Neela Patel | Part 1: Finding the Intersection of Science & 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. 

 Jon - 00:00:23: My guest today is Neela Patel, Chief Business Officer at Bonum Therapeutics. Neela is a seasoned scientist and business development executive with more than 30 years of leadership experience in drug discovery and development, project and portfolio management, and pipeline development through internal and external innovation. Prior to Bonum, Neela was Chief Business Development Officer at Good Therapeutics, where she orchestrated the Roche acquisition and spin-out of Bonum. Previously, she was also an Executive Director of CorpDev at Seattle Genetics, Director of Search and Evaluation at AbbVie, and Director of Global External Research at AbbVie. Before AbbVie and AbbVie, Neela spent the first 16 years of her career in drug discovery, advancing many drug candidates into the clinic at Poniard Pharmaceuticals, Genentech, SUGEN Pharmacia, and Roche Bioscience. Her deep expertise in drug discovery, business development, and management makes her conversation one that founders can't afford to miss. Over the next four episodes, we cover Neela's journey from childhood to biotech leadership. We explore her multidisciplinary academic career and transition to industry. We also delve into her leadership roles at numerous elite pharmaceutical companies, highlighting extensive work in drug discovery and pipeline strategy. Finally, we discuss her leadership position at Good Therapeutics, its acquisition by Roche, and her current role as CBO at Bonum Therapeutics, where they're spearheading development of innovative oncology therapies. Today, we'll talk with Neela about her upbringing in an intellectual household, exploring how her father, a physicist at Bell Labs, shaped her leadership style and curiosity for science. We'll hear about her dual major in the humanities and biology in college, and how an internship at Genentech sparked her passion for the life sciences. We also the challenges and triumphs of her graduate school experience at UCLA and her decision to move from academia to industry. Without further ado, let's dive into this episode of the Biotech Startups Podcast. Neela, it's so good to see you again. Thanks for coming on the podcast. 

Neela - 00:02:08: Likewise, Jon. Really a pleasure to be here with you.

Jon - 00:02:10: Yeah, we've really been looking forward to it. You know, as we were doing our homework and research and just, you know, always thinking about the origin story and where you got your start, we thought it would be great to turn back the hands of time and really go back to the earliest days for you and really kind of pick your brain on what got you into science, what has influenced your leadership style and business philosophy, and really tell us more about what was your early upbringing like?

Neela - 00:02:38: Well, I was really lucky. I grew up in a fairly intellectual household. My dad is a scientist. He's a physicist by training, and he worked at Bell Labs, which you might be a bit young to remember, but it was sort of a mecca.

 Jon - 00:02:53: Yeah, I've heard. I've heard.

Neela - 00:02:55: Yeah, yeah. So he worked there and all of our family friends work there as well. My mom's also super smart, very high EQ, always very supportive. And one of the things that I remember my dad saying to me was, always hire people who are smarter than you are. And kind of implicit in that is you have to have the confidence, right? And also your focus is on what you're trying to get done, not on your personal glory and self. And I've always done that when I've needed to hire and it works. It works like a charm, right?

Jon - 00:03:37: And I think too, something that it's kind of like... You got to like just like swallow the pride. And also like I think for me, early days and those early kind of hires and just kind of I think it stems back to when I was playing sports. I haven't played team sports in a long time, but like early days, I remember like I want to be the star. Like I want to be the star. And then I saw as a team, we weren't winning when we should have been. We were aspiring to go all the distance and win the championship, obviously. But I just was in my own way by like having this ego and not really embracing the fact that, hey, like, actually, this is a team game here. And we all stand to benefit by bringing in exactly what you said, people who are, you know, a cut above us.

Neela - 00:04:26: Yeah. It's incredible how well it works.

Jon - 00:04:28: Yeah. And so you mentioned your father was in Bell Labs and, you know, in your household, was science always kind of like, was that like a dinner conversation? What was that like? What was the kind of growing up, the dinner, the dinner table conversations for you?

Neela - 00:04:43: The dinner conversations weren't always about science because my mom's not in the science field. But my parents were very engaged in the issues of the day. You know, I remember their conversations. I remember about the Vietnam War, which was really weighed on both of them very heavily. And in fact, my father took me to protests down in DC. I was five years old and, you know.

Jon - 00:05:07: Yeah, early, early, early.

Neela - 00:05:09: That sort of thing. But they always talked about substantive things. They cared about hearing how my sister and I, how our days were and things. But they wanted real answers. So, you know, there were a lot of books in the house. My dad read a lot of science. Often in the evenings, he would be reading scientific journals and things like that. And he tended to give me science books as gifts.

Jon - 00:05:34: Yeah. Thanks, Dad. Like, I want the fun books. I want the fantasy books for once, please. 

Neela - 00:05:43: Exactly. But they, but they, I mean, he gave me, they were interesting. They were interesting. And then because they, they both were engaged in social issues, you know, they gave me like a biography of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, you know, it was like, it was that sort of a household. And certainly a lot of support for whatever I was interested in. So we had a great library in the town and I just, I could bike to it and I'd fill up my basket with books and just, you know.

Jon - 00:06:10: Awesome. I love that because the. Feeding that curiosity, I think is like critically important. It's like wherever that whatever that might be, like, you know, whether it is science, or whether it is, you know, social issues, you know, whether it's math, whatever. And as you were like, in your early, like early schooling, high school, college, did you know that, like, when did it start to form for you that you're like, okay, like, science was, you know, kind of where I'm I want to focus on?

Neela - 00:06:40: Yeah, it kind of came a little late for me, I would say, relative to a number of my peers, in a sense that in high school, I was maybe equally good on the science and the English or, you know, the other side of the brain. And when I was in college, I first declared a major in humanities. That was really my first love for literature, for history, art, politics, how those all fit together in a culture. And I realized that one of my general education courses was to take a biology intro level course. And it was with a professor who married genetics, evolution and ecology. And I just got so excited that I was like, oh, this is really, really interesting. So I declared my second major later in my college career. And I still didn't know when I was coming after my fourth year, and I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do. I actually spent two more quarters to finish the second degree. And I wanted to stay out here in California for a summer, my friends were staying out, I wanted to be, you know, it was one of those things. I went to the Career Center, and I saw this ad for internships at Genentech. And this was, this is in 1986. So Genentech was not an established name company. It was in one building, it was an unreconstructed warehouse. And I was like, well, I'll just give it a try. They pay, like, I don't know, $700 a week. That's a lot of money. I'm making up a number. But it was, you know, to me, it was like, oh, this is amazing, right?

Jon - 00:08:25: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Neela - 00:08:27: I realized when I started working there that I could do something that was intellectually stimulating and had the possibility to make other people's lives better. And I kind of... Bandered about the idea of going to med school. And I just didn't think that psychologically, I had what it took to work with sick people every day. And I didn't want to do medicine and just deal with well people. I'm like, what the hell is the point of that? You know what I mean?

 Jon - 00:08:58: That's exactly it. That's exactly it. And I think something too, I think I I had a similar journey in that way. Where I was like, you're going to be interfacing with patients all the time. And you got to find energy out of that. But I think something was grueling as hard as that. You don't actually get an interface with a patient. Like, and like, you don't know what you're actually getting into for a long time until you, and you have to declare like being a pre-med almost like out of the womb, like almost like I'm on the track, like I'm on the track. And I, I, by the way, I felt the same exact way. I was like. I don't know, but sorry to interrupt. That was like, I took a similar parallel path with my journey.

Neela - 00:09:38: Yeah, absolutely. And I guess the other thing is that I found out later, you know, in work settings where they do Myers-Briggs, that I'm right on the line between introvert and extrovert. And I really do get my energy by doing things on my own. I enjoy people, but it's not the thing that charges me up. And I realized that in some ways, the lab work and the science was sort of the ideal for me because I did contemplate even after that experience, I was like, okay, I'm pretty sure I'm going to grad school. If I go into history or art history or whatever, I'm pretty much going to be working by myself in the archives. Then I'll have students, but it's like a on your own thing. And the thing I loved about that experience at Genentech and the lab that I worked in as an undergrad is that there was togetherness, but also apartness, right? You're working on a commonality. You're working on a commonality. You're working on a common goal, but each person's doing a piece of it. So I really, I like that. And it really was very motivating to me when I looked around. It was just the edge, the beginning edge of the biotechnology revolution, right? Where people were starting to think about protein therapeutics. There were no antibodies marketed. It was not like that, right? Antibodies were still a dream. Like how can you even make such a thing? And how could that be a drug? But protein therapeutics were really emergent. And it was very exciting to think about all the ways in which those had the potential to really make a difference for human health.

Jon - 00:11:14: That's incredible. And I mean, the opportunity to have an internship at Genentech at like the ground floor is kind of like... What a like amazing star, like alignment of stars. And you're just like, holy crap, this is crazy. 

Neela - 00:11:29: I was so lucky.

Jon - 00:11:31: Because in undergraduate, it's like hard. I think everyone who's kind of gone through that process, there's kind of like this existential dread of like, what's next? What's next? And being at Genentech, it's like, oh, like that's like a home run. That's like a grand slam when it comes to exposure.

Neela - 00:11:47: Exactly. I was very fortunate. Afterwards, my sister joked to me, she's like, It's too bad they didn't give you any stock options.

Jon - 00:11:55: Yeah, I know. We would be, before we hit record, you'd be in Hawaii, you'd be on Hawaii after your undergraduate and just like, you would be just relaxing.

Neela - 00:12:07: Exactly, exactly.

Jon - 00:12:08: That's amazing. And, you know, just really quickly, during your undergrad at Stanford, so for me, I had a similar experience for a moment. I almost was considering double majoring in philosophy. I still took philosophy classes, but I didn't actually declare it. So I'm curious, when you pick the humanities, does Stanford make you focus in on the classics or anything? Or is it kind of more broad and general?

Neela - 00:12:37: Well, they had traditional degrees, like you could get a degree in English or history or poli sci, right? I did a self-designed humanities major that was multidisciplinary, so that I could look at all the different aspects. And I was focused on 19th century Europe, and I was looking at the art, the history, the philosophy, like all those different pieces and kind of how they fit together. So you're right, it wasn't a traditional major, but... I've always been interested in that cross-disciplinary. And it's, in fact, something that I love about drug discovery itself is that really, if you're going to go from an idea to a product, there's not one of us who has all the expertise in our heads to do that, right? I can't be a basic biology person and be a PK-ADME expert and be a toxicology expert and be a clinical design, you know, clinical trial design expert. That's just, that's not happening, right?

Jon - 00:13:37: No, not at all. And I definitely, that definitely resonates with me too, is that the, I'm a big proponent of having like this kind of breadth of education and, and you don't necessarily need to be like the best in like that breadth of coverage, but like, it definitely is beneficial to at least have like kind of a higher level understanding. So when you interface with a true expert, like the toxicologist or like, it's not like a complete foreign language. You're like. I'm with you. Okay. I'm with you. We can, we can keep this going. We can keep this going. And so on the biology side, I'm always curious about this kind of first lab experience. How did you land your undergraduate lab role?

Neela - 00:14:22: You know, it's now in the distant past. And I think that... A number of professors there would advertise if they were willing to take an undergrad in their lab. You know, so you kind of go around and you quasi interview, you know.

Jon - 00:14:36: Yeah.

Neela - 00:14:37: Most of us, hardly anybody that I knew who got a lab job already had lab experience by the time they got to college. It was a different world. Like nowadays, so many high school students are like super achievers. Like they practically done a PhD by the time.

Jon - 00:14:50: I know.

Neela - 00:14:51: You know, it's like I'll bow down to them. But that wasn't, you know, in the era that I was going to college, that wasn't the case. So I was fortunate that a microbiology lab took me in. I have to say, looking back, I was probably more of a burden than a help.

Jon - 00:15:09: I make the same observation. I was clearly a liability in the lab. I was like contaminating the cell lines. And they're like, not, no, like we were working so hard to maintain these. Like. We just wanted to teach you how to pipette and you ended up ruining everything. Sorry, same experience.

Neela - 00:15:30: So yeah, I mean, I did learn some things, but I am doubtful that I generated any meaningful data for them.

Jon - 00:15:36: Yeah, totally. And so now, you know, you went to Genentech and you had this internship experience. And I'm going to imagine that experience is when you're like, oh, grad school is on the horizon. Would that be accurate?

Neela - 00:15:50: You hit the nail on the head. That's exactly right. Because I got to look around at who was doing what. And I was like, oh my goodness, I want to be on the strategic and management side. I want to be helping set the direction for the company. And it didn't take a few weeks to realize I needed to go get a PhD. So that was how I decided. And UCLA was on my horizon because professors from UCLA had founded Amgen. And so I knew that they had a mindset that wasn't just, you come to grad school to become like me. You know, you are my replicon. You will become a professor at another university. They were a little more open to the idea that you could do good science and important science in an industry setting.

Jon - 00:16:48: That's interesting because when I was at Berkeley it was like quite the opposite It was quite the opposite. And things have changed since then. But now they're like very much embracing it. Maybe a little bit late to the parade, but definitely the early days. I remember, when I was like, I thought it would be responsible to do market research for Exeter as one potentially should do. And I just like asked the labs on campus. I was like, hey, like, what do you think about equipment leasing? And they're like. Are you going to the dark side? I was like. I'm just trying to help.

Neela - 00:17:27: Why is it dark?

Jon - 00:17:30: Yeah, right. Like, why is it dark? I'm just trying to help. And again, this is not to point fingers or poo-poo on Berkeley or anything, but it's a culture.

Neela - 00:17:38: It's a culture. It's a culture.

Jon - 00:17:40: So yeah, it's a culture thing. And that's very cool to hear. And I love hearing like different and, you know, UCLA being part of the UC system, it like has, it varies, like even just like within the same California UC system, it's like very different culturally.

Neela - 00:17:53: And then even within that, I went specifically, I picked the Molecular Biology Institute. As you heard already, I knew that I was interested in cross-disciplinary work. And there were professors who they had affiliations with biochemistry or biophysics or anatomy or whatever, but foundationally, they were using molecular biology tools. And the institute, I think, had been founded maybe not more than 10 years before I got there. And so it was very, very exciting, just the principles were emerging about molecular biology at that point in time. 

Jon - 00:18:33: Very cool. I'm seeing kind of a trend here, like ground floor at Genentech, ground floor at UCLA with molecular biology. And so now that you're kind of like seeing this unfold in real time with UCLA, how did you end up choosing the lab to spend your time in? I guess whose lab was it? And kind of can you tell me about that process and what that experience was for you?

Neela - 00:18:54: Yeah, I mean, I ended up getting my degree in a lab that was focused on C. Elegans as a model system. It's a nematode for your listeners who aren't familiar with it. It's really a very nice model system, in particular for development. And I was looking at developmental neurobiology and how the nervous system was put together. And unlike in humans, where... We probably don't have the exact same number of neurons. Our neurons are connected a little differently. In C. Elegans, there's 302. And one of the early pioneers in the field sat down with a dissecting microscope. And looked and mapped every connection. So there was this crazy map, right, that had been made. And then it was a relatively easy species to do mutagenesis. And then it was transposon-induced. And you could measure different behaviors and say, oh, this is different. Now can I find out the neurological basis why? And the PI had identified a mutant that moved forward fine, but not backwards. And all the muscles were there, but it couldn't move backwards. So I did basically the molecular biology to identify where was the insertion, what was the gene, in what way was it changed, and then some hypotheses about how that resulted in the phenotype. And for me, it was a great experience. It was olden days of sequencing, you poured the gels, the acrylamide gels between two sheets of glass, things that people would laugh about today. But that's just, you know, it was part of the learning and it was great.

Jon - 00:20:41: I think that's critical too. And also when I look at the companies that are starting today and the tools that are available to them. It's like a sci-fi future.

Neela - 00:20:52: It is. 

Jon - 00:20:53: And, you know, in C. Elegans, you know, I'm going to imagine, like, when you're running your assays and experiments, like, the feedback loops are a little bit quicker. They are. They're quick. And obviously, you know, as we get into kind of humans and stuff, it's way, way more complex. But with the tools that are available, it's like all that. I think about the work that I was doing, and I was like, man, I spent, like, countless hours.

Neela - 00:21:19: I mean, yeah, somebody could, the sequencing that took me, like, six months to do, people would do in, like, two days now. I try not to think about it because it makes you wince. But it was what there was. It was what there was. And, you know, I think there is something that I've seen, you've seen it too, is that that trend is beyond just technology. When I started, and we'll come on to this relatively soon, when I started working in drug discovery and development, if that's what you wanted to do, you could only do it and learn it in a large company setting because there was no outsource for PK. There was no outsource for toxicology. Now, I feel like the ecosystem really supports it. If you have an idea and you can raise money for it, you do not need to build a facility to house CINOs so you can do your studies. No. You can outsource this. And it really has. It's really dramatically altered the ability for new ideas to come through small companies instead of having to make their way through a big company setting.

Jon - 00:22:31: Absolutely. And I think that exact observation is, like, I think critical. There's, like, a Bezos saying where it's, like, only work on what makes your beer taste better. And basically, like, if you're a brewer, that's, like, what you should be focusing on. Like you said, you shouldn't be, like, outsource what is not core here. Like, if you can, like, and if you have the capital to do it. And I think that's, like, amazing because it brings down, like, the activation energy. For example, company formation, which is massive. It's kind of like, and I think with that kind of proliferation of these folks who can do these kinds of specialists like outsource help, I think it really helped the burgeoning startup ecosystem come into existence, frankly.

Neela - 00:23:17: It did. It did. And the people who are at those CROs, they were often in big pharma where they did that function for big pharma. So they have decades of experience. So you don't end up, in my experience, you don't end up shortchanged by the level of expertise or the quality of work that's done.

Jon - 00:23:36: Absolutely. And so now at UCLA. You know, it sounds like you are starting to find a rhythm. Were there any memorable challenges and triumphs in grad school for you?

Neela - 00:23:50: A lot of challenges. I don't know.

Jon - 00:23:53: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Neela - 00:23:54: Triumph is all relative. I was very nervous about public speaking. And for me, it was a triumph when I went to the big C. Elegans conference and I gave a talk and people were like, oh, that was really good. And I was like, it was?

Jon - 00:24:08: Yeah, I blacked out. So I don't even remember. But thank you. I appreciate that.

Neela - 00:24:13: Exactly. Exactly. For me, it was a challenging time. The first couple of years were especially challenging because although I'd done well at Stanford, I found that I came in and a lot of my peers had either more experience or their degrees were more specialized than what Stanford offered, which was a general biology degree. So the first couple of years, there was just so much jargon and a lot of things that I remember I called my mom like a year and a half and I was like, mom, I went to a seminar and I understood the whole thing. not just the introduction.

Jon - 00:24:47: Yeah. It's like, I made it. Like, I'm at the starting line.

Neela - 00:24:52: Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, part of it was just the learning and going up that learning curve. I also think that for me, graduate school was also about having grit and determination, you know, to just, there were times there were just a slog. You know, data was coming slowly or there were surprises or setbacks. And you just had to be like, okay, I know why I'm here. I'm going to keep at it. I'm not giving up. Right.

Jon - 00:25:25: Yeah, absolutely. And I think so we work with an organization, Nucleate, pretty closely. And it's like basically grad students. One, it's a nonprofit. Two, it's a student run org of grad students and postdocs and MBAs who are want to get into biotech entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship. And a lot of the time we have these conversations, like I have conversations with them and they're like, how how like how am I going to apply my grad school to to this, you know, the startup life? And I was like, look, a lot of startup life is just uncertainty. And not giving up. And, you know, grad school is kind of like that, too.

Neela - 00:26:05: It's exactly like that.

Jon - 00:26:07: Am I going to actually be able to defend? Like, I don't know at this moment. Yeah. And that in itself, it doesn't sound glamorous, but I think is a critical skill, as you've highlighted, is not giving up when there's that uncertainty and be willing to fight through it. Honestly, it's not.

Neela - 00:26:26: Yeah, sometimes you just have to. So, yeah. And it's interesting because I also, when I've gone through patches, either personal or professional, that were tough, afterwards, I was like, wait, you made it through that. You can make it through this.

Jon - 00:26:37: Yeah, exactly. I've seen worse. Like I've seen worse, exactly. So now you're wrapping your time up at UCLA. Was there ever a point where you were like, I might become a professor and stay this academic route. Or was it like, nope, we're like, we're going, we're going back out to the industry.

Neela - 00:26:55: Yeah. Yeah, the only things that I contemplated were where else could I use those skills? Yeah. Like I thought about should I now? This sounds crazy. Should I go get a law degree so I can do IP?

Jon - 00:27:10: Oh, I almost did that too. I almost did that too. Sorry. The parallels are crazy.

Neela - 00:27:18: Yeah. Or should I get an MBA so I can go more into the business side? And I decided, you know, let me just stay with this through postdoc and see how it goes. And there were some special circumstances in my graduate school that were difficult. Partway through, my PI decided he was an associate professor and he'd been given a grant to get going and stuff. And he decided that he wasn't interested in doing this anymore. It wasn't like it was his career as yet.

Jon - 00:27:48: Yeah.

Neela - 00:27:50: I mean, I wrote. The grants that went out and we didn't, we actually, you know, we ended up just running on shoestring at the end. So when I went to my postdoc, I went to D-NEXT for my postdoc and that I have to thank Sherry Morrison, who was on my committee at UCLA, just a wonderful, wonderful, supportive person, brilliant research scientist in antibodies and antibodies as drugs. And she recommended D-NEXT for me. And D-NEXT was really the research arm for sharing plows. And so it was a hybrid. And I got there and I remember I was mixing buffers. I was weighing, I remember weighing salts, right? I was going to make a buffer. And the PI came into the lab and he's like, what are you doing? I was like, well, I'm mixing my buffers and we're going to autoclave them and they'll be ready. He's like. That's what the catalog is for. You buy those things. You don't waste your time mixing them. Here's the catalog. Please order them. I'm doing that. I was like, okay, you don't understand. I come from a kind of poverty stricken, like really resource constrained place where there was no money to buy anything.

Jon - 00:29:06: That's so funny. That's the exact same way that we had it too. We're just like, we're doing this by hand. We're going to get this done with elbow grease. Like, and anything that we can autoclave, we're going to autoclave and like, let's, let's make sure that we make this budget go the distance. That's, that's also amazing that like the immediately, like right out of grad school, the first kind of like industry kind of like postdoc experience was like, don't do that. Like, just like, do not do that. We can just order this out, like off the shelf. So now you're at Dena. Can you tell us a little bit about the work that you're doing there? And what was like the culture like, you know, the lab culture like and company culture like?

Neela - 00:29:46: The company culture was fantastic, I'd have to say. About a third of the company was postdocs. And when you came in, you signed an agreement that basically said that you would publish as much as you could. So, you know, you were never given a project or let work on a project that they would not allow to be published, you know, which I know I looked at a couple of other places and they were, you know, it was a different philosophy. And I get that. I mean, every business has to run how they want to. So the culture was pretty lively and I didn't know how much I was getting to interact with the stars of, you know, basic immunology. Bob Kaufman, you know, Martin McMahon, Louis Lanier. I mean, but they were just like the everyday people there. Do you know what I mean? To the birthday parties and you chat with them. And it was really great. So I got to work on understanding some receptor ligand interactions and what residues were involved. I mean, it was basic science, but there was a broader purpose of understanding signaling receptor pairs and cytokines and how they worked, which I found super interesting. And the second project I did was to see if we could find a leptin receptor. Leptin had just been discovered and everyone thought that was going to be, you know, the cure for everything. I ended up cloning a binding protein for it, but it wasn't the signaling receptor. Sometimes it's like that, but. Yeah, it was a great experience. And, you know, I got a lot of exposure to the other programs and how IL-10 was discovered there, and then how you would think about that for human health.

Jon - 00:31:36: So that's so crazy. And were you know as a postdoc and it being a business were you starting to get exposed to like the business side as well or was it research like heads down research

Neela - 00:31:51: It was pretty well insulated. The site had really tried to insulate folks from too much business pressure, I would call it. But I was always interested in the intersection of science and business. And a friend of mine invited me to join an investment club. And none of us, it was like first jobs. Nobody had a lot of money. So you're like, okay, everybody puts in $50 a month. And then we have like... $500 that we, you know, we can invest. And each time somebody would come, two people would come with investment recommendations and you could do it in whatever field, a lot, needless to say, in Silicon Valley, a lot of the recommendations were for, you know, high-tech companies. But I decided, oh, this is a great opportunity to like research some pharmas and biotechs and learn how to read their. Annual reports and.

Jon - 00:32:49: How was that experience, by the way? I remember mine. I was like, what the heck? Like, why are there so many pages?

Neela - 00:32:57: Well, I kind of eased into it because I look, I started like, you know, most well-written annual reports talk about the program. So I was like, well, I understand the science. So I can start there and now I can try to understand, okay, what products do they have? How much money are they making? What's their profit margin? And it was actually a very good learning experience, right? So I, it was. Yes, I was learning with my peers. Most of my peers had gotten MBAs recently. So I was able to kind of watch what they were doing. And I let the other people go first. And then, you know, I.

Jon - 00:33:34: Learning by osmosis. Like, that's kind of like, I do the same. And I think I wasn't classically trained in finance, but my co-founder is a finance pro. And so I kind of just like, via just being working with him, I was like, learned it on the fly. And for the listeners out there, too, is it's like. This is possible. Like, and you can get quite far without like the quote unquote classical training. If you're willing to just put in the work and like, but like be throw yourself into the, you know, the pool and just get your, you know, get your feet wet. But also with like, I think reading like my first annual reporter 10K, there's like, you mentioned like the, you know, when in your grad school, kind of like having to learn the language, all the acronyms, same thing.

Neela - 00:34:19: It was the same. That's right. That's right. But by then I had some confidence about my ability to do that, you know, so.

Jon - 00:34:25: Were these friends from D-NAX or from outside D-NAX?

Neela - 00:34:30: Outside D-NAX.

 Jon - 00:34:31: Cool. Very cool. That's, that's amazing. And like the, I love the idea of just like, it almost kind of like feels like starting, like it's almost like a hobby almost. And then turned into something, you know, that you probably carry with your, to this day. And so as you're reflecting on D-NAX. Like, and you mentioned that you're in, you're in the presence of greatness. Lots of people who are kind of pioneers in their, in their, you know, respective fields. I'm going to imagine you're like, this is super rad. I have autonomy. You know, I'm, I'm doing work that's like really, you know, pushing the boundaries here. When did you know it was time to go? Why would you leave such a, you know, kind of a sweet gig?

Neela - 00:35:13: Well, I don't know that I wanted to leave, but as I mentioned, like a third of the folks there were postdocs and you pretty much were signed up for three years. If you, you could leave, you could leave anytime. Like, you know, you weren't, it wasn't, you know, there was no handcuffs binding you there, but most people, most people ended up staying about three years because it was an enjoyable experience and so on. So I really was looking for that first job. I wanted to be able to have at least one or two folks in my group because I didn't want sort of an extension of my postdoc where I would continue to be the only one kind of plowing away on a certain thing. And I wanted the management experience, honestly. I'll tell you, I was, on day one, I was... Terrible at it. And every day I would come home and I'd be like, oh my God, today I made a hundred mistakes. Okay. Tomorrow I'm not going to make those mistakes again. Let me try to make 50 new ones. You know, it was just like a continuous learning curve and self-reflection on. And luckily the folks who came into my group, they were senior RAs and they, they actually helped train me into my job. Do you know what I mean? And I was like, oh, that's really nice. I appreciate you. I'm grateful.

Jon - 00:36:32: Totally. And was this around the time when, you know, you kind of the couple years in when you started to look at opportunities elsewhere and you ultimately found yourself at Roche?

Neela - 00:36:44: You know, it was towards the end of that time that I really started looking. And this was, sad to say, before the days of the internet. And so the D-NAX library had a publication that came out annually. It was about, you know, two, three inches thick. And it listed all the names and addresses of different companies and what they did. So I went through that thing and I was like, okay, I'm pretty sure I want to try to stay in California. And that's maybe not the worst filter. In those days, yes, Boston was a hub. But actually Boston, the trajectory for Boston as a hub came much later. So most of it was California anyway. And it was not a great job market. So you didn't see a lot of openings advertised. I applied if I saw something advertised. But I just started cold writing to companies. I'd be like, okay, I see what you do. This is what I, and I try to think about my skill sets. Like, this is what I could do for you. You know, and you don't have a lot of connections at that point in your career either, right? I mean, sure, I asked around. But even the people at D-NEXT, they were like in their beautiful bubble worlds. And they knew other people, mostly, honestly, in academic institutes. And it was also the days that you would print your resume and you would put it in an envelope with a stamp. And you would send them in.

 Jon - 00:38:03: Yup.

Neela - 00:38:04: I went through a box of 100 envelopes. So that tells you.

Jon - 00:38:08: Holy moly.

Neela - 00:38:09: What it was like. I got four job interviews and two offers. It was not the easiest time to be getting a job. There just weren't, I'm not saying there was zero, but there weren't a lot, you know?

Jon - 00:38:22: Totally. There are two things that stand out to me about that experience is one, it's like, that's like a, there's grittiness to like landing that first gig, like having to send out just a hundred and only receive four and then two offers out of that. It's like. Gotta just push like you just have to push and there's sometimes Like, there's no secret to it. It's like, you just got to like grit like white knuckle and get through it. And the other part too, is that you, that stood out to me, it was like not having the network early days, you know? And I felt the same exact way. It's just like, it's almost like a cold start, like chicken and egg. Like, how do you, like, it's kind of that thing where it's kind of a running joke or meme where there's like... Like, how do I get my first job when my first that first entry level job requires 10 years of experience?

Neela - 00:39:15: Yeah. The advertised jobs were all like it's entry level and you need four years of industry experience. I'm like, where am I going to get?

Jon - 00:39:22: I thought it was an entry. How is this? It's not mathing. It's not computing here. I don't know how this works. But thank God you got those two offers.

Outro - 00:39:35: That's all for this episode of the Biotech Startups Podcast. We hope you enjoyed our discussion with Neela Patel. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave us a review and share it with your friends. Thanks for listening. And we look forward to having you join us again for part two of our conversation with Neela. The Biotech Startups Podcast is produced by Excedr. Don't want to miss an episode? Search for the Biotech Startups Podcast wherever you get your podcasts and click subscribe. Excedr provides research labs with equipment leases on founder-friendly terms to support paths to exceptional outcomes. To learn more, visit our website, www.excedr.com. On behalf of the team here at Excedr, thanks for listening. The Biotech Startups podcast provides general insights into the life science sector through the experiences of its guests. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from the podcast is at the user's own risk. The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not the views of Excedr or sponsors. No reference to any product, service or company in the podcast is an endorsement by Excedr or its guests.