Purpose-Driven Innovation: Niki Santo's Biotech Journey (Swaza)

0:02 Thanks for joining me today, Nikki. Hey, Rashad, great to be here. As we said today, you are leading a biotechnology startup at the forefront of medicine. How did you get here? Well, it's an interesting story. I actually am the co -founder and CEO of Swaza, which is based in Mountain View, California, Silicon Valley biotechnology startup. But how I came to it actually was as the first outside investor to the company. And the story really starts in COVID, as many of the stories today start. But in my case, in 2020 is the year that I call my Jobin year, because in that year, I lost my mom very early to COVID. To tell you how early it was when she passed in Virginia, they wrote about it in the Washington Post with two other people, because it was so exotic to actually have someone die from SARS -CoV -2.

1:05 In that same year, I lost all of my dependents who lived with me. They were older dependents. And I suffered a head injury where I had to relearn how to walk again. I had so many different life changes in that one short period of time. I found myself at the end of 2020. alone with the mirror and God and asking the question, you know, when we lose those aspects of our identity that we define our daily lives by, then who are we really? And at the end of that time, I sort of just realized that, well, whatever I have or I haven't done or whatever I've achieved, I haven't achieved.

1:47 I'm a steward. We don't really own anything. It's all on loan to us, time, money, resources, and talent. So I thought, well, what I need to do is basically spend whatever time I do have, whether it's 10 years or 100 years, it's all really short, building things that matter. And so I radically changed what my Focus was on, I radically changed the things I was investing in. I had a very different risk profile and risk appetite. And it wasn't really for money, but it was for impact. And so in parallel, at that same time, my co -founder Jay Rajadas had been rapidly trying to race against the clock to develop key technologies in response to COVID. a vaccine, a therapeutic, a number of other technologies.

2:41 But the fourth technology he developed was this nanofluid breathing aid technology. And so when we met and converged, it really was about time and purpose. And I saw the utility of what we were doing in not only in respiratory care, but really the approach using these advanced drug delivery techniques to really create new kinds of therapeutics that really addressed the host or the person rather than specific underlying biochemical processes of disease as being not only very useful, but having huge utility and in meeting a huge unmet need. So my journey to this type of entrepreneurism rather than having it be a progression or departure from something that I had been doing before was more of a homecoming to a really intentional grounded and purposeful approach to not only investing my time but resources and an effort into. So when I came upon Swaza technology, it wasn't the question, should I do this? It was the question, how can I not do this? Because this matters. This is what I need to be called to build. And so that alignment of purpose, that alignment of mission was really

4:13 what drove what drove all of this. Jay, who's the inventor of the technology, he spent his entire life creating life -giving therapeutics. And it's not for money or for fame. It's because he wants to see people benefit from good science and have better quality of life. So it's a real privilege to be able to do this and to represent a team of people who have decades of experience and passion creating therapeutics and regenerative biomaterials. I'm sorry to hear about your mom and your family. It sounds like you went through a very difficult time. to almost reprogram and rewire your thinking and your purpose to a different mission. If you're open, maybe talk to me about how did you think about purpose in life and how did that translate to different career opportunities you undertook before? It seems like you did amazing.

5:26 work even before the COVID pandemic, and you continue to do amazing work after. To me, it looks almost like a linear trajectory, if I'm being frank with you, although I'll be in different industries and different radicals. How do you think about purpose now? And what advice do you have to say a 20 -year -old Nikki, if you had a chance to talk to her, what would you tell her about? purpose and maybe let's, you know, feel free to go into the personal side of things as well, but if you can give a synopsis on the career or the work side of things as well. Well, thanks, Rashad. I had been blessed with a very good career. I was good at what I did before.

6:13 I was an executive leadership, particularly at the intersection of academia and entrepreneurship. We were building businesses spinning out of academia to actually scale up higher education. This was with the growth of online learning, with the growth of digital. textbooks, and the growth of competency -based education. So we were really one of the pioneers that ended up building an organization that was sold to University of Massachusetts in 2021. And so the educational mission, again, it ties back to a sense of purpose, a contribution to the world leadership. At the same time, I think, in the course of that career, which was very meaningful. I think we all reach these certain plateaus where you know that you're very good at it, but you're not learning more, and that the thing more that you should be doing may be outside of your comfort zone. And so I had reached that point at several different stages in my career. And I would always respond to that by stepping back and then seeing, given where I am right now, what can I do to explore these other aspects or talents that I want to cultivate?

7:43 And who are the people that I should be doing that with? And that actually led me to a lot of my angel investing too. So prior to coming on board with Swaza, I had been doing a number of investments. investor with a little I, but you know, I had had the fortune of being just being in the Silicon Valley, right, persisting, getting getting some wins in that that area, which then, you know, rolled into my entrepreneurial journey at swaza. But to tell the 20 year old self, I actually have one of the really profound joys that I have is when I talk to young people.

8:24 A couple of years ago, I was invited to University of Chicago at the Booth School of Business to meet with students there and talk to them about their journeys. And what I actually told those students, and this is something that I did after that profound year in 2020 at the end, was I sat and I made a list of everything that I wanted to do, be, and see like in terms of achievement and these are not necessarily a career achievements, but I didn't want to die before I knew this list of things that I had touched upon them and. It and it had to be a very honest list. It wasn't about what would look good to somebody on the outside. You know, the house car, everything that it wasn't from the outside in. It was from the inside out and having to sit and very be very honest with that list. And I sat at one point and I wrote and I kept writing and I kept writing just each line a different thing until I found myself starting to repeat things. That means I had exhausted that. And that became what I call the list, not very creative. But the interesting thing is when I committed to that sense of vision, that real true heart list, that's when everything

9:56 really shifted for me that brought me to this part of my journey. Some of the things on the list were actually quite outlandish and ridiculous, like things I would have never imagined happening, but they felt truly aspirational to me. And the interesting thing is that over the course of time, I started noticing even those outlandish things on the list actually start to happen, because there was a fundamental truth, I think, from the inside out and then connecting. With the world that you live in and the life that that you you live in it there's there's an alignment there so i tell young people. Spend time making that list and be 100 % honest with yourself and then if you think you want something stop and say why do i want that is is it because i'm supposed to want that. Because social media tells me to want it, or whatever, or my classmates in my grad school tell me that that's what I should aspire to, or do I really want it? And it can be simple things as well. So my list ranges from the outlandish, about building my company, et cetera, to just small daily rituals of like, well, I want to have nice flowers in my house every week. Like, down to that level of detail, it somehow is important to my soul. I put it on the list. So that's what I tell young people.

11:26 And that's what I tell myself, because that was a transformative process for me. And I still, every day, every morning, I put that list in front of me. Because you need that on the entrepreneurial journey, as you probably know yourself, to remind you, what am I doing? Why? Where does this come from? and every morning I put in front of me. And that's what orients my thinking that day. That's fascinating. And I'm someone who struggles with routine a lot. Every day is different, and I kind of like it that way. Which isn't ideal because often I get into Friday and I have 30 things to do and I'm up till midnight. How do you think about routine and having say weekly or monthly goals or even daily goals as opposed to more going with the flow to an extent and just kind of seeing where the opportunities and problems lie in both here. personal and business life and dealing with those as they come? Yeah, that's a really good question because I think like you my natural tendency is to want to Not be limited by routine and then as an entrepreneur you can't really have professionally a routine

12:58 as you would in a corporate environment where I know that these sort of set meetings are what I need to get to in order to, quote, do a good job. In a startup, which is not a company, it's a startup. It's building something that doesn't exist yet. You need to get to the milestone. You need to solve the problem. You need to address the the situation, whether it's equipment in your lab or if it's closing an investment. And those things can be very stochastic and they are the enemy of routine. What I found probably be more helpful rather than the routine itself is to have a very stable mental model about how you manage your objectives and time or effort rather. And I think effort and energy That's now what I think about things more. And so I was not, for example, prioritizing my health very early in the startup. It was all living very cognitively trying to just focus on the work of and the thousand different things that you need to pay attention to. But I realized that having a proper routine for my sleep, my diet, my exercise, if I didn't have that, then I couldn't support this cognitive life that had

14:29 to drive. I couldn't make the right decisions. I couldn't have the right level of energy to do what I need to do. So it was more aligning to the bigger goal and then having that be what drives the sense of routine. And then also having some flexibility and then having those habits. So I like to think about things more in terms of a weekly container. What are the priorities for the week according to the role that I'm playing? And I'm a student of 1990s management theory.

15:16 So like the Franklin Covies of the world, in 1995, Intel had adopted this kind of universal time management system, which was called the Franklin system. This was ultimately acquired by Stephen Covering and became Franklin Covey. But that kind of model of having understanding what the important things are versus what's urgent. Did you explain the system to us? Yeah. So this paradigm is kind of understanding the difference between important and urgent. There are things that are both important and urgent. Those have to be top of mind. There are things that are urgent just because they're emerging contingencies and exigencies, but they're not necessarily important.

16:09 They're little fires. But then there are things that are Neither important nor nor urgent or not strategic but oftentimes these take up a lot of our our time meaningless meanings pro forma kinds of things random emails but. because their activity, they can feel productive. And so the paradigm that I found very useful was, I think, one developed by Stephen Covey himself was called the big rocks, where you focus on what the big rocks are in your week, like the big things that you know have to get done that are really important. And then everything else gets organized around them. And then sort of organizing things by the week tend to be the right time scale for me, because then the day, you can slot things into the day. But as long as you feel that you are in the right direction for the week, I tend to find that that's been my sweet spot in terms of routines and in organizations.

17:11 It's still a work in proc, still a work in process and progress. You know, I have colleagues who are very routinized, and I kind of admire them from afar for consistency. But that's what I do for me. There's a common mantra in this world or in this ecosystem that says, you know, move fast, break things, have a strong bias to action. And from an experiential perspective, I feel like that can go wrong very often in health care, because often you don't get second chances if you move fast or break things. And I have a very strong bias to action, so I have to temper this bias. Sometimes I need to plan a bit more before I launch a new product or even simple things like editing this podcast. I need to spend some time editing it and listening to it, coming up with some promotional materials. How do you think about bias to action versus bias to planning?

18:20 I like Adam Grant's philosophy of moderate procrastination here. I don't know if I like it because that resonates with me, but how do you think about kind of these two opposites of planning or just acting right away? I think probably my experience is that overall a bias towards action tends to move the ball down the field. But a bias towards action isn't an excuse for lack of very intentional thinking and planning because you can move the ball the wrong direction. You could score the wrong goal, but probably on average, it's better to move than to keep still. That's just been my experience. I think procrastination is probably inevitable with any kind of thinking work that requires deep, deep thinking. And anywhere you're dealing with an unknown, that is, in fact, what you're mulling over. Where there could be multiple possibilities for a problem or a solution, you can't just act your way towards a solution sometimes.

19:38 You have to think through, iterate, create small experiments, sort of test a hypothesis, and move forward. But I think the world as it's structured now is made for people who take action. And we know this intuitively. Is it always the most clever, the most competent, the most qualified who win the prize or win the game? No, it's often people who reach out and take. Take it right and that said. You know we want we want people to be thoughtful I don't believe in breaking things and we're in and you and I are in the sort of the health. You know field right where it's not about breaking things about first doing no harm and so. That's a guiding principle for us. Whatever we build, we need to make sure we spend the time. And if it takes longer, that it's 100 % absolutely safe. And it's 100 % absolutely we are confident that it's not going to cause harm. Or if there are harms, we understand every aspect of that potential harm. I think even if you're not building a medical technology, that's

21:10 a good stance to adopt. And I think more builders, more engineers should think of that first. Why am I doing this? And what is the broader impact of what I'm doing? And therefore, I should force myself to slow down where it matters so that I don't create unintended consequences for what I build. Yeah, unintended consequences and downstream effects of what you build are critical in healthcare. You said something in the previous answer that I really like is activity can feel like progress. I feel like founders, sometimes they seek external validation more than internal validation. And by internal, I mean, internal company validation, which is, you know, does this drive revenue growth?

22:00 Is the internal team aligned on the strategies we're foreseeing and is everyone happy? Is the team happy? Are we getting along? Sometimes I'll meet founders and then I see they're jumping from pitch competition to pitch competition and stage to stage and I go, oh no, these guys or these girls, they're going for the external validation of speaking on stage and winning. You know, usually these pitch competitions are $1 ,000 to $5 ,000 as opposed to, and their team is staying back and working. And you can kind of see the path there. And usually it does not work out. Maybe let's give you a scenario. Let's say you got invited to JP Morgan Mainstage keynote speaker for Swaza. So something that maybe could. move the needle for revenue in some aspects, or at least from an investor perspective, although I would argue raising money is not the goal.

22:58 It's a signal, but it doesn't really move the needle that much. There is some internal team dynamics at play that urgently happen that kind of need your attention to fix them. You know, your co -founders are fighting or something that I'm sure happens with every startup at some point. What do you pick and how do you kind of think about external validation and internal validation? And I'll kind of wrap this whole question up and with one more caveat, given that marketing matters and the world that we live in is designed where people make emotional decision and organizations make emotional decisions as well. And brand and marketing is important. I think your last caveat is so important and is so often under looked.

23:51 And I'll get to that. But when you said JP Morgan main stage, sorry, the building can be on fire. I'll be on that main. that main stage. That's an opportunity you don't really pass up. But joking aside, that points to the bigger point, which is being selective about those stages. And you always have to tie it back to the mission of the company, what you're actually trying to achieve at that point. People and team, you're not going to achieve anything without them. making sure those things are taken care of. And we've had critical points where on the surface, all the external things were great. But I knew if we didn't address some internal dynamic, that surface success was going to disappear. quickly, or it would evaporate. And so sometimes doing the deep work of really realigning everybody, and myself included, actually, is important at key touch points. And then being able to also reflect back, because oftentimes, particularly in the startup world, we're running to the next thing. We're winning, but then there's you climb

25:23 one mountain. You see the seven others. You've got to climb still and you don't stop. You have to stop and reflect back because you can't keep everybody with you, right? And with this, if you can't step back and and really in gratitude, see where you've come from that that that's really, really important. But your last point about. Well, the marketing and the story, I think there's obviously two extremes where when you say like, what gets measured gets done oftentimes in a very media rich environment and an information heavy environment. What you post and what seems external looks like what you're measuring. And then you create this self sustaining loop where the more you do that the more it seems like you're making progress and it it tells a good story but i i was recently in conversations with a very close friend who is the managing director of a big investment bank in new york that specializes in biotech and he offered me a cautionary tale which is from our perspective from the 45th floor of people who are going to be financing that last three rounds right before IPO or that acquisition.

26:54 We see your activity as a distraction because for us we're running the core numbers on your primary program and is that particular asset going to make money and of sufficient multiples on our investment in order to justify the investment. And so it can look like and feel like you're doing a lot. But if you're ignoring your primary business and it's proper feeding and care, we are going to see that we can see it because we see it all the time. So he literally offered me a top down view as a cautionary reminder that the external validation and there are a lot of It's like founder culture or hustle culture is very external, right? I'm doing so much, and I'm in this city, and I'm that city. But in the end, you're running a business. And you're not just running one business. You're running multiple potential businesses backwards and forwards, because it could be a number of different things.

28:04 And my job as the CEO is to understand every business this possibly could be. and then to build both forwards and backwards simultaneously to what those strategic options are. So as long as you can always come back to the center, am I moving the right ball down the right field at the right pace? Then that's the guidepost. But you do have to check back in with yourself because you can end up spending two quarters on the big world tour and get a lot of press. But if that press doesn't translate into moving the core, the core business down the field or the primary program or whatever it is that you're actually supposed to be doing at that time, it can actually just be a distraction. What is the path to exit for swaza? Yeah, so there are a couple of different strategic option so that it's all situational based on where we find ourselves at different inflection points. So our primary assets was a one, which is the nanofluid breathing aid. We're accelerating that into phase two clinical.

29:21 Studies within the next eighteen months. And pending on early readout of those phase two studies there are a couple of options one is to already strategically partner with the big pharma to bring that asset to market to is to also or to seek. Then. funding from the public markets to then support later clinical trials, which is sort of a classic biotech playbook. But this was pre -COVID playbook. So you and your audience may have heard of Merck's recent acquisition of Verona Therapeutics and for their first in class COPD drug. And Verona was one of these companies that had very good early phase two readout. They went public on the NASDAQ in 2017, raised $80 million, did their full clinical trials, and actually got the drug already approved in 2024 by the FDA. And it was after that point that Merck went in and then acquired them for $10 billion. So many multiples over what Merck might have had to pay if they had come in earlier.

30:41 Big pharmas, the cost of capital for them is much smaller. They can afford to completely come into a de -risked asset and acquire it later. They have the cash to do that. But that's sort of a classic. strategic option for a company like Swaza. So it really depends on the gates where you cross. What we are hoping for is nice early phase two readout. What we would like to be able to do is leverage that into much larger capitalization to be able to then fuel not only that asset, but we have a number of other programs because we have technology for wound healing, for example, to suffuse wounds and burns with oxygen, replicating the benefits of hyperbaric oxygen therapy treatment without the hyperbaric oxygen chambers. You can imagine that this can be very useful for patients with diabetic ulcers, for which there actually aren't any topical specifically approved for that. Actually, you think of the current leading drugs for they actually indicate in the labeling that it's not really intended for use where there's poor vascularization, for example, which kind of defeats the point. That's an area of unmet need that we'd like to address.

32:06 But we also have other advanced delivery technologies which are very promising that we want to advance. For example, being able to leverage the colon. for advanced drug delivery for a number of different indications to be able to bypass the liver. And then also, we have very advanced sublingual technologies, which we can load various peptides and molecules on. Again, minimally invasive, noninvasive, bypassing the GI tract and the liver. So inhalation route of drug delivery, also extremely promising for a number of things. So we have a number of really exciting projects that we are developing and pushing forward. And we want our first asset to be the Vanguard to be able to expand all of those technologies. For the physicians listening, I think we inherently recognize that ventilation is kind of the worst way to deliver oxygen. But we also then say, well, When we think of something like Swaza, you know, nanotherapeutics delivering oxygen to the alveoli, it sounds like science fiction. Talk to me about, yeah, just talk to me a bit more about the technology, about the

33:38 delivery method, and then is the goal to then replace? ventilators and intubation and how do you kind of think about the initial clinical use case and then what's the blue ocean or blue sky scenario? Yeah, in essence what we've developed with SWASA is a topical breathing egg that comprises liquid nanoparticles that can enable dynamic gas exchange at the surface. of the lung. So we're actually addressing the physical barriers, the key universal features of lung injuries. So you have fluid buildup, protein buildup, and oftentimes scar tissue at the surface, which are a physical block from oxygen coming in and carbon dioxide leaving. And so what we've done with this technology is actually leverage technology that was actually developed in the 1960s by the US Navy, where they were really interested in media that you could breathe instead of air for deep sea submarine. So the concept of liquid breathing has been long known in literature, but has been very limited in practice because, well, as mammals, land mammals, we don't want to drown in fluid in order to breathe. And so this idea of replacing air with fluid one to one was the governing paradigm for the use of these materials. Our insight and where we turn

35:11 this around was to say, well, what if we didn't actually replace the air with the fluid? But what if we use the fluid and encapsulate it in such a way where we can use it as a gas shuttle? And that's what we've done with Swaza. So this may be a silly question, but do we still need to inspire and expire? Do we still need the diaphragm moving up and down for this technology to work? Yes. And so it's working with how we breathe with our negative pressure diaphragmatic breathing. So the idea is when someone is under a certain amount of respiratory distress, if we can Use the diaphragmatic breathing, which actually provides the mechanical force necessary to power the particle, so to speak, to stir them in the alveoli. Then we can enable the diffusion of gas through those liquid and fibrotic barriers, and then sustain the person on their own breathing. while their clinicians are addressing the underlying cause of the inflammation or the sepsis or whatever is actually causing the injury. So this is addressing the gas exchange part. And it has to do with actually the material's very strong affinity for carbon dioxide is actually the driver for it. But under the atmospheric and physiological conditions that you would find in a human lung, what you would be doing is actually delivering

36:44 oxygen and absorbing carbon dioxide and exhaling it. Where this technology is actually very exciting for us as well is that because it sequesters carbon dioxide in a situation where you have a hypercapnia or something like a COPD exacerbation, and this is when we're thinking blue sky, which is that could be very, very useful. in dealing with those specific conditions and helping provide relief for those patients. But it was designed to be a breathing aid that could be used in austere environments. It's nebulized with simple jet nebulizers. Or basically, we actually have a device that's simple compressed air device, solar powered, battery powered, that if you were out in an area where you didn't have much infrastructure clinically, you could still apply this material.

37:36 Now, I think the obvious use case is healthcare, but it seems like you've come across other use cases like defense and maybe travel or deep sea diving or altitude sickness. How do you think about go to market for a solution such as this, which could have potentially different use cases? Yeah, I think those are what we're exploring now. And actually, our work with NATO and the US Department of Defense is very synergistic in that, in being able to explore, for example, uses for high altitude or dive injury, but then also more broadly in the recovery of human performance to be able to repair lung tissue, for example, after extreme exertions, or to be able to sustain, for example, VO2 max under extreme conditions.

38:42 But just for the average person, for example, Many of us, I'm probably one of the people included, are at risk for being pretty hypoxemic on planes. Our blood oxygen just drops, for example. And for certain people with certain conditions, that can be very risky. For people over 65 who are very much at risk of ischemic heart disease, if you can imagine having this be portable with you in your undergoing an event to try to protect the heart tissue quickly while you get to the hospital or while you get to your clinician can mean the difference between that first heart attack and a second fatal one, for example. And so we, big picture, we envision this being something in the back of every ambulance and actually being carried by people who are at particular risk, sort of an EpiPen for oxygen, so to speak. That's sort of the big picture. And then if all the safety data, which we are confident actually can be supported by further study and validated, align, it's something that we would like to see broadly available to people for those uses. How do you think about intuition when building and selling in this industry? And maybe give us an

40:12 example where you encountered something while building which challenged your intuition. And how did you kind of, so for me, I used to be a very intuitive person in terms of who to hire. And I've kind of been wrong so many times. So I think vibe hiring does not work, and you need a structured process. So I think it's hard to kind of know when to trust your intuition and when not to. Whereas maybe the easy or the lazy way is to always trust my intuition, because then I don't have to do the structured diligence on the back end of things. Yeah, so how do you think about intuition? And then like, yeah, just give me maybe an example where something happened and then you were like, oh, like intuitively this didn't make sense to me. Yeah. I mean, in a kind of scientific environment where there are a lot of unknowns, you often have to experiment your way forward. But I like what you said about intuition and just caused me to think, well, what do we really mean about intuition? And intuition is essentially a heuristic based on our informed choices and experiences. And so sometimes intuition can be a reflection of cognitive biases, which

41:45 may not be helpful. And so I'll give you an example. I very early on in establishing the company as the investor, I did not have the plan of actually leading the company. What I did was I put in some initial capital, syndicated some investors from the Valley to come in early. And then I set about trying to hire the right CEO. And this was at the time, like late 2021, the public markets were already starting to tank a bit. And this was the very beginning of biotech winter. the early science had already been happening. So when I was calling sort of my Boston crew, Harvard Medical School crew, empty PhDs who had all the right kind of credentials done by a pharma startup before, they said, hey, Nikki, we really love this technology. We think it's great. We want to support you whenever we can. We do not want to have to raise money in this environment. So if you want us on board to do that, we'll help you. But we don't want to do that. And I said, well, that's the job. Right? And then so I thought, and at that point, what my intuition had told me was, well, look, Nikki, you need to get someone who fits a certain demographic profile, a certain pedigree, a certain look, a certain type, just fill in the blank of whatever cardboard cutout you think should be that founder to be able to

43:18 raise money. And that's your job is to find that. And that, quote, intuition meant I wasn't that face. I wasn't that cardboard cut out. But somehow I thought that from behind a curtain, I was going to plan the roadmap, drive the roadmap, resource it with the right people, resource it with the right team. And yet somehow this other entity out there, this person who is supposed to be that right CEO was going to raise a bunch of money for the company. That turned out to be a massive mistake. Yeah. Yeah. Given your experience, like for me, you would be the cardboard cutter and the person to raise money for anything, including SSA. Well, my intuition was informed by certain quote facts, such as only 2 % to 3 % of venture capital goes to women founded companies, much less minority women founded companies. And then we're also, we were still in the wake or the shadow of an Elizabeth home. And I'm dealing with a technology that, as you said yourself, sounds like science fiction, right? It takes some explaining, but it's very scientifically sound. But when it's category changing. So all of those things, quote, had informed my intuition in 2021. But they were all wrong on a lot of

44:52 different levels as well. I thought I was being prudent, but really, it was just reinforcing these biases. And the funny thing is, I did something that I would have never advised a mentee of mine to do, which would be to recede into the background, thinking that this other strategy would make the company win. And that wasn't correct. Do you think entrepreneurship is innate? Were you always an entrepreneur, say, when you were in middle school in your teenage years, or do you think it can be learned? I would say I was always creative, slightly iconoclastic and moved outside the strictures and the structures of what was around me to create things, but I would have never labeled myself as an entrepreneur. And I've asked that same question, Rashad, are there people born to be this? I think it's along a spectrum. There are some people that you know that they could never work for anybody else, that they have to strike out on their own. But I think our current environment actually demands us all to be entrepreneurs. We don't have the

46:22 stability of institutions and. Cultural and even work norms that we had even 30 years ago. So everybody now has to think in terms of the the entrepreneur and i don't want to say that rightly but i think is humans we actually are highly adaptable. We solve problems we do that every day. I say, moms are the best entrepreneurs, right? Like if you want something done, ask a busy mom, for example, because they've got to manage building up human beings what could be more complicated or complex than that. So I think I see those skills and capabilities in people every day. And I think the environment that we live in now demand more of that. And I think it's a human thing to create. And it's a human thing to build. I think we are made to be creators.

47:28 We've just formed that way. We're designed that way. And so in as much as entrepreneurism is an expression of that, I think we all are naturally entrepreneurs, whether we call ourselves that or not. What do you think is the path to changing the statistic that only 2 % to 3 % of venture capital flows to women? And even substantially, I'm assuming a small minority of that flows to minority women. I wish I had a really good answer to that question. I think It's just a matter of normalizing the effort. I tend to find that separating out women founders hasn't been as effective for women founders as we think it might be, like having women only funds, for example.

48:32 They tend to be under a different kind of microscope. and actually tend to be more risk averse, right? Because they have to, you know, they have to win. They have to get returns. There's also always that stigma if you're in this. So I'm a minority in India. And then I was a minority when I moved to Canada when I was 16. I was one of four brown people in my high school. Although I used to think of myself a minority. I don't think I am anymore. If you look at the CEOs of a lot of public companies. I think intuitively I agree that if there is a class of humans that is oppressed, and I agree, women and women minorities are, they need to be uplifted so they're no longer oppressed. That makes sense to me. I don't know anyone who would argue against that. I don't personally know. I'm sure there are people who would argue against that. how to do it is more difficult and I can only speak from personal experience just seeing a lot more brown male CEOs. I don't feel oppressed anymore and I'm not a minority anymore, right? And there was no category that I know of for that specific race and gender for venture funding. I think you bring up a very interesting point is having these categories does it kind of make people

50:04 who belong to those categories more insecure that I got this funding or I got this job because of my demographics, but not because of my aptitude? So we would love for you to kind of maybe dig a little bit deeper and like, does it mean that we just don't do it externally and internally, you know, we still uplift people? who need to be uplifted. Yeah. I think it's both. I think you want to reach down and support talent where you find it, and then also recognize where some of those barriers and challenges might be. I was challenged recently by very profound work by my colleague, Siri Chalaxi, who is a researcher at the Harvard Kennedy School. And she just came out with a book called Make Work Fair. And it's really fascinating work. They were particularly looking at gender discrepancies, for example, in corporate leadership and latter. And they found that these very kind of data -driven interventions really worked to level things out. And it wasn't really about categorizing people and separating them into specific programs, et cetera. But it was really just creating practices just even by the way that you screen resumes and write

51:38 job descriptions to not privilege any particular group, but actually make it make it more fair. And these resulted in very good outcomes for everybody involved in the organizations that they studied. And so I think there is one thing, as we are all building companies and organizations, we should be mindful about the policies and structures and who we hire. I have a number of other female CEO colleagues in biotech who are also aware of these issues. But then we talk about, for example, hiring. And then they'll, for example, pick a candidate over a really great candidate, maybe a more qualified candidate who was like a mom. But she couldn't start right at that time they wanted her to because she needed to factor in the school start times. And I thought, guys, why are we Why are we doing this? Right? Like, it's our job to think about, are we perpetuating things that actually are then holding back really great talent? Because we have these ideas that somehow our organizations would be better benefited by by some what what what difference does it

53:09 make if you change that higher by like, six, eight weeks. And you got this really great person. But you're discounting her off the bat because you didn't want to take into account this one consideration. So we have to be very mindful of that. And human beings, they have babies. For example, just think on a very basic level. In most cultures around the world, the majority of that work or thinking around that falls to moms. Well, as companies, as leaders, have we factored that in? Are we ruling out talent by not being able to be flexible to ramp these really talented people? It's not even about their gender.

54:01 They're talented. ramp them back into the workforce properly so that we can benefit from that talent and we create value out of that. This is not charity. This is good business. So I've thought about these questions for a while. And I think it's in building organizations too. When you're in charge of the policy and you're in charge of the hiring, not vibe hiring because we vibe with people who are like us. And when I think about our company how very different the people that were brought together are we share very similar values underneath but as people we are radically different and if it was on vibes it would not have happened and um but if it was on purpose if it's on creation of value like if we but these are the exact people that we need On board to create this thing and build it forward but it's definitely not on vibes and it's definitely not on similarities and we tend to over rotate towards. Would i be like buddies with that this person the thing is you grow into that relationship. We're built for connection and you tend to find people that you spend more time with somehow you would have never been friends with them maybe just walking across the street and meeting them but. But in a shared mission together, you're a brand of brothers. You're

55:33 a band of brothers and sisters. And because you have the shared purpose. So yeah, I think being aware of our tendency towards vibe anything, right? And then stepping back and saying, hey, what if I thought about this in a more holistic way or in a bigger picture way to reflect my values in what I think is important? um, societally within my, the confines of my own company is, is a, was a place to start. I think this is a great place to end. Thanks so much for joining us today, Nikki. Rashad, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks for having me.