Josh Geballe: Managing Director of Yale Ventures

Josh Geballe, Managing Director of Yale Ventures, shares his thoughts with BioBoss host John Simboli about leadership and community building in biopharma. Yale Ventures is a new initiative created by Yale University to support and expand innovation and entrepreneurship across Yale university and throughout the greater New Haven region with the goal of helping to develop innovations that impact the world's greatest challenges.

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

I think there's just a coiled spring here. Yeah, that has such potential to have such an impact in the world.

John Simboli: 0:12

That's the voice of Josh Jabaal, Managing Director of Yale ventures. listen in to hear insights from Josh, about leadership and community building in biopharma. And how Yale ventures, a new initiative created by Yale University is supporting and expanding innovation and entrepreneurship across Yale, and throughout the greater New Haven region, with the goal of helping to develop innovations that impact the world's greatest challenges. I'm John Simboli. You're listening to byo boss. Today, I'm speaking with Josh Jabaal, managing director Yale ventures. Welcome to bio boss, Josh.

Unknown: 0:51

Thanks, John. Thanks for having me.

John Simboli: 0:53

Josh, what led you to your role as Managing Director at Yale ventures,

Unknown: 0:56

it's really the role that the University created that brings together so many aspects of things that I've found, I really enjoy the most, over the course of you know, my 25 year ish career at this point, you know, I've been fortunate to have a very diverse set of experiences. And when I came across this role that the university was creating it recognized that it's bringing together a lot of the most attractive things to me, because it really is a dream job from the perspective of, you know, being able to work with entrepreneurs, founders, builders, the types of people that through the course of my career, I've come to really gravitate to both for their optimism, their commitment to make the world a better place, their willingness to take, you know, enormous risks against all odds to try to solve hard problems. And, you know, being the source of so much of the innovation and the progress that we see in the world coming from entrepreneurship, coming from founders, and seeing this as an opportunity to be really helpful to them, you know, here at Yale and in Connecticut more generally,

John Simboli: 1:55

I can imagine with your experience in in private sector and government, I can imagine that you would be able to lay out a framework and find the right people to help get it going, that's a different step from you know, I'm gonna do this, it's gonna take a tremendous amount of my time was that at all a difficult thing to say, like, I want to lead this thing,

Unknown: 2:14

colleague here at Yale initially sent me the job description from the search firm for this role. And my first reaction was to send a few names of other people who I thought would be great at this, you know, I was Chief Operating Officer for the State of Connecticut working for Governor Lamont love the job, you know, three years into a four year term I had intended to at least stay through his re election. And so my, that's not where my brain was, my brain was on Yeah, this looks like a really important job, I want to try to help find somebody amazing to do it. But after reflecting on it further over, I think, another week or two, you know, I was like, wait a minute, this looks like an absolutely amazing role. And, you know, they're gonna fill this role in someone's, you know, they're gonna get something great to do. And that person is going to be in this role for a long time. And so there's kind of a one shot deal here, like if you if you really want to go for it, and then you have to do it now. And that's ultimately the decision that I made.

John Simboli: 3:05

What did you mentioned might be the possibilities for Gail ventures that might not be achievable elsewhere.

Unknown: 3:12

I'm a little biased, because I'm a Yale along right, I went to Yale as an undergrad came back to go to the Business School, a school of management. So I have, I have a view that Yale is the best university in the world. You know, there's a lot of evidence to back that up. I think in terms of the scholarship that goes on here the research, you'll invest a billion dollars a year roughly, and reach a wide range of different areas of research, we attract leading scholars from all around the world. And we attract the best and the brightest in terms of students, both undergraduate, graduate, doctoral, students, postdocs. And so it's just such a fertile ground for for innovation for discoveries. And at the same time, it's an area where the university historically has focused first and foremost on its core mission of research and teaching, but historically less so on the translation of that research for application and in the world. And increasingly, the universities come to recognize that the research and the teaching is critically important. That's our core mission. It always will be but that's necessary, but maybe not sufficient in today's day and age where we have so many enormous problems. And we have so much potential to to solve those problems with technology with science, engineering, and that we have an incredible position to use our intellectual capabilities to help solve those problems. And there's a growing desire you can feel it walking campus amongst our faculty amongst our students to help solve those big problems to improve human health to address the climate crisis to any number of different domains where that we can have an impact and I think there's just a coiled spring here, el that has such potential to have such a such an impact in the world and you know, this role and what we're trying to do at Yale Ventures is really To help accelerate that,

John Simboli: 5:01

how do you answer when someone who doesn't know the Innovation Entrepreneurship landscape asks, Josh, what do you do for a living,

Unknown: 5:08

we try to help our faculty and our students in the broader good or even community have as big an impact as possible on the big challenges we're facing in the world. You know, at a high level, that's, that's the summary. And so there's a lot of things that we do if you double click on that, to try to support that mission. And they range from some core responsibilities that every university has around technology transfer under the vital act to take the intellectual property that's developed at the University and protect that through patenting. And then and then license it out to either startup companies or other organizations that can develop those technologies, bring them to scale, hopefully bring them to the market in terms of products and services that can make a difference in the world. And more broadly, you know, we have a number of programs that we run, that provide support to faculty and to students in particular, to help them in many cases, take faculty, you know, our faculty, almost by definition, are the leading scholars in the world in whatever their domain might be. But in most cases, they have never tried to start a company or they may have never had any training in business, generally. And so the notion of how do I think about taking this discovery I've made and bringing it out to the world can be a very intimidating and mystifying question to ask. And so we try to help with that journey in terms of surrounding them with help in terms of funding in terms of mentorship, connections, with investors, connecting them with student fellows who we hire and train who can help do market research help with business plans, and pitch decks and all those sorts of things. You know, those types of programs are designed to help make it easier, less of a burden, less of a challenge to help translate research for external benefit. You know, when it comes to our students, we have a very wide range of students here, ranging from some who have founded companies in their dorm rooms and are generating revenue and have raised venture capital already to others who are just interested in innovation generally, and want to explore as part of a complement to their liberal arts education, you know, what is entrepreneurship? What is innovation? How do I think about becoming an innovator, whether that's as a startup employee, a startup founder, or maybe just someone who's going to innovate in a nonprofit, or in a big company, these are all important areas to develop your skills and your understanding of the world as a student, and we're really excited about the programs, we have to help complement the curricular programs at Yale as well.

John Simboli: 7:33

How do you spend your time each day? Are you having a one to one conversations with these people you just described? For me,

Unknown: 7:39

it's one of the most exciting parts of this job is getting to know our you know, the faculty and students here understand what they're working on. It's a it's a limitless learning opportunity for people who are curious and interested in learning new things. But we also have a great team, you know, we've got a team of people in our business development team, who partner with our faculty, and these are mostly PhD scientists themselves, who have expertise in in these domains who can, you know, get into a very low level of detail from a scientific or engineering perspective, but also bring that external commercial perspective, so they can help our faculty think through, you know, what are the potential markets for this technology? What are investors likely going to want to see or what corporate partnerships might be prime given what we know about the landscape in the industry in that particular area, who's very focused on these types of discoveries that this faculty member might be working on in the research lab. So you know, we've got a team that fanned out across campus and trusts provide very kind of white glove hands on service to connect those dots, you know, I think that team across the board would tell you the same thing I did, which is that they love the opportunity to learn from, you know, again, leading scholars in all these areas, but help them think through the process of how to get that technology out into the world where it can have an impact on patients lives or on you know, the the big challenges we're facing the world.

John Simboli: 9:05

What have you learned about your management style that says who you are, that kind of defines who you are.

Unknown: 9:11

First and foremost, it's it is about the team. It's about the people that you get to work with, and the alignment on mission on energy, passion, getting the right people around you, at any size, organization, any size challenge is, in my judgment, by far the most important thing, you can go it alone, or you can go with a you know, mediocre team or misaligned team but it's just you're not going to get as far as you're not gonna go as fast. You're not gonna have as big an impact but you for everyone who's listening, right, you probably hopefully everyone's had that experience where they're on a team where it's just a bunch of high performers who are just out to conquer the world and when you have that alignment, it's just a it's such an energizing, you know, exciting environment to be in and you just can do great things. So for me, that's job like one, two and three for managers, you know, people, people, people,

John Simboli: 10:04

as you look back, having worked for large companies having built a small company having worked in government, you see something that connects all that, would you have thought about that? Like, oh, yeah, this is the path I'm gonna go.

Unknown: 10:15

i In retrospect, yes. Like there's, you know, I can point to you experience of head and every job I've had, up until now that are helpful to me in this new challenge that I'm in now. However, if you were to rewind the tape and kind of go back in time to those career decisions I made over this journey. Absolutely not. I mean, there were some there were some career transitions I made, which were deliberate that I kind of went and sought out and I knew something that I wanted to do next, I had an itch. But in some cases, it was serendipity, you know, something that came out of the blue, like this role that I'm in right now, or the prior one working in state government, I never thought I would do a roll like that was just a set of circumstances aligned. And that phone call came in. And one thing led to the next, can you

John Simboli: 11:01

recall, when you were eight, or nine, or 10, or whatever is the appropriate age, and you were fashioning an idea, no doubt, based on what your family sort of projected for you about what you might be when you grow up, you know, Josh is going to be a doctor or lawyer or fireman or whatever. Do you remember that? Does that have anything to do with what you're doing now?

Unknown: 11:20

No, it doesn't. So you know, I think when I was eight, or nine, even around those ages, I'm pretty sure the only thing I really was focused on was I wanted to be a pitcher for the New York Mets. Like a lot of kids, you know, firemen, police officers and athletes, anyway, so that obviously, you know, by the time you get to be a teenager, you realize you may not have been given the natural gifts to that journey. But you know, it started to come together for me really more after college early on, you know, very interested in making a difference in the world, very idealistic psyllium in many respects, but particularly so then, like a lot of young graduates, and I was working in government and politics and nonprofits. And I think through that world, I was observing that a lot of the impact that actually happened was being driven by business leaders or people who had or, you know, thinking through the private sector knew how to harness the economy, you knew how to work the levers of capitalism, to get big things done, and have it scaled impact, and to move fast and do interesting things and innovative things in the process. And that led me back to business school, you know, where you kind of acquire more of those core skills that I hadn't really developed yet. And from there, it was, you know, straight into the private sector, over the course of 20 years, a wide variety of different experiences, as I mentioned, you know, you kind of develop an appreciation for at least my senses, which is if you really want to have the biggest possible impact, the resources needed to do that the investment, the the income, the the marshaling of talent, you know, really lends itself to, you know, to scalable businesses that can really have an impact around the world and can move quickly and innovate and tackle difficult problems.

John Simboli: 12:55

I know you're new in the job, because the job is new. But have you is there any kind of pattern you can point to and say, oh, yeah, sometimes people hear this, I have to help them understand it is that

Unknown: 13:05

occasionally I'll get a question of venture. So you're, you're a VC. And we're not a VC. So we don't make equity investments in companies. We do distribute funding, but it's it's in the form of grants that are designed to really to help our innovators bridge the proverbial valley of death from where, you know, federal grant funding for basic research kind of leaves off and where the venture industry is ready to take over. There's often a gap there. And so we provide grant funding that can help support that final experiment, get that data package together, get the proof of concept built, that can provide confidence to an investor that they're ready to fund that Series A, we do give out non dilutive funding along those lines. And then we are also active in working with venture investors to connect them with innovators in areas that they might be interested in. So there's obviously a lot of activity and you know, in life sciences and biotech, early stage biotech investors we spent a lot of time with, but there's other areas as well spanning, you know, engineering, software, climate, quantum computing a whole wide range of other areas, where we try to help both bring venture investors to town stimulate the formation of new venture funds, independent from the university, but that can be active investing in university spinouts. But we are not a VC firm ourselves.

John Simboli: 14:24

My understanding is that Yale Ventures is set up in four levels to serve for different kinds of audiences. Do I have that right? And can you tell me a little bit about that?

Unknown: 14:32

We have four teams that are organized kind of based on the type of work that gets done. So the first is our IP and licensing services group. And this is the core tech transfer responsibilities of the university receiving invention disclosures, if applicable, getting them patented, and then working to market them and license them out whether that's to a new startup company or to a corporate partner or any other group. The second team is innovation training and startups. And this is the group that we're provides a wide range of programs that help support our faculty help support our students to understand how to take their idea take their invention, and turn it into a business or think about how to develop it in different markets. So there's a number of different programs there, ranging from the Blavatnik fund for innovation, which supports life sciences innovations, Roberts Fund, which is focused on engineering and more software based innovations through to our students Center for Innovation sigh city, which is helping train students as to think as innovators, and oftentimes to help them develop their own ventures as well, a number of other programs as well. But that's the second team. Third team is corporate partnerships. So we work with industry as well, in areas of mutual interest to develop alliances, where it brings additional resources to bear from that company into the university for kind of jointly organized research in areas of mutual interest. And then the last area is innovation community, which represents our kind of ambition to help connect the dots and help provide connective tissue to the entrepreneurial ecosystem, both on campus and off campus in New Haven, Connecticut, we have so much momentum right now, and in the startup ecosystem here, but it's not always well coordinated. People don't often know what's going on or cool events or other companies working on similar problems, or potential customers are working together to build the the environment where you know, employees want to come work here and stay here. So we're actively working to promote the entrepreneurial ecosystem here, off campus as well as on campus. You know, I think you start with the fact that, you know, New Haven has an exceptionally high density of really smart, innovative people. So you know, this, this market ranks in the top three in the nation in terms of patents per capita, advanced degrees per capita, you know, so we're just packed in with really smart, interesting people, we also benefit from the fact that Yale imports people from all over the world, and that manifests itself in incredible assortment of entertainment options, dining options that represent the best from all around the world. But then you look at, you know, other really important aspects like quality of life, for people who are particularly, you know, raising families who care about great public schools care about, you know, being able to afford homes that they love living in not being subjected to horrendous traffic to get back and forth to work, you know, we've got a great equation there. And then, of course, cost of doing business to, you know, companies that might not be in New Haven would probably otherwise be in Boston, or New York, or San Francisco, where the cost of lab space is going to be, you know, two to three times higher, literally, that much greater than it is here. And so you can take that precious investment capital that you've raised, and stretch it out a lot further. And, you know, the historic knock on US has been access to talent, because we're a smaller market compared to a place like Boston Cambridge, but you know, that's, that's been changing, you know, with more companies staying here and more of the talent in here, and also post COVID. Now, when in a lot of, you know, maybe non lab roles, people can work here at companies here, but not actually live here. And vice versa. You know, we're seeing a lot of now kind of Boston area, biotech execs taking jobs, running startup companies down here, you know, taking the train down to three days a week and working remotely to three days a week. And that's happening a lot now as well. So the historic headwind we faced on that, I think, has really been declining rapidly. And so, you know, the mix of all of those ingredients, things come together, and really unique and exciting way. And then we think about the future and the potential we have here for growth and expansion. It's also kind of a fun challenge, you know, to think about what we can grow this place into and, and how much more potential we have in front of us and the fact that it was going to be a relentless engine of innovation, pumping out new ideas, pumping out new graduates, you know, I think we just have a really exciting mix of ingredients to put together and build something really special.

John Simboli: 18:56

How would you describe a good fit for a partner to your ventures?

Unknown: 19:00

There's so many different possibilities. So a common area would be companies now that are thinking about where to expand where to locate their their headquarters or, you know, research branch of their company. And so we spent a lot of time selling New Haven, walking people around introducing them to people helping them understand why we love it here so much, and why they might want to put down some roots here as well. We spent a lot of time talking to other organizations that may not want to physically move here but want to collaborate with us and want to collaborate with our investigators or faculty, you know, where there's areas of mutual interest in from a research perspective, that's a fertile ground. But we also spend a lot of time connecting students and faculty, with mentors. So we're blessed to have, you know, an incredible alumni base 130 or 40,000 alumni around the world, who many of whom have been successful entrepreneurs themselves or developed deep expertise and different areas where we have interest here on campus, and people are encouraged Be generous with their time and in loyal to the university and one want to give back and help others where they have been in those shoes, you know, 2030 4050 years ago. And so we spent a lot of time connecting, you know, those mentors or in more some cases, more substantial relationships where if someone might become an entrepreneur in residence, and you know, dedicate significant chunks of their time to helping advise people here, and that's another area for partnership in quotes, I guess, but you know, involvement in the ecosystem in ways that can be really, really helpful. We also, of course, are eager to see our students and our graduates get connected with great career opportunities. You know, I have a slight kind of personal bias here, which is I remember, you know, when I was a student, I think this is largely true today, you know, there are tracks, right that people think they have to get onto you to go to Wall Street and become a investment banker to go into consulting. And one observation I have is that I think over the last number of years, more and more so working at a startup or you know, the kind of path around entrepreneurship, or early stage companies has become much more mainstream, but it's a little harder to identify those those opportunities and access them. And I think there's a role we have to play there to to connect students and graduates into startup opportunities, which I actually think can be absolutely remarkable learning operates postgraduate learning opportunities, where, you know, if you're working at a small company, you get involved in all sorts of stuff. And there's almost no limit if you're willing to work hard to, you know, the learning how that you can do and the impact that you can have. And I think it's just a remarkable early career opportunity for people and we can help connect them in as well.

John Simboli: 21:31

If it's successful, how does one cope with the success in the sense that an organization like your ventures is almost by definition, a geographical kind of a thing. And so you want to build from your base, right. But you also want to be inclusive, you want to remain open to ideas from outside. So how does how does one manage success so that it doesn't become insular.

Unknown: 21:54

El is, you know, constantly bringing in, you know, new people, right, new faculty that come in with different perspectives. Our current faculty are incredibly collaborative, right, both internal to the university, as well as external, they're working with colleagues and other universities, oftentimes on these inventions. So there's a, there's a very robust flow of ideas and information from a scholarship perspective. And then obviously, from student perspective, you know, look, every year, you know, we import three 4000 students from all around the world, in almost every country out there, every part of the United States in the world, come to New Haven to be a student at Yale, and bring with them, you know, incredible diversity of experiences, opinions, backgrounds, and like I said, I mean, I think one of our real goals is to both help them in their education and their career journey, but also entice more of them to stick around when they graduate, you know, enrich the fabric of of the Greater New Haven community here and fill the jobs that are being created, hopefully start some of their own companies that can be based here as well. And I think there's enormous opportunity for that, as well, you know, in addition to, that, they will help ensure we don't become insular and that we continue to benefit from Great thinking that's coming in from all over the place.

John Simboli: 23:07

There's something about the kind of people you've met, that helps propel that

Unknown: 23:12

faculty who end up at Yale students went up at Yale tend to be, you know, superstars, right, they tend to be exceptionally smart, very driven. And so you start from that base. But I think another thing that generally is, is maybe even more unique to Yale, united and other top universities is there's, there's something about you, that attracts people who are very collaborative, who wants to work together on problems, and who are also perhaps, you know, a little bit more well rounded, then, you know, maybe it's a bit of our kind of liberal arts heritage, or it's something about, you know, being in a smaller city, you know, not in one of those major markets. But there's some, there's some ingredients there that I think attracts and retains people who want to work together on solving problems, who want to help other people and, and support their journey and their growth. And I think that's pretty, pretty special here, and I think is a little bit of a special sauce. And in Yale in Connecticut, generally, I think as well. If you think about the really strong and exciting foundation that we're building on right now. And you think about some of the key players, you know, I think you go back in time, maybe 2030 years to like the one of the first biotech spinouts that really took hold here in New Haven has gone on to great commercial success, which is Alexian and Lennie Bell, the founder, they are, you know, a real pioneer in many respects. You know, in more recent times, you know, Craig crews who's spun out several companies now and in partnership with Tim Shannon, who's been kind of his wingman investor, you know, have insisted that those companies stay in New Haven grow in New Haven, and it really helped, you know, build the ecosystem here from you know, our Venice to hold us to doom and now, you know, another person is Jonathan Rothberg, who you know, of course his The yield graduate but on his own has been a serial founder and entrepreneur here in the New Haven area has founded numerous companies, including a number that have grown quite large from kerogen to four or five for life sciences to ion Tamara, and now running a a incubator in Guilford, that that's spinning out new startup companies at a blistering pace. You know, there are a lot of the people in this ecosystem can trace their roots back to one of the Rothberg companies somewhere along the line, I mean, just the number of former kerogen execs who now play prominent roles in this ecosystem is substantial. Other, you know, external leaders, people like Carter, when Stanley I think really took a chance on New Haven back at a time when there was almost no commercial lab space here. And people thought he was crazy for it, and spending time in New Haven investing in New Haven, but now his, you know, built out 2 million square feet of wet lab space in New Haven, which is essentially fully occupied, including a building that's going up now, which is basically fully leased 18 months before it even opened for business. So, you know, he was a real pioneer, I think you have to look at John Soderstrom, who led our tech transfer office for over 20 years and was instrumental in the commercialization of a number of these companies that have been successful, you know, Bruce Alexander, right, who was one of the key leaders here at Yale, who, you know, saw the need and, you know, marshal the resources to help develop the the biotech and life sciences ecosystem here. And then more recently, our current leadership at El Nino from Peter Salovey, our president Scott Strobel, our provost, my career as the Vice Provost for Research, you know, I'll people who have identified over the last couple of years, the opportunity for Yale to really up our game in this area, and invest and do more to unlock more of the intellectual property, intellectual firepower of the university on the big challenges in the world and, you know, decided to create this role that I'm now in and, you know, arm us with the resources necessary to have a greater impact. You know, they're also key protagonists, and where we are today in, you know, giving us this Launchpad that we're on right now for impact in the years to come. There's a number of organizations that play important leadership roles connecting the ecosystem. And you know, a few of them particularly here bio CTE is the trade association for the life sciences industry in Connecticut, very active with events with helping support companies job training, a number of other areas. And then more broadly, there's advanced CTE, which is the state's kind of business recruitment organization helps with site selection work for out of state companies. And when someone expresses interested in learning more about the state in the area, you know, organizes the tours and the visits, and we plug in with them regularly. There's Connecticut innovations, which is the state's venture capital firm, incredibly active, they do an amazing job investing in a wide variety of industries, different stages, but also playing a really important convening role for the startup ecosystem across the state. So we're very, very involved with them. And then state government. And you know, under Governor Lamont, and the economic development team under Commissioner Lehmann, soon to be incoming Commissioner, Alexandra Dom, they are fully committed to the importance of entrepreneurship and startups in building a robust, fast growing economy here in Connecticut, and they are very active supporting a number of different initiatives from job training programs, to economic development projects, new lab facilities, a whole variety of important initiatives where the state can provide that extra boost that can get a project over the goal line, or help train the workforce that we need for the future in these industries at the scale that no one company can do by itself. And you know, we know that when companies grow and are successful, you know, there's a lot of benefits that accrue to the shareholders and the top executives. But we were very focused as well on making sure that the community benefits that the jobs that these companies create are accessible to people from communities in which we're based. There's a huge need for not just, you know, PhD scientists and these companies, but also people who can be lab technicians who can be bench scientists who can play a number of variety of roles, including many roles that often don't require a college degree. And so they're job training programs that we're trying to support to scale up the opportunity for the community to benefit and the city's important partner initiatives like that very passionate about that as well. Also housing, you know, we don't think of that maybe directly as an important enabler here. But as the economy grows, as the jobs grow, we need people we need places for these people to live. You know, we have very low residential vacancy rates in New Haven, I think are among the lowest in the country. The last time I saw it, and we've had huge in migration to Connecticut during COVID. A lot of people you know, moving out in New York moving into Connecticut, and from other places in the country too, and our growth could be constrained if we don't have enough housing. You know, if you travel around Haven right now you see a lot of cranes, you see a lot of construction projects, residential housing projects going up, in addition to the commercial construction. But that's an important place where the city is very focused as well, in terms of making sure we have places for everybody to live. And then of course, the infrastructure, the transportation, all of the other enablers of having a place where you know, people want to live want to build their career want to raise their family?

John Simboli: 30:22

Does your background as someone who built a company from scratch, does that give you any insight into working with other folks who are doing the same thing trying to do something? Yeah, I think the

Unknown: 30:32

the kind of lived experience of the the entrepreneur, right is a pretty unique thing. It's hard to describe, and it's hard to recreate in, you know, other ways, you know, through books or classes or, you know, reading about it. So, yeah, I'm hopeful that, you know, the, the experience having been through the journey of joining up, you know, bootstrap company, when were 15 employees, you know, through raising venture capital, scaling it up, ultimately, being acquired, and, you know, working at the acquiring company for a couple of years, you know, hopefully provides a perspective that can be helpful, but also, you know, learning that you get along the way, you know, how to negotiate a financing, you know, how to think about term sheets, how to think about scaling businesses, and all of the things that go along and about, you know, you know, the maybe the softer aspects of it too, which are critically important, you know, how to stay focused, how to not get discouraged, how to persevere how to, you know, expect things to go wrong, and overcome them when they do and not get derailed by them and manage the stress. It is a unique journey, and people haven't been on it before. It's hard to describe. In particular, when you think about a faculty at Yale, you know, in their lives, you know, their day jobs, right? You think about research, running your research lab in and of itself is like running a small business, right? You have to secure funding, you have to write grants to get get funding in, you have to hire a team of attract grad students postdocs to work in the lab. You have to produce product, right? You have to do research, you have to publish papers. Oh, you have to teach by the way. And, you know, presumably, you're mentoring people, and you're participating in the, you know, the university life being a good university, you know, university citizens serving on committees, other things. So these are, these are big jobs to begin with. And then the notion of, oh, yeah, and by the way, you know, why don't you start a company, which I know you've never done before, and envision pretty quickly how important our roles are to be helpful and take as much of that work and mystery out as we possibly can. And so, yeah, having having those experiences, I think is super important.

John Simboli: 32:40

Josh, thanks for taking time to speak with me today.

Unknown: 32:43

It's been a pleasure. Great to catch up, John. And, you know, thank you, as well for all of your contributions to building this ecosystem. You've been personally involved and helping many of the companies we've talked about today. So you know, I'm grateful for the invitation to speak with you.

John Simboli: 32:58

Right at the start of my conversation with Josh, he said something I remember resonating for me, when we met the summer, Josh said, I gravitate to the founders and CEOs, optimism, their commitment to make the world a better place, their willingness to take enormous risks against all odds to try to solve big problems. Having worked for many years with biopharma leaders to help uncover their company's authentic story and create the aligned brand, I to marvel at the willingness to take big risks. Knowing how fragile a biopharma company can be, especially one that has not yet developed an FDA approved medicine. Josh's experience with starting a technology company from scratch, and building it into a successful enterprise gives him a strong foundation to the deal ventures work of supporting and expanding innovation and entrepreneurship across the hill and throughout the greater New Haven region. In my view, this firsthand understanding what it takes to overcome headwinds and build a company is what sets Josh apart. I'm proud to belong to the Yale Greater New Haven ecosystem. I look forward to the prospect of continued growth under Josh's leadership of VL ventures in 2023. I'm John Simboli. You're listening to bio boss