Links and resources

• Oviva Therapeutics – Biotechnology company focused on improving and extending ovarian function to enhance women’s health span and quality of life.
• Granata Bio – A biopharmaceutical company focused on developing innovative treatments in women’s health.
• Massachusetts General Hospital – A leading academic medical center in Boston, renowned for its clinical care, research, and teaching.
• National Institutes of Health (NIH) – The largest biomedical research funding body in the world, supporting studies across all areas of health and disease.

Interview Transcript

Shubha K. Chakravarthy:  Good afternoon, Daisy. Welcome to Invisible Ink. We’re so excited to have you here today.

Daisy Robinton: Thank you so much. I’m so thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy:  So, I want to start at the beginning though, can you just first of all tell us a little bit about the company you founded and what it does?

Daisy Robinton: Sure. I founded a biotechnology company called Oviva Therapeutics. The vision behind Oviva is to expand the research in women’s health, somewhat broadly but specifically with a thesis around the importance of ovarian function for health span. So we are developing therapeutics that aim to improve and extend ovarian function.

A lot of people misconstrue that to mean that we’re trying to support fertility over a broader window but really it’s much more than that. It’s acknowledging that the ovaries play an important part in health overall for a woman and the ovaries signal to lots of different s in the body. So really our intention with Oviva was to develop therapeutics to help support ovarian function as a means to improve the quality of life for women and the health span of women over time.

That includes fertility, but it also includes things like lowering cardiovascular disease risk, osteoporosis rates, improving immune function and things of that nature. So, it’s been a real journey and so exciting to drive that vision forward.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy:  Awesome. So, clearly you’ve done your research in that area but was there a core moment or insight or a pivotal point that marked the start of this company for you?

Daisy Robinton: Yes, definitely.  Women’s health was not my background per se. I’m a molecular biologist by training and I had wrapped up a postdoc and had gone to see a reproductive endocrinologist for my own, just trying to understand my own fertility when I was in my early thirties. And I was very shocked to realize that I knew very little about female physiology, even though I held a PhD in human biology.

And that led me down a path to really just want to learn for myself to better understand what my body does. And because my background is developmental biology overlaid with aging and pathology, I started getting really interested in the concept of menopause and how it drives accelerated aging and very hyper-focused on this, given the fact that I had no awareness of this before then.

And obviously all women go through menopause at some point in their lives. And so it was really quite striking to me that this hadn’t been a topic of conversation in the circles that I ran in professionally when we talk about aging and health span with frequency. And so for me, having that doctor appointment and recognizing the gap of knowledge that I had as a very educated person in this space, it just really motivated me to learn more.

And the more that I learned about women’s health, the more that I realized there’s so much more that we don’t understand. And the state of women’s health overall as I think we all know now, it’s having a cultural moment. I guess I should say, women’s health. But when I was really diving into this, five or ten years ago, it wasn’t so widely known and menopause wasn’t a topic of conversation at the dinner table.

And the fact that we’d studied male bodies for most of history, both from the mice all the way up to human clinical trials and biomedical research and beyond, that wasn’t commonly known. I think that’s still not quite commonly known.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy:  I didn’t know about the mice part.

Challenges in Women’s Health Research

Daisy Robinton: Yes, most biomedical research was based on male animals prior to 2016 when the NIH instituted a rule that any funding they provide must have both sexes represented unless it’s something specific to one sex, that was the exception. And the NIH is the largest biomedical funding body in the world, so the vast majority of research before then didn’t have that rule.

And if you look at it, you can see that most people studied male animals because of the idea that they thought it was simpler because they didn’t have menstrual cycling and the hormones weren’t changing so much over the course of the cycle. And so a lot of work that’s been done today and our understanding of biology has been built on a male baseline.

And that’s really left all people, both men and women, at a disadvantage because female physiology is super fascinating and very dynamic. And there are things to be learned not only to care for women in a more appropriate manner than we are today but also to be gleaned from and to drive new innovations for male physiology in areas where they’re less dynamic than we are.

All of this is to say that the moment this really changed for me was the moment in the doctor’s office when I recognized with horror how ignorant I was. And the months that followed, just learning more deeply and having this sort of, I don’t know if aha. I don’t know if there was an aha moment so much as applying the lens I developed scientifically, which is development in aging into this problem of menopause and understanding, women go through menopause at what is now roughly halfway through our lives.

And the second half of our life is appreciably worse in terms of quality than the first and sends women into accelerated aging. And we spend 25 percent more time in poor health relative to men, even though we live longer. And so there’s all these really interesting things there and that really pushed me into the space and wanting to develop solutions to address that.

From Scientist to Entrepreneur

Shubha K. Chakravarthy:  So, all of us face problems and I appreciate that you come from, you know, a particularly well suited background but it’s a long jump from saying, hey, I’m in the doctor’s office and I have this problem to a company, a worthy idea, especially where there’s IP and research and all of that stuff that’s involved. What’s the short answer to what helped you jump across the gap?

Daisy Robinton: Yes. I think it was a preparedness meets opportunity moment. I was mulling over this. I was learning about it somewhat casually just for myself, and I happened to have a coffee with a friend of mine who started a company called Cambrian Biopharma, which is a biotech R&D longevity company in New York.

And we knew each other from the longevity circuit, so he told me about his company. They were developing new solutions to reverse or prevent aging and I said, James, you really should look at the ovary. It’s like the perfect low hanging fruit. Women’s ovaries age faster than any other organ halfway through our lives and they drive accelerated aging on the other side.

And there’s so much that we don’t know, so there’s so much to learn and so much innovation to grow from that white space. And he invited me to come join his company as what was called a scientist-in-residence to explore that idea, sort of like an entrepreneur-in-residence. And I accepted that and ended up finding some really fabulous research out of Harvard, by Dr. David Pepin, Dr. Pat Donohue.

And the work that they were doing fit the thesis that I had around ovarian function in health span. They were using anti-malarial hormone or AMH, as a means to modulate ovarian reserve. And ovarian reserve is one of the drivers or the loss of ovarian reserve is one of the drivers of loss of ovarian function.

And so that all came together in this perfect storm. Like no part of this I think I could have designed on purpose. I genuinely believe it was serendipity. And, like they say, preparedness meets opportunity. I was prepared, the opportunity arose and the path fell in front of me somehow.

Developing the Lead Asset

Shubha K. Chakravarthy:  And at what point did you decide, I have enough for this to be its own company? Because you’re now sitting as a scientist in residence in a different company and you’re getting more familiar with what’s involved. What is that moment and what was that decision?

Daisy Robinton: Yeah. I think in particular for Oviva, the asset that we, the lead asset that we had under development, was just ready for the more intense capital requirement that translation really requires. The work, the science that had been done to date in the lab was extremely rigorous, and there was this wealth of data.

So from an investor standpoint, you could look at these data and say, okay, this is robust. I believe based on the fact that there’s this wealth of data and it’s been independently validated in other groups, that this mechanism is true and that this approach could work. And now we just have to manufacture this at scale, test it in primate systems.

There’s other tire kicking that has to happen on the way to getting into the clinic but the academic research as it stood was very strong and the science was very, very rigorous. And so just the path that it needed to take from when I came in, it was ready to be supported by VC and taken in for development.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy:  So now you have all these assets, you have a somewhat clear path. Were there any misconceptions or concerns or apprehensions that you had going into entrepreneurship? This was the first time for you?

Daisy Robinton: It’s a good question. You know, because I didn’t really plan it, I don’t think I had specific expectations about what would happen. I think I was really just utterly thrilled to be able to pursue an idea that I thought was amazing with people that were very talented, with scientists that are at the top of their field and had rigor behind them.

And so there’s missteps that I made and I’m sure we’ll talk about some of those, things that I probably should have thought about in advance that I didn’t. But really for me, I was on the journey. I was really bought in from the beginning and it was amazing. So I think I was just present to the opportunity in front of me and excited to be the person that got to develop this vision and bring it into fruition.

Balancing Science and Business

Shubha K. Chakravarthy:  Awesome. So now you’re a scientist. You’ve got a great commercial idea and one thing I am really interested in is how you balance science and business realities. I’ve just been, funnily enough, talking to a few investors earlier today, and that was the first thing they’ve all mentioned is to say it’s very tough to get a precise scientific mind into the CEO role. So that’s one of the biggest challenges that investors see. Can you just talk about what is the hardest part of that for you?

Daisy Robinton: Yes, I agree. Because as a scientist, you’re trained in a very specific mindset and with. Obviously training is diverse but my training is quite rigorous. And so you think about all the different variables you need to address and the different ways you have to approach a question to really verify that what you think the story you’re telling is the truth. That’s really the point.

You’re trying to tell a story about how the world works or how some aspect of biology work. I mean, I’m a biologist, so that’s how I think about it. And you generate data that can either prove or disprove, and both are equally important in business. You have to reorient because while of course you want your work to be rigorous and you want the thing, the data you’re generating to be ground level truth, you have to be pointed towards a commercial endpoint.

So there are things that make a lot of sense in a scientific academic context to do and are important to do especially with the incentive alignment that scientists are geared towards which is publication and grants. That just aren’t important commercially or they’re less important. And at the end of the day, you have to manage a budget really tightly. And I think the biggest adjustment is really saying what is absolutely essential to de-risk this asset if we’re talking about an asset to get to the next phase or what are the risks with this asset or in the science and when is the right time to address them?

That’s another way of looking at it. And there’s some questions that relate to the science that feel important as a scientist. Like how can we plan this if we don’t really know, like this other little corner of biology that’s related to it? And you just don’t get to answer those questions. They may or may not be important but in today’s funding model, that’s not how drug development really operates.

And that’s certainly not how the investors, in my experience, who are putting money into these endeavors are operating. It’s not curiosity driven work, it’s commercially driven work and you have to really prioritize the essential questions that de-risk moving forward and moving into clinic.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy:  So is there an a moment where either the first time you’ve encountered this and your natural inclination is to pursue the scientific angle. Is there an example you can walk us through where you made that trade off and what allowed you to do that successfully?

Daisy Robinton: Yeah, I think, I can give you an example of how we were planning something that had to really change through. I learned that we needed to change it through fundraising which I think is also, especially for first time founders who are academic, a really important.

I can share something that I thought was a really important exercise to do as the idea developed, which is really socializing what you’re developing with the investors that you’re targeting before you even need anything from them. And I think that’s very essential because on one hand the market’s always changing and so the needs that an investor has for making something investible are shifting, the guideposts shift.

So something that might be Series A ready in one climate is actually not in another climate. And that’s something that we encountered at Oviva or we thought we were Series A ready. I mean, we all know we’ve been in this terrible market now for several years and we went out for Series A like early in that shift. And we got a little bit of traction but at the end of the day, there was more that we needed to demonstrate to be ready for that kind of funding level because of how the market changed.

And so with that, we had built in this very robust experiment that would’ve really de-risked the clinical design in a big way. But it cost an enormous amount of capital, over a million dollars to do this experiment. There was no other way to demonstrate what we were trying to learn. There was no other animal system or model system that could have more cheaply answered the question. And in my opinion, especially my like academic scientific hat opinion, the question needed to be addressed. I still think it needs to be addressed.

The question is, are we doing this in a preclinical setting in a model system or are we doing this in a clinical setting with humans? It’s not a safety issue. It’s really an efficacy issue. And at the end of the day, many drugs fail because the efficacy is not there. And so I really drove this pretty aggressively as something that I thought we should address early. The earlier the better. Yes, there’s a lot of capital that it requires but it’s going to be a lot more expensive to do that later if we don’t get it right.

That was my take on it. Again, the market and the climate that we’re in, I think you have to always evaluate what kind of market it’s in this environment when it’s so difficult to get funding and when dollars just cost a lot more. We just didn’t have the environment that really allowed for that kind of work to be done at that stage. And so what I learned, I had many pitches where or diligence I guess I should say, so we went through the pitch.

We were down in deep diligence with a really fabulous biotech investors and I got this question countless times of how important is that experiment to do or how much of that experiment do you need to do? And can you do some now and some later? Like, why this now? Because we still are a preclinical stage company. And that was something I really had to evaluate. And there were a couple investors that said, you can’t do that experiment. They just overly said, you can’t do it. Like we were to back, like that’s not a thing that we would support.

And so part of what I wanted to say was, a little nugget of advice was I ended up having a lot of meetings with investors who I was interested in approaching for funding before we were really ready to do the new version of our raise. After we pivoted out of Series A into more of a bridge approach. And I told them the high level story and I said, what would you need to see from us in order for this to become a Series A ready company? And that survey was incredibly important to help focus what we really needed and what was the minimum amount of capital that we needed to spend to de-risk it enough to make people comfortable for us to do the Series A which five years ago, we would’ve, I think, readily been able to raise for.

So all of that is to say that, I mean at this point we ended up selling the company. So it’s not my decision anymore when that happens or how but had I had it my way. The scientist in me believed the de-risking of it earlier, filling out our knowledge of biology, the fundamental mechanism of how follicle recruitment happens in ovary is essential to utilizing this therapeutic for any purpose that relates to that mechanism, which is the only way I would know to use this therapeutic. And at the end of the day, the market told me through investors that we didn’t need to address that question in the next two years. That’s going to be answered later or never.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy:  Did it require a lot of internal reconciliation and chats with yourself, like the scientist hat and the CEO hat?

Daisy Robinton: Yes, I think it took me several months to really internalize it. In the beginning, the first couple times I heard that sort of feedback, I really brushed it off. I was like, no those people just don’t know what they’re talking about. We need this. I felt so confident in my opinion.

And I talked about it with more people. I talked about it with others in the industry who I respect, were more experienced in sort of a commercial landscape. And then I really allowed myself to reconsider what would it look like if we didn’t do it? Like how would I steer the ship if we couldn’t do that experiment at all in a way that I still could feel confident.

And the reality is it really compromised my own confidence in guiding the asset into clinic because I just felt that was an important question to answer as early as possible. But at the end of the day, I’m not funding this with my own money. So I don’t get to choose.

I think part of being an entrepreneur and part of especially being a first time entrepreneur, even if you’ve been in academia for decades, there’s just things that you need to learn. And there’s, I think you have to be open-minded that other people understand the dynamic of the beast that we’re operating in better or differently and being open to learning from that.

I don’t think that the way that it’s done is necessarily the best way. But I think that we need to be open to learning from the people who’ve been doing it a long time successfully as well. So, I don’t know. I’m a person who I’ll take in the advice and I’ll think about it and I’ll contemplate it, and then I’ll make a choice. I don’t think it’s just, find someone good at it and follow everything that they do. That’s very much not my philosophy in anything.

But I do think being open-minded, especially when you’re feeling very stubborn about something, when it comes to the science because you are an expert presumably in what you’re doing and so you feel really like you know best. You just need to make room to think about what does it actually look like if I do this thing I don’t want to do, and what does it cost me? What does it cost the company from any number not just monetarily. I think that’s an important, very important exercise.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy:  So it’s fascinating because on the one hand there’s the “golden rule”, the person who has the gold makes the rules. But there’s also this question of, there’s a consensus of scientific opinion. So I’m imagining that you mentioned people who have done this before.

Did you talk to other exited or other experienced bio founders who may have gone through a similar challenge, in addition to just this critical minimum of investors? How did you allow that or how did you get to a point where you said, I’m not going to compromise the fundamental value of this invention by going this way? Where is that? Where was that hard line? And did you feel like you had to draw that hard line?

Daisy Robinton: That’s a good question. I wouldn’t say that I drew a line around that. And because of my background, which was I guess I should say was very largely academic, I didn’t seek out a lot of guidance from other academics. It would’ve been helpful to speak to other founders who had to make a similar choice, but it’s hard to really know where to look for that. It’s a really specific strategy question.

And generally those kinds of questions are not public. So that’s what a board is for. Like you should have a board with experience to help guide you. My board was quite small and not comprised of people who had founded multiple companies in biotech. They were people in biotech who had experience there but it wasn’t the experience that could necessarily speak from experience to this exact question. So that would’ve been nice to have.

But I do feel like, well in reality, the jury’s out. We’ll see what Granata chooses to do. They’re making their own choice now. And I’m really curious actually how they’ll proceed with the program with regard to this question. It’s something that I presented to them when we talked about it as a key choice. They’ll have to choose on how to use their capital and how long to hold that risk for and when to address it.

So it’s on their plate now to figure that out. But it’s a tricky question and when I think about the tension between science and business, it also makes me think about how people, not just academics but certainly academics, when you’re pursuing an idea you really believe in, it’s very important to know when to quit it. And when to cut your losses and holding onto something is not better just because you put a lot of time and effort into it.

I learned that pretty early in my PhD with the project I spent a year on, deeply devoted, very excited about and it just wasn’t coming together and I wanted to graduate so I said, okay, I am going to cut the cord on this and put my energy into something else. Because ultimately for me, in that phase of my career, my goal wasn’t to answer the question that I was trying really hard to figure out and have limited techniques to do so. My goal was to graduate so that I could go do what was next. And so I think that’s also important for anybody doing anything anytime, anywhere.

But certainly for a founder, what is your actual goal with the business that you’re operating and with each work stream within that business? Because we can get focused on things and forget that long-term goal. And this example of the preclinical experiment I wanted to run, it would’ve served the broader goal of the company.

But the work stream and like the immediate needs, which were pull in money so that we could get this over the line, we didn’t need it for that. At the end of the day, we didn’t need it and we weren’t going to get what we needed if I held onto that experiment. So that was a really important thing to let go of and to be able to do quick enough so that I had the opportunity to continue moving forward across the board.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy:  Is there an extractable principle? Is it just a question of what’s the cost of what you want? And is that cost high enough for you to bear? In your case, the cost of holding onto that it seems, was you’re not going to get the money because there wasn’t a critical mass of investors who buy into the same conviction. Is that the principle? Is this like looking back to your younger, earlier self at that moment, is there something that you tell her or counsel her as to how to handle that challenge of science versus business conflict?

Daisy Robinton: If anything, I think I would’ve whispered in my ear earlier in my experience to just contemplate that question because it didn’t really occur to me so tangibly before this moment came up. I obviously knew that I was making an adjustment and I was devising a strategy.

With my experience not layered with the experience of being an experienced executive, it probably could have happened faster had I contemplated that question or really acknowledged to myself that tension. But I really think that it went reasonably smooth because I adapted to it and I was open to that change.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy:  So on that whole topic of business versus science, if you had to turn around and say, okay, here’s the advice to you earlier CEOs, based on my experience. I will tell you –  what?

Daisy Robinton: Based on my experience, I would tell you that anything you want to do scientifically, you need to have a very strong commercial reason to do it. It has to tie back to the return for the investor in a very direct way.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy:  Does it mean that it would have to prove the marketability of that or the chances of getting regulatory approval? Are there some dimensions of that commercial logic?

Daisy Robinton: Of course. Yeah. I think there’s a number of things that could satisfy that being able to shorten time to clinic which saves money. Being able to more efficiently run a clinical trial because you’ve answered a question early so you can focus the clinical trial to a smaller number of patients or understand the endpoints better so that you can model how many patients you need to get the signal that you need for significance.

Things that do that I think are really important. Of course, anything that relates to the marketability, I think just based on my experience and how I’ve thought about the assets that I’ve developed, it’s really a time. It’s like time and volumes — how much time is it going to take in each phase? How and when can we shorten that time? And then how many people are involved and how and when can we contract that to save on costs and get basically the minimum viable dose.

It’s apply minimum viable dose to everything — how can you get minimum viable dose? How can you get the most for your money? And that’s, I think, at the end of the day, your job is to effectively use capital as efficiently as you can to get the greatest return from that. Some academic founders will in some ways know that because they’ll have managed their own budgets.

I hadn’t managed a budget aside from my own personal budget prior to that. So it wasn’t the first way that I thought about things. And I think now when I approach anything relating to business, the lens is right here in the front of my face of how does this extract from the budget and are we getting what we need out of it? And is there a way, a different way, to do it more efficiently? And that’s something that you very quickly have to learn as a CEO.

Fundraising and Investor Relations

Shubha K. Chakravarthy:  Awesome. So all of this leads to the big question of getting capital and investment. So I want to talk a little bit about fundraising, credibility and confidence as CEO, especially as a first-time CEO. How did you approach fundraising, high-level as a first-time CEO with this deep scientific background? And were there some strategies that you consciously used to build that credibility with investors?

Daisy Robinton: I had an unusual journey and there’s sort of two stories that I can tell about this and we can pick which is more interesting or you can ask me to speak more to one of them. So there was the seed funding that I raised for Oviva — we closed 11 and a half million from Game Brand, which is the longevity R&D company I had worked for as a scientist in residence.

And then we went out for a fundraise after that to bring in new capital which started as a Series A raise and then morphed into a bridge round. So if I start on the first part of that story. The development of the vision and the idea and the fact that I didn’t see anything remotely like it in the market gave me the confidence that I needed to go in and say, I’m the right person to do this.

And I guess that’s the question you’re asking, which is for you as the CEO, how did you go sit in that room? Because I could advocate for that idea all day but then I had to, after that, advocate for myself moving into the CEO position. And that was a process because that wasn’t really the path that our investors envisioned for me.

Normally, the SIR scientists in residence would move into a CSO, Chief Scientific Officer type position or something thereabouts. And when it came down to it, as we spoke about this, I said, I didn’t just usher the science. And ultimately at the end of the day, I actually didn’t do that. My co-founders really did. They were the academic founders.

This was their science, and their idea and their vision married to my vision. And I felt like I was the steward of that vision and the person that really built what this could become and how it could translate from the academic setting. And I think, again for me, because I have a somewhat unique background in that I’ve spent an enormous amount of time teaching and public speaking and focused on and interested in storytelling as it relates to science, that I felt like there were few, if any, other people that could do as good a job as me to tell this story in a way that would actually translate into the action needed to get it done.

Both from the standpoint of internally, how do we organize all the parts that we need to start moving this asset forward, and then externally as well, both to investors who we want to bring capital in from, as well as partners who we want to develop with, pharma partners as well as the broader media and greater public. Because we want them to know this is something that’s possible, that they can be asking for, that they can be having conversations with their doctors about.

The status quo of today isn’t even quite yet for women going into menopause taking hormone therapy. There’s not really a good status quo other than that women suffer. Period pain is normal. Hot flashes and cognitive decline and fatigue and irritability are normal and you just have to deal with it when you go through menopause.

And I just think that’s total BS. And so I think that a big part of my excitement around being the leader of Oviva was being able to tell a new narrative that could almost like that movie where they like put the memory into someone’s brain? Do you know what I’m talking about?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy:  I know what you’re talking about. I just don’t know the movie.

Daisy Robinton: Inception, maybe. Whatever, you have to show people what the future can be before it can happen. And there’s so much that needs to happen in our broader atmosphere and infrastructure to have drugs like this develop and for clinicians to think to prescribe it and for insurers to want to reimburse it, just to name a few.

And so I felt if something like this drug is ever going to make it to the market for the purpose of preventing ovarian decline. Then there’s a lot that needs to happen beyond just getting the first clinical trial approval, which we were doing in a fertility indication. And I said to my board at the time, I said, tell me who else would do it better than I will. Because you know that there isn’t anyone.

And I just felt that deeply true because — and we can talk more about this — I felt like the story was such an important part of it, in addition to obviously my deep confidence in the science and the mechanism. And when you think about fundraising, so much of that is the story. Being able to tell the story, being able to have the right things in the pitch at the right time, and getting the investors to feel resonance with you as a founder and with your idea.

And so I thought and I think that I’m very good at that and that I would do a good job at that. And the rest of the things that I was inexperienced at, I felt confident I could resource myself effectively to learn what I needed at a pace that would make sense. And that piece is also, I don’t want to understate that and I mentor sometimes first-time founders, especially people that are coming out of a postdoc or something. I have a couple people I speak to who are in that position.

And I think that’s really, at the end of the day, the most important tool for anybody but certainly an entrepreneur and certainly anybody doing something the first time, is you don’t actually have to know how to do a lot of things if you know who to ask to help to resource yourself so that when you do it, you can do it well. You can avoid big mistakes and you have what you need to make the decisions that are important to drive the business forward.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy:  So it sounds like you had a couple of huge pluses in your favor in terms of the vision and how bought in you were and how confident you were. So in some sense they were helping you speak for this product and advocate for this company and for yourself.

What are the parts where, particularly I want to talk about, you know, many investors have heard about or are uncomfortable talking about women’s products and women’s health products, especially if they happen to be male.

And number two, there’s skepticism about is this really a market and is this a niche market? And why are you serving a niche market? And just, the third piece is around the financial and commercial aspects of, okay, you’re coming in from a science side. Talk to me about market. Talk to me about all the money terms. Can you talk about those specifically and how you overcame that?

Daisy Robinton: Yes. You might have to give me the three prompts again as we talk through it, but I’ll first speak to having a female-focused product with investors. And I’ll tell you, there’s many times in meetings when I had men skeptical of the need for something like what I was describing or the existence of a market for that.

I want to word this in a way that isn’t offensive but I’m just like, you’re ignorant if you think that there’s not a market or that this isn’t a problem like, that is you being ignorant. I would not say that obviously in a meeting but that’s the truth because we know or at least anyone who’s in the women’s health space knows, the problems that females face because of the lack of understanding of our physiology and because of ovarian dysfunction are utterly enormous.

The Economic Impact of Women’s Health Issues

Daisy Robinton: And they have a dramatic impact not just to quality of life but to the standards of care that we have and to the economic output of women, both in the home and in the workplace. And so there’s some real incentives for the market to serve that need because there’s a huge unmet need, enormous number of pain points for women, and it costs a lot of money — the fact that we don’t address it.

Which is not even to speak to the fact that women are generally paying out of pocket at an enormous rate for things relating to their health and lifestyle, much more so than men do. And of course, we know they’re the number one spenders in the home on health and they generally manage the healthcare of their families.

Like, women are the customer and their needs aren’t being met. And actually, like I said before, part of this is empowering women to say, oh, actually this is a problem I would solve rather than, oh, this is a problem and it sucks for me, which is what we’ve been doing forever.

So, especially in today’s day and age, I think it’s pretty easy to address that question because there are a growing number of reports and data coming out about what that market really looks like. Five years ago, the numbers were really squishy. They’re still actually really squishy.

But it was harder to put data behind that other than the fact that there were data on X number of women suffer from this condition and so therefore there’s an unmet need. There hasn’t been a pull from the market. Women haven’t been asking for it and clinicians haven’t treated these things as real problems that deserve and require attention. So those have been obstacles for these kinds of products to get capital to be developed. But I think in today’s climate and context, it’s very easy to address those questions.

Convincing Investors: Personalizing the Problem

Shubha K. Chakravarthy:  So when you were talking to the investor and you know that they’re ignorant but they still have the checkbook, how do you get them over the hump? I’m just curious to see.

Daisy Robinton: Yeah, it depends on the person. I mean, I often would ask the question like, how many women do you know or work with? Or do you have a wife and sisters and a mother? And every single one of those women that you know either has or will go through menopause and 80% of them will experience symptoms that impact their work performance and their quality of life.

And then you go down the stats of what that actually looks like and it’s just not tangible for them. And so if you bring it into a more immediate — okay, you have 10 women in your office, you know, Martha and Sarah and whoever they are and like literally every single one of them has this enormous physiologic shift in the middle of her the most productive years in her life. And you just start painting that picture. And then it’s all, I mean, sometimes the angle is fertility, which is never my favorite. Because there’s so much attention going there but it’s really easy because it’s very emotional for a lot of people.

And a lot of people connect to the emotionality of it because almost everyone in my age demographic, which is like late thirties, early forties and onward, knows somebody who’s had some sort of fertility struggle. And so that’s a really easy way in. Also everybody knows somebody who’s been through menopause but that’s a more silent problem. So it’s less obvious. But I think it’s making it personal for the person and describing in detail what that experience is like for the majority of women.

So when you say things like they have hot flashes, okay, that sounds uncomfortable. One of the things that sucks about hot flashes is it really disturbs your sleep. So then you have significantly decreased quality of sleep, which then impacts every aspect of quality of life that you have.

Significant increase in brain fog, irritability, anxiety, mood disorders, sexual dysfunction, immune dysfunction, increased rates of osteoporosis, increased risk of cardiovascular disease. All these things are very well documented. And when you start, it’s just such a long list.

And the statistics are so strong that it starts allowing the pattern recognition to occur for an astute investor of, oh, I hear these stats as it relates to oncology, or liver disease, or whatever. And you and the numbers start making sense, but you have to do it in that way. I mean, the data speak. You have to just detail the data and do it in a way that they can cure it.

Commercial Aspects and Market Realities

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: And how about the last piece of that was the commercial aspects helping them, getting credibility and establishing credibility for yourself that you do understand the commercial, the market, the financial aspects.

Daisy Robinton: Yeah, I’ll say that for me, that was my weakest area. That was the hardest to learn. I mean, there’s of course the vocabulary, the vernacular to describe those things. There’s the different philosophies and modeling that you have to understand. And then the market which again is quite squishy.

Like there’s data, but they’re very hard to get. And I don’t think they’re very strong because there’s not a lot of precedent for what we were doing specifically. And so I think it might have looked different had I wanted to start a company that was in oncology or something that has a lot of precedent because there’d be really concrete things that I could point to like, this is what an exit looked like here, this is how much money that drug made. But there wasn’t really anything good like that in women’s health.

And so admittedly, I wasn’t very strong when it came to that aspect because there wasn’t really a strong story to be told or I guess a better way of saying that is I couldn’t figure out a way to tell that story in a compelling way to demonstrate that I had a strong working knowledge of that. Which I think was in part because of how difficult it is to pull the data together to tell that story and partly because I’m not trained in that and I wasn’t then.

And certainly now, as I think about different assets that I think are interesting and looking at the market, there’s a different way that I’m looking at that and learning about it. So that, as I’m thinking about a scientific idea, it’s always actually paired with that exercise of—what is the market, what is reimbursement potentially looking like, what are the inflection points for partnership, what do those deals look like?

That’s actually part of my mental landscape now when I’m thinking of something, even in discovery, because it has to connect to all of those points to make any sense, especially in today’s funding model.

And so I think I did a bad job of that with Oviva. That was something that I didn’t do very well. I was so focused on the nearer term because there’s such a high volume of things that had to be sorted, obviously for that. And it’s such an enormous learning curve for someone coming out of academia and going into biotech and drug development.

That’s where I put my focus because I said, if I have all of these T’s crossed and I’s dotted, of course this will come on the other side and there’s enough, to me, there’s enough of a compelling story around what that market could be. But I needed to work harder to make that more concrete.

And I honestly don’t know. I think it would’ve just been me working hard to get talking points down. Because at the end of the day, the data that are there are the data. They were never going to be any different. I just needed to do a better job at being able to bridge the gap from what we were trying to develop and how it would lead to revenue generation.

Advice for First-Time Founders

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So what would you have done differently or what would you recommend a first-time founder do differently?

Daisy Robinton: I think it would’ve really benefited me and I would strongly advise anyone who’s coming out of academia to look into taking a class that covers that. There’s a lot of cool classes now offered by schools like Harvard, whatever, through extension on commercializing medicine.

And I think that’s so important just to get a better landscape picture of how does this work and what is the exercise that one needs to go through to see something through fruition all the way from start to finish.

And I think you need to be able to know that even if you’re in early preclinical stage before you even have a candidate like you really need to know the end at the same time as the beginning so you can effectively develop across that lifespan of the product. So I think that would’ve been my first move would be to do that—just get a baseline knowledge through a course.

And then on top of that, have two to three advisors or consultants or mentors who I could meet with some regularity to ask questions and share my plan and get feedback so that I could have them ask me the questions that investors were asking before I get in the room with the investor. I can do that work or ask them how to do that work. So I can have a good answer. And I didn’t do that exercise and that would’ve been really extraordinarily helpful.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Awesome. I love it. I didn’t know about these courses, which is great. So that leads me to one other interesting question which I hadn’t thought of before, which is—if you have more of the academics in life sciences taking these kinds of courses, do you think you’ll have a material effect on improving the productivity or the yield of the drug discovery research process?

Because would you kill more uncommercial or non-commercially viable ideas even though they’re scientifically exciting? Or I mean, I’m not even going to get into the ethics or should you, but I’m just curious—what do you think the impact would be if you had more?

Daisy Robinton: I do think that socializing some of this commercial ideology and philosophy with academics who were translating earlier would be really beneficial to the drug discovery pipeline and to people looking to pick up assets out of academia.

Yes, because I think that there’s work that can be done at the academic stage to determine if an idea is appropriate for translation or not before it goes through the whole rigmarole and becomes a company and then dies because it’s not ready or whatever the thing is.

I wish there was more opportunity for academics to get that training earlier. Of course, we have tech transfer offices but I don’t know. And I feel like there’s a pretty big gap there still. And whether that’s beneficial for science, I don’t know because I do think that the open-endedness within an academic lab that’s allowed there allows for more discovery and innovation than if you were just to have a focused project that was trying to translate. That’s my opinion. I don’t know if it’s true.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: It makes sense because otherwise everybody would be a pharma company and what’s the difference between a pharma company and a university.

Daisy Robinton: And at the end of the day, we need foundational research to allow for the innovation. I think you can’t really innovate without understanding how things work and why they’re working the way that they do sometimes.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So it’s a tool to be applied with the wisdom and discernment, I guess, in terms of the commercial viability. Interesting. That was fascinating.

Storytelling Tips for Founders

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: You’ve talked a lot about storytelling, so I don’t want to go too deep into it. I’m just curious if there’s one specific storytelling mistake or one specific storytelling insight that you would offer for first-time founders that they typically tend to miss.

Daisy Robinton: Yes, there’s so many but I think I would say the most important thing and it’s going to feel trite probably but knowing the audience. I think a lot of academics will get too technical and they will lose people in the details.

And they might put on a slide like every member of the signaling pathway and they are acting a peer and then all these things happen and then it does this thing. It’s like no one actually needs to need know most of this stuff. If you’re in a 15-minute pitch, don’t put that on the slide and don’t talk about it. It’s really how can you translate your science in a way that is true to the science and gets the main message across without getting too much in the weeds and losing people.

And then probably paired with that is like I said, just because this is an area that I was weak in making sure that your story encapsulates that commercial end. It’s not just about the science and the vision and where the science can go but it has to come back to the dollars. Because if you’re in a meeting pitching, that’s what they’re looking for.

And if they don’t see it, that’s what they’re thinking: When is this going to return my fund? Is this going to fit in my three-to-five-year fund’s return timeline? Because if it doesn’t, they’re not getting funded.

I think related to that is just the vocabulary that’s used, the visuals and the vocabulary, making things approachable. I think a lot of people misconstrue that to feel like condescending or something. That’s not even remotely what I mean.

I think if I was going to go sit in with a bunch of people that were driving trucks crisscrossing the country, I’m sure there’s lots of things that they would be talking about I had no idea what they’re talking about.

We all have our own culture and vernacular and so meeting people where they are in a vernacular that’s common ground while the idea is still very scientific, I think is essential and actually difficult to do. So that’s what I think I would convey. Try to keep it simple, approachable but true to the science.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So that’s interesting because what you just told me triggered a thought and I’ve just been talking to investors. One thing one investor told me was and this is life sciences.

And he said, if the founder is not able to tell me in 30 seconds—even if it’s something in life sciences—why their product is so unique and why I should bother and go and pitch my other partners, they don’t have a chance. And that’s a hard thing to do when you’re doing something as complicated as drug discovery.

So I’m just curious if you had either—I don’t like to say framework or checklist—but some kind of process like what are the building blocks of that skill?

Daisy Robinton: Well, I don’t know if this is directly addressing your question but one thing that came to mind immediately is that, as a scientist you’re trained that everything is contextual. So, this is true in this context and you’re sort of caveating everything because these are the conditions under which you found it to be true but it could be different in a different context.

And those kinds of nuances just aren’t appropriate for these conversations. There will be a time and a place for that nuance to come out later in diligence. So I think part of it is reassuring whoever this person is that we might be coaching that you’ll have a time and a place to get into that detail and nuance, the pitch is not that place.

Bringing it to the highest possible level of common ground and simplifying it—how to do that? I mean, I think what no one ever does is actually put a timer on and say it in 30 seconds. Can you say something that makes any sense? Can you get the idea, even in your normal vocabulary, in 30 seconds? And if not, do it until you can and then iterate on that till you can do it in a way that, if the guy serving your coffee will know what you’re talking about.

And you know, for the large part if investors are evaluating you as a biotech, they probably have a more advanced vernacular, of course. And a better, deeper technical understanding than a lay person. But they’re not experts in your field. I don’t care how advanced they are. They’re not scientists in your field. They might have been 30 years ago or something but that’s I think something that’s commonly misunderstood.

You have to think of it as you’re talking to a lay person with a layer of advanced knowledge that isn’t specific to your random mechanism most likely. There will be exceptions but on the whole I think that’s true.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So I know I said one last question but this I really love what you talk about. So, we talked about the need for storytelling. We talked about the need for commercial awareness, commercial sensitivity when you talk to investors. We talked about practice you said how important that is to get that.

Navigating Different Audiences

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: There’s another angle, which is as a founder, you need to go through multiple audiences and get something from multiple audiences. Investors are obviously a very big part of that but they’re also regulators. They might be strategic partners—I don’t know—but there are different audiences with different sensitivities and different things they’re looking for.

Do you have any tips in terms of how you develop a fluency quickly in storytelling to meet these different audiences’ expectations and levels of knowledge?

Daisy Robinton: Well, what’s challenging about that is that if you’re a first-time academic founder, you don’t share fluency in their different industries. So I would say again, being able to speak with fluency in their language is a good place to start. Which is to say, I think an easy way to do it is these courses.

Obviously you can have some real-world experience where you’re sitting in on meetings or whatever the thing is but you have to learn in some way what is the way that they think, what are the things they care about, what are the words that they use to talk about their work?

And in each of those industries you mentioned, investors I think are the most approachable. In my opinion and experience, it’s the easiest to live in that mindset. Regulators, I still find somewhat nebulous, but I’m working hard to better understand that animal.

And then you have the insurers, which are very important—you probably aren’t interfacing very much with those until the very end. Then strategic partners, of course and those are going to vary pretty widely as well because there’s some that like to get in early and there’s some that really only come in phase two and beyond.

And so understanding how they think and what they care about is going to be important. So yeah, again I think back to, there were a couple courses I took when I was in my training because I took a translational medicine program inside of Harvard.

You could sub-apply to the program. It was human biology and translational medicine. So we took coursework in clinical trials, and how do you translate from bench to bedside. There was some stuff that I picked up there that I didn’t appreciate at the time how important they would be. Then when I was running Oviva, I also took a course that was offered through the extension.

I forget now what it was called but it was something around, biotech, bench to bedside, whatever, like how do you develop a drug? I don’t remember the thing, but they offered a handful of courses and I took one.

At least a third of it was very redundant to my knowledge and training but two thirds of it was very helpful to give me the mental framework, and the language that could allow me to think about how to talk to these other groups and learn what I needed from them and at times get what I needed from them.

The Exit Strategy and Post-Exit Reflections

Shubha K. Chakravarthy:  Okay, so that brings us to your recent exit. So given that you’re in life sciences and it’s drug development, it’s a fairly well known path even though the specific indication and the specific biology might be different at what point did it start to become like, did you start to think consciously about it? And how did you shape your actions, your decisions and your path? What were your expectations about exit? I just want to get a sense of what were your thoughts around this.

Daisy Robinton: Yeah. Well, I thought about it obviously from the beginning in terms of how do we set up a business strategy. And what happened was very different than how I designed it in my mind. I thought we’d build this company. We’d start developing these assets. We’d develop a portfolio of assets and start just sort of like blobbing them off and we’d keep the engine going.

And then we lived in the market that we lived in which is to say there was just no chance of that happening in the climate that we were in. So when we were fundraising and I still had plans to at minimum bring the asset we had through a little bit further than we took it, I started thinking more about who are the right strategic partners for this either now to help co-develop or to acquire at a later date.

And I did that in tandem with the fundraising because I saw them as two very interrelated things, which I think most founders will say is, oftentimes a raise and a partnership will be orchestrated at the same time and one kind of hits right after the other in a way that gives additional momentum to the other. And so as I was out fundraising, I was also on the ground developing these relationships and setting the groundwork for strategic partnership whether that was going to happen for the raise or after the raise.

And I thought about it from the standpoint of co-development because that at the time was my preference. And we had been approached by a couple groups about potential acquisition of our asset before I was ready to think about that. And I was not particularly interested but I entertained the conversations and I thought it was important to have that sort of strategically in our opportunity landscape.

So I guess now it would’ve been, where are we July? Yeah. So quite some time ago now, like over a year ago or maybe almost two years ago was when I really started putting a serious effort into turning those relationships into something concrete. Whether that was a signed co-dev deal or a signed acquisition. That again, was sort of in tandem with the fundraising efforts.

And what became clear was as a women’s health company in biotech with a recombinant protein, single asset, single mechanism, we were not in an environment to get favorable funding with a cap table that would allow for continued raising in the dynamic that would make sense. Because the cost of capital became so high.

That’s just what the market was. So had we raised capital rather than going this other route, it would’ve been exceptionally difficult to raise the next round of capital. We had the opportunity to be acquired. We had a number of conversations around that with different groups but the people that we were speaking to were very exciting and the right partners for us.

We ended up being acquired by Granata Bio, which was so thrilling for me because we had met them a couple years before through GV [Google Ventures  -Ed] actually, who was one of their lead investors. They were trying to facilitate, oh, this is an interesting collaboration or partnership in some way. I just loved their team from the moment I met them years ago.

I was like, I just felt deeply. These are good people, we’re doing this work because they want patients to have a better experience than the experience they’re having and to have more options. That was really like very obvious from the early meetings, how they thought about the work they were doing, which in many ways is similar to how I was approaching the business which wasn’t to say I want patients to have a better experience.

For me, I think women deserve better and I know this will deliver that. It’s kind of a different way of saying the same thing. So I just felt very aligned from a value standpoint. Then they have a wealth of experience as well in the areas that we were working in. So being able to come to a deal with them was so exciting because I just really love their people. I think they’re very talented, but also they are extremely well-meaning people that want to see impact.

That’s what we were trying to do at Oviva. So now I feel like we have a really wonderful custodian of that work that will continue to grow and build and take it all the way.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So how does life feel different? Is it the same as what you would’ve expected? Because I’ve read some stuff around founders who had massively successful exits and they’re like, I feel an emptiness. So what does life look like now post exit, that is unexpected? Good, bad, however you want to define it.

Daisy Robinton: Yeah. I think one thing that was weird which isn’t a good word, very descriptive word but Oviva came together in such a strange way, meaning I didn’t think I’m going to go build this company and then do it. It really was like I was working on something I thought was interesting.

I was really infuriated by the state of the world and someone invited me to kind of apply that theory and curiosity to potentially build a business. I genuinely didn’t think that it would lead to a business. I was like, well, I’ll continue doing this work because someone’s going to pay me to do it instead of me doing it over here for free. Like, it’d be cool if something came from it, but I had no expectation that was likely.

So when the deal was coming together for Oviva to be sold, I very much felt okay, well what do I do next? Because that was so specific like the creation story of it was so specific. It’s not like I have a back pocket of now I’m going to build this other business. But I will say there’s such a wealth of experience that I’ve gained that I see so many other problems and I feel like I have a better understanding on what are ways I can solve those problems through mechanisms that can be supported in today’s climate, which is what Oviva really butted heads against.

We were a great company in a very difficult climate, which is true of all the companies in this climate. So, yeah, I think I was thrilled. That was my number one feeling of just feeling like the work is going to continue with people that are wonderful and talented. So number one, that feels like the greatest thing of all time. Number two, what do I do with myself after that?

I know a lot of founders feel that way. Having room to say what is it about that that I liked or didn’t like? How do I think about that in choosing my next role or in starting my next business? So that’s been a really fun exercise to be going through. I don’t know. I’m happy to talk more about that if you want but that’s really it.

Current Funding Climate and Advice for Scientists

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Awesome. So, you mentioned climate a couple of times. I do want to talk a little bit about it. It’s a vastly different funding climate for life sciences, especially for women today than it was, I don’t know, several months ago.

What’s your take on that climate and especially with regard to the uncertainty around research, grant funding for life sciences, especially for women? What’s your take on that and what’s the lesson there or what’s the actionable advice for scientists today who might want to pursue the same kinds of paths that you did?

Daisy Robinton: I think it’s a really difficult time. I don’t want to sound like a total pessimist. But I also don’t understand how the actions that have been taken in the last several months leave room for people to continue doing important work that unlocks more innovation and gives room to develop ideas to become something tangible as a solution moving through drug development, if we’re talking about life sciences and drug development specifically.

So, I think the best advice anyone can have is just to diversify both your talent and your funding sources. People that were relying only on government grants are in a really terrible position. I happened to be in multiple labs during my training where a lot of funding came from government grants to be sure but a lot of funding came from private donors and foundations.

Unfortunately there’s only so many sources of capital and now there’s more people competing for that because the government isn’t spending as much as it has historically on this work. So mostly, I think just a lot of labs are going to close. Unfortunately, a lot of work is not going to get done and won’t be continued for many years.

We’re going to have irreparable harm from that, I think, when it comes to the scientific industry in this country. But I do think that there’s a lot of opportunity for finding other ways to fund the science and being creative about how to do that. So I don’t have a lot of great practical advice. I know that the people in my network who are academics and trying to figure out how to survive are, like I said, they’re finding other grants all over the place.

I know there’s also a lot of interesting philanthropic efforts that are underway now. I know the Bill Gates Foundation just announced, I think today, they’re releasing 2.5 billion to address five pillars of women’s health that are underfunded, including maternal health and menstrual health and things of that nature.

So, getting in front of the people that are funding that, I think is number one. And also just trying to develop relationships with the private funding community which I think is really difficult. Because I can imagine you being a person sitting in your lab being like, how do I find whoever that person is?

I don’t have good advice for that, so I’m sorry but I do think it’s important. Now more than ever, a PI of a lab is just like a CEO of a company. You need to put yourself in environments where you’re finding people passionate about your work, who have money. And that could be anywhere from random individuals. I know a lot of people get funded by the Saudi government for things, to celebrities like Halle Berry who are speaking openly about menopause.

I know there’s a couple of them now that are confidentially backers of women’s health companies. Sometimes it’s not confidential but sometimes I know a handful that are not public. It’s just a new way of getting money. Because there is actually a lot of capital out in the world. It’s just new ways to get it. And then I think also, like I said, diversifying skill because and asking yourself the question why is it you’re doing what you do?

I know a lot of academics just like the intellectual freedom of that. That’s hard to recapitulate in another environment. But I do think that there’s ways that you can pursue certain questions and particular lines of work in a non-academic environment. So I don’t know. None of that’s very satisfying. I think it’s a really hard time and I really feel for my friends and colleagues and people I don’t know who are in academia because I think it’s just utterly brutal. I don’t know when that will be different.

Transferrable Skills from Academia

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: You know, we talked earlier about this and you said being trained as an academic has applications beyond academia and these are a set of skills that can be used in different places. I’m just curious what your take is on what those, the biggest of those are and how an academic might leverage them outside of the intended use, so to speak.

Daisy Robinton: Yeah. Well I think it’s a number of things. I think I told this story when we had our pre-interview and it’s not, I don’t think useful but I think it’s one way to think about it that might proliferate other thinking which is I laughed at myself about my training because I had twins last year, twin babies.

I have a toddler as well, so my home is just like utter chaos and trying to feed two babies and a toddler just like the amount of labor that goes into caring for these children is unimaginably enormous. So I developed systems that made just little aspects of that more efficient, down to the most basic of things like, here’s the drying rack for the bottles.

And certain things go in a certain way and there’s a certain process I go through when I’m washing. And it made me think of washing glassware in the lab. It’s you do this and this three times and you do and you put it right there but you put this one here and you put that one there because you don’t want to bump this one when you get to that one.

So there’s like an efficiency of thought that happens. Also, at least in my PhD, when I was thinking about all the experiments I had to do. I would layer them, right? You do this and this one’s going to have a two-hour incubation so you can do this in that time. And those are all incredible skills of time management and sequence and prioritization and strategy.

I think strategy being an enormous one that I really didn’t recognize until actually recently, because that’s actually what I really love doing, what I feel like I’m very good at because I spent so much of my academic life strategizing, like what are the most important experiments and how do I do them? But I also have to do these things and there’s more things to do than I have time for. And that’s only just gotten more intense since having children. So, I think those are all very desirable skills.

Not to mention, obviously what I believe is a great scientist is a creative thinker and a problem solver and a devil’s advocate. And being able to apply those skills into so many different environments can really uplevel a lot of those environments because a lot of people who go into things like consulting or finance or whatnot, they’re not developing that same methodology of thinking.

And so actually taking your skillset and putting it into a different environment, even though there’s a whole world of things that you don’t know there, your way of thinking is so strong and so methodical and efficient and creative and multifaceted that I just think that trained academics have superpowers.

Having been in biotech and leading a company as a founder and CEO definitely showed that to me. But also, this is going to sound totally absurd. Also, I spent 14 years as a model, a working model. I swear to God, I applied a lot of those skills in modeling too because of course no one in the audience, very few people if anyone in the audience, will know anything about this.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: I don’t.

Daisy Robinton: But you know, when you’re not just like a person that looks a certain way and you put on the clothes and you go stand somewhere and they take your picture, you have a whole wardrobe that’s chosen for a certain reason and it hangs a certain way.

There’s a certain kind of fabric and colors and there’s light coming from different directions. And you have to understand how when you move your body this way, this type of fabric and this type of shape is going to look that way, but it needs to look this way for the client. And there’s a lot of physics and aesthetics. If I move in this way, these things are going to happen. And oftentimes there’s a number of shots you have to get in a certain amount of time.

I wouldn’t say the model is a thought partner to anyone else on the set for these things, but they can be. And when I was modeling, I was also doing my academic career. And so I was doing my best to optimize. When I’m on set, I’m nailing the shot quickly so that I can get back to work on editing my manuscript or whatever while the other girl is shooting her part.

So I always aimed to be as efficient as possible and I used weirdly a lot of skills from the lab and science in that environment. Or I guess maybe the way that I think about things helped me do a much better job and perform better in that job. So I don’t know. Having been in very disparate contexts, applying skills and training I got in my PhD, has made me very confident that any place you put yourself in whether you’re going to go become a fisherman or a librarian or stay in science or a chef.

Oh my God, like running a restaurant, I feel like scientists would be amazing at running restaurants. There’s just so many variables and so many uncertainties that I think generally scientists are trained to accommodate and work well with.

Final Thoughts and Gratitude

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Awesome. This has been a super inspiring, very interesting conversation. I want to thank you for all the insights you shared. It’s been inspiring to me and I’m sure it’s going to be inspiring to many other founders, particularly women in life sciences as well. So I want to thank you. I want to congratulate you again and I can’t wait to see what exciting things you’re going to do next.

Daisy Robinton: Thank you. This has been such a pleasure. Appreciate you having me on.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Thank you so much, Daisy.