Risa Stack of The Production Board joins Nate to discuss Can BioTech Extend Life to 150 Years? Gene Editing, and Investing in the Future of Life Sciences. In this episode we cover:
- Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital, and Starting Companies
- Venture Studio Model, Technical Risk, and Investing in Businesses
- Challenges in Therapeutic Development and Commercialization
- Prioritizing People Over Products, and Assessing the Funding Environment for Critical Industries
- Biotech, Life Extension, and Investment Strategies
- Gene Editing and Cell Therapy Technologies
- Personalized Medicine
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Our guest today is Risa Stack who is joining us from San Francisco. Risa is currently a Partner at The Production Board, a venture firm that both builds and invests in the companies solving Earth’s most fundamental problems acros agriculture, biomanufacturing, and the broader life sciences. Prior to The Production Board, Risa was a General Manager of New Business Creation at GE Ventures and Also a Partner at Kleiner Perkins for nearly a decade. Risa, welcome to the show!
0:25
Hi, Nate, really great to be here.
0:28
We’re gonna go through a number of different areas today. But first and foremost, I heard an interesting story about how you were influenced to become an investor. So how did reading the book the billion dollar molecule influence your path to become a VC?
0:44
Yeah, so So I, at the time, I had a very non traditional path to becoming a VC. So I was working on my PhD at the universe Chicago and PhD in immunology. And at night, I was working on the trading floor at the Chicago Board of Trade, and they IRS Chicago, and you may know the Chicago Board of Trade, it’s I think, all the trade is electronic now, but I would hand signal into the pit at night I was trading the yield curve, which is the two year five year 10 year notes and 30 year bond. And then And why was I would go through what it was slow, I would read books. And one of the books I read was The Billion Dollar molecule and the billion dollar molecules about the founding of vertex. And while I was working on my PhD, I love science, but I thought, I’m not sure if I really want to be, you know, a lifelong scientist as a career. What can I do and read about the founding of the billion dollar molecule, Joshua Bulger, and the whole story of vertex and I was absolutely fascinated. And I thought, This is amazing. I want to start biotech companies and you know, this is the 1990s in Chicago’s not a lot of opportunity to do that in Chicago. But what it did lead me to do was to explore her opportunities outside of research, and that led me to wander through the business school, the universe, Chicago, and I’d wondered that business school and at the time, they would be postings for when different companies were going to come on campus etc. So for example, once I went to interviews at McKinsey as I can on a phone to be consultant, but one day, there was a posting for a fellowship to become a venture capitalist. I was like, Ah, I know what venture capitalists are. I read about them and the billion dollar molecule, they stop start biotech companies. And again, this is days before the internet. So I went to the business school library, read up on venture capitalists before I went to this, this, you know, information system that was in a big auditorium in the business school, and it was me and a couple 100 business school students and asked a bunch of questions. And then, you know, applied for the fellowship I was, I think, in my year, I think it was the only PhD you got so I’m Kauffman fellows class too. And that’s, that’s how that’s how I got interested in venture capital and have been either on the founding side of companies or as founding CEO or the venture capital side building companies.
3:12
This is typically a question I would ask much later in the show, but I’m assuming the billion dollar molecule is the most influential book or is there anything else that you would gift with? Yeah, high degree of frequency.
3:24
The Billion Dollar molecule was probably the most influential book. The other one I is invisible frontiers, which is about the founding of Genentech and the cloning of insulin. So that’s another one that I have gifted along with the billion dollar molecule. And so I have some I have some more fun facts about what it was pretty amazing. I went from reading that book. And within the reading that book, and within 10 years of reading that book, Getting to meet Josh progress, because I worked at Kleiner Perkins and book buyers. Very cool. Very cool. So how many how many people get to meet like, as I said to book when I joined Kleiner Perkins, these are these people are my rock stars, and like you read about them in a book and 10 years later, you could sit next to them and have a conversation with them. It was absolutely amazing. When one time Kleiner Perkins used to have we had a life sciences or health care conference, and I think the first year, Brooke broke barriers, we would organize the tables and Brooke Byers sat me next to art lovers and the founder of Genentech. And I was just, I was so thankful again, another legend in the industry. Within 10 years of reading the book, I get to meet these people. It was fantastic.
4:45
Absolutely. Fantastic. Well, I guess you knew you’re in the right space. Absolutely. So you’re at Kleiner for a decade. Why did you decide to leave to ultimately go to GE ventures? Yeah,
4:57
so you know, Kleiner goes various transition And when I joined Kleiner in 2300 really ramped down the focus on healthcare, Joe like Binbrook buyers, were still there, and I joined in 2003 and we really ramped up healthcare again, Dana, me joy, the best Seidenberg joined after me, and then Isaac Sienna. So we had a pretty sizable group. And then around 2012, when we’re doing the next fundraising really wasn’t clear, like how big they wanted life science to be at Kleiner Perkins. And, and so I and I had this really interesting opportunity. So John Doerr was friends with Jeff Mo, they were I think, on both Bahamas jobs committee together and I had been advising them on an effort they called Healthy imagination. And I and it was, and I got to meet Beth Comstock, who was the chief marketing officer and ultimately became the chief innovation officer. And I was wasn’t really clear, we were going to do a lot of health care and the next fun and I thought, Well, maybe it’s a good time for me to do something new. And I was talking to Beth Comstock at dinner when she’d come out to Silicon Valley. And I really love started companies. She said, why don’t you come do that at ge, ge? And she said, Yeah, you know, you can start companies here. It was really interesting, because as I thought about it was a great opportunity is one of the biggest challenges when you start companies is you have to have a problem to solve. And I think a lot of the challenges that your capitalist have, we get excited about these ideas. And sometimes they are real problems that need to be solved to create a business. And so I thought, Well, this has to be interesting because I can interact with customers, so customers could tell me their problems. And then maybe I could build businesses to solve those problems. And then the other aspect was there’s a lot of cool technology at GE and so I could spell technology. So i i You know, I, I say my colleagues like Brookwood always in other colleges simple. You’ve never really had an operating job. Because I had been a scientist, I’ve been a private equity admin venture. And I’m like, Well, this is great, I can create my own operating job and my operating job will be starting companies. And so I went to GE and I started a number of companies it was it was really interesting. I learned so much Morgana environment was really fun.
7:09
And now you are at the production board. So for those that aren’t familiar with the production part, can you share a bit more about the mission of TPB and your model?
7:19
Yeah, so we’re we’re a smaller San Francisco based VC firm, and we build and invest in in really transformative businesses. And we really, we focus on working with very passionate founders to really try and change the world in their own little way. And we focus on we really do we do seed in Series A, sometimes we’ll build our own businesses if we can’t, if we have an idea, and we haven’t found the entrepreneur to tackle that idea. And we focus on my colleague, Dave Freebird, with many people who listen to this podcast may know he’s known as the Sultan of science. So the all in podcast, absolutely amazing human being. And he’s built some really interesting businesses in the ag tech space, I joined to expand into the life sciences, technology space, because why built most of the businesses that I’ve been involved in our life sciences, although at GE, I did help build a semiconductor company, which was a really great experience. But we spend a lot of time really building and helping founders build early life sciences, technology businesses.
8:28
Got it in. It’s interesting, you both invest and build. And I feel like we’ve seen more and more venture studio models as of late, what are the keys from your guys’s perspective at TBB? To get the studio model? Right?
8:45
Yeah. And so so we do some studio, I think, with regards to studio, it’s really, it’s really about getting the right people when you build businesses and getting them going early on. And some of I would say, personally, my most successful businesses are the ones that I got an amazing team together. And that team is literally still together in 10 years, and a couple great examples of that vericite at Menlo Microsystems, and so it’s getting the people, right. And it’s a combination of having really, I’d say the best ones, we have an amazing scientific founder, and partnered with a really strong business founder. And I think that’s really the secret sauce. Because those if you have those two people working together, they can usually figure things out from a market and a technical perspective, because one of the biggest challenges is building businesses. If you you know, depending on the type of business you’re building, you’re taking both market and technical risks. So having both of those key people on board early on is really essential. I can I can tell that I can give you some specific examples about
9:50
that. So yeah, I’d actually be curious how you assess the technical risk when when you’re spinning up these companies?
9:58
Yeah, so it’s really interest hang out, maybe take a step over to the side is one of my favorite topics is market versus technical risk, I actually taught a class A class at Stanford, such as Stanford on market versus technical risk. And, and kind of my mantra personally is I take what I will, I’ll take one, but not both. And so every different opportunity that I look at either has to have my really established market that I’m willing to take technical risk in, or low technical risks and take market risk. And so I, I really focus on one versus the other. I would say that a lot of my focus really is more taking technical risk and established markets these days, it’s that’s probably my favorite area. So
10:46
has that been where the best outcomes have been, in your experience? Or waiting for you’ve made investments? Yeah.
10:53
Yeah, from where, from where I’ve made investments, I think that’s where the best outcomes have been. But I’ve had some that that. So for example, in drug development, or therapeutic development, that’s one that pretty, you have a disease that you need to cure, or you need to treat. And so the problem is pretty well defined, you often know about what the market is, you know, what the competition is. And so when therapeutic development, it’s, it’s much better defined. And I would say another I’ve done a lot of work in is molecular diagnostics. And there, I think that industry has been recently created, I spent a lot of time working with for buyers to develop companies like Genomic Health Foundation, medicine, vericite. And there that was, that was a bit of a row, we did take a lot of market risk, less technical risks there. But I think, in that particular, those particular examples, we have really changed the way that diseases are treated, because we focus on understanding like your basis of the disease. So we did take market risk, and those in those particular instances as well. So but not technical risk.
12:02
When you’re investing in businesses that have technical risk, how do you think about when to stop investing in the business? Like you’re investing? The technology isn’t working yet? How do you get to the point when you say, alright, this is not going to work? We tried and the technology, it’s just the wrong time, or it’s not possible, whatever the reason is, but saying no to doubling down and continuing to try to develop it to make the technology possible and commercialize it.
12:35
Yeah, it’s interesting, I would say. So, with regards to therapeutic development, a lot of times, you have a theory about how the biology will work. And, and sometimes the biology doesn’t work like you think it well. And so there there are, you can try a number of exciting experiments to you have a hypothesis about, okay, this disease has this particular mechanism, and therefore, if I block molecule a binding molecule, B, it should work. And sometimes you can’t find them, you can’t find the technology to address that problem, or the problem isn’t what you thought it was. And so I think, in, in kind of therapeutic development, it’s often more it’s more clear, because you had a hypothesis that was wrong. I would say one of the more challenging things that I found is really, it’s not that the science does it work, it’s tricky getting it from the science to something that can look like that looks like a product. And so often, the technical you can, you can you can, the science does what you want it to do, but it’s the translation from making that having the scientific experiment work, to being able to do it repeatedly at a low cost. For example, in the world of molecular diagnostics, a lot of the technologies have been around for a while it was just industrializing them in a way that we could have products that we could sell to, you know, 1000s of you know, that DAX doctors could use on 1000s of patients in a very cost effective manner. So, got the bigger problems.
14:21
Yeah, that was me. My next question is if you solve the technical problem, like you have the hypothesis, you validate the hypothesis, but you’re not able to commercialize it, because the economy that scale don’t work out are the costs the economy. Yeah. Yeah. The unit economics don’t work out.
14:36
Yeah. Yeah. That’s more than that’s more the challenge and is when you it works, but you can’t get economies of scale unit economics don’t work out. And I think those are usually the bigger challenges.
14:48
When that happens, you put a pin in it, and you say, alright, and five years later, let’s revisit and see if something happens that allows us to democratize this technology.
14:59
Well, you think about You know, I like to think about, like DNA sequencing, right, a lot has been made of the fact that, you know, it cost and I think maybe Samir Cole was on your show a while ago. And I think it was a couple billion dollars to be the first sequencing of the human genome. And now we do it for $100. And so I think there was a lot of excitement in the early days about while we can sequence the human genome, we’re going to learn so much with regards to therapeutic development in terms of new drug targets, we’re going to learn the molecular basis of disease. And, and I’d say companies were started around those thesis is theories. However, it took a while really took the cost of DNA sequencing to come down in the last 10 years, particularly the last five years to make that technology reality specifically, for example, for molecular diagnostics. So I think a lot of companies were started on the promise of being able to sequence new DNA sequencing. And there was definitely some really great results in terms of new targets, etc. But it really took the cost to come down and to the levels has for the last five years for, I think, some of the broader use and molecular diagnostics and some of the great new work in understanding therapeutic pathways.
16:18
Well, I’m curious to dive into some of the other technologies that you’re both building in investing in a moment, but on the company building side, specifically from scratch, like incubating studio model, whatever you want to call it, what of what have been some of your other biggest learnings there because you’ve done an edgy, you’re now doing that the production board, what of what have been some of the biggest lessons on that side?
16:44
Yeah, I think so the number one thing it’s, you know, and I’ll maybe make a reference to something that would be fun to talk about another time is, can we hear recliners loss? No. All right, this is sorry, I’ll take a little bit of silence. So there’s a list of what we call Claire’s loss from Kleiner Perkins, tried to get them out from a website. But when I joined Kleiner Perkins, they were referred to Eugene Kleiner was still alive. But one of the things that that I learned at Kleiner Perkins, and it’s kind of my mantra is invest in people, not just products. So the number one thing when you start a company is you’re investing in people, and it’s very much and, and that’s true when you invest in a company, but even store more. So when you’re building together. Because, you know, everything, it’s really hard, it’s in a way, it’s like a marriage, it’s really hard, because things are gonna go wrong, and you’re gonna have to trust each other, you’re gonna have to really think about, okay, you know, should we keep going? It’s a lot of times you ask yourself, should we keep going? Should we keep going? And I’ve a lot of, I have some really crazy stories about things that have happened with like, companies, what do I keep going. And so it’s really you’ve got to trust, you’ve got to like the people you work with trust the people you work with, because you’re gonna go through some really, really hard times. I mean, we all know Silicon Valley, we love to hear these great success stories. But you know, and that’s what we celebrate is the huge success stories. I think, you know, you don’t always hear about all the bumps in the road. And a lot of times companies are listed and survived. I think the one that’s most talked about right now is Tesla, right? I guess people say almost went bankrupt two or three times. But there’s, I mean, almost every company has that story. So it’s really about, about wanting to like liking the people you work with and wanting to work with them. I mean,
18:32
when you’re building the team, at from the get go, is there anything you do specifically to make sure that the dynamics of the team are such that there’s going to be longevity there and that they’re going to be able to work together to navigate some of these challenges overcome adversity?
18:49
Yeah, I think a lot of it is doing a lot of working sessions and as doing a lot of working sessions with the team and and doing whiteboarding sessions and like, what’s the prob I start with? What’s the problem we’re going to try and solve? How are we going to tackle that? And really, before you formalize, putting together the company is, is watching people work together. And the other component is, and I think I see, I don’t think this is people do this as much, but like, I always have to be in the room. Like I have to be in the room and feel it and see are these can these people work together? What are they doing? Because it’s because you have to look at their backgrounds, like do they have the right skill sets, but then it is the chemistry right? And I think you only get that from spending time together being in a room together. And so that’s really I would say is it’s kind of old fashioned. It’s like getting a room and talk and how we’re going to work together. Yeah,
19:47
that’s interesting. I’m surprised that that works as well as it does, because I can imagine when you’re whiteboarding and there’s not the pressure of needing to deliver for customers. You’re running out of cash. And there are all All these fires that need to be put out? It, it’s the stakes are different. But
20:06
yeah, but you don’t but you don’t know that going in like, obviously, I do like to back people who have been entrepreneurs in the past because they’ve been there done that, right. And I’d say the two projects I’m working on right now I’m backing people who have started and taking companies public before, this is, you know, their second or their third company, and they’re friends of mine. And so, if you back people have done it before they’ve lived through all those things. And, and they obviously, are comfortable doing it, because they’re going to do it again. And so I you know, I think what what happens when the industry gets really overheated, like it has last year is you find a lot of people who maybe, you know, they don’t necessarily they haven’t won had the experience of being an entrepreneur are and haven’t lived, and they haven’t lived through any tough times. And the great CEOs lived through a really, really tough time. And so I think that’s one thing when I look at people to is, what type of environment have they been in? Have they been in an entrepreneurial environment, I would never like when I was a GE building companies. I none of the people who in the companies we started were, who ran them wherever GE executives, because they had never been in they hadn’t been in a startup environment. So I’d always we’d get the technology, that idea, but I’d bring in people who had been entrepreneurs and run companies before, because they knew how to deal with all the challenges and the problems and people come out of big companies, it’s a whole different set of challenges and problems they deal with. Yeah, yeah.
21:33
I want to transition to talking about some of these areas, specifically life sciences, biotechs, cell and gene therapies, prior to diving into some of the more granular details, and we’ll talk about some of the fun stuff in a moment. But how do you assess the overall state of the funding environment in general, like even putting aside the macro, it feels like so much money has been dedicated to software SaaS? Do you feel like enough capital is being dedicated to these industries that are critical for humanity and climate like energy, AG, life sciences, climate, tech, etc? Like, how do you assess where we’re at from a capital standpoint, for these industries, relative to industry? Or sorry, the broader VC industry?
22:26
Yeah, so I think, with the I call it the boom, in tech, over the last number of years, we’ve had the same thing in life sciences and life sciences, is cyclical. We have ups and downs, we were I think, since about it was almost a 10, year upcycle. And so a lot of money went into life sciences, a lot of healthcare it has, it has gotten in the last 10 years. So I think we in the life sciences, space, meaning therapeutics, diagnostics, and platform technologies, a lot of money went into this industry as well. So we have a little bit of the same challenges that you see on the tech side, which is, you know, companies being shut down companies, valuations going down substantially. So I think, you know, that therapeutics in particular has been very, very well funded, I think that there are a lot of the company’s segments, a lot of different therapeutic segments, decrease in value, one that’s still really hard as gene therapy, because there’s a lot of problems for that technology. But so a lot was was over funded in the same timeframe. And we’re going through the same reset process. And again, this, I think, you know, we’ve been in this industry for a while this happens that this has been the greatest cooling cycle, the last eight, you know, eight to 10 years, I think is really interesting. And I’ve had a really interesting exposure to AG tech, obviously, my partner, Dave Freeburg, is, you know, amazing, and really helped create the space and, and then at my time at GE, the industrial technology segment, as well. And I think those ag tech and the industrial segment, there are areas that I think we’re starting to get funding, I think there are areas that are really important to be funded in. I wish there were more investors involved. I think the nature of those particular segments is, for example, in ag tech, there’s, you know, the, there’s not not as many buyers, as there’s, say, for the biotech companies. And it’s very common now for the pharmaceutical companies to basically fund and buy the biotech companies that drives a lot of the the innovation. I don’t think we’re there yet. In ag tech and the industrial side. I think, hopefully we get there because I think both those industries could use a lot. I think there’s a great opportunity venture venture there to really revolutionize those industries. But I think the companies in those particular spaces need to be more acquisitive and adopt a similar amount of model is the pharma companies have with the biotech industry. But I think climate still really is very much up and coming right now. Nate, I think there is, I mean, especially with the events So the last few months in the super hot summer, and I think there’s just a really awareness now that climate is important. And we need innovation in this space. Again, I think we have to be able to make money from an investment perspective, but I think it’s an area that’s getting a lot of focus right now.
25:17
Yeah. You mentioned biotech and and also how cyclical these spaces can be. But I believe roughly half of biotech companies are worth less than the cash that they have on hand. Why is biotech which literally can save and extend life so much more cyclical than other sectors?
25:35
Well, I think just, I don’t know, if it’s more cyclical, it feels very similar to tech, where it was we get super excited about the promises of new technology, whether it be in biotech, or in the tech side, and we are very excited about it. And and then and so valuations go up, and then people realize, wow, it’s gonna be, you know, another five to 10 years before we see therapies and, and people get less excited about, and then they go back and say, Okay, I want to see the data, like, I want to see this, I want to see a drug in clinical trials. And so I think they, there’s excitement about the promise. And then then there’s the the actuality of that it’s going to take five to 10 years to develop a drug. So you see that? And I think, you know, we’ve seen that in the tech industry, as well as people get excited about new technologies, and it takes longer for adoption.
26:26
Yeah, it’s always funny taking a look at images from the 1950s or 60s as to what they thought the year 2000 look like. And there’s flying cars, levitating trains, things of that nature. And taking a look today, how far off about that was? And it has you thinking like, How optimistic are we on the future today, looking at 2050 2075. And you mentioned the promise of some of these technologies. And one of those I was curious to pick your brain on was cell and gene therapies. And because there are large promises being made, and there’s a lot of optimism with those technologies, such as human life, like how, what, and how long can we extend human life to? So I’m curious, are we going to be able to extend human life to 150 years? Like, can we eradicate all the unknown disease states? Or how long do you think that will take before that’s realistic?
27:28
Well, I think right now, gene editing holds great promise. And that is where we can actually edit genes to, I think the initial focus era will be diseases that are genetic diseases. So people are born with a defective gene. And let’s see if we can’t fix that in the appropriate cell type. And so I think they’re I think we’re making great strides in that particular segment. And I do believe gene editing will become a tool that will be broadly used to treat disease, and Cell Therapy, which has been around for a while, which is the difference between, I’d say, gene editing that invade in vivo. So basically, let’s, let’s go fix those cells while they’re in a person’s body. Whereas cell therapies don’t really like we got to take the cells out, or add rehab to put the cells back in the body, ie the car T is where we engineer T cells to fight cancer. And we have to put them back in so those are the two differences between I would say, what’s called in vivo, in vivo gene editing versus cell therapy is where we fix we fix the cells and put them back in and I think cell therapy is that particular areas, really, there’s been a huge boom in the last 10 years, a lot of we can fix a number of different types of cells, we different types of immune system cells, and then the real focus I T cells, B cells, NK cells, number of different cell types. And and I think there we got things in clinical trials. It does. I think that cell therapy will be an important for a specific segment of disease, probably disease, and mostly in the area of oncology, cancer, gene editing, we’re starting with the heritable diseases, I think there’s a whole new frontier that is pretty exciting, which is that they’re started with the founding of these Yamanaka factors, which are these particular molecules that can really extend the life themselves. And there’s some really interesting companies doing work in that area, most notably altos Lab, which is incredibly well funded. And I think that will be the secret to dealing with things dealing with aging and because basically at the end of the day, what happens is your cells get old as you get older and they don’t replicate the same way. There’s a and as a result, you end up with cancer is signs of aging, etc. So I think really the area of trying to figure out Auto and everyone says, whether it’s extended life or thinking about, you know, stop aging, however you want to say it, but it’s really at the cellular level understanding what we need to do biochemically to extend the life of our cells as in a human being. And so I think there’s a lot of promise in that area. I think, still early science out those labs is incredibly well funded. But these are, you know, it’s gonna take a lot of time and money, but I think we’re heading in the right direction, there have been some notable publications.
30:39
I feel like when people read about these technologies, or hear about them, they blow their minds and why. And for someone like yourself, who is on the forefront of these technologies, and you’re hearing everything that’s going on, it has me thinking, What What’s blowing Reese’s mind? So it’s like, yeah, what, when being on the forefront of all this technology, like what are some of the things that you’re most excited about? Or what are the things that are surprising even to you?
31:07
Yeah, I think one of the things that I’m super excited about this new therapeutic platforms and I say therapeutic platforms is so you know, if you think about it, the world started one of the major therapeutic technologies that we use is monoclonal antibodies, and monoclonal antibodies are our drugs like HUMIRA. There’s, there’s a whole class of these drugs, and they’re and and what we ended up doing initially is, we made these monoclonal antibodies, and then we then added kind of warheads, either either drugs to taps to them, or now the greatest thing is radio light again. And so, monoclonal antibodies have been the workhorse of biotech industry. And now we have things called bytes, which are by specific antibodies, which means you can hit two different targets in that cell. But I think there’s a lot of new even more interesting technologies and development, I am an investor to company that focuses on the proteins most proteins are what you call L, they’re left handed. And, and you can make right handed proteins to and the really interesting thing is that your body doesn’t know how to sleep, they don’t, they never dealt with them. And so for example, they enzymes in the gut don’t break them up, because we don’t have enzymes to break up because they’ve never seen them. So I think that’s a really interesting area. There are some other interesting areas as well, with regards to other therapeutic platforms that I’m looking at. There’s I’ve seen, cyclic the peptides that can get into cells. That’s another area. That’s super cool. So I think it’s really looking at new protein therapeutics and different different platforms and technologies. And by the way, a lot of these were became more possible in the last five years because of a lot of the the modeling technology in terms of you could model what peptides which are components of proteins and what proteins look like. I mean, obviously, alpha fold is the one everybody talks about, but there’s been other technology developments. So allows us to think about what things look like, and what they might do before we actually do a lot of development and investigation. So that’s an area that’s that’s really cool and exciting to me. I think another area that’s very exciting to me, and having spent a lot of time in personalized medicine and molecular diagnostics is the a lot of the when we develop a diagnostic experimental data, you look at the what’s called the transcriptome, a lot of times what genes are being transcribed in the cells, but we didn’t really put it together with we call clinical factors or clinical data. And now there is the capability to combine, I would say experimental data sets with clinical factors, ie, let’s look at the person’s age and look at the type of treatments that they’ve had. Things like that. So I think it’s gonna bring together different components, which will allow us to make better diagnose better diagnosis, diagnosis for people.
34:02
I heard Michael Schneider speak at a conference recently. And the topic of personalized medicine was mind blowingly interesting. It has you question like, why don’t we have this yet? Or like, of course, he does, you know, so. Yeah, looking forward to that. Interview. So if we could feature anyone on the show, who should we interview and what topic would you like to hear them speak about?
34:29
Oh, I think you guys shouldn’t I think you should interview the old guard. Interview, you know, interview the retired Kleiner Perkins partners like Kevin Compton, Doug McKenzie. Focus prepares is famous for not giving interviews but he would be an absolutely amazing person to give them these go to the old guard and have them tell stories about building companies because I feel like there’s a whole bunch of people I mean, I listened to Yeah, that was absolutely amazing. He’s an Amazing individual and so I would say do more of those and help you find a list of scope who interviewed all the old guard, meaning the people who, you know started the firms and and how to help them tell their stories, because I think, in the environment that we are in with a lot of people telling stories and, and I’d say some of the inflated stories, it’d be good to go back to, to hear stories from some of the guys that did it, you know, you know, 3040 50 years ago, and I think people would really appreciate I love listening to your interview with Chuck, and I’d heard him speak before and knew some of the stories but it just reminded me about how much we have to learn from people who’ve been in this business a long time and kind of want to bring that back to the forefront.
35:49
Yeah, Chuck. Chuck is so great. And so many of those stories from the founders of the most iconic firms are some of my favorites too. So might have to tap you to help recruit Brooke or or someone else at Kleiner.
36:04
Absolutely, John Doerr, Vinod Vinod, is Vinod still out there and talking? Yeah, so yeah, so yeah, he’s he’s, he’s helped he’s helped build the next generation. No, it’s really nice helped build the next generation. It’s federally fun. And Joe Lekha was obviously moved down to new things in terms of the warriors. So one of my sorry, yeah, one of my most prized possessions is a picture of right after Joe Laker bought the Warriors we used to have. We’d have the CEO Summit Kleiner and, and we play basketball because Joe loved to play basketball. And I think he’s still playing basketball, and we never see a summit and we play basketball. And I was the only woman that played basketball, but I always played with the guys and he’s like, bring some of the warriors down. And so I have this picture at home on my wall. It’s a picture of 40 Guys, and these three really young unknown players named Steph Curry, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson. Wow, okay, my prized possessions.
37:11
I can’t imagine why that I don’t think many people can say that. So you get to play basketball with Steph Curry One of the greatest of all time.
37:20
Absolutely. Why? Yeah, yeah. Now it’s funny, they would coach us because they couldn’t quite play basketball with us, but like, maybe the coaches and we’d had you know, two different teams playing that was fun.
37:30
Awesome. And then last reason what’s the best way for listeners to connect with you and the production board?
37:36
Yeah, so I am not I’m not heavily on social media. I need to be more on social media but you can connect with me at Risa. Our is a at the production board.com. You can email me so yeah, but I’d love to hear from you.
37:53
Awesome. Well, thanks again for doing this. This was Thanks. Thanks.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
