🧬 The Outsider Mindset Behind Successful Biotech Founders | David Li Rerelease (1/4)
The Biotech Startups PodcastShow Notes
In this part of the podcast, David shares how the Roy Vagelos Life Sciences and Management dual degree program at the University of Pennsylvania opened his eyes to the possibilities of combining scientific discovery with business acumen. A pivotal summer internship with Arie Belldegrun at UCLA—during which Kite Pharma was born—planted the seed for his future in life sciences entrepreneurship. He also discusses his transition into finance, landing at Goldman Sachs, and the lessons learned from sitting in boardrooms alongside C-level executives at critical moments in companies' life cycles.
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Scott Chetham explains why he left Google and Verily to tackle the unglamorous planning work that slows clinical development. He recounts sketching the company in Costa Rica, raising a pre-napkin-stage round with Polaris, finding an early customer, and adapting when COVID-19 disrupted pharma economics.
The conversation then moves to the decisions that determine whether a trial succeeds: what to measure, whom to enroll, and when to measure it. Scott uses Amgen's osteoporosis strategy to show how a focused endpoint and staged market entry can outperform an attempt to capture everything at once.
The conversation then turns to scaling teams through uncertainty. Scott shares how company growth creates organizational whiplash, why founders often underestimate the need for change management, and how leaders can stay close to what employees and customers are actually experiencing.
Scott Chetham traces the influences that shaped his path into life sciences, from growing up on Australia's Gold Coast and watching his parents build careers through work and education to studying the intersection of engineering and medicine. He shares how a combined degree, early exposure to hospitals, and an unusual appetite for difficult problems pushed him toward biomedical research.
As Slone Partners grew beyond its original five-person team, Leslie Loveless had to confront one of the hardest parts of leadership: letting go. She talks about delegation, resisting the urge to rewrite everyone else's work, and learning that a different approach can still be the right approach.