I was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. I lived in South Africa for the first twelve years of my life and at the tend age of twelve and a half, my parents decided to leave South Africa. They didn't agree with the government at the time, it was an apartheid government. I had an older brother that had to go into the army and I didn't want my brother going into the army and fighting for a cause he didn't believe in.
And my parents were very much part of the anti apartheid movement and wanted us to grow up in the right kind of environment. So twelve and a half thirteen moved to Sydney, Australia, where I had the more formative part of my education secondary education. I went to university at the University of New South Wales. My story is more of a school of hard knocks in the sense of how I got to where I got to, and.
I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about that.
But I was very fortunate to be part of a unique program where I was on scholarship between industry and the university for a group of five of us in the areas of marketing and commerce. As part of a scholarship program. I did that for three years. I got a little bit frustrated. I felt like I needed to leave Australia. You know, it's like this little island at
the end of the world, far far away. And I was very lucky to be able to receive an opportunity to do an exchange program with a university in the US, with a college in the US, and I spent a year which very much influenced me, and I'm.
Very grateful for this.
I spent a semester abroad at Babson College in Boston. Babson's the number one school in the US for entrepreneurial studies and that really started to inspire the entrepreneurial spirit inside me. I was amazing professors and the way things worked at that time was Australians were allowed to actually work in the US for.
As long as you studied.
And after finishing my semester abroad, I didn't want to go back to Australia.
I wanted to work and I started to apply for internships.
But it was really tough to get an internship when you didn't you know, you were this little kid from.
Australia and I was very lucky.
I interviewed for an internship at Pepsicola in Boston, and I was accepted as an intern, and I started my career at the back of a truck with a two eeler, literally getting up six o'clock in the morning and being one of those, you know, very challenging job delivering products to South Boston to Back Bay, up and down the
streets of Boston. And that's really where I started to learn and understand the importance of how to bring consumer brands to the marketplace and understanding the power of executing the right way.
Well, you had an incredible journey, and we're going to talk a lot about your really wonderful resume because the one thing al that I got from it is there's a lot of diversity going on between the soda company and high tech and now what you do for the last four and a half years a CEO of Bioharvest Sciences, which is an incredible company that we're going to find a lot out about it with the mission and what you do, but it really is revolutionary when our listeners
and CEOs and future entrepreneurs get to hear what you're doing right now, because it really truly is extraordinary. I'm going to have you dumb it down for me because I'm still learning as I go here. But it's about fruits and plants and really helping everybody out there when it comes to that. So, but before we do that, I want to talk about your journey out of school.
And you know it's not going to surprise you a lot that you started doing really hard work right out of the gate and out of school, not exactly what you want to do, but you work your way up the ladder. So if you could maybe kind of capitalize your journey after that, after your interning at PEPSI and the things that you did, because because it really truly is an incredible resume. So if you could get everybody kind of the highlights, we'd love to hear that.
Yeah, sure, I want to go backwards to go forwards because I think it's important because my story really is a story of an immigrant and you know, coming to and I'm sure many of your listeners have similar backgrounds. I came to Australia as an immigrant. My parents came with literally very little money. Anything that I wanted, whether it was going to the movies or anything that was considered a luxury I had to work for so at the age of literally fourteen, I was lucky.
I was pretty tall. I looked sixteen.
In Australia at the time, you had to be sixteen to legally work.
And off I went as a fourteen year old and I started to work.
At that time, it was Saturdays and Thursday nights, so you worked like sixteen to twenty hours a week. And I started in a delicatessen and learning how to slice meat on a slicer and do window displays, and that taught me how to do merchandising. And then I got promoted with a speaker and a headphone to start to do sales in the shopping center.
And you know, there I was.
On a Saturday talking about you know, silver side nine ninety nine ladies and gentlemen coming in to cut price deli. You've got the best silver side and cheeses and off our wents. And that taught me, you know again, how do we engage with customers all the way through to dish being a dishwasher, apprentice, butcher, and you know, at that time, you would do anything in order to get some cash to be able to enjoy the benefits of what people around you were enjoying, but you just couldn't afford.
So I think that taught me the value of money. And then I was lucky to get a scholarship. But the opportunity in the US started at Pepsi cod I spent in Pepsi. I was able to you know, I had a lot of lucky breaks. You know, works dynamic. I had a boss who basically quit all of a sudden, What do we do, We need a merchandiser. Take the Australian kid. Put him in that job. If I went, I learned how to merchandise and now I was CBS, Walgreens, Walmart,
resets and learned the area of merchandising. And then one of the sales guys just didn't come to work, and the business development sales guards said, take the Australian guy. And you know, Dennis, I was very lucky in my career. I had a lot of breaks.
For example, at that time, if you can remember, there was this great movie that Americans were infatuated with. There was an Australian movie called Crocodile Dundee absolutely put your shrimps.
On your barbie, right If you remember that and here I was at that time, I had a much thicker Australian accent because I wasn't married yet to my South African wife, who's been my sweetheart from when I was twelve years old.
That's another story we can we can talk about it.
By the way.
By the way, I do want to tell you that's the first and the four years I've done this series, a Paul Hogan reference has been thrown into CEOs.
You should know, so bravo, do you, sir?
Well, Paul Hogan.
I owe a lot of my career jumps to Paul Hogan because there I was, you know, going in and pitching coke versus PEPSI all these different accounts, and because I had this stick Australian accent, people remembered me and it just helped me get those sales over the line and I was.
Started to win.
I started to win all these accounts in Fennel Hall and all these strategic places in Boston, and before I knew it, literally, I was running business development in Boston City at my Pepsy Van or if.
I went to every single lead and converted it.
And end of the end of my internship came up and I actually was very fortunate that Pepsi Cola USA was willing to sponsor me from a visa perspective, come to the US working operations for two years and then going to purchase New York.
So there I was.
I had to go back to Australia tell my parents I was going to live after immigrating from South Africa to Australia.
I had to tell my Jewish mother that I was going to be leaving, leaving Australia, going to live in America.
And I don't know if you know much about Jewish mother's guilt, it wears on you. And after having the discussions with our parents, I said to them, Okay, I've got three months here in Australia to finish off my undergraduate degree. Wherever the best job is, I'm going the best jobs in Singapore. I'm going to Singapore. The best job is still with Pepsi USA. I'm going to the US.
And I was really lucky. At this time, the Coca Cola company was looking to hire ten middle managers to develop and nurture with intense training over a one year program in Australia, which is a very mature market. Develop market and then send those managers into Asia. This is now we're talking nine to ninety six, ninety seven. Asia
was pumping. You got the growth of China, the growth of Indonesia, and I was very lucky because of my experience at PEPSI I got accepted onto that Coke program and that Dennis was the start of an amazing eighteen year career that I'm so grateful for. Where I spent, you know, twelve years in Asia in multiple different roles running businesses across Asia Pacific, including in China, where I was headed up all of marketing and innovation for the China business, where I.
Was responsible for fighting the Code Wars.
Which had a very interesting time in the history of China, built a billion dollar juice business with the Minimate brand, launching the Minime brand in China, and was responsible for
all the marketing around the Beijing Olympics. And I was able to then follow that up with going back to South Africa, which is a really interesting opportunity from a leadership perspective, where in South Africa leading up to the twenty ten World Cup, I was responsible for the marketing for that and also leading the organization, the marketing and the commercial organization at a time where it was critical from a diversity perspective to change the nature of the
organization to reflect the rainbow nation which South Africa is today is so well known for.
And that was an amazing leadership experience.
So, you know, basically twelve years in Asia, three years in Africa, and then I got sent to the US initially to head up marketing for the Glasow business unit, which is brands like Vitamin Water, Smart Water, the Power Aid sports drink line, and the energy portfolio. And I was fortunate there to very quickly be able to take over as general manager of that business unit that I did for three years up until twenty fourteen. So that really gave me a lot of global experience from running businesses.
You know, I started the business for Coca Cola locally in Mongolia. I'm an honor in Mongolian. I'm really happy to say there were like four countries in the world where coke was not producing locally at the time. It was Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, and Mongolia. And the company had found a partner and I had the opportunity of really being able to work with that partner, build a business, build food law in Mongolia with the local Mongolian authorities
and really upgrade the whole industry. And when I say, I'm almost like an honorary Mongolian in the sense of this. It's just a huge affinity to the people, such wonderful people. And when you have an ability to come into a market and ubscull people and be able to pay people
more money and help them progress in their lives. You know, these are the great benefits of what companies like cocon Cola do all around the world, from an economic development and professional development, female leadership, diversity, really critical human values that are so important today that I had the benefit of being part of for eighteen years.
I want our listeners to trust me on this one that we could talk to Alan for a couple hours about everything he did before Bioharvest, because it's such a cool, diverse,
incredible journey. But this is one of my favorite questions that I get to ask any CEO or founder or entrepreneur on this series when it comes to the current place you're at the last four and a half years as a CEO, and I can certainly see what bioharv Sciences was interested in you and the diversity that you brought and all the change and a risk taking that you've done.
I'm very clear about that.
But what did you see in this company that made you say I want to join them as CEO.
Wow, that's a great question, Dennis.
So it's important to understand my journey because before I got to Bar Harvest, I went from the front of the aeroplane to the back of the aeroplane, and from the Four Seasons Hotel in Atlanta to the Red Rooftop Motel in Atlanta. I don't want to disparage the Red Rooftop Motel for great people that run their place.
Yes, yeah, okay.
And so I went into startup World and together with two Israeli partners because I moved my family, I wanted to become an entrepreneur. Hit the age of forty, I kind of had a I would say, a positive midlife crisis. I always had a deep connection to wanting, as a religious tuition observant Jew, to have my family live in Israel. And I moved the family in twenty fourteen, and I also wanted to ignite the entrepreneurial spirit inside me in a way that you know, it was outside of the
corporate environment. And together with two partners, we built a big data, IoT and software company in the beer industry, which we were very fortunate. We had a lot of luck and we landed up exiting after four and a half years, and and I was a bush Imbev, the largest brewery in the world bought our company. I worked as part of the deal. I had golden handcuffs. I had to work for them for a year. They were a great company, great management, amazing people, and I actually
ended up working for them for another year. But I got to the stage where, you know, it was kind of ironic. I was the oldest guy in the high tech company right at that time. I was like, you know, forty five, forty six years old, and I kind of felt that I, you know, again, I was back in corporate America and I needed to unleash that entrepreneurial spirit again inside me.
And I got introduced to bio Harvest.
Sciences through a friend of mine, and Wow, when I came to this company, what I saw and the best way to explain it, because I came to the company initially as an investor, what I saw was an R and D gold mine, the most amazing technology to unlock the secrets of plant biology, to be able to be a bridge between the power of the plant kingdom and all the pto medicinal compounds and fighter nutrients that are contained in plants, and to be able to have a
technology that can democratize all those critical fighter medicinal nutrients compounds that I found at such small levels, but to be able to find a way to manu to produce it at such scale that you can democratize the power of these molecules and change the world of health and wellness hundreds of millions of people, but doing it in a way which preserved the planet for generations to come.
And as a father of three kids who were quickly growing into their teenage years, I felt this significant, compelling desire to want to do something from a professional perspective, which was much more in the spiritual stage of my life, where I wanted to leave a legacy, a lasting legacy that my kids would be super proud of.
Me, that was a legacy that literally.
Changed the lives of millions of people. From an overall specifically health and wellness perspective, and what I saw by Harvest, I saw an R and D Company was a gold mine of R and D, but they didn't. Like many R and D companies, they didn't yet have the knowledge on how to unlock this R and D and commercialize it and bring it into the global marketplace. I still landed up investing, even though that was a risk in
my investment. I was so blown away with the IP strategy, with the clinical trials that they've done, with the regulatory strategy, and the regulatory approvals that already received, all the way through to the scalability of the technology, which is so important. At the time, I never thought I was going to be the guy that was going to be, you know, unlocking that and bringing the technology to the global market.
And I invested in the company and I literally went away with my family and I got a phone call from at the time the CEO of the company, who was the largest investor and an amazing man who's become a dear friend and a partner for the last four years. His name is doctor Zaki Rakiv and doctor Zaki. He was the co founder together with doctor Yoki Kagai, and he himself has a very impressive resume.
You should have him on his show as well.
Entered voice over Internet, the cable modem and they had invested his money similarly to my desire to change the world.
Wanted to take the money that he had made there and.
Build a buyotech company ultimately that was going to be able to change the world, leveraging the power of the plant Kingdom. And doctor Zaki called me up and he said, listen, you drove me crazy during the due diligence process, and I really did.
You know again, going back, I don't come from money.
Every dollar I've earned from where I was at a delicate testant all the way through to exits, every dollar is a dollar. So if I'm investing like one hundred dollars or five thousand dollars or more, it's the same due diligence, right, drive some people crazy. But he said to me, listen, besides driving us crazy with your due diligence, I realized I need a professional CEO to come in and to run the company and to be able to
really bring this technology to the world. And at this time my heart started to beat and it was the kind of adrenaline rush.
Well.
I realized at the time, Wow, this is an opportunity of a lifetime, and almost Dennis, an opportunity if you think about it, if you go back to my days with a two wheeler at the back of a Pepsi truck and as a merchandiser and as a sales guy all the way through to all the roles I did in the Coca Cola company, and then going into high
tech as an entrepreneur and being bootstrapped. I couldn't have asked, you know, for a a better training camps, multiple training camps in order to be able to take this company who at the time had just gone private just sorry, I had just gone public, and to be able to manage this company and scale the technology and bring the amazing molecules that day had already developed to the marketplace and impact people's health and wellness.
And so it was a very quick decision.
For me which I made, and after unraveling some of my responsibilities with annalser Bush, I started as CEO.
In the company in June of twenty twenty.
I tell you it's been the best four and a half years of my life from a professional perspective, and I would probably say from a personal perspective, because when you're professionally happy, you're personally happy, and it works the same way but it's just you have positive energy, you're energized, and you know, we've now built an amazing business where where we've brought to market our molecule, our key molecule,
which is a red grape cell molecule. And just to kind of go back, maybe for your listeners to explain the technology, might just take like two minutes to explain the technology of what we do, as people might find it interesting and.
It may help some of the future questions that you have.
But basically, we've invented a technology called botanical synthesis. So people have probably heard of chemical synthesis, some people have heard of biosynthesis.
What we do is botanical synthesis and what does that mean.
It's a big word, but simply what does it mean technology platform where we can take the plant once and as you know, plants have these critical phyto medicinal compounds that are found in very very small levels that it's very very difficult to be able to unlock these molecules in a way that's consistent, in a way that's economically viable, and in a way.
That you can actually build patents because you can't patent nature.
And this is these are the three core reasons why pharmaceutical industry they started with the plant and move to chemical synthesis, because when you chemically synthesize a compound, it's consistent, it's cheap normally, and you get patents. So what our technology does is it allows us to take the plant. Once we understand exactly where in the plant are the
cells that produce these critical phyto medicinal compounds. We take the cells, We grow the cells in a petra diish, and we do literally thousands of experiments where we change the nutrition we feed the cells, We change other variables like the light, the temperature, and a whole bunch of other variables that I'm not allowed to talk about, which are part of our IP box.
And at this stage we get the cells to do two things.
One, we get the cells to produce the exact same mirror of the phyto medicinal compounds that the plant produces.
We call this mirroring. Two, we can.
Identify a specific phyto medicinal compound that we want to increase by an order of magnitude by changing the variables. We call this magnification. So in the case of our red grape cell, we produce a very unique compound called pissis vitral. Passirisvitral is the gold standard of resveratrol because it has the highest level of solubility. It's twenty five times more soluble than regular resvertrol, and it's much more bioavailable.
Stays in the body for at least twelve hours for two peaks, one after one hour, one after five hours, so it's like the Rolls Royce of resveratrol versus all other resvertrol that comes from polygenium.
It's called transfers vitual.
It's much less soluble, much less bioavailable, and we're the only company in the world that can produce pi seed res vitrol together with all the other polyphenales from the red grape, computing catogen costine, anti sinis and tannons because we magnify the levels one hundred times at least one hundred times versus what's found in the red grape. And at this point, Dennis, we lock the cells, we create a cell bank, and we never have to go back
to the plant. And then what we figured out how to do, and by the way, all of this is non GMO. We don't need any way change the molecular structure of the actual cell itself. And then what we figured out what to do is how to actually take these cells from a petri dish and grow them in massive industrial scale bio reactors thousand leader plus and economics scale. We do this in eighteen to twenty one days. The cells multiply, they produce the fat and medicinal compounds.
We harvest the cells, we take out the water.
We're left with the rich mud of highly efficacious, soluble by available end product that we dry and today it goes into dietary supplements. We have as a company where science based everything we do is backed with clinical trials, double blind placeibo publish and peer reviewed scientific journals. And in the case of our red grape cell molecule, which we call vinear v nia, we've been able to demonstrate the ability to significantly increase dilation of arteries after taking
one capsule every day for ninety days. And arterial dilation is so important because it increases blood flow and Dennis, blood flow is the most critical part of your body's operating mechanism.
No blood flow, no quality of life.
With more blood flow, you got more oxygen, more nutrients flowing to the body. Tiss your cells and organs, which means you have more physical energy, more blood flow to the peripher part of the brain. Our molecule gets below the blood brain barrier, so we're able to increase blood flow and critical parts of the brain. Normal brain flow, more mental alertness, maintains blood pressure within already normal levels. We're able to help reduce oxidation of LDL cholesterol and
oxidative damage to the cells. So this is a product that now we've brought to the marketplace. It's a subscription subscription based product and it's really validated the power of our technology platform. We sell it as a supplement in capsules. We've just launched a superfood coffee. We're about to launch a tea in the marketplace, all direct to consumer.
We don't go through retailers.
After spending all my time with retailers, I said, thank you very much, we're now going to go direct to consumer. I always want to be directly connected to the consumer.
It's so important not.
Just to have the cash cycle that you need as an entrepreneur, so you have the voice of the consumer directly in your ear all the time. And today our product, we have more than six thousand verified reviews four point eight out of five verified rating, and we change people's lives. And this has been the validation of the power of
the technology platform that we have. We have an olive cell molecule that we're going to be bringing to market the end of next year which has the most potent anti inflammatory called verbosca side from the olive cell, which is going to target liver health as well as lestra
health and bone health to bone and joint health. And now that we've scaled the business and we've developed the technology and it's so mature, we made a conscious decision to open the technology to other companies and earlier this year we opened up a CDMO, which is a contract
development and manufacturing organization with existing contracts. We have contracts with pharmaceutical companies, with nutrition companies to develop unique molecules for their businesses, leveraging their muscles so that we can really democratize these molecules from plants and impact the lives of hundreds of millions of people. That's why I think I have the best job in the world. I'm really
the chief plant officer for the world. Ultimately, we're leveraging our technology to be able to bring the power of the plant kingdom, and the world is now realizing that if we don't start to responsibly utilize the power of what we were given, whether it's from God on Day three, evolution of creating the world, or whatever evolution theory you subscribe to, there are five hundred thousand plants that contain the secrets and answers to so many of the challenges
that we as human beings are dealing with. And fortunately the world is becoming a lot more integrative in their thinking as it relates to the whole world of health
and wellness. So the timing for our technology really is perfect from leading farmer companies starting to go back to the future because they started there, and going back to the plant kingdom for the next generation of therapeutic solutions to address current indications today where there's no solution ninety five percent of rare diseases, so there's no solution out there.
So I'm having the time of my life. It's brutal hours.
I have an amazing team, but when you're changing people's lives every day, and you know, I'm fortunate that I get forty to fifty reviews because the direct to consumer subscription business we're getting reviews. I get forty to fifty reviews from people every day that keep my blood pumping in addition to me taking two vinear a day, but keep me going from a spiritual perspective because it's, you know, being an entrepreneur.
It's dealing with a company on the public market.
You're dealing with all these challenges, scaling expectations of investors. But wow, I mean, it's been an amazing four and a half year journey. I have an amazing team together with my partner, doctor Zaki Rakim, going back to brought me into the company.
He's a chairman of the company, and the two of us.
That are very very dedicated management team and nineteen employees. You know, were mission focused to change the world. With the north star of developing ten to fifteen molecules from plants.
I've got to change the lives and.
Health and wellness of hundreds of millions of people by leveraging the power of the plant kingdom in a way that preserves the planet for generations to come.
Well, it's pretty extraordinary.
Of all the things you talked about, and admittedly as a B minus student in both are sciences and chemistry, I understood most of what you were talking about. But here's what I would like you to do, because I know that you're a believer in this and knowledge is power.
And when you.
Talk about what you're exactly doing with your company, as you work with all of your clients and heading them down to the consumer, the consumer wants to know what's going in their foods and maybe how they're processed or not process and how they're growing and all that. So your clients and the consumers want to know about this and need to know about it. But I'm sure the education process is going to take some time, and I imagine that as you work with people, those are conversations
that are happening right now. So as you see the technology continuing to evolve down the road and you're working with these clients who are delivering to the consumer, what's the overall plan of educating everybody of all the great things that are coming out of this.
So look, firstly, the world is changing rapidly and consumers are understanding the need to move to cellular based technologies, whether it's meat cells, chicken cells, our space that we own and we've.
Been you know, global leaders of because we've been doing it for seventeen years.
The company was started in two thousand and seven, amazing team of female leaders from our founder, doctor Jokika Gai, doctor Malki Dosai, VP of R and D, probably the best planned cell biologists in the world, and a number of other members of the team or PhD plan cell biologists. My CEO runs manufacturing, doctor Elana Beltze, she's a PhD plan cell biologist.
So it's like it's all in the DNA.
So you know, the world has started to understand, the regulatory environment has started to understand, and you know, we as a company when it's when it's related to the consumer.
For the brands that we're building in our director consumer business, we invest a lot of resources educating the consumers, helping the consumers understand the power of our technology, because when you understand the power of the technology, you understand the magnitude of impact of what you're putting into your body, the cleanliness of it, because we grow all of ourselves in aseptic by reactors, so there's no funger size, there's no insect the sides, there's no verbal sides. You're coming
to our manufacturing facility, it's a really it's a sterile facility. Right, you've got to be cold, I mean literally glay everything.
And biological facility.
And because at the end of the day, consumers want to understand more. They're so open to be educated. And when you take the time and you obviously you have to simplify to understand it and you explain to it.
So a lot of.
TV that we do, we're explaining to consumers our process and our technology and how the technology works. And you know, mirror, magnify and multiply. This is how we do it because this is the future. This is the future of everything from food all the way to preventative therapeutic solutions. This is the future because the world cannot continue the way
it is operating today. Look at what we've just experienced from a global warming perspective, right, you know, look at our friends in Florida, right, and the southeast of dealing with right.
You know, the.
Magnitude of impact of our actions from an industrial perspective for the last one hundred and fifty years has taken its toll on the world. You cannot There are today, for example, one hundred and forty drugs on the market that contain critical active pharmaceutical ingredients from plants. If you're one of those companies, your supply chain is at risk. Your supply chain is at risk because of global warming.
Your supply chain is at risk because there's not a consistency in your raw materials, because you don't know what's going to happen from let alone, day to day, month to month, year to year, and you're not able to control the economics, and you don't have a moat around
your technology. So this is where our technology becomes so critical for everybody, from players who are in the RX world, all the way through to if you think about cosmetics companies today, the consumer today, Dennis has voted as saying to cosmetic companies all the top ten, all the way through to the small guys, don't give me any active molecules that come from chemicals. I'm not putting chemicals onto my skin every single day.
For thirty years, consumers have voted, you.
Know, a major change right now, and technologies like ours become really poignant and critical for those industries all the way through to just the simple nutrition chain. Think about what Stevia has done for the overall let's call it.
Food system.
But I would even go broader to say the healthcare system, because at the end of the day, you know the perils of sugar when you don't have an active lifestyle and you have a seventy lifestyle, right, this is what you know the American health and wellness system is dealing with today. The unintended consequences of this Stevia came in. It was a decent tasting non nutature sweetener that had a following.
But what if we could develop the.
Next generation, the next generation of non nutature sweetener where there was no trade off versus sugar, but ultimately you were bringing a non nutature sweetener into everything that you ate. It would change the whole healthcare system based on the perils of the underlying perils of the biggest challenges of a healthcare system. So this is where our technology really is anchored in all these different areas and.
Why these partnership with key companies are so critical.
Whilst we execute our game plan on a director consumer business, launching all of our own products which just brings us significant scale and learnings so that we can apply them, or to our CDMO Contract Development Manufacturing organization with these key partners. So the world is changing, education, the consumer wants to be educated. We just have to change the narrative. And that's what we did. When we brought our resverratrial to the marketplace, people said to me, Elan, you're crazy.
There's every other resvitraal product out there. You go into Amazon, every other is viratual product out there that use polygonum Japanese, not weed.
How are you going to differentiate? No chance. That just made me more motivated to try.
And figure out a way, and I just realized that, look, you just have to change the narrative to consumers. We
have clinical trials, we have an amazing technology. Let's just give them the respect and help educate them, spend the time the investment in the right kind of For example, we brought the best medical and animator in the world on board to work with us, and David built three beautiful videos top videos of medical animation explain to consumers basically the power of our molecules and how are molecules
work in your body? And that was critical and those videos have been seen by thousands and thousands of people. So you have to be willing to invest in education, and the consumer's ready for it.
They are ready for it.
Specifically if it's going to change their lit from a health and wellness perspective and protect the planet. And so when you're hitting on those two areas, you have the ear of the consumer.
Yeah.
I agree with that, and I'm glad you addressed the education part because as much as we wanted, I think once again, knowledge is power.
We need to know what we.
Wanted, what's good for us, And it sounds like the future is bright. We are running out of time, Aline, and I do want to do this and just maybe do a little recap if we could, and just get some final thoughts from you. It really is truly amazing and just the four and a half years as you've been there at CEO at this incredible company about what has change and what the future like.
It's blowing me away.
The technology that you guys have patent and what you're doing as you do direct a consumer. Let's just get some final thoughts and recap everything. The floor is your, sir, that some final thoughts.
Look, I would just say to all those CEOs out there, you know, if you're doing something that you love.
And you really feel is making a change in the.
World, you're aligning your heart with your values, and when your heart and values are aligned, then no matter how big the challenge out there is, if you have a great group of people around you.
And I'm so blessed to have an amazing team.
And I've shared a number of the different people in my team, including our chief medical officer who's from John Hopkins and has a whole interesting story himself.
Everybody's just you know, got their own unique story, and everybody is aligned with the strength of a team.
And when there's heart and soul and it's all congruent with your values, your values as parents in some cases in my team, your values as grandparents.
Because in the world of biotech ages.
Everything right, age is everything that's the high tech and biotech.
You're able to climb a.
Mount Killerman Gena and back ten times over because you're going to be facing and every few months we face some really challenging hurdles. But because there's such conviction and such deep belief in the impact of what we're doing and our desire to really change the world, that you're able to actually conquer those hurdles. And so I just say to people like specifically, like for me, I'm so blessed that at the age of forty five, I really
found my call him. Honestly, like you, Dennis, I think I was a nightmare for all my biology teachers, right. I think I flunked out every class except one on biology.
And I don't want to talk about right.
But I just found that when I came to this company and spending time with doctor Jokika, who's the mother of the technology and amazing also she has thirty years of experience in the pharmacide and the biotech side. Together with doctor Malkett, I just became like a spongergame because I realized that they.
Simplified it for me.
They helped me understand what they were doing. And I realized that if I could tell their story and if I could work with him with all my experience in manufacturing and in high tech to be able to scale the technology, we as a team to change the world right, right, And what better way to wake up? Like this is why I wake up in the morning and I'm pumped
and I'm happy. Like literally, I always when I sit down with all my staff members and I do like a media review or check in, and I always ask them, when you wake up in the morning, where are you on a scale of one to ten. One you don't want to get out of bed, you can't even open.
Up your eyes.
Ten you can't wait to get out of bed. By the way, there's very few people in this world that are tens. For the last four and a half years, I've been like a nine to nine and a half, right, which is amazing. And that's really driven by the fact that every day I'm focusing all my energy because there's no politics in our company.
This is either thing all.
Those CEOs out there dealing with politics pulling knives out of your back. It sucks energy when you're mission focused. When everybody comes to work, from a biologist to manufacturing to literally my team in manufacturing that I'm working with the bioreactors, everybody understands this bireactor is going to produce twelve kilos of our red Grapes video product and it's going to change the lives of a few thousand people. Everybody's all focused the energy on the outside, their hearts
and values are aligned. It's all positive energy, and it just allows for you to be able to achieve success in a way that is so satisfying. And that's what I would say to those CEOs out there. Find the space where your heart and your values are aligned, where ultimately you can be in your spiritual phase of your professional career. By the way, it can happen much earlier
in life. The earlier the better. You can just stay there for longer, but make sure you don't spend your time and energy doing something that your heart and values are not aligned. Get out of it, get out of it quickly. And I was lucky that all through my career I was pretty much aligned. But when I got to the world of biotech and I saw the impact of all my energy, Wow, right, like it really it's such a virtuous cycle of energy that permeates individually and
from a team perspective. And this way we can really, you know, fulfill our calling of unlocking the secrets of five hundred thousand plants that are out there that are ready to be conquered and utilized in a responsible way, responsible way that leaves the planet in a situation that generations to come will be able to enjoy in value.
Well, so, well said man, thank you for that. So you've got a great website, whoever designed it. It's beautiful, it's easy to navigate. Let's give the website for everybody who wants to check out a little bit more about.
Exactly what you and your team do. Add Bioharved Sciences. What's that? What's a u ur L the web?
So the r L is Bioharvest dot com, bi h A r V e st dot com. And if you want a little more at a product Vinia, you can go to Vinia dot com, v i NI dot com.
All right, and sir, before you go, I'd like to pay you a compliment. I've talked to a lot of CEOs and entrepreneurs on this series for the last four years. There is a common theme about getting up every day and being excited about what they do, having the best team members on the planet that sometimes are usually more smarter than them and are very good at what they do. The communication, having fun, working your tails off, being jacked up about.
What we're doing and what the future is.
But also your passion and your enthusiasm come loud and clear through our conversation. And I will give you a personal story that I relate to a lot of people that listen to the series in my industry. What I do and I'd like to think over the thirty years of what I do, I do a pretty good job. But every hiring manager lon that's ever said, hey, Dennis, do you know.
Why I hired you?
It wasn't for all your gifts and what you brought to the table, what you're good at. I brought you because of your passion of the industry. And that comes loud and clear that you're passionate about what you do. And I think that's a good lesson for all the entrepreneurs in future CEOs that if you're passionate about and you're willing to take chances like our guest has, you're probably going to succeed. So I want to pay you that compliment because that came through loud and clear.
Thank you.
I really appreciate it. And you know you've got to be passionate about.
What you believe in.
Yeah, yeah, I agree. That's where Will said, well, listen on. Thank you so much for a valuable time, continued success. It really is extraordinary where you and your team are doing, and we really appreciate you joining us on iheart's CEOs you can do.
Thank you very much. Enjoyed the opportunity to talk with you. Thank you so much.