Sandy Paige - Seabright Ventures Fund - Part 2

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.

Recap - 00:00:32: In our last episode, we spoke with Sandy Paige about his early years, his forays into politics and industry, and why he ended up getting an MBA. If you missed it, be sure to go back and give part one a listen. We continue our conversation in part two, diving into Sandy's expertise managing a massive construction infrastructure project at CIANBRO, the lessons about people learned from being a general manager, and the culture shift of moving from the East to the West Coast to take up a position at The Jackson Laboratory.

Jon - 00:01:05: After you kind of wrapped up your time at Babson, did you know where you're going to go next? I know you ended up joining CIANBRO and working on the Neptune project. Did you know that was going to be your next step or was this something again where you were like, hey, this looks like a great opportunity. I'm going to take a stab at it.

Sandy - 00:01:20: No, I certainly didn't know what I was going to do. I was, I talk about being terrified. I was getting out of Babson, this would have been 2002. It was a pretty crappy environment. At that point, I had a three-year-old, two and a half-year-old and a pregnant wife. And talk about bad time to be an entrepreneur. That was not the moment to go take a big risk. And so I needed a job. And this came together. Neptune had just been funded. It was actually funded with some Enron money. It was a Enron, still around, a very interesting entrepreneurial, corporate piece of corporate entrepreneurship. So it was an idea that was being kind of incubated within a corporate construct of CIANBRO. They were one of five partners and they were the largest and most, the biggest balance sheet of any of the other partners. And so it was a fantastic place for me to go. And the CEO of Neptune was somebody whom I had known from my government days and trusted. So there were, I think, at that point, three of us, the CEO, the COO, and me. And off we went trying to run underwater electric cables at the time from north of northern Nova Scotia down into Boston and New York. And that ended up for a range of reasons not being a good idea, believe it or not, not because the economics of that didn't work, but because the gas that we were going to move as electricity ended up not being out in Sable Island offshore, not being anywhere near as much as they thought. Copper, which is also the substance of a cable, also went through the roof. And so we ended up running a much shorter cable that's been incredibly successful, 75 miles long between the PJM grid in New Jersey across to Long Island. And so I think today 10% of the Long Island, of the electricity used on Long Island, New York, which has a lot of electricity, runs across this cable that we developed and built and ran out the Rio Tan River, across Sandy Hook, across underneath Jones Beach and up the Wantagh Parkway. And it's buried under the bike path on the Wantagh Parkway. And it's importing power in one direction into Long Island. And what it means is two things. One, they didn't have to build a new pipeline for gas to make the power on Long Island, because that was really the thing we were competing against. And two, in terms of reliability, in fact, when Hurricane Sandy washed over New York and Long Island and parts of New Jersey, it literally washed right over the top of this buried cable. And it remained in operation. And it was a big part of keeping the Long Island grid stable because the power wasn't being made on Long Island. So it's a really good grid reliability program. We learned a ton about environmental permitting and regulatory permitting. And it was a project financed deal, $600 million of project financing to build it. It was super interesting.

Jon - 00:04:12: Holy crap.

Sandy - 00:04:13: And it had a couple lives and deaths during the few years that I was involved there. I ran out of money, made a recent war, lost a CEO, picked up a CEO. It was just a really neat project. Lucky to have been a part of that.

Jon - 00:04:26: That is incredible. It sounds like you're on the ground floor. And so I'm going to-

Sandy - 00:04:31: Yeah, those are small teams, those development teams. I mean, it sounds like, it sounds $650 million project financing, you must have a big team. There were six of us at the closing dinner, and the whole company was there. There were more investment bankers, I think, and lawyers at the closing dinner than there were for us. And that's because in these project finance development deals and heavy infrastructure projects, everybody's a subcontractor. You hire somebody else to build the project, Siemens. Like Siemens built the project. And that's the way you do it. You manage Siemens. And then you have a few other folks who do specialty work like permitting and legal, but you're basically managing budgets and setting timelines and raising the money. But it's amazing how big those project financing numbers can get in infrastructure. It's pretty cool.

Jon - 00:05:18: Yeah, I mean, right out of an MBA, that's, I mean, that sounds like the baptism of fire and a dream for a fresh out of MBA

Sandy - 00:05:25: It was all of those things, yeah.

Jon - 00:05:27: I feel like any MBA would die for an opportunity like that.

Sandy - 00:05:31: I hope so. 

Jon - 00:05:32: Yeah, I hope so too. I would, if I was like graduating like recently, that sounds like I would learn a lot. I can kind of see they're like just doing some pattern matching that all these kinds of skills and experiences are just like adding arrows to your quiver, which is like a creative, it may not. Feel like you're going to be applying this forever or like in your future endeavors, but I can piece it together. And so it was a project. And so a project has an expiration date. After that, what was the kind of the next for you after the CIANBRO and Neptune project?

Sandy - 00:06:03: So you do the project financing and then the next morning you wake up and all of a sudden you're in a different mode. You're in construction mode. And I didn't really have a lot to add to that. It was also less interesting to me and there were people on the team who were going to be really good at that. So for me, the interesting thing would have been if we were going to do another development project and run another cable. And at the time, it was going to be a while. It was going to be a couple or a few years, I think it felt like until we were going to the chance to run another cable somewhere else. I was living in Maine and commuting down for the week to Fairfield, Connecticut, which was a long way. And there was just a range of things about it that led me to say, I'm just going to go back and do some consulting for a little while. Spent almost a year trying to buy a business and got to a couple closing tables, a self-funded search basically in Maine. Oh, wow. Walked away from two deals the night before closing on both of them because of diligence findings. And as I ran out of kind of my self-funded search capital, started consulting, and that's when I got the chance to be this general manager of this paper mill in Maine, something for which I was completely unqualified and had no experience doing. And that's what made it so useful, right? The learning curve was just the classic drinking from a fire hose every day. And I tell a story, it's probably worth sharing again, because it probably the most formative moment. It was my first day on the job. I'm 37 or something, eight, maybe nine. So this is again, I'm going to say it again along the Androscoggin river in Maine, a big sprawling hundred year old, or it's been around, been built up over a hundred years, 200,000 square foot, 24, seven, 365, heavy industrial manufacturing. So in the morning they start with wood chips that get delivered overnight on one end and the afternoon they're shipping four by eight sheets of wood fiber board, softwood fiber board, which is made in a paper making process called a food denier. So I show up in the first day of work and all paper mills tend to have a gate. Like, I don't know why, but there's like a gate where people arrive. And in this case, it was, you sort of arrived and there were some railroad tracks and you had to turn in and keep moving because you, people would turn in behind you and the traffic could pile up. And so, but I pulled in on the first day and there was this guy standing head down, his hat down low. It wasn't very nice day. He was cold. He was standing like waiting for me uncomfortably out in the traffic as if he didn't want to be on company property, but he had something that he wanted to give to everybody who was driving in. And so I'm like, how nice they sent a greeter out to meet me. He's probably going to tell me where to park. And I'm looking out at this field of pickup trucks, right? Of different ages and manufacturing plant parking lot. And I pull in in my old Volvo wagon, right? With my tail sticking out into traffic. And he, he goes, roll down your window. Hi, I'm, and he cut me off and he didn't want to hear who I was and he said, here, sign this card quick and send it in before the new guy gets here. And I was like, oh, he gave me a card. How nice. And I put it on my seat and I drove down to a parking spot and I looked at it and it's like. Union organizing card, card check, sign here, vote for the Union. And that was my first day on the job. Like welcome to Union. Busting effectively and you don't really union bust because you're so handcuffed in what you can do. But that was the year for me was learning what it's what it was. It take for people to be so unhappy with their employer that they'd rather work for a union. So what had happened in the last decade to these people that they'd rather work for a union when they were really they've been very successful as the only non unionized. Plant in Maine for previously for international paper, but then for a different private company. And I got to see what led people to have those worries. And if you treated them a certain way, how would they respond? And if you treat them that way for long enough, they end up making decisions that seem pretty silly to you, but don't seem silly to them. And so that was my year. Knight-Celotex was managing a union campaign. And ultimately on my last day on the job, losing that vote by one vote. Well, I'll say one vote. I think we likely had it one, two days before, you know, it's sort of these are campaigns that build both sides are talking to the people and, you know, the union is allowed to go door to door. And they went door to door to their members, prospective members the night before and I think some things got said and some promises got made and they flipped a few votes and we lost by one vote. At that point, I'd accepted an offer to come out west. But one year later, they didn't have a union contract. And a year and a half later, the facility was a gravel pad and all the jobs were gone. And what equipment had any value had been moved to Virginia. All sorts of life lessons in there as a leader and sadness as a community for whom this had provided really important jobs and put a lot of kids through college and paid off a lot of mortgages and bought a lot of sandwiches at lunch and bought a lot of groceries for that community to go from that to nothing. It felt like it could have been avoidable, but it would have taken more capital, it would have taken more patience, and it probably would have taken some local leadership that it didn't have, and local authority, I should say, that it didn't have. But that was a really fascinating experience for me and enormously stressful and deeply personal discussions. And out of that, for me, came promises to myself to make sure I was treating people in a way that I would never regret.

Jon - 00:11:49: Absolutely. And hearing that story and the way you described it too, it takes years and years of mistreatment to get to that point. It's like that boiling over. And I can't imagine the sleepless nights that their first day already is making my palms sweat. Oh my God. What did I get myself into? What have I done?

Sandy - 00:12:13: You don't even know what you don't know, right? I mean, the whole union organizing campaign, there's a whole industry around us on both sides. And it's never just about the people at the plant. Somebody is running the people at the plant and somebody is running the people who are running the campaign for the people at the plant. And then on our side, you hire outside consultants who have experts who can help you do what you're allowed to do, but prevent you from doing things that you're not allowed to do, which is a pretty long list as an as the employer and the person with the money and the control and the tools. There's quite a few things you're not allowed to do or say in that campaign. So that was very useful for me to be exposed to. And I don't know, I definitely regret that I couldn't save that thing. And I don't want to think that it might still have been there because there were a lot of other factors that led to that thing turning into a gravel pad.

Jon - 00:13:08: The takeaway sounds incredibly important to you.

Sandy - 00:13:12: It's very important to me and something I took into every single place I've been since. And it doesn't mean you have to give everybody what they want. I mean, that's impossible to do as well. But just in terms of your professional choices, going places, for example, where there's margin, where there's margin to spend, if you need to pay people more and give better benefits, for example, and spend a couple of years doing that. Maybe when, if you need to dig out of a hole or retain people or whatever, being in an industry where there's margin and growth and not a commodity was one of the lessons I took away and I've stayed away from those industries ever since. Life Sciences.

Jon - 00:13:50: Yep.

Sandy - 00:13:52: Today Life Sciences is a good one because it doesn't have a lot of that, but it's amazing that, you know, the interesting story there is commoditization does lead to cost cutting and obviously, and that's where the seems to me one of the places where unions end up taking hold and, and whether that's Starbucks. I mean, you could say coffee is not a commodity, but I think it just might be. Certainly labor, the labor. That works there is unhappy and telling Starbucks something, for example. But Healthcare, you see it as well. You know, the need to control costs and Healthcare leads to a lot of unhappy and unhappinesses, for example. And then there's all these other jobs that really need to get done that are really important, whether it's that or the janitor. And I should have put this together sooner. For example, one of the stories with our dinner table, I remember a Saturday night and the phone rang late, 10:30 or 11 at night. And it was somebody in jail calling my father to bail him out. My father was president, CEO of the bank, and one of his employees was calling to back him out of jail. And I remember kind of watching this and watching my father listen and watching him nod and having him say, I'll be right there. And my mom's saying, well, like, who was it? And he said, it was Fred. She's like, who's Fred? And Fred was the janitor and dad's like. He's a good guy and he works for us and I'm going to go bail him out. I'm going to do it tonight. I'm not going to do it next weekend, but I'm going to do it tonight for him. And, and I'm, that was one of those little things that made it down. Hmm. There's all sorts of people who work for you and they're all human beings and of equal value in those roles they play. That made a dent and I've never had to bail anybody out. I've often thought what I would do on a Saturday night if I got that call.

Jon - 00:15:53: Yeah. Totally.

Sandy - 00:15:54: I probably would do the same thing. I would like to think I would do the same thing. 

Jon - 00:15:58: Yup. 

Sandy - 00:15:59: Times have changed. So I'd probably break an HR roof if I did it today.

Jon - 00:16:03: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There might be some rule around that. And you mentioned, you know, as your time at the paper mill was kind of coming to an end, you had already signed or committed to go into the West Coast. And I know this part of your journey, I know this is kind of The Jackson Laboratory. Era. How did that opportunity come about and also the pivot into Life Sciences?

Sandy - 00:16:26: Again, it was somebody for whom, the same guy actually for whom I had worked previously. There's a few people throughout my career who are common touch points. This gentleman's name is Chuck Hewitt, and he had been the chief of staff to the Governor when I worked there. He had and we'd become good friends. He had then gone to be CEO of Neptune and had hired me out of business school to go join him there. He had then left and gone to The Jackson Laboratory and I'd stayed and finished, gotten the project across the finish line and he had voted in and out and we had a new CEO. Then I'd gone on to do the night solitics, what we're calling the type role. He'd been at The Jackson Laboratory and he called one day and said, I've got a challenge on the West Coast, is there any chance you guys would want to go? He was somebody for whom I'd worked a number of times. It wasn't a call where you immediately say no, it's one where you listen and figure out what the opportunity is, why somebody would ask me to go out here to do that. What could I possibly offer because I've never seen a genetically engineered mouse, and I've never managed a PhD. The group I was managing was five white males, mid-50s, no college degrees, maybe a couple of college degrees, but a bunch of high school degrees, all lived locally, none of whom had ever worked anywhere else. That was the paper mill team I had. Going to California. Everybody had a college master's or PhD on my staff. It was 50-50 men and women, multicultural. Average pay was twice what it was in Maine. Turnover was twice what it was in Maine. So it's just a very different experience as an actual leader. The buttons, the dials you had to turn were more and also more complicated, and more was asked of you as an individual in different ways. I don't want to imply that the paper mill rule was simple in any way, but just in every possible way, culturally, demographically, from an education perspective, from an entrepreneurial perspective, from a growth perspective, everything around here in California was different. It was bigger, it was faster, it was more diverse, for sure.

Jon - 00:18:40: I mean, it sure sounds like it. And that is a very interesting tidbit, the, that there was twice as much turnover despite having twice as much compensation, roughly. And I'm going to get, I'm trying to piece it together. Was it kind of a situation where they're like, Sandy, need help to not have this Churn. And we don't want this. And we want to go the other way.

Sandy - 00:19:04: Where there was a little bit of that. It was a little bit of that because they'd already decided to invest $50 million out here to grow. And they needed some stability. But it's also a very different culturally, for example, going back to the mill on the river in rural Maine. Obviously representing any employer. If you don't want to work at that mill, you don't have to, but the alternatives are few. Whereas here in many parts of California, if you've got a job and you're unhappy, it's not hard to go next door for another two bucks an hour. It's just not hard. And if you have those skills, somebody's probably gonna hire you. Now, that's different in different environments, it's different in different industries, but generally it's a much deeper, more vibrant employment market out here than it would be in any rural environment in the US, probably anywhere in the world. And so people didn't leave that plant that I had been running very often. And people often left the Life Sciences, manufacturing or breeding environment, if you're manufacturing mice, people would leave for two or three bucks an hour and they're making 18 or 20 bucks and they get a chance to make 23 or four and go somewhere else and not work overtime. They would do that all day long. In Maine. It remained. People were lining up for overtime. You would have mandatory overtime. But out here, my experience has been people just don't want it. I mean, they generally get paid more to begin with, and many of them just don't want the extra, they want, there are other things they want to do on the weekend. And why not? It's a beautiful place, as is Maine. So, you know, I just think it's, there's all these subtle things that are different. And I think the interesting challenge to the management challenge was learning my first lessons as a leader in Maine, for example, And then coming out here for a Maine based organization who really wanted a Maine based leader to run California and kind of fix it and make it more like Maine. I think that's what they initially kind of thought I should be doing. But the more time I spent here, the more I realized that's the fool's errand. You don't do that any more than you go to Mexico and make them act like people from Wisconsin. I mean, you wouldn't do that. You have to work with what you got. You've got to be culturally sensitive. Yes, you standardize wherever you can. And on the very important things you do, but you also have to work with the people you got. Otherwise you're not going to have anybody. So you have greater opportunity and greater challenge in other ways. And that's what made it interesting. 

Jon - 00:21:34: Fascinating. And so as you touch down, I'm assuming this is when the move happened. You're now in California you're in and this is in Sacramento, Sacramento site. Is that correct?

Sandy - 00:21:43: That's right, Yeah.

Jon - 00:21:44: And so first day on the job and did you have a grand plan? Did you like scope out what needed to be done? What was kind of like the early days of being on at the Sacramento site and that you know, easy to get to? 

Sandy - 00:21:56: Pretty clear. There was one existing fairly small lab, and there was another one on the other side of town that was under construction that needed to be filled. And so we needed to move living animals in a breeding environment from one side of town to another without breaking the bubble around them because these are what are called clean animals. That was the challenge. The logistics of this, the hiring of this, planning of this. And it was a step change of organizational magnitude going from, I think, 25 or 30 people to what needed to be 50 or so right out of the gate at the new facility. And we had some stumbles in how aggressively we hired to be ready for that move, how we were trying to squeeze the nickel a little bit too much in a year like that in order to not hire any more than we needed. And while that was all understandable, I think we also made things a lot harder on ourselves than necessarily was required in order to, and asked more of people than may have been necessary in those early years. But again, it's all a question of how you can motivate people. We got it done. And most of the people that I wanted to stick around stuck around. And so I think I must have done a few things right in terms of the leadership team. And again, there's lessons there about what you ask of your leadership team and they may stick around, but if everybody below them turns over, what is that telling you? And are they really given the tools to retain the people who they want, who really just doing what it takes to keep them? There's a whole bunch of layers to that. That's hard, really hard, the hard nuts and bolts of being a leader and managing in difficult environments. And so the answer to your question is eventually, we did get the new facility open, we closed the other one, we did it generally on budget and generally on schedule. And the new facility was incredibly successful much sooner than anybody thought it would be. So that was fantastic. And good, by the way, for my main routes. This was the West Coast outpost of a deeply impactful main organization. The Jackson Laboratory is based in Bar Harbor, Maine by Acadia National Park, been there since 1928. And here we were now consuming a lot of capital in California, but once we got it up to speed, it was sending an awful lot of earnings back to the headquarters in Maine. And that allowed for the development of the main infrastructure and enables just tons of research that otherwise wouldn't have happened. Jackson Laboratory, to be clear, is a nonprofit. Again, my first exposure to a nonprofit that may make money, but that money, as long as it's used in ways that are consistent with its original mandate, is considered clean and nonprofit money that can continue to support the organization's mission and does that very, very well.

Jon - 00:24:41: There's a ton more direction. It really got the synapses firing here. Something that you mentioned that was really fascinating to me, Ian, is that during the early days, you kind of juiced the nickel, kind of squeezed on it a little bit too much. And for listeners out there, and maybe kind of what your takeaway was, when is it time to be hyper, hyper efficient? And when is it time to be willing to open up the purse strings to spend? Because I think right now, it's a very interesting time for all entrepreneurs, where now there's an incredible emphasis on efficiency. And we just came from a couple years of incredible excess at growth at all costs. And from what I've observed, that it's not binary, it's a kind of a scale. But when do you make a judgment call on it's time to spend versus, hey, we need to tighten the belt and be very efficient here?

Sandy - 00:25:32: It's a great question. And there's no single answer, you're right. There's a scale of answers that are. Dependent on many things. It's what competitive environment are you in? What's your balance sheet look like? You know, what does the overall economic environment look like and what do you have to do in two years from now, for example? Are you trying to save money for something else or do you feel like if you get this done, you know, you'll be generating additional income that can be spent on something else. So what do you have for a team? What can your team actually accomplish? How deeply experienced are they in what you're doing? So I don't think it's possible to give one answer to that. I do think, though, that generally speaking, I am more inclined now than I was earlier in my career to over capitalize or to build and integrate a buffer for things that are strategically mission-critical. If they're truly mission credit, it will increase your confidence in getting it done. I mean, I wouldn't tell this necessarily to my subordinates, but being off by 5% on the spend is probably. Not all that impactful to the outcome. But that 5 percent in some of these large projects is a ton of money. If that could mean five or six more people during a three-month stretch when everybody's really stressed and pressed and those people can be trained up in time to be contributors, that's a big difference. I think the key again is what kind of management and junior management do you have in place? Do you trust these people to manage those people well so they're not sitting around doing nothing because that's even worse. Nothing worse than having half your team busy and a few people over here doing nothing. That's the single worst outcome. It's far better to have your rest of your team in on Saturday night, opening up boxes and putting things together than having them all angry at inefficient spend. That's the tightrope you walk. That's the art of management and getting that right is impossible to nail it. But generally, what you're trying to do is make more good decisions than bad. As the leader of that, the way that gets done is by having the right team. You're not making all those decisions. There are hundreds of decisions that get made over the course of a day when you have. 5, 6, 7, 10 subordinates working for you who are managing a management level. They're making dozens of decisions each that you wanna be in line with a set of values and a certain culture and you can't control them all and you shouldn't. So I think I would give you one answer on that spend if you felt like you had a team that was adult enough to handle it. And I might give you another answer if part of what you were trying to do to your team was help them get their teeth cut on how to run a project on budget and on time. If that's what you're trying to do, then maybe you need to squeeze the nickel. But understand that there's risk there. And that's, and understand the risk you're taking. What you're hearing is a guy who's run a lot of different kinds of projects have a lot of different value and I've watched them go well and I've watched them go poorly. The most recent one I did would have been Explora. And fortunately, we had the business dynamic was such that we had the money to work with to do pretty much what we needed to do along the way in order to make sure we retained most of the people we needed to retain. And it didn't hurt profitability. Or our ability to continue growing. So that was just sort of the capstone kind of career opportunity for me to be able to have all those things come together and to have a team that were built for it.

Jon - 00:29:08: And I think I'm like, I'm thinking of how I try to make these kind of like capital allocation decisions. And you're exactly right. I think there's an incredible amount of judgment. Like what is truly strategic? It would be easy if, you know, everyone wants to think everything they're doing is strategic. But having to focus and hunker down and really ask the hard question, like, how important is this thing that we are evaluating right now? And I think sacrifices have to be made. You know, there's only so there's finite resources, there's finite time. You need to make a call. You can't treat everything the same.

Sandy - 00:29:43: Absolutely right. That's totally true. And just in terms of leadership, there was something else I read, I'm sure it's been said many times, but you and I as CEOs are the others who are listening. Kind of make three, four, five important decisions a year, at least when the organization's big enough that we're actual CEOs and not CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, COOs. We're not doing all of those jobs at once. But when you're actually in a CEO seat, it's really true that you make three to five really important impactful decisions each year. And the rest of what you do is important and maybe in support of those three to five decisions. But the rest of those little decisions that kind of pass in front of you across your desk probably could go either way or other people could make them and it wouldn't really matter. But man, those important three to five decisions, knowing which ones they are is really the most important part of your job. And getting those right and making sure that whatever you decide is what happens and is able to happen is the name of the game as CEO. And I suspect it's probably the case with you as it was with me that if say there's five important decisions, three of them are hiring.

Jon - 00:30:50: Absolutely. 

Sandy - 00:30:51: There's room for two strategic decisions a year at a small company. If you're making eight or 10 strategic decisions a year, you're probably not strategic, right

Jon - 00:30:58: Yeah.

Sandy - 00:30:58: You're probably trying to do too many things.

Jon - 00:31:01: Absolutely. It's interesting too, because I'm drawing this connection to evaluating what is strategic. Everything you're saying about having like a breadth of exposure to different kinds of businesses, practices, projects, everything, and how different people work and meeting people where they are. I think that has at least for me armed me with the ability to have. Almost like taste, it's almost like, yeah, that feels strategic. I have seen this somewhere else play out in this way. And I now know, despite encountering this circumstance within Excedrs context, I've experienced it elsewhere. And I know how this generally plays out. Therefore, I think there's a higher likelihood that we need to really hunker down on this. Whereas not having that exposure elsewhere, you're seeing this thing or this situation for the first time, like truly the first time, and makes for a very difficult strategic question, is this strategic or not? Because you're working with no data.

Sandy - 00:32:02: It's about pattern recognition. And it's why, for example, in the space I'm in, Search funds, we have, well, by necessity, Search funds are almost always a first-time CEO. And they have, by definition, very little pattern recognition. And so part of the search fund magic is you surround them with more experienced board members with whom they have really direct personal relationships who can help widen their pattern recognition. If I had any value in my career or do still, it's that I've got some gray hairs, I've made a lot of mistakes, I recognize patterns, and I can sometimes see things coming like a freight train. And I often will be able to see a mistake being made sooner just because I've done it myself or if others do it. And again, as is usually the case, three out of five of those are human-related choices of individuals for particular roles that aren't right. And by the way, when you get one of those right, Oh my God, it's like you have nothing to do all day. It's just such a dream and it's really fun. You will find, as you probably already have the greatest, most satisfying thing in your career is when you find that you can actually take your hands off the wheel or even walk away as I did a few times. Better people ran organizations than you and because you picked them out and you gave them the opportunity and they're going to go off and crush it.

Jon - 00:33:26: Yeah, absolutely. And that's, you know, it feels like truly like a grand slam when you make that strategic, you make the right call on the higher. And I think for founders out there, the tendency is to hold everything just like that Spider-Man movie when he's like trying to hold back the train. And you're just like, I'm going to hold it all together. And I think you're going to bust up the seams.

Sandy - 00:33:47: And for very long, at least. 

Jon - 00:33:58: Yeah. Yeah.

Sandy - 00:33:50: And even Spider-Man didn't, did he? 

Jon - 00:33:52: No, he didn't. He didn't. I don't remember. I don't. Yeah. Well, he might have, but he was in shambles. He was an absolute shambles. So I don't think.

Sandy - 00:34:01: It led to two or three Spider-Man follow-on movies where he was an emotional disaster, right?

Jon - 00:34:06: Yeah. Exactly. It didn't, it was perfect. Yeah. Yeah. That's all for this episode of the Biotech Startups Podcast. We hope you enjoyed our conversation with Sandy Paige to learn more about his journey. Tune into part three of our conversation, where we cover his experience interfacing with international clientele, the importance of not walking away from meaningful work and his tips on getting started with business development. 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 on the Biotech Startups Podcast for part three of Sandy's story.

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