Hitha Palepu

The Palapoo is the CEO of Roshan Pharmaceuticals and an author of two books, including Worth Speaking The Life Lessons of Kamala Harris. Use such a rich family history, and I'd love for you to share it with our listeners. I am a daughter of Indian immigrants, I am a mother raising who I hope to be feminist sons, and

I am the wife of a true partner. And I said, in every sense of the word, and truly it starts with not just my parents, but certainly more progressively minded grandparents who raised each of my parents with a different

perspective than traditional Indian values were at that time. My mom rejected several men before she said yes to my dad, So even though it was an arranged marriage, it was very much a marriage based on her terms and her acceptance of it, and the reason she said yes to my dad, I find to be so interesting because he was not the wealthiest, He was not the most financially secure.

He was just working in the United States, finally gotten a job in the pharma industry, someone who had lost his hearing as a child and had to so he struggled a lot to get to where he was at that time, and told my mom the truth about what life in the United States was. He said, it's very lonely and it is hard. You do have these conveniences like dish washers and washing machines, but you're living in a world where people will rename you because they can't

take the patients to understand your name. You're going to have this culture imposed on you versus being in the culture you yourself had been raised in for years. If that sounds like a life you can handle, you know, I would be delighted to build a life with you. But I want to tell you what you're in for. And it was that honesty that had my mom saying yes.

They had met on her birthday in nineteen seventy seven and were married two and a half weeks later, his older brother was one of only a hundred Indians in one year that was allowed to immigrate to the United States. Can you talk a little bit about that and the impact it had on your family. Absolutely. So. My uncle earned a Fulbright scholarship that allowed him to travel from

India to the States to continue studying chemistry. And that was at the time that was in the late fifties, before the National Immigration Act had been passed, where the cap was a hundred visas issue to Indians to come to the United States, and so he was one of very few and there was no Indian community really at that time. My aunt followed a few years later with her husband and they in turn were able to sponsor

my father to come to the States as well. And once he got here, that was the first time he got a hearing gage, which meant that was the first time he could hear. Your latest book is called Worth Speaking in the Life Lessons of Kamala Harris, and Kamala also has a very strong immigrant mother. What drew you

to Kamala's story and wanting to write about it? I write in the book about how this is a book that I had actually been writing for a very long time since I knew who Kamala Harris was, and how you know, she had been mentoring me from AFAR for many years. So she first came on my radar, you know, during the mortgage foreclosure crisis and the follow up and the legal follow up of settlements for homeowners all over the country. So I had a very nerdy obsession with

the recession and was like, how did this happen? Why did this happen? What are we going to do to make sure something like this hasn't happened again and citizens are protected? And so this one name kept popping up in the news about it, Kamala Harris, Kamala Harris, and I I never took the time to google her at the time, which I find really funny because I'm the type of person who google's everything when it comes to

my mind. But it wasn't until you know, she had negotiated the settlement for California homeowners that exceeded what was already what was on the table for the full federal and state responses. She had walked away from the negotiate, the joint negotiating table, and brought together allies to fight for a better settlement and I was. I was on some business trip, had CNNA on the background and saw this woman and I'm like, she could be related to me.

Drug to the podium with such confidence, and then the chiron said Attorney General Kamala Harris, and I was like, that's Kamala Harris, because in my mind I was picturing someone much older, like with the quote unquote experience that had always been attributed to impactful politicians, and I had no idea she was this relatively young attorney general of the largest state in the Union who made a major, major thing happened on behalf of California homeowners, so that

the obsession with the recession focused onto his obsession with Kamala Harris. And really it wasn't studying how she spoke, what she wore, the way she carried herself, because at the time, and I was working with my dad on in a separate company, I was in a lot of rooms where I was the only woman. I certainly was always the youngest, and I was one of the few people of color, and being mothered was something that happened

to me quite often. And not having the ability to speak up or contribute the way I wanted to and there weren't a whole a lot of women in leadership and life sciences at the time that I could look to for mentorship or guidance. She became that mentor from afar. So it's not as if I started donning pants suits and had like a perfectly curled blowout, but she gave me kind of the confidence to where what I felt

good in and own that. In reading your book, I felt like you must have felt like you had discovered her, and then suddenly the whole world had discovered her. With it a little bit like that, where you like, she's been my obsession well before any of you knew her. It definitely was. It's like when you know the first know of a band or a certain author. Felt very

much like that. But I also is I take it personally when I see like just bullshit reporting with like the inflammatory headline making mountains out of mole hills, because it's part of a really troubling trend I observed when the press were parts on powerful women. There is like the build up of hyping her up, the flattering profiles and features. They're sort of the anointment with the cover cover.

Some magazines awards all of that and then comes to tear down what was your entry into pharmaceuticals like and what that trajectory been like for you. Well, it's started with nepotism and let's just um call out the elephant in the room. I have my job because my father was co founder of our last company side us. That said, we did have a pretty clear division of church and state in terms of I reported to his business partner

who was the CEO. Joe took me under his wing, taught me everything I needed to know when it came to negotiation and managing partnerships, financial accounting. Our general counsel Paul Feyerman walk me through kind of the mechanics of term sheets and licensing agreement and getting comfortable enough with the legalise to know what I can tackle on my own and confident enough to know when to call excellent outside council and how to hire great lawyers as well,

which very grateful for Paul for that. Our CEO CFO Mike Boolio taught me like how to build a model and the mechanics of this I have and I want to just say this, I have had wonderful men who have championed me in industry and given me what I needed to succeed. That said, I was one of the only and I had to say, why can't our head of manufacturing be a woman? Like there have to be women candidates out there? Why can't our head of regulatory

be a woman? There have to be women candidates out there, At which point they realize, oh, yeah, we absolutely can and we should. So I am grateful that they were, and once we had those team members join us, they helped show me the ropes of how to navigate the gender politics of being in some of these rooms. It would be awful if you get explained to us what happens when you're running pharmaceutical company. I think for so for most of us who are not in science, it's like,

what does that even mean? And what are you doing every day? And what are you building and bringing to market. So we're working currently at Rissian Pharmaceuticals and injectable aspirin which will be administered by your e M T or by a nurse in the emergency room. The significance of delivering aspirin in this way is for suspected heart attack or stroke, where getting preventing the clot from getting bigger within the first hour of claw onset, it could be

life or death. They call this the golden hour. So two safe ours works and under a minute versus oral erectal aspirin taking a minimum of about twenty minutes to hit the bloodstream. Additionally, with ours, acent of drug enter us a bloodstream versus thet because of the gastric effect. So when you think about the urgency of these conditions and then to deliver this extremely safe therapeutic as effectively as possible and consistently as possible, the need is there.

The pricing you can't price aspirint exorbitantly high, which is why we really struggle to raise venture or get large biopharmas excited about this, but it was a long slog, so to talk a little bit about the history of the company. This is actually something that has been my dad has been thinking about and working on since the

late seventies. When he was getting his PhD. His adviser said the GESH who ever develops injectable aspirint, deserves a Nobel prize because from a chemistry perspective, it is exorbitantly difficult, but all but impossible to have a scalable manufacturing process and for a formulation to stay in a crystal inform He also then said, also it would save a lot of lives. So my dad had been thinking about this

for years. This was a product that we did. He did start working on at SIDOS, and then once we had out licensed the active portfolio from Sidos, he spun this product out and said, I'm going to keep tinkering with it. We're not where we need to be, but I wanna this might be my final one, so let me keep thinking about it and working on it on my own without the pressure of working on it with

a partner. He successfully got to the lead formulation by the end of I want to say sixteen, worked with our i P lawyers to file the patents so we confirmed we had freedom to operate. His patents were novel, non obvious, and not infringing any other of the aspert i P that was on the market at the time, and filed those patents that have now since been granted. And then in March seventeen, we met with the FDA for the first time to talk about the development plan

and specifically the clinical study required for approval. F d A agreed with our approach and gave us a very reasonable clinical study design that allowed us to you know, get approval in a pretty modest study, which that study

is is just wrapping up. And then we brought on a head of manufacturing at that time who has been wonderful and a wonderful partner to me, and I will say we are still given all this time, and even though we got to skip a lot of steps and that we were formulating something that already existed in terms of the active drug, we still won't file with f d A for a couple of year and a half. What did the day in the life of a pharmaceutical

CEO look like? It looks different every day, much like any CEO, and it really depends on what we have going on at any specific time. But also, as I've been able to hire a bigger team, what I do is significantly less than what I used to do. So for instance, right now, we're wrapping up a clinical study, so it's about scheduling calls with our partners to get them the full update on how the final dosing and

the final subjects have gone. For manufacturing, it's making sure my head of manufacturing and our technical team of what they need to work with the new partners and then for me right now, it's managing the licensing, the partnership with the team that licensed our products. So I speak with their senior team members every single week. We have overall catch up joint steering meeting, committee meeting every few weeks, and it's making sure the partner is informed of everything

that's happening and it's happy with everything is happening. So relationship management is my job. But before that, it was securing funding, so a lot of investor pitches, a lot of nose and a lot of retooling the pitch, refining my list and getting back out there with When we were negotiating the licensing deal, it was a lot of time with my lawyers to understand the redlines and want to get that legalise education and to think really thoughtfully what is non negotiable for us and what can we

accept with maybe some caveats or edits, you know. So right now I am thrilled that my team is really taking the lead on development and on building relationships with their technical team, and my job is really too. It's much more focused and the stress of managing cash flow or understanding like when is our next tronch of capital coming in, how am I going to afford to pay my team is significantly decreased today than it was a year ago. What's it like working with your father? It

is the best. However, I will say that I think family businesses it's like very binary. It's either phenomenal and a perfect fit or it is the worst idea ever, and I don't see there being much of an in between. It is truly an honor and a privilege to work with someone who I view as one of the most brilliant scientific minds of our time, and especially in life sciences. You know, you could have a brilliant formulator who none of his formulations or her formulations could get scaled up

to be a commercial product. You can have someone who is so smart about scaling up manufacturing, but then you're giving up some of the elements of the formulation that made it you know, soluble, stabilizeable, or you know, diminishing the quality of the product. And then on top of it, you need to be able to develop a formulation that can get a patent granted on it. And right now my father is adding a thousand when it comes to defending his patents against infringement or in validation ass so

he really is a triple threat in drug development. But he's also just one of the best people I know. We've had a remote culture since the beginning of Side Us. We've never been the type of company to require people to be in an office, but we did prioritize getting together on a regular basis to not let things go too far without gathering live and building relationships with with people.

He is someone who has such humility about what he is doing, like he understands that I'm doing this to help save lives, and it has been just one of the great honors of my life to get to work and build companies with him that have hopefully impacted humanity for the better. And now a quick break. Are you a woman owned business looking for a new sales channel. I'm so excited to tell you about our newest partner

in the W Marketplace. Founded by two women, it's a nationwide e commerce site for women entreprene yours and the shoppers who support them. It offers favorable terms and is a supportive community for female founded companies. With over five women owned businesses selling thousands of products and services, The W Marketplace might be your favorite news sales channel. Intrigued learn more at join the w marketplace dot com. You've let your hair go gray and it looks so youthful

and beautiful. I bet you've influenced so many women to do the same. Can you talk about that decision and what that's like. I decided to go gray right around the time I had I delivered Rocky, and so my groots were already starting to grow out. And that was the first time I was like, uh, I kind of like these little sparkles of silver versus the dread of oh my god, I need to get back in this salad.

I went back to my roots, literally did a lot of like Indian oil scalp massage to recondition the grays that were coming in, to soften them from that wiry texture they usually are to like a really softer like my my usual hair texture. Was very diligent about that, was very diligent about getting glosses so that the hair the gray didn't become overly brassy, and have just maintained it too. Now three about three years later, like there is no more highlight left of that. It is just

my hair and it feels so me. It feels so good. And it's the first time in my life I actually really like my hair, and I like that part of me versus, you know, having more frizzy, thick, unruly Indian hair that I would beat into submission with straightening irons

and like straightening treatments and all of that. I've kind of learned to really like this part about myself, and I think it helps helped me like other parts of myself more from embracing my very distinguished nose and liking just all the parts of me that normally I would beat myself up about. What was your relationship with your

name growing up and that part of you. I mean, when you're growing up a brown kid and one of the only brown kids in your class in school and your name ends with Pooh, You're gonna get some really creative insults hurled your way. I think someone called me hit the pile of Pooh, and I came home wanting to change my name, and again my mother, in her infinite wisdom and confidence, said, this is why we chose your name. And your name is beautiful, your name is strong.

These people are deeply unkind, and obviously something is bothering them that they feel the need to take this out on you, and really, my mom needs to write a book because she really is a genius. But also that has also influenced kind of thinking about where do I want to raise my family, what do I name my kids? And you know, it was one of those sort of it builds character experiences that while I endured it and I grew from it, it was something that I wouldn't

choose for my own children. So, you know, living in New York City, where of my older son's class is South Asian, which is something a critical mass I certainly never had, is something that I find it is so different from what I grew up with. But it's also exactly how what I what i'd like to give my

kids that I didn't have. And you know that they had their Indian full names, but these westernized nicknames that one makes it easy to pronounce, but to have their own meaning for our own family is special to us. And you know, your names are a gift from your family, from your parents. It's the first gift any of us

ever received. So we are very reverent about names and with the kids too, it's teaching them to always ask what someone's name is and take the time to learn how to pronounce it properly, because that is the first form of respect you ever show anyone. So tell us how you met your incredible husband. We met at an Indian networking conference in Canada, and even though it was in Canada, neither of us are Canadian. We're living in

Canada at the time. Just we were both members of this organization, him from the national chapter leadership perspective, me as the chapter liaison from Philadelphia. I was late to the board meeting. He um came up to me after the board meeting and said, I haven't met you yet, and I said, no, you haven't. I'm hit the We talked for a bit, go our separate ways. The next day he comes back around, comes up to me and

I'm very excited because I'm like, keep away from yesterday. Yes, And He's like, Hi, I haven't met you yet And I was like, excuse me three and arism and I met you yesterday. Did you go through all four hundred women at this conference in a single night that you're now recycling lines? Well done you and stormed off And so for the rest of the conference, he just like

was kind of chasing me down to apologize. But when any time we got into a really great conversation, like a woman would come up to him and be like three and I was like, what is going on here? Like is he into me? But all these women are chasing him? Apparently he was like the bachelor to get at this conference. But anyway, it was one of those There was this moment. It was the Saturday night of the conference. We were talking. It was at a club Silarium.

If it's still there in Toronto, I feel like I need to go back and pay my respects to this, to this very important venue in our relationship. And there was something about how I mentioned like my vision is so bad. It's like too bad. If we lived in Gattica, like this would be resolved, or I mentioned something it's like you know my way, poor kids are going to be totally blind. He's like, well not if we live in Gattica. And I was just like, oh my god,

you're my soul mate. You were a nerd who was also partially blind and gets me and didn't shy away when I like dropped kids in the conversation very early on. Instead made this really funny. It's completely spot on reference. So you know, we were engaged five months after we met. We got married ten months after that, and it's been eleven years in marriage. And now a quick break. All right, we're gonna have to go to our speed around now, and do you want to kick us off? What book

are you reading? A couple, because I'm a promiscuous reader and I'm always juggling multiple books at the same time. So I am listening to Tenday from Peloton's new memoir, which is excellent right so far, I'm loving it. I am rereading the Court of Thorns and Roses series because it brought me great joy at the beginning of the year and we were all locked down for the Auboicron variant and I just need to bring back some familiar

joy into my life. And then Row and I are reading a series called Wings of Fire, So there's a graphic novel version that he has the first five books for it, but I really want him to also get used to reading or reading with me, the full novel version. So we're making our way through that and that's it's actually excellent, and that's been really fun. So juggling those three books right now. You're such a positive person, how

do you get out of a bad mood. I have to give myself some time to wallow so I don't try to push out of it too fast. But I do put a limit two said wallowing, where I will listen to the music I need to listen to and I will like lie in bed or on my couch like a lump and just stare at the wall for a bit, and I'll cry if I need to. I think,

I think a good cry can be very cathartic. And I once that timer goes off or that limit is done, it is tackling one really small tactical project that makes me feel like I have that wind, which lately has been going through all like the drawers in my room and organizing it so like I did that with my undergarments drawer last week, I felt like a new person. I'm going to tackle my socks like next, because I have a lot of socks that just need to be

get like tossed with holes and are worn out. That helps. I will also do I call it like a tea meditation, where you make a cup of tea, but rather scrolling on your phone or listening to a podcast while you're doing it, you actually engage all five of your senses while you're making the tea. So you listen to the kettle hitting up boil, you smell the tea as the hot water hits it and the aroma it gives off. You feel the heat of the mug and so I kind of call that active or pass like a meditation

and like in living. So I'm not someone who does great with just sitting on a cushion in silence for twenty minutes. This is a way I'm able to kind of just come back to myself and give myself the grounding and centering I need. And then I'll try to get outside, even if it's for a quick walk around the block or even going into the park a little

bit and sitting on a bench for some time. I think getting outside and actually changing your environment can really help shift your mood when you're ready to move on from it. And I think like something Tanks an influencer on TikTok, who does is she grows like a funeral for you know, dates that didn't go anywhere and they

never followed up or excess. I like to think of throwing a funeral for a moment of disappointment, particularly if it was something I was really hoping for, like an investor who had to be in conversations with for months coming with the no or a no from a potential partner.

I think creating a small ritual of just saying, here lies so and so, may they rest in peace, giving you that closure and letting you put the final nail on that coffin versus it feeling like it had been done to you, is a way to reframe and kind of take control back of those disappointing moments. Who leaves you starstruck? I mean, besides the Vice President herself, Speaker Nancy Pelosi. I think she was my first political crush,

um Secretary Hillary Clinton. Of course, women politicians, clearly Democratic women politicians leave me quite star struck. And then I would say Stacy Abrams, to which I who I got to meet at the Riveters Summit, and I met Vice President then Senator Harris later that night. So really, I viewed November seven is one of the greatest days of my life. Lu Burns has been listening to this interview and he's going to join us with the final question

from the male perspective. I want to know like when you were like in your fourteen fifteen sixteen and maybe in high school years? What was that like for you? Were you like a student athlete, really like in politics? How were you as a kid? So I had a really rough eighth grade. We had just moved to the UK. I was in a new school in England, um and it was I had always been aware of privilege and how much I had, but this was the first time being around extremely wealthy people that made me feel less

than and was pretty badly bullied. It was a really, really, really hard year. Mercifully, it was also a school with a lot of turnover, so my ninth grade beginning of ninth grade was a much different experience with new friends and new people who joined the school that saw me for who I am and liked me for me, so

that helped. And then I had two more schools my freshman year of high school, so by the time I got to tenth grade, I was tired of one moving and two having to make friends that I found these two incredible women in my high school, Stacy Eadie and Rachel Mendel Rice, who were equally nerdy as I was about politics, like we would sit on long lunch days on Wednesdays, order a pizza from dominoes and sit around on pontificate about like the state of the world and politics,

like we couldn't vote, there was very little we could actually do. But I felt finally like I had found my groove, and with that came joining the debate team, joining theater um, joining the school newspaper. I literally, I don't know if my parents nudged this or if I found my way here, but finding community and things I

cared about really really helped. And I didn't care so much about what other people think thought or of me, or of what was quote unquote cool, because I had a very clear sense of what these people find to be cool is not at all aligned with what I care about, and so I'm just going to release myself of that burden or expectation. You know, Sam, It's really funny.

When we invited Hither onto the show, I was trying to remember when I met her, and I couldn't because Hit is one of those people that once you meet her, you feel like you've always known her, because she's so willing to share every piece of herself, the hard parts, the good parts, the ugly parts, the beautiful parts. And there aren't many people like that in the world. And by the way, you know how my background is in personal branding. I think she is so smart about how

she's managed her career and her brand. And you know, I did ask her about her gray hair, because it's true, she is so youthful looking with gray hair. She just pulls it off in a way I've never seen anyone

pull it off. But on top of that, I think it's so adorable and sort of disarming that she talks about her love of Taco Bell and romance novels, because it makes it so that anyone can find something in common with her, and it's something I encourage everyone to do on their Twitter, Instagram bio is saying something that just makes you a little more approachable. She actually got me to read my first romance novel, and whenever I do eat Taco Bell because my kids love it, I

think of her. Thanks for listening to What's Her Story with Sam and Amy. We would appreciate it if you leave her review wherever you get your podcasts, and of course, connect with us on social media at What's Her Story podcast. What's Her Story with Sam and Amy is powered by my company, The Riveter at the Riveter dot Co and Sam's company, park Place Payments, at park place payments dot com. Thanks to our producer Stacy Para and our male perspective, Blue Burns