Alok Tayi - Vibe Bio - Part 3

Intro - 00:00:00: Welcome to The Biotech Startups Podcast by Excedr. Join us as we speak with first-time founders, experienced scientists, serial entrepreneurs, and Biotech investors about the challenges and triumphs of running a Biotech startup. Gain actionable insight into navigating the life sciences industry in each episode as we explore the business of science from pre-seed to IPO with your host, Jon Chee. 

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Jon - 00:01:10: In our last episode, we spoke with Alok Tayi about his experiences co-founding PreScouter and TetraScience and what it was like building out Egnyte's Life Sciences business unit. If you missed it, be sure to go back and give part two a listen. In part three, we chat with Alok about the origins of the Biotech2050 podcast that he co-hosts, how a medical diagnosis in the family led to Vibe Bio's creation and how Vibe Bio is changing the way that biotechs push their cures to market. So sit back, relax and let's get started.

Jon - 00:01:44: And so you mentioned this kind of during the pandemic. Was that during that period when you decided to start the podcast and how did that come to be?

Alok - 00:01:52: Yeah, you know, podcasting is really interesting kind of venue. I think in mid 2019, I remember having this idea for a podcast called Biotech2050. Linked up with my now kind of co-host and co-founder of Biotech2050, Rahul Chaturvedi, who runs a company called Clora. He's someone you for sure should have on the podcast here. Rahul's now become a close friend and he runs a company called Clora, which is a talent marketplace in the life sciences space. Everyone from clinical to regulatory to MSLs, it's really hard to find the right type of talent at the right time. And so his software platform does that. And both of us had spent enough time in the industry. He previously in the clinical development space, I obviously building software in the domain, recognized that there is a big gap in how the industry kind of discusses and evaluates and pursues innovation. Namely that we relegate a lot of the conversations and dialogue about innovation and new types of thinking to a select number of conferences, bio, JPM, an occasional Gordon conference. And all that's well and good, but what happens in between? And so we essentially set up Biotech2050 as a labor of love, both him and I have put personal capital into the endeavor in order to basically create an approach by which we can have these same conversations around innovation and biotech, but in between these other sort of conferences and events. And so we started Biotech2050 in 2019, we get tens of thousands of listens every month, if not more on each episode, have done about two to 300 episodes and just cracked half a million listens for the podcast.

Jon - 00:03:27: Awesome

Alok - 00:03:28: And so obviously there's a huge team behind us that's helped with scheduling, editing and all that good stuff. And they for sure deserve a tremendous amount of the credit. But I think it was a really a point in time when podcasting at least in life sciences wasn't huge. And so we simply, I think had a philosophy of focusing on the innovation, no got you questions, but really also trying to have a set of dialogue and topics that could appeal to the breadth of the life sciences ecosystem. And so our community today and our listenership today really is very much one third kind of truck development biotech execs, one third folks in the adjacent spaces like finance, IT, illegal accounting, et cetera. And then one third early career folks. So think graduate students, postdocs, et cetera. And so I think having a set of dialogue and topics that allows us to be able to include and speak to the needs and interests of that broad group, I think has really led to Biotech2050 success today to your earlier comment as well with the pandemic that just ended up becoming an accelerant. JPM went virtual and JPM was like one of those experiences being in San Francisco, you probably have been to more than I have. It's like a love hate kind of relationship, right?

Jon - 00:04:40: Yeah, definitely.

Alok - 00:04:42: You're like, “I don't want to go”, especially for folks in Boston because you have to fly literally across country. It's like, I don't want to go, but I have to go. And when it went virtual and everything else went virtual, I think podcasts became the unique way in which we could then start to connect with each other, albeit one way and sort of hear about some of the exciting things that are going on. So I really think the pandemic kind of sort of put the pedal to the metal, added fuel to the fire, et cetera, and led to its success and its prominence today. Just the other day when I was in California, I had a company offer to buy Biotech2050

Jon – 00:05:12: For us.

Alok – 00:05:13: Yeah, which I thought was kind of entertaining. So yeah, really excited.

Jon - 00:05:17: This is a passion project, but I'm flattered. And I see kind of like a through line, again, it's like the multidisciplinary kind of like making these connections that you're appeared to be fostering and Biotech2050 seems to be doing the same that are outside of necessarily just like what you described, the JPM, the bios, because there's so much more to that. And I think being open to that and facility is almost like democratizing it, trying to create the serendipity. Dang, their journey has been so cool. Just on off chance, finding that new material, off chance, finding your 15, 16 year olds, like basically summer gigs and then kind of like cascades. And I would imagine our listener would find some similar inspiration, just listening to the podcast and you're able to manufacture that magic.

Alok - 00:05:59: Oh, absolutely. I think you're obviously doing a great job here. And Excedr’s podcast is well on this. And I think being able to get folks outside of like the more formal suit wearing type environment, being able to talk through topics that are core to them and that they're passionate about, along with our relevant to much broader story that's happening in the world, I think is really part of the magic that podcasting enables. And to your point around sort of connections, a great example from like a week or two ago, I was doing a tour in California with some podcast interviews. I interviewed one individual who has raised 80, 90 million bucks for their biotech. Younger gentleman started his biotech right out of his PhD program at Stanford. Really exciting company in the oncology space. And I kid you not, Three Minute Drive Away was another biotech company that I did a podcast interview with. And the CEO there was someone he's like, oh, I've admired Tim for a long period of time. I know the work they're doing in that company. Tim happens to run a company that's publicly traded. And he's like, “I'd love to meet with him”. And I'm like, “well, you guys are literally three minutes away from each other”. So I happened to grab coffee with Tim and I was like, “hey, can I make a connection?” And he's like, “sure”. And so it was a really great opportunity where like now you can connect people even at that level in a way that they never would have been able to ever before. And the podcast only just became that sort of venue to do it. And I think just sort of self-reinforces in many ways, whether it's relationship building, opening your eyes to sort of new opportunities and things that are happening in the industry, or be able to serendipitously create these connections for others to have serendipitous moments. I think we're really excited about that.

Jon - 00:07:30: Totally. And I think we're so early days too. I get from my perspective, I've always been at like an early adopter of things. So I'm like, “okay, yeah, I know about podcasts, but that's probably just a me or early adopter thing”. We're like, “yeah, I've been around. But I think there's so much this green field for the podcasting space”. And in the age of, and obviously we live in the age of the internet. It's like exactly what you're saying, like connecting people who may have not bumped into each other at a conference or whatever it may be and making that connection. It makes me so bullish and so optimistic about the future and how these connections were fruit that will bear. And podcasting is free. It's like going to JPM, not free. Whereas podcasting, you just boom, low risk. You can just turn it off if you want to turn it off.

Alok - 00:08:16: Yeah, and I think it's on demand too, right? It's on your own schedule, which I think is another opportunity. 

Jon - 00:08:20: Yeah, you don't have to fly across the country from Boston to go to it. So I completely agree. And now it's almost up to like current day now. And I know you have founded Vibe Bio. What inspiration drew you to found Vibe Bio and the mission and focus and everything in store?

Alok - 00:08:36: I was at Egnyte at the time, loving working with that team and helping grow out the business in the life sciences vertical. But as life does got thrown a curve ball in 2021. My wife and I were fortunate enough to have our first kid. Pregnancy went okay, but unfortunately our daughter was born very sick. Our daughter was born with two different rare diseases that had no dedicated treatment. What was the hardest part about that experience was the fact that the diseases that she had were actually somewhat common. The biology was actually well understood, but there were no medicines available or even in development at the time. And so both my wife and I being scientists in the space were really taken aback by that situation and surprised by the scenario where why do we have diseases that we understand yet have no treatment, especially when we have so many tools in our toolkit for attacking them. And so during that time while I was on a paternity leave and my daughter was ill, it gave me the opportunity to start to think deeply about this problem. And it actually became a bit of an obsession for me to figure this problem out. Ultimately the insight that I had was that the challenge wasn't finding a potential drug, but rather funding it. And so when I came back from paternity leave, I remember coming back to work and sort of thinking about customers and I remember sitting in on a customer retention call with my peers about how someone was going to drop their contract and sit in there thinking to myself, though I love software and I love the team that I've built and the people and the opportunity at Egnyte, I had to go work on this new problem. So the Egnyte team leadership were very supportive. They were very kind and actually are now angel investors in Vibe as well. And so about a year and change ago, I started Vibe Bio. Vibe is essentially an AI driven investment platform focused on biotech, where when you start to look at the broader space of biotech, there's so much potential in the science and the medicines that are sitting either on a shelf or within a biotech company. But oftentimes the challenge is really rallying the capital required to be able to advance those medicines to a critical inflection point and to the next stage of development. And so today a lot of biotech funding is deployed by a small number of venture capital firms, in part because they have the domain expertise and the know-how and the deal flow to be able to do so. But what we started to see more and more is that especially for folks in my shoes with a child who is sick or others, there are actually avenues and paths by which you can actually develop medicines, even if you come from outside the industry. There just happens to be a lack of capital to be able to do that in a systematic routine manner. So we started Vibe in order to be able to help support this broader pool of investors. Think angel investors, family offices, hedge funds, even traditional venture capitalists who all want to invest in biotech, to be able to help them with facets of expertise and domain knowledge and deal flow. So essentially what we're building is AngelList, but specifically for the biotech sector, where we're able to combine both AI-based tools and expertise to rapidly evaluate and diligence the different biotech drugs and programs, and then enable a much broader pool of decentralized investors from angels to family offices, to hedge funds, to VCs, to then invest in those biotech companies with greater confidence around which have the highest potential. And so our hope is to be able to really open the aperture and democratize to your word, the drug development domain, and really bring sort of new capital and new thinking to the table alongside the exciting work we already do.  

Jon - 00:11:59: Awesome. That's like so inspirational because I think my lab at Berkeley, we weren't the fanciest lab. Even in an academic realm, you'd imagine that all science is funded somewhat well. There's like these pools of capital, like these slosh funds that kind of just like move to the hottest labs on campus. And it sounds similar to what's going on once you make the transition into the private sector. And just to kind of set the table for the listeners out there, is it just a purely economic decision for these pools of capital that, hey, this opportunity is not large enough, or what is the status quo and why is it the way it is? 

Alok - 00:12:34: Yeah, great question. I think the biotech industry, and I'll be the first to admit that when my kid was sick, I was really angry and upset with the industry and how it structured and what it did. The reality is when you start to peel back the onion and spend time with these folks, you realize it's not out of malignancy, but rather just out of constraints around how they operate and what their obligations are to other stakeholders in the ecosystem that drives a certain set of outcomes. So what ends up happening, I think in many cases, that biotech companies are often founded with tremendous amount of potential, a lot of promise. They often have a great platform underneath, underpinning their work, that allows them to identify multiple different drugs for different diseases. But given the fact that the costs start to scale exponentially, the closer you get to an inflection point, oftentimes these organizations are forced to focus on one or two key drugs and diseases to be able to advance into later stages of development. When choosing which diseases to go after, unfortunately, many have to make a really hard call, not necessarily based on what's best for patients or what's best with science, but rather what has the biggest economic potential. What that does is guide the majority of industry, which follows the same sort of mental model to the largest set of common diseases. And so those diseases end up getting a lot of herd mentality where a lot of people sort of focus in on them, while a lot of the other sorts of diseases that maybe aren't less well known or have no treatments available today, often unfortunately get ignored. And it's not that they aren't good economic opportunities or the science is bad or those diseases aren't serious. It's simply one of optimizing for the largest economic number. But then also secondly, a lot of recency bias, right? What's the hottest target today? Where did the most recent large transaction happen? What's the new modality that's kind of being spun out of X, Y, Z's lab, right? So I think there ends up being a lot of thinking that often again guides us to a more modest, smaller number of diseases when there's a much bigger pool that I think we can go after in a sustainable, both economic and scientific manner.

Jon - 00:14:34: Absolutely. And it sounds like Bye Bye was like making those connections. I'm an outsider looking in from this perspective, but it sounds like you have to hit a critical mass. You have to get the activation energy for it to be worth your time or worth any kind of like pool of capitals time and getting it past that activation energy. If you're not in whatever oncology, cardio, neuro, it just doesn't get quite there and it's correct me if I'm wrong, but Bye Bye was like, the mission is get it there where it actually can get past that and break through.

Alok - 00:15:02:  A hundred percent. And so to use your analogy around the activation energy, I describe it in sort of two ways. One is if you have a promising medicine, even in those spaces, it's hard to get capital because you might not have gotten the pivotal data required to be able to show that it has potential. So that's one circumstance. The other is in disease areas. And as a heads up, there's 13,000 diseases that we know about 10,000 of which are rare, roughly half of those rare diseases affect children. So there's a huge unmet need that's in that broader space. And so even things like awareness, right, becomes an issue. So there, I think we can help increase the activation, get across the activation barrier in order to be able to raise the profile of an opportunity there is with these candidate medicines in this specific disease. So the way we kind of go about doing that is by first combining scientific expertise that ranges from preclinical development to clinical development, to program management amongst others with a data set that allows us to use historical data to better pinpoint which drugs have higher potential. We often leverage our most recent knowledge to identify which drugs potentially could be interesting. But if we can actually train AI to look at the historical data that exists in the space across all approved failed private public data, then it gives us a much better insight into which have the higher potential. So I think that approach allows us to be able to solve for the domain expertise challenge that many investors have when it comes to this space. I think what we saw with Moderna and BioNTech and others is that there's a huge economic upside in biotech and one that's highly differentiated compared to, say, the tech industry or other spaces. And so I think for a much broader pool of investors being able to get into biotech both for the mission as well as the uncorrelated nature of the asset class gives them a lot of excitement about it. But that key gap of domain expertise ends up becoming the barrier. So again, we can sort of solve for that and the deal flow in a fairly systematic way using technology.

Jon - 00:17:07: Absolutely. And it's really inspiring. It's like de-risking it for these pools of capital. It's like when they're looking at it, it's like too much work, you know, on the back, the math can math, like it doesn't seem like this will pencil out too much capital, too much work. Okay, next. But it seems that vibe is like de-risking it such that when the capital is looking at it, it's like, “oh, this is achievable. We can get this done”. And that's really inspiring. And for the listeners out there who are just embarking on whether it be like right out of tech transfer or whatever, what are some key inflection points that they should consider? There's no playbook. Here are the key pivotal moments or like life or death of your company. What are some inflection points in your opinion that folks should be very, very cognizant of?

Alok - 00:17:43: There are a myriad of different inflection points across the scientific access, team access, capital access, et cetera. You know, if you're at the very early stages and you're especially sort of translating something out of academia, there's a couple of pieces that I think are really critical. The first is really showing that that science that was done in academia actually reproduces and translates outside of the organization and in your own laboratory. That's, I think, extremely pivotal because there often is a little bit of skepticism of the science that's being done. And a couple examples out there where science didn't fully reproduce or the scope and capability of the platform ended up being way narrower than expected. The second is I'd say in the drug development process, we're somewhat fortunate, if you can call it that, that we have a very structured product development process where early on aspects of in vitro efficacy, in vivo efficacy, as well as non-GLP toxicology end up becoming really interesting, important experiments that can help further bolster the case for a given asset or platform as a whole. So I think if you're sort of thinking about translating something out of Academia, having a seasoned drug developer be able to assert in a independent kind of environment within your company, outside the four walls of academia, that the technology works along with sort of really robust data around the mechanisms, that in vitro efficacy, in vivo, and then also some sort of tox type insight, I think could really change the game from an inflection standpoint for that biotech. 

Jon - 00:19:13: Absolutely. And in the context of like how Vibe Bio can assist those who are reaching their inflection point, how can folks work with Vibe Bio? And I realized AngelList connects a lot of different people and I know we grab coffee, you have connections to folks in the CRO land and more. Can you just describe what Vibe Bio brings to the table at each inflection point. 

Alok - 00:19:32: Yeah, a hundred percent. Well, I think the best part about it is that in our case, we work directly with drug development experts who have worked in these indications or in these modalities and in this space, who actually work with us to be able to help identify the characteristics of these assets and biotechs that have potential, but also to help support these companies even after they decide to work with us. Our model is simply to invest in these companies across the conventional set of funding mechanisms. So our primary value add is going to be around the capital to help get them to that inflection point. But the second part of it is that because we have drug development expertise in house, they can also work with those companies on an ongoing basis, help them think about what the right experiment is, help them find the right CRO, help them connect with the right expert that can give them the insight they need for the next phase of development, et cetera. And I think it's those little bits that can help start to paint a broader picture for the founder and the executive team as to what will get them to the next round of financing and beyond for their program.

Jon - 00:20:31: Totally. And colleagues of mine who've gone on this road that you've kind of described over dinner, just talked about it. There's like crap, didn't see this coming. And knowing that you have experts in your corner, in addition to the capital, to help you get through it, it really does take a village in addition to the capital and like, you know, everything else, but to get it across the line. And I think it's so valuable for founders to know that Vibe Bio is in your corner in that sense. And now zooming out, what does Vibe Bio have in store for the coming year, two years? Like, what would you keep our eyes out on?

Alok - 00:21:04: Yeah, you know, we're super excited to be able to work with a myriad of different biotechs to help fund a lot of their key work through to the next inflection point. As an organization, we've got several exciting programs and companies that are now collaborating with us on that front. And what we're hoping to do is actually start to use our software and technology to help start to scale that out, both from a biotech standpoint, but also from an investor standpoint. So then what you'll start to see from us more and more is more interesting companies and technologies that we're investing in and helping to overcome the activation barrier around. But then second, creating more opportunities by which a broader pool of investors can now actually support the next generation of biotechs and medicines. So we very much see it as a two-sided endeavor that we're on, but one where if we are able to make it more efficient and lower risk for people to participate in the biotech sector, a lot more opportunity can be created and also hopefully more medicines getting to patients as well.

Jon - 00:22:00: Absolutely. Every time we talk about VibeBio, I'm always fired up, has a very similar ethos as Excedr, honestly, from being like, frankly, didn't get across that activation energy, didn't get to that point in a lot of our research. And we just had to put it on the wine rack, shelve it. And that was a big bummer. And I just don't think that should be the case. From our perspective, we do it just within the equipment perspective. But there's so much more to that. It's exactly what you're saying. It's the capital, it's the personnel, the experts and being able to do all that across the spectrum. And it's a very long journey too. These are like decade plus points with multiple inflection points. And I think glad to have you and Vibe Bio supporting that endeavor. Just two kind of like closing questions I like to round things out with. Would you like to give any shout outs to anyone who has supported you throughout your career? And I realize you've given a lot of shout outs early on, but is there any other shout outs that you'd like to give?

Alok - 00:22:48: Yeah, you know, there's tons of individuals, I think, who have been able to contribute to my own growth and development and success. And to your earlier comment, it does take a village to be successful. And whether it's, you know, my family, my wife, my daughter, obviously, it has inspiration. Professor Stupp, my PhD advisor, George Whitesides, my postdoc advisor, even folks like John Kelty, who's my independent board member and a longtime mentor for me. You know, there's a myriad of individuals out there for whom I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for them. And so I'm eternally grateful to all those folks. And so I think we'd spend another two hours going through the full list if that was the case. But I think they know who they are.

Jon - 00:23:24: Absolutely. And just to round it off, if you can give advice to your 21 year-old self, what would it be?

Alok - 00:23:30: I would say that things compound. And what I mean by that is when you're a graduate student and maybe you saw this in the lab, oftentimes when you start, it's not a linear process in terms of knowledge or progress. It's actually highly nonlinear. And I think a PhD is a great example of that, where the first one, two, three years, you're not really getting much done. It's really in year four and year five when things start to click and you really start to understand at its core what you're working on, the discipline, the opportunity in the space. And so I think that nonlinear nature of growth and learning and value is, I think, a critical thing where, especially when you're 21, you're probably fairly impatient. And whether it's money, network, knowledge, one really needs to be thinking long term and how these sorts of things really start to scale and compound over a modest and long period of time. So those would be, I think, like the key things that I would often highlight for both myself and for others. It has to rewind the clock back to the age of 21.

Jon - 00:24:28: Absolutely. And I think what the saying is, it's like exponential curves are flat until they're not. Very much not. There were times, like very early days where for Excedr’s, it's like, is this ever going to work? Like, I don't know. And there's a time and place to put things on the wine rack, but I'm sure grateful to like stick it out and have that compounding do the work. And it really resonates with me, especially in grad school, it can get tough. But Alok, thank you so much for taking the time. It's always a blast chatting with you. And I'll let you know when I'm in Boston, I'm coming out of my shell and doing more travel. So I'll get out of the San Francisco Bay area. But thanks again, Alok.

Alok - 00:25:05: Yeah. Well, Jon, it's a pleasure being here and thanks so much for the opportunity. Excited for Vibe and Excedr also to collaborate in the coming months and looking forward to meeting again in person in life.

Jon - 00:25:14: Yeah. Thank you so much, Alok.

Alok – 00:25:16: Thank you. 

Outro - 00:25:18: That's all for today's episode of the Biotech Startups Podcast. We hope you enjoyed our three-part series with Alok Tayi. Be sure to tune into our next series, where we will be chatting with Manish Jain, CEO and co-founder at Nirvi. Manish is a highly accomplished scientist and serial entrepreneur with an impressive track record. From his time at the Stanford Geo Technology Center during the 1990s, to his contributions in next generation sequencing, to successful mergers with companies like Illumina and Grail, there will be tons to learn from Manish in the next series of the Biotech Startups Podcast. The Biotech Startups podcast is brought to you by Excedr. Don't want to miss an episode? Make sure to search for Biotech Startups Podcast in Apple podcasts, Spotify and Google podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts and click subscribe. To learn more about our leasing program, visit our website www.excedr.com We provide research labs with equipment leases on founder-friendly terms to support a path to exceptional outcomes. On behalf of the team here at Excedr, thanks for listening.