Commercialization Strategy: Fireside Chat with a Biotech Legend

Scott Shively is a powerhouse in the pharmaceutical industry with a proven track record in commercialization, business development, and capital raising. From leading companies like Bexion Pharmaceuticals and Neumentum to key roles at Pfizer and Sanofi-Aventis, Scott has driven groundbreaking therapies and led successful launches for major brands like Lidoderm, Flector Patch, Lyrica, Celebrex, and Nucynta/Nucynta ER among many others. He's been on the ground floor of dozens of launches.

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Please note this is a lightly edited transcript that may contain errors.

Alina: Hello everyone. Thanks for joining. So I'm gonna go ahead and kick things off and hopefully as people roll in feel free to keep the introductions coming. So I'll give you a little bit of background about what we're doing here. Use of funds is really a monthly series and we focus on sector specific fundraising questions.

This season in particular is focused on biotech and the life sciences, and so we're asking questions around traction commercialization like today, risk mitigation and more. And the series is really run by the team at Weave and Pitch where we help startups, especially startups from the pre-seed to about the Series B stages in their fundraising journeys.

And we really do specialize in a lot of those biotech, life sciences spaces, health, tech, climate, and ai. So I am extremely excited to have Scott Shively joining us today. I will actually let him introduce himself because he has such an incredible journey in his career that I want to see what he's going to say.

But he has, he's a serial founder chief commercialization officer, a c-level executive at a number of pharmaceutical companies. So I'll let you introduce yourself, Scott, and give a little more color to that brief introduction.

Scott: Thank you Alina. And good afternoon to everybody. Good evening, wherever you happen to be. Maybe I should have had Alina introduce me. She might have said more, more good things, but in a nutshell I've been kicking around the biotech and biopharma industry for quite a long time. I've been playing in it for over 40 years. Started out my career as a lot of people typically do in big pharma.

So I worked for quite a long time with Sanofi the big French, multinational, and then worked at Pfizer in New York City for quite a while where I ran a couple of big therapeutic areas a number of years back globally, as well as commercial development, which is very relevant to the topic today. And then at some point there, I caught the entrepreneurial bug, moved out to California and have been involved in three or four different biotech plays out there. Interestingly, progressively smaller companies. I don't know if that was by accident or whatever, but really enjoyed the startup world and creating a company from, if not scratch, from asset acquisition.

I've been a founder and I've been a CEO of a couple of companies. And as Alina said, I've been involved in pretty much all facets of drug development, commercial development. I've done quite a lot of m and as I, I've been fortunate to be a part of three different exits along the way and raised a lot of capital. All that is to say that I've, got a few gray hairs that I've achieved along the way, and I'm happy, very happy to share any of this wisdom with you guys. As we go forward. This is meant to be what we call a fireside chat, which means that I'm gonna present some slides. And by definition, because our time is limited, it's gonna be relatively short talk at about 25 minutes, give or take. 'cause we like to maximize the time for everyone to ask questions. And as you'll see from the slide content, we could go into deep discussions on any one of the top topics. So this is a high level overview by definition. And I'll try to give some examples, some many case studies along the way, which I think, Alina and I thought we'd add some some color and maybe some fun to the discussion.

So with that I guess let's go to the the next slide. Okay. So let's start at the very highest level, 30,000 feet plus. And this may seem like a nuance, but I wanted to start off by talking about just definitions here. What is commercialization versus commercial development? And commercialization is, in a way, a much broader term, right? And a lot of people think of it as preparing for launching and then generating revenues around your assets in the marketplace, generating sales. So how do you take whatever the asset is, ultimately sell it and develop revenues for the for the company or whomever the partner might be.

And that's largely true, but there's an earlier stage facet of commercialization, which we in the business for a while have always called commercial development. And that is actually the topic of our talk today. And this is the beginnings. It's almost I guess the, the metaphor would be early stage drug development, but the commercial things that one should do even at the early stages of the company and of asset development. And these are the things, like the building blocks, if you will, where you're building the foundation for the commercial activities to come and ultimately for success of your product in the marketplace, or again with a partner and ultimately for the company. And, one of the questions that we're gonna address here in a moment is, how soon do I start doing these things, how much they cost?

And so on. So we'll get back to that a little bit, but I think of it like a a upside down pyramid bit, if you will, where you start small and don't spend too much. Because as you all know I'm sure there's a real focus on, at the early stages dedicating as much as the precious resources that you have to development of the drug, whatever stage you're at. But as you move toward market, the expenditures and actually the expense of doing the commercial activities will grow more and more. And it's in a way parallel to clinical development, where you're going from, preclinical to phase one, to phase two, et cetera. So we're gonna talk about the early things, and these are things that I would advocate or suggest that can be done even if you don't have a lot of resources, budget, et cetera, et cetera, to dedicate to them.

The message I wanna leave you here is just do it. And there's different ways to get these things done, and I'll talk about that. So next slide, please. Okay. This is a cookbook now. I don't think anybody would be surprised at this. And it, this is a little bit of a cut and paste out of a pharma a pharma publication recently. And of course every drug development program and every asset can be different, right? There's. Longer timelines on these things, they're shorter timelines. It all depends. But on average, and this is based upon solid data, once you have a, let's say a lead compound identified, whether it's a a biologic or a small molecule fuel or whatever it might be, I, let me just say at the offset before I forget, this whole talk is actually oriented more towards therapeutics, right?

But I think that it can be, also, a lot of the fundamentals can be applied to diagnostics, technologies, and even services. So the timelines may change the, what regulatory requirements may change, but a lot of the things, the same things you would want to, consider doing. This is by way of saying that it takes on average based upon all the data out there from lead, if you will, 10 to 12 years to actually get to approval. And this can be much longer if you've got say, let's say some kind of chronic medication that requires, two well-controlled trials for phase three that might be three or four years long. Or it can be shorter. A lot of times where FDA would like to fast track or assign breakthrough status.

And this is true for certain rare diseases or has been true for oncology drugs in a lot of cases. There's acceleration opportunities too. But the point is it takes a long time to get there and of course lots of money. And the other point I wanna make out point out is that really a good fundamental thing to think about doing is to tie your fundraising, your capital campaign strategy two. The phases of development, because these phases of development usually tie to additional money, more studies you're gonna be doing and so forth. So there's a logical way to kinda lay these things out as part of your planning process. I don't know where all of you might be with your companies. I, I know from Alina's discussions with me that the focus of Weave and Pitch is largely on the earlier stage.

But I think the things we're gonna talk about now in the next few minutes are very valid doing even back into the sort of beginning of preclinical and maybe even before that, to start that apex of the inverse pyramid on commercial stuff. And I'll tell you, I'll give you a quick little the first little sort of case study is that with my most recent company and by the way, I retired from this company back in June and that's why I'm doing some speaking opportunities like this these days. But, I came in as CEO of that company about three years ago, three and a half years ago. And they had really done no commercial development whatsoever. And it was a fairly typical situation where there were brilliant scientists and really interesting technology and a cool lead product.

They actually had the beginnings of very interesting phase one data. And we, what we did is we then went out and did some customer research, so some stakeholder research. We talked to investors, we talked to even banker analysts and others, and did some financial planning. And it resulted in a 180 degree shift in the strategy of the company. We, we went from a very difficult form of cancer called glioblastoma adult brain tumors, which is very tough to to achieve, success in over to metastatic colorectal cancer, which is an area of great unmet need and a much, much bigger market. And so since we pivoted in the studies we were doing and did, successfully hit some of the end points that resulted in a major upside in the value of the company and a lot more investor interest going forward.

And the company's still doing great as a result of that. So it's just an example and, if I had more time, I can talk more about it, but by doing some of the things I'm about to talk about it really clearly resulted in a change of strategy, which is very beneficial for the for the company. Okay, next slide. Just starting again, this may be basic, business 1 0 1 a little bit, but not everybody does it. Maybe the way that is ideal. And so it's really important for you if you're a CEO or involved, with a company to sculpt out a company vision. More than that, be able to clearly articulate it to people, to all the people that you're talking about and, especially to yourselves and, have alignment of course with the board on this.

So in terms of what the company's, these are just examples of some of the things that could go into it, into a vision, but, what does the company want to be when it grows up? Is the company going to be focused purely on early stage development, or does the company want to grow as the asset grows through development and be, have expertise in later stage and maybe even get to commercialization? Or, for example, would you prefer to partner and focus on just your area of expertise, temporarily along the timeline and count on others to provide the expertise as assets move along. Another thing to consider is it a single asset play going forward or is it a pipeline? And there are advantages, one could argue for either. It might be an enabling technology which enables others to create, assets as well. But be very clear about what it is that you are and also where you see yourselves in the next five or 10 years. What would you like to be at that point in time?

Since we're talking commercial is commercialization and commercial development, it's a big decision. Do you ultimately with your company, want to take part in the commercial process or partner it? And again, I'd argue there are pros and cons either way, there's no right answer at all. Depends. A few years ago it was predominantly partnering or m and as that people were getting into for the commercialization of their assets. Now if you look at some of the recent data published by the accounting group, McKinsey, I. A lot more biotechs are choosing to stay engaged at the commercialization stage, which I find very interesting. Because it requires a lot of assets. It requires hiring, a whole different group of people and so on. This can be done by co-promotion in other ways, but that's a big decision. What's your exit strategy? So am is something that may be very attractive and at what stage would you like to try to do that?

The good news I have for everybody is that it, it's predicted by a lot of the analysts that MA is gonna pick up next year in 2025. And even though there's been some downside turns, based upon some of the recent appointees from the incoming administration in the XBI and in biotech futures and so forth it because of some of the things that Trump administration may put into place from a regulation regulatory perspective that may even accelerate m and a's activity. So stay tuned for that, but that's an important thing for you to have in mind. And then another thing of course is, what's your geographic footprint? Do you intend to be global? Do you prefer to be multinational or US focused only? A lot of companies I think, get themselves spread a little bit too thin by trying to be global. And it's a tough world out there, right? And, many try to or attempt to just develop their assets in the US and partner actually us. So there's all kinds of different variations on this theme. But I guess this is all by way of saying get your company vision solidly in place.

Get everybody on the same page and be able to talk about it as you go out there and talk to all kinds of people. And it's the same thing on the right hand side there with the product or technology that you have. And what's your vision for it? Because you can have a certain strategy or a vision for your, let's say your lead product. Going through development, but it could be different from a, from other things that are coming up behind it. In other words. So your first product could be a way to generate capital. It could come through licensing deals, et cetera. And that could help to fund the development of your subsequent products, which you may wanna talk, take further into a development commercialize indications. What makes sense? What's, what are the highest value ones? What could be the quickest ones to get there? Does your product or your asset have multiple legs? And what we might call a, in the business of life cycle plan. So giving that a lot of thought because a lot of molecules have a variety of different things they could be developed for in the world of cancer, especially, one molecule or biologic or antibody could conceivably be developed for multiple types of cancers.

The question is. What do you do first? Because FDA makes you do a separate development program in most cases for each indication. So it costs money, time, effort, and all that. And then again if you have more of a technology, play a platform or whatever, are you enabling others? Are you developing an individual SI think I mentioned that already. Okay, next one, Alina. So these are the the requirements. I think the, the kind of the essential things and it's really not too early to start these even at the early stages. Really importantly in my view is identifying clearly who your key stakeholders are. And it's not just key opinion leader, drug developers that could be involved in your program, but getting input even early with the end users. Users. Providers, what specialty groups will actually ultimately prescribe, utilize your product or your technology? A lot of people don't think about this at the early stages, but payers, insurance companies and so on, what will be their requirements now?

It's hard to predict the future on that if you're pretty far from market, but getting an early sense of that because these questions will come up early, especially from investors and bankers and perspective partners is what is your pricing strategy? What's your reimbursement strategy? What are the considerations? 'cause a lot of the newer technologies and products end up being are priced a lot more highly than those in the market currently. Having a clear IP strategy, this is probably, pretty straightforward in terms of the need for it. But it's not just what patents do I have or have been submitted for approval? What's my long-term strategy? And what would I project as being an LOE loss of exclusivity for the product once it gets to market? Ultimately. For example, if your goal is to have an m and a, have your company acquired by a big pharma player, they're gonna run the numbers post-launch and look at LOE is a major input, a major assumption into their financials.

So being able to think through that and being able to talk about it with people is very important. You probably don't wanna give away too much of the detail in the beginning, but at least being able to talk strategy is pretty key. And then connected to the first one a scientific ad board, super important to have one of those employees. The number of folks that you include can vary from three to 10 to 12, and you really don't have to necessarily go out and do, three 12 KOL ad boards a year at the cost of 120,000 a pop. Really there's. A lot simpler and a lot less expensive ways of doing this right down to doing one-on-one meetings and phone calls to get people's input and so on. And here's a good, here's a good chance to maybe share another case study. So different company that I was with earlier in my career it's called Endo which right nowadays is, has morphed into a much larger company. But that was actually a startup company right before I joined it back in a while ago. And it was such a small company that, the, our office was on the third floor over top of a Wawa food market in southern Pennsylvania. So it was pretty rugged and a couple of products in the beginning. But the company licensed a product from a, at that time, unknown Japanese company.

The product was called Lidoderm, which is a pretty simple product. It's a 5% lidocaine patch. The idea was to develop it for pain for some type of pain indications. The first year of sales, and this is right when I had arrived, this was happening. I think the company totaled about 7 million in revenues on the product, and the board was, not happy and all this. So long story short, we pulled together an ad board, and I understand that this is, into the commercialization phase. It's not early stage of this company. But it's a really good example. And we, because nobody knew the company, we couldn't even attract the real thought leaders in the space to come in and meet with us. They had no interest. So we came up with an idea to try to get some of the up and comers, what we call at the time, the Young Turks to come in and meet with us. And they were very happy to get the attention. And so we had a meeting with some of the younger up and coming people who were specialists in pain and neuropathic pain in this case. We had been developing the product for something called Postherpetic neuralgia, which at the time was an orphan disease and that's what the product was approved for. But it turns out they as we're sitting around the table, all the young KOLs got very enthusiastic about the product and started coming up with all kinds of ideas.

And long story short is because of the input we gathered at that point in time, the product was developed for and at, for various pain indications and even started to be used even off-label for migraine headaches. I can remember one KOL like cutting the patch up and putting it across his forehead and saying, Hey, this feels pretty good. So it's an extreme example, but because of the brainstorming, the excitement and so forth, we were able to really accelerate the growth of the product. And the product became, I think a peak year about a $1.5 billion product in about four years. That was the kind of the catalyst for all that to happen. So it's all by way of maybe encouraging you to talk to people that are outside and get input, get ideas. Don't just think inwardly and discuss it. It's very easy to convince yourselves that you're very smart and know what you're doing, and you probably are and do. But it's great to get outside input. Then on the other side, the other one I'll put out I'll just focus on a little bit is competitive intelligence. Really important to understand who your competitors are, not just in the market at present, but who you think might be coming to market potentially once your asset gets there.

And this can help you design things into your development program that can help you differentiate from who the competition might be and also be able to answer questions that you know, frankly, I. Any sophisticated investor will ask you when you're trying to raise capital because you're not just competing for eventual revenues in the market, you're actually competing for share a voice among investors. It's really hard to get investors' attentions as some of you guys may know, and, so how do I even get a meeting? Part of the story needs to be, how do I differentiate? So knowing your competition is really key, and there's lots of ways to do that don't require, commissioning a big consulting agreement or whatever to have somebody do this for you. Take some hard work in digging, but very important to do that. Okay, let's go maybe to the next slide. Okay. So those are the things, I didn't go through everything just 'cause of time on that previous slide, but, the the harder work, not that wasn't, which I shared, is kind, getting in there and rolling up your sleeves and doing some of that. The heavy lifting on some of this.

The things that most of big pharma companies, all of them I'm sure and a lot of the successful biotechs do is they, at a very early stage that Kraft was called a Target product profile or A TPP. And this is a a detailed profile of, in a way what your product is gonna look like upon regulatory approval or what you're aspiring for it to be. Everything from, the clinical endpoints, the clinical data you will generate to the regulatory indications and claims you'll be granted formulations, everything. That's the nuts and bolts of what that product will be when it gets approved. And it's designing, if you will, in detail. The destination is that you're trying to achieve as you go through your whole development program. Very important. And happy to share. There was a a publication recently that I sent to Alina and to max. I'm sure they'd be happy to share that with you if you want to see some examples. That's a whole discussion in fireside chat unto itself because it gets pretty detailed. But really advocate that being done. Identifying key milestones and building out a project plan, which once you know what your target is just laying out, not just what are my milestones in the next year or two, but from where I am right now to potentially to approval.

What are the key clinical outcomes and regulatory milestones that I want to achieve? And then what's the project plan that I need in place? And this could be pretty general in the beginning, of course, to get to those points. And so this is something that, again, prospective partners. And many VCs, for example, will want to see because these will then inform the financials that hopefully you'll have to be able to share, but also that they'll run based upon these assumptions. So milestones are really important. And then build out some financials. And I think, the when your early stage, it's pretty hard to be to have an illusion of precision here. Meaning you can do a sales forecast of the eighth dollar incent, but if you're eight years from market, who knows? So there's a wide standard d wider standard deviation the earlier you are, but at least have a range, a market estimate with some kind of logical assumptions behind it that you can share and then build financial models around to say, Hey, I think I've got a product that could, if all these assumptions come through and we achieve our target. Come to pass in the marketplace because, otherwise you'll leave others to do that work for you. And that may or may not, they may or may not make the right assumptions, and they may come up with something that you don't like. So try to lead that horse a little bit to to drink from your your oasis.

Identifying risks and accelerators very important as well. A quick, I think I have time for a quick one here, Alina. Another case study is again, my previous company was developing novel biologics for various types of cancers. And the the shift we made, as I mentioned earlier strategically was away from glioblastoma of brain cancers to metastatic colorectal cancer. But we had this other opportunity running in the background because we we started a, a pediatric trial in a rare form of pediatric brain cancer called DIPG. That's diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma. This is a rare disease. There's probably two or 300 patients diagnosed each year at it's virtually 100% fatal. It's really horrible and it's little kids who get this. And it turns out that in, in our phase one study, even though we shifted over to adult colorectal, we did have some pediatric patients in there, and they seemed to do pretty well. So the company maintained a phase one study in that indication with pediatric patients. And at the time I left, I retired from the company. They hadn't enrolled about 11 patients, and had some pretty good results. Now, it took a little, it's a little bit of a risk because it's a really hard one to crack, right? And it's not inexpensive as you might imagine, but it could result in a a rare disease.

Sort of breakthrough status from the FDA and in fact, the company just recently got breakthrough status on it. So it was a little bit of a risky play and upside because it would bring the product to the market much, much earlier and have a amazing halo effect on the whole portfolio, the whole company. So it's an example of the strategic risk and an investment. But identifying upsides and helping to share that, with others that you talk to, I think is can be a good idea if you can afford to do it. It's can be a calculated risk depending upon the area you're in. And I think the other two are pretty straightforward. I, I think people ask how do I get competitive intelligence? How do I develop relationships? You have to get out there. And ideally it's the CEO. 'cause the CEO is oftentimes the face of the company. But, attending not just the scientific medical meetings that make sense but also some of these investor meetings and networking events where you can meet people. Have a quick introduction. Just, be, begin to get to know and have some notoriety out there. Maybe you're get, you get selected to make a presentation. All these things actually help and you never know what introduction or what pitch you might make, might result in a really a contact, a connection that has a lot of legs to it.

So I would totally, I recommend doing as much of that kind of thing as you can, as you're able. Okay. And next slide. Yeah, so just to I think we're a little bit over the the formal talk time, but here's just like the highest level takeaways. Being able to articulate a clear vision that you can share and everybody owns in the company even though you're early stage and everybody's focused on, gosh, how do I make it through the next year or two, and what do I need to accomplish? Then have a long-term strategy thought out so you can present it. You can always change it if you need to. The data comes out differently or whatever it might be, but have it thought out because people are gonna want to hear that they're gonna see it. Don't let them assume it. You share that with them. And once you add that in place, identify the key milestones and have a plan around your capital strategy. Link your needs for fundraising. Two key milestones. 'cause key milestones will drive your ability to raise subsequent rounds. And then building relationships. I can't encourage that enough through networking. There's a way to cut through the competition. And even though there's a highly scientific, very technical field that we're all in relationships still count for a lot with bankers, with investors, with prospective partners, everybody across the board. So with that, I will bring a halt to my to my comments and I certainly welcome any questions and. Happy to do one-off meetings with folks if they would like to at some point.

Alina: Thank you so much, Scott. I think this is a really helpful kind of perspective on thinking about what are some of the steps that you can take in terms of commercial development, which are fundamentally steps around also building a good business that that will eventually also help you around some of those pre-launch commercialization efforts. So I wanna maybe start off before I start off, I'll say, if you have a question, feel free to post it in the chat and then we will call on you as we go. But I'll maybe start off with a question, because you mentioned early on in your presentation around deciding whether you're going to commercialize something yourself or partnering sometimes. Potentially partnering with big Pharma, and I'm curious, how early do you start to think about pursuing those types of conversations with pharma and what does that look like and how do you strategically do that without maybe giving too much away, et cetera?

Scott: That's a great question. And the answer not meaning for this to be a cop out, but it depends. And it goes back to what your sort of vision of a company is like. If your vision is to have an m and a is to sell the company at some point in time, the question is when, when do you wanna do that? And it ties to, do you want to be a public company someday or do you want to stay private? And there's very, all kinds of different plays on that depending upon the situation. But the challenge with partnering in the recent couple three years has been that big pharma companies have a couple of things have fundamentally changed. Number one. They've been waiting until deeper and deeper into the development process to actually do a lot of deals. And not universally 'cause there are still, early stage deals that have been done. But pharma companies on average would like to wait until they say, see definitive proof of concept data, which in a lot of cases equals phase two A data before they plunge in and do a deal.

And that can be licensing or it could be m and a's activity. So they, it's not because of a shortage of capital and money they have on hand. There's tons of money out there for big pharma companies to to acquire with or do deals with. They would rather offset the probabilities the risk and pay more for it. So there's a little bit of a bias to be later in the process when deals are done. Again, not universal at all. And if you have a whizzbang technology or a product that clearly, it's in phase one and it the the mechanism has already been proven if you will, or validated somehow clinically that could be a whole different story. But so the question being when do you jump in? And I'm an advocate of it is never too early to start, but your expectations about actually doing a deal, you need to manage those a little bit. And you don't want to open up the kimono and show too much too soon, right? So it's identify who the targets would be for partnering.

In other words what pharma companies or large biotechs or whoever your targets are. Have plays in their portfolio, in the sector that you're in. Look at who's done deals, who's doing deals, who's active, and that will help you ratchet back and target who you wanna talk to. And then typically the the way to get into it is through the business development group. They're the gatekeepers. And if you can show them something that is, again, going back to how I differentiate from my competition, you'll get their attention and they'll likely take a meeting. If you really want to get something serious cooking though, what really is helpful is to have a connection somehow with a higher level executive, either in their commercial organization in their r and d organization or even, senior leadership.

And that's the way to really accelerate the whole thing. There's no sort of, tried and true answer to it. But I would say starting the process of getting, helping them, getting to know you're out there. As early as you can because it ultimately takes a long time to do a deal even after you go into you get a CDA sign with a big pharma company. If it's j and j or Pfizer or Novartis or whomever, it could take up to a another year to get the deal finalized if Adida goes through. So that's why I say get the jump on a little bit. And, but then just be eyes wide open about what you share when and when a deal could get done.

Alina: Just to follow up on that I, I think a lot of people, especially when they're, let's say preclinical or fairly early on, are pretty heads down and there isn't that much of a focus, let's say on press or pr or shaping what they're doing in terms of potentially coming off coming across to the public as you said, a whizzbang kind of technology. And I'm curious. What do you recommend, even in terms of getting yourself out there and making what you're doing known? How early do you do that? And when you don't have a lot of resources, how do you actually approach that?

Scott: Yeah also, good question. I think you have to take advantage of every opportunity to help people know that you're out there, that you exist in what you're doing. So there's some really basic things. Most companies have a website and having a good website where you have things like posting any studies that you've done, publications any presentations you're doing at medical meetings, these kinds of things. And it's more of an, but I think it's more of an ir investor relations philosophy than it is a true public relations philosophy early on.

And if you think about who your real targets are at this, at that point. It's really investors that you'd like to ultimately convince to come into your company or to invest in your company. So what do they want to see and how do they wanna see it? And so I think you can use social media really inexpensively to do that. LinkedIn's not a bad vehicle. Your website is key. 'cause the first thing when people hear about you, you give 'em your business card or whatever your locked your E-card, first thing they'll do is go look at your website. So you know that should be a pretty good focus. But when you do have a publication or you're presenting a poster, have an abstract, whatever it might be, do a press release.

It's okay even early, and it doesn't cost that much money. It, it can, with a little bit of help from an IR firm who you don't have to have a, like a major retainer agreement with. You can have that done and you'll just multiply the legs that you have on your data, get it out there. So I think I, there's some things like that you can do to help. Spread the notoriety of your company and the data you're generating and where you guys are.

Alina: Speaking of investors I'm curious are there unexpected things that investors look for that you can mention from your previous experiences?

Scott: They all wanna see more data, more better data. So that's not unexpected. But I think it's some of the things we were talking about actually they want hear, they wanna hear, even though you may be far from market, they want to hear some kind of a vi value proposition. So what do you want your product to be and look like and feel like in the marketplace when it gets there? What do you envision, what's, what are the target patients that you'll, be trying to access? Who's the target audience in terms of providers? What do you wanna be able to say about your product in the marketplace? So they want to, they wanna wrap their heads around that, not just the science and technology behind it, and to the extent that you can share with them again not a sophisticated, really detailed, financial model. But at least how big can this be? How big an opportunity is this?

That would be, that's maybe surprising to some people because I can't tell you how many presentations I've seen where beautiful science, beautiful charts, beautiful MOA videos and so on, and you're going, okay, but what's this look like? Ultimately, what am I, if I'm gonna invest what's the trigger for me getting a return on my investment? Because your VCs are looking for a, they're looking for a big return on the investment.

Alina: Now we have very little time and I, we just got some more questions, but I'll let Jane ask her question really quickly and and hopefully maybe we can stay for another minute just so that you can answer it. But Jane, do you wanna get on video?

Jane (Audience Member): Thanks. So very broadly, we we have a technology. We developed a platform, essentially we were gonna use it to create a product to sell to other biotechs and pharma companies. Also using that same tech, we can do follow-up services based on that initial product. So we'd been developing this commercialization strategy around products and services. Another companies come in and our technology, they believe could really help them. Do something they wanna do and can't currently do. This is very early on, but this is just a completely different revenue model I had not been thinking about. So just curious, based on your experience, your expertise, questions I should be asking myself or things to be thinking about as I start entering these very preliminary conversations.

Scott: I think it it goes back to how does that y butt up against your strategy or your vision for the company. And it can be serendipitous, it can be cla Yeah. This can come in from the left field and a sudden, yeah, it's a great opportunity. So being open-minded to it, but it, you probably need to do a couple of scenarios, right? What was your business plan initially before this came up, and then what does this do to it? And one of the questions is does this, if you do a deal. And I don't know nearly enough about this to really be, these are just broad comments, but, do you prevent yourself from reaching your ultimate potential if you didn't do it? In other words, are there any downsides to doing this?

Do you put a competitor in the market, for example? And I don't know, again, is there an IP issue to doing this? So it's not necessarily bad to generate some short-term revenues that you can use to plunge back in. Could be valid. I just, I'm not trying to, I'm not answer your question. I just would need to know a little bit more about it, so I'd be, no,

Jane (Audience Member): I fully understand it, but just even that was actually very helpful.

Scott: Okay. Sometimes these things that you're not expecting turn out to be fantastic opportunities. You never know.

Alina:Absolutely. So I know we're a few minutes over time. I'm just gonna wrap up. I I think Scott, you mentioned that you're willing to stay connected with people. Maybe we can, you, if anyone has follow-ups, you can always email us and we can we can bridge that. But just a little bit of quick wrap up. First of all, thank you so much, Scott, for taking your time and and giving us some of your stories and we read about this all the time, but I think it's helpful to understand how much, even an example like Lidoderm sometimes comes from these types of serendipitous or pivot based directions that you didn't really encounter or didn't expect, but actually have build a huge company basically. So thank you for that. I will just really quickly mention we do run these monthly.

Next month we are going to be talking actually about inflection points for successful fundraise and how to think about when to fundraise. So that will be on December 11th. And as I mentioned before, we help startups in the life sciences, deep tech, healthcare and climate spaces with their fundraising and sales. So feel free to reach out to us if there's anything we can be of help with. And other than that thank you so much for joining today and for spending a few minutes over as well.

Scott: Thanks everybody. Pleasure. Almost meeting all of you.

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