The Gatherer Vol 11

“ You can have a degree, but once you’ve got that intellectual specialisation, you’ve got to be prepared to make jumps, to make leaps and get other skills and experiences to become whatever you’re going to become. ”

Todd: What have you learnt along the way about developing career paths? Matt: I was talking to my son the other day, who is thinking about his career. I gave him the example of my own career where I’ve had eight different types of jobs, and how I got to where I am now. There’s no study chart that you can follow to end up doing what I’m doing. I was saying to him, “You can have a degree, but once you’ve got that intellectual specialisation, you’ve got to be prepared to make jumps, to make leaps and get other skills and experiences to become whatever you’re going to become.” I was a senior associate in a law firm, about to make partner, and I moved to a startup company. My parents just about had a heart attack, but I wouldn’t change it. I could be a partner of a national law firm today, but I probably wouldn’t be happy. You have to throw yourself in the deep end and see what happens, and if you do that enough times, you learn to swim fast. Todd: Can you tell us about your new home town? Matt: Philadelphia is one of the oldest cities in the US. It’s where the constitution was signed. It’s where Ben Franklin worked his magic. It’s where the Liberty Bell is. I can compare it to Melbourne versus Sydney, where New York is Sydney, and Melbourne is Philadelphia which in many ways, has a similar architecture and feel. It’s a great city to live in, the suburbs are very English with stone houses, creeks, big trees, deer and brooks. The city is placed beautifully between New York and Washington. It’s a central hub, and a lot of bankers and lawyers live in Philadelphia area and commute to New York and Washington as a result. It’s also very sports mad. We have Philadelphia Eagles football team (who won their first Super Bowl the same season the West Coast Eagles won their last), an improving baseball team and the 76ers basketball team that features Australian Ben Simmons.

Todd: What do you miss about Perth? Matt: The quality of lifestyle in Perth is unrivalled anywhere in the world. The beaches in New Jersey don’t hold a candle to what you can find in Western Australia, and the fact that you have warm weather and sunlight most of the year, means you can be very healthy and outdoorsy. That entrepreneurial spirit in Western Australia obviously is really important, and my family is all in Western Australia, so I miss them as well. Todd: Any final words of advice for our readers? Matt: I recommend everyone at some stage in their lives read The Man in the Arena, by Theodore Roosevelt. It is about the importance of the guy who’s got dust and blood on his face, he tries and he fails, and yet he keeps coming back. It’s really good. In Australia it is something we should embrace more of, giving people opportunities and picking them up and throwing them back into the fight, as opposed to just standing on the sideline and criticising or saying, “It can’t be done.”

Todd: That reminds me of a saying “Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.” Matt: That’s a really interesting comment. I think it’s something that Australia doesn’t do as well as the US. Experience is gathered by making mistakes and having another crack and doing it better the second time. I think the US entrepreneurial mentality is a lot more tolerant and respectful of mistakes. You get your stripes from being successful obviously, but you also get your stripes from having a go and not being successful and learning from that. It is important to have a lot of different experiences to make yourself good at anything because you need context. Todd: You sit across a number of companies. What do you look for in the people that you work with? Matt: It’s a mix. You need very good scientists who understand the mechanism of the drug or the disease and on the commercialisation side you need people who know “Where do I get off this train?”. One of my mentors uses the analogy of the train. Drug developments go from one end of the train track to the other end, but along the way, there’s lots of different stops and you have to understand what those stops are - the value inflection points. You can stay on the train to the next station, or you can get off the train for some value, and that value changes as edge towards the end point. Commercialisation has to have that understanding of what that the train track looks like in its entirety, but also how to make the value decisions. “How much money do I need to get to the next stage? What value do I get, if I get off at that particular point, or carry it to the next station on the track?”

Todd: Can Australian-based biotech companies looking for a U.S. presence, manage those opportunities from Perth? Matt: You can. There are good examples of that happening. You look at companies like OncoRes Medical, with Dr Kath Giles. Her advisory network is very strong in the U.S. She’s focused entirely on the reimbursement landscape for getting a product commercialised, separate from how she actually gets it approved by the FDA, and developing that infrastructure and those insights. But if you’re going to commercialise a product in the U.S, you need US-based experience of how to do that well. Australia remains a great place to develop early stages of drugs and conduct initial clinical studies, but for Phase 3, you need US patients in the study and there’s no getting around the fact that the biggest market is the US and so you have to do things the American way to get the American returns - that’s what investors are looking for. Todd: As a venture capitalist, what attributes do you look for in a company that may predict future success? Matt: To be honest, when I was a venture capitalist, I wasn’t a very good one, just because I had no operational experience and didn’t know what I didn’t know. Of course, in the pharmaceutical biotech world, it’s really US-centric and I knew honestly next to nothing about that. At the time, the things that I picked or got involved with probably weren’t the best decisions, but I guess over the last 15 years I’ve learnt something and understand better now what makes a good biotech pharma opportunity.

TODD SHAND Principal Life Sciences Group Head

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