Sandy Paige - Seabright Ventures Fund - Part 1

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

Jon - 00:00:31: My guest today is Sandy Paige, Co-Managing Director of the Seabright Ventures Fund, a search fund investing in the US middle market with a focus on the life sciences and clean tech. Sandy is an expert CEO, most recently leading and scaling Explora BioLabs before its acquisition by Charles River Laboratories for $295 million. Prior to Seabright, Sandy led The Jackson Laboratory as a site director and a director of international distribution from 2008 to 2018. His decade of experience establishing and growing The Jackson Laboratory West Coast  presence and further expanding their JAX mice and clinical research services globally provides him with a unique perspective that is invaluable for any life science company looking to scale and operate at the highest level. Before The Jackson Laboratory, Sandy spent time as a general manager, consultant, and financial analyst gaining extensive experience in a wide range of industries outside of the life sciences. Over the next four episodes, we cover a wide range of topics, including how personal hustle and being a team player was critical to his success, how he ended up at The Jackson Laboratory and led the organization's North American and global growth initiatives, his experience launching and running a search fund, and the invaluable lessons learned from hyper scaling Explora Biolabs. Today, we'll discuss how Sandy's desire to follow his curiosity has led to unexpected opportunities. We'll also chat about his time in politics, his transition into industry, and how it all led to getting an MBA in entrepreneurship. Without further ado, let's dive into this episode of the Biotech Startups Podcast. Andy, so good to see you again. Thanks for taking the time to jump on the podcast.

Sandy - 00:02:01: Oh my gosh, this is fun. I'm glad to be here.

Jon - 00:02:04: Appreciate your time. So as my team and I were doing some research before we hit record here, we thought a fun place to start would be to just turn the hands of time back and really go to the early days and as far back to your upbringing. And really just kind of like, so the listeners here can live and learn vicariously through your experiences. And so thinking back then, what drew you to entrepreneurship and what influenced your leadership style and style of company building?

Sandy - 00:02:31: I'm stumbling because it was a long time ago, longer for me probably than most of your guests, just because I'm a little bit older than probably most of your guests in my early 50s. But I think my story is not, in some ways, not all that unusual. It goes back to sitting around the dinner table and the kind of conversations you were able to hear and soak up and the stuff that was interesting to you. And for me, I was the youngest of four boys growing up in Maine. And I actually had fair amount more one-on-one time with my parents, if you will, because I was quite a bit younger than my next up brother, seven years older. So they were all off to college and I was sort of alone at the dinner table. And my father at that time was CEO of a regional Maine bank. And he was in the process of taking it public and just lots of interesting anecdotes. These were his late 80s, early 90s. And so it was a nine to five or sort of eight to five banking role, even when you're in the middle of taking it public. But it was just a really interesting process. And he would sometimes talk about his father. And so my grandfather who ran the family business, which was a woolen mill on the coast of Maine. So literally starting with wool on one side of the production process and ending up with pool table felt and army blankets coming up the other end of the factory. And that was a business my father decided not to go into for a range of reasons. And he went off and did something else. But sort of the story of a little bit of wealth having been made a couple of generations ago and then having largely been consumed by generations and not really having been remade. It was cool for me to watch my father sort of become CEO and take the company public, which I think it's also worth noting he did. And he took it public and he wrote it up. And back then you didn't have structured selling programs as CEO, you only sold, I don't really know when you sold. What I do know is my father never sold any and he wrote it up. And then through the banking crisis, he wrote it down to zero. And so he built this enormous value and then it all went away. It was paper money. And in fact, here in my office, I keep a copy. It's not going to focus, but it's a stock certificate from that IPO that reminded me. I've kept it in my office as a CEO to remind me that that it was paper money we were making and it's really not real until you find a way to convert it to liquidity. And so some of those things made a dent in me and not a big enough dent to turn me into a scientist or a business undergrad. I went off and got a degree in medieval history to give you a sense of exactly how serious I was. And even just to underline that Classics for my minor. So that was my undergrad experience. It was even so, so unscientific that the part way through my college experience, when I decided I wanted to become a doctor, I explored that, started changing my major, took a couple of classes I'd never taken and realized that that's really hard. So I'm not going to cut out. I still remember, I was so naive. I wrote my parents a letter from college and said, I'm going to do something easier than being a doctor. I'm going to become a veterinarian. Which of course is ridiculous, right? Yeah. So that's what college is about, being ridiculous and bouncing around and screwing it up and trying different things. But eventually I did whatever it took to get myself out of the college experience and that meant history. And that was Middlebury College in Vermont where I had a great experience. So there you go. That's a bit of my background. And I think none of it told me that I needed to be a zero to one entrepreneur. I don't think I ever necessarily felt that was... What I needed to be. That was, I think, an important learning and I still believe that was the right choice. I'm not particularly creative. I'm not particularly smart, but I do hustle and I'm a pretty good team player. Some of those things sort of came together and guided the choices I made over the next couple decades.

Jon - 00:06:28: That's really fascinating. There's so many directions I wanna go. I'm trying to imagine what these dinner conversations with your father might be like. Was your father, did he always have kind of like, I guess, intention for you to go into business or it was like more of a casual, here are kind of my experiences in business and via osmosis, you kind of learn but there was never kind of a track for you.

Sandy - 00:06:54: No, I was never attract. My dad and my parents were just fantastic. They sort of wanted their boys to get liberal arts degrees and then go do what they could with them, whatever made them happiest. And my brothers, we've all done different things. My dad, by the way, had two years at Brown and then left and went into the army, never finished Brown, got himself into HBS with two years of Brown only. And it wasn't enough, he failed out of HBS. So yeah, there's just sort of these stories of business and entrepreneurship and kind of grinding your way through just through, through hustle, hard work, integrity, kind of a bunch of old fashioned things that aren't all that cool anymore to kids or others who are listening, but it actually served me pretty well. And multidisciplinary liberal arts education turns out maybe to have, I don't want to say it's back in style, but I wish it were because I think it does serve you pretty well. And I think it makes you a little more well-rounded and a little more interesting, frankly. But that's judgmental. So I'll leave that, leave that alone  

Jon - 00:07:53: Yeah. And that resonates with me, having the kind of multidisciplinary kind of just like getting exposure and kind of learning as much as you can, because I think there's a certain amount. It might be just an underappreciated aspect of broad breadth over depth in that you can apply these learnings from whether it be manufacturing, software, whatever it may be, these business practices and philosophies into the life sciences. They're not so dissimilar. Business is still business. And so even it might be, quote unquote, old school, I think it's these are timeless principles, not just something that is antiquated. That's my opinion, at least.

Sandy - 00:08:32: I totally agree. And I went from running a basically a paper mill in a mill town on a river in a small town in Maine to running The Jackson Laboratory West Coast Life Sciences genetically engineered mouse breeding factory in California. The same skills were needed at both places. I didn't need to be the expert in either one. Thank God didn't need to be the expert in either one. And nor was that possible because it just took decades to become that expert. But there were other things that I brought to the table that, fortunately, a few people felt was useful and that ended up working out. But I think people underestimate the value of bouncing around between industries and being able to tackle lots of different things. I mean, I come from more probably here because of my explorer experience, which came from search fund investor. And that is, if anything, kind of the story of multidisciplinary learning and the ability to tackle lots of different kinds of businesses that you may end up running. Sort of the definition of what a search fund entrepreneur is. I guess that was sort of good preparation.

Jon - 00:09:41: Absolutely. And I didn't know this about your background, but I mentioned potentially wanting to be a doctor, given that and giving your parents the call that, Hey, I actually want to be a vet. Did you know that you wanted to get into life science? Like, was there like, did you know that early on? Or was this something? No.

Sandy - 00:09:59: No, I didn't know it, to be honest. I didn't think there was a chance of it because I felt it was so specialized. And I had never given it a shot until I was running that paper, knowing I got a call from somebody who knew me from a previous industry. And what they wanted was somebody from the East Coast to go out to the West Coast and do a little bit of a turnaround and kick off an expansion that they needed to take place. So really what they wanted was their guy out West whom they could trust, who could handle a range of different kinds of things. So they didn't have to ask me more than once to go from rural manufacturing, wood products, to life sciences in California. I was quick enough to say yes to that the first time I think it was offered. And I'm here because I did.

Jon - 00:10:50: Amazing. And so based on my research, it sounded like you ended up sticking with history for your undergraduate degree. You did not become a vet. You did not graduate. Okay, got it.

Sandy - 00:11:01: I almost ruined my GPA by trying to become a doc because I had to take calculus and chemistry and physics, which I can promise the history students didn't take at the time. So I had those three classes and I remember sitting in the physics 101 as a junior at Middlebury sitting next to these freshmen that were coming in and sleeping through class because they'd taken the AP exam and had gotten like a two instead of a three or something and they didn't text out of it. And I remember going to them as a junior to try to get help from these kids. They just were not interested in providing it. And it just sort of all blew up on me at that point. So I threw the towel in and figured I'd find some other way. And it was not a plan. There was no plan. It was just get me out of college and get me into something that's going to be interesting. And we'll see where it goes. And I'll just take it job by job.

Jon - 00:11:54: Very cool. So as you graduate from Middlebury, I know you spent some time working in government as the assistant to the governor of Maine. What drew you to that opportunity and how did that opportunity come about?

Sandy - 00:12:06: So it was a dark and stormy night and I was bartending right out of college and I served a member of Jack Daniel's on the rocks to the CEO, I didn't know it at the time, to the CEO of Bath Iron Works, which is a very large, the largest employer in Maine. They make Aegis Cruisers for the Navy. And I served him a drink and we started this really interesting conversation because after Middlebury I'd spent six months in Austria at a place called the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies. It was a fantastic international think tank. It was a really long time. And I'd come back and he and I were talking and he went and then gave the speech at this place that I was serving, where I was bartending. And I listened to him and I thought, oh, what an interesting guy. So I wrote him a letter. On my dot matrix printer. I just sat down and wrote him a letter and I said, it'd be a really interesting conversation. Thanks for having it with me. It'd be fun to finish the conversation. I folded it up and ripped those edges off the edge of a dot matrix piece of paper and put it in the mail and didn't think anything of it. I'll be damned. But like two weeks later, I got a letter back from him and he called my bluff. And he said, come on up for lunch. Like, shit, now what do I do? I don't have anything to say. Like, I said everything I knew in the five minutes that we chatted while he drank his cocktail. But I walked into this mecca of manufacturing in Maine and really in kind of US history in some ways. And he was fantastic. He became a bit of a mentor. He introduced me to some people. And one of the people he introduced me to was this friend of his who was running for governor and was going to run as an independent, not a Democrat, not a Republican, as an independent. And he said, you know, he's doing some interesting things. He may need some help. He's just started his campaign. I don't know. I'll see him tonight for dinner and I'll mention your name and your follow-up. So he did and I did. At the time, he just went by and he sort of still does, the name Angus, and he and I spoke and we met and he said, here's what I need. I need somebody to be my driver. We're going around the state. He had one other employee, I think at the time, it was his son, and he said, I just need somebody to pick me up in the morning, drive me all day, be with me all day, take care of everything needs to be taken care of. We're gonna drive and we'll see how this goes. No promises and I can't pay anything, but when we're together, I'll buy you lunch. And there's probably a bunch of rubber chicken everywhere we're going. You can eat rubber chicken. I'm gonna be on the phone and you're gonna drive and we're gonna get to know each other. 18 months later, we driven 50,000 miles around the state of Maine, become very close. And he won as an independent. And I stuck around for a couple of years to be his personal assistant as governor of Maine. He then went on to two terms. I moved on, but he went on to two terms as governor. And he's now in his second term as US senator for Maine. And is an amazing individual who's played a very important role in my life. And we're still very much in touch. That's how I stumbled into that. I can tie most things I've done in my life professionally, even personally to that moment of serving that Jack Daniel's on the rocks to Buzz Fitzgerald and just being able to follow up on the things people are recommending I might try and saying yes at a few of the right moments to things that may not have seemed like the obvious thing to do, but seemed like they would be the most interesting thing to do. And that's served me pretty well.

Jon - 00:15:29: That's amazing. It would have monumental Jack on the rocks. Right? Yeah. That is like inflection point, massive inflection point.

Sandy - 00:15:41: Well, he pulled me back. I could still remember. I was working. I remember getting this letter back on the station area and I was like, oh, no, what do I do now? You don't want to hide in this envelope.

Jon - 00:15:59: Yeah. I just remembered too, those early meetings where I'm like, oh crap, my first outreach to business people who are much smarter than me. I don't even have business clothing. I don't have any of that. I need to go and my wife is like, we need to take you to Nordstrom.

Jon - 00:16:19: You need to get dressed because currently what you're wearing right now is not going to cut it. I still have my ill-fitting suit that I got for the first time. Just did not fit.

Sandy - 00:16:31: Like curtains on you. 

Jon - 00:16:33:  Yeah. I asked my dad, I was like, can I borrow some of your stuff too? Because I can't afford those leather shoes, I can't just borrow yours. I just remember having the drape and then the shoes that were just too big for me. 

Sandy - 00:16:45: Right.

Jon - 00:16:46: I was looking silly. I can't imagine what they're coming in. They're like, who are you? Right.

Sandy - 00:16:53: Well, if they've been around at all, they knew exactly who you were. And he's trying. Yeah. I want him to try. Back then, I actually don't have it anymore. But I actually had, since this would have been the mid-90s, I had gotten out. I'd graduated from college. I thought, well, what do I need? I need a Rolodex. So I bought a Rolodex. And that was when Rolodexes were actually individual little pieces of paper that sat in a little index card thing. And you'd flip through it and take a business card and put it in alphabetically. And I thought, how should I fill it? Like, how do you fill a Rolodex?

Jon - 00:17:27: Yeah.

Sandy - 00:17:28: Well, a great way to fill it is to get involved in a political campaign, it turns out. And so I did. By the time I was done, a couple of years later, I had a great Rolodex. And that Rolodex is still in a box somewhere. And I bet you I could open it up and point to a good number of the people who have been important in my life who were in that Rolodex in the early years 

Jon - 00:17:48: That's like very, very cool. And I think something that I maybe recently learned. Like somewhat recently is to like. I used to just like kind of be hunker down, just like put the blinders on and I'm just like going to chop wood. And, and, but I think what I've learned now or via just like being kind of like getting out of my shelf and putting myself out there and like meeting more people is this kind of serendipity that you're kind of describing that I wasn't accustomed to or ever even know knew existed, which I think is so powerful. I won't lie. It was like definitely uncomfortable the first couple of times. I'm more introverted than what might seem. But after like coming out, like going out there and like putting myself out there, I was like, oh yeah, it's not as scary, but also just like making these like lifelong like relationships is like something that is like, you can't even anticipate. And you know, I know kind of like after you had done your time with being in government, When did you know it was time to move on from the campaign and go into industry?

Sandy - 00:18:53: I think it was as the first elect, what would have been the re-election campaign started to warm up. I had a sense that if I stuck around for that. That I would be forever stuck in politics, because I hadn't really done anything else. So I had a couple of things that sort of floated around that would give me a chance to leave and go get a real job, if you will. And that's what I did. I went from there to Fairchild Semiconductor and took a marketing job that was really interesting and first exposure to big business and corporate culture and those sorts of things, a big LBO and an IPO. So I saw really interesting things for a 25-year-old kid and it was there that I realized I needed an MBA. I was never gonna do anything other than marketing if I didn't get the MBA. I was never gonna move into another section of that business, for example. And I really didn't know what I wanted to do. So I didn't have the chance to do an evening program or an online program, they didn't really exist. So it was kind of like a full-time two-year MBA program was not gonna be my only option. I was very much married and had a two-year-old at the time. And so we sold everything in Brunswick, Maine and moved to Boston. I went to Babson. That was really, really important decision and allowed me some time to think and learn and figure out as good as a few things and get the toolkit that I know, believe it or not, you don't learn accounting as a medieval history. That's not on the list. I'm pretty sure Middlebury college doesn't offer an accounting class. I think probably, probably blow them brains somehow, but yeah. So I, you know, had to build that toolkit and kind of learn how to use Excel and do all those things. And it was a fantastic place for me to have gone. Love it.

Jon - 00:20:40: Very cool. I'm figuring it out. Like going like you're on the east coast and then you make your way to Fairchild, this legendary company on the West coast. Was that via a kind of someone you met on the road in government?

Sandy - 00:20:52: You're totally right. Fairchild. And for those who are listening, who don't remember Fairchild and weren't around long enough, the integrated circuit was the Andy Grove, Noyce, somebody else. They all got together in the first garage and Fairchild I think was, was founded before Intel was, if I remember right. The name was in mothballed and brought out, you know, a few times as it was acquired and mothballed and acquired and mothballed, but the headquarters to Fairchild was in South Portland, Maine, believe it or not, when it was brought out the third and probably final time. And so I was in Maine and it was a big deal that was where the headquarters was chosen to be located. And it was just because the two, three guys who founded it had been located there with national semiconductor, which had done the spin out of Fairchild. So from whom the LBO place, I guess is the way you would say it. I didn't go to Silicon Valley then. I went to many places with Fairchild around the world, but not Silicon Valley.

Jon - 00:21:55: Yeah. During that time, as I was like, just like doing some research, it sounded like you had joined right when they did the management buyout and then basically hyper, like hyper-scaled and then you stayed like for a year after the IPO. Can you just like give some like color into like, what was that experience like? It must've been hectic. 

Sandy - 00:22:16: It was hectic, but don't give me very much credit here. Cause I was a, I think my title was corporate marketing representative, which gives you a sense of how far down the organization I was. I had very little exposure to the C-suite if any. And if any, it was on nothing that was of any real importance, but that doesn't mean it wasn't useful at that stage in my career. That was exactly what I could do. And that was all I could do. And I soaked it up and learned a lot and saw some roles that where I said to myself, that looks interesting. And I wonder how they do that. And how did they know like, whose idea was that to create an LBL and to do it? And how do you build the relationships to just say, okay, we're going to buy this thing from you. And I wanted to see, you want to see how some of those conversations took place. So it was formative. It was, it was useful. It was paid the bills for a period of time, but I didn't get any real insight into the C-suite there. That's for sure.

Jon - 00:23:16: Yeah, you know, as I've like spoken to colleagues who not at Fairchild, but work in big pharma as like a research associate with their undergraduate degree without an advanced PhD or anything like that. A lot of what I've heard is that getting exposure to like the broader business and seeing where you could potentially go is like a common denominator when you join a large org like Fairchild or you name it, Big Pharma. And then it informs them. Like I know folks who have like, like, okay, I did a couple years at Big Pharma, I'm going to go get my PhD. And then they follow that track or go get their MBA in a similar kind of fashion as you 

Sandy - 00:23:53: It's really important. And it seems like it's harder and harder to find those sorts of roles where you can get in and do something kind of that needs to get done, but isn't particularly impactful, but where you can see everything else and you survey the landscape and figure out what's more interesting than others and where your interests lie. Those are all really important things to have a chance to do. As our first kid gets out of college and we're watching him try to get his first job, those seem like harder roles to find because of course, things I was doing then and he was doing them now, they can be automated for the most part. And it won't be long before AI does pretty much all of it, at least for these things coming right out of college. So I think there's an interesting change and a little bit worrisome change, at least for the college kids coming out with medieval history degrees or sociology degrees or anthropology degrees. Maybe interested in business too, but that's probably another podcast.

Jon - 00:24:49: Yeah, yeah. So you're at Babson and you chose to focus on entrepreneurship and you mentioned like learning accounting. Overall, your experience, did you feel like it was your, the 101 to entrepreneurship and that you kind of like carry, you know, kind of setting the foundation and carried you forward in your business career?

Sandy - 00:25:07: Yeah, I mean, Babson has always been rated very highly for entrepreneurship. So everybody who goes there, whether they go to the unbelievably strong undergraduate business program or the graduate program, you get a ton of entrepreneurship. It's woven into every class, so you can't really get away from it. What you want to do is Bain or corporate strategy, it's probably not the best place. But if what you want to do is figure out how to take creativity and translate it into the business environment, business widely defined, call it management environment, because a lot of it was for nonprofits, for example, it was entrepreneurship for nonprofit worlds as well. It was a fantastic place to go. And I left there with a sense that I, again, that I wasn't a zero to one entrepreneur and that I was going to do what you might call corporate entrepreneurship, which just felt better taking something that was pretty good and trying to make it bigger using internal funding for that. It just felt like a better risk reward profile for me than trying to get somebody to give you money for an idea from scratch, you know, like Excedr or something like that.

Jon - 00:26:14: Yeah, it's funny that you're describing this because I think back on the zero to one days of Excedr and I get like shivers thinking about it. I'm like, I don't don't send me back there, please. Like that was that was not fun. Like I am very glad that it's like in the rear view mirror. And I'm very much shout outs to those who are serial entrepreneurs that live for that because that's like the complete opposite. And that's probably a psychological profile of mine. It's like that doesn't fit well with me, despite having gone through it.

Sandy - 00:26:43: I actually think that's a really important point, though, because from what I remember studying at least the Babson and have seen ever since, you want the most risk averse people you'll ever meet are entrepreneurs. It's all we do really is manage risk and just terrified of risk and seeing risk everywhere and trying to mitigate everything rather than just going forward as if we're never going to run out of money or we'll never need to be breakeven, for example. I think the best entrepreneurs, there are obvious exceptions. We can talk about the Elon Musk and we can talk about the Jeff Bezos, but I think they're the outliers. If you look at the bulk of the curve for successful entrepreneurship, these people are unusually good at managing risk and don't like it, feel very uncomfortable when the risk return profiles outwack.

Jon - 00:27:32: Absolutely. And I think also for anyone who's like contemplating going the entrepreneurship route have spent a decent amount of time thinking about where they fall in terms of that. I think you're doing yourself a disservice by not doing that introspection and just like, yes, like wherever I've read about this, this sounds very glamorous and great and I'm just going to go do it. And then you're in for a rude awakening once you find out that doesn't jive well with your lifestyle.

Sandy - 00:27:59: No, it's a really interesting question. You're right. And of course, now, particularly now there's lots of different kinds of entrepreneurship. It's a broad term that's taken on a lot of different meaning and it can mean zero to one as you did or it can mean search funds as I did. And there are very different kinds of risks. And I kind of like the search fund because I felt the risk profile was asymmetric. I felt like it was a lot less risk and the chance of a lot greater return than. The risk would warrant. And I think generally speaking, that's worn out over 20 years, if you look at the search fund data, but.

Jon - 00:28:32: Yeah, absolutely. 

Outro - 00:28:33: That's all for this episode of the Biotech Startups Podcast. We hope you enjoyed our conversation with Sandy Paige. 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 Sandy, where we talk about the joy and struggle of leveraging his corporate entrepreneurship expertise, how his year as a general manager taught him lifelong lessons about people, and how he made his transition to the West Coast taking a role at The Jackson Laboratory. 

Outro - 00:29:10: The Biotech Startups Podcast is brought to you by Excedr. Don't want to miss an episode? Make sure to search for Biotech Startups Podcast in Apple podcasts, Spotify and Google podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts and click subscribe. To learn more about our leasing program, visit our website www.excedr.com We provide research labs with equipment leases on founder-friendly terms to support a path to exceptional outcomes. On behalf of the team here at Excedr, thanks for listening. The purpose of the Biotech Startups Podcast is to provide general insight into the ever-changing world of life sciences through the experience of a variety of guests. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from this podcast are at the user's own risk. The views expressed by guests and any employee of Excedr on the podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Excedr or content sponsors. Any appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement or recommendation of any product, service or entity referenced in the podcast by Excedr or by its guests