Biotech 2050 Podcast
Biotech Breakthroughs: Jeb Keiper, CEO of Nimbus Therapeutics, Discusses Their Innovative Journey
Synopsis:
Dive into this episode of Biotech 2050 where host Rahul Chaturvedi interviews Jeb Keiper, CEO of Nimbus Therapeutics. Discover Jeb's fascinating journey from MIT chemist to industry leader, and the unique strategies that have driven Nimbus's success. Jeb discusses the evolution of biotech financing, the importance of taking bold risks, and the innovative approaches Nimbus employs in drug development. He also shares insights on building a resilient team, navigating challenging capital markets, and fostering a collaborative ecosystem in biotech. This episode provides valuable lessons for aspiring biotech leaders and a deep dive into the intricacies of managing a cutting-edge biotech company.
Biography:
Jeb Keiper, M.S., M.B.A., has served as our President and Chief Executive Officer and as a member of our board of directors since October 2018. He previously served as Chief Business Officer from November 2014 to October 2018 and as Chief Financial Officer from February 2017 to October 2018. Since joining Nimbus, Mr. Keiper has overseen the discovery and development of three programs into clinical testing across a range of indications, over $400M raised in equity funding, executed deals worth over $7B, and the return of over $4B in gains back to equity holders. Prior to joining Nimbus, Mr. Keiper served as the Vice President of Business Development at GSK Oncology (a subsidiary of GlaxoSmithKline plc (NYSE: GSK)) from March 2011 to October 2014, where he was responsible for identifying and concluding several critical collaborations for GSK in Oncology, including the Novartis-GSK Oncology integration, and spent a decade at GSK in various business development leadership roles. Prior to GSK, Mr. Keiper was a consultant at McKinsey & Company starting in September 2000-2002, then September 2004 to 2005, after having started his career as a pharmaceutical chemist at Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE) in 1998. Mr. Keiper currently serves as a member of the board of directors at private biotechnology companies Cardurion Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and ROME Therapeutics, Inc. Mr. Keiper received two B.S. degrees, one in Chemistry and one in Chemical Engineering, as well as an M.S. in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School of Management with joint program in Biomedical Enterprises with the Harvard Medical School.
- Duration:
- 35m
- Broadcast on:
- 17 Jul 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, and welcome to the BioTech 2050 podcast. BioTech 2050 is a think tag chronicling the disruptions changing the biotech sector over the next several decades. You can check out our website at BioTech 2050.com or on your favorite podcast listening platform. I'm Rahul Chauterevi, co-founder of this podcast, and today's host. I'm also the founder and CEO of Chlora. Chlora is a platform that enables BioTechs to augment their teams while accessing the best talent. You can check us out at Chlora.com. I'm very excited to welcome Jeb Kuiper, CEO at Nimbus Therapeutics. Thanks for joining us today, Jeb. I know Abbas had joined us several years ago. So really excited to have you on and get an update on Nimbus. Thanks, Raul. Really appreciate the chance to be here on the BioTech 2050 podcast and chat with listeners about all things BioTech, including what we're doing over here at Nimbus Therapeutics. Wonderful. So Jeb, to kick us off, talk to us about how you initially got interested in BioTech and then the arc of your career to this point. Sure. Thanks for the opportunity. So I've been here at Nimbus Therapeutics for just about 10 years. I began my career coming out as a chemist out of MIT in the late '90s. I started working in Groton Connecticut at Pfizer, which was a wonderful experience getting industry experience as a chemist being attracted to making medicines for patients. It was always something that pulled me into BioTech or into kind of a life sciences or therapeutic product development. But I had very little patience and was there for less than a year and went back for more graduate school and perhaps slid into that to what a lot of scientists describe as the dark side of things and joined a management consulting firm McKinsey and got an MBA and started checking those boxes and soon found myself in New York City as a consultant for many of these big pharmaceutical companies. And ultimately, that role got a little bit long on the tooth and had a real lust for taking operating roles, so not just giving advice, but actually doing the work. And joined GlaxoSmithKline, and I was at GSK for a decade, primarily in business development roles. Ultimately, the Vice President of Business Development for GSK Oncology. And GSK has gone through a lot of changes over the years. The particular time when I had transitioned out was 2012, 2013, 2014, where we had decided to exit the commercial oncology business and actually led the sale of our oncology business to Novartis Wall. At the same time, GSK was buying the vaccines business and they were forming a joint mentoring consumer healthcare. So a very large scale deal and a deal person as it were, up to that point in my career at $16 billion for that particular portfolio, it was quite something. Having been on that business development side and specifically actually working with the oncology team, I had exposure to quite a few biotechs and loved the ecosystem, loved the innovation that came out of it. And while exposed to a variety of parts of the pharmaceutical process, including commercialization, lifecycle management and those sorts of pieces, as an MIT kid, I'm a geek at heart, loved the early stage work and didn't want to move with the portfolio to Novartis, also didn't want to stay at GSK and move into more commercial and sales roles, actually wanted to return to the root and looked at a variety of biotechs and ended up at Nimbus as the chief business officer in 2014. Thanks, Jeb, for that background. This is your first time being CEO, you mentioned that you had joined Nimbus when you were a CBO and had some different roles. Talk to us about your own evolution and what it was like to step into that CEO role and perhaps what were some of the non-obvious things that you hadn't anticipated when taking that role? It's a great question. Look, as I've been with Nimbus now for nearly 10 years and I've been a CEO for just about six now, initially served as the chief business officer. We didn't have a CFO, so it took over that title as well, became chief financial officer, did a lot of financing and corporate structure in moving forward. And eventually, as the first CEO, Nimbus Therapeutic, Scott Nicholson, stepped back in 2018 to retire, I took over and the board asked me to step in, which was a great honor. I think most first time CEOs, let's completely be honest about this, have incredible imposter syndrome about what it is to take to do that role. And while there is a clear business strategy and execution on it, in particular, the role in managing the ownership of the organization is something that's quite new. I think it's one of the big differences between executive leadership, where you have strategy, you've got a business plan and execution, and you've got people leadership, so you've hired great people, you have wonderful talent, and you build a working team. CEOs often, partnering with CFOs, things like end up really having an outside say in things like your investor composition, your board and your governance aspects. And I had the good fortune a year before I became CEO, is actually to take a board seat on another private biotech company. And I often will encourage biotech executives who aspire to leading organizations to really look for independent board director roles to get that perspective. And that was incredibly useful and quite a bit of a learning curve. Ron Cooper, the CEO of Alvarado, who actually exited, is now reflecting on his next things. It was kind enough to be a mentor of mine of a period of time and said, "Yeah, there's only two types of CEOs." New and embattled. And I have to tell, to give Ron credit, it feels a little bit like that. You're new to that thing. And then otherwise, you're working through a lot of the tough stuff and issues of progressing a pipeline, retaining people, making budget and timelines and value creation and executing on whether it's transactions, partnerships, growth, investing, and doing that. It's been a blast. I don't know at six years whether I could call myself new. It gets more just maybe battle-harmed is the right way to describe it. One of the things I'd tell your listeners that many people will report that the CEO is a lonely role. And in many respects, they're right. It is different and it felt different even with the team, even with people very close to me, people I count as friends when I do that because of some of the responsibilities for that. But I will say, and I credit COVID accelerating this and real community leaders in our community, Jody Morrison, for organizing more of a community for CEOs. And actually, I see more collaboration amongst biotech CEOs over the last three or four years than I've ever seen before. 'Cause many times, unless two organizations are directly competing on the same target for the same clinical indication, there really isn't competition amongst biotechs. We're all trying to make great medicines that will really help patients. And therefore, having an opportunity to do that and talk with others makes it less lonely. And I think you could call that partly board rules and reaching out, but actually networking beyond that. So I just wanted to give a community call out to those organizations. - Jeb, you brought up two points that I'd love to unpack. First was around having a group of folks that you could rely on as mentors. And then the second was your role as a board member for other organizations. So let's start with the ecosystem that you have around you. And I'd love to understand one, how you went about building that and two, what advice you would have for first time CEOs in terms of the lessons you've learned building that perhaps informal advisory board around you. - Well, maybe I'll start with some of those lessons learned. I think there can be an errant attendancy to the familiar. There can be an attendancy to the existing team, your existing board, and you need to do that. You do need to attend to your team and your board and be present there, but a big part of the role, especially as that oftentimes unique singular principle is to be out there and exposed to the rest of the world. And in particular, getting advice along those lines is a really important piece. One piece of advice I took away early on, which really helped catalyze the approach to building a network of people to give advice, both on the board that I turned to and still turned to, as well as others, was around becoming a new CEO or especially a first time CEO, but any new CEO. And the differences between being promoted internally as I was to being brought in externally. And it's interesting the type of error that individuals see in those CEOs for new CEOs that are new to a company. The error that's usually made is they make too many changes too quickly. They get in, it's not exactly what they thought, it's not their place, the people aren't their people, and they start just changing it right away. And it actually causes quite an error in performance degradation and potentially quite a significant risk. The error for the internally promoted person is they don't make changes quick enough. There's now a going CEO, they come in and everything seem to be going fine. So just do the job the last person did as opposed to set that individually. And that is a bit of a haunting vision there, especially as the new person. Because then, well, I've been part of driving these agendas, this strategy, that's why I likely, the board likely asked me to have this role. And there is an expectation of continuity. So what do you mean change? What do you mean look different? And I think from that perspective, getting individuals who can offer perspectives on unvarnished perspectives of your company. And in this case, I was thinking about Nimbus and talking about the challenges and the opportunities, how would you approach them? Was an important question to ask and sit down. And along those lines, I think one of the common little rubrics a CEO can use to determine what to do and whether the status pose the right thing or not is play the thought exercise of if you were just decided to take a vacation on a desert island and not come back or were beamed away by aliens or any other things, you're just not there. And the board's bringing somebody new in. What would a new CEO do, you ask yourself? What would that person do? And if you're like, do A, B, and C, then the question is, why aren't you doing it? And it's a really hard question. I would change this person or division out or I'd stop this program, I'd start that one, or I'd form this relationship, or I'd raise money over here. If that's what you disappeared and a new person would do, why aren't you doing it? It is a great mental test to keep that kind of fresh thinking fitness that I think the CEO, not uniquely amongst a leadership group, but probably primarily needs to continue to bring to the team in a challenge. And that leads to the last thing, which is building team. I think the CEO's role is to bring that to the team, to challenge, and the team needs to receive that challenge and form that. I think CEO's barking edicts and subtly changing things with the authority that's bested in that role, oftentimes it doesn't lead to performance because everything, certainly what we do in our industry, therapeutics development is all about teamwork. And bringing a team along is just as important as having the right strategy. - Really well put, Cheb. You touched on the lonely existence that CEOs can sometimes have dealing with all of the complexities of running an organization. I'm curious over your time at Nimbus, what have you found to be particularly effective that works for you in terms of remaining balanced with all the invariable ups and downs that any company faces? - So just to clarify, in terms of balanced, is that engaging with people or what exactly do you mean by that? - More what have you found that you have to go for a run as an example to balance out or you meditate, something more so on the personal front so that you're presenting your best self to the team, although you're dealing with a lot of stuff that others won't be able to see? - It's a great question. I was at a panel recently talking privately to CEOs and some aspiring CEOs about this and a tendency, especially with new CEOs and others to really get burned out to really feel they've given it at all, they've reprioritized the company over their life and willing to sacrifice so much for it to be that martyr nearly. And I think there are moments in what we do in therapeutics development that are a little bit like storming a hill to use a lore analogy where people pull all nighters and heroic efforts, but they're rare. I mean, this is way more marathon than sprint and finding balance and the ability to reflect, pause and rejuvenate is supremely important, number one, for any type of executive. And it's more important for the CEO to do that and do it visibly. There's never a moment I feel off, but there have been moments that with my teenage sons, I've been unreachable in some mountain range hiking. So to figure out that balance and to figure out what to do there requires kind of coordination, but I would encourage individuals in this team environment we have to not hide that to make it present that you need balance as well because actually getting that in the rest of the team is super important. Everyone has their own piece. For me, it's spending time with kids. It's exercise and those sorts of pieces that find that balance. I love work, I love being at work, I love doing it. I love the intellectual stimulation of the challenges we face. That gives me a lot of energy, but being able to find a rhythm and habits that make that work are exceptionally important. - Great blends, Cheb. - If you're an HR or hiring manager in biotech, you know all too well that the pool of experts seeking full-time employment is shrinking. Filling key full-time positions can be a long, drawn out ordeal that can slow the pace of execution and growth. Throw away the old hiring playbook. Now you can build a biotech dream team in a fraction of that time. Find out how. Visit chlora.com. Chlora, talent optimized. - Now we'd love to switch gears and let's talk about biotech and the ecosystem that we all work in and now that's been operating. You have a very unique vantage point in the biotech ecosystem, having been in numbers for some time and have a somewhat unique organizational structure and financing strategy. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on where biotech is right now, given the correction that we've been seeing in the capital markets for over the last several years and help us understand how you view the current landscape through your eyes. - Yeah, so it's a great question. Look, here we are in the middle of 2024 after a COVID spike in peak in one of the most sustained flat periods of biotech valuation that we've seen in a long time. And to be honest, a period that has dis-tangled itself, biotech has dis-tangled itself from tech in a way that's really tough, right? 2021, we came off the peak the whole year and it kept going down in '22 and then it's been flat whether you look at XPI and BI or other things. There have been bright spots in the moment but it has generally been a sustained period of tough. The cyclical market, bubble-licious equity capital valuations and large rounds has yielded way to a new normal. And we're seeing this across the current financing environment. I was joking with some folks that they're asking about Nimbus's origins and I told them Nimbus before I got here did a $24 million Series A. I announced back in 2011 so we'd spend the seating in 2009 and actually lived on that 24 million from 2009 to 2015. I can tell you no company does that these days. Not many at least. And the idea of a $24 million Series, I was actually meeting for Drinks, a CEO who was first time CEO, struggling with their $62 million Series A, getting told that just, oh, that wasn't a big Series A, must not a bit of big technology, other things. It's amazing. So what happened with this great inflation? Why do you see this? And there's actually a reason because of this financing environment. The financing environment itself is a risk. It's a risk that before these small amounts of capital that were being invested, you would invest for a little bit and then you'd see the data, sometimes just single experiments. And then an organization would go out on fundraise again and you take these little bite size. And what you were doing was you were managing R&D risk. But there was an expectation that you'd be able to finance. There is not anymore. People are gun shy about the ability of finance. So what we're seeing is we're seeing larger rounds because investors are recognizing the financing risk. They would actually rather take more R&D risk and give a company more money so that they have at least a better shot of getting to some quote unquote value inflection point. And so what we see is this bifurcation of haves that have not. So we're seeing these much bigger rounds for some companies and other companies really struggling reductions in force, downsizing other sorts of things to make all of those pieces work. So it's a little bit where we're seeing this marketplace. And then we're seeing a discontinuity with companies going public. And this is, I think, a little bit where the Nimbus model has been an interesting one and I've had a lot of conversations about that model that is there a way of providing liquidity and capital returns without being a public company. Because the traditional is you raise a serious day, you raise a serious beat and then you get public. And those early stage investors are able to start harvesting their returns after six months of a lockup once a stock's public to be able to start making those returns. That model, we do see some companies go out. There's quite mixed performance if you look across the classes and nothing really to write home about to really get public market investors energized that the entire sector is moving out. - And so with that perspective, Jeff, on the capital markets, talk to us about Nimbus's unique approach to how you operate, how you finance and then how that leads to your very focused approach to drug development then. - I always try to avoid the word unique, but certainly rarer, Nimbus has been successful now 15 years private. So we've raised over $600 million in equity capital financing and maybe the more unique part is we've returned well over $4 billion in dividends back to our investors and doing that private. So we have cycled capital. Now, there were two transactions that drove the primary amounts of those that we get talked about a lot. The first was in 2016 when Gilead bought our liver disease drug for Socastat, our Astalcoi carboxylist inhibitor and a bus cuisine. We talked about this actually when he did a podcast four years ago. And the second was when Takeda in 2022 bought our Alistairic Tick-2 program in auto immune disease for $4 billion upfront and moved that forward. What Nimbus has been able to do as a private company with a top company, a parent company and daughter subsidiaries has been able to sell those subsidiaries as full companies. So when Takeda acquired our Takeda molecule, people say they bought Nimbus's Takeda. They acquired our Takeda program. They required thousands of molecules, every piece of intellectual property, everything about Takeda. They bought, 'cause we put all of that intellectual property in one sub called Nimbus Lakshmi Iq. That is a Delaware Sea Corp that was owned by Nimbus Therapeutics, the top company. And the top company owned a thousand common shares of that and effectively Takeda bought a thousand common shares for $4 billion upfront. And that was what they acquired. And the turnkey nature of it is quite amazing because the next day, so for example, the IMD was open with the subsidiary. All Takeda had to do was update the address of a financial please send stuff to our address and Cambridge as opposed to Nimbus and Boston. Because they are the sole holder and owner that just joins as part of the group structure, but all of the intellectual property, all of the supply chain relationships, all of the clinical relationships, the IMD with FDA, the CTA's with other nationalities and other things, all kind of vests within there. And there's no people there. So all of the people that supported sit centrally at Nimbus and support every one of our programs. And so actually while you could say, do you need folks to do that? Would they want to acquire personnel? We actually continue to work with Takeda. It is in our best interest that they have tremendous success there. And so while they were staffing up to take over, Nimbus personnel absolutely supported the continued develop. We had an ongoing clinical trial and we're starting others and preparing for regulatory interactions. And so our team worked for months, post the close of that transaction to effectively hand that over. But everybody came back to work that next day at Nimbus and were able to work on that next program. - And so I make sure I understand is that you have a central team that's working across all programs and those team members and then splitting their time across various different programs that you have running at any given point. - Exactly. And so we've had these moments where, and this is a little bit some of the conception of the Nimbus model is we can look across our industry many times at what we call serial entrepreneurs. So these are individuals management teams who will grow a company often they'll listen on NASDAQ and then it'll be acquired by a pharmaceutical company. And then 18 months later, you'll see all of the trade news say, so and so the XT of this gets packed together with this new name and they're working on this different. They went back to the same investors and now they're at it again. And they'll have success again. Nimbus is interesting. It's just like that, except you don't need to go away and reform you actually can keep working on the portfolio. And what is really something about that Nimbus model is you can have a portfolio, you can play the R&D portfolio, management and investing game, so that you can manage risk and return and change the velocity of investment in any one of those portfolio agents. But it also says when a company is often acquired, it's often acquired for its lead program. And many times the acquire really doesn't do much if anything with the other pieces. Maybe at best case it spins them off. Nimbus allows an acquire to have exactly what they want, which is the lead program and everything around it. So there were all the lawyers and everybody else was happy to have everything they need to have full success in that and nothing else. And it actually works incredibly well for both acquires as well then as for Nimbus to keep our team motivated to continue to generate those next generation of breakthrough medicines for patients. - It's a very elegant model. I'm sure it wasn't always easy to talk about what's been the evolution of this operating model and corporate structuring? And what are some of the lessons learned from six years ago to where you are now? - One of the biggest pieces and this is quite important is how important cycling capital is. So when we had, this was pretty shocking for many individuals, but when we completed the Takeda transaction, we returned 100% of the net proceeds of that transaction back to our equity holders. Effectively not really leaving Nimbus with anything. And I've gotten a lot of questions about that by other operators. The team at Nimbus looked at me like I was crazy. Investors are quite happy with this, but there's a point to it. And this is one of those points that maybe is less appreciated about public versus private entities. By doing that, it forced Nimbus to have to go out and finance again for the next chapter. That is a good thing, not a bad thing. Because at the end of the day, I talked a little bit earlier about one of the CEO's roles is sorting out who owns the company. And it is so important for alignment of purpose in a next, we call it the next chapter of Nimbus, that the investors are who are putting money in now fully buy in to this existing pipeline and our plan and aren't here for the Takeda program. And when we went around to investors, we did not know if any of them actually would want to put more capital in. We're very thankful that the vast majority did, but not everyone, but actually new investors wanted to put capital in, great new investors. Led that round who would not see any benefit from the Takeda transaction, but actually saw what we built in a team here, and the value and the rest of the portfolio and the approach that Nimbus takes. So what does that do? When that new investment comes in, it comes in at an appropriate valuation, a much lower valuation. So when we did our financing announced the summer of 23, it was at a much lower valuation because we didn't have Takeda, we weren't basing it on that. Now, we're not public, so that number's not out there to be tracked on some type of stock ticker. And somebody'd say, let's a down round, to be honest. No one really cared because every investor up to that point got handsome 10X plus returns on their investment. And then they had a decision of whether they wanted to invest further in the future or take those and watch from a distance. And either of those are okay. We did the same for employees. So when we say we return equity returns to employees as well. So if this had been a public company and we were just bought for the Takeda and people would have stopped it would vest, we treat the individuals at Nimbus the same way, which was very beneficial to folks who would be here. And so people personally didn't want to continue to work on that. They wouldn't have to. And up to this day, we had the vast majority of the team and all of the executive teams stay around to continue to progress the pipeline, which is amazing. And I think a real testament to what we all see as the future value potential. And I think that's really aligned. But I'll tell you, it would have been nearly impossible to do that as a public company. Because the stock goes up, it trades up to a balance sheet, it goes down, why did it go down? It becomes very difficult for investors or employees to appropriately be in center or capture value. So I've had a lot of discussions about, with individuals about, can we adopt some of these techniques so that we can cycle capital and stay private? It is a real challenge as a public company executive, because you only want the stock to go up. You don't want to share bad news, you don't want to have to reprice. And those things happen. And my colleagues who are amazing, strong and resilient people deal with this on a regular basis and have this, you look on your phone and this validation of whether you think you're doing a good job or not, and maybe not at all correlated to your stock at all, by the way, when it moves. As a private company, it is a more discreet set of events that are actually a lot closer tied to the value of the products that you're working on. - Yeah, and Jeb, given that the team is working on multiple programs at any given point, I imagine you need to hire a particular phenotype for your team. I'm curious what you've learned in terms of the types of folks that operate really well in your model, and perhaps those that haven't worked out. - I think first of all, what's the real recipe for success? Nimbus, I think goes for any successful organization, it is the team, and it's how we come together. And we take a lot of time and effort during the recruitment process to identify people who are curious and who have real flexible thinking, and adhere to our values and behaviors because it really is a team sport here. I would say this is really important to have folks who have a desire to work across different projects because things do change over time. - One of the common questions I've gotten since the tick two transaction, I'm sure we get to this as well, is what's the next big tick two, what's that? And I joke, gosh, if I knew what that was, Rahul, I'd have us invest, everybody would be working on that. And so I could hire as many specialists and other things right down that 'cause that's what it is. The thing is we don't know. And when we sold our first exit to Gilead back in 2016, we were working on the tick two program, and actually had been working on it before that. We did not know it was the big success. We didn't, we didn't back then, no one did. We had other programs and actually at the time if you look at board decks and other things you'd say, oh, there were other things that were being featured and many of them failed. But we looked at what happened between those two exit events. It was about six years. We had 70%, 70% attrition in our pipeline. We took lots of failure. Again, so much easier to do as a private company where you're not having to disclose and announce each one of those things because actually the right decision was to kill those programs. So you take a portfolio approach and I do think you need the kind of creative mind who can get behind a program and is curious and can drive it, but also is flexible enough to think across it. The third attribute is someone who can really ask for help. There are core expertise is absolutely essential for drug discovery and development. And for every stage, there are true world experts. And you don't know exactly all of the challenges your program will have, but when you encounter them, you need to find those individuals. When I was a GSK or many big pharma folks goes, that was a matter of looking through the corporate directory. Who is the expert in rat cardiology, rat hearts? Oh, so and so, over on this side on the other coast, let's go talk to them. No, no, at Nimbus, we don't have anybody who's an expert in rat cardiology. And should we need that? Oh, we should be able to find that individual. So well networked folks who are willing to ask for help and reach out, make excellent flexible folks who can continue to pivot and be adaptable to this pipeline. Jeb, we talked a lot about deal making and corporate structuring. I've been noticing a growing trend where CEOs and biotech have started to have more of a BD background compared to perhaps CEOs and biotech 10 years ago. I'm curious, one, if you're seeing that and two, in this environment, what advantage do you think folks with that background have? Obviously, folks with deep scientific backgrounds, the typical MD PhDs that we used to see also are bringing tremendous value. But I'm just curious how you think about the complimentary skill sets that those two different phenotypes bring to a biotech. First, I don't think it's surprising most every biotech. And when I'm talking about biotech, I'm talking about R&D stage therapeutics development organizations, like Nimbus and many others. But different organizations, certainly commercial geared organizations or folks in kind of device or much more on the platform tech side. I do think there are differences there. But I would say in therapeutics development, it's clear you need all of those skills. And I don't know that one particular phenotype makes the best chief executive officer. I'll leave that for some of our chief people officer, CHRO colleagues, Nam and Gov, type of board, chair folks to espouse on what that looks like. Because I think the right leader has a vision, has a passion for engaging people and investors in that story and can be able to speak that. And I find most of my colleagues. I can't tell, honestly, most of them, I can't tell what their background is, especially if they've been a CEO for a while. It seemed like a CEO. What does that mean? They're at least bilingual, if not tri-lingual on the languages of finance, business, science, business executives who don't speak the science. I think have a huge liability. So I think when you find maybe people with a business background that are quite fluent on the science and can hold their own with investigators and luminaries and scientific diligence teams at pharma, they'll do fine for that pontificating CEO who just knows the business side, but doesn't have a good appreciation of the science. I actually think it's very tough for them. And likewise, the CSO CMO type, who doesn't really get how capital markets work, who really doesn't have that intuition of how value is both created and captured has a liability as well. So I think we've found a lot more bilingual folks, regardless of which trajectory they come into, that boards are looking to occupy that role, somebody who feels more comfortable in those. I will say, as somebody who feels like that, the first thing you've got to realize is, because you're bilingual, it means you're actually not really good in any of those languages. And you really do need great people. And I am so blessed and fortunate to have, you know, Boscazimia is my chief business officer, Ian Sanderson is my CFO, and Peter Tsumino is my CSO, and Natalie Fraunshman is my chief medical officer, because they are the detailed experts. And they are all learning to speak cross talk as they grow their careers, but they really are deep experts in each of those areas. And it really is the team that needs to focus that. So being that chief executive officer to be able to pivot that is important. And I wouldn't rule out some of the other sides of understanding the CHRO, CPO side of things, understanding the legal side of things. I do think you end up being multi-lingual quite a bit in this type of role. - Yeah, I really like the framing of bilingual, tri-lingual, Jeff, thanks for sharing that. Before we let you run, Jeb, we'd ask you to reflect one more time, and given all that you've seen and experienced in your life, what's one piece of advice you wish you could provide your younger self-knowing? I'll let you know now. - Take bigger risks. It is amazing how resilient both people are. You are, as a person, how organizations are resilient and can pivot and adapt. I think organizations that are very true and famous kind of sports expression about the difference between playing to win and playing not to lose. The number of times in any sport kind of event where the team that's at head changes how they play the game. There's only a couple of minutes to go, they're winning, but they're not playing to win. They're playing not to lose at this point. And it's funny, without ever seeing the conclusion, most humans can watch that and go, look at the hunger in that other team. Oh, are you surprised that the other team actually came from behind and win? That come from behind, how does that happen? And is that hunger to play to win? And I find in a very risky environment like drug R&D, we don't take bold risks. No, no, our industry can take more. We're capable of doing it. That's what the capitals look there. And look, there's so many slides that people develop for boards and other things on risk mitigation. And yes, we should think through that. But at the end of the day, our goal is to change patients' lives for the better and incremental improvements. The world is telling us it won't tolerate it. Now, there's some other policy things we've got to get in the way to allow true innovation to matter, but true innovation really ought to matter. And that true innovation requires taking risks and being bold. And so even as I look in my career and look back and say, wow, could have been bolder there, could have taken a different risk. And you know what? It'll work out okay. So that's certainly a piece of advice I'd give my younger self and certainly any of our listeners. - Jeb, thank you so much for joining us today and for updating us on all things related to Nimbus. It was a pleasure to have you on. And thanks for such a wide ranging conversation. We certainly covered a lot. - Thanks for all, really appreciate the opportunity. (upbeat music) - Thank you for listening to this episode of Biotech 2050. This episode is hosted by me, Rahul Chaturvedi, and Alok Tai. If you enjoyed this episode of Biotech 2050, please subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review. Also follow us on Twitter and Instagram and Biotech 2050 pod. Again, that's Biotech 2050 POD. Until next time. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) You