My personal goal is to build a company that can develop restorative therapies for spinal cord injury and other neurological damage; and to build a model of a company that works efficiently, and mobilizes as much of the talent out there as possible to work toward a common goal.
How Did I Get Here?
During my internal medicine residency at the University of Virginia, I saw my first spinal cord injury (SCI) patient. That experience stayed with me even after I went back to New York City and practiced medicine while pursuing the other love of my life-the theater. For a while, I lived a dual life as medical director of a clinic in the Wall Street area and as an ER doc, while also taking acting classes, auditioning and working in commercials, off-off Broadway plays, and as a contestant on Jeopardy. I was having a wonderful time, living with one foot in each of two very different worlds.
But then in May 1986 friends from my medical school class at Columbia called and told me about a scientist friend of theirs, Dr. Gail Naughton, who was starting a company around her work in tissue proliferation. She needed an M.D. to help build the company, and who was good at making presentations. An "acting" M.D. seemed like the perfect solution. My friends had shown Dr. Naughton tapes of me being interviewed for the local news and as a contestant on Jeopardy, and she decided that she had found what she was looking for.
I had never considered going into the business world-but this made no difference to Gail. At my first meeting with her, her husband, and her two kids, she pulled out a piece of paper with three lines of writing that essentially said, " I will work for Marrow-tech for $X," and she said, "Sign here!" While I wanted to think about it, Gail said, "You don't understand. I want you to sign here!" So I did, and that is how I got into biotech-it was an impulse based on the way Gail and I clicked; it just seemed to be the right thing to do.
This simple exchange of "sign here" provided me with the most profound change in my life. I plunged in without knowing anything about business, and neither did Gail. A dentist friend of a relative put in the initial money, which ran out after a couple of months. But I was hooked-I worked for no salary and worked part-time in the ER to support myself while Gail was working in the lab at Queensboro Community College to make ends meet.
Two years later, we took the company public, recruited a very experienced pharmaceutical executive, Art Benvenuto, as CEO, and grew Marrow-tech in Advanced Tissue Sciences, Inc., which is now a major biopharmaceutical firm with approved products entering the marketplace.
A Day in the Life of A CEO
There is no typical day when you head up an early-stage company. Since I am the only full-time employee other than my assistant, I do anything and everything. The responsibilities are overwhelming at times. At this stage in the company's development raising money is key, along with keeping the "virtual" organization motivated and on track to meet goals, attracting new members of the scientific and business advisory groups who can help us grow and take things to the next level, strategic and financial planning, accessing new technology for Acorda to develop, and maintaining an intellectual property portfolio. We have to generate and maintain technology licensing agreements, patent applications, research agreements, and corporate partnerships. My assistant, Tierney, now does the in-house financial management and office management, including responding to patients and editing video PR pieces.
In addition to dealing with company staff, a CEO also must work with the company's board of directors. This group should provide experience and expertise apart from the in-house management teams, they should provide access to networks of potential sources of funding and corporate alliances, and they should critically evaluate the decisions and progress being made by the company. Some of the board members represent groups that have invested heavily in the company.
This means that you have a diverse group of people on the board, each with a different agenda and different past experiences. Managing the board can be a challenge, but a strong, well-balanced board can help a CEO stay ahead of changes in the business and financial environment and it can allow the CEO to steer the company through rough waters.
The general timetable for each day is about the same, but the activities can be very different. I usually get up at 6:30 A.M. and read the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. I head for the office around 8 A.M., where I read e-mail and make calls. The rest of the day can be taken up with traveling to meetings with potential investors, potential or existing corporate partners, scientists whom we wish to recruit, or to industry meetings to make contacts. If I am not traveling, the day can include anything from chairing a scientific advisory board (SAB) meeting, to conducting a conference call or a meeting to plan our clinical trial program. Each day, I discuss ongoing projects with Acorda's chief scientific officer based in New York and our research director in North Carolina. The day usually ends between 8 and 10 P.M., with the occasional all-nighter. I work one or two full days on the weekend, but I try to keep at least a half-day for fun.
Here is what I did last week: On Monday, I wrote an ATP grant to apply for $2 million to fund a program, I had telephone conference on clinical trials, and I worked on financial pro-formas with our acting chief financial officer. On Tuesday, I flew to an industry meeting in Boston to make a presentation on being a virtual biotech company, and I had dinner with our chief scientist and our corporate collaborators to discuss the clinical trial program. On Wednesday, I attended the rest of the conference and met with a company consultant to discuss corporate development strategies. On Thursday, I was back in the office and met with our chief scientist and a potential pharmaceutical partner from Europe, and then met with auditors to get ready for an upcoming audit to prepare for our next financing.
On Friday, I met with a potential candidate for full-time CFO and vice president of business development and I had a working session with the acting CFO; I worked on a revision of the executive summary and business plan in preparation for the financing; I went to the chief scientist's lab to discuss recent data; and I worked on a slide show for the financing.
For the next 5 to 10 years, I plan to stay with Acorda and get it to the point where I feel I've accomplished my key goal-successfully developing breakthrough products for restoring neurological functions, which is one of the big remaining frontiers in medicine.
How Can You Get This Job?
These positions are not advertised. You generate the opportunity yourself by starting a company, or you find someone who has just started a company and join their team to learn the process (as I did with Advanced Tissue Sciences).
I founded Acorda from scratch, and on my own dime. This meant several years of deciding which area I wanted the company to pursue, plowing through the technical literature and attending scientific and clinical conferences to find out the current status of SCI research and therapeutic development, identifying the top scientists in the field and persuading them to work with me, figuring out what the other biopharmaceutical companies were doing in the area, getting the various not-for-profit foundations that fund SCI research to cooperate rather than compete. Then I had to write a business plan that made scientific, clinical, commercial, and financial sense. Hardest of all, I had to round up sufficient investment dollars to fund the company. This last task never ends, but you won't have a company without the first infusion of dollars.
If you want to become involved with someone else's company, you have to use your network to reach them. Start with people you know who are already in the industry or are leading scientists in the field. For example, the best way to find out about opportunities in a startup working on new drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease is to identify and network with the scientists who are developing key technology in that field.
Keep your ears open-if there is a talk being given by someone from a company, go and meet that person and network-this is a critical skill if you want to get into business. If any of your friends or professors have contacts in the relevant arena, make sure you network with them and express enthusiasm and interest.
What about entrepreneurs who come right out of academia? In a strange way, ignorance of the business world can be useful for entrepreneurs. One of the hardest things anyone could ever do is to start your own company. Had I known just how hard it really would be to get Advanced Tissue Sciences up and rolling, I might have been scared off. The advantage is to be naive-we were too ignorant to know we couldn't do this. Once we were committed, we just struggled to keep our heads above water. It was the hardest, yet most exciting, thing I had ever done.
However, at some point experience is crucial. My Acorda experience is very challenging-huge amounts of work and stress, but at least I knew what was coming. I strongly urge budding entrepreneurs to ally themselves with people who do have that experience, to balance out their ignorance. Scientists need to align themselves with people with management and people skills, who have been through it before. This requires swallowing your ego. It's hard to share control with others, but often it is a fatal mistake for entrepreneurs to try and go it alone. Strong scientific skills do not translate directly into excellence in other areas. A Nobel laureate does not necessarily make a good CEO.
