View from the Top: Interview with CEO of Raven Biotechnologies
Bioresearch Online (BIO): How many years had you been working in biotech before you started your own company, and how did you know that it was the right time?
Mather: I had been at Genentech for 14 ½ years, and for me it was the right time to leave. I had worked in the development side of the company, and then for the last five years I moved to the research side. It was good for me to have had experience all around the company in order to move on and start my own company.
BIO: What's your vision for your company?
Mather: We want to become the company that everyone thinks of when they think of cell-based drug target discovery and monoclonal antibody therapeutics. That doesn't mean that we want to become a Merck, but I don't plan to remain a small company either. I think there's something in between.
We are looking to grow to between 200–500 people, not 3,000 like Genentech. That's the break point at which you move into a company that has to have so many layers of management that people start loosing contact with each other
Scanning electron micrograph of a small blood vessel created in-vitro. The scanning EM was done by David Phillips, a collaborator at The Population Council, NY.
BIO: Do you plan on going public?
Mather: Yes, we hope to go public. The timing is something we can't predict at this point. It depends on our progress, how fast we move to our stated goal, which is to have therapeutic antibodies in the clinic by 2002–2003. But it also depends on things we have no control over, like the market in general. We've all been on that roller coaster lately.
BIO: Having a product by 2002 or even 2003 is not your typical 15 years to product in the pharmaceutical industry.
Mather: It is quite a short timeline. One of the strengths of our approach is that we have a method that allows us to both identify the target that is useful to approach with a therapeutic, and to get the therapeutic at the same time. Because we're doing it by raising antibodies to cell surface proteins and then looking for those that modify function, say inhibit the growth of a cancer cell, by the time we say "yes this target is good, it will inhibit the growth of breast cancer," we already have an antibody to take to the clinic.
BIO: Do you think it is necessary to be have a short timeline these days?
Mather: Well yes, I think the whole dot-com experience has people thinking on a totally different level with the time line for developing any company. It's always going to be longer for biotech because you're dealing with a biological entity and there's only so fast you can go before you run up against the biology and the safety issues.
BIO: How hard was it to raise funds?
Mather: A year and a half ago, when we started, some people said "… don't even think about it. Biotech is dead it'll never come back."
But I think there's always money for a good idea. When it's a hard market and a hard sell, you have to refine your ideas and work harder. But if your ideas are good, you can find the money. What I told people was that these things are cyclical. There's no reason to say biotech is over. We're just starting in a number of ways. I'd rather start a company at the bottom of the trough starting up, than at the top and slide down. The return to biotech has already happened. We saw a huge turnaround in October and November. A lot of excitement is coming back to biotech, and even after the last few weeks. I think it's still there for biotech.
BIO: How different is it to keep investors happy, than say a research director?
Mather: I hate to even draw a parallel with academia. I'm president, CEO, and chairman of the board. The bosses are the board members. Some represent venture funds, some are independent investors. We have about half our Series A funding coming from private individuals. We are fortunate to have the late Bob Swanson, the founder of Genentech and Bill Young, then chief operating officer of Genentech, as investors. Bill Young, now CEO of Virologics, is on our board, as well as partners from the two Venture funds who invested. These people are very savvy, they are supportive. If you get the right board, they're a resource. So they're both a resource and a boss, but with the right board and the right relationship, they're a resource that helps strengthen the company.
BIO: How did you get started?
Mather: I was phenomenally fortunate trying to start the company in the Bay Area and as a Genentech alumnus because, from the very first, when I started talking to people, I could immediately name ten CEOs that came from Genentech. Those people, and other people whose names they gave me who had never heard of me, were very kind and willing to spend time—an hour, a lunch, a dinner—talking to me about my ideas and how they viewed them and how to refine them from their own experience. It was just invaluable.
And there's also the forum for woman entrepreneurs (FWE). It started in the Bay Area. It's an organization for women who are officers, or founders, of startup companies. They have a course for entrepreneurs called the e-series. You spend an evening every other week for several months dealing with the basics of how to start a company, what you need to do, how do you do it, how do you do a term sheet, etc. That was very useful. It's a great resource. They're branching out to Los Angeles, Seattle, and some other areas.
It's certainly easier when you have a network of people that you can e-mail and ask: "What was your experience with this? Give me the name of a good lawyer for a patent, or of someone who can get a green card for an employee."
BIO: How do you approach recruiting?
Mather: Finding people has been a real joy in some ways. It's very important that you don't get into the mentality that a small company has to settle for second best. You don't. You just have to find people who are a good fit, because it's a very different atmosphere from a larger company. For the people who like it—it's like people who get addicted to running—there's just nothing else quite like it; but for people who don't like it, it's awful. You do have to be careful to make sure people know what they're getting into and that they are the kind of person who's going to thrive on the startup atmosphere.
But then you can find that kind of person who is happy to come from an established position because you get something out of this small start-up that you just don't get elsewhere. It's the sense of teamwork; it's the sense that what you do makes a difference every day, everything; it's the excitement, the sharing. This whole company is a team and everybody sees the whole process. They see what it takes to raise money. They see what it takes to recruit people.
Everyone in the company is a shareholder: That was one of my main goals. I not only wanted to make the science work, I wanted to create a company where that excitement was kept and fostered and people's personal growth, as well as scientific growth, was supported as well.
BIO: What advice do you have for people who think they want to start a company?
First of all, I would say to people in academia, if what you want is a way to get rich quick or a way to support your research so you don't have to get grants, starting a company is a real hard way to do it. It sucks in your life, that is if you're really going to do it yourself, as opposed to finding someone else to do your company, and you're the scientific advisor, in which case you're going to have a smaller impact on what happens, and get less out. It's not a 40-hour-a-week job or a 60—or 80. It's a 24-hour-a-day, 7-days-a-week job. You're either thinking about it, or dreaming about it, or recovering from what you did yesterday, or doing what you have to do today, or planning for what you have to do tomorrow. It's not something you do on the side if what you really want is an academic career.
The first question is not "Why do you think your idea will make a business? ", but "Do you really want to do this with your life?" If the answer to that is yes, then you say: "How do you make a business out of this idea?" If you have a clear plan for that, go for it.
BIO: Why did you choose to be CEO?
There were two reasons: The first was to take the scientific ideas into drugs to help people. The other was to create a certain kind of company with a certain kind of atmosphere and set of values, and I think the best place to do that from is the CEO position.
BIO: What's the best part of your job?
It's a combination of things. The science—just seeing the science move, but also seeing the company grow. You're really creating something out of nothing.
BIO: What's the hardest part?
I think the hardest part for me is dealing with areas where I'm learning on the job—like legal issues and business development. The details of it are complex. It's a whole different mindset in some ways. Having worked in science, there's an element of creativity and risk taking, but then you can go back and fill in all the pieces as you go. That's part of what science is. With these other things, there's no way to ever prove it was the right or wrong decision, except whether it works or not
BIO: How do you manage information—the pull between keeping results proprietary and publicizing them both for your investors sake and for the good of science?
I think it's not that much different from an academic lab. Now there are more and more academic labs trying to file patents before they publish. There's more and more ambiguity about talking about data before it's been published in a reviewed journal.
We are using the Genentech model. We encourage publication. If you have a good idea, let's file a patent on it and then publish it. We'll continue to do that because I think sharing and getting feedback, getting other people's ideas (we have collaborators in academic labs), all these are a very important part of making this an intellectually rich and stimulating environment. There's never been any question in my mind about the relative advantages and disadvantages of having an open environment scientifically in a company. The advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.
BIO: Any last words?
Mather: Biotech—even after 25 years it's still new and still recreating itself all the time. A lot of people don't realize that.
Jennie Mather Biography
Mather has thirty years of experience in cell culture and cell biology research. After completing her training at the University of California, San Diego, she spent a year as an NIH/INSERM exchange scientist at the Hopital Debrousse INSERM U 162 in Lyon, France. Mather then joined the faculty of The Rockefeller University and the Population Council.
In 1984 she joined Genentech (South San Francisco, CA) as a senior scientist and was promoted to staff scientist in 1988. She was involved in genetically engineering the production parent line, and designing cell culture production processes, for three currently marketed recombinant protein products. In 1994, she and her group moved to the research division of Genentech where she initiated discovery research projects in the areas of neurobiology, endocrinology, and cancer biology, and contributed to a genomics screening effort.
Mather was a member of more than 12 project teams, is a co-inventor on more than 15 patents, and has authored or edited several books and more than 150 journal articles and book chapters. In January 1999, Mather left Genentech to found Raven Biotechnologies, which is specializing in using cell biology as the key to the rapid discovery and utilization of relevant cells, proteins, and small molecules to treat unmet medical needs.
For more information: Jennie Mather, President and CEO, Raven Biotechnologies, 305 Old County Rd., San Carlos, CA 94070. Tel: 650-620-9400. Fax: 650-620-9431. Email: info@ravenbio.com.
By Laura DeFrancesco