Trust Over Control: Building Teams Like the Best Scientists | Roy Maute (Part 3/4)

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 how he joined Ricardo Dalla-Favera's demanding lab, why presenting imperfect work built comfort for failure, and how Irv's hands-off postdoc environment was completely different. If you missed it, check out part two. In part three, Roy talks about co-founding Ab Initio Biotherapeutics with colleagues from Chris Garcia and Brian Kobilka's labs, pulling together seed funding and managing a team of 10 while staying hands-on in the lab. He shares how a Pfizer collaboration provided funding but required careful balance, why the team chose acquisition over raising major capital, and how Ligand Pharmaceuticals closed that chapter. He also discusses joining 47 to lead CD47 biomarker strategy and why the $4,900,000,000 Gilead acquisition happened as COVID lockdowns began, and spending over a year without meeting colleagues in person.

Jon Chee - 00:01:37: Very cool. And I guess, like, as you're reflecting on the experience in Irv's lab, like, what were some kind of, like, key lessons, key learnings from that lab as you look back on that experience?

Roy Maute - 00:01:48: I think about it all the time, especially because I still work with Irvin, because I'm still friends and colleagues with a bunch of people that I met at that time. Everything I said about my PhD experience, the way that that lab was constructed, the focus on putting in the hours, hard work, you know, like, everyone's standing up every week, telling the lab what they screwed up on that week. Irv's lab is 100% the opposite of that. It was a huge environment. Like, I'm not even joking to say that the key threshold that you need to get over in order to be in that lab is just to, like, get in front of Irv and get him to agree because, you know, the people he respects, he trusts them implicitly. And so if someone he knows and likes sends him someone and says that they're good enough to work in the lab, he'd be like, "Alright. Like, I'll let you know when space opens up, but the answer is yes."

I think he's really good at that, just sort of trusting that this network that he has is gonna do its job and bring in the right people. From there, he is the furthest from a micromanager of anybody that I've ever seen that's so successful. He really just brings people in, tries to bring in the right people, and then lets them do their thing. And what that means is that a lot of people do not thrive in that environment because I think especially if you're in process with your training, you just, in generally, a little bit more structured than that. Some people, that's all they need. I had the opportunity to work with some real—really exceptional scientists who the only thing they need is the space, the equipment, and the funding, and they can take it from there.

It was such a cool place because it was, you know, a large group, people coming from all kinds of backgrounds. You know, everyone just really focused on collaborating with one another. I'll steal a story from one of my friends and colleagues from Irv's lab who actually works at my current company. She grew up in Brazil, trained there, did her PhD in France, and then came to Stanford. She points to, like, one of her real introductions to, like, what scientific life was like there. You know, she's new in the lab. It's, like, late at night. She's just chatting with someone who's, like, doing their own experiment. They're, like, have their, you know, gloves on, and they're, like, pipetting. And she—they're just brainstorming, and the person's like, "You know what? That's a great idea." Just drops the experiment. It's like, "Let's do it." And they just start working on the other experiment.

I love that story of hers because it really is exactly what it was like there. I think that freedom is just a really special thing that is not unique to his lab, but he does it, like, really well. And to see how that can work is a fascinating thing. As I think about, like, what kind of work environment I want at my company, it is not either of those two, like, diametrically opposed things, but I—I love having had the experience of both and also right in immediate proximity to one another. And you start to form an idea of, like, "Well, hard work is the key, and, like, that is what makes you successful." And then you turn around. It's like, "Not necessarily." I mean, all of the people in our lab who are successful also work hard, but it—it is completely self-generated and doesn't involve any level of external supervision or pushing.

Really fascinating. So, yeah, I would say my time in that lab is incredibly influential, again, because I'm still working with a lot of those people and also just because it put me on this scientific path and specific stuff that I'm working on now that I'm really interested in and just showed me a different way of working and being successful.

Jon Chee - 00:04:44: Very cool. Yeah. I love that there's, like, kind of just, like, you can do that juxtaposition, and I think it's just like getting exposure to different styles. Like, I think sometimes it can be—here's just an example, outside of the lab—like, people, like, are like, "Well, Elon Musk does things this way, therefore, I should do it this way." Or the Steve Jobs of the world, like, "In order to recreate this success, I need to do it that way." But, really, it's a stylistic personal decision. Like, there are plenty of people who are successful in various different styles, and I think kind of figuring out what is right for you and your organization and the people around you is, like, what's more important. And kind of it's like what you're saying, like, earlier, just, like, making sure that it really does sit flush and is, like, aligned and doesn't cause, like, friction. Because, like, if you're gonna do anything of import, it's gonna take a long time. And you can't have constant just, like, wearing down, and you'll—you'll burn out if you adopt someone else's style. That's just, like, kind of antithesis to you as a human being.

Roy Maute - 00:05:44: Yeah. And it's also a little bit difficult to pre-anticipate. So thinking about this experience of my own, what if they had been flipped? Like, I'm not totally sure that would have worked for me in the same way. I think I—I needed one thing at one stage of my training, and then I was ready for the other thing at another stage. That's gonna be different for everybody. And, yeah, there's another argument in favor of not overthinking too much. It is you gotta get out there and try it, but then be real about what's working, what's not.

Jon Chee - 00:06:07: Absolutely. And so now you're a startup founder. This is a kind of another completely kind of new experience for you. Talk about, like, starting a company. You mentioned that you got a little bit of seed capital. You're at an incubator. Talk about the early days and, you know, your founding team and the technology you guys developed.

Roy Maute - 00:06:27: Yep. The concept of the company was using those directed evolution techniques I mentioned, so yeast display, to try to engineer therapeutic drugs that are just not really gettable by other methods. And so that's kind of like a vague thing. And I—I said that specifically because in the early days of the company, we had kinda two things that we were working on. The first was immunotherapy focused. We had taken, you know, one of these immune receptors, PD-1, and then engineered it for ultra-high affinity binding to its partner PD-L1. And that was kind of an academic project which was undertaken concurrently with the emerging clinical data from the drugs that would become nivolumab and pembrolizumab, anti-PD-1s that would really change the anticancer landscape.

We sort of finished that project, like, right as the real clinical readout was coming. And so we had an idea that, like, "Okay. This is an actual thing that could be developed into a drug." We're probably a little late to the party. And so, like, the idea of, like—yeah. We—first, we don't really know how to fully do this. Second, like, we would have to pull together a lot of money. We're not sure we could convince people to give it to us for this since it would be, let's say, like, best-case scenario, like, third or fourth into this pathway. At the time, I assumed that there wouldn't be space for a million different drugs against this same set of targets that I was completely wrong about. I think we had just gone headfirst and really tried to make that into a drug, and we probably would have been able—I mean, assuming we could have pulled together the funding and the pieces, the idea that there wasn't space in that pathway was completely incorrect.

But I think the humility that, like, we didn't really know what we were doing there—and so if we were gonna do it, we need some form of partnership, I think, was accurate. So that was our idea. It's like, "Okay. We've got this potential drug candidate, and maybe we can try to find someone who'd be willing to do a very early-stage licensing or collaboration." We can sort of work to put it in their hands, and then maybe they can turn it into a proper drug. Meanwhile, we could then use that to support development of this other angle on the company, which was focused a little bit outside of my scientific expertise or, to be honest, my scientific interest on these G-protein coupled receptors.

So this was—my other co-founders were coming from Chris Garcia's lab at Stanford and Brian Kobilka's lab at Stanford. And both of those labs were in a really intense period of just publishing incredible papers at an incredible rate around G-protein coupled receptor structures, which that had been this kind of, like, white whale, as I understand it, of the structural biology field because it's just really difficult to use the traditional crystallography techniques to see what these things look like. But then a couple labs in the world, including Brian's, had kinda cracked this problem. And then there was a ton of cool stuff you could do to understand the biology of these flowing from that.

Some of these co-founders of mine are among those, like, truly exceptional people. They—it's really amazing to meet. So, you know, these are basically MD-PhD students who published, like, five Nature papers, like, while they're going through their training and went straight to becoming, you know, faculty. Yeah. Just incredibly productive scientists and just cool people to work with. So they had kinda developed some of these tools. As we were collaborating together, they had sort of helped me understand what potential they might have in this field and how they could be, you know, redirected to develop drugs that might alter the function of G-protein coupled receptors.

But then amongst that group, all the rest of them were just going straight to open their own academic labs. Like, they were skipping the postdoc step, going straight to that, which was shocking to see. But I was the only person of that team who was, like, actually wanted to start a company. So it was really a great alignment in that sense. So back to the question of, like, what the company was, we were, on the one hand, trying to, like, find a partner for this immunotherapy drug candidate, move it forward a bit, and on the other hand, trying to use these yeast display methods to develop G-protein coupled receptor targeting drugs.

And that was a bit more of a sort of research project. We hadn't yet yielded a drug that we were then trying to develop, but I felt like it was a good match with that tiny team that we had formed, you know, just building up, like, people working in the lab. And sort of as we made progress to use these techniques to develop drugs, maybe do these collaborations, we'd start to get the expertise and the resources that we needed to then take it to the next level and then to the next level. So that was the idea of the company.

In terms of things that I learned or needed to learn, I was going from a solo scientist to someone who's, like, managing a small team. How do you decide the right person to bring in? How do you train them? Actually, that's a piece where I think scientific training is pretty good because you—you are often in the position of training an undergrad who knows nothing or, you know, working with a graduate student who's, like, got their own focus but is, you know, also needs to, you know, be supporting the work of others in order to get the skills that they need. So I did have some experience with classic management and training people, which I think served me well.

We managed to bring in some additional people to the company who just had experience on the venture side or had experience seeing, you know, how to run a small company—nuts and bolts like HR, payments, these kind of things. And that was good because I—I think reinventing the wheel on that would have been a real pain. In the end, it's not as hard as the scientific part, and so it was something that I was able to kind of learn on the job, learn from my colleagues, and, you know, certainly, I've carried that forward into my subsequent company experiences.

And, yeah, I think for us, the big challenge at that time as it is for every company at every stage of development in biotech is just getting the money that we needed in order to do stuff we needed to do. That started, as I said, with a little bit of seed funding. We eventually managed to get a research collaboration with Pfizer, trying to use these techniques that we had, I think, sufficiently proven to be functional to now identify candidates against targets that were specifically interesting to them.

So that was a pretty, you know, interesting place for me to be coming from a background of biology where, like, novel targets were sort of my real focus as I was going through my training. Now instead to be like, "Well, somebody else has got the target, and I've—you know, I've got the technique to try to develop it." That sort of, like, relationship was a good thing to learn from as well. Basically, like, we're autonomous in terms of how we're operating, but we—then we were responsible to this kinda external party. We needed to give them regular updates. We needed to describe our work and our progress in a way that was honest, but also, like, made them feel like we were, you know, moving along the path that we had described.

And then we had to be very careful about how we spent the money that that collaboration had yielded, trying to build out the team in a way that could sort of serve the needs of that project while hopefully building something for the future as well and kind of deepening the data that we had around these techniques. So, yeah, very cool experience. I think we were 10 people at our peak, and that was, you know, most of the laboratory team but included, for example, kids right out of undergrad and people who—you know, we couldn't afford to hire a senior team.

So we had just a couple of key scientists, including myself, that was very much in the lab at that time, and then people who are hands-on with our work in ways that we felt like accelerated but in a cost-effective way. And then eventually got to the point where we either needed to raise a bunch of money and become a real drug development company or we needed to put this technology in someone else's hands. And we pursued both paths. We did not find the right opportunity to raise the money that we would need, but I, you know, was very pleased that we did find someone who was interested to acquire the technology.

And so that was the sort of final point of that Ab Initio Biotherapeutics. We were acquired by Ligand Pharmaceuticals, really with a focus on the ways that whatever we had done to identify drugs was kind of like a nice bonus to them. They were really interested in taking these tools and techniques and plugging it into a drug discovery pipeline that they were building in their own company. And so it—it worked out very well. It was, you know, an acquisition that was tiny by Silicon Valley standards, but the founders made a little bit of money. Our investors made a little bit of money. I was very relieved by that. We didn't zero them out, and then it let us kinda put that work in someone else's hand to do something with.

Jon Chee - 00:13:41: Very cool. I mean, it sounds like you were, like, soup to nuts. Like—like, it was like a crash course, like, of entrepreneurship, at least in kind of a short—how long was Ab Initio, like, from founding to acquisition?

Roy Maute - 00:13:54: Four and a half years.

Jon Chee - 00:13:55: Four and a half years. So, like, very much, like, a crash course on the whole thing. And, like, also, you know, collaboration too, which is, like, you know, it's kind of, like, really doing it. And I guess, like, when you look back on that and I guess, first, it—kinda, like, working with an organization as large as Pfizer, like, what makes for, in your opinion, an effective collaboration?

Roy Maute - 00:14:13: Yeah. I think even just the mechanics of getting it was very dependent on some of the relationships that we were able to leverage. So amongst the founding team on the science side for Ab Initio, one of those exceptional scientists that I mentioned is a guy named Andy Kruse, who's currently at Harvard, and he had collaborations on the academic side with a very famous scientist named Tim Springer. Tim was a successful entrepreneur as well as a very successful scientist, and his network is very broad, both on the academic science side and on the industry side.

So he was the source of our initial seed funding. The company wouldn't have been anything without that, but he also introduced us to some folks at Pfizer. I think because that intro was coming through him, we started with credibility, which was crucial because we never would have gotten that collaboration without it. But that also was really crucial in carrying forward that relationship. I think, you know, for us, we were very realistic to ourselves and in describing to others, like, what kind of organization we were—just really small, very inexperienced in terms of drug development, but, like, really strong scientifically.

So we're resource-strapped, and we had to work in a cost-effective way. I think for Pfizer, once we sort of set those expectations, I think they really did appreciate the sort of scientific energy and creativity we're able to bring, and we've tried very hard to never overpromise, to always be very frank about what was working, what wasn't, and to just communicate really fluidly. I think, you know, for them, they weren't exactly betting the company on this collaboration. So it allowed them to approach it in a pretty low-pressure way, which, yeah, I think was crucial for us to have success because I think we just weren't set up to, you know, move fast on, like, really large-scale things the way that they might have been accustomed to with their internal work or other collaborations they might do.

I was just very pleased that they kinda made space in their—in their budget and their pipeline for that kind of, like, tiny-scale collaboration. And then we learned a lot from it, and, yeah, hopefully, it moved the work forward a bit too.

Jon Chee - 00:15:57: Yeah. I think something I took away just—it's like always like to underpromise, overdeliver. And, also, it sounds like your Columbia experience of, like, being able to communicate in a regular cadence of, like, what's going well, what's going not so well came in handy.

Roy Maute - 00:16:10: Yeah. That is accurate. Yeah. For me, "underpromise and overdeliver" is a phrase that I hear often. I like to tweak that just a tiny bit. You know, like, let's set aggressive goals and say that you're gonna do them, but then also just, yeah, be very open about your progress toward those. I think, like, strategically, underpromising is something that I try to discourage my team from doing. And the way that I think you can allow that to happen is to make sure that they don't think that they're gonna get beaten down by missing a goal. Right?

Like, we own these goals together. We set them in the most aggressive realistic way that we can and shoot for them. We fall this short, but it's for good reason. As long as everyone has gotten visibility into that process over time, it's all good. I just slightly prefer that as opposed to, like, "I think it's gonna take two months, but I'm gonna say four months." And then—yeah. And, yeah, nobody at my current company does that ever. But I think there is just a little bit of, like, people are coming from all over, you know, big companies. Different places work different ways, and it's—it's not uncommon to encounter someone who's been burned in the past and, therefore, is, like, just a little bit more protective of what they say that they will do. Absolutely. Gotta strike that right balance.

Jon Chee - 00:17:13: Yeah. Yeah. And that's a—I think that's a nice kind of, like, tweak to it. So—so you definitely don't want to sandbag. Like, let's try our best here to do something, you know, of impact. So I totally agree. And talk about the experience of, like, going through an acquisition process. How was that?

Roy Maute - 00:17:28: As with everything else with the company, I was definitely not doing it alone. And I don't think I said his name earlier, but the CEO of Ab Initio was a guy named Ken Lin, and he was coming from a background in finance. He had been part of the C-team at another biotech company in kind of a different therapeutic area. He, way back when, had a scientific background. He hadn't been a working scientist or physician in—in some time. And so he and I had a good division of labor in that respect.

It's definitely what I needed to thrive in that role is, like, give me control of the lab team. Felt very, very qualified to do that even as the work that we were doing and the kind of team that we're working with was a bit different from that academic background. But it was a step forward, but one that I—I was very comfortable to take. And it was a big relief to have him on the business side just, like, taking care of all of the other stuff, just the pure mechanics of having a company. But then when it came time to do kinda higher-stakes things like licensing our technology out from the Stanford academic lab or figuring out this Pfizer collaboration agreement—maybe I could have muddled my way through, but I—it's much better to have someone who—who had been through it before and had some sense and some resources to draw on to, like, do these things well.

That was absolutely true for the acquisition too. You know, it was an interesting time because the company had sort of run down its cash, and so we had kind of mothballed a lot of our work. And the opportunity to get acquired kinda came late in that process. So the company, you know, wasn't defunct, but it was in a quiet state, and then we had the chance to go to this acquisition. And so I was in the process already of kinda figuring out my next position, which ultimately was the move to Forty Seven Inc., which I guess we'll talk about. But I got to really more observe than craft what this acquisition looked like.

But it was interesting to just kinda game it out and, like, "Okay, here's what's important to the internal stakeholders." We've got the founders. We've got the investors. They might want different things. There actually was quite a lot of discussion about whether we should pursue the acquisition, which would bring the company kind of to a close, or whether perhaps it could be spun into another sort of emerging venture, which would push it into the future, and different people had different ideas for which one was a better outcome and a better success. So it's fascinating to sort of think through those things. And then as far as just the pure kind of negotiation, putting together the paperwork, getting lawyers together, I didn't contribute to it in any meaningful way, but I—it was a learning process to watch it go down.

Jon Chee - 00:19:39: Yeah. And—and, like, even if you're not, like, hands-on, like, being able to observe that, like, fly on the wall to be able to, like, see how it goes, like, it's a rare opportunity. Not many folks get to see that.

Roy Maute - 00:19:51: That's right. And physicians have this phrase that "watch one, do one, teach one." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I heard it, I was like, "You gotta be kidding me. Like—" but that is actually—that's sort of rapid-fire. Like, you don't necessarily have to stand around looking at something for a 100 reps before you're ready to just, like, get your hands dirty. I've had a couple instances in my kind of entrepreneurship journey of, like, watch one, do one, teach one, and, yeah, sometimes that's all you need.

Jon Chee - 00:20:16: Yep. Absolutely. And so you mentioned that you're now looking for your next role, and you mentioned Forty Seven. Talk a little bit about how did that opportunity come about and what compelled you to join Forty Seven.

Roy Maute - 00:20:27: Yep. As the Ab Initio was getting acquired, I had quite a lot of discussion with Ligand, the acquiring party, about just sort of what was gonna come over to them. The technology was important, and the ability to implement it was what was really crucial to them. They did ask me if I would come, but, really, when I got down to it, my specific scientific skills were not the most crucial for implementing that at their company. Someone else on the team was the real GPCR expert, and they were the one who—they really needed in order to access that.

So for me, I was pretty satisfied with that because I think it would have been cool to sort of go through that process and really integrate it. But, yeah, in the meantime, I had reconnected a bit with the folks in Irv's lab who had developed this drug at Stanford. Since then, they had turned it into a company called Forty Seven Inc., and they were making really rapid progress. You know, they've gotten through the monotherapy dose escalation. They were in, you know, a bunch of different clinical indications. And as I thought about being part of a company at that stage, that's kind of like at Ab Initio, that's what we were dreaming of, what we were working toward, but it would have been, you know, years until we would get there.

I would say going with the technology to the acquiring company would have kept me, like, firmly on the sort of early drug discovery side, which is important. It is interesting. It wasn't a bad opportunity, but then, yeah, as I talked to Irv and some of those other folks just sort of dreaming about, like, how science could contribute to that stage of clinical development, it just hooked me, and I—that's what I wanted to do. So I was, as with many other stages of my journey, very fortunate because I knew that group very well already. I truly, like, knew the science that they were working on very deeply. I think my knowledge of that biology was on par with a lot of the folks at that company.

I had absolutely no exposure to clinical development or to translational science or biomarker science, but they had an open position in that role because someone who had crafted that early on the team had left, and so there was just an opening. And it would have been very reasonable if they had just gone looking for a sort of biomarker scientist professional from some other background, but instead, they put me into that role, which was great. Because I was coming with such a sort of strong scientific understanding of what they were doing, I was able to learn all the other pieces on the job from what was then a—quite a fully formed team of, you know, clinical development professionals.

It's funny for me to think sometimes about, like, what the folks, let's say, on the sample management side must have thought about me when I had absolutely no idea what they were even talking about when it came to, like, biobanking and, like, the tubes we were using and, like, "You know, does this need to be shipped overnight, or does it need to be shipped cold?" Is it—and they're like, "I don't know. I don't know. I don't know any of this stuff." But it was an awesome time to—to step into that role because the company had gotten through sort of the crucial early stage of the development. They—they demonstrated some activity for the drug and the target.

They built up this huge bank of patient samples, but hadn't yet fully tapped them to ask the key questions of who's responding, who's not, what can we learn about those patients that might help us develop in the future or maybe pick individual patients for future indications. We have all these preclinical ideas of how the drug is and should be working. Like, is any of that true in the patients? So I got to step into that chair and start to, like, quickly moving some of those scientific inquiries into process, and, yeah, it was really neat, really fun. As with my postdoc, the only regret I have about that experience is that it didn't last a little bit longer because the company was moving so quickly and demonstrating this, you know, really exciting clinical approval concept.

And, you know, I was there for about one year before it was eventually acquired by Gilead. But in that one year, I did a lot of watching and a lot of learning, and I think that company was so well constructed and led in different areas by such experienced and really capable people that I think I—I was incredibly fortunate to get a glimpse into, like, almost the best version of a company at that size and stage. And, yeah, I've taken a lot of notes.

Jon Chee - 00:24:02: That's amazing. I mean, that is fast. I mean, when was that company founded? Not to put you on the spot.

Roy Maute - 00:24:08: It's actually not such an easy question to answer. I don't know when it was incorporated as a commercial entity because the drug program started in the academic lab and went through a lot of that early development. I would say that was the sort of real birth date of the company, but the pace of development during that academic phase was maybe a little slower than what a typical company might do. So I have to say it was probably pretty parallel to that formation of my company, Ab Initio. So maybe by the time I had joined, you know, the drug had existed for about four and a half or five years or so. Commercial entity maybe was, yeah, three and a half years old or so.

Jon Chee - 00:24:41: Yeah. No. I think too is, like, I always think about the conversation with my parents. Like, "How does this, like, moving from academia into, like, a commercial enterprise?" They're like, "What is that journey like?" And I'm like, "Oh, no. Like, a lot of these things just, like, just stay in academia for a really long time. Use it, like, for a really long time." And then eventually, when it does, like, stand up on its legs in the commercial, like, things start going quick. Like, I'm not gonna say you're, like, starting off on, like, second or third base, but you're definitely not, like, you know, at home. You've got, like, the skeleton during the acquisition of Gilead too. Were you, like, observing and kind of in a similar fashion as the Ab Initio acquisition?

Roy Maute - 00:25:17: Yes. It was a much larger scale by many zeroes, and it was also higher stakes in the sense that this isn't just a technology that can enable something down the road. It was like, "This is a drug, and, you know, we're not just acquiring the company and the rights to that drug. We are also committing ourselves to many millions of additional dollars of investment in order to carry it further." Because the exact stage of that drug, magrolimab, at that time was it had gone through monotherapy dose escalation, demonstrated, you know, some biological activity, but then immediately found a—on a registrational path in combination in a—in a hematopoietic indication, MDS.

So that was in combination with another drug, but in a kinda single-arm trial. And so, you know, there's a lot yet to be learned about just exactly how the drug would work, how well it would work. It seemed apparent from that—that early data that it was on a path to success in that particular disease in combination, but then there were a lot of ideas that the team had about where it could go next and how it could be expanded. So, yeah, the actual acquisition—I was not part of the senior leadership team of this company, full stop.

So I—you know, I learned about the acquisition along with other members of the company after the decision had been made. Wasn't involved in negotiation. Wasn't involved in anything. I think I did, in my role, generate some data that sort of helped the acquiring company think about where the opportunities would be and how it was working. And then as we look to the—the future post-acquisition, you know, the drug was not approved yet. And for me, I—I knew that I didn't wanna just quickly walk away. I was just starting to learn what this all meant, and so I definitely wanted to stay with the program and contribute to it in the way that I could.

And that next phase after the acquisition was a great learning experience. So, you know, first, in the same way that Forty Seven Inc. was a great opportunity for me to see the inside of a sort of mid-stage biotech, Gilead is a much larger organization, worked in a completely different way, had a completely different set of kinda decision-making processes and budgetary processes. And I think that seeing the ways that it was different, the ways that it worked well, the ways that it didn't, I think, was really useful to me. I don't know that I'll be building an organization that will get to that stage certainly anytime soon, but understanding the way a company like that works, what they value, what they see in smaller companies, for example, they might partnership—partner with or license from, I think, was really educational.

Jon Chee - 00:27:29: Just to stop you there, what would you say those are?

Roy Maute - 00:27:31: Well, I imagined that there might be a lot of, like, bureaucracy, for example, at a larger company, and maybe that's the barrier to, like, getting things done. I heard people say that before, so I thought maybe that was true. Actually, didn't really find that to be the case in that particular window of time in our acquisition by Gilead. That organization was actually going through a big change of its own because they had brought in different members of the leadership team. I think at that time, the chief medical officer was relatively new to the organization.

They're making big changes in the internal governance and organization and, like, who sat where, who reported to who. And so there were a couple instances where, at least, like, the piece of the Forty Seven team that I was part of, like, would sometimes find ourselves asking, like, "Okay. Well, we wanna do this thing. Who do we need to give us permission to do it?" And in some cases, that was apparent, and in other cases, like, it wasn't. Um, so that was a—yeah, quite an interesting thing.

But I also got to connect with a lot of colleagues there who essentially were, you know, the leaders of the biomarker translational function, seeing how they worked on their internal programs, but then also seeing how they assessed and how they talked about other programs that they had acquired. I would say that they were in a process of, like, rapid deal-making at that time. So Gilead was acquiring a bunch of different companies. And so, you know, '47 was sort of a late-early development. They had done some collaborations with companies that were earlier and have, like, a broader pipeline.

They'd acquired a company called Immunomedics, which had gotten accelerated approval and was on the verge of full approval for their drug, and that was more of, like, an expansion strategy. So each one of those, it was interesting to talk to these colleagues and hear as they were going through diligence, like, "Oh, here's what we saw you guys did well versus, like, this other company. Like, surprisingly, they didn't have this crucial piece of data, whereas, like, you know, you tell me you haven't, like, used these samples in this way. Like, can you explain to me, like, why you haven't done this set of experiments?"

So that was, I think, very educational as well. And then, also, once we were integrated in the company, one of the things that we did was connect with the people at Gilead who had been responsible for the internal program against the same target that we were developing. So, basically, they had a lot more resources and were starting kind of at a similar time, and it's interesting to see what slowed that program down in a way that led Gilead to acquire Forty Seven as opposed to just carrying it through their internal development.

And in a couple instances, it was just as simple as, like, well, the smaller company either thought about doing that but didn't have the resources to do it, so just went forward anyway or, like, didn't know any better and so didn't do this thing, but it also didn't stop them in the stage of development. I would say the folks that I interact with at Gilead were incredible professionals. In many cases, really strong scientists. So I was very pleased to sort of see that from such a large organization that, in some cases, focused on those sort of later stages with drug development, but they're very scientifically minded there.

Jon Chee - 00:30:08: Absolutely. And, I guess, like, when you compare and contrast, like, a smaller org versus, like, the kind of larger org Gilead, like, what do you think the large organizations are best suited for? Like, where do they really excel and maybe not excel? And then kind of, like, on a startup side, obviously, it's size-wise inverse, but, like, what are startups best suited to do and not so best suited to do? And how can we, as a new entrepreneur, capture the best of both worlds if possible?

Roy Maute - 00:30:38: Yeah. So the—a really simple answer to that question is sort of, like, for drug development phase three—global phase three and multiple indications takes hundreds of millions of dollars, and it takes, like, a really established, you know, sort of global network in order to do that smoothly. Obviously, drugs do get all the way through approval at smaller companies, but that was one of the things that I think the—certainly myself and other members of the Forty Seven team were excited to access. It was like, "Okay. Well, we don't have to build this huge apparatus from scratch because this organization is quite experienced at doing it."

On the other hand, again, the interaction that I had with people on the kind of earlier side or, like, internal programs coming up through—through Gilead, I think that this is probably a generalizable notion that, like, a big organization like that with a ton of resources—since they could do just about anything, the question of what to do and what not to do is—is a pretty hard hump to get over. I think, like, they've got a lot of, like, governance systems established in order to do this in a kinda systematic way. But that's one of the great things about a startup is, most especially for a company like Forty Seven, it started with a drug, a target, you know, real focus.

Like, eventually, they sort of expanded the pipeline and thought about what was next, but not having to ask yourself that question of, like, "What is it that we're trying to do around here?" is a real benefit to a company, especially at those smaller, less resourced earlier stages. And I would say that leads you to classic thing of, like, startups moving fast, I think, is true in general, but it is also the consequence of just making perfect the enemy of good and the enemy of progress is something that's, like, pretty hard for a big organization to avoid, and it—you know, a smaller organization can sometimes avoid it just because they have no other choice. And I think that that can lead startup companies to sort of take the wrong path, but it also can help them move really quickly through parts of development that are easy to get stuck at.

Jon Chee - 00:32:20: No. I think that was a really succinct way of putting it honestly because, like, I think it reminds me of, uh, Google, where there's, like, what do we do with all this money? The money machine is getting bigger and faster. And not to say that Google hasn't had some hits because, like, obviously, there are some hits, but there are also times, like—where do we put these big bags of cash and where do we reinvest it? And that's, like, a hard problem because, like, everything at that point is, like—you have the resource to do everything. But, like, the focus, I could imagine, is, like, really hard. Like, it's just like option paralysis. You're just like—

Roy Maute - 00:32:54: Oh my god. Yeah.

Outro - 00:32:57: That's all for this episode of the Biotech Startups Podcast featuring Roy Maute. Join us next time for part four where Roy recounts leaving Gilead to co-found Pheast Therapeutics with Amira Barkal and the Forty Seven founding team around the CD47 target. He'll also unpack why Pheast became the first company pursuing macrophage checkpoint inhibitors, how PHST001 addresses earlier programs' limitations, and his philosophy on combining with ADCs and T-cell immunotherapies.

If you enjoy the show, subscribe, leave a review, or share it with a friend. Thanks for listening. See you next time. The Biotech Startups Podcast is produced by Excedr. Don't want to miss an episode? Search for the Biotech Startups Podcast wherever you get your podcasts and click subscribe. Excedr provides research labs with equipment leases on founder-friendly terms to support paths to exceptional outcomes. To learn more, visit our website, www.excedr.com. On behalf of the team here at Excedr, thanks for listening.

The Biotech Startups Podcast provides general insights into the life science sector through the experiences of its guests. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from the podcast is at the user's own risk. The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not the views of Excedr or sponsors. No reference to any product, service, or company in the podcast is an endorsement by Excedr or its guests.