Sean Harper of Westlake Village BIOPartners.

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, a show that explores the evolving landscape of the venture capital world. We'll have candid conversations with today's VCs and entrepreneurs who are shaping those changes. I'm Jim Behr, Managing Partner at Behr, Negron and Troff, and President of CMUG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind the decision making strategies, and ultimately to how they got to where they are today. You can go around the world and ask the top thousand scientists in any field, what's the field of science that's really taking off and is gonna be the most transformative for mankind?

And the vast preponderance of it, we'll say, biology. We are thrilled to have Sean Harper, managing partner at Westlake Village Bio Partners as our guest today. So, Sean, first of all, welcome. It's nice to meet you. Thank you.

You wanna give us a little introduction about your background and kinda what drew you into the field of medicine and research to begin with? Sure. So I am a physician scientist and started medical school in the early eighties in San Francisco at UC San Francisco. From the time I was about 15 years old, I wanted to be a doctor. That was just something that popped in my head.

No doctors in the family or anything. My family are aerospace engineers and things. But for whatever reason, I decided that that's what I wanted to do. And I ended up at UCSF for medical school, which is a fabulous place. But, you know, that was the era of the AIDS epidemic, which was really beginning there, and we really didn't have any idea what we were dealing with.

By the time I left medical school five years later, you know, we knew what we were dealing with, but we had very, very limited treatments available for the disorder. Now, today, of course, it's a chronic disorder that doesn't limit people's lifespans if they have access to medicines, and there's all kinds of advanced understanding of the disease. But what really struck me during that experience where I watched a lot of otherwise vibrant, healthy people die pretty ugly deaths was we don't have enough human therapeutics. And when you took that lens and looked at any area, oncology, rheumatology, arthritis, metabolism, you realize that, hey, you know, we're still using a lot of drugs that were developed in the 1950s and 60s to treat disease. And we're still injecting gold into people with rheumatoid arthritis in those days.

And this is only thirty five years ago. It's not as long ago. And that led me to have this strong interest in human therapeutics development. And I felt at that time, 25 years old and finishing medical school, that, you know, there was gonna be a remarkable era that was gonna occur largely because of the molecular biology revolution, which really had started in nineteen seventy nine, nineteen eighty. And you could see really there was going to be a level of understanding of biology that was gonna be much deeper and should lead to more therapeutics potential.

And so, you know, I went off to the Harvard system and did residency there at Mass General, postdocs with Phil Sharp at MIT. And the whole time, I was on this academic medicine track to become a professor and teach and do laboratory research, blah blah blah. But I thought up until a certain point that I could pursue human therapeutics, change laboratory bench to bedside in an academic setting. And I think it was really during my time at MIT that I began to realize that that just was not feasible really in an academic setting. The capital requirements, the complexity were too high, and the only real therapeutic work that was going on then in academia was gene therapy, which in the mid nineties was really not ready for prime time.

And I guess I judged that accurately. It's come into its own quite recently, as you know. And so I decided to leave the academic track and ended up going at the time to the premier blue chip drug discovery development shop in the world, which was Merck at that time. And I moved to Merck in the mid nineties, had a great experience there that I think of as very similar to the one that I had at Mass General or MIT or UCSF, you know, in education, deep education and drug discovery development. Was recruited to Amgen here in California in the early two thousands, 2002, by Roger Perlmutter and Beth Seidenberg, both of whom I had worked with fairly extensively at Merck.

And Roger moved and Beth moved. I came and a number of us came to Amgen at a time where it was explosively growing. And I was there for, about seventeen years. The last seven years or so, I was head of r and d there. And then Beth Seidenberg and I began really talking about the opportunity to establish a venture fund and firm here in this part of California near where we live.

We both settled in this Westlake Village area and halfway between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara because Amgen is here. And while Beth had gone up to Kleiner Perkins and become the lead life science investor at Kleiner and was there for almost fifteen years, Her primary home remained here in Westlake. And so we began to talk, and I told her of the experiences I had had trying to provide advice to places like Caltech and other universities in the area about what was kind of missing in the ecosystem to allow more local company development spun out of intellectual property from these kind of institutions. What I ended up advising them to their surprise and really to mine was the big gap is venture capital with people that are oriented toward company incubation, starting up companies from scratch out of academic discovery, and have adequate capital and knowledge and how to do that because every other component that you need to be successful is here already. And I could go through those with you.

That really rang a bell with us. And so about two and a half years ago, I turned my role at Amgen over to a successor that I've been grooming for about a dozen years, David Rees, who's done a fabulous job as head of R and D at Amgen and left to cofound Westlake Village Bio Partners. And since then, we've raised two funds. The first was about $325,000,000. With that, we started 11 companies, and then we've just very recently completed a second raise of $500,000,000 that will allow us to create another, dozen or so companies and some money that is available to us to make heavier investments in subsequent rounds so that we can really double down on some of the successful companies.

So that's what the journey has been at a 30,000 foot level. That's fascinating. And one question I have for you is when I look at the Southern California landscape, because one of the thoughts of the puck is where's the puck going, but also showcasing Southern California. Having been a lawyer here and restructuring professional for years, I've witnessed the o1.com crash. And then what seems to have been a sustainable run of technology and venture capital from, like, 2008, 2009 on.

When you look at the numbers, just sheer numbers of capital in the Bay Area versus Southern California and the venture world, it's staggering how much more money there is up north. And then I haven't done the same deep dive with respect to biotech, but at least as a native of Southern California, historically, we thought of Orange Counties and San Diego and Boston and other places as being more of the biotech hubs. All of a sudden, boom, there's a billion dollar fund in Westlake Village essentially doing biotech. That's pretty transformative. How did that come about and why now, and where is this going?

Yeah. I mean, really, it came down to, as there always are, some personal aspects that Beth and I both love living here and had homes that we love and wanted to really stay in over the long term. And I'd say, in addition, it was really clear that with the quality of resources that are available, you should be able to make this the kind of hub that we watched evolve in San Francisco and Boston. I mean, I did all of my training between those two cities and watched over the years those biotech hubs grow and prosper. And Beth has had a similar experience for sure in the Bay Area and in Boston where she's had companies.

When we looked at it, we thought it was like the advice that I was giving to the local universities. I mean, there's tremendous amounts of NIH funding coming into the universities here. Of course, the intellectual property to build companies can come from anywhere, but you have this home court advantage. I mean, you go up to Boston to San Francisco and go to a an innovative laboratory, and there'll be venture capitalists sitting in the waiting room. You know?

You gotta wade through them to get to talk to the guy. You know? It's not like that at all down here, but there is terrific caliber of science going on in universities down in this area. And if you look at the numbers, the amount of NIH funding to these institutions is very large. I think it's third in the nation after Boston and San Francisco.

There's terrific talent in terms of not just people who can be hands at the bench to graduate from the places like Caltech and UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, etcetera, but you've also got a really significant number of experienced and talented individuals here who come from companies like Allergan, Amgen. Now you have Kite, Gilead, and Santa Monica. You know, what happens in this area is people move here, and the quality of life is extremely high and they don't wanna leave. And so you have a lot of people who retire from a place like Amgen and wanna be active, but the infrastructure, the ecosystem just isn't really here. The governments, the city of Thousand Oaks, the county of LA, they get it from the perspective of the value of biotech.

And Thousand Oaks in particular, where Westlake Village is located, it's kind of part of Thousand Oaks. They've had Amgen here, you know, as part of their tax base and so on, and they get it. They will do whatever they need to do to help us be successful. And in addition, there are other partners like Alexandria Realty, who's the blue chip builder of biotech space, right, in The United States. They are headquartered in Pasadena.

The CEOs there, they have a co CEO model. And both these guys, they're really passionate about seeing this area, the Greater Los Angeles area, undergo the kind of transformation that they've helped to drive in places like South San Francisco, Mission Bay, Cambridge, Massachusetts, New York, etcetera. We just felt that a catalyst was required to really be able to start building companies. Not that there haven't been successful companies. There have been, you know, Atara has done very well here, Kite, Cougar, Kythera, and, of course, Amgen, you know, going back thirty five, forty years.

But we just felt it was clear that if we could just add that catalyst of this type of venture capital capability that we could get things to ignite, and that's kind of what's happened. I think you mentioned 11 companies that you and Beth, your partner have invested in. Are those all over the country? Are they all in Southern California? What's the mix?

Yeah. Great question. About half of them are here in the Westlake area. As I mentioned, Alexandria has built a beautiful incubator slash graduation space facility and is building other manufacturing. We have Charles River coming in with the vivarium.

There's a lot of this kind of development happening, so we're able to build the companies and house them here. Now we did have some legacy companies that came from work that Beth was already engaged with from her network in the Bay Area. So the other half of the companies are either in the Bay Area, and we do have two companies that are in San Diego. We have one company, and this is again kind of a legacy thing in Philadelphia as well. But that was from earlier when Beth was at KP and we co invested in that company.

But we're pretty committed to building the companies whenever possible here, meaning Westlake, and almost always in California because it just makes it a lot easier for us. The model we use largely is a company incubation model where we're starting companies up through a few different models, but from scratch, essentially. And that's a very hands on type of a daily interaction. So I know everybody's working over Zoom right now, so it doesn't seem to matter. But we feel that, ultimately, it's very beneficial to be close to our CEOs and our companies.

I was very close to Idealab when Bill Gross founded that as an incubator in Pasadena back in '98, give or take. When you look at that model, even they would take a certain amount of equity in these companies, and there was legal and finance, and there were all these different synergistic things they would bring together to get economies of scale. Are you doing similar things for your companies? You know, what we do is we try and make it as easy as possible for the companies to do all the blocking and tackling necessary to get company set up so that the focus of the CEO and the team we assemble can be on the r and d, on the science. And so what we have is a great set of resources that we provide recommendations on everything from lawyers to use to HR people to rent to CFOs, auditors, IT technology, helping again with this space issue, which is for people to be able to get into turnkey, you know, incubator space.

So we do a lot. And because we don't invest in competing companies as a rule, our CEOs and our chief business officer type people have networks where they meet on a regular basis. And I participate, for example, every two weeks in the CEO meeting we hold now, of of course, over Zoom. Now there's 14, you know, CEOs or so that are helping each other out on things, and we have a Teams site and all of that. So it's a lot easier today to come in and be a first time CEO with us than it was two years ago when you were the first one.

And we were trying to figure out, not that we didn't know how to do this, particularly Beth knows how to do it, but we wanted to use local resources when possible to help to build the ecosystem here. So, you know, things like HR, IT, etcetera. The space issue was the most challenging for us because there really was no incubator graduation space available here in this area. As you mentioned, there was a little bit in Pasadena, a little bit down in Los Angeles, but challenging to commute for people who wanted to stay living in this area. We've really tried to foster that ecosystem here.

When you're investing in these companies, are you a lead investor and then you bring in other investors or are you the sole investor? Is there any methodology in terms of how you fund these companies? Yeah. I mean, all of the above occur, but in general, we will be the lead investor. We occasionally will be the only investor.

It really depends on the check size. We're willing to write, let's say, a $15,000,000 check to get a company up and going to bring their project to IND, and we might just do that on our own. If it becomes more of a capital requirement, which it often is, then we'll syndicate, but we'll generally be the lead, and we'll bring in investors that we've worked with that Beth has worked for for a long time or people that we know quite well. Sometimes it's our LPs that wanna make additional investments. Other times, it's other venture groups.

And sometimes we get invited to come in on something that's already been incubated by another venture group, and they want us to participate as co leads with them largely because they'd like our technical expertise around the board table. We sometimes will offer if another big check is required, and we feel that we would like to just have one other significant investor, we'll show the opportunity to select people at other venture firms so that they might come in. There's also even some crossover investors these days who are expressing great interest in investing early in series a's. This is one of the things we do for our entrepreneurs. They, of course, participate in the process.

They have veto rights and all that, but we help them build the syndicate, especially series a syndicate. You know, to be honest with best track record, it's never an issue for us to put syndicates together. You know, we generally are having to kinda turn people away. Are you in any way, would you say a feeder fund or in any way closely affiliated with Amgen? All of us, myself and Beth and Desmond Patty, our principal is a key player in our firm.

We're all Amgen veterans, and we know lots of people there still and love the company. But there's no formal relationship at all. And we don't do a build to buy models for any company. Sure. We didn't want to have any of those strategic biopharma companies as LPs either because that can be problematic.

Everyone else assumes that somehow they have first dibs on everything. So we have our LPs are largely university endowments and foundations. But, of course, we will syndicate sometimes with strategics, and Amgen is one of the companies we would talk to where we know the people very well there. Of course. One of the things when I think of myself as a VC lawyer or as a strategic thinker, I always looking back in terms of what made a certain VC successful and not another one.

One of the things that kinda came to mind was the sports metaphor, which is you take somebody, it was a first draft pick, and they then go into the thing and they play well, and then they come out, and you can see where people spin out a technology company, for instance. They can quote unquote carry the football, they can build a company. And so the Cliners, the Sequoias, they have the relations with these people, and it's not so much that it's a good idea. Everything comes down to execution. And in biotech, which I don't know as well, how do you assess whether or not something is worthy of a $15,000,000 check?

Yeah. It is true that biology is not yet an engineering based discipline, and we can talk more about that because I think it's very interesting and something people really don't understand very well. But it is right now becoming a more predictable, quantitative type of science. I think the days of, well, anybody can do this biotech investing because it's a completely random whether something works or not, throw it on the wall and see if it sticks. That was not an irrational view of the way that biotech was not that long ago.

But I think today, people with a deep operating experience doing drug discovery and development in high quality environments for twenty five plus years, which describes myself and Beth and Desmond each, we're able to use our judgment. I mean, a lot of it is intuition and pattern recognition. We'll get a pitch on something. And instead of saying, well, I don't believe this is gonna work because of some engineering problem, What I'll say is I've been to a very similar movie to this before, and I didn't like it. I don't wanna go again.

A lot of it is pattern recognition. So when it comes to the technology piece of it, you have to accept a certain amount of uncertainty that just travels with the state of biology today, the lack of translatability of the animal models into predicting human outcomes and all of that. But that's why, really, our focus is always people first because technology can be pivoted. So if you get the right CEO and the right c levels team and well, it's important to build the team high quality right down to the ground. But if you get the right people, particularly in the CEO role, and you use the kind of judgment we all learn to do in managing large portfolios of projects in biopharma, you can recognize that this is not working.

And I'm not gonna spend the rest of my series a's proceeds just repeating experiments hoping it's gonna work. We're gonna pivot. And, usually, we have plan b in mind, either a different application of the technology or the need even to just license something else into the company because we have a great team, and we can get that team to execute, as you mentioned. It remains very much our focus to get the talent, the technology, and the timing because a lot of this has to do with the timing, a lot of great ideas. I mentioned gene therapy before.

I mean, gene therapy wasn't a bad idea. It just was not ready to be turned into a commercial product in the mid nineteen nineties. You know, you could do the thought experiment then. It just wasn't there. And a lot of it is judging that or recognizing that this is a pretty speculative proposition on the science, and we're gonna pass.

So we have to feel pretty confident on the technology, but we always are ready to recognize that the technology is not working out. Now we're talking early stage here Right. Where usually you're spending a relatively small amount of money doing preclinical experimentation, and it just doesn't pan out. You can't transfer the technology successfully. Experiments give surprising results.

As you mentioned earlier, what we call product development, it's really research. Most experiments we do, we don't actually know for sure what the outcome is going to be. So it's very different than an engineering based discipline where you can predict in a computer what will happen unless the metallurgy fails or someone programs the system in feet instead of meters and it burns up in the atmosphere. Right? You know, those kind of mistakes happen or things can fail because you get a bad transistor or whatever, but you can kind of predict what's gonna happen.

Biology is not to that level yet, and so there's a lot of uncertainty that you have to deal with. On the other hand, there's enough known and enough pattern recognition that expert people can make better judgments than people who don't know what they're doing. Well, when we look at vaccines, for instance, and we look at historically how long it took to get vaccines done, a little over a year ago, the big companies came out and said, we think we can really get a vaccine done in a year. Right? Engineering, you know, you've got, as you said, those computer models.

But when you look at the number of companies that have come up with a workable, safe vaccine, it does seem like there's a sea change in certain areas of science and biotech. And does that relate to what you're talking about when you're talking about that there's been progress? It's not at the same level of engineering. And for a layperson, and a lot of our listeners are, can you help us better understand why? Instead of it just being a miraculous, it sounds like there was some science behind this ability to get a vaccine done in a year.

Absolutely. I've been giving a lecture around the world for the last decade that is called the golden age of biotechnology. And what I try to do in that talk is to explain to people that if you look at the field of biology, it is undergoing this nonlinear sort of explosive growth in becoming less of a squishy qualitative descriptive sort of science and a much more quantitative, data rich, predictable sort of a science. Now it is not yet at the level of, you know, electrical engineering. However, if you look back a hundred years ago, you will see that those fields went through this same kind of change.

And, you know, I always tell the story. My grandfather was born in 1900 and didn't see an automobile till he was 13. At 25, he was designing airplanes for Curtis Wright. In his fifties, he designed the Thor rocket and the d c three through the d c nine. When I was a kid, like, seven years old fifty years ago, I'd go in his home office, and he had these beautiful models of his planes and things from McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, where he was chief of structural engineering.

And I'd be like, well, how did you get this great job? And he said, you know, I'll never forget. He said, well, you know, I just was in the right place at the right time. I just went into a field where the underlying technology, the science, and everything was exploding, and I just rode the wave. Now that's obviously somewhat modest response, but it was really what happened in that time that a hundred years ago, right in 1920, people were imagining sending rockets to the moon and radio waves across the Atlantic and ferrying people around the globe in commercial airplanes and these kind of things.

And you get this just nonlinear explosive. So now you've got a computer more powerful than what they use to send people to the moon in your pocket. That's nonlinear. So what I try to make people understand is in this century right now in the twenty first century, it's the bio century. And what's happening in biology is incredible.

As a result, when you try to make predictions about how long it's gonna take to do something, well, you could have said, well, you know, I'd expect it's gonna take five years to produce a vaccine against the coronavirus. And, obviously, smart things were done in terms of investing in the manufacturing in parallel. You know, that cut out a huge amount of the cost. But the bottom line is because of the technology that was originally, by the way, you know, these mRNA technologies were developed thinking that you were gonna replace monoclonal antibodies and things by injecting these things into muscle and producing protein therapeutics in patients. You know, there wasn't an all that clear how you were gonna actually modulate things like dose or be able to turn it off.

So, ultimately, these companies drifted into using it for immunization because there, you just need short term expression. It doesn't really matter that much how much. So these technologies were ready. And the fact that you can see the publication of the sequence of this virus understand already enough about these viruses to say, okay. This is the sequence for the spike protein.

That's what I'm gonna make. I'm gonna produce an mRNA. You could program a machine to make that. Like, hours later, you could be doing, you know, laboratory experiments with that. It goes into mice.

It works. It goes into monkeys. It works. It goes into people. Now nobody expected it to work this well.

But also, remember, they had to package the mRNA in nanoparticles to get it to actually enter cells. And both companies, Pfizer and Moderna, use a lipid based slightly different kind of formulations. But all that science has been advancing non linearly as well. And so these things converge, the computing, the DNA sequencing, the material science, the ability to manufacture these what are otherwise very fragile. I mean, RNA is something that just vaporizes.

But now we use all these analogues of the bases for AML to make these things robust enough where they can be managed. Although, as you recognize, they have to be kept very cold in storage. It's just a remarkable story. And by the way, using more traditional technologies that also have advanced in many ways, from what I can tell, the Russians made a really couldn't vaccine, from what appears to be the case using more traditional AAV technology that same with the J and J. So as you say, this is one of the proof points now that I point to.

It's replaced some of the other examples I used to use when I would give this kind of talk and say, Hey, do you get it now? What's happening? Because we get this question, Oh, is this all a bubble? Is biotech booming the way it is a bubble? And my response is, Not really.

What's driving it is this underlying nonlinear progress that's happening in the field of biology. And you can go around the world and ask the top thousand scientists around the world in any field. What's the field of science that's really taking off and is gonna be the most transformative for mankind, whether it's designing computers based on the human brain or human health issues or making other biologic systems for industrial processes? Processes and the vast preponderance of them will say biology. So when you're talking about biology and you're talking about this explosion, and in the same way you were describing that in 1900, people were talking about being able to fly airplanes or thinking about going to the moon or otherwise, which seemed pretty abstract.

As we're sitting here today, and I'm not asking you to put this in stone, but if you want to think ten, fifteen years out in terms of major blow your mind changes, like in the same way we interviewed someone, we were talking about self driving cars. Cars. Okay. That's pretty amazing. Right?

Yeah. And we're gonna have drones delivering things. That's pretty amazing. When you're talking about and you're excited about your field, which obviously you are, where do you see us blowing our minds in the next ten, fifteen years? Well, you know, I think the way to answer that question is to just step back.

And this is hard for us to do, I think, because we all have a certain world view we were born into, which is that there's lots of people that are gonna have all kinds of awful stuff happen to them from a health perspective. People develop Alzheimer's, they're gonna get cancer. You know, one out of four people get cancer. I mean, the number one killer in the world is still cardiovascular disease or certainly once coronavirus abates. You know, we just accept that.

We accept the fact that if you're born with schizophrenia, boy, that's not a good outcome. There's not anything that's really gonna help you. A lot of these rare monogenic disorders, etcetera. I think that when you step back and look at the amount of unmet need that still exists in medicine to deal with things like let's just pick brain disorders. I mean, the brain's still kind of a black box.

We've got some ability to do some things to help with central nervous system disorders, but they're very empirically discovered in many cases. And you can just very readily imagine that we will begin to understand much more about how the brain functions. Again, it'll be a convergence of computers that are able to actually model how a brain is working. We have absolutely no idea how consciousness is created. I mean, you and I are here.

We're conscious. We're talking to each other. We have no idea. And I mean, when I say no idea, I mean no idea how the brain does that, let alone that we're going to help someone with profound autism or be able to treat somebody with severe depression. And, you know, these are disorders that are just I think now that I'm on this riff, the most human suffering probably takes place in this dimension of brain disorders between psychiatric disorders, Alzheimer's disease.

Is it science fiction to think that over a ten or fifteen year period, we'll figure out how those problems come to be and be able to interdict them in a way that is really meaningful? I don't think it is. I think that kind of thing will happen. We'll turn cancer into a chronic disease state that can be managed much in the way that has been done with HIV. Some people will be really cured.

Autoimmune diseases. You know, we have great therapies for things like rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis and multiple sclerosis, etcetera, etcetera, but they're all just various ways of selectively immunosuppressing people. You know, we're getting better at figuring out how to do it in less and less blunt ways, so there's less infectious risk associated. But why don't you perturbate the immune system in such a way that it stops recognizing self as non self? There are so many of these areas.

And then, you know, look at something like I'm a type one diabetic, so I have to give insulin every day, every meal. It's a big inconvenience. Thank God that we have all the existing drugs and technology and continuous glucose monitoring and everything, and it's fabulous. But will we have the ability to replace cells that have been destroyed by any number of disease processes? Can we engineer organs for organ replacement?

All of these things will be possible. It's just a question of timing. That's what a lot of the art of investing in this area is separating the thought experiment that you can do about these things, which is almost certainly doable from okay. But when exactly is that gonna be possible to do in a way that meets the criteria that regulators would find it acceptable, that payers will pay for it, that it's got performance characteristics to make it a potentially a successful product. And the challenge is that we don't think very well in this exponential way.

We tend to think very linearly. So you always have to suspend disbelief a little bit and imagine that something may be able to be done faster than you think it can be done because you're not on a linear curve. When you're looking at Southern California and you're looking what you're doing in Westlake and you're looking at the trends, do you see Westlake and where you are becoming a big hub in the same way that we've got Silicon Beach and we have Silicon Valley? Do you think people will be talking about Westlake and Thousand Oaks? As you said, Amgen's been there for a long time.

But do you see this as being a major biotech hub? I do. I don't know that it's really gonna be specifically Westlake. I mean, I think if you look at the Bay Area rather than looking at, like, Cambridge, Massachusetts, you see that there really are clusters. There's a cluster of activity out on the East Bay.

There's a cluster close into the city down around Stanford. There's four or five nodes that make up that whole ecosystem, and I think that's what we can expect here. There's a certain amount of company formation that goes on, for example, in Pasadena around Caltech. There's the Santa Monica vibe. People like to be down there.

Kite is down there. Culver City's got some incubator space being built. We've got our stuff up here in the West Lake Thousand Oaks area. I think you have to think of it more like the Bay Area because it's a much larger geographic. And I know that in Cambridge, just because of limited space and real estate, it's starting to sort of metastasize out into the surrounding area.

But it had that very concentrated center, you know, around the Harvard, MIT, etcetera, in that small area where it still really is very focused. But Bay Area is a little different, and I think that's what you can expect to see in the greater LA area. But I do expect that I see no reason that this won't continue, and I think there's a need for a third major hub. And to me, I see no reason it shouldn't be LA. The war for talent, the density of venture presence and so on, really, and cost of living and cost of space and so on are real governors on how much more growth I think can occur in the industry in places like San Francisco and Boston.

And I think there's an enormous opportunity to build companies in this part of California as well. Sean, I'm gonna go off script. You can't make this up. I'm getting my J and J shot in fifteen minutes. Oh, congratulations.

You mentioned Pfizer, Moderna. You mentioned the Russians. You mentioned J and J being made more with traditional things. Am I nuts to be getting the J and J vaccine? No.

Not at all. All of these vaccines that are approved in The US are almost certainly achieving the only goal that matters, and that is really reducing the risk of hospitalization and death. People, I think, have focused way too much on the statistics having to do with just avoiding any symptoms associated with the infection. That's really doesn't matter. I mean, that's not the problem we're having with coronavirus.

So I think it's very smart to just get vaccinated with any one of these three products, and I wouldn't hesitate to do that because I think the data are very, very strong. Had the j and j data come out first, we would have been doing cartwheels over the data that j and j has developed. So I thought I had to bring that up at least. I mean, I could talk to you for hours. What you and your partner are doing are just absolutely amazing.

Is there anything we haven't covered that you'd like to touch base on? Venture is not a scalable type of business, and it relies enormously on people that can work together well. And I think we're just very lucky that I've known Beth for more than twenty five years. I've known Desmond for twenty years. We're very fortunate to have been brought together, and we have some other outstanding people.

But there's only six of us in the firm. And what we leverage is this enormous network of consultants and people that we know in the industry to help us with specific things that need to be assessed and so on. But I just think it's sometimes people may look at what we're doing and say, well, that looks pretty easy. But what I would say is it's actually not the technical aspects of it that's the hardest. It's getting the right people together to be able to work together productively in the way that we do, and I feel very happy and fortunate about that.

Well, Sean, listen. Thank you so so much, and we look forward to hearing more about you and Beth's success and what you're doing. And as a person who loves Southern California, the fact that you're bringing this to us is a gift. I really, really appreciate your time. And then selfishly, I loved your perspective on the J and J vaccine as well.

So thank you. Well, great, and congratulations on getting immunized. And thank you for inviting me. This was fun. Stay well, and we'll hopefully stay in touch, and look forward to hearing more about your successes.

Take care.