Jason Foster - Part 1: From Paper Routes to Pharma: Building a $1B Addiction Medicine Business

Intro - 00:00:01: 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.

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Jon - 00:00:23: My guest today is Jason Foster, CEO and Executive Director at Ori Biotech. Ori is revolutionizing cell and gene therapy manufacturing through its development of its proprietary platform, Iro. By automating and standardizing cell and gene therapy manufacturing, Ori and Iro offer scientists the tools they need to streamline development and support widespread patient access to life-saving treatments. Jason's experience prior to Ori includes more than 20 years of life science leadership in operations, sales, marketing, technology, and investing, during which he developed deep expertise in commercial strategy and a thorough understanding of healthcare markets across the UK, US, and EU. Throughout Jason's career, he has helped build organizations that improve patient outcomes while delivering exceptional value for investors, like Indivior, where he played a pivotal role in his £2.3 billion public listing in 2014. Jason's wealth of experience offers invaluable insights for scientists, first-time founders, and industry leaders alike, making this series one you won't want to miss. Over the next two episodes, we'll explore Jason's inspiring journey. From his formative years and the early entrepreneurial lessons he learned, to the challenges of building and scaling Ori Biotech into a leading company, this series is packed with actionable wisdom into cultural adaptation, regulatory hurdles, and the power of mission-driven teams. Today, we'll discuss Jason's early years, exploring the personal and professional experiences that ignited his entrepreneurial drive. We'll hear about his upbringing, the influence of his family's business background, and the early jobs at home and his work ethic. From paper routes to marketing innovations, Jason's story offers invaluable lessons in creativity and resilience. Without further ado, let's dive into this episode of the The Biotech Startups Podcast. Jason, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Good to see you again. 

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Jason - 00:01:59: Thanks for having me. It's great to be on. 

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Jon - 00:02:00: So in typical Biotech Startup podcast fashion, we always like to go as far back as we can to really learn about what has shaped your business philosophy and honestly, your leadership style. And so if we go all the way back, can you tell US a little bit about your upbringing and maybe what were those pivotal moments for you as you reflect that kind of shaped your journey, or at least style and business philosophy? 

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Jason - 00:02:24: Well, I was kind of a cranky baby. No, I don't know if you want to go that far back. So, I mean, I grew up actually as an only child. So I spent a lot of time with adults and, you know, with creative play, you know, going through the woods, building a... igloo out of sticks or whatever. And, you know, that kind of, you know, creative outlets. And I had half siblings that were older than me. The closest one was 11 years. So I always joked that I had the best of both worlds. I was an only child, but we get my butt kicked enough by my older siblings to like not be a complete brat. I don't know if that actually worked in reality, but that was the joke. So I think, you know, that kind of idea of being creative, imaginative, using your imagination, and also learning to communicate at an early stage. I mean, if you think about what we do as human beings, the vast majority of the value we create is through communication. Oral, written, increasingly through email, text message, you know, website, marketing, copy, social media. The written word is an incredibly powerful tool. And so as a kid who spent a lot of time around adults as a young child, you know, I helped hone some of those skills at a very early stage. 

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Jon - 00:03:31: That's a similar experience. I'm an only child as well. And actually it's super, I guess it's weird, but my wife is also an only child. So it's kind of like you, I don't run into only childs all too often, but I just happen to also marry an only child. And so, you know, as you were growing up and it sounds like you were, you're interfacing with a lot of adults, was business always kind of in that communication? Was it always kind of in the ether for you or was that something that, that, you know, kind of you found the passion for business later on? 

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Jason - 00:04:02: Yeah, it's interesting. My dad was a business fan. He was a salesman for an apparel company. So they sold technology that made jeans for like HG, Lee, or Jordache or whomever. And he would go very cool, exotic sounding places like Japan for work. And it all sounded very sexy and appealing. When you're on the other side of it and you realize it's a lot of hotels and airports, you're like, not at all. But, you know, when you're a kid, you're like, that sounds super cool. I want to do that. I want to be an international businessman, whatever that means. I don't know what that means, but it sounds super cool. My grandfather was very similar. He distributed and was a salesman for kitchen cabinets when he had his own distributorship. And so kind of that, you know, my mother was also in business. So, you know, growing up in Richmond, Virginia, kind of a quaint little town compared to London where I live now. But, you know, there were three jobs. It could be a doctor, maybe four, a doctor, a lawyer, a banker or a businessman, whatever that was. You know, there was sort of like, you know, today we have almost innumerable number of different ways to form a career. And, you know, as an influencer, there's apparently a job. So that way that didn't exist back in the day. So, you know, I think business was always close to the family. And, you know, I was one of those kids that had like a paper route and used to cut the grass of the neighbors to get some pocket change and rake leaves. And, you know, it's that kind of entrepreneurial flair of, you know, being self-sufficient and finding ways to make money was always part of the... Part of the ethos. I remember going door to door to selling wrapping paper, which was, you know, people took pity on me and bought a roll here or there, but it was not, roughly not my career trajectory of choice after a few summers of doing that. 

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Jon - 00:05:44: Yeah, totally. That's interesting, too, because like I had a similar kind of my parents like in the summers, like you're not hanging out here. Like you need to go out there. And I know they strategically set the allowance to be just like. Not enough to like, it wasn't enough to actually go have like a blast with my friends. So I was like, you got to go get that your own. 

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Jason - 00:06:05: That's right. That's good. That's good training. 

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Jon - 00:06:07: Yeah, it was good training. It was kind of like a Jedi mind trick by my parents. Like they just like were orchestrating in the background. And for me, one of my early jobs was basically, I grew up in Berkeley, was just hauling basically trash to the dump that people were, they're just like, we would drive around in our truck and just be like, you need that to go to the dump. And we would just like haul it and just pick up change left and right. 

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Jason - 00:06:31: Great, yeah, perfect. Well, you have that like two man in a van kind of stuff. They've got it. And there's a, that's like a real business now. Yeah. It's actually one of the questions I often ask on almost every interview is I want to know what people's first job was. And, you know, if they're like, well, I got a job after college. I'm like, no, like before that, like tell me a little bit, because you want to hear that, like, you know. I've had a lemonade stand or I, you know, whatever, I cut people's dog's hair or whatever it was, you know, there's something that shows up and I get up and go, a little Blanchford airship. New York kind of started up there. You know, there's so much that needs to get done and people need to look laterally and find ways to add value. So let's, let's just start with it. I think when you're, when you're young.

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Jon - 00:07:10: Absolutely. And we do the same thing, actually. It's at Excedr where just some sort of experience like that, and it could be entrepreneurial in nature. And we also, something that we like a lot too, is that someone has worked in hospitality or the service industry. That was my other job. I was working at a deli. And if you can handle a disgruntled customer who's having a really bad day in hospitality and service, you can handle almost anything. 

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Jason - 00:07:37: It's the sandwich you just made. 

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Jon - 00:07:38: Yeah, you're just like, oh, my God, I'm so sorry. I am so sorry. I love that because it's like you don't really you can't really learn that from a book. Like, I guess. Yeah. 

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Jason - 00:07:51: Yeah. You learn with the public. It's a very rated skill set. Yeah, I worked in retail, which wasn't that different. And actually, I had so I had the best hospitality job. There is the best commute to work. I was doing a summer in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. If you've ever been absolutely beautiful place, Teton Mountains. The ski mountains, the Jackson Hole Resort has a tram. You know, it's maybe a, I don't know, 40 person tram. And at the top, there's something called Corbett's Cabin. And during the summer, people hike up the mountain and, you know, it's there and you've got snacks and really nasty hot dogs and old T-shirts that you sell. So I used to commute in the tram every morning up to 10,700 feet or whatever it is, looking at the beautiful Teton Mountains to go work in Corbett's Cabin for a summer. And that was it. That was an awesome experience. I didn't make very much money selling bad hot dogs and old t-shirts, but it was still a great experience. 

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Jon - 00:08:44: That's awesome. Did you get to go in the winter? 

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Jason - 00:08:47: I went to ski and that's how I fell in love with it and then went back to the Sunria. 

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Jon - 00:08:50: That's awesome. Yeah, a lot of buddies of mine. Would like basically do ski lessons. And there's like, I just have a season pass. And basically- 

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Jason - 00:09:00: Or whatever I want, yeah. 

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Jon - 00:09:01: Yeah, exactly. 

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Jason - 00:09:02: That's awesome. 

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Jon - 00:09:03: And so, you know, it sounds like you had a very, you know, hands-on kind of business, kind of school of hard knocks education. As you were approaching, you know, a college decision, can you walk me through like, where were you at at that point in time? Did you know what you wanted to do? Did you know your major? Put US back in the kind of that mind state. 

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Jason - 00:09:21: Yeah, I don't want anyone to get the impression that I was like walking the mean streets of Richmond, you know, digging through trash cans for my next meal. I mean, I have a pretty solid upper middle class upbringing. But yeah, I mean, I think having that, you know, my father didn't go to college. He was working since the time he was 12. You know, he had that kind of working class American dream, give your kids better than you had sort of mentality. And I think that rubbed off. And, you know, I was much less ambitious probably than kids are these days thinking about college. I was in Virginia. I grew up a University of Virginia fan of Virginia Cavaliers. I applied there basically as my first choice and my only real school I wanted to go to. And our rival school being a Virginia Cavalier is Virginia Tech, which in its own right is a probably a better athletic school, certainly in football. And but at the time wasn't my choice. And so I was like to tell the story. Well, Virginia Tech tried to pay me to go there. They tried to give me a scholarship. And I said no. And I went and paid my own way at Virginia. So that was I mean, I literally applied to three schools. It was like Virginia, Virginia Tech and I think James Madison University also in Virginia. I'm not going too far away. My daughter's going through the same process now. And she's like, I'm going to put she's applying to Duke and UVA and, you know, Princeton and Edinburgh and University College London. And she's got like a whole whole globe is open to her. And it's a whole it's a whole... 

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Jon - 00:10:40: That's different. 

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Jason - 00:10:41: The schools are within, you know, 3000 miles of each other. And mine were all within like a two hour drive. But anyway, yeah, that was that was the ambition. I just loved UVA. I loved, you know, the. History of the university and Thomas Jefferson and the Academical Village and how it all the whole evolution of that that sort of piece of the of the state and went there and had an amazing education. And, you know, it was somewhat affordable at that point, although, you know, adjusted for inflation was still pretty affordable these days as an in-state student. I mean, some of the private universities are one hundred thousand dollars a year. Basically now for kids to go to college. I don't know how people make the economics work either, but, you know, staring at a high school senior basically. Yeah. I don't know what to be footing the bill bill for. I'm like scratching my head like how does this happen? But yeah. Yeah. So UVA was a great experience and started my journey in thinking beyond that sort of two hour radius in the center of Virginia that there were actually really interesting things out there in the world that I should go maybe see. 

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Jon - 00:11:40: Absolutely. And I, it's funny, like, as you're telling these like experiences, I also had a similar experience. So I grew up in Berkeley, I only applied to three schools. It was Berkeley, UCLA and Davis. And it just so happened that you can just apply like one click, or like, I guess three clicks, but it's one application. Yeah. And I was being I was like, I don't really want to leave the Bay Area. And I still haven't I'm still like, I'm in San Francisco. So like, my joke is that I was born in Berkeley and now I'm in San Francisco. So I've like been in a, maybe like a seven mile radius, like my whole life, at least. So at least for you, you went beyond the two mile radius. 

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Jason - 00:12:19: At some point I reached escape velocity. 

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Jon - 00:12:21: Yeah, I have not. We have not. I was just like stuck in orbit. I'm like, I guess I'm just in the Bay Area forever now. 

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Jason - 00:12:28: That's right. You could be in worse places for sure. 

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Jon - 00:12:30: Yeah, definitely. So at UVA, I know you focused on your major was government. What was that program like? Were there any professors that kind of like took you under their wing or perhaps inspired you and kicked off this kind of what you said, getting out of orbit or the stratosphere? 

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Jason - 00:12:47: So it's interesting. My mother was a lobbyist at the state level. She lobbied the state government in Virginia. And I got a little exposure to politics through that route. I was a page on the House of Delegates in Richmond. So you go for like six or eight weeks and you take off school as a high school sophomore. You basically carry mail around the Capitol Hill version in Richmond. But you get to see the process up close. And it's enamoring. You know, you get close to politics and it seems really cool. When I went back to D.C.. And later in life, I saw the sausage getting made. It was less less enamoring. But, you know, ultimately, the, you know, Larry Sabato is one of the right that time was one of the political pundits that, you know, was very well known. I took his class kind of intro to politics. And and it was just super interesting. I thought, you know, the kind of psychology behind elections and how people get elected and how the process works was super interesting. And ultimately it came down to political science or history. Uh, history, I had to write a thesis at that point was relatively lazy and decided that political science should be the major and history, the minor versus the other way around. Cause I was interested in both and, and have to write a thesis in political science. So I'm, I'm bearing my soul. I'm telling you all of my secrets here. So it's funny. I was telling someone today who's coming out of their MBA and telling them a little bit about, about my career journey. And you know, when you look at it backwards, it all sounds very well planned and it all fits together nicely. And there's a red thread. When you're in the middle of it, you're just sort of, you know, you're hopping from lily pad to lily pad, you know, trying to make the best decision you can with the information you have at that point. And it seemed to me as a about to be newly graduated, you know, 20, 21 year old that Washington, D.C.. Would be a pretty cool place to go and work and live for a while and go see the political process firsthand. So that's kind of the track that I ended up following as an undergrad and then, you know, just post graduation. I worked for the House Commerce Committee, which makes health care policy. And at that, amongst other things, it does energy. It does, you know, a bunch of different things. But health care kind of caught my interest then. And this is, you know, when would this be? 1998 or 9, something like that. And we were right in the middle of FDA reform. The committee was rewriting the FDA kind of authorization. This was a big deal. And so kind of a lot of exposure to health care issues. And I'm like, you know what? Health care is super interesting. Yeah. And obviously, you know, an outgrowth field. But also, you know, if you're going to have an impact, I realized that actually the private sector was driving change more than the public sector. And that's kind of when the switch flipped for me that I really needed to get to the private side if I wanted to impact patients and impact lives versus being reactive and that were not. 

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Jon - 00:17:16: Yeah, and you're not alone in that sentiment. I had a conversation with Barry Ticho, who's the chief medical officer of Stoke Therapeutics, and he said a similar thing. It wasn't in government, but he was in the academic world for so long. And then he got a taste of what can be done in the private sector. Not to say that academic and nonprofit and government work isn't important. 

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Jason - 00:17:36: It has value. 

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Jon - 00:17:36: It is incredibly important. But to see the speed in which you can have big impact pretty relatively quick, I think is something that I think before, at least when I was at the bench, I was always told if you're going to go to industry, you're going to the dark side. But fortunately, now that sentiment has kind of changed, which is great because I don't think it has to be a dichotomy. It's definitely more of a gradient than anything. And there's always a place for pure research, but there's also a place for collaboration across the opposite ends. So very cool that you kind of had that exposure to healthcare during this kind of this period in DC. That was kind of, you know, maybe not the most fun, but at least you got a spark of inspiration out of it. And maybe you ate Le Diplomate, which is great, too. 

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Jason - 00:18:27: Well, and also, I mean, I think the healthcare bug that really started there and also is right, so 2000, like right at the dot-com bubble, you know, started and then startups, you know, we had sock puppets that were worth billions of dollars. And it was the first wave where actually working in a startup seems super cool. Like this, for US now, like it's been in fashion for now 25 years and everyone's like, yeah, of course. But it wasn't always like that. But if you go to a big company like GE, that's the pinnacle. You know, you sort of reach this industrial conglomerate and working for a startup, like, why would you do that? That's not even a thing. It's just a soon-to-be-failed fall business. You're like, no, no, no, this is interesting. We should listen to this. So I kind of have combined both of those things. So I had the healthcare experience where that stuff was super interesting. I went to a startup, a dot-com startup. It only lasted 10 months. I was the second employee or third employee there. But as you know, with startup companies, we learn a lot quickly. You know, you get sort of 10 years of experience in two years or something. And so it was there that I sort of realized that actually, you know what? I'm kind of really interested in building something. I've never been good at, like, coloring inside the lines. I'm very bad with authority, people telling me what to do, as opposed to my former bosses would contest. So it's kind of that. You know what? I really like healthcare. And startups are cool, even though this one blew up. But I think there's something there, maybe. You know, and those two pieces didn't come together for another five or six years. But I think that was the genesis of it, is those two experiences in Washington. 

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Jon - 00:19:57: Very cool. And I know after your time in D.C., you decided to get your MBA. And can you talk about that process for you and why you chose Columbia? 

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Jason - 00:20:08: Yeah, absolutely. So that was really my opportunity to make the jump from public policy to industry, having learned those things. And again, applied to three schools, applied to Columbia, to Harvard, and to UVA to go back to Charlottesville, which would have been lovely. It's a beautiful place. But I think for that stage of my career, being closer to the pharmaceutical center in New Jersey, and at this point, Boston really wasn't as big a biotech hub as it is now, but a lot of stuff, and the center of finance in New York seemed like an opportunity that shouldn't be passed up. So Columbia was a great choice for me. And we were there in kind of peak New York. So my then girlfriend, now wife, and I moved from D.C. to New York. Three weeks before 9/11 happened. And despite the obvious negatives of that event, it was a great time to be in New York. New Yorkers were proud to be New Yorkers and proud to be Americans. And it was a great time to be in New York. We loved, I mean, you know, student and then, you know, newly married young single couple that didn't have any kids and could, you know, find our way around New York City and enjoy that all it had to offer. So, you know, Columbia was an amazing experience. And it was actually, for most of my life up until that point, I was a big fish in a small pond. I went to kind of a small high school and I was, you know, one of the smarter kids and, you know, did some AP classes and sort of did all right in my grades and played football and did those things that, you know, high school kids do. But I never really kind of, you never really know until you really put it to the test. Like, can I compete? You know, can I hang with the big dogs? 

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Jon - 00:21:52: Yep. Yep. 

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Jason - 00:21:53: And Columbia was a chance for me to do that. You know, Columbia is a fantastic school. It recruits, you know, I think it acceptance rate is in the, you know, mid single digits somewhere. And I was in there with, you know, McKinsey consultants and Goldman Sachs bankers and a bunch of guys that were about to do private equity. And it was just, I was swimming with the sharks and I was just, you know, country bumpkin from Richmond who'd spent a little time in DC. And it was an eye-opening experience for me. It was really, I think for me, the most formative part of my life where, I left my comfort zone, even DC kind of, you know, a few things just tacked on the top of Virginia. It's kind of, it's all, and there's tons of UVA people there. So it felt kind of safe. But going to New York was like going to the big city and it was scary. And so that was an awesome experience for me. I mean, I think, you know, they say about MBA, you know, it's the network, it's the reputation. You know, I remember maybe two or three factoids from classes, but you know, it's the content is less important than the rest of it. So taking advantage of the learning campus in New York City, you know, street accident, you know, Pfizer's headquarters was there, access to New Jersey and the kind of biopharma hubs there was an opportunity to really, you know, expand my horizons. And, you know, I think 30% of my class was international at Columbia. And to think, hey, you know, there's a whole big wide world out there outside of not only Virginia, but also out of the US. So that might have foreshadowed some of my future decision-making, which I'm sure we'll get to. 

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Jon - 00:23:21: Absolutely um and my wife and i always wonder what it would be like to go live in New York kind of what you're describing before yeah we don't have children yet but we're like this is like a finite window in time when you can do this and actually enjoy New York but then when that switches and you do have children, New York becomes, it goes from awesome to maybe not so awesome. Kind of like. 

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Jason - 00:23:43: Totally unmanageable. Yeah. No, I think. 

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Jon - 00:23:46: Yeah. Not so awesome. 

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Jason - 00:23:48: Top 0.01% of wage earners having children in New York is impossible. So people move out. But yeah, it's a great time. And I would argue at some point everyone should live in New York City just to give it a go and see what it's like because it's a great place. It has its own energy and its own vibe. It's unlike any other city in the world. 

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Jon - 00:24:04: Absolutely. And as you're kind of like reflecting on your time at Columbia, were there any like memorable challenges or triumphs or standout moments of your graduate school experience that you can recollect? 

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Jason - 00:24:15: There's actually two that kind of jumped to mind. One is, so I had a, they call it an integrated project, an IP group, IP team that you get put with in your first year when you're doing an integrated project, as you might imagine, that kind of brings together different parts of the curriculum. And there was a woman who had gone to Dartmouth, who'd grown up in Rockland County, New York. There was a guy who'd grown up in Delhi, India, went to Penn, and then made his way to Columbia. There was a guy who'd grown up in the UK. His grandparents, I think, were the first patrons of Van Gogh. 

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Jon - 00:24:52: Oh, my God. 

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Jason - 00:24:53: A collective mix of people that I would have never been exposed to had I not had this experience and gone to Columbia. Those folks are still great friends. And I remember some very late nights working with them, two or three in the morning. When everyone wanted to go home, it was usually Deb and I who were the last ones. We've got to fix this paragraph. It doesn't quite work. We were the word people, and they were the analysts. And together, we made a great team. And then we added another member who was from Canada, and she was great. So it's just like that. That experience of working in that totally diverse international team, totally different from anyone I'd ever really spent time with, was just such a great experience. And again, sort of awakened my passion to say there's just so much else out there. And the kind of having that international experience, you know, thinking way back to my dad going to Japan, as I said, sort of like the international realm and opportunity was just so appealing. You know, at that point, working with an international team and doing great work. And we happened to get on that particular project, the highest grade in the class. Not that I'm bragging now. We had a great time and had some great work. So that was one. And then there was another one. There was a Turner-Arons class. This is one of the few bits that I remember. And it was one of those that really, there were two things that just like moments of, you know, when you get those like lightning bolts moments of clarity, like you're just like, yeah, of course. So there was a project, the very first project we had to work on, our case study. There was no solution. The point of it was there wasn't a solution. And he spent hours like agonizing over this thing. Like, why is it not working? Like, why is there no answer here? And Sean Edgett, the guy from Delhi just came in. He's like, we just need to do this. We just need to like, you know, for him, because his family was in business. He's like, we should just factor the receivables. I don't know, make it like 8%, whatever the number is. And we're like, okay, that sounds like a reasonable solution. But ultimately, the answer was, to choose the least worst option. You know, they gave you a set of options. None of them were particularly good. You know, you looked at the cost of capital to do various different things. And you said, I'm going to pick the least worst option. There is no right answer, but the least worst option is the right answer. And I think that that parable kept me in good stead for the rest of my career, because there's not always a great answer. Sometimes the least worst answer is the right answer. And that is certainly the case in startups where, you know, there's not always an obvious path forward. And sometimes you just have to make the least worst choice. 

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Jon - 00:27:27: That is incredible. You know, you mentioned that the, you know, the MBA is more about the network, but these are like real lessons. Like these are like real, real lessons. Like that's like an educational experience. I don't know if it's just the network. 

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Jason - 00:27:39: Yeah, there's a couple of golden nuggets in there. There's another one I'll tell you, which I'll never forget. So actually, funnily enough, a guy that I knew in high school from Richmond, different high school, but sort of knew each other. We then went to UVA together. Fraternities were great friends in uni and continue to be great friends. He ended up at Columbia in the same class. 

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Jon - 00:27:57: Oh, wow. 

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Jason - 00:27:58: And like, I know this guy. Like, I hadn't known this guy since I was like 16 for the better part of a decade. Like, I know this person. I know how he thinks. We were in negotiations plots, and we were tasked with splitting up a dollar. And the rules were, the person who made the offer, I forget exactly how it works, I'm going to butcher the explanation, but you'll get the point, which is essentially, so I had a dollar, and they had to make a bid. And if they made a bid that matched what I was willing to accept, then we would do a deal. And if they didn't, then we wouldn't effectively. And so the rational play to split a dollar, if you've got zero and I've got a dollar, you should be willing to take any bid greater than one penny because you're better off having one penny than no pennies. That's the rational play. And this guy was like an analyst in a mutual fund, like analyzing stocks and like most, you know, whatever that is, left brain or, you know, it's the most analytical person. And I'm like, clearly he's going to do the rational thing. So I said, I said, I'd be willing to accept any bid over three cents or under three cents, whatever it is, because, you know, maybe he's got a little bit of irrationality, but he's not going to be full. So he, what was the bid he offered? 50 cents. The only amount he'd be willing to take was 50 cents or more. I said, why? You have zero. And so we both ended up with zero because we couldn't make a deal. I said, you should be happy with anything over one cent. He's like, yeah, but it's not fair. And I'm like, fairness has nothing to do with this. What do you mean? This is a rationalist of business deal. And I said, if it was a million dollars, what would your bid have been? He was like, yeah, like a hundred bucks. And I'm like, not 500,000? No, of course not. But he's like, the order of magnitude matters. And I'm like, that makes no sense, but I get it. We're not rational beings. We do things that are emotional. And you're like, well, screw it for one penny. I'm not doing that unless it's 50 cents, 50 cents. So, you know, there are a couple of things that, again, the people not being rational beings, making rational decisions is another lesson that you carry forward with you and say, you know what, actually the rational decision would be that. Probably that's not going to be where we end up. 

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Jon - 00:29:58: Totally. And there's a bunch of things that are coming to mind. Like, I guess on the first one, on your kind of integrated project, I think that's like a crash course of like, just like, how do you work efficiently with just like different styles and cultural kind of norms? And like in a startup, you're going to have that ultimately because like people are like from different walks of life and like people are going to be extroverted, introverted. People are going to be more like math oriented or more like quantitative versus qualitative. And I think that's like incredibly important that like that lesson you probably experienced firsthand like early on in a kind of a project like that is you can't just like bludgeon, like we're going to do it this way, my way or the highway, or it just doesn't work that way. And so that's like the first thing that came to my mind. 

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Jason - 00:30:46: I was going to say at Ori, we certainly learned that lesson in that we've got a very large engineering team. And engineers come from an archetype and you're attracted to things for a reason. And engineering is one of those things that very sort of analytical, math-minded folks are attracted to. And we've got a lot of biologists. And, you know, in biology, there's a lot of, you know, art. And there's, you know, biology doesn't always behave like it should. And it's not always right. Biology is not always rational. And bringing those two groups together and getting them to work together in a very effective way, which we have done because we have fantastic people at Ori, wasn't the easiest. You know, having a lot of biologists and a lot of engineers that have to work together on a day-to-day basis was just not on a larger scale. 

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Jon - 00:31:31: Absolutely and I think that's like at least for me i i've always felt like i was like more of like a generalist than i that's why i'm still i'm not in the lab anymore it's because i was like dang my colleagues over there who can just like go deep super deep and just focus like that that wasn't me like i can go deep but like that level of dedication and like kind of yeah precision i was like oh i don't got that but um kind of like how do you make these like differing kind of approaches like harmonize which is like incredibly important because if you don't it's going to be kind of a zero-sum situation where one person's like you know we're doing it the engineering way and then everything else atrophies and you're just like oh my god we have to work together we're on a team 

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Jason - 00:32:14: No, I mean, people management, you know, engineers, people management, these things can be tough. 

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Jon - 00:32:20: Yeah, absolutely. 

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Jason - 00:32:23: The EQ and the IQ both have to be engaged. We can't have too much IQ and not enough EQ. 

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Jon - 00:32:27: Absolutely. And on the turnaround experience, that's like super fascinating too. And I think, you know, coming out of school, I felt like there's always going to be an answer, a right and wrong. But that experience is just like, no, like there isn't. But a decision needs to be made. Like also like indecision is not the right decision either. 

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Jason - 00:32:48: That's right. You're making a decision to not make a decision. And that's not, you know, that's not going to move the ball forward. No, exactly right. You have to choose a path. And that's what, you know, now I sit on a couple boards of startups and, you know, obviously I'm a full-time operator and CEO at Ori. And, you know, I counsel the team, the leadership team and the boards, the kind of leadership teams, the companies I sit on to say, just make a decision. You can course correct. You know, you don't have all the information. It's always going to be an imperfect situation, but make the best decision you can, the information you have, and retain the optionality to flex if you have to. And that's the, definitely not making a decision is the worst of the options. Because that will definitely lead to a bad outcome. 

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Jon - 00:33:28: Absolutely and I know it can feel like especially when you're posed with two hard decisions and you're just like the inactions like comfortable it's like you're just a you're forestalling the inevitable but like that is not what you want to do like that is not what you want to do you end up getting in the worst of it. 

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Jason - 00:33:46: Exactly it's even worse when you're using resources to get more and more data and do more and more analysis to do more and more analysis paralysis you know it's sort of that's a way to look like we're doing something valuable but just avoid making a decision uh and so i think that people do often fall into that trap of well we'll just you know we'll we'll do we'll interview a few more key opinion leaders or we'll just buy this report or we'll look through that data when you know it's probably on the margin not going to make a difference and they just should be making a decision 

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Jon - 00:34:17: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it was Bezos who this is attributed to. It's just like one way doors versus two way doors where like if the decision is like a one way door and you know you can't don't have the option to go back. Think long and hard about that one. 

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Jason - 00:34:31: Yeah. 

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Jon - 00:34:32: But if it's a two way door, send it like just send it and then you can course correct. Like there's no reason to be like hemming and hawing over it. And then the last point about your your third kind of learned moment of the rational kind of like decision making. Like it's interesting because my my co-founder. Is in private equity and he's very like hyper rational, a student of game theory, like just like. I am, I'm the guy who plays hearts and shoots the moon every time. And he's like, why? 

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Jason - 00:35:07: Why would you do that? 

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Jon - 00:35:09: And I'm like, why not? I'm like, why not? 

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Jason - 00:35:12: Great compliment. Yeah. 

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Jon - 00:35:14: And I think that's something too, like early days, I thought that especially doing sales for Excedr when it was just me just like pounding the pavement was that I thought like sales was like a rational decision. But oftentimes, it is not like it is very much like an emotional one. There's like, I would even argue that it's primarily emotional, and kind of like you're navigating kind of status, like what, how are people going to reputation, like you're all of these things, the numbers could look perfect. But if you don't line up these other aspects, you're not going to get across the line, which can be frustrating. 

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Jason - 00:35:52: 100%. Yeah, no, there's tons of great literature about effective sales. And the Challenger Sales, one of the better books that I read around these things. And, you know, they talk about essentially, this is, sales is a human endeavor. You know, one of my mentors used to say, there's nothing happening in a sales call or sales meeting other than one human being talking to another human being. That's literally all this out. And so how you build rapport, how you establish a relationship, how you effectively match and discover and actively listen and question to understand the real needs of what's trying to solve, what's motivating them. And trying to match what you have to offer with what they need. I mean, that is the art of selling. And what's really frustrating in the UK, the NHS is, you know, obviously the National Health Service, the public payer healthcare system is an incredibly challenging customer for startup health tech businesses in the UK because you don't know what they care about. So I vastly prefer... A private company that you understand, they want to make money. Great, do you want to make money? We can figure out all the ways in which we can help you improve quality, make money, and do all the things you want to do. And that's a much easier conversation to have. And so you can have bigger purposes around it. But ultimately, and I think what people don't appreciate, I think that the pharma industry, which I've been part of for 25 years or so in different guises, has done probably the worst job of any industry of PR, of demonstrating and clearly articulating the value that they have created. If you look at the lifespans globally, they continue to increase. Knowing people in their 90s and 100s is commonplace these days, especially in different parts of the world. A lot of that is due to the pharmaceutical interventions that exist today that didn't exist 50 years ago. But if you look at the list of industries that people hate, pharmaceuticals is like right above oil and gas and, you know, tobacco. It's like literally at the bottom of the list. And you're like, how is this possible? If you go to the doctor and you've got, I don't know, whatever, you've got a problem. If they don't write you a prescription, you're like. What are you doing? Like, you're not even practicing medicine if I don't walk out of here with a prescription. You know, it's such a norm. But again, you think about, well, actually, you know, people in industry are afraid to say, like, we're a for-profit company. We have to make money. So that we can invest in the next generation of therapies. Everyone has to understand that this is a for-profit effort. This is not a non-for-profit effort. So it's that kind of, you know, thing. I think it's just sometimes I just, things don't make sense to me. But that sales conversation of trying to match and trying to build relationships and, you know, people, that's what they say, people buy from people, right? And it's, you know, does this person understand me? Can they help me? Do they have my best interest in mind? At least parallel with their own, you know, those kinds of things are what sell. So not, you know, if you're talking about ours is better than theirs. 

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Jon - 00:39:27: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That always is like insufficient, insufficient. My first kind of foray into sales for Excedr was the UC system and Lawrence Berkeley, which was like, okay, we have the state level and then we're doing federal sales too. I didn't know better. So I was like, I went, jumped headfirst into just like a pool of sharks. I was like, I was getting eviscerated. 

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Jason - 00:39:51: I'm in the wrong place. 

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Jon - 00:39:52: Yeah, I got eviscerated. I was just a bench scientist. And I just thought that selling the feature and selling just like this number is better than this number, like, right. Better than theirs. Yeah. Yeah. And it was just like, they're like, you can just see like nods, but like people were just not really that into it. Yeah. And then we ended up refocusing to exactly what you mentioned, the private sector, where that is a little bit more clear. It's not always crystal clear, but it was like a little bit more clear. You know, something, too, is that our businesses being in science, it can almost give you the false sense that everything is rational. Because it's kind of like empirical, published, peer-reviewed. 

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Jason - 00:40:31: Peer-reviewed, and that means something. 

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Jon - 00:40:33: Yeah, but at the end of the day, it's again, it's all comprised of people who are emotional. So it's like, if you try to, you know, ignore that aspect, or that it's kind of the other half of the coin, you're at a significant disadvantage. And even science and the sciences, broadly speaking, you know, have that aspect to it, like it or not. 

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Jason - 00:40:55: If you think about it, like even peer review, you just think about what that is, that is third party endorsement, right? Emma, New England Journal, The Lancet. Is leveraging the reputation of those journals and the reviewers, the peers that are reviewing the proxy trust that they have. To get validation for your idea. It's a human endeavor. It has nothing to do, really, with the quality of the science. We assume that it does, and that's how things end up in that publication. But again, it's humans communicating with other humans. And in that case, you're using essentially third-party validation, which is a very powerful sales technique. Who else, you know, when they ask you, who else is using this? Oh, well, this big company that you've heard of rather than this company over here you've never heard of before. It makes a difference. You know, this is how human beings think and how we operate. 

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Jon - 00:41:47: Absolutely. It's funny. So my wife worked at the Public Library of Science. So kind of similar to your DC experience, I kind of, via osmosis, I was like, seeing how the peer review process works. And everyone has different interests too. And you're just like, how can this be purely objective? Like, it is actually impossible. Obviously, there's an attempt to be, and not to say that, but still, it is unavoidable that there's going to be this kind of human irrationality. 

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Jason - 00:42:16: Wherever there's humans involved, there is bias. 

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Jon - 00:42:20: Exactly. So you're wrapping up your time at Columbia. Did you know where you're heading next? Can you talk a little bit about what was kind of the next phase of your journey? 

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Jason - 00:42:30: Yeah, so Columbia was an opportunity for me to switch from the public sector to the private sector. So I really wanted to get into the private sector of healthcare. And I thought pharmaceuticals was the place where I could go and learn a lot and make a difference. And that sounded interesting. You were probably not alive then or certainly very young. You know, in 2000, the dot-com bubble, there were incredible amounts of economic activity. I think from the year 2001, when I started business school, August 2001, that prior spring, the May graduating class of 2001, from Columbia alone, so that has 600-odd students at that point, 68 of them got hired by McKinsey, just from Columbia. 

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Jon - 00:43:13: Oh, my God. 

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Jason - 00:43:14: That's how bubbly the inflection record was at that point. And I'm like, you know, I got into Columbia. This is going to be awesome. I'm going to be picking from offers. It's going to be fab. 9/11 happens. The whole economy flips over. There are no jobs. Like literally by 2003, when I went to get a job, there were no jobs. And so, you know, I was very lucky that I met a Columbia alumni at Merck. So it was the Merck Medco on the Medco side, on the PBM side at that point. I didn't really know what a PBM was. I knew Merck, but, you know, sort of fully vaguely. And was lucky enough to get into a management rotational program at Medco, in the Medco division, which shortly after got spun out of Merck. So it was Merck Medco, and then she became Medco Health Solutions after that. But it was literally my only option. I would have been, you know, panhandling on the street or something with all the other former MBAs, trying to, you know, make ends meet if I hadn't gotten a job at Medco. But it turned into a fantastic learning experience, and I still have some great friends from that. So, you know, as I said, when I tell it in retrospect, it all sounds extremely well-planned. But, you know, you got to work hard, you got to get lucky, you got to, you know, work the relationships. And again, this individual really helped me sort of, it wasn't even public that they had this program. So it was, he helped me get in the door and get an interview. The rest is history, as they say. So, you know, I was really excited to get into industry, get a toehold wherever I could, and learned a huge amount about how, you know, drugs get priced, about how they get accessed by patients, how they get to pharmacies, pharmacy contracting, rebates. I mean, incredible formularies, P&T committees, all this stuff that, like, most people have no clue what they even are. Market access strategies, health economics. Like, this was all an amazing education about how drugs actually get priced, how they get made accessible for patients. And so it was a great introduction to the industry, which I didn't realize I was getting, but did end up getting while I was there. 

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Jon - 00:45:19: Sounds like a baptism of fire to me. Because, like, for me, I've always lived in, like, the preclinical world. Like, there's, like, a distant future. Everyone's crossing their fingers for an approval that this thing is going to actually go out and get commercialized and actually get into the hands of patients. And, you know, the lucky few do get through. But after that, it's kind of like this, like, black box. They're like... All right, it's like, now that's over there. That's for you guys to handle. So I can't imagine you probably were just, it was just like complete mind expansion of like seeing how this apparatus works. And, you know, after Merck Medco and obviously the split, it sounds like you got the hands-on tactical experience in the pharma industry. What was next after the Medco experience? 

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Jason - 00:46:05: So I was at Medco for like two and a half years. I did two jobs there. So I studied marketing. And what I love about marketing is there's a huge amount of psychology about why people choose to buy. And, you know, we talk a little bit about sales, but the psychology behind influencing purchase decisions, super interesting. A little bit of game theory, as we talked about earlier. So I was working functionally in marketing within Medco. And then I got to start my own division. So I went from what they called home delivery marketing. So they have a mail order pharmacy where people can get drugs shipped to their homes, bypassing like a CVS or a Walgreens or whomever. Started out there and then moved to start an organization called Field Marketing, which essentially supported the sales team with sales collateral, if you would, around 11 different lines of business in Medco. So I got to learn the whole business from end to end, what every individual kind of product offering, if you will, was within the business. But I also got the flavor of starting my own thing. Within a big business, I got to start a division, you know, a subdivision that didn't exist before. And so I had creative license to kind of define what it was and work with a lot of stakeholders. I got my, I got to manage my first employee, you know, Paula, if you're out there, you know, hope you hope you're doing well. She was awesome. And, you know, got some of those life experiences that were beneficial, you know, moving forward. I'm like, you know what? I really like this thing. This kind of, running my own show in this little, in this little corner of Medco. And at that point decided that, you know, I was going to go try something different. It was kind of like big company, got an experience, got a little taste of something smaller inside. That was interesting. Um, but I really wasn't working in pharma. I was working in managed care. It's a little bit different. PBMs are adjacent. I went to a small boutique consultancy, which at the time was called Campbell Alliance, for a very short period, to try my hand at pharma consulting. And at that phase, the government had instituted Medicare Part D, which, as you know, is the drug benefit for Medicare, which didn't used to cover pharmaceuticals. And that was a massive time of opportunity for the industry that I was trying to figure out, do we participate? You know, don't we participate? You know, there was something called the donut hole. No one understood what that was. There was all this new regulation and new stuff to learn. So I did a lot of Part D work in my short time there with big companies, you know, big pharma companies that everyone knows the name of. And that was super interesting. And at that point, when I was looking to move from Medco to something else, I had a job search running and a job opportunity came up in Richmond, Virginia. And I'm like, well, that's actually pharmaceutical marketing, brand management in Richmond, Virginia. There's like... One company. That's a pharmaceutical company. But at that point, as we talked about, you know, my wife and I had been a couple of years married. We were thinking about maybe it might be time to have a kid. We live in Manhattan in a one bedroom apartment. That's not going to work. So a couple of things sort of came together. And so I ended up getting a job at what was then a very, very small part of the large conglomerate called Reckitt Benckiser. Reckitt Benckiser is not a company most people know the name of, but they know their products like Lysol and Dr. Scholl's. And there's a bunch of brands that sort of in the U.S. Are very common. They compete with P&G and Colgate, Palmolive and Corox and those guys. But they had a very small pharmaceutical division in Richmond, Virginia, which was unknown to me until then. But I remember I couldn't go down for an interview. I had to fly down on a Saturday morning. And the CEO and my eventual boss that had a marketing came in on a Saturday morning to interview me. And we walked in and the floors were sticky because they were replacing the carpet. And it was just like a big room. Like literally there was no one in this huge room. I'm like, how many people work for this company? And they're like, you'd be the fifth one. You'd be the fifth person. I'm like, okay. This sounds interesting. Is this a real company or not? 

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Jon - 00:50:08: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Am I going to get kidnapped? Like this is like, are you trying to trap me here? 

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Jason - 00:50:13: Yeah, it was a little bit like, you know, Boiler Room or Office Space where there's like this weird, you know, faux office setup. So it was a small molecule company, specialty pharmaceuticals, operating a really interesting part of the market in addiction medicine. So opioid addiction pretty much up until that point. And then, you know, 2000, three, four or five was really heroin addiction. And it was only treated by methadone. And, you know, everyone has the social stigma associated with heroin use. You kind of have a picture of what that looks like in your mind. But about that time, OxyContin started and sort of the prescription opioids started. And we all know how that story ends. And this company offered an office-based alternative to methadone. So I could go to my GP and get treated, you know, with a prescription in a normal fashion. And if I was, you know, a soccer mom or a lot of people, former athletes, a lot of people got addicted to opioids because they have surgery. And then, you know, maybe they have a sports injury or whatever, a backache. And so people kind of, you know, innocently wander into this. And then for whatever reason, you know, the addiction is a DSM, you know, DSM-5 now criteria. It's a psychological condition. And so people, most people don't realize that. And they think it's just bad people doing bad things. It's a moral problem when actually it's a psychological condition. And so I learned a huge amount about not only pharmaceuticals and brand management, but also addiction medicine around psychiatric disorders and all kinds of other incredible lessons. But being the fifth employee in that business, it brought me, brought the US back to Virginia where my daughter was born. And we did, you know, sort of bought a house and a white picket fence and a dog and sort of settled into that experience in 2006 it was. Grew that business from five people to 400 people in four years. So massive growth. I think I trained the first like 220 salespeople in that business. So it was a really, again, another baptism by fire. You know, it was kind of that small opportunity right in the heart of the industry I wanted to be in. What a chance to really learn a lot and, you know, color outside the lines and have a big impact. So we grew that business very quickly. Make real a billion in revenue ultimately. We built an incredible franchise. I think we used to count the number of patients that got treated by average doses and try to calculate who was ending up on therapy. But we think a million people got therapy when I was there. That may have not had treatment otherwise. And, you know, addiction is a family disease. It impacts another three or four people around the individual. It has huge economic impacts on families. And so you felt really good about that and offering this alternative to people that probably wouldn't have gone, you know, to the wrong side of the tracks to get methadone or never, you know, never would have considered it because that's for heroin addicts. I'm just taking too many pills. So there was all of that stuff going on. But it was an incredible experience going from five to 400. And then in 2010, the CEO said, hey, do you want to go to Europe and help start the European business? You know, I'm looking at my two-year-old daughter, my house I just bought, my wife pregnant, five months pregnant with our son. Like, huh, this isn't great timing. You know, we're a mile down the street from my parents, you know, babysitting. But, you know, the opportunity to kind of realize that dream of international business and going to live somewhere else and experience another culture was too good a draw. You know, my wife had done a summer at Regions College and loved London and it seemed like a good fit. So we ended up, you know, blowing up our whole life in Richmond, which was supposed to be like forever, and moving to London, which was a whole other startup experience in the same company on a different continent. 

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Outro - 00:54:10: Thanks for joining us on this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast featuring Jason Foster. Be sure to tune in for part two, where Jason reflects on his transition to the healthcare sector, his insights into scaling startups, and the pivotal moments that shaped Ori Biotech's mission. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your friends. See you next time. The Biotech Startups Podcast is produced by Excedr. Don't want to miss an episode? Search for The Biotech Startups Podcast wherever you get your podcasts and click subscribe. Excedr provides research labs with equipment leases on founder-friendly terms to support paths to exceptional outcomes. To learn more, visit our website, https://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.