Why One-Size-Fits-All Leadership Fails - How Context Creates Success | Michael Newton (Part 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, Michael Newton shared how growing up in 1980s New York City shaped his independence, curiosity, and leadership style. If you missed it, check out part one. In part two, Michael picks up the story at graduation, where he bypasses the traditional recruiting track to land a role in private equity without a finance background. He shares how that experience gave him a crash course in business, exposed him to influential mentors, and sparked a shift in his career ambitions that would eventually lead him back to business school.

Michael Newton - 00:01:09: Yeah. So I wrote an honors thesis my senior year. Because of that, I didn't really participate in the standard recruiting cycle, which I don't really understand why I did that. It kind of seems like it was a stupid thing to do at the time, but I was super lucky because it worked out for me. What ended up happening is I was writing my honors thesis, really focused on that, and then later, through the Dartmouth job board or whatever it was—I can't even remember, to be honest—I got put in touch with an opportunity working for a large private equity fund in Manhattan.

Most people go to investment banking, you work for a couple of years, then you try to get on the buy-side. I kind of got stupidly lucky to land this job as a PE analyst back in Manhattan. What was interesting was I had been involved in a nonprofit when I was at school called Dream. Some friends of mine a couple of years older than me had started it. They're actually still running it. Dream's an amazing organization. I still happily support it; it's incredible.

But back then, my senior year, I actually had the opportunity to go back to New York City and work in private equity or to move to Burlington, Vermont, and be the executive director of Dream, which was this relatively small, up-and-coming nonprofit at the time. I mean, those are pretty dramatically different.

Jon Chee - 00:02:40: Pretty different. Yeah.

Michael Newton - 00:02:41: And to say that I struggled with it would probably be a bit of an overstatement. And maybe I don't want the people from Dream—Mike Foote, sorry—because I was just sucked into, "Well, I can go to New York and live the world that is much more your traditional path, make more money." So I think in the end, I didn't know myself well enough, or I didn't have the courage to really consider going the other direction. So I ended up taking this opportunity and going to New York. So when I was at graduation, I had that lined up. And so I had a little bit of time. I think I started in early July after having graduated in early June. And so pretty quickly, I dropped back to New York. I'm fortunate I'm from New York, so I just moved in with my parents.

Jon Chee - 00:03:13: Yeah. Yeah. You're just like, "This is great."

Jon Chee - 00:03:14: Like, "I already have housing set up, so this is gonna be..."

Michael Newton - 00:03:16: Exactly. Yeah. I was like, "I don't know if they thought it was great."

Jon Chee - 00:03:19: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

Jon Chee - 00:03:21: "We had four years, and now, oh, goddamn it." Yeah.

Michael Newton - 00:03:24: Exactly. And so I knew what I was doing after school, and that allowed for that last semester of school to be pretty interesting and fun. But yeah, I just jumped back into the Manhattan world and into that finance world. It was interesting because I wasn't an econ major. Right? I wasn't a math guy. So I don't know exactly why they chose me at the end of the day, but I was fortunate to have this opportunity, and it was awesome. And it worked out super well and, obviously, led on the journey we're talking through now. So I went from high school kid in New York, four years up in the woods in New Hampshire, back in New York.

And being 21, 22, 23, 24 in New York City, working your guts out, getting your butt kicked a little bit, wound up being super fun. I mean, there's just a great dynamic of young people from all over, whether it be the finance people or the legal people or whatever. There was just a great vibe there. And I was lucky because I still had high school friends and other people who were there, but I also had this whole new community that I was able to build. So it was a super experience for me because I really do believe that after school—and I give this advice to a lot of people, especially people who I know who grew up in Oregon or whatnot—I'm like, "You gotta get out of Dodge and get to a real city."

Jon Chee - 00:04:41: And I put San Francisco on that list. That counts for me. Okay. Cool. Cool. Cool. Good.

Michael Newton - 00:04:45: I just thought I'd dial it in enough. Right?

Jon Chee - 00:04:47: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

Michael Newton - 00:04:49: But you gotta get to New York or San Francisco or to LA or somewhere that's gonna expose you to what this is. You know, I mean, what's that line from that silly graduation speech? It's like, "Live in New York, but leave before it makes you too hard, and live in LA before it makes you too soft."

Jon Chee - 00:05:04: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

Michael Newton - 00:05:06: And so, no, I was really excited and fired up to just get back to the city at that point and dive in.

Jon Chee - 00:05:11: And that first PE role—I've heard stories about how intense it can be. You said it was a formative experience for you. What was that like? Were there any challenges or triumphs? Going in with no finance experience sounds like a baptism by fire. So I'm gonna imagine there's some...

Michael Newton - 00:05:30: Well, two things were super fortunate to come together. One is that the Dartmouth Business School—a great business school, Tuck—had this summer program, which is basically business school boot camp where they take liberal arts kids and kick their ass for 30 days, getting them grounded in finance. So that was super helpful. But then what was awesome is when I landed at TH Lee, this private equity fund, they put me in a shared office with a guy named Mark Ciccarelli, who's a super dude. And I probably annoyed the shit out of that guy because I was just asking a million questions.

To be fair, the first things that I was doing, they literally had me trying to identify potential targets to invest in. So there's no hardcore analysis; I was the lowest on the totem pole, cold-calling companies, being super uncomfortable cold-calling companies, all these things. But it was a great opportunity to learn a ton. He was there; he was post-business school at that time. And so to kind of ride his coattails—and he was awesome. He was just endlessly patient. He kicked my ass too, let's be clear.

So I was just lucky to have somebody literally in the same office, desk-to-desk, screen-to-screen type thing. And it really paid off. Over time—and it wasn't even that much time—but six months in, they started staffing me on deals, starting to do real analysis of companies, starting to get in. We used to build these 100-slide decks on our investment thesis and where we would go with these businesses. And it was definitely a baptism by fire. We worked super hard.

Jon Chee - 00:07:04: Every night. You know?

Michael Newton - 00:07:04: Oh, there wasn't even a question. I would just eat dinner at the office every night.

Jon Chee - 00:07:08: Every—yeah. Yeah.

Michael Newton - 00:07:09: Yeah. And it's actually funny because I look at myself now—I'm 43—and I'm like, "Okay, 20 years ago, I used to work all day, eat dinner at work, go run six miles in Central Park, and then go out."

Jon Chee - 00:07:21: Oh my gosh. You know? Yeah.

Michael Newton - 00:07:25: And now I'm like, "Oh, forget it." I can't even dream about that sort of shit.

Jon Chee - 00:07:33: Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Newton - 00:07:33: You know? I'm like, "I don't know where you get that energy." So being in New York when you're young like that is just super fun. It was a great group of people, hands down, in the firm, which was awesome. I was really fortunate. The guy who was the chairman of that fund was a guy named Harvey Golub, who was the former CEO of American Express. And before that, he had been the global managing partner for McKinsey.

I actually don't know if Harvey's still alive or not. But, you know, this is Manhattan in 2002 to 2006. You can't smoke. But he would just walk around smoking.

Jon Chee - 00:08:07: Nobody had the guts to tell him.

Jon Chee - 00:08:08: I don't think anyone could tell him anything. No. Nobody would be terrified.

Michael Newton - 00:08:13: I remember we used to build one of those 100-page decks, and we'd spend months and months and months on this thing. And within ten minutes, he was looking up this thing, and he's like, "So on page 72, this is wrong. Can you explain it to me?" And we'd know. It'd be like, "Oh, the weakness." And he'd find it in ten minutes.

Jon Chee - 00:08:29: I've heard when people are locked in like that...

Michael Newton - 00:08:33: He was a savant. Just amazing, understood how businesses work, understood how people work, just really good. And so I was fortunate; he didn't, quote-unquote, mentor me, so to speak, but I was in his wake. And so I just saw how he worked and saw how he worked with other partners. And then at that fund, a few people left, and they started another fund, and I went with them, and Harvey was involved.

So there was actually a period of time—because as the former CEO of American Express, he got an emeritus situation. I think they got to take care of him for life. So he had a private office in Teaneck, New Jersey, that while we were starting this other fund, I used to reverse commute from the Upper West Side to Teaneck, New Jersey, which is crazy. And I got to work in his office and work with him really directly for a period of time and just really learn. And his office in Teaneck, because it was American Express that built it out, was beautiful. They put in a special filtration system so he could smoke.

Jon Chee - 00:09:30: Oh my. That's so funny.

Michael Newton - 00:09:33: It's so funny. So AmEx shareholders spent, like, a hundred grand or something on this suburban office place. I had a car, the company paid for me to park it in Manhattan, and I would reverse commute to Teaneck.

Jon Chee - 00:09:45: It was so funny.

Jon Chee - 00:09:47: Yeah. A special filtration system.

Michael Newton - 00:09:50: Oh, yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:09:50: Yeah. I love that. And was this Kubera Partners?

Michael Newton - 00:09:54: Yeah. Exactly. So, essentially, I was at TH Lee, and that was a $1.1 billion fund that was part of the Thomas H. Lee family of funds. Thomas H. Lee does big general buyouts, but they had this growth equity fund. And so as that fund was wrapping up, coming to the end of the fund life, a few of the partners decided to spin out and do their own thing. And so there were actually a couple of entities that got created that all kind of merged into that. But, yeah, it was a really great experience. Again, just really lucky to be in experiences where people assumed you would figure your shit out, but also would help you.

And I made some stupid mistakes. I remember some of the mistakes, like getting stuff wrong in a financial model, doing something dumb with one of our partners or whatnot. And you would get chewed out at times, but everybody was committed to learning and getting it right. There was no vindictiveness. To be fair, in a lot of Wall Street, it's kill or be killed. It was more just, "No, you just had to perform, and you had to show that."

I remember many of the people there were great. A lot of them had been on Wall Street for a long time, so they told crazy stories about how, when they used to work at banks, they would put their coats into FedEx envelopes so they could sneak out and go home. Just crazy stories like that. I didn't know her at the time, but my wife was actually in investment banking at JPMorgan in New York at the time, and she has crazy stories. I mean, she worked so hard, she got an ulcer when she was 26.

Jon Chee - 00:11:19: Whoa. Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:11:20: Those stories are so crazy. I have a buddy who told a crazy story where when he was—and I don't approve of this, but it's a crazy story—he had to fly across the country to hand off a slide deck...

Michael Newton - 00:11:34: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:11:35: ...a paper slide deck. Oh, yeah. Only for it to be just thrashed.

Michael Newton - 00:11:40: Oh, so my wife tells this—this is not my story because I wasn't in banking, she was in banking. This is before they had email and stuff. Or some partners, especially, wouldn't use it, and maybe some partners had a fax machine. But they used to get black cars—you know, not limos, but the New York City black cars—and they would work till two in the morning or three in the morning or four in the morning, whatever. And then they would take their work, put it into the back seat of a black car, and the black car would drive to Greenwich or wherever the guy or the gal lived, and the driver knew to just drop it off at the door. So the amount of money and stuff that would be spent on all these things was just so wild.

Jon Chee - 00:12:19: So wild.

Michael Newton - 00:12:20: Just so wasteful. Thank god for email.

Jon Chee - 00:12:22: Yeah. No, thank god. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. But I love that during this experience, you—and I always think that in these early roles, being in the orbit of these people is so pivotal, and not being afraid to just be annoying and ask. I think, especially in the early days of any role, you get a free pass to be annoying because you're like, "I don't know anything yet. I just wanna know." Eventually, it gets to a point where you're just like, "Alright, you gotta know it now," and that time frame varies. But...

Michael Newton - 00:12:57: Well, yeah. I mean, I'd push back on that, Jon, because I actually think a true superpower is being able to ask for help. Always. And I struggle. I find myself not using it enough. Because even now, as the CEO of a business, I don't ask for enough help. It amazes me how responsive people will be to that. But I agree with you, to your point, if you're not showing up and doing your work and hitting the basics, you're not gonna survive in those places. But if you're like, "Hey, this is hard. How do we think about it? Let's unpack these issues," it amazes me how many people are willing to help.

It's one of the things that I would tell my younger self: just ask for more help. You need to do it with a great attitude. You need to be super appreciative. And obviously, you can't be asking for help like, "Oh, where's the coffee machine?" But I think in everything, people generally just have too much ego to be able to say, "I just need some help on this one, and it will make it much better." And some of it is, well, you could actually do it, and let's say you can do it to a level of a seven. But if you ask for a little help, it's gonna be a nine. So that's something I'm always trying to keep in mind for myself. It's one of those things in the whole diamond of success, but asking for help always is another tenet of what I try to bring and what I try to help teach my kids and other people.

Jon Chee - 00:14:14: Yeah. I love that. I mean, it's kind of like this continuous learning thing and just understanding you never know everything. And seeking out that information and seeking out that help is so critical. Especially, I'm sure now that you're in biotech, it's just like every time I talk to colleagues, biological problems are so freaking hard.

Michael Newton - 00:14:35: Unbelievable. Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:14:37: Unbelievable. So you have to. If you don't ask for help, you're cooked. You have to really be able to seek out. And I think, I don't know, not to put words in your mouth or your experiences, but I would imagine because you've come from a different perspective, you're able to not be bound by a specific discipline in science where it's like, "This is my lane," and you can probably pull from all kinds of different corners. You can pull in the knowledge that you need. Because for me, I was like, "I'm a biochemist." That's kind of my thing, and I look at everything through that lens. And I would imagine from your perspective, you're not bridled by that, and you can probably pull in the right people, put people in the right seat on the bus.

Michael Newton - 00:15:21: Yeah. It's interesting, Jon, because this is something I'm always thinking about a bit too. I really pride myself on being an agile learner and being like, "Okay, I can go from working here at Nike to leading this venture-backed biotech company, and how do I do that?" And asking for help is one of those key things. You're right. We'll get into the biology, but I am blown away at how tough biology is. Blown away. I'm also blown away by how much progress has been made and the science and the skill. Our chief scientific officer and our team are just amazing.

But how do you become really agile in doing that and question your own assumptions and everything too? I don't know, because there's a part of me that's like, "Oh, man. I wish I had a really deep passion where I was like, 'You know what? I wanna be a biochemist, I'm going to go do that, and I'm just going to become the best biochemist and really go deep in there.'" Versus for me, because I never had that one passion, I definitely consider myself more of a generalist. I love to solve problems and work with people, meet new people, and explore new things. But I sometimes wonder, if I had gone deeper, would that be better or more rewarding? So I think there's always that trade-off of depth versus breadth. And I'm definitely a breadth guy these days, but I don't know. Maybe it's just personality, a personal thing too.

Jon Chee - 00:16:46: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that is something to highlight. I think leadership is highly personal. Your leadership style has to fit you as an individual. My leadership style is gonna be very different. You hear about these leadership styles from all these entrepreneurs who are in the zeitgeist, all these tech folks. And if you just try to do what they do, that's not leaning into your strength. You're just trying to be someone else, and you can't be someone else. Obviously, you can get inspired and...

Michael Newton - 00:17:17: Yeah, take the pieces.

Jon Chee - 00:17:18: Take the pieces that actually fit with you as a human being. But if you just try to replicate, like copy-paste someone else's style and personality, it's not gonna work. So I think you're absolutely right. It's a personal thing, and everyone's got their own lane, and you shouldn't ignore it.

Michael Newton - 00:17:34: Yeah. Well, I think a lot of times people, to your point, Jon, probably either because they really admire somebody, they try to adopt things that maybe aren't fully authentic to them. Instead of taking the pieces, they try to take the whole thing. You're like, "Oh my god. What Elon Musk did..." and we could talk about Elon Musk, but what he did with SpaceX is mind-blowing. If you read about what he actually did there and how he just broke paradigm after paradigm after paradigm. But I could never in a million years do what he did if I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna be like Elon Musk. I'm just gonna throw out every rule book, kill myself, kill the team, do all that..." But he advanced humanity. I don't think you can question that.

So how do you take those pieces and figure out who you then are authentically? It's hard, man. I still think I'm young, but I just had my 20th college reunion. I wasn't able to go, but I remember when I was in college, to make some money, I used to work reunions. And I worked the 20th reunion, and I was like, "Oh, these guys are old." But what I just realized is, it's not like that. Certainly, we are older, there's no doubt about it. But I thought as a kid, "Oh, well, they will have it figured out." And I'm like, "Oh, no." If you're not always evolving and learning and being as curious as possible, you're not taking advantage of what's out there.

So I'm pretty set in who I am, but one of the big pillars of being set is that I'm just gonna constantly change and constantly learn and adapt. That's why I use the term contextual leadership. How do you lead in a certain way? And I think as a CEO of a company now, or when I was working back at Nike, when you have a team, it's your responsibility to provide the right context for the right people.

So I had these two guys working for me when I was back at Nike, and we used to joke and refer to them as "the puppy and the cactus." And they know this, so it's not rude to them. But the puppy was this guy who was just—I mean, he just needed TLC. And he was great, and he got a lot of shit done. He was a great employee, and we loved to work together. But at a certain point, I was like, "Okay, Todd. I can't deal with another 500-word email. I just cannot deal. TLDR, come on." The other guy, Bill, was a former navy guy, and he used to write back to emails with "Wilco," which I didn't even know what that meant, but it meant "will comply."

Jon Chee - 00:20:05: Oh, wow.

Michael Newton - 00:20:07: So these guys were peers, both reporting to me, and we were running this big project. And you're just like, "Oh, how do you contextually set up, one, just me one-on-one with each of them?" What's the leadership I need? But if I rolled into a meeting with Bill in the same way I rolled in with Todd, I would've just failed, and vice versa. And you have to coach them, and the onus is on them, obviously, to work in the environment too. But as the leader, the onus is on me to provide contextual leadership that enables them to be successful.

So I think this is something I'm always trying to think about, but also, how do I personally think about my context all the time? And it's super hard. And I'm telling you, with kids, because my kids are super different. It's late and you're tired, and you just... and my wife will look at me, and I'm like, "Oh, shit. Okay." It's like, I have to be grounded in love and safety and all these things, but the context I have to provide my daughter is definitely different than the context I have to provide to my son.

Jon Chee - 00:21:08: Absolutely. And on this continuous learning and evolution of oneself, as you're wrapping up your time in private equity, is this when you're like, "I gotta go back to school and learn more about business?" Is that when the business school idea was spawned?

Michael Newton - 00:21:26: It was twofold. One is, when you're in that environment, you're surrounded by a lot of people who have been to HBS, and my father went to HBS as well. My dad basically came to the United States to go to Harvard and go to business school. He graduated class of '69; I was class of 2009, so we're 40 years apart. But I had that legacy, if you will, that history. I think I just always thought I love school, I love learning. If I had the opportunity to go to a place like Harvard Business School, you'd be an idiot not to go do it. And I was fortunate to get that opportunity, which is great.

But actually, underneath that, Jon, I realized I didn't wanna be a finance person for my career. Not because it wasn't great—and sometimes I regret it a little because I'm like, "It probably could be pretty sweet if I was 43 and had been in finance the last 20 years." But no, I kid a little bit. What I learned was that I really liked—you do this big work on a transaction, and you're building up towards this transaction, and you're doing all this diligence and analysis. But then you get to a point where you're like, "Okay, this deal is gonna get done," and you start to become operational. And it was in that period that I was like, "Oh, I actually really like how these men and women are going to run the business." We would move on to the next thing, and Sally and Bob and whatever would be driving the shit every day. I just was like, "I kind of like that more. I want to do it."

So for me, business school was a bit of a pivot to say, "How do I gain some more business skills, round out the finance stuff, and get more on strategy and operations and marketing and all these things?" So it was a little bit of that context to say, "I don't wanna go back to finance. Let me use business school as a pivot point." And so it was great. I mean, if I was a pig in shit at Dartmouth, HBS was even more so, because that is truly a super institution. If you put your heart into it, go in with a good attitude, and are like, "I'm gonna take advantage of everything this place has to offer"—but you just can't do it all. My finance professor has a Nobel Prize. Seriously.

Jon Chee - 00:23:37: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Newton - 00:23:38: I had another professor who was the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs and now is a member of the Federal Reserve Board. You can just walk down and go talk to these people. It was just super cool and very lucky. For me, it worked very well in that arc of, you get your butt kicked—you can do consulting, you can do finance, whatever—and then how do you figure out where it goes from there? I'm really, really happy to have that deepness that I had, and then HBS allowed me to start building more breadth. So it was really lucky, really fortunate. And I was like, "I'm gonna try to eat as much of this as possible," which was great. And I had the double benefit that I met my wife there. So that just made the experience even better.

Jon Chee - 00:24:25: You're at HBS. You're surrounded by Nobel Laureates, future Federal Reserve folks. What were some of the biggest highlights for you coming out of that experience?

Michael Newton - 00:24:35: Oh, man. I was there during the financial crisis. I graduated in 2009. So when that went down, there were a whole bunch of highlights where you had these incredible people talking about what was going on in real time. There were some really amazing highlights that happened there. But more personal things, I had this professor, Dick Vietor, for a class called BGIE, which I can't even remember what it stands for, but it's like Business, Government, and International... something. It was all about trade and macroeconomics.

The guy was—I was gonna call him a lunatic in the most loving way ever. He was just awesome, and I loved that class. It built on a lot of what I'd done at Dartmouth, and I just ate it up, and we used to just riff. He really made you understand the fundamentals. I mean, God, I wish some people in the administration now would have been taught by this guy about how international trade actually works, and all of these dynamics around trade imbalances, and how you actually think about GDP growth and what the levers are. And he did it in such a dynamic, interesting way.

You just have a lot of experiences like that, that were truly awesome, unique experiences with incredible professors. You'd be in class talking about some company, and all of a sudden, the CEO would walk in. I remember one experience in particular. You'd be in this class, and there'd be a case that you read the night before that's an experience of a protagonist. Oftentimes, it was the CEO of the business. We did a case on SodaStream, and it was very Socratic. The professors would call on you and pick on you, and they would do it if there was some connection. I got called on, I remember very vividly, the first day of class, the first cold call, because there was a case about a wireless company based in Hanover, New Hampshire. I went to Dartmouth, so the guy picked on me. That was a bit of a rude awakening, but it was great, actually.

But in this SodaStream case, the company was Israeli. So there's an Israeli classmate who was in the classroom, and they picked on him and had him talk about it. Basically, "Do you think this is gonna work?" And the guy—he's a friend, I haven't talked to him in a long time, but he's super successful right now. He's actually in finance, done incredibly well financially. Great guy, super smart guy. And he basically was like, "This isn't gonna work." And then the CEO walked in, who'd been watching the whole dialogue, and he was awesome. The CEO was game. He was like, "Alright, Daniel,"—the guy's name—"let's talk about it."

You just have those moments. What's cool about a place like HBS is it's like the liberal arts of business. Every day, you're exposed to three situations, and you have to put yourself into the shoes and think about what you would do. You have to learn accounting and other things, but they figure out ways to do that that are still essentially story-based. I remember there's a whole class all about management operations and manufacturing. We did a case, a very famous HBS case, about cranberry manufacturing. There's this whole thing in the manufacturing line that if a cranberry bounces, it's fresh. If it doesn't bounce, it's not. So they would have steps in the factory where it would bounce, and if it didn't bounce high enough, it would get thrown away. Just these cool ways of bringing things to life that were very cool.

So, overall, it was a very great place like that. But then the international reach is amazing. You get to travel a lot with them. I did a trip where we went to Israel, and we got to visit an air force base where they literally have—at that time, maybe it's different now—two F-16s running 24 hours a day, plugged into a gas tank in a reinforced bunker, and they could get those planes off the ground, in the air, and defending the country in something like 16 seconds.

Jon Chee - 00:28:24: Oh my god.

Michael Newton - 00:28:25: We got to meet with the pilots and have a conversation with them and hear about what it was and the ways in which they do that. They're telling stories about how they had been up in the sky and had missiles locked on a commercial jetliner because if that jetliner did something, they would shoot it out of the sky. Literally, that's the type of stuff. They're on the phone with the prime minister. At this time, there were three people in the Israeli government who could authorize the shooting down of a commercial jet. Because if you've ever flown into Israel, there are always very clear, different rules. So I guess if a commercial jet doesn't follow those rules, they scramble an F-16, and they're up there. We just got to do some—we got to meet with the vice prime minister of India when we were there.

Jon Chee - 00:29:08: What the heck?

Michael Newton - 00:29:10: Yeah. That place just opens doors that were really awesome.

Jon Chee - 00:29:14: That's crazy. That's so crazy. I have friends who've gone to HBS, but I didn't go. But they're like, "What a surreal..." It feels so surreal, just being there and experiencing that.

Michael Newton - 00:29:26: And what's crazy, though, is a lot of people don't take advantage of it. They have their company paying for them, and they're like, "Oh, this is kind of a two-year holiday." Because, frankly, you don't really have to work that hard if you don't want to. The grading's all done one, two, three.

Jon Chee - 00:29:40: Is it like St. Ann's, like, comments?

Michael Newton - 00:29:43: No, they don't give you comments in the same way. And not necessarily, if you did really well at HBS, are you correlated to doing better in life? Whatever. But it's just a little bit more about that attitude. If you're at a place like that or you have those kinds of resources, certainly, yes, I could go to a bar on a Tuesday night or whatever, but it's much cooler if I'm engaging in what this place uniquely can offer. So I just feel very privileged to be there and to take advantage of it.

Jon Chee - 00:30:08: I really wanna highlight that because it's like you go into Dartmouth and really embrace it for what it is, the environment, and then being at HBS and capturing the moment. Because these moments are fleeting, and you got to capitalize on them because it's once in a lifetime, frankly. I think about my experience at Berkeley, and I took a lot of classes that were not bio or life science related. I had the opportunity to be surrounded by these people. That was a moment in time that I can't get back. I can't live on campus forever. You have a number of years in this environment. Soak it up while you can. So I love that. As you're wrapping your time up at HBS, did you know what was next after graduation? Where was your head at as you were coming out of this super surreal experience?

Michael Newton - 00:30:58: Yeah. It's funny. You just reminded me of something else just quickly before we move on. There's a guy who I got exposed to who runs a big company in LA. I guess he was pretty good friends with Munger. He was the guy—Peter Kaufman is his name—who edited the encyclopedia of Munger.

Jon Chee - 00:31:16: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:31:17: Is that Poor Charlie's Almanack?

Michael Newton - 00:31:19: Yeah. The Almanack. Thank you. Yes.

Jon Chee - 00:31:20: I just reread it. It's so good.

Michael Newton - 00:31:22: Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:31:22: Absolute—just god. Yeah. Just what a rare individual.

Michael Newton - 00:31:28: Yeah. Well, this guy, Peter Kaufman, was friends with him, and he runs this defense company based in LA that he grew, and it's a $3 billion company. Through an HBS connection, I got to have lunch with him and go down there, which was a super experience, really amazing. But he said—we were talking about raising kids, actually—and he was like, "There's only three things you can do for your children, only three." He's like, "Make sure they feel unconditionally loved, ensure that they know how to build good habits and do hard things, and then you can surround them with good people." Because he's like, "Your kids' friends are gonna have a thousand times more impact on their life than you are, so you gotta play one degree removed." He's like, "That's why I super value education." Not because I don't think any school in America can teach you more than you can learn on your own. Frankly, you don't need to go to Dartmouth, you don't need to go to HBS. But what's amazing about those places is you get surrounded by a group of people. So it's exactly what you just said, Jon. I'm always thinking about that for me, because I wanna surround myself with those good people, but then also, obviously, for my kids. So what you just said really hit me.

Jon Chee - 00:32:35: Yeah. And I mean, I think about my Berkeley upbringing. It sounded a little bit similar to your educational experience too. I went through the Berkeley Unified School District, and UC Berkeley academics put their kids there, and a lot of them just end up teaching. They're like, "I'm kind of retired on Emeritus at UC Berkeley, I'm going to just teach high school physics or whatever." That's why I think it is important to be very cognizant of where you're setting up your solar system of people surrounding you. Even though on the Internet, everyone feels more connected...

Michael Newton - 00:33:16: It's not the same.

Jon Chee - 00:33:18: ...it's not the same. It feels like it is, but it isn't. And I think for a moment during the pandemic, people were like, "Oh, San Francisco's cooked. It's dead."

Michael Newton - 00:33:28: Over. Yeah. San Francisco, Montana. Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:33:31: Yeah, we're gone. And then now it's just this super... people came back, and the density... I just go to coffee shops down the street, and the people you will run into, absolutely mind-boggling. You have this ability to rub shoulders with people you could never dream of, and it opens up opportunity and conversation that you couldn't dream of either.

Michael Newton - 00:33:57: I totally agree. And actually, the data is super clear: cities are the engines of economic development and progress, and it's because of exactly what you're talking about. I really believe in that. How do you put yourself in places that create those opportunities? It doesn't mean all opportunities for a better job necessarily—I think those tend to go hand-in-hand—but it's more of, what's interesting? What can you learn from? How can you get engaged in that community?

I'm a huge, huge believer in in-office work. I'm a huge believer of going to school, getting those skills, being side-by-side with people, building those relationships. My kids are both in summer camp right now, and it's kind of the equivalent for them. How do you put them in a sleepaway camp that forces them to understand how to work in those environments and benefit from that? So yeah, I'm a huge, huge, huge believer of that. It's been interesting moving to Amsterdam; it's a very different environment than being in New York or whatnot, but it's been very good for us. But you gotta always put yourself in that situation as best you can.

Outro - 00:35:06: Thanks for listening to this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast with Michael Newton. In part three, we'll hear about Michael's decision to step away from finance to pursue his MBA and why he started looking for a more mission-driven path. He'll share how his time at Stanford helped him to reconnect with his passion for science and health and why that journey ultimately led him to the startup world. If you're enjoying the series, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a friend.

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