Why Comfort Is the Enemy of Scientific Growth | Roy Maute (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, Roy shared stories from Dallas, how Jurassic Park sparked his interest in genetic engineering, and landing his first Berkeley lab position. If you missed it, check out Part 1. In Part 2, Roy talks about joining Riccardo Dalla-Favera's lab at Columbia to study genetic rearrangements in B-cell lymphoma, why he chose the most demanding training environment, and how working alongside medical doctors accelerated his learning. He shares why weekly Friday afternoon lab meetings—where the PI called out missing controls—taught him comfort with failure and witnessing the transition from Sanger to high-throughput sequencing, transforming the questions scientists could ask. He also recounts why he never wanted to become a professor, how he chose Irving Weissman's Stanford lab for his postdoc, and discovering Erv's completely hands-off management style was the exact opposite of his PhD experience.

Roy Maute - 00:01:36: So, the work that I wanted to do as a graduate student—I loved this development study that I had done as an undergrad. I wanted to focus on cancer research. There are a lot of reasons for that. I think it is a fascinating biological problem, and one that I was just starting to understand: this is how genetics can drive the proper development of an organism; this is how it can go awry and drive this poorly formed tumor that nonetheless can outgrow the surrounding tissue.

Anyway, I really liked that notion. And, of course, as I thought about what I eventually wanted to do—this is another one of those things where I can't quite be sure at the time what it was that drew me to this path so much—but many people who are studying in academic labs, pursuing PhDs, are really focused on, "I want to become a professor. I want to have my own lab. I want to be a PI." And I think there are a lot of reasons for that. One of them is that PIs will really encourage you to follow that path, and that the "best" people will follow that path. Everyone else, like, whatever—they're going to do their thing.

But I never quite wanted to do that. I really liked the idea of doing something useful—developing a drug that might actually be in patients. For me, even though that can happen, at least in part, in an academic lab, I saw that biotech companies were really the best place to pursue that in a focused way. So I wanted to do science that was relevant to a disease. Cancer is what really hooked my attention.

Still, though, as I was looking at labs to rotate in, I wanted to see a lot. Going back to my childhood and having this encouragement to do a broad set of things and not get too focused on a single thing at the expense of others, I did want to do some sort of classic genetic laboratory work. So I rotated, for example, in a Drosophila lab that's really focused on how the organism develops. I did some work in a lab that was using a pretty useful but niche model system where they take frog eggs and they crush them, and then they can study the dynamics of DNA in this sort of cell-free system.

That was really fun, and also potentially relevant to cancer as you think about how DNA replicates and repairs itself. These are things that have relevance to cancer. But ultimately, the lab that really got me was Riccardo Dalla-Favera's lab. He is a scientist originally trained as a medical doctor who was really focused on understanding genetic rearrangements and mutations in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. So, like: what can go wrong at the genetic level, how does that drive the disease, and then in cases where one can take that next step and say, "Okay, then how would you develop a drug to counteract this?" That lab had just that sweet spot of blue-sky science with a path toward relevance to eventual disease.

You know, one of the other big things that a graduate student at that stage needs to consider is just, aside from scientific interest, "What's my personality match with this lab?" These labs are very different from one another in that respect. And as you're starting, you're at least going to be spending four years there, maybe six, maybe more. You can never quite guess how long a PhD is going to take, so you need to be very comfortable there and you need to have a good rapport with the PI.

A lot of my friends wanted to get into labs that fit their scientific interest and maybe were also fun, nice places to work. I was not focused on that at all. I wanted a place that would be the best place to train for me. And so this lab that I joined—I don't think Riccardo would mind me saying—has a real reputation for being a very tough place to work. He didn't take a lot of graduate students because even those who would rotate often decided not to stay. For me, I found it to be exactly the right place.

He was a really demanding mentor in the best way: really high standards, expected very long hours in the lab. But for me, at that age, it’s like I had nothing else going on. I was very happy to do that, and I learned a ton from it. My PhD took about six years, and I think I got twelve years of lab experience in that time just because of the hours that we spent, but then also just the people that I got a chance to work with.

It's fun to be in a lab that has a lot of other graduate students. You get a lot of camaraderie. You learn from one another. You commiserate together. This lab really had very few graduate students. It was all people who were older, at a later stage of their career, which for me was really great because I got to learn from people who were more advanced and who were doing things that I would then be hoping to do at the next stage of my career. It was a really fun experience, and I just have tremendously great memories from that time.

Jon Chee - 00:05:34: Love that. I think what you said earlier is incredibly important. It's to find that alignment, because this is a big time commitment—a big time commitment that you shouldn't take lightly, because you're going to enter a world of pain if you find yourself constantly at odds with the lab itself that you're dedicating your time to.

But also, badass on you to just be like, "You know what? I'm ready to be the super sponge." Talking about your early first lab where you're just like, "Alright, this is just bare basic," you're now like, "Alright, let's take it to the next level here." And even just knowing that the lab itself is like a hard final boss—what are some key lessons and takeaways that you took from that lab that you perhaps carry with you today?

Roy Maute - 00:06:18: On a pure scientific level, one of the things that I think was the most important that I observed in that lab and tried to learn from was that when you're studying cancer, it really all starts at the DNA level. If you can understand genetically what's happening to a cell that drives it to be a cancerous state, I think a lot of the understanding you'll need to eventually treat that disease is contained there.

The specific set of diseases that the lab was focused on are ones that are not my focus today, but I think they are a great starting place for that type of investigation. Cancers of the B-cells often arise because the B-cells themselves, as they develop in the immune system, need to rearrange their own genome in order to produce the diversity of antibodies that are going to be relevant for fighting pathogens. But that process of breaking your DNA and repairing it is just very perilous, and it can go wrong—and it does. That's what causes diseases to arise from those types of cells.

They're not quite exposed to the same level of environmental mutagens—B-cells don't see a lot of sunlight, for example. But this process that's really necessary for their normal biology is the thing that drives them to become cancerous sometimes. And so that's really fascinating and really cool to think about. Zooming all the way out to this evolutionary pressure level, it's like: well, you really need a functional immune system, and being able to have a lot of flexibility to that immune system is integral to it working well enough for the organism. But then there's always that tradeoff. And if you can't correct that other side of it, then you will get cancer, and that will shorten lifespan.

Anyway, I really liked all of that. In terms of the lab life and the way people approach research, that's another thing where I really took a lot of important lessons. I said it already, but the people who were in that lab—which was a relatively large group of about 15 to 20 depending on the time—many of them were trained as medical doctors. Many of them were coming from Europe and working in this lab as their opportunity to really dig into the research before returning to medical practice or to research back in their home countries. And they took it really seriously. They were trying to get the most out of that time, just as I was trying to get the most out of my time as a graduate student.

Because many of them were coming from medical backgrounds, and because the PI was originally trained as a physician, I think they always kept that piece in mind. It's always fun to do science for its own sake and to learn for its own sake, but if you can learn something from it that will eventually be relevant to patients, that's the ultimate.

As far as the actual techniques and a lot of the things that were emerging at that time, it was in the early days of high-throughput sequencing. Right when I was rotating in the lab, we were using Sanger sequencing techniques—the old-school sequencing techniques—to try to profile in a medium-throughput way the small RNAs that were present in these cells. MicroRNAs had just been discovered and described, or at least their role in mammalian biology was increasingly understood. So it was a really cool opportunity to just ask, "Okay, what's there? And then once we see what's there, what does it do?" That aligned very well with this genetic screen concept that I had become focused on, even if it wasn't a classic genetic screen in that way.

But then while I was in the lab, the world turned over, and we went from Sanger sequencing—where you can look for a couple hundred sequences at a time—to high-throughput, where it really just changed the way we thought about it. By the time I was finished with my PhD work, a lot of the screening that others in the lab were still doing had become a primarily computational problem, which really wasn't something that we were focused on in the earliest days. So it was pretty cool to live through that era and see the transformation of the kind of questions you could ask based on what techniques and technologies are available.

An additional aspect of the way that that lab operated and the way that they did science that really does influence the way that I think about it today is there was a real focus on having people report their work and their results in real time, and that was a very stressful thing. Every person in this lab presented at lab meeting every single week. When I tell that to people who have been in a lab, they're often shocked by that. I'll also say that lab meeting started at 3:00 PM on a Friday, so it was very illustrative of the character of the lab.

It would go for hours and could be really tough because, as I said, the PI was really focused on success, and he really would push people. If you got up there with a poorly designed slide or an experiment missing key controls, he was absolutely not afraid to say it, and say it again, and really push you on it. So as I think about how I am the leader of the scientific work here at my current company, I don't have every person present every week, but I do really encourage people to get out there and present "imperfect" stuff—present stuff that's not working. You want to be talking to your colleagues in real time about what's happening in the lab because the alternative of getting the opportunity to digest and plan for a couple months before you get it out there—all of a sudden, you're not going to benefit from your colleagues' input as much. So even though I would say that lab was the toughest possible version of that, and I certainly don't try to do that in my current leadership capacity, I do think there's a lot of value in that type of approach.

Jon Chee - 00:11:02: Absolutely. And there are so many things that stood out to me about that experience. I think, too, just getting your work out there and getting the feedback is—both in the lab and outside the lab—super important. I suffer from—I don't know where it came from, but just a kind of perfectionism that can be debilitating. You're just like, "I can't put this out until this is, in my mind, perfect." But if you do that, you're never going to get it out. The moment has passed, things keep moving, and you're just like, "Welp." I think one of the benefits, too, is that it allows you to be a bit more flexible and course-change when you need to.

Roy Maute - 00:11:39: Yeah, and I think that's really a crucial part of scientific training. I have sometimes been asked what value scientific training can have for people who are no longer in a technical laboratory role. I think comfort with failure, or at least exposure to it, is really important and is just an everyday part of laboratory work. And then public speaking, or representing either your successes or your failures in front of an audience, is another really necessary part of scientific training—everybody goes through it. I think that serves you tremendously well outside of the lab.

I have many friends from my time in that grad program who just aren't scientists in any respect anymore, but I think those aspects of the training are really crucial and universal. I think that's especially important for people who are high-performing students getting those A+s and things that are able to be mastered. But when you get into that laboratory environment and nobody can tell you how to do the next thing, and you may have the right idea but just the wrong set of hands, or you understand 80% of what you're doing but that 10% just gives you a completely confusing result—I think that's a big adjustment for a lot of people. Something that many people coming from an academic-focused background can't really get over, but those who do, I think, really benefit from it.

Jon Chee - 00:12:50: Absolutely. That is one thing about being in the lab—it’s just like everyone is feeling around in a dark hole. Whereas when you're just hitting the books, there's way more structure. That was, for me, the biggest eye-opening experience. It's like, "Oh, we are all just figuring it out, and you've got to talk about it."

Another aspect too that you pointed out is that effective communication is so critical. And whether it's emphasized or not, I just think it is so important. Especially to folks who are in science, we sometimes are really good at communicating with other people in science. But I also think—and this is where I don't think it's emphasized enough—is that we need to be able to communicate with non-scientists as well. It kind of reminds me of what you're saying about thinking about the patient at the end. There are other stakeholders here that ought to get excited and understand the work that's being done because—and now I'm starting to wax philosophic, maybe this is just a Jon thing—if you're too overly "navel-gazey" about it, it'll just stay within the confines of this room.

My hope is that we can get people who are non-scientists to get fired up about it, bring in all the stakeholders. That way, it could just amplify the impact, and hopefully, at the very end of it, impact and bring great benefit to patients. Because I think, at least for me, I found myself just talking to my peers in almost an encoded language. It always became really apparent when I was telling my parents about what I was doing. They're not scientists—they're like, "What are you even saying?" "Oh, my bad."

Roy Maute - 00:14:32: I would say that storytelling is a crucial part of the scientific enterprise. I think a lot of scientists are very comfortable talking to each other. I think sometimes we hide behind lingo because we're not really confident to tell that bigger story. I'm far from a perfect public speaker—it’s something that I think you can continue to improve at and grow over time. But I think that's one of the great things about being part of a startup: you really have to tell your story externally. There is no way you can just continue on talking to other scientists, because we've got to bring in these additional stakeholders: investors, physicians, patients.

As I think about that piece, there are not that many scientific discoveries that cannot be described in a compelling, general-interest way. You just sometimes have to work at it to find the right message, but you also have to be willing to do it. And I think that's something that, once they've invested all that time and effort into becoming good communicators of technical scientific facts, some people are hesitant to then step back out and say, "How do we bring in other people to this thing that I've been working so hard on for years?"

Jon Chee - 00:15:29: Yeah, absolutely. That's spot on. And this lab experience sounds like you're just drinking out of a fire hose in a lot of ways. It seems like it forged you in the fires, and I'm imagining that it really was great building blocks for running a company, too. As you're wrapping up your time at Columbia, I know you mentioned that you wanted to get back to California. And then also, you mentioned that you always had your eye on going into industry before you made that transition. But how was that received? You talked about how most people want to become a professor—how was that received? Or did you even voice it at that time?

Roy Maute - 00:16:07: Only in part. I would say that my mentor, Riccardo Dalla-Favera, encouraged me to do a postdoc to become a professor. He's like, "You've got it in you." Thinking to myself, I may not want to follow that path, but I knew for me that just as graduate school seemed like a natural next step—a crucial part of my training, not really something that I... it was more of a question of when than whether I would do it.

I felt the same way about postdoctoral training. That's not as obvious. I would say that you can pivot to industry or to a biotech, or even be a leader of a startup potentially, without that deeper scientific training. It probably is because I spent so much time with postdocs in that lab. In addition to Riccardo, who was my primary mentor, there were a ton of people in the lab. Most particularly, a woman named Katia Basso, who was a postdoc at that time. Now she's faculty at Columbia. She was the other side of the coin to the training—without some additional day-to-day support and someone who was carrying me on a little bit more, I probably would not have had the great experience and success that I did.

In any case, seeing those scientists and it being self-evident how much better scientists they were than us grad students, I felt like: I want to be a scientist. And if I'm going to be a scientist, this is every bit as crucial a part of the training as the PhD experience.

So then as for who I would work with and where I would do that, this is another instance of just, I would say, luck and following opportunities where they were. I had some ideas. As you said, I really did have a focus on coming back to California. So, great news: there are a couple decent schools out in the Bay Area. I was looking at labs at Stanford, UCSF, and Berkeley that I might go to, and I was talking to my mentor about what he suggested. And he's like, "You absolutely have to go work with Irv Weissman."

I knew the name; I didn't know his work really well. He is most famous in the stem cell field, which I wasn't really deep into at that time. And so I wasn't immediately sure why he felt that way, but they were good friends—they had been friends and colleagues for a long time—and he told me that I shouldn't focus so much on just exactly what the lab was doing; I should go work with the very best person that I could.

Also—and this is a little bit more mundane, but it's really crucial—to go somewhere that has the resources to support the kind of work that you want to do. There are a ton of great scientists out there who have smaller labs and a smaller scope. As he told me about Irv's lab and why I should go, he's like, "He's just the very smartest guy. You should work with him no matter what it is that you're doing or he's doing." And also, it's a really successful lab that has the resources to do the highest-level work and publish at the highest level.

So: great. Let's do it. Let's get in touch.

Everything I said about my PhD mentor, Irv is exactly the opposite. His lab is not regimented—it's not really intensive in that way. I have to say, in hindsight, the very biggest challenge to going to work in Irv's lab at Stanford was just literally getting a hold of him. Incredibly busy, not great about answering emails. My PhD mentor is from Italy originally, and he has a really strong network of folks who have come from Italy to the United States to do research. So he’s like, "I know an Italian guy who works in the floor above him, and he’ll be your 'in'."

My wife had already secured a job out in the Bay Area, and so we graduated. She finished her legal clerkship, and then we moved—still with this kind of postdoc situation a bit unsettled, which was a very unusual experience for me. I think like a lot of academically-focused students, it's like you plan very far ahead, and you don't take any steps without having the next one already secured. So it was very funny to me to just move out to the Bay Area, hoping that I would get a postdoc somewhere.

My mentor assured me that it would all work out. And indeed, after I had been in the Bay Area for some number of weeks, I managed to physically get to Stanford and was introduced to Irv. I was accustomed to the interview process for postdocs coming into my old lab as being like: you've got a minute-by-minute schedule for the whole course of the day; you have a bunch of one-on-ones you do. I showed up to Irv's lab, and someone's like, "Who are you? What are you... who are you here to talk to? Oh, yeah. You're that guy who's supposed to be interviewing for a position. Yeah, maybe you should go talk to Jeff. Is Jeff in today? No, Jeff's not in today. Yeah, go talk to this other person."

I was really stunned that this lab, which was self-evidently very successful, could be so lax, especially coming from the place where I just was. But anyway, that was a perfect slice of life into the lab and a view into how these two mentors—really important figures in my life—would be so different from one another.

One of the things that I had come to learn as I was just familiarizing myself with Irv's lab and what they were focused on at that moment is that there was a much better alignment than I realized with their current cutting-edge research, because they had continued to work on stem cell biology and he's very well known for his contributions to that field. But a big section in the lab had turned its attention to understanding two things. First: how stem cell biology could overlap with the biology of cancer. Basically, the dysregulation of things that make a cell like a stem cell are often hijacked by cancer cells. And even in certain cancers, there are stem-like populations that are the real drivers of the disease, whereas the bulk of the cancer cells may not be as critical to that disease progression. So that was interesting to me.

And then what proved to be even more important was their emerging interest in immunotherapy—ways to understand how the immune system is interacting with cancer and then how we can target the immune system to have an anticancer effect. Irv's lab then, as it does today, has a very different view on how to do that most effectively. That was an era when the concept of cancer immunotherapy was in the process of transforming from a century-old "crackpot" idea that had never really worked out in the clinic into what was then very apparently the next wave of cancer therapies.

A lot of that work was focused on T-cells and the ways that they could be targeted to attack cancer. Irv's lab was always asking, "Okay, what other parts of the immune system can we bring into the fight?" Their work on hematopoietic stem cells led them to identify some key signals that talked from HSCs to macrophages. And from there, they had really focused on understanding those pathways, developing drugs against these macrophage regulatory targets that might allow them to be anticancer effector cells.

And I really loved that. I came to the lab initially thinking, "I'll focus on this cancer stem cell biology," but I very quickly turned to the immunotherapy because it was just really obvious to me that it would be an exciting path to follow up.

Jon Chee - 00:22:09: Very cool. And I have a couple questions. One more personal: how dare you go to Stanford? Man, how dare you? Colleagues of mine from Berkeley end up doing their graduate studies at Stanford, too, but I haven't spent much time there. What was... if you compare and contrast: Berkeley, "sink or swim," "fight for your life," figure it out—what's the Stanford culture like?

Roy Maute - 00:22:32: Having been at Berkeley as an undergrad and Stanford as a postdoc, there's almost no overlap between those pieces of the university, in a way that I don't know what it's like to be a graduate student or a postdoc at Berkeley, and I don't know really what it's like to be an undergrad at Stanford. I didn't visit Stanford when I was deciding where to go for my undergrad, and it just didn't have the vibrancy that I was looking for at that time in my life.

That mattered a lot less to me as I was thinking about my scientific career, and working at the medical center is just a very different experience in that respect. I will say now, having spent a ton of time at both places, zoomed out, for me, Berkeley was the right place at that stage of my life. That exposure—that sink-or-swim mentality—was really crucial for my growth.

Stanford is a great place to get a degree, and it's a really great place to work as a professional scientist because the community there is big enough and it's just really strong. Berkeley has a ton of great science going on. I do think that the smallness and tightness of the Stanford research community that I was part of—this stem cell institute group—there was just much more collaboration and everyday contact between labs than what I was accustomed to. I found it to be a great place.

Also, Irv's lab, certainly at that time and even still today, is so large—it's sort of a universe and an institute unto itself. That network is deep into the fifth decade of his scientific career, and so the people who have trained in this lab stay really close. I would say that Stanford is a great institution and I'm proud to have been associated with it, but being associated with Irv's lab and that institute is probably even more important to me and the work that I've done in the meantime. I think once you get to that stage, the particulars of the lab environment really outweigh the institution—but I still have a ton of Berkeley athletic gear. I've never purchased a single Stanford piece of football... ever.

Jon Chee - 00:24:20: Yes! Exactly. Good, good, good. Really good.

Roy Maute - 00:24:22: This is—

Jon Chee - 00:24:23: —the one I like to hear. And it sounds like Irv's lab... because when I was in my lab at Berkeley, it was very anti-industry. It's just like, "science for science's sake," academic in nature. Was Irv's more with an eye for translation?

Roy Maute - 00:24:39: Yes, I should have said that, actually. That's honestly, if Berkeley can improve itself in any fashion, it's by taking a little bit more of an attitude adjustment from how Stanford—and Stanford professors specifically—think about industry, engage with industry, and approach startups. At Stanford, they just take incredible pride in it. Like, everybody's always starting a company all the time. That can veer into a negative direction as well, but I would say that even though Irv is, in my mind, the quintessential academic—he really has been generating massively important blue-sky scientific discoveries for his entire career—he also has always been looking for ways to turn this into something useful in the real world.

He's been involved with many startups. And at that time that I was in his lab, even though there were plenty of incredible scientists who were really focused on that academic path—and many or most of them indeed followed that path—there was this group of scientists who were really looking at this discovery around macrophage immunotherapy (this target CD47 that controls how macrophages sense their environment). And they were in the process of transforming that from a science project at the academic lab into a drug program, doing it in a way that I've never really seen before or since.

Irv saw the opportunity to raise grant money to support not just the scientific understanding of this pathway, not just ways that we might... they actually developed a drug, and they manufactured it and put it into clinical trials all while in this academic lab. That was not my work, but I got a chance to observe it and just see a few more of those steps than you would typically ever have a chance to glimpse as an academic scientist.

When I came to Irv's lab and to Stanford, I wanted to do good science. I wanted to find an opportunity to start a company—not just be part of one. I wanted to truly found one. I ended up doing that while this other work was happening over on the side. The company that I started actually was a little bit less core to my scientific curiosity and interest, but I was following an opportunity that I saw, and it was good science. It was really fun. But I definitely was interested to stay in touch with that other group who was working on that drug program, because I think that was really something that I was passionate about—trying to find ways to target this biology as an anticancer therapy.

It was really cool to see them succeed in that. And eventually, after I left the lab, they spun out a company, but at a much more mature stage of the drug development process than you usually see.

Jon Chee - 00:26:58: Whoa. That is a rare instance to have a drug developed in an academic lab. And so, was the company creation after your postdoc, or was it in tandem, timeline-wise? How did that unfold?

Roy Maute - 00:27:12: The company that I co-founded was... I was in my postdoc probably for a year and a half. I had made some great friends and colleagues who had a different set of skills. Basically, they were really experienced in structural biology. They had these really amazing tools that they were using to essentially evolve proteins for certain purposes—whether high-affinity binding or binding to a G-protein coupled receptor in a very specific way to alter its signaling.

Interestingly, even though I had this historical focus on genetics and this fascination with genetic tools, I never really properly used them as part of my work since I was an undergrad. Meanwhile, this structural biology tool-making process directly used genetic engineering and directed evolution in a much more real way. So I really loved that, and I first was just following along with some of the work they were doing. Then we found an opportunity to do some of that stuff together.

And then that set of tools and techniques I saw—and my collaborators also saw—the opportunity to form a company around that. We were just a handful of scientists, pretty junior. I was the most senior person of the group as a young postdoc. But I think that's one of the great things about Stanford: there is a little bit of infrastructure around just to start to at least learn how you would start a company, connect with some people who have experience in industry that can help the process.

So yeah, I ended up in a much shorter postdoc than what I ideally wanted, but I didn't want to miss that window. Got together with this group. We engaged with some of those resources at the university, put us in proximity with... and then born was the company. I had a couple months of overlap where I was just wrapping up some things in Irv's lab and then left to do this startup, which was called Ab Initio Biotherapeutics.

We managed to pull together just a little bit of seed money. We managed to get a space in an emerging biotech incubator in South San Francisco. And yeah, it felt like, "Alright, we made it." You know? From here on out, it’s... no, I definitely didn't think it was easy from there, but I do feel like we had the key ingredients to get something off the ground. And yeah, we managed to.

Outro - 00:29:14: That's all for this episode of the Biotech Startups Podcast featuring Roy Maute. Join us next time for Part 3 where Roy recounts co-founding Ab Initio Biotherapeutics using yeast display and directed evolution techniques, securing a Pfizer research collaboration, and why the company was ultimately acquired by Ligand Pharmaceuticals. He'll also unpack joining Forty Seven Inc. to lead the CD47 biomarker strategy and how the $4.9 billion Gilead acquisition during COVID lockdowns shaped his next move. If you enjoy the show, subscribe, leave a review, or share it with a friend. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

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