Building Up Your Circle When You're Starting From Zero | Sandra Shpilberg (4/4)

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, Sandra Shpilberg shared how selling her first company led to unexpected challenges, why market forces matter as much as execution, and how those lessons shaped her perspective on entrepreneurship. If you missed it, check out part three. In part four, Sandra reflects on founding Adnexi, how a moment of pandemic stillness, a spark of curiosity from her teenage son, and a shared desire to build something meaningful kicked off their next venture together. She also talks about building a mission-driven platform, working alongside family, and how this chapter feels different—more patient, more focused, and rooted in the long game.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:01:16: It's COVID. For the first few months of COVID, we were all kind of crazy. Are we all going to die? What is this? Is this like a cold, or is this lethal? The kids are not in school. The kids are at home. I'm making food for them every day.

Jon Chee - 00:01:32: Yeah.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:01:32: So I did not get to take that time off at all. In fact, I got to do the opposite. I got to be home, which was actually very nice. There was a part of me, I think, that actually really needed to just nest for a little bit.

Jon Chee - 00:01:46: For sure.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:01:47: But it was during that time that this new company, Adnexi, was born. And the company was born because my son, who was home from school because he can't go anywhere, had started to learn how to program. He taught himself how to program. At this point, he's about 16 or 17 years old. And he comes and he asks me a very important question. He says, "If you had to start another company in the biopharma space that was solving a problem, what would it be?" Right? "If you had to start again, a new company, what would it be?"

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:02:22: And I said, "Oh, you know what? I think I know what I would do. What's missing here is a platform that is basically aggregating all the profiling data for key opinion leaders and then patient advocacy groups—all the external stakeholders to a biopharma company that are out there that have a lot of public information about them. There's really no way that—or I haven't seen it yet—a company that's aggregating all of it into one place where we can begin to rank them and tier them and put them into lists." So it's basically like a key opinion leader platform. And he said, "Okay."

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:03:03: So he starts asking me more questions, like, "What are the data sources?" I'm like, "The data sources are like PubMed. That's where the researchers put their publications. There's clinicaltrials.gov for clinical trials. There's open payments data for the payments they get from biopharma." So I kind of started taking him through it. He goes into his room and starts looking it all up and doing his programmer thing. He goes into these tunnels and comes out of the tunnel, and he shows me something. He's like, "Like this? A profile like this?" I'm like, "Yeah. Like a profile like this."

Jon Chee - 00:03:38: Oh my God. I love that. That's amazing.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:03:42: I had to go a long way from there, but that was the start of what I'm thinking this thing is. And so that's how Adnexi got born. And he was like, "I want to make a company. Let's make this into a company. Can we do a company together?" And I was like, "Yeah, we could do a company together." So we incorporated Adnexi in January 2020. And then, we can go a little bit deeper into that. But basically, Adnexi was born out of this COVID boredom, where you have a kid who is a programming genius, looking for a place to apply his programming and asking me where I think there could be a place to apply it. Right?

Jon Chee - 00:04:31: Cool. That's freaking awesome. And it kind of reminds me of your time at BioMarin, hitting home runs at BioMarin. You just came off the back of selling your company. You're like, "I got all these plans," and then boom, life comes at you fast. COVID hits, or you have some setbacks in your clinical trials. But what comes of it was these really interesting opportunities that come from these experiences of being locked down or having things fail in the clinic. And I love that it's also a family business. That's really, really cool because I don't see that often, especially in the life sciences. And when your son came to you and was like, "What would you do?" why did you think that that was a worthy problem of solving? What was the state of the market, and how did Adnexi tackle that?

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:05:31: Yeah. So two things. The first thing I want to say is related to the comment that you were making, "out of the ashes." I think that life is constantly delivering abundance, and the abundance sometimes comes from continuous momentum that feels really good and things are going generally well. And it also comes from the ashes. We are starting from zero. Everything burned to the ground. In both scenarios, life is always delivering. The more I think that way, the more I become unafraid of the ashes, unafraid of the failures, unafraid that Nurex Therapeutics failed and I got laid off, unafraid that we're in COVID. And now I'm sitting at home, and eventually, we end up setting up this business. Right?

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:06:14: So something always comes out of the ashes, and the ashes are many times necessary because the ashes are cleaning. They're cleaning things that are no longer serving us that we need to get cleaned out of our life in order to be able to move to the next level. So, basically, bottom line, after living through many periods of great momentum and also complete destruction and ashes, what I've learned to appreciate is that both are necessary. Both will happen in a lifetime and to definitely not be afraid of the ashes because they clean everything out and they turn you into the person that you need to be to be able to tackle the next stage of your growth and evolution.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:06:55: So I think that's really important. On Adnexi, one other key thing to mention about the Seeker Health acquisition is that many times when you sell these companies, you're going to get a non-compete agreement. So you're going to get something that says that for a period of five years or whatever the term is, you cannot do exactly the same thing that you were doing before. And usually, hours will go into crafting this little paragraph so that it protects the acquirer, but it also allows the person that sold the company to still do something in the world.

Jon Chee - 00:07:44: Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, you can't—the non-compete says you're not allowed to work ever again. You're just like, "No."

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:07:52: You can't do that. My non-compete had some things that said that I couldn't do a clinical trial enrollment platform, but, of course, I could work at a biotech company. I could do something else that was unrelated to that. So I was honoring that non-compete. So when my son came to me, I was trying to come up with a brand new idea that had almost no overlap with clinical trial enrollment. And at that time, what I was doing was mostly plugging into my memories of the job at BioMarin. And in that job at BioMarin, what were we doing really manually? The question I asked myself to answer his question was, "At BioMarin, what were we doing really manually that should not be done manually anymore?" Right?

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:08:44: And so the things that came to us is the way that we tracked our external stakeholders seemed very manual. And again, this was five years ago, so a lot of things have changed because there are huge companies that came into this market and do it really, really well. So where we started Adnexi is not where we're at today at all, but that is where we started the company. We started with this focus on patient advocacy groups. They play a huge role in helping companies in the biopharma space, and there are a lot of them now. There are a lot of them when you think of the business as being global. And so if we can get manufacturers a place to track these to understand what it is that they're posting online, who are they already collaborating with? What do they tend to get involved in? If we can give them a whole profile of the patient advocacy groups and then also do the same for the key opinion leaders in rare diseases as well as the digital opinion leaders that are posting online, this would be a value to companies. So that's where we started, but it's not where we are today.

Jon Chee - 00:09:39: Yep. And I can see it reminds me of when you're talking about BioMarin, the importance of staying really, really close to the important stakeholders, especially patients, and you're enabling that because I can't imagine how much time it would take to just find where all of them are living on the internet and then try to piece it together and redoing that every single time would be so laborious and just inefficient. And so this was kind of your V1, and your son's like, "Check it out."

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:10:06: V1.

Jon Chee - 00:10:07: What were the natural evolutions to Adnexi from there?

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:10:11: So here's the thing. A lot of things happened. Right? Because my son was having to go to college.

Jon Chee - 00:10:18: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:10:19: And he actually really struggled with the decision to go to college because he felt that he had been born a computer scientist, and he could be a computer scientist today without going to college. But he did go to college for a number of years. And so the company operated in what I would call a part-time mode for the first two to three years in which the main objective of the company was to provide a commercial opportunity for Kobi to develop software that will be commercially available, but we were going to try things out and we weren't really going to scale them at that point. So the first few years, we generally had two or four customers that we were working with. So we had customers, which is great, because there's nothing like doing work for a customer. Right?

Jon Chee - 00:11:05: Yep. It teaches you a lot.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:11:06: Teaches you a lot. So the first year, we had two customers. The second year, we had four customers. And these were opportunities for us to perfect what we were doing, to understand what it is that the customers were buying, did they like it, did they not like it, would they buy it again for another indication. So the first two years was more like testing, trial and error. He was in college, and I had another detour to go on. And that detour was creating Sanofi Health, which was a special purpose acquisition company, a limited-time vehicle in which the company goes public and then has the opportunity to acquire or merge with another company that is looking to go public. Right? So it's a way to bring an operating company into the public markets through a method that is an alternative to the IPO.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:12:00: Now here's how I came into this thing, Jon, and I had to do a lot of reflection here because, obviously, this was a detour that also led to a few ashes that I had to clean out of my system. So the detour began because around the time that I was building Adnexi, I got contacted about this opportunity to be the CEO of this very small biotech company. And the first thing that biotech company needed to do was raise funds. And so as part of the discussion that I was having with this company, I was entertaining the discussion. I'm working on Adnexi, but it's part-time. I'm supposed to be taking time off that I don't seem to be able to do. So I entertained this discussion, and the founder of that company basically expresses that what he's contemplating is either taking the company public through an IPO or doing a SPAC.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:12:49: And at that point, you could hear there was a lot of noise in the market about these SPACs—special purpose acquisition companies. And so I go research this whole thing of the SPAC just to be able to know what I'm talking about in an interview. I do know what an IPO is, but this SPAC thing was—I didn't know about it as much. And so I go to research all of it, and then I come out of this whole thing saying, "Oh, wow. This is a pretty interesting opportunity that is happening here," where, basically, ex-founders are creating these special purpose acquisition companies. They're getting investors to take the company public. The public vehicle then merges with an operating company that you need to find during this period of time.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:13:30: And so in this process, I get really excited about this opportunity to create a SPAC, and I go take this detour and do it. Right? And I invest my own money, invest family's money that they're willing to give, create a whole sponsor cap table that has about 15 or 20 people that have put money into this to take this company public in order for us to then find another company to acquire. Now in the finding the company to acquire, for Sanofi Health, it was all about promoting innovation in healthcare. So we were going to find a very innovative healthcare company that wanted to go public.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:14:13: So when I'm starting this, SPACs are at an all-time high. There's like, hundreds of them being created every month, and this is a very exciting opportunity. And then as I start going through it, there are signs that the whole thing is going to come apart. Right? That there are too many SPACs, so the market got oversaturated, that companies don't really want to use a SPAC to go public, that at the end of the day, maybe it's not such a good investment for anybody that participated in it because most of them crashed down. So, anyway, so I'm in this detour that's basically a spiral down.

Jon Chee - 00:14:51: Oh, man. I can imagine, especially when you've already built up some momentum, to see it spiral down is like, "Crap." And you're right off the back of an acquisition too. So it's kind of getting to a dichotomy.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:15:07: You know, these things are not unrelated. So after that, I joined several groups where people that sold companies go to or people that have come into some kind of windfall gather. And I saw a pattern there. And the pattern is that after you have a success, something happens in your mind where you say, "Oh, wow. I have this success. And now I'm at this level. And because I'm at this level, I should now be able to do something that is bigger." And this is not always true at all.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:15:37: What I came to learn is that the success at Seeker Health—yes, it was me. But you know what else it was? The market. I was in a market that wanted it, that was ready for it, that was positive. It was a positive force. The market and the company were working together, and this was a positive force. And I think after the sale of Seeker, until the SPAC, I wasn't quite aware of how much the market had contributed to my success. And then with the SPAC, I get to correct that misunderstanding. I basically begin to understand that, yes, I can show up. I can be good and focused and disciplined and do a good job, but if I am doing that in a market that is turning, that is going down, that is a force against what I'm trying to do, then I'm not going to get through.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:16:33: It's not all about me. It's not all about what I do. It's what I do in collaboration with the market that exists out there, which is an incredible force that I don't control. So all I could do is work with it, flow in the direction that it is flowing. If you're flowing in the direction opposite of the market, things don't succeed. Right? And so with the SPAC, I got to learn that lesson. And bringing it back to the point of meeting other entrepreneurs, I wasn't alone there. I wasn't the first person at all. I was actually average. Most of the people who had had a big success had then done something with a portion of their winnings where they lost it all. And this is now the pattern. And I think part of it is you get maybe overconfident. You think that it's all you, and it's not. It's not you. It's the market. It's you and the market. You and the market are collaborating to create something. And the only way that collaboration happens is when the entrepreneur, the founder is flowing in the direction of the market, not against it.

Jon Chee - 00:17:32: Yep. I think it's an incredibly human thing what you went through. Like, why wouldn't I be able to roll this over into another win? And just for anyone out there listening, market forces are real. Timing is very important, and just don't underestimate it. There are a rare few who can create their own market, but those are a rare outlier exception, like smartphones and Apple and Steve Jobs. But it's not to say that that's never going to happen again, but just go in eyes wide open to be honest with yourself. It's an important thing. And the market can also be wind at your back too. Right? So it's like you live by the sword, you die by the sword. It can be headwinds or it can be tailwinds, but just be honest or try to be as honest as you can about these things. And those are lessons, you know, I think. It's a very human lesson.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:18:28: Yes. Definitely.

Jon Chee - 00:18:29: Yeah. Because I know a bunch of friends who play in the public markets, and they're like, "I got it figured out," but then quickly learn the market turns, like, "Oh, man. Maybe I wasn't as smart as I thought I was." And it's constantly this battle. And sometimes it's really hard to discern. Was it the market that kind of drove this outcome, or was it me? I don't think you'll ever know completely because it is kind of a mix of the two. And so after you've gone through this kind of learning experience, is this when, I'm going to assume, your son came back from college?

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:18:59: He was still in college, but it was around the time when I was—well, first of all, I spent like two months pretty sad.

Jon Chee - 00:19:07: Yeah. Of course. Of course. As anyone would feel. Yeah.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:19:10: Just kind of really sitting with where I went wrong here because there were signs. There were signs that I missed. There were signs that I muscled over. Right? And my muscling over things in the past had been a really good feature of me. Like, if somebody told you what's really good about her, she's very persistent. You know? She'll get through the obstacle. And so here with the SPAC early on, there were obstacles. And instead of me turning around early, I used my persistence, my resilience to go through. And the right thing to have done would have been to turn around, right, not to go through.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:19:50: So I learned a lot about that—that there are some obstacles that are big obstacles. You can't move them out of the way. And the best thing that one could do is just be humble and say, "I can't move that obstacle out of the way. So what I need to do is just close this door, and there are millions of other doors that are open to me." Right? And so that's the part that I didn't do. So I spent two months really reflecting. It was very dark. It was very sad times for me. But it was also very rich because I think that there were really important lessons that I had to learn. These are not easy lessons to learn.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:20:25: But I think in life, one of the things that I believe is that we get a lot of contrasting experiences so that we really understand ourselves and we understand where we want to be going. So I obviously had the Seeker experience, which was very successful. It was difficult and not everything went well within it, but in general, it ended with a good outcome. And then I ended up with this other contrasting experience where it had a flat-out bad outcome. Right? And so I had to have that contrast, I think, in order to now be a full business person, also a full person that has this entire understanding of what part is mine, what part is the market, and what do I control, what don't I control, where do I show up in ways that are maybe too persistent, you know, instead of just flowing with what is. Where do I maybe need to take off some armor and say, "I don't need to fight through every obstacle?" If the door's not open, it's not open. I should only be walking through doors that are open. Right? Why am I going to knock on doors that are closed?

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:21:28: So I had a lot of learning to do. And then after I did that learning, then my son, Kobi, he was probably ending his second year of college, not all the way through it by any means. But I came to him and I said, "You know, I think that we have something that if I took my focus and now put it on this versus where it had been, now that the SPAC is done and this detour and distraction is out of the way, what do I have? Well, I have this company that we've been running more in a part-time manner. But if I could put my full-time focus on this, I think that we could do something good." And he was like, "Yeah. Let's do it. But you put your full-time focus on it. I'm going to try to go to class and do this."

Jon Chee - 00:22:16: "I got a midterm I gotta go do, but you got it, Mom."

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:22:19: Then let's see what happens.

Jon Chee - 00:22:20: Yeah.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:22:21: And so at that time, we came into a partnership with this company called The Collaborative, Sherry Fox, who ended up being very, very influential in our business, and she helped us connect to a customer that became a very foundational customer. And then that year was a very good year from a revenue perspective, and we worked on the company this way. I was full-time. Kobi was part-time trying to get his college degree. And then over time, he began transitioning to being full-time on this. And there were a lot of hard moments, things where he missed the final, he missed the midterm. He forgot he had it because he was so busy with work. Lots of things. And eventually, he will graduate. Maybe. Who knows? But you know what? He's gotten a really good experience here building this company.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:23:22: So now we've been at it for five years, and what we do today is really a combination of what Seeker Health was because the non-compete agreement is fully done by many years now and what we initially were doing about stakeholder and landscaping profiling. So Adnexi stands for Advantages for the Next Generation of Patients and Treatments. And where our mission is is to bring as much technology, efficiency, and effectiveness into this process of enrolling clinical trials and then finding the key stakeholders that are influential to that process. So we do two things today. The first thing is related to what I first mentioned, which we call landscape mapping. So part one is landscape mapping. We have a platform that helps companies find, track, rank, and evaluate all the patient advocacy groups, all the key opinion leaders, all the digital opinion leaders for any given disease. And then part two is we now use that data in order to create a clinical trial campaign that is going to activate those influencers as well as do Facebook, Google, and Instagram advertising. So it's basically Seeker times 10 with a lot more technology and a lot more influencer activation in order to get that clinical trial enrolled.

Jon Chee - 00:24:37: Very cool. And we're talking about how businesses are like these growth spurts, and they're constantly growing and evolving. And now that you're able to take it to the next level with your son, when you think about how you're doing it differently than Seeker, what's your go-to-market? Is there a different go-to-market strategy? How are you doing things differently when you have another bite at the apple?

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:25:01: Yeah. We're doing things very differently. I would say this time, some things are the same and some things are different. So far, the same is that we're still bootstrapping this company at this point. Now we are open to raising a seed round, and we might do that at some point because I think we are both starting to understand that that capital can actually help us go faster and really conquer the piece of the market that we need to conquer. So while with Seeker, I wasn't even really open to that route, with here, we started the same way, but we're very much open to that, and it might be part of what happens in the next few months for the company. So that's from a funding perspective.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:25:48: From a customer perspective, we have a lot of focus here on CROs, clinical research organizations, as well as biopharma companies. And unlike Seeker, Seeker was really good for the small companies. We're not tooling this to be for small companies. This is for any size company. Our target customers are very large biopharma companies. I think that those are great places to be. They're very stable. They have lots of clinical trials. And so in essence, I like to use that analogy of the whale full of fish. Essentially, we are deploying this platform so that it is used by those whales that are full of fish—the company that has multiple clinical trials, they have 24 clinical trials, and they can get a lot of scale here.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:26:38: I think the other part that's different is that with my son on board, he has a much longer time horizon. You know, him being a younger person and him being one of those people who has admired Warren Buffett since he was seven years old. And once we rebuild, he wants to build a real, stable, tangible, sustainable legacy business. Right? And so I think that's also different because in the Seeker days, it felt a little bit more dynamic. Like, "Okay, yeah. This is happening now, but now acquisition offers are coming and I'm willing to move on." This feels a little bit more like this longer-term legacy type of work that we're doing together.

Jon Chee - 00:27:17: Very cool. I mean, I love that. It sounds like your son's taking this long-term compounding mindset around it, and that's kind of how we think about it at Excedr. I love that and feel like a kindred spirit. And so now, Seeker was kind of more focused on the smaller organizations. Obviously, you had a very large CRO that worked with you. You talked about your first customer that was really pivotal. Are you able to talk about some of the customers that you work with now that were big inflection points for you guys?

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:27:43: I mean, one of the inflection points early on was a company called Horizon that was acquired by Amgen. They really liked what we were doing and had a chance to try out all the different parts of the platform. So that really helped us quite a bit in the sense that we had a very engaged customer that wanted to use that. I mean, since then, we've had lots of different customers. Daiichi Sankyo was another one that was very important to us. We got to do very deep work with them in the oncology field. And then, from then, we've been growing and continue to grow. But as you see, generally, we're working now with slightly larger companies.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:28:28: And the best thing is when we find there's a customer, but this is generally a person. Right? We find the person who really becomes a real advocate for what we're doing. And so, for example, at Horizon, that was this woman, Julie Brown, who really was very much an advocate for our platform, for our products, for giving us feedback, for telling us what they needed, what they were using, what they weren't using. And, really, as a company, that's what you're after. Yes, it's the customer, but inside the customer, it's generally a person. And it's one person that is going to, for some reason, take the time to tell you very truthfully what works and what doesn't work about your product, what works and doesn't work about your pricing, and just give you the feedback that you need to actually continue to refine the product so that it can succeed at other companies as well.

Jon Chee - 00:29:11: Yeah. I love that. And I think, especially in a bootstrap company, I always think of it like customers are almost like your investors.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:29:19: Yes.

Jon Chee - 00:29:19: They're paying you money. They want to make sure that thing is working for their needs.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:29:22: Yes.

Jon Chee - 00:29:22: And getting that feedback is invaluable, and I can only imagine you guys are probably experiencing some level of network effects. Like, if one large group gives you feedback, you implement that into your platform. And the next go, you have another large player that's having a conversation, and you've just evolved again. And you just continuously feed that information back into the system and continue to evolve. And that's freaking awesome. And it's also—people forget that large organizations are composed of people.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:29:52: Yes.

Jon Chee - 00:29:53: And they also are people, and not forgetting that those relationships matter and finding those internal champions. So anyone who's looking to do these enterprise motions, don't forget. They might seem like on the outside these big, unapproachable monoliths, but there are people that you can work with directly in an intimate fashion that can help you, whether it's just a software platform or you're trying to find a collaboration. So I love hearing that. And as you're considering raising venture and you're starting to scale this thing, when you look one year, two years out, what's in store for Adnexi?

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:30:28: Yeah. It's a great question. So we are after three things that generally all happen at the same time: the growth of the product to continue to perfect it and integrate it with the latest technology that is available. So one is the growth of the product. Two is the growth of the team. The team has to be there. And so, you know, I learned that lesson at Seeker, how important the team is—to have people there that is obviously not just the founders but have the team that's really there to make this repeatable and sustainable. And then the third is the customers. Right? Making sure that we're continuing to find them, delight them, retain them.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:31:09: So those are really the three things that are in store, which I think are the three basic things that are there for most companies. Right? You have to have a product that customers want to use, and then you have to have the employees that are here to deliver that product and keep the company moving forward. So I think those are the three things. I would add to that that our consideration possibly for funding this time around for Adnexi, you know, we're open to that, and I think we might go in that direction. So yeah. So those are the things that are in store. So it's going to be a busy couple of years.

Jon Chee - 00:31:41: Busy. I was going to say, it's going to be a busy couple years. I think what you said is absolutely true. Business doesn't have to be that complicated. There are some cornerstones that you can focus on. And if you focus on it, the results will ultimately ripple from that. So I love that. And I'm just thinking—well, one, I just want to say thank you for sharing your story. I've learned a lot. And throughout your journey and you telling me your story, I felt like I was there. I felt like I was there, and I also had parallel experiences. And I feel like a lot of the listeners out there can benefit from hearing the story because the bootstrap journey is a different one. And also the lesson that I'm really taking away is that the ups and downs are just inevitable. But don't forget that good can come from both, and you don't have to let a setback be the end of you. A lot of opportunity comes from setbacks. Because I think sometimes people, when a setback is had, it's just kind of resignation and they throw in the towel, but it's a matter of perspective.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:32:51: Absolutely. And I think at that time, at the time of the setback, it's very easy, one, to feel bad for yourself, two, to get all depressed and inactive. And that's not actually what the moment is asking you to do. What the moment is asking you to do is to say, "What have I learned from this?" Because everything that is happening is happening for us to learn something. Right? So when a setback is happening, if I know that the setback is happening here to refine me, to polish me, to grow me into a better version of myself, then I'm not going to be all inactive on the process. I'm going to be like, "What am I learning from this? Why did this happen specifically to me at this time in my life?" Right? And, generally, you get to a pretty good answer that is then going to unlock where you need to go next. So it's just about extracting the lesson and then getting perfected by it to move on.

Jon Chee - 00:33:48: Yep. Absolutely. And another thing that stood out to me that you highlighted was the importance of being able to put yourself out there, ask for help, and talk to people who can be resources, like coaching mentors and colleagues. Because an important business partner and a mentor of mine reminded me that even the most high-performing athletes like LeBron has a coach.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:34:12: Yes.

Jon Chee - 00:34:12: He has had mentors. The highest-performing individuals still have coaches. And it's an important thing even as a leader of a company to be able to go and get that help—almost like business therapy. You don't have to stomach it on your own, and you can ask for help, and people are oftentimes very willing to give that help. I can imagine when you're going through an M&A experience for the first time how critical it is to gather that information. So for anyone out there feeling like they have to bear this alone, you don't. People out there are willing to help.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:34:47: They're absolutely willing to help. And I think one of the things that I found in this whole process of asking other people to share their experiences and sharing their help is how much people enjoy doing that because people also want to feel connected. They want to feel like they're not alone as well going into something and that whatever they did has value to someone else. So I have to say that in general, I found most of the people that helped me also got some value out of the connection, whatever the connection was that was being established there. And who knows? Today, they're helping me, and then maybe tomorrow, I'm helping them. So the directions change very frequently, I find, in these specific times when we ask others to help us.

Jon Chee - 00:35:26: Absolutely. And one, again, thank you again for sharing this, and I find myself again just rooting for you and rooting for Adnexi because this is so cool, what you guys are doing. And I love the multivariate, multifaceted, getting everyone engaged across the spectrum of stakeholders is what it takes to, one, improve patient outcomes. So I'm a big believer in that and what you guys are doing. But in traditional closing fashion, we have two questions. First is, would you like to give any shout-outs to anyone who supported you along the way?

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:35:57: Yes. I mean, so many people have supported me along the way, but I think in general, I'm going to do a couple of categories. My first category is my family. My family has supported me through and through. Right? Whether it was Seeker, whether it was the SPAC, whether it's Adnexi, having family that supports you and believes in you and is there for you unconditionally is the most important thing. So, a big shout-out to family.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:36:26: I would say the next set of people I would say all the people that ever employed me for something. Each of those people believed in me, trusted me to do a certain job, and delivered value and delivered lessons and skills that I could then use. And so from the very early days, whether I was employed at Burda, I was at a store, right, or JPMorgan, Citigroup, Genentech, J&J, BioMarin, Nurex Therapeutics, all those people were the people that actually helped me become who I am today, and that's really important. And I mentioned a couple of people there.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:37:03: And then finally, in terms of shout-outs, all the customers that ever trusted us to do anything for them. Oh my God. Thank you so much. You contributed to us being able to build this platform to be able to offer this service. If there's no customer, there's nothing we can do. Right? So the customers have played such an incredible role in what I've been able to do. Right? And I'm really, really grateful to all of them.

Jon Chee - 00:37:27: I love that. And I think about the first early customers too. They're taking a leap of faith with you.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:37:33: They really are.

Jon Chee - 00:37:34: They're taking a leap of faith with you. So, I also feel incredibly grateful, not just to the customer, but to all three categories of support. And it really does take a village and it's really something to be grateful for. So I love that. And last question is if you can give any advice to your 21-year-old self, what would it be?

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:37:51: Yeah. So what I've come to learn is that we, as people, we are porous. We receive the energy of the things, the people that are around us. Right? We are not concrete rock. We are actually porous. And so it becomes incredibly important to surround yourself with the type of people that bring out positive energy, creative energy, innovation. Whatever it is that you want to be doing in the world, surround yourself with people who are doing that already really well or who want to do that really well because that is the energy that matters.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:38:28: And there are actually studies that show this, that if you're sitting next to somebody who's depressed and doesn't want to do anything, doesn't want to go anywhere, that will affect the mood of the person that's sitting next to them. And if you're sitting next to somebody who's excited and who has a place they want to be going and they want to build something and they want to create and they want to serve, right, and they want to innovate and they want to be a pioneer, that is what the other person gets as well. So we are porous, energetic human beings, and therefore, it becomes incredibly important to surround yourself with people who are providing that positivity and that forward movement.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:39:03: And so I think my advice to my 21-year-old self is be very careful, very intentional about who you select to be in your circle. And this is the entire circle. It's about who is your partner, who are your friends, who is the family that you keep around or interact with, who are the mentors that you keep in your area, who are you working for, who's working around you, who are you hiring, who are you doing work for that may be your customer, and be intentional and selective about this to continue to have the type of energy that is actually going to create and move forward.

Jon Chee - 00:39:43: Spot on. There's a saying that came to mind. I'm going to botch it a little bit, but it's that you're an average of the four or five people that you surround yourself with. And I think there's absolutely truth to that. So be intentional. Definitely be intentional. And, by the way, I was not intentional when I was younger about it, but I am very much now. And, fortunately, my parents kind of helped put me in the right places, so I got lucky that they were kind of overseeing that. But, absolutely, with my co-founder, being with him throughout this journey, we are rubbing off on each other in a lot of ways. And without that kind of porous osmosis energy, I would not be who I am or where I'm at now without him. And just be cognizant, when you—and that's why co-founders are so important. You're going to be spending a lot of time with this person. Same with your significant other. Right?

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:40:40: Yes.

Jon Chee - 00:40:41: Yes. Be intentional and in all facets, whether it's business or personal. So I love that and, you know, it's advice I could have definitely taken when I was younger. So but, Sandra, thank you again. This has been so much fun. You've been so generous with your time. Maybe next time we can go to Sol Food.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:40:57: Sounds great.

Jon Chee - 00:40:57: Yeah. The next time we're in San Rafael. That'd be super fun. But thanks again, and I'll talk to you again soon.

Sandra Shpilberg - 00:41:03: Great. It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for doing this, Jon.

Jon Chee - 00:41:05: Yeah. Thank you.

Outro - 00:41:08: Thanks for listening to our four-part series featuring Sandra Shpilberg. From stocking shelves at her father's store to leading drug launches and founding multiple ventures, Sandra's story is a powerful example of how real-world insight, persistence, and strategic thinking can drive meaningful change in healthcare. If you're enjoying the show, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, or share it with a friend. Join us for our next series featuring Darren Cooke, interim Chief of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer at UC Berkeley. Darren also serves as executive director at UC Berkeley's Life Sciences Entrepreneurship Center, is a professional faculty member at the Haas School of Business, and is the former chair of the Berkeley SkyDeck Startup Accelerator. In addition to his leadership roles, Darren teaches entrepreneurship at Haas for the Innovation Corps, I-Corps programs, for the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. He's also an investor and the former chair of medical device and digital health at Life Science Angels. As an attorney, Cook led the IP legal team for the Life Science Tools Group of Bio-Rad Laboratories and was a life sciences patent litigator at Covington and Burling. Before law school, he was a mechanical engineer developing cochlear implants at UCSF. With deep experience across startups, academia, law, and investing, Darren brings a uniquely multifaceted perspective on life science innovation, making this a series you won't want to miss. 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.