Advertise on podcast: The Biotech Startups Podcast

James Evans calls himself a late starter. Childhood in the UK was skateboarding and video games, not science kits. His dad was an engineer and his mom was a nurse, which only looks like a straight line if you draw it afterwards. Science wasn't in the house. Soccer was mainstream. Skateboarding was not, and that counterculture stubbornness is the part he still recognizes in company building.

Steve Visco grew PolyPlus Battery Company on government contracts instead of a stack of tiny SBIRs. Lawrence Berkeley had already taught him how to write large proposals. The danger, he says, is chasing money that pulls the company off its North Star. Once you sign, you cannot renegotiate the work. You get reports, audits, and no BMWs in the parking lot. ARPA-E will kill a grant that stalls. His grant-writing rule is the same as a venture pitch: why should anyone care, who is on the team, and don't ask for too little.

Steve Visco's spinout found its first CEO in the audience. Rudolph Hurwich had already built Dymo, cashed out, and was hunting for another shot at something big. He offered to raise the angel round and take the job when Steve said he wasn't ready. The founding four were faculty: Steve, Lutgard De Jonghe at Berkeley, Michel Armand in Montreal and Grenoble, and Meilin Liu at Georgia Tech.

Steve Visco was an introverted kid with a microscope, pond water, and books on Louis Pasteur and Jonas Salk. School science lagged years behind what he was already doing at home. Literature almost pulled him into writing instead of the lab. He still treats writing as a leadership skill, because too many scientists cannot explain why their work matters. A high-school rock band got him used to being watched. That comfort later showed up in grant pitches.

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.

Leslie Loveless joined Slone Partners after a major personal transition, leaving a large healthcare company to become employee number five at a small recruiting firm. She hadn't worked in recruiting before, and at the time, she didn't fully appreciate how big the leap would be.

Leslie Loveless leaves the classroom for pharmaceutical sales in 1999, a coveted industry at the time. She describes the culture shock of moving from a school building into a territory-based role, where her days meant driving between providers, managing her own schedule, and learning to sell one to one.

Leslie Loveless starts at the beginning: growing up in a close-knit Indiana family, watching her father build a career as a pharmacist, and learning early that education mattered even if the eventual career path was left up to her.

He then turns to company building at Axelyf: in vivo cell reprogramming for solid tumors, modular lipid nanoparticles, AI-informed discovery, external partners, and a deliberately lean operating model. The conversation closes with the mentors, expectations, and leadership philosophy shaping his next chapter.

The conversation covers layoffs, company transformation, patent cliffs, biotech's feast-and-famine cycles, modified mRNA, and the effort required to scale production from tiny academic batches to grams and kilograms.

At Merck, a three-month visa detour exposed Örn to another laboratory and reinforced the value of adaptability. He then describes leaving a secure role for Transform Pharmaceuticals, building a small team and collaborative culture, developing new formulation technologies, and helping create the patents and assets that led to a Johnson & Johnson acquisition.