Betting on Women's Health | Sabrina Johnson (1/4)

Intro - 00:00:06: Welcome to The Biotech Startups Podcast by Excedr. Join us as we speak with first-time founders, serial entrepreneurs, and experienced investors about the challenges and triumphs of running a biotech startup from pre-seed to IPO with your host, Jon Chee.

Our guest today is Sabrina Johnson, founder, president, and CEO of Dare Bioscience, a Nasdaq-listed biopharmaceutical company advancing innovative therapies in women's reproductive health, spanning contraception, vaginal health, sexual health, and fertility built on a guiding principle she calls biotechnology Cyprus Bioscience, leading four product launches, building a 115-person commercial organization, and raising a $170,000,000 for a pipeline that included Civella for fibromyalgia. She then served as COO and CFO at WomanCare Global International, delivering reproductive health products to women in more than a 100 countries before becoming CFO and CAO at Calibre, the California Institute for Biomedical Research.

At Dare Bioscience, Sabrina leads a lean team of 25, executing what she calls the groomed trail approach, identifying therapeutic gaps in women's health, matching them to existing FDA-approved actives, and closing the distance between promising science and something a woman can actually use. With a first-in-category, non-hormonal contraceptive in a pivotal phase three, a sildenafil cream for female arousal disorder launching in 2026, and over $75,000,000 in non-dilutive funding from the Gates Foundation, NIH, and ARPA-H, Sabrina's journey from Rome-born biomedical engineer who nearly pursued the arts to Nasdaq CEO shows what it looks like when you choose your mission before your industry and refuse to treat women's health as a niche, making this a conversation you won't want to miss.

Over the next four episodes, Sabrina shows how growing up between Italy and the US with entrepreneurial immigrant parents shaped her comfort with calculated risk. She traces her path from a theater-obsessed student talked into biomedical engineering by a clever science teacher through Tulane University and a formative year at University College London at the dawn of the biologics revolution, a first sales job where she went from worst rep in the building to top of the board simply by being herself to a series of serendipitous moves at Advanced Tissue Sciences and Cypress Bioscience, a Saturday morning epiphany that led her to found Dare, and ten years of quietly building one of the most thoughtfully constructed pipelines in women's health.

Today, we'll hear about Sabrina's upbringing. Born in Rome, raised in Phoenix by entrepreneurial immigrant parents, a chemist father who reinvented himself as a woodcarver and artist after immigrating to the United States, and a mother who spearheaded the first-ever online driver's license program in Arizona and how watching both of them follow unconventional paths planted seeds for Sabrina's own willingness to lean into what others overlook. We'll also hear about how a high school physics and chemistry teacher recognizing a science-gifted student fully committed to theater and makeup art, reframed biomedical engineering as science fiction, setting Sabrina on the path to Tulane University and how studying a multidisciplinary field in the uniquely cross-cultural city of New Orleans opened her mind to an approach she'd carry her entire career.

Lastly, we'll hear about Sabrina's junior year abroad and subsequent master's degree at University College London, where being placed in biochemical engineering put her in the room with the early pioneers of biologics and monoclonal antibody therapeutics. Her first job doing bench science at Baxter Healthcare that she quickly realized wasn't for her, and how universal career advice to get sales experience first led her to Clonetics Corporation where she climbed from the worst rep in the building to the top of the leaderboard simply by dropping the persona and being herself. Without further ado, let's dive into part one of our conversation with Sabrina Johnson.

Jon Chee - 00:05:26: Sabrina, so good to see you. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:05:29: Absolutely. My pleasure. I've

Jon Chee - 00:05:30: been really looking forward to this conversation, and thanks again for your flexibility as, you know, in the entrepreneurial journey, there's always things coming up and being able to book this with you. I totally appreciate it. But as I was putting together the prep sheet here, really excited to dig into the formative moments for you early in your journey. What were some things growing up that really formed your business philosophy? What got you into science? So take us all the way back. Tell us what your upbringing was like.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:05:58: Yeah. Absolutely. So I was born in Rome, Italy, and I lived there my first few years, and that is definitely very relevant for a lot of reasons. I mean, one, coming to the United States, learning a new language as a little kid, all that fun stuff. But also just watching my parents and seeing what that was like for them starting out here, how they followed their dreams and their passions, how they decided what to prioritize, what's important, how they made time for the things that mattered to them, and how they didn't prioritize things that did not. I now can look back and see that definitely was a very formative period for me in not being fearless as a leader. Right? Being willing to take risks. Understand that a calculated risk or mitigated risk is not the same as being irresponsible, or cutting corners. And so it has definitely shaped how I manage and how I lead the team and how I am with investors also. How I explain what we're doing and why we're doing it and how I work with my team and my people and also feeling comfortable to work in women's health, which is the area that we focus on and being comfortable to lean into something that is maybe overlooked by others, but is still really important.

Jon Chee - 00:07:12: Were your parents entrepreneurs as well?

Sabrina Johnson - 00:07:14: So my father had come to the United States. He was a chemist when he was in Italy. He worked for Solvay, a big company, but came to the United States not knowing the language and not being able to pursue that career that he had done. So he kind of did become an entrepreneur. He ended up taking up woodworking and wood carving and really transitioned—big transition, to an artist, from a chemist to becoming really an artist. And my mother always worked for the Department of Motor Vehicles for a long time in Arizona, but they were the first state to do driver's license online, and that was her initiative.

Jon Chee - 00:07:49: Cool.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:07:49: So even someone working in the government, she's very much an entrepreneur. Right? So I saw her. That was a perfect example of seeing her say, wow, this could be better. There's technology that would enable us to do this in a very different way. We could be the first.

Jon Chee - 00:08:03: Absolutely. Being in the Bay Area, people have a very narrow view of what entrepreneurship looks like. But you can be entrepreneurial within larger organizations. My wife works with the public sector. And as much as people like to beat up on large governmental bodies, they are doing things to try and innovate and actually change the way that things are done. But that's really cool. And so it sounds like when did you move from Rome to Arizona?

Sabrina Johnson - 00:08:30: I was three when we came to the States. I was five when we moved to Phoenix kind of on a whim. And growing up in Phoenix definitely had an impact on where I went to college, ultimately.

Jon Chee - 00:08:43: Of course.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:08:43: And also had an impact on me deciding to go into science, which was very accidental. I was very much into theater and orchestra, kind of the arts and makeup art when I was in high school and probably would have been the path I had taken professionally or tried. Tried to take professionally. My high school physics and chemistry teacher just thought that I excelled in those classes, and I think it killed him to think that I was gonna not pursue it.

Jon Chee - 00:09:11: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:09:12: But he was a smart guy. He was clever. So he understood that I was really into science fiction and science fiction kind of aesthetics. And so he tried to position biomedical engineering to me as science fiction. It's artificial limbs and robotics and prosthetics, and you can probably apply that into makeup art at some point and for sci-fi. So he was fantastic. So he's the one, honestly, that convinced me to study biomedical engineering, and his pitch to me was just get the degree in this, then you can go do whatever you want. But it's close enough. You're gonna learn stuff that you're gonna be able to apply in other areas, so thank goodness for him.

Jon Chee - 00:09:48: Very cool. I'm sure your dad was like, hell, yeah. He was pumped. He was like, yes. I could finally scratch this itch again.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:09:59: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. 100%. And then it became the issue of where to go to college because when you grow up in Phoenix, it's hot. Yeah. So I knew a 100% I did not wanna go anywhere where it snowed. But at the time when I wanted to study biomedical engineering, there actually were not that many accredited biomedical engineering programs. And most of them were in states where it snowed, so they were just automatically out of the equation. And I remember being at this college fair, and I was there with one of my best friends from high school. We went to this college fair together, and she had an uncle or something who was a professor at Tulane. So she said we have to go stop at that table. So I was like, sure. And I had my list of places that I was gonna stop that seemed like they might have biomedical engineering. And somehow Tulane, I had missed it. And in those days, we didn't have the Internet, so I didn't have a great way of searching. But anyhow, so we had to go to the Tulane table because of her uncle. And so I just asked them like I did for anyone. You don't have biomedical engineering, do you? And the woman said, actually, we do, and we're one of the only, whatever, 12 accredited programs in the country at this time. And so then I said, okay. Does it snow? Because I didn't know my geography as well as I should have probably. And she said, no. No. It never snows. I didn't know to ask about the humidity and the hurricanes. So yeah, I should've asked about those, and that was it. Then I applied and went to Tulane. Didn't really apply much elsewhere. Applied to a couple other schools, and that was it. But I thought this is perfect. It doesn't snow. It has the program. Done.

Jon Chee - 00:11:34: Awesome. Did your friend also end up going to Tulane as well?

Sabrina Johnson - 00:11:36: No. She went to Mount Holyoke. Yeah. I know. So

Jon Chee - 00:11:40: No. Yeah. It's funny because my childhood friend—so I grew up in Berkeley. One of my best friends, I've been going to school with him since kindergarten. So Berkeley unified, K through eight, went to high school with him, went to Berkeley with him, was a roommate with him all the way through, and then still hang out with him all the time. But it's like we just couldn't separate just all the way through.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:12:04: That is awesome.

Jon Chee - 00:12:05: And he lives in Berkeley still, and we see each other all the time. But I was just thinking about, holy crap. We've literally been in every classroom all the way through.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:12:14: All the way through.

Jon Chee - 00:12:15: Yeah. It's very bizarre. Very bizarre. So talk a little bit about when you touched down in New Orleans. Was it a culture shock? I feel like the temperature is okay, the heat level definitely—

Sabrina Johnson - 00:12:26: It was definitely culture shock. New Orleans is really different from any other place on the planet. So I think on top of the normal person leaving high school, transitioning to college, which is a shift anyhow for anyone, if you're moving away from home in particular. But layered on top of that was I was coming to the city that truly is unlike any other place—not even in the United States, just on the planet. It's just so unique in how it is and how it embraces music and art and people being whoever they are and just a very, very different place plus the architecture. I think that was part of the real lesson in coming to Tulane, obviously, the biomedical engineering part and also the city of New Orleans. So biomedical engineering is very much a cross-disciplinary science because you're taking biology. You're taking physics. You're taking chemistry. You're taking all kinds of different engineering concepts, fluid dynamics, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, all of it coming together. So studying that that was bringing all these different aspects of science together and then doing that in a city that was also so unique and cross-cultural, it kind of opened my eyes, and I can look back and see this more now probably than I totally appreciated then, that it definitely planted a seed in me of really feeling comfortable and confident in those kind of cross-specialty environments and bringing them together or cross-cultural environments and understanding that embracing that is bigger than the sum of the parts. So I think it was really foundational for that in me.

Jon Chee - 00:14:02: Very cool. And when you're trying to get your bearings about you, it sounds like you're getting exposure to a ton of different fields. Was there a specific lab or professor or someone that took you under their wing or perhaps inspired you while you're at Tulane?

Sabrina Johnson - 00:14:18: There were a couple. So there was a professor at Tulane, Scott Cowan, and he ended up having a very prominent role over the years at Tulane. So definitely, he was someone that helped me think outside the box and just helped me with kind of scientific method, even very basic scientific thinking and problem-solving and problem approaches. But I think also really interesting in what he did was he created an opportunity for engineering students to do a junior year abroad program. So often for engineering majors, that's really hard to be able to send students to study in another country and still get all of your very rigid requirements for your engineering degree. But he created that opportunity. He's one of the people involved in creating that opportunity for us to do that and studying abroad. I went to London. I went to University College London for my junior year. Again, amazing experience just because we're going abroad, we're going to London.

Jon Chee - 00:15:10: So that's awesome in

Sabrina Johnson - 00:15:12: and of itself.

Jon Chee - 00:15:13: Yep. Yep.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:15:14: But they didn't have an exact match for biomedical engineering, so they had to put me in the biochemical engineering department. And that was another eye-opening because that was the beginning of biologics and biologics for therapeutics and monoclonal—this was in the late eighties. Monoclonal antibodies and how they can be used for therapeutic purposes. Malcolm Lilly and Peter Dunnill were two of the University College London professors and had written books on this, and they were the early sort of people, and they were there. So that was also a mind-blowing experience because here I already thought I was in this super interdisciplinary science field of biomedical engineering, and then I go and learn, my gosh, there's this whole other one where you're taking biology and chemistry and molecular biology and putting all that together. So that was definitely an important part of both my Tulane experience, and then I ended up going back to University College London for graduate school because I wanted to get that biochemical engineering degree. Once I learned what that was, that became really interesting to me.

Jon Chee - 00:16:20: Very cool. It sounds like you're at the bleeding edge.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:16:22: I was. Yes. Yeah. Early days. Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:16:26: So rad. And I was gonna say, did you have a bench experience while you're in London?

Sabrina Johnson - 00:16:32: I have to tell you, I wish I had more bench experience while I was in London because I got my dream job then at Baxter Healthcare doing exactly what my degree at the bench was optimized to do and realized I didn't love that as much. My bench experience ended getting in London with more around—it was a super cool project, but we got to design a manufacturing facility, like a large scale manufacture, yeah, which is a super cool master's thesis. We got to design this large-scale facility to do monoclonal antibodies, specifically large scale production, but didn't ever get to work as the person doing that production. Where your job in the real world is likely going to be in the plant. Doing the work in the plants, not design. There aren't that many jobs to design the facility. So it was a fantastic master's thesis. I learned a ton. But in terms of practical use, there aren't that many jobs for designing those kind of equipment. So I went on to take a job where I was at the bench, which wasn't what I thought it was gonna be.

Jon Chee - 00:17:34: Yeah. Were you considering a career in academia at any point in time or you're like, I'm going in industry?

Sabrina Johnson - 00:17:40: No. I have to say never was on the radar. Not for me. I mean, obviously, when you're in an academic institution, you see academicians every day, and you get a sense for what their day is and what their work is. And I crossed that off my list really quickly. Just not for me. It is a lot of departmental politics. It's a lot of things moving slower than you hoped. It's a lot of publish or perish, sometimes ahead of the focus of what the real scientific objectives are, if that makes sense, and what the longer-term goals are. So it was never on the path. Or med school. People always ask me too, how about med school? Because a lot of biomedical engineers go on to medical school, saying I had no interest in practicing medicine.

Jon Chee - 00:18:23: Yeah. I mean, those are good things to know early on because those paths are long.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:18:27: Yeah. And extensive.

Jon Chee - 00:18:29: Yeah. Expensive. And you're on it. You kind of don't know what's on the other side. You're like, oh god. The train's in motion already. So you're wrapping up your masters. You wanna go into industry. Talk a little bit about how you landed your first role at Baxter, and what was the first job hunt for you? What was that like?

Sabrina Johnson - 00:18:49: So fortunately, with that degree program that I did in London, they were really great at University College London of sort of guiding us around the importance, wrong or right. But this was the sort of guidance we got was your first job should be with a large company. Just get the experience. Go to a large company to really get that foundational experience and get the exposure. Because in a large company, you're gonna truly get to see what very well-developed departments are and what those roles are and what it takes. And maybe you wanna do something different later, but get that experience. So that was super helpful, and so it really had me focusing on, okay, who are the big companies that are already leaning into this relatively newer area of pharmaceutical and biological medicines because I definitely wanted to work on recombinant therapeutic proteins. I mean, I knew that that was what I wanted to do with that degree out of UCL. So the universe was relatively small in terms of who were the companies doing that, and I never even though I spent that time in London, which does get cold and actually did snow once—

Jon Chee - 00:19:56: when I was there. Yeah.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:19:58: What that did was reinforce for me that I did not wanna be in Boston. Yeah. And so when you started looking—because I started looking for these opportunities, that was a real limiter. I have to be honest. That was a real limiter not wanting to be in Boston because some of these early companies, Genomic Institute, are in Boston or San Francisco. I think it's in the early ones in the Bay Area. And San Francisco also gets kinda cold.

Jon Chee - 00:20:24: Yeah. I know. It's raining right now.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:20:25: Exactly. Right. So I was trying to hone in my—so talk about that search. I have this limited scope of parameter of wanting to work for a company that's doing recombinant protein therapeutics, and I've completely crossed off the list. A 100% for sure crossed off Boston and was pretty sure I wanted to cross off San Francisco, but I did apply for some jobs there. And, fortunately, I applied to Baxter because I saw that they were doing that, and it was not their Chicago Baxter, which would have been off my list because of the—

Jon Chee - 00:20:54: That would have been brutal.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:20:57: Terrible.

Jon Chee - 00:20:57: Yeah.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:20:58: It was Los Angeles. They had a facility in Los Angeles because it kind of stemmed out of what it was originally their blood products business that used to come from plasma. So it was things like factor eight. It was blood clotting factors where they were transitioning from plasma-derived therapeutics to recombinant, cell culture-derived. And so everything lined up beautifully with Baxter. They were just setting up a new facility. They had a partnership with one of the companies on the East Coast, ultimately, for large-scale production and commercialization, but they were setting up their own facility to do process optimization, supporting scale-up, those activities. So it's perfect for my degree because it was both kind of setting up that facility, but then operating that facility. So that was just a perfect match. And so I got what I told everyone at the time was my absolute dream job. I just felt like I landed, you know, if someone had asked me to write the job description for what I dreamed would be my first job with that degree, I got it. And Baxter was fantastic as a company, but I will say realizing the day-to-day, and it kinda goes to your question about what was the bench experience. I wish I'd had more of that. It just was not what I envisioned. Like, gowning up in the bunny suit thing. It was like the full where you have to think 20 times. Do I really wanna go to the bathroom right now because I gotta take this all off, and then I gotta put it all back on to come back in? And am I really hungry right now? Just being in that environment all day, and it was a very repetitive job, and it was a very isolated job. I was in this cell culture suite with other cell culture scientists that were working on this too, but it was still limiting. And so for me, it really drove home that I loved the science, loved the science, but I did not wanna spend my career at the bench. And I had the realization of that probably in the first month in the job. So imagine that. I spent all the time studying and training for this. Then month one, I was kinda like—

Jon Chee - 00:22:58: Uh-oh.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:22:59: Like uh-oh.

Jon Chee - 00:23:00: He's set

Sabrina Johnson - 00:23:01: for me.

Jon Chee - 00:23:02: Yeah.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:23:02: And yeah. But fortunately, it was at a large company like that. And so what it gave me was the opportunity to look around and say, okay. There are other kind of roles here. What are they? What are the other people that are not in the lab every day with me? What are they doing? What is their job? So it became this perfect environment for me to literally do informational interviews. I'd go to the lunchroom, leave the lab and go to the lunchroom because I had a nice big lunchroom. And I'd just meet people and ask, what do you do? What is your job? What do you do every day? And that a bunch of people on the marketing side, there was a big focus on how Baxter was going to communicate to the public this new source of factor eight, this recombinant factor eight, versus their plasma drive. So it was a big marketing effort at the time at Baxter, and I just remember meeting those people and being so fascinated about what they got to do. Like, this is so cool. So you're gonna come up with how to explain this to someone who doesn't understand the science. But what surprised me was that none of them had a scientific background. So here were these people tasked with this role of explaining something very complex and distilling it down into something that anyone can understand, but they're in the group that didn't understand in the first place. So I was like, wait. How do you do that?

Jon Chee - 00:24:23: Yeah.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:24:24: And it was those conversations that kind of gave me the very calculated decision to leave the bench and go get my business degree because I thought, my goodness, how powerful would it be to have the business fluency, which I did not have at all, on top of my engineering training and my understanding of the science and then being able to communicate that and understand how to put it into a business context.

Jon Chee - 00:24:49: Yep. There's so many strings I wanna pull on. I guess the first thing is, I think you said it right or wrong, but I think it is invaluable to get that big company experience. I really do. I haven't had it. Well, I mean, I did, but it was not within the context of Excedr. But I think a lot of the time, people wanna just jump straight into entrepreneurship immediately. And it's like, that works. It definitely works. But I think I could have probably saved a lot of heartache by just spending maybe a year or so just learning from someone else that's already done it.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:25:24: Yes. A 100%. And even me, I mean, it took me years to feel I had the confidence and skills to be truly an entrepreneur and start a company. There is something wonderful about being able to be in an environment where you absolutely get to look around the room and see where all the roles are. Even just that, like, wait. What are all the roles here? What are all the things that you need to make this happen?

Jon Chee - 00:25:47: Yeah. It's kinda crazy because what I just see reflecting, I'm like, oh, I was recreating the wheel when I really didn't need to.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:25:56: Yes. Exactly.

Jon Chee - 00:25:58: Like, why did I do that? I don't know. I wasted a bunch of time. This is solved. This problem is solved. Why did I resolve it? So I think that's an invaluable experience, and I know a lot of folks who are contemplating the entrepreneurial journey. It's like, if you can spend a year, just absorb for a little bit, take that with you, and do it. And it's really awesome hearing your ability to just basically sponge, just tapping shoulders. Like, hey. What do you do? And I think that is such an invaluable opportunity and skill to do. Just have that beginner's mindset to just go and solicit and people wanna talk about what they're doing anyways, so they're just like—

Sabrina Johnson - 00:26:44: They love it. And the other thing that you realize in life, and I tell people this all the time, people love to give you advice. I'll often talk to students, maybe undergraduate students or graduate students or people that are new in the job market, and they'll tell me how they're very tentative to reach out. They may have reached out to me on LinkedIn, and then I take the meeting. And they're always so surprised. Like, oh, thank you so much for taking some time with me. And I was like, man, learn this right away. People love—one, people love talking about themselves, and two, people love to give advice. Like, as long as you make it clear that's all you're asking for is a little bit of time for them to talk about themselves and give you advice—

Jon Chee - 00:27:22: Yeah.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:27:22: They will have coffee with you.

Jon Chee - 00:27:23: Exactly. Like, it really happens. We've been remote first for a very long time, but when you're talking about the lunchroom, that is the perk of being together.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:27:35: Yes.

Jon Chee - 00:27:35: It's because you can just say, hey. What's up? What do you do? And I love that you're able to observe there's kind of this gap of marketing, which is—and I think that's a whole another thing that I could go really for hours on is I think being obviously in science, it's like we are working on really hard things that are very hard to communicate, but I sometimes think that we do a poor job of communicating. There's always that translation, verbal translation or written translation to people who don't have PhDs. I always talk to my parents who are not scientists, and they're like, what is this thing? And you've got to be able to communicate to them because if we're gonna get anything done, you need to bring everyone on board. But it's super neglected, I think.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:28:30: Totally. And I will say I left Baxter ultimately to go get that business degree, and I went to Thunderbird, which is an internationally focused business school. Used to be independent. It's now part of Arizona State University. It's in Arizona. I heard about it ironically even though I grew up in Phoenix. I heard about it when I was in London. I heard

Jon Chee - 00:28:48: about the

Sabrina Johnson - 00:28:49: people in London because when I would tell them I was from Phoenix, they would say, oh, like, where Thunderbird is. Yeah. And I was like, I don't know what you're talking about. There's a Thunderbird high school, but you can't possibly be talking about that.

Jon Chee - 00:29:00: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:29:01: So I learned about it that way, and I'll talk about what happened after Thunderbird. But it goes back—it kinda goes to this point of people giving advice and telling you things. I kept hearing over and over again that one of the most important things you can learn how to do is how to communicate and not just communicate, but influence people with your communication. Which is not something you learn directly in business school. You have to kinda learn that afterwards, but it definitely inspired kinda what I did after business school for sure.

Jon Chee - 00:29:30: Absolutely. And I think coming from a technical background, at least I remember making the assumption that's like, yeah. Why don't you get it? Everyone should get this. This is groundbreaking. You should understand the impact here.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:29:43: Right. Yes.

Jon Chee - 00:29:44: But you can't make that assumption. You cannot make that assumption. And I think something to, you know, kind of what you're talking about at a company like Baxter, there are many, many groups of people to make a Baxter work that are nonscientific are imperative to the mission. Exactly. I have great pride in coming from the bench, but I realize it's necessary but not sufficient to get it all the way to the end zone.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:30:12: Right. To get it all the way to the finish line. And I always tell people too, the finish line isn't getting to market. The finish line is getting your product adopted with whatever you're looking to solve or do. That's the finish line. That's success. And understanding, oh, okay. That there is so much that goes into that.

Jon Chee - 00:30:29: Yeah. And exactly to get back to what you're saying, the communication aspect, that's why it's so important. Because if you can't effectively get it to the next group who doesn't have all the context that you have, it's gonna be dead in the water. And I think there's not enough of that, because there's so much pride and ownership to this all. Anyways, so you went to business school, and now you're looking for your next role. Talk a little bit about kind of where you were at there.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:30:55: Yes. I go to Thunderbird. I choose Thunderbird specifically because it was, like I said, I heard about it while I was abroad in London, and it was in Phoenix where I grew up, so there were some benefits of also going. And it had this international focus, which is also super cool. So it's a lot of positives about Thunderbird. And I was inspired to go get my business degree because I talked to all these people at Baxter who are in marketing, and that's what I wanna do. I wanted to be them. I wanted to go get the business degree so I could transition into being them. And Thunderbird has this amazing alumni network, and I thought, okay. I'm gonna leverage the network,

Jon Chee - 00:31:32: and I'm gonna call all the fantastic

Sabrina Johnson - 00:31:33: Thunderbird alumni who are at big pharmaceutical, especially the ones in marketing. So I leveraged the network, which is really good advice, again, that I got from the career center. So good advice. I leverage the network. I make all these calls. I talk to all these people. And to a person, they were sort of like, no. No. No. No. You're not just gonna go from your bench science job at Baxter to your MBA to my job, vice president of marketing at Pfizer. Like, that is not happening. That is not happening. And more, I think, shocking than that, they all said, you need to start in sales. And I was sort of like, wait. What? What do you mean start in sales? I have an MBA. I could have gone and gotten a sales job. I did look at that. I could have gotten that immediately without this degree. What are you talking about? But they all said the same thing. So I did have one of those sort of introspective moments where you realize, okay. They're all telling me the same thing. I can not listen, see where that goes, or there's probably something in it that they all told me the same thing. So I really wanted to be in pharmaceutical drug development, so I was able to do a ride-along with a pharmaceutical sales rep. So I thought, okay. Let me just understand what the day-to-day is, and then I'll apply for these jobs and get tips from this person. So I do the pharmaceutical sales ride-along thing. And after a day, I did it a day, and I thought, okay. I cannot start here. This is too hard, too depressing. Doctors don't wanna see the reps, and I just thought, you know, I'm gonna be focused on one specific product that maybe I know nothing about, but I learned it. And so I thought there must be another kind of sales, and so that's when I started looking then for sales jobs. So I heeded the advice. I heard it. So I thought, okay. I do need to get some sort of selling experience, but I'm gonna look for something different. So I was fortunate. Again, I wanna stay on the West Coast and stay in warmer climates. And at that point, then I was really focusing in on San Diego because San Diego had a very vibrant biotech sort of life science community, so it was a great place to settle in all my criteria. And I was looking for the sales up, so I decided to hone in on something that was really more of a technical sale. And, again, I had a cell culture background, manufacturing background. So there was this company, Clonetics Corporation, that ended up becoming part of BioWhittaker, and who knows what BioWhittaker became part of since. But, basically, Clonetics sold to researchers human cell cultures, so different kinds of cells, cultures you could buy. If you're a researcher—let's use Pfizer again as an example. You're a researcher at Pfizer that needs to do experiments for cells and you want human cells, you could buy the cells and the media from Clonetics, and then you could talk to me who's your handy dandy sales rep who's gonna set you all up with that. But better, also if you're having trouble with the cells, I can help you. So it's a technical I'm selling, but I'm gonna help you figure out which is the right cell line to buy for your experiments. It has this more, again, science component to it, which was great, and it was fantastic experience. The first six months in, though, I was terrible. I was terrible. I was literally the worst sales rep at the company in terms of my numbers, like, literally. And I think in part is because I was trying to be in my mind what I thought a salesperson was, if that makes sense. I had sort of this mental picture of what selling is and what I should be doing in that job. And so I was very much I was like a robot trying to do this thing that I thought was selling, and I was just doing miserably. And I was so disappointed and frustrated. And every day, I would just come home like, I'm the worst. I'm the worst one there. I don't understand. Why can't I get this? And it was my then-boyfriend, now husband at the time. He said, I think that maybe you're trying too hard, and maybe you just need to kinda be yourself. I think you're sort of being a persona, and maybe you just need to be yourself. Best advice I ever got, probably ever, because it just flipped the switch. I kinda went in the next Monday and thought, okay. I'm just gonna be myself. I'm just gonna have a normal conversation with these people. I'm just gonna be normal. Yep. It's gonna be myself and be my personality. And I went from bottom salesperson to winning the top salesperson award in that year. Just turned it around. So that was also a huge life lesson.

Jon Chee - 00:36:06: For sure. Basically, I had a similar experience of really sucking in the very beginning. I bought some books, and I was like, oh, this is how you do it. Like, basically, just trying to copy-paste. These are the things that you need to say at this time, and it felt so robotic and just not natural. And I was like, this is not me. Screw it. I'm not that buttoned up. So I just, I was like, screw it. I'm just gonna be,

Sabrina Johnson - 00:36:32: I'm just gonna

Jon Chee - 00:36:32: be because people can smell inauthenticity. If you're authentic, you'll kind of make that connection. But if you're putting on a front, people are like, oh, this is weird.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:36:45: Totally. And that's what it was. And it was sort of realizing that and particularly for a consultative sales process. You have to engage. I'm not going to do a good job if I don't actually listen. And not just listen, but internalize, understand. What are they trying to do? Why is that their goal? How can I best serve them? How can I be honest with them and tell them if we don't have something that fits your needs? Realizing that too. Sometimes being the best salesperson was telling them that actually these cell lines weren't what they wanted.

Jon Chee - 00:37:16: Yep.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:37:17: You should do that experiment in a different kind of cell.

Jon Chee - 00:37:21: Absolutely. And that is a tactical lesson I learned early on too. It is like, if you're not a fit, just own up to it. Even if it's your competitor on the other side and it means they win, you're like, oh, that's actually a better solution. And then you garner trust because you're not just trying to make the hard sale.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:37:38: And Exactly.

Jon Chee - 00:37:39: Because I think there was a school of thought on the hard sale. I don't know who propagated that idea. We're just like, yeah, just sell, sell, sell at all costs. And I was like—

Sabrina Johnson - 00:37:49: I know. Well, it's like movies too.

Jon Chee - 00:37:51: Right? Movies. Yeah. Yeah. It was like

Sabrina Johnson - 00:37:56: like, old name. Right? Glengarry, Glenn

Jon Chee - 00:37:56: Ross or whatever. Yeah. Those kinds of personas were the only thing of what I knew what a salesperson was. So you're like, I'm gonna hard charge and just try to force this sale across the line, and there's like, oh, this doesn't work. And I think something I noticed too is that if you're selling into science, scientists are also hyper just like, oh, this smells like that even more so than other industries. I think a lot of people choose science to get away from business—

Sabrina Johnson - 00:38:27: Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:38:27: Like, naturally. So it's kind of like oil and water.

Sabrina Johnson - 00:38:30: 100%.

Jon Chee - 00:38:31: It's a different motion.

Outro - 00:38:34: That's all for this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast featuring Sabrina Johnson. Join us next time for part two where Sabrina recounts a chance name tag encounter that led her from Clonetics to Advanced Tissue Sciences, a tissue engineering company that grew from 50 to 250 people while she was there, where she supported US and European commercial launches, got a deep education in medical regulatory legal review, and received the recruiter call that would bring her to Cyprus Bioscience for the most consequential chapter of her career.

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