From Law School to Teva: Learning a 45,000-Person Organization | Mati Gill (2/4)

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.

In our last episode, Mati shared growing up as an American kid who chose Israel at 12 years old, six years in the IDF that instilled values he still runs by, and a constitutional law professor who handed him a D and turned him into someone who could earn an A. If you missed it, check out part one.

In part two, Mati talks about juggling law school and the minister's bureau at the same time, the personal health crisis that reset his priorities, and the Teva internship that turned into a 12-year career. He breaks down how he learned a 45,000-person organization by methodically working his way through the org chart and how Teva's financial crisis, rather than sidelining him, became an opening to build something entirely new.

Mati Gill - 00:01:25: So I've always, since relatively young, since I was 20 or 21, I had a mentor that encouraged me to think about what was really of core importance for me and for the rest of my life, basically, and how I want to live my life—not necessarily values, but what I want to live in service of. And I ultimately decided to align, after a thinking process, on three things: family, Israel, and a life of service. So, living my life in Israel, building and raising a family, and third, my life and my career will be something that is in service of the ideology of Israel and of our people in that sense, and really providing meaning, I would even say, behind that. So that was a kind of a decision.

And when I went into law school, one of the reasons I didn't want to go to work in a law firm after law school—not that I didn't enjoy it, I did some apprenticeship during my time in law school and I enjoyed the legal work, but I didn't want to make that my career. And actually, during my second year in law school, I got a call from a former commander or boss of mine from the army. And he made me an offer. He said, "Listen, a friend of mine is working to help someone who's entering into politics in a very senior role. He's going to be entering into politics next week in a new centrist party, a center-right party that's going to be formed. And he's looking for an aide to come work with him during the campaign, the election campaign. He'll likely be appointed a minister because they were pretty certain at the time that his party was going to win, maybe even a senior minister, no promises. But if you want to get some experience, it's a great opportunity to go work with someone who's going to be a very senior minister from the campaign level. And if all things work out, then maybe you'll continue with them after the election." And I said no. Because I said no, that was my first intuition, though in shock because it came out of nowhere.

Jon Chee - 00:03:26: Yeah. But—

Mati Gill - 00:03:26: I actually liked my life, and I liked law school. On campus, I was head of the student union for the law school, was on my way to becoming elected to be head of the student union for the whole campus, was an educator also, and informally running a Tel Aviv youth movement branch of mine and a couple of other things, and really liked my life. So I wasn't looking to make a change during that year, and liked being on campus and knew what that would entail. And the same commander who got me to actually sign on for an extra year in the army gave me the same exercise that he did back then. He said, "Go think about it. It's Thursday now. Think about it over the weekend. Give me a response on Sunday." And so I said, "Okay, Zohar, that's fine." His name is Zohar, getting aside as a Colonel. And I said, "Okay, that's fine."

And I started to think about it and then called up a friend of mine who gave me some good advice, and he said, "Are you crazy? Go to be a student union leader in order to get an opportunity like this, not the opposite. And this guy is going to be a very senior minister." And I said, "Well, not sure we ideologically align." He said, "Nah, you're fine." And then I kept finding reasons to say no, until finally he gave me one reason to say yes. And he said, "You know what, if you take this job, you're going to get to learn and know the country that you live in in a much more in-depth manner than you've ever discovered up until now."

And I thought I knew Israel, and I thought I knew various areas in Israel. I had lived in various cities up until that time, and I told him that. He said, "No, no, no. When you do a role like this campaigning, running around the country, getting to meet the actual people and sit down and talk about the issues and listen to them about what's of importance for them and what bothers them, that's when you get to really know your country." And for me, that was fascinating. I came back. I said, "Absolutely, yes, I'm all in." I went to meet the future minister. He hired me, pretty much gave me the opportunity on the same day, and I spent the next three and a half years working for him until the following elections that came afterwards. And all in parallel to law school. So, I did it in parallel to law school.

Jon Chee - 00:05:32: Oh, this in tandem.

Mati Gill - 00:05:34: Yeah, that was one of his conditions. So the campaign was fine; it was second semester, second year was fine. It's a four-year law school program. And so after he made me an offer to continue with him after he was elected and we won the election, he was appointed a minister. He said, "I'd really like you to be the first hire and then help me build out the team in the bureau. But on one condition: you're not going to quit law school. You're going to have to be able to juggle. And if you think you can juggle, you're all in." I said, "I can at least try." I was 25, 26. And so I can at least try, I'll help you build the team. And if I start flunking out of law school, then I'll just leave and replace myself. And we agreed on that.

Thankfully, year one of law school, I was on the Dean's list, so I was able to average out. I ended up with a B average because I started out from a high place, which helped me out throughout the rest, but I didn't show up actually besides exams. I don't think I came to any classes besides the seminars of the same constitutional law professor that was so good in that sense and was well worth my time there of late memory.

And then, basically, at the end of law school, it culminated with the elections three and a half years later or four years later, where then I came back to him and said, "Just like you conditioned me working for you with not giving up my legal education, it's now time for me to take the bar." In order to take the bar in Israel, you have to be basically a junior associate for a year. You have to do what we call a staj, an internship, which is basically being a paid junior associate for a year. So I said, "I have to do that same principle, and then we'll talk in a year, a year and a half from now."

I also went through a personal health incident where I was injured in a terrorist attack here in Israel, wounded in a shooting. So it was on all levels, again, prioritization and focus. It made sense for me to take a break, focus on doing the one thing I hadn't been able to do up until then, which was potentially build a family over the next few years, as well as take a break, get healthy, and then start to finish up my legal education and actually get licensed and certified, which I did.

Jon Chee - 00:07:42: Wow. I was going to say, like, sounds like a busy four years.

Mati Gill - 00:07:46: It was. It's funny, you know, I was asked at some point, "How can you do both in tandem?" My answer was very simple: there's a lot of innovation—we both work in the innovation world, right?—there's been a lot of innovation, but there's one thing that we haven't been able to innovate, which is how to make the day longer than 24 hours or how to make a week more than seven days. So it's all what you give up again. It goes to the beginning of our conversation.

So at the time I said, "Okay, I'm going to work, I'm going to pass law school, and I'm going to have a lot less time for a lot of other things like sleep less, workout less, see friends less." I gained 10 pounds. It was a very clear algorithm in that sense. And right as I got out of law school again, after the wounding also, I said, "Okay, now I'm going to run a marathon." So I ran the New York marathon a year later in order to get back in shape and healthy.

Jon Chee - 00:08:33: Yeah. So now you basically said, "Alright, I need to reset here. Like, it's time to reset. Let's get back in shape here." So talk a little about that phase. You've kind of level-set. Where were you heading then?

Mati Gill - 00:08:44: So I took a decision basically by process of elimination to do my internship in-house counsel for Teva Pharmaceuticals, and that's really how I entered into the biotech space and the pharma space. I did that because I liked the idea of, if I was going to work in the private sector, working in the healthcare and pharma space and for the best and biggest company in Israel, which is Teva.

And so an opportunity arose and I said, instead of working for a law firm—which again, I didn't want to go on that track—and instead of working for the government in a legal internship role, where I try not to take decisions based upon an ego, but after being a chief of staff equivalent for a minister that's very senior and being in the room, like they say in Hamilton, then going to a very junior role in the same organization, I thought that would be putting myself in a very frustrating place. So I moved over to being in a very junior role, but in industry, where I said, "Here, I'll be able to learn some skills, gain some knowledge by starting out from the bottom up in a place where I really don't have any understanding of, which is the private sector and industry."

And even while I was in government, I had a seat at the table, again, in the room where they take the decisions, but I felt truly that I didn't have the skillset and all the skills to be able to impact and influence the way I thought that I would want to, and to be really a leader in that space, because I'd never run an organization. I'd never set strategy. I'd never run large budgets, hired and fired team members at a large scale, or managed team members at that scale, beyond the minister's office. And I felt that those were skills that I could learn at that point in time best in the private sector and in the industry specifically, which thankfully I ultimately did, I believe, over the next decade or so at Teva Pharmaceuticals.

Jon Chee - 00:10:47: How did that opportunity arise? Was it just like, "I'm just going to go look for a job posting in an industry that I have no familiarity with?" Was it through a friend, or how did it come about?

Mati Gill - 00:10:57: So it was through a friend. Everyone was starting to look for internship opportunities. Teva was looking for interns and a friend of mine in law school, she kind of passed on my resume through her father who was in the legal department at Teva, and I went and interviewed. For some reason they accepted me. We kind of laugh about it up until then, because I don't think they had ever hired an intern like me—again, running the country, or thinking I was running the country, probably a little bit over my head, but running the country affairs up until the time of my actual interview with the person that was hiring all the interns, and then doing the same thing afterwards. And they would joke about it afterwards, like, "How the hell did they find this guy to come in?"

Jon Chee - 00:11:37: Yeah. Yeah.

Mati Gill - 00:11:38: Yeah. And even during my internship, I was still staying very active in politics up until then and volunteering for the same minister. So I would fly with him to help them fundraise and to help as an advisor when he was then a Knesset member in opposition. And so we went to Australia, went to the US a couple of times throughout that first year, and they had never had someone who actually did that on the side while still doing training. But I found a great home in Teva to advance my career and gain some of those same skills.

Thankfully, the chief legal officer who then entered his position during my time there—blessed memory, I still have a reminder of him, Richard Goes—he was a mentor of mine. He came as a legal mentor and a legal leader who wanted to build up an organization, offered me a role because he saw that I could help him build up legal operations for the global legal group and actually turn Teva Legal into a global legal group. And so I remember running the budget with a few hundred million dollars of external expenses and then helping him run operations and build it up into an organization of a few hundred people around the world. And so I really gained some managerial experiences at a very senior level over the next five to seven years, while also then working in policy and government affairs, and ultimately then in external innovation throughout my 10 or 12 years there.

Jon Chee - 00:13:03: Very rad. So airdrop me in. You got the internship. You started at the bottom. What were the early days like for you?

Mati Gill - 00:13:09: Very frustrating. Yeah, I showed up and, again, from being in a very posh office in the government where I was very senior, all of a sudden sitting in what was almost like a closet that was transformed into an office for two people. It was me and one of the admins—very sweet, relatively older, probably twice my age at the time—and the two of us had desks right next to each other. And I was so low on the totem pole there.

But I came to learn, and I really came to learn. I came with the humility, understanding that I knew nothing about what I was trying to do there, and learned how to do contracts bottom-up and created a routine for myself. I was somewhat frustrated after a few months, especially when large events would happen in the country and I wasn't immediately part of them and could impact them. But then I reminded myself there's a reason why I'm here: take myself seriously, take the profession seriously. Ultimately, I was able to gain a lot of experiences, contacts, friends, mentors, and skillsets throughout that time in the industry, and really be able to carve out a niche for what I like to do in the private sector with a lot of meaning behind it. Again, my career always has to have a strong sense of purpose and meaning throughout every job I've taken, which I was able to find at Teva on a pretty much daily basis.

Jon Chee - 00:14:38: I guess a question for you. I talk to a lot of grad students who find themselves—like, they finish, they wrap up their PhD or postdoc, and they find themselves at an Eli Lilly or something, a very large organization. What was your strategy for thriving in such a large organization? I've always done startup life, so I don't know. Frankly, I don't know. But, I mean, Teva's pretty freaking big. It's a big deal, a big organization.

Mati Gill - 00:15:03: Very big. It's very big. As an intern, I was somewhat isolated within my own role, getting very strong directives: "Here's what you're going to do today. Here's what you're going to do tomorrow." And just being coachable and trying to execute the best way that I could. After that year, when I came and passed the bar and then came back in a relatively very senior role as COO for global legal and part of legal management, part of top management for the company, it took me about a month to understand I knew nothing. I really didn't understand the organization. All of a sudden I was shocked by how large the organization was that I was working for. I thought the Israeli government was large, or I thought the Israeli Defense Forces where I spent six years was large, but Teva is like 45,000 people all the way from Japan to the United States and everywhere in between. As a global legal group, we had people everywhere supporting all functions of the company from operations through R&D, etc.

And so I just basically took it upon myself to learn the industry and then learn the organization. So I did two things in parallel. I found someone on my floor who in the past had been the deputy head of R&D. And he had some time because he was towards the end of his career at Teva. So he was in the audit group, but a wonderful man. I said, "Mickey, come and teach me drug discovery and development." So we would have coffee twice a week where I'd come to him and he would just teach me the fundamentals of drug discovery and development over about a three-month period. And each time we would focus on a different area and a different stage. Therefore, I really understood the basics. You're probably not going to find the next Copaxone, but at least understand the industry I was working in.

And then the second thing was to learn the organization and through that, to understand the industry as well. So I just took the org chart and went bottom-up, top-down, started finding people. And at the end of each meeting that I would find for myself—and took the initiative to set those up on my own—I would ask them, "Who are the other two people I should be meeting, either from your organization or a parallel one?" and really just dedicated time to learning the organization in a very systematic manner over that first year there. And that helped me to at least understand where I was so I could actually create value.

And ultimately, when Teva went into a crisis on tax incentives in Israel—and it was a huge crisis in that sense of what our tax incentives and tax rates would be—I was able to contribute to that because I understood the organization. I knew the players that were deciding on that. I was able to call up—I was in a senior enough role that I could call the global CFO and say, "Hey, do you need some help? This is an area I actually have some background in government, and maybe I could help think of a way that we can navigate this crisis successfully, even though it wasn't my role." And he said, "Yeah, all hands on deck. You're senior management, right? This is a crisis, come help." And I have a motto saying, "Never let a good crisis go to waste," and that helped me to open up new areas of my career accordingly within Teva.

Jon Chee - 00:18:16: I love that because I think when you get into a large organization, you can let it paralyze you. But I love the systematic approach of just like also, just like in the very beginning, you have like a permission slip to literally tap on everyone's shoulder: "Teach me, teach me, teach me." Eventually, they're going to be like, "Alright, you should have a grasp by this time," but there's like this window of time where you can just basically pop in.

Mati Gill - 00:18:42: When training soldiers as an officer, I'd always tell them, "There's no such thing as a dumb question in the first month. After that, there's certain things you should know and you should have looked. But in the first month, ask anything."

Jon Chee - 00:18:55: Yeah, exactly. And I think that applies here too. And also, I just love just like, "Give me the org charts." It sounds so straightforward, but it's just like you have to break it down into its constituent parts and then see how it all kind of plays together. And I guess, from a pure strategy perspective, my cofounder is very much about decentralization—like pushing down responsibility into other groups, all about that. There's also a different strategy where you kind of do more fully integrated decisions that come over the top. Philosophically, what was Teva like? Or, I guess, what's your take on that? Because I think, at least in my space, we're in equipment. You think of Danaher—Danaher's like push down responsibility all through the units. Then you think of Thermo Fisher, not so much; Thermo Fisher's at the top. What was Teva like? What do you think about it?

Mati Gill - 00:19:45: Well, I think asking a question of what Teva was like, from my perspective, it had various different strengths depending on the CEOs, right? So, CEOs that I had the opportunity to work with that pushed it down were very empowering and just said, "Go out and do whatever." Then there were other CEOs, again based upon their philosophy and the time of what situation the company was in, that were very strong managers versus leaders necessarily—very strong managers that would have a tight fist on everything, every specific decision, very top-down. I was able to get exposed to both opportunities.

Ultimately, I think the philosophy I like to adopt is, number one, making sure we're aligned on the top priorities and strategy. And the whole organization that I now lead has to understand this. I learned absolutely at Teva, both from Eli Hurvitz, who's the founder of modern Teva, as well as from Kåre Schultz, who was the CEO of Teva ultimately that helped save the company, always making sure that everyone knew what the strategy and the top priorities were. I mean, as the CEO of Teva that I got to learn from, he always made sure we knew what the top priorities and the strategy were, all the way down into the organization.

Number two is hiring great people and surrounding yourself with great team members that can lead on their own right, and hiring the strongest people you can, and then empowering them. And number three is making sure that I am not doing anything in my day job that someone else from my team can do. So really empowering them and allowing them to do that, while at the same time, the most important things to the success of our organization, I have a very strong hold on and work on those very closely. And I think that's the balance to be able to do them both top-down and bottom-up.

Jon Chee - 00:21:42: I love that. And I was just listening to the recent Invest Like the Best episode with Brian Chesky at Airbnb. He had a similar kind of philosophy where as the company got larger, he was like, "I need to know all the way that the strategy is being implemented all the way down, or else it just is like entropy."

Mati Gill - 00:22:02: Everyone just kind of does whatever they want and—

Jon Chee - 00:22:04: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mati Gill - 00:22:05: —waste resources and lose direction and lose focus.

Jon Chee - 00:22:09: Yeah. And so you said, like, at Teva, you were—I think you said you did external innovation kind of at the tail end of your time there.

Mati Gill - 00:22:18: At the end, yes. A bit of my career there, it started from legal operations, building up a legal organization, running those legal operations on various different aspects, and then went into government affairs and policy. And ultimately, as part of my role in external affairs, corporate affairs, an opportunity arose to build up a new innovation program for Teva in Israel, focused in Israel. I'm again out of the same "never let a good crisis go to waste" type of model. Teva was in pretty much an existential crisis to the company on the financial side due to a failed acquisition and needed to go into a lot of cuts very deeply.

But at the same time, we were able to ask the CEO for the permission and the mandate to build up a new external innovation program in Israel that would help to build up future growth engines for the company, because while you're cutting, you still need to save some capabilities to grow. But we didn't have the same capital capabilities that Teva had in the past before that failed acquisition and didn't have the same relationships that a large pharma company would have everywhere in the world. There was one geographic area that we thought we could build a competitive business advantage for Teva to have access to the best science and innovation, and that was Israel. So we asked the CEO for the mandate, and he gave it to us to double down.

And sometimes you look around and you say, "Okay, who's supposed to lead this?" And a lot of the time, she said, "Why don't you take it?" And so I did, and I just said, "Okay, I don't know anything about science in that sense. I'm not a scientist. I know something about it, but I'm not a scientist or an innovator at the time on the biotech side, but I know how to lead processes and strategy and, hopefully, lead people and get people together and develop a strategy, get them motivated." There were tough times where all of us were having to let go of a lot of our friends, kind of get their sails up and start to look up and become optimistic and think about the hope and dreams of what future we could build for ourselves in the company, in the country, etc. And so that was something I was able to do and kind of got the team together from all different functions of the company—from finance, from business development, from R&D, of course, and operations—got everyone on the same page, got some support from external partners in Israel, learned different models for how we could innovate, and decided on the strategy, which had three prongs.

Number one is refocusing our attention on Israeli science and academia, and we did that hand-in-hand with the R&D group where they selected the core focus areas, and I just helped to open up the doors and fund the initial stages. And then secondly, which was to build up new talent programs. And third, ultimately, was to do AI and machine learning and start to seed those abilities back in 2018, 2019. The decision was to start to seed those capabilities within Teva R&D in Israel out of the understanding that that is something Israeli talent is good at, right? Israeli technology helped to innovate throughout the world in many different industries, and now it's starting to do so in pharma as well.

So we identified that back then and we said, we'll start with the basics: pipeline assets through sponsored research organizations. We started again with the Weizmann Institute because that's where Teva ultimately grew out of with Copaxone, the multiple sclerosis miracle drug. So I'm a big believer in karma, and I said, "Okay, when we're going to reconnect with the Israeli scientific ecosystem, we should start from the same institution that helped Teva grow into what it is to this day." So we started from the Weizmann Institute, and ultimately the R&D group led by a wonderful partner of mine up until now at Ion Labs, Donna Baron. She took that to areas and heights that I never even dreamed of. It was that successful because of her leadership. We kind of opened the door and then they took it, and we forged the first partnership. Now they have over 30, including pipeline assets throughout Israel at all institutions, partner of choice for all scientific innovation within their scope to this day, well-positioned. And even with pipeline assets now in the company, which I'm not privy to because I'm not a Teva employee anymore, but I know that those partnerships have led to tangible value for the Teva pipeline potentially, and I'm very proud of that.

And the bio-innovators program that she then built out of the talent play that we wanted to do, we just had the opportunity to host them last week at Ion Labs. So full circle, this is their seventh cohort with hundreds of alumni now. And Ion Labs, which I lead to this day, was directly born out of that strategy of how do we seed the capabilities of AI and machine learning and drug discovery and development in Israel. And this was the implementation of that strategy.

Jon Chee - 00:27:10: That's super cool. There's so much I want to unpack here. So—

Mati Gill - 00:27:13: Yeah, sure.

Jon Chee - 00:27:14: I guess the first is, can you talk a little bit about the talent development program? How did you conceptualize it? What were the early kind of iterations to what it is now?

Mati Gill - 00:27:23: Yeah. So, I mean, ultimately it was about the goal, right? Back in the end of 2017, 2018, Teva had to cut about $3,000,000,000 out of its cost base. It was at the time about a fifth of the cost base of the company that they had to cut, and very quickly, which means that all supporting functions had to let go of 50% of our headcount within two to three months.

Jon Chee - 00:27:47: Oh my god.

Mati Gill - 00:27:48: We cut down one quarter of the 80-some factories that Teva had around the world, and the R&D groups had to let go, I think, around 40% on average of the R&D team members throughout the world. So we lost a lot of talent, mostly at a lot of senior-level talent that, either through early retirements and nice packages, were able to kind of come out quite well. And I'm proud to say that Teva handled all those decisions in a very humane and respectful manner of the employees that helped the company become the success that it was.

But that being said, we needed to then reignite a new talent pipeline in new areas of drug discovery and development and bring in more cutting-edge, younger talent at the time. So the idea was to go to all the best labs—and it's still the same core elements. Donna Baron, she's the external innovation lead and partnerships lead for Teva R&D globally, and her vision was to go to all the different best labs in Israel and the best universities in Israel and ask those labs to nominate their top PhDs and postdocs, and then build a forum where you get to know them throughout a six-month period and meet with them at least on a monthly basis, to be able to help them understand industry and how they apply their top scientific capabilities towards industry, as well as entrepreneurship, non-related directly to Teva, but understanding this is the way to kind of get to know the people and to position Teva as an employer of choice where innovative things can happen and people can be empowered. And even at Ion Labs, we've hired for our startups some of the graduates from those programs because we get to know them, and they're great scientists that also want to work in industry. So we get to know them and then make them offers to build a company.

Jon Chee - 00:29:37: That's freaking awesome because, like, when I was at Berkeley, a talent program like that did not exist. I'm not sure if it exists right now. It kind of, like, has a—

Mati Gill - 00:29:45: Yeah, look at it as a fellowship program, and they would get also scholarships. So to participate in this, there was another talent program that I had the opportunity to build while at Teva still, which we called the National Network for Excellence in Neuroscience, that Jeremy Levin and then Michael Hayden—Jeremy was CEO and then Michael Hayden as head of R&D—they were big neuroscience believers. And so we did the same type of core elements where we came to all the labs and researchers and really incentivized them through very lucrative scholarship and fellowship programs to be able to come work with us throughout that year. So this was kind of the next iteration of that, but more focused on talent, not just on research, but actually on talent.

Jon Chee - 00:30:27: That's awesome because I think, at least when I was still in the lab, it was like, "You're in academia or die." Like, basically, I was like, "I'm going to be destitute if I can't be a PI." Like, this is going to be—and there's only so many tenured professorships that you can go for. It's like the NBA of the NBA. Not all of us can be LeBron, I'm sorry. That's okay. And, you know, LeBron's LeBron.

Mati Gill - 00:30:52: LeBron's my favorite, you know? I'm like—

Jon Chee - 00:30:53: Cleveland's like—

Mati Gill - 00:30:54: There you go. So nobody can be LeBron. I'm drawing an alley-oop to his son in a playoff game.

Jon Chee - 00:30:59: Yeah, I know, exactly. Right? Come on.

Mati Gill - 00:31:01: Didn't think.

Jon Chee - 00:31:02: Like, come on.

Mati Gill - 00:31:03: Anybody—you don't have to be a sports fan to tell someone that and to see, you know, how in the hell did that ever happen?

Jon Chee - 00:31:09: Yeah, it's insane. I love having the embrace of industry plus the research institution that's homegrown, cultivating that talent and letting them know that there are alternative paths if you don't stay in academia—there's a path in industry. And now it sounds like it's not just that, it's more broadly talent, which is awesome to hear. And I guess, when you are structuring these external partnerships, in your mind, what makes for an effective partnership when it's industry and an academic institution? How do you make it work?

Mati Gill - 00:31:43: So the core element is understanding what each one does well and not trying to do the other's role, right? Academia is supposed to innovate. I learned from the former president of the Weizmann Institute; he said, "We want our scientists to come out and be curious and explore without necessarily having to reach a specific industrial goal." Because that's where the best science happens—you discover the mechanisms in the brain to solve, cure, or be able to treat things like multiple sclerosis through very radical curiosity that ultimately leads to breakthroughs that you didn't necessarily plan for. So they want to advance that science, and that's where the best science happens, but it's basic science at the best level possible. And industry then has to turn that into a product that can then be sold.

Where I think things go wrong is where in industry, we have the feeling that we can be the best scientists and innovators. And on the other side—and this I've seen many times—is where academics and scientists in academia believe that they should then be the leaders of the companies that are spun out from their labs. Sometimes it works; some people are absolutely capable of doing that, but that's the rare exception, it's not the rule. I think each side needs to understand what it can do best and allow the experts to really lead with what they do.

Same thing at Ion Labs: I'm the CEO, but I have a CTO, a Chief Technology Officer, who's a deep scientist. I have no scientific background since high school. He's a deep scientist and he's a scientific authority for the lab. And when we started working together, Yair said to me, "So why are you reading these scientific papers? It's not your role." I said, "Well, I'm a curious person. I want to understand and learn what we're working on." So I would do that once in a while to understand the basics, but if I spend my time in the labs or reading scientific papers, I'm not focusing my time on what I'm able to do best.

Jon Chee - 00:33:47: Interesting. Yeah, I definitely agree. I think it's kind of—for me, it's just like when you think about team and collaboration, you can't be the best at everything, kind of back to the LeBron analogy. But it's always the best thing to do to just have someone that can cover your blind spots or your soft spots, and that's totally cool. That's the perk of building a well-rounded team.

Outro - 00:34:12: That's all for this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast featuring Mati Gill. Join us next time for part three where Mati unpacks the three-pillar external innovation strategy he built for Teva Israel: reconnecting with the Weizmann Institute, launching a fellowship talent pipeline now seven cohorts deep, and seeding AI and machine learning capabilities before most of the industry understood why and how that work combined with Israel's bioconvergence initiative and a German venture studio model gave birth to Ion Labs.

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