Consulting Startups: Entrepreneurship Meets Consulting

Summary

Featured Panelists:

1. John Pena earned his PhD from Rockefeller University in 2010 and his MD from Weill Cornell in 2011. He completed his residency in Ophthalmology at Weill Cornell in 2016. He founded Sonder Medicine in 2019, which uses extracellular vesicles from the vitreous humor as a potent vector to efficiently deliver recombinant proteins into the sensory tissue of the eye, the retina.

2. Vadim Shepel earned his BS in Economics from New York University. He has worked for a multitude of companies, including Pfizer and Concarlo Therapeutics. He founded Bench2Bio, a company which empowers biotech entrepreneurs to navigate the complex landscape of fundraising and partnerships, and is also a mentor at IndieBio.

3. Yue Hu received her Bachelor’s degree from Jinan University in Biomedical/Medical Engineering and Masters from Drexel University in Biomedical/Medical Engineering in 2017. She has worked in many financial roles and currently is a manager at CSPC Pharmaceutical Group. Yue co-founded Tupelo Brittany, a consulting firm specialized for pharma and biotech.

4. Drew Zhu received a Masters in Biotechnology from New York University. Drew was a research consultant at Navigant before co-founding EMW3, a company which helps brands across various industries at all stages to maximize their ROI and achieve exponential growth, and is now VP of Global Business Development at Hudson Holdings Group. Drew co-founded Tupelo Brittany with Yue.

Words of Wisdom:

John:

·       NYC is a great place to find mentors for entrepreneurship. However, you have to prove that you are hard working and teachable.

·       To be successful, you should have an understanding of finance, business, etc. even as a scientist so that you are not taken advantage of.

·       To create a company you must be able to answer the questions: Does the world need it? Do you have a solution? Is it fundable?

·       Hire new team members who have the goal of changing the world rather than making money

·       It is possible to use consulting as a means to work with someone for a short amount of time to determine whether that person would be a good fit for the company

Vadim:

·       There should be excitement in the startup world in biotech because there is no funding. For companies that can advance their science during this period, when funding comes back, there will be a large boom in innovation.

·       At the end of every business is a human and you need to know if that person will pay for your product, and also your product should be directly enhancing the life of people using it

·       Need a solid discipline as an entrepreneur to stay focused and not explore too much beyond the current goals of the company

·       Working at startups allows you to be involved in more roles than at pharma

·       Typical corporate analysis involves the creation of a 5 year plan, key drivers of growth, and what can be scaled to get a competitive advantage

·       Market trend analysis is a new trend that is beginning to be more common for small companies

Yue:

·       Working with small companies requires a lot of fast learning and working closely with the biotechs

·       It takes a lot of time to work with companies as a consultant

·       Pharma can still use a lot of improvements so it is possible to provide innovation there as well

Drew:

·       Consulting requires a lot of problem solving

·       It is important to stay up-to-date on current news and trends to understand where companies can prosper from using consulting

·       Small company consulting is much more hectic because things can change much faster since startups need to survive. Big pharma uses consultants to be more efficient and create new innovations to get a competitive advantage over other large companies.