really great plug for HBS and their case method. I don't think a lot of people know what the style is. What does it mean to be a case, a case method kind of school? But I had no idea either. And, you know, they're good school for a reason, but I just had no idea what I would learn in business school. I had no business experience. I didn't know what case methods were. I had never taken finance class. And long story short, for those people that don't know, you don't have textbooks. You come to class with a case and everything you need to know is in this booklet of maybe 10 to 15 pages of information. And it's all centered around a leader or protagonist. And so the class starts, mostly you've prepped. You'll have a discussion about the case and then learn how that leader made a certain decision. And that's actually how you learn, even from the finance perspective. You do a little bit of math here and you have to know some mechanics, but you're still always really focused on a leadership decision that a company made. And I now look back on that. It is so valuable. And not just the real world experience in companies, but now across fields and disciplines. I never truly appreciated, especially until now as we're building, the importance of that exposure and saying, oh, well, the Delta Air Lines CEO did this. And that actually can apply here. And that exposure to concepts was more important than me being able to fill out an economic model from scratch. You know, that I know how to do it if I went back into my notes and did it again. But really, those concepts have been super helpful today. And I couldn't be more thankful for that type of education style. 

Jon - 00:43:12: Yeah, absolutely. And I like, I didn't go to HBS, but you know, friends that did that talk about the case method, say the same thing. I'm like, damn, that's freaking rad. Because I think, and I try to recreate it myself. It's just like, there's so much information out there nowadays, you can learn about how like any business ticks, like really. And I love that ability to cross pollinate. Because when you boil it down, companies are just organizations and groups of people. And groups of people working on a problem. I don't see why a lesson learned in a different industry couldn't apply to another group of people trying to solve a problem.  

Aaron - 00:43:52: Yeah. And two things that really stood out for me high level were one, I think another benefit of HBS, I guess, in the ecosystem. Not only do you talk about the case, if you're really fortunate, the protagonist would zoom in or be in class. And so you got about 10 minutes or so at the end of every class to hear from the person and how they thought about these decisions. And that gets you into the mindset of saying, oh, this is how the person actually thought about that. So they always end cases right before the conclusion. And then the protagonist comes in and tells you and fills in the gaps. And getting to hear that, oh, well. It seems like these themes I heard about, I'm going to say Delta again, but in the airline industry, these are universal themes that I was able to draw from my past and apply to now. And also then say, hey, it doesn't have to be biotech specific. Although now the program I was in was a biotech specific dual degree program that I think will almost be an expectation for leaders going forward, where instead of learning in the field, we now have case studies about biotech companies. We have asset versus platform companies, the AI drug discovery companies, FDA approvals. It was kid in a candy shop for a biotech nerd learning about the business ins and outs to go back to school and go, wow, we can really dig in. And I think that having that expertise and work experience before really just allowed me to kind of dive in deeper than I ever thought was possible.  

Jon - 00:45:27: I'm so jealous. That's so cool. Like, that's so rad. And, you know, we kind of jumped ahead here. Like, can you talk a little bit like, about getting to Boston? Like, you've done your internships, you're like wrapping up at Vanderbilt, graduations upcoming. Tell us about that mind state. Like, what were you thinking? Did you always have your eyes on going to Boston?  

Aaron - 00:45:47: Absolutely not. So I brought up my professor, Dr. Closter, who is that biology professor at Centre a lot. He was the reason I'm in Boston. So not, I mean, he did, I think he did his postdoc, if I'm not mistaken, in Boston. He encouraged me to think about, he helped me find this post-bac program technically for people wanting to go to medical school or fill in some of the curriculum gaps that was at BU or Boston University Medical Campus here. And for me, I was just looking for another reason to come up to Boston. Like, I didn't know about jobs. I didn't know what I could do, although I had some exposure to research. And this program allowed me not only to come in, take more classes that I was really fascinated by, but also gave you the flexibility to then choose where you did your thesis work. And that is where the snowball really starts. So Dr. Closter, you know, I'll say it over and over again, you know, he's my Mr. Frizzle of Centre is really why I'm here. But also at the time, my first boyfriend, later husband, now ex-husband, we're on good terms, don't worry, was in the New England area. So we had met during school. And so it was a, I don't want to say killing many birds with one stone, but coming up here allowed me to continue my education. It allowed me to see what this Boston biotech place actually was, get exposure to this research, and also be closer to someone for the first time in my life, I got to connect with and start exploring this personal side of me that now really shapes who I am today and how I lead. You know, I think that was a big jump for me going from the small town, Kentucky boy to the big city of Boston.

Jon - 00:47:30: Awesome.

Outro - 00:47:33: Thanks for listening to this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast with Aaron Edwards. In part two, we'll follow Aaron to Boston, where a cold email lands him in a cutting-edge immunology lab working on mRNA vaccine research years before COVID-19 would make the science world famous. He also shares how that experience shifted his career trajectory and how asking the right questions became a habit that shaped his leadership. If you're enjoying this series, follow the show, leave a review, and share it with a friend. See you next time. The Biotech Startups Podcast is produced by Excedr. Don't want to miss an episode? Search for The Biotech Startups Podcast wherever you get your podcasts and click subscribe. Excedr provides research labs with equipment leases on founder-friendly terms to support paths to exceptional outcomes. To learn more, visit our website, www.excedr.com. On behalf of the team here at Excedr, thanks for listening. The Biotech Startups Podcast provides general insights into the life science sector through the experiences of its guests. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from the podcast is at the user's own risk. The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not the views of Excedr or sponsors. No reference to any product, service or company in the podcast is an endorsement by Excedr or its guests.