Making a Universal Flu Vaccine

Pushkin. I love vaccines, I really do. Vaccines train your body to make these antibodies that protect you against deadly diseases. It's a thing you get so you don't get sick in the first place, and it's so clever and so elegant and so obviously useful. I think it is honestly fair to say that vaccines are truly one of the greatest inventions of all time, on the very short list. They've saved hundreds of millions of lives. Give me all of them, Give me all of the vaccines. But I

You imagine talking to a generation that didn't have flu anymore.

They would think we were nuts.

They were just like, oh, yeah, every year we have a circulating pandemic and then six months later there's another one, and yeah, you know, fifty thousand people die.

But what do you do? And like, that's nuts, But we take it for granted.

The vaccine that Jacob's company, Centivax, is developing for flu, is likely to go into human trials next year. The company is also in earlier stages of developing universal vaccines for HIV and COVID, among other diseases, and wildcard. They have also worked on creating a broadly effective anti venom for snake bites. We talk about snake bites later in the conversation. To start, Jacob told me about the moment he first got the ia for a universal vaccine. It

And so I was riding back on my motorcycle one evening and I was reflecting on this problem where there was this target called PCSK nine. It kind of looks like Mickey mouse's head, and they really wanted antibodies against kind of where the neck is that if you get an anybody there.

Then that can affect cholesterol and lower cholesterol.

The problem is that they're getting anybodies against the ears, and they weren't getting anybodies.

Against the neck.

And so I was trying to figure out, is there an engineering way to sort of focus the immune system at arbitrary sites that would save me a bunch of time. And I started imagining, what if I were to take that target not just from humans, but from like a donkey and an alligator and a chicken, and like just take a swath of different versions of that. They were different just about everywhere up in the ears, but they were the same down where the neck was.

Huh.

And then if I.

Mixed those together and diluted each one so there wasn't enough of any one of the species of PCSK nine, then maybe only the neck would be the thing which was shared across all of them, and the entire immune system would focus on uh huh.

So like in total, the sort of sum total of the mix, it would be like a lot of neck. The neck is conserved. The neck is what is the same, and there's only enough of that to induce the antibody response. So that then if you whatever inject that into an animal or a person, what the person's immune system is going to see is a lot of neck.

Yeah, And so they finally focus on the neck instead of getting distracted by the ears. That was the principle, And so I got home, and then at a certain point I realized I was being an idiot and what this was was not a way to save a few months on an Anybody discovery campaign, that this was a potential window opening to the to the.

Holy grail of vaccine science.

The holy grail is that all of the major viruses that we're confronted with flu, influenza, HIV, ebola, these viruses mutate and change, but they always have some little spot that they cannot mutate. And those spots are always super important. That's why they can't mutate it because if you mutate it, the virus.

Is no longer infectious.

Yeah, And normally they get away with it by having distracting areas and most of the surface that can mutate. And that's why we have to update our flu shots every year.

Distracting meaning distracting to our immune systems, like our more immune systems. Ooh, I like the ears. I like that shiny part on top, and that's exactly Yeah.

Basically, the conserved Achilles heel is a small site and most of the surface can vary, and it can't it gets away with not changing the critical site by varying lots of stuff around it and taking advantage of the fact that the immune system doesn't know the difference, and so to the ability to focus the immune system against a conserve site would be the basis of a universal vaccine, because instead of targeting one strain of flu or one strain of coronavirus or one strain of HIV, you could

Right.

I mean that part of the idea is the part everybody knew already, right, Like that is the relatively obvious idea. It's like, don't go for the part that changes, go for the part that's the same. Right. The hard thing is how do you do that? So had when you described the idea of like, oh, just take a bunch of different ones, dilute them, mix them together. Nobody had thought of that before.

Yeah, so surprisingly not to your point, people since the nineties were aware of these conserve sites, and so they knew where the sites were.

We had crystal structures it was just, how the hell do you get the immune system focus on those sites? Was the problem. Yeah, and people have tried a couple different things.

They tried chopping out parts of the protein, but then the site you're interested in falls apart. It's like trying to grab a snowflake. It'll melt in your hands. They tried a couple other techniques that didn't work out.

So okay, so you have this new idea for how to make a universal vaccine that nobody's tried before, which to use flu for an example, would mean you take a bunch of different strains of flu, and in particular the sort of spike protein of the flu that your immune system sees. Then you dilute them and mix them all together in a single vaccine. So what the patient's immune system winds up seeing the most of is the part that's the same in all those different strains, the

Yeah, and you recognize it might not work right.

You always are like, look, this is a pipe drain, but like I could not go to sleep because I was like, if this works, this is such a stunning breakthrough that it's like it's hard to sleep when you're thinking about that.

It sort of becomes all consuming.

So you get this idea, and you're working for Pfeiser, a company that makes vaccines. By the way, what do you do?

Yeah?

So again, I was not doing anything involving their vaccine group.

I was doing for intellectual property reason.

Ye. Yes, I was not working on vaccines at Pfizer. I resigned. So I did two things.

I started my first company, Distributed Bio, and I also applied for the PhD program in immunology at Stanford.

And you do this because of your idea?

Yeah?

Yeah, Because basically I applied to the PhD program because I was like, if I'm wrong, I need to stop thinking about this. I need to surround myself with brilliant immunologists who can kick holes in this, and I need to be able to make sure I'm not being myopic.

And then if I'm right, I need the world to hear me.

And so I need to be a card carrying PhD immunologists from Stanford so that people go, Okay, this guy is into some Yahoo and then for the company side, I just saw this opportunity to be able to go test it because I originally I did go out and I try to talk to some vcs in twenty twelve, and I think there, you know, predictably, their answer is like, what the hell is this?

And who the hell are you?

And you were a bachelor's degree, right, we'd worked at Miser for a couple of years, like a million other people, so not you.

Know, you can't blame him. I was like, I guess I'm nobody right now. Let me go fix that.

Yeah, And so I decided that I was going to go found a company because there was some work I was doing at Pfeiser that i'd public created some publications on using the deep genomic sequencers to look at the immune system and then building better anybody libraries with what we learned about that, and I realized there was a business that could be built on that. And my intention was to build that business and use it to subsidize some of the early proof deep risking experiments.

On this universal vaccine concept. And so that's what I did.

So I just did both for five years and didn't sleep that much until the PhD. Graduated from that, and then later I sold the first company distributed by it.

So the company you start you're selling your clients are drug companies essentially, right, But you're doing that that's sort of your side hustle. That's sort of funding your vaccine dream. Right. And while you're doing that, you start doing this research on your vaccine in pigs in Guatemala, right, tell me about that.

The background is I grew up in Guatemala. My parents are Americans, but they met in Guatemala in the seventies and they built this hotel and restaurant with my grandmother.

Hippie dream.

Yeah, the hippie dream, that's exactly what it is.

There's small hippie enclaves down there, and then there's most of the village is the wheel may In and then there's Katchi Kels and some other Mayan communities, and it's very beautiful lake. So it makes sense that the hippies would go there.

The Civil War largely.

Drove them away, but my family, when I was a little boy, they went down there to try to fix up and sell the property. And then one thing led to another and we ended up becoming innkeepers.

And so I grew up in the village.

I think it probably had an effect on my interest in immunology in the first place. And I had this connection to Guatemala, and I ended up maintaining a connection to USAK, which is the University of San Carlos, the National University. And so fast forward in my career too, when I was thinking about universal vaccines, like one of my I say, one of my deep impressions left from

And he said, it's definitely flu in pigs.

They get the flu in fact they transmitted to humans, and so pigs are definitely not as convenient as mice, but I felt that the data would be much more meaningful because they actually get the flu.

Yeah.

So I ended up doing it back in Guatemala with Airwin Calagua, my collaborator at the University of San Carlos, and some property that my father had. So I ended up making some calls. I found out we could get the pigs. There was a vet who was involved in the H one in one two thousand and nine pandemic shift monitoring.

You're doing it in Guatemala because it's cheaper. Basically you're offshoring.

You're yeah, it's way cheaper, radically cheaper and faster. I think if the cycle time is astonishingly slow to do animal studies and ask for grants like you're lucky to get a study done like once every two and a half years according to the US model, Whereas in Guatemala the costs were radically cheaper. I could build a facility to spec and I was, you know, I'm an engineer, so I need to be able to do cycle yeah. Yeah, and so this enabled me. I think we ran five studies.

There over a couple of year period.

We're able to go pretty quickly go in and do rapidly de risk this universal vaccine technology in a way that was economically feasible given the growing profits but still finite profits that I had from the Anybody discovery and software side of the business.

So when you're doing those pig studies, I mean just to return to your initial idea of using essentially different different strains. Let's say you got to figure out what's the right concentration, because if you do too little, it's you don't get any meaningful immune response, and if you do too much, then you're getting immune response to the parts that are not conserved, to the parts that you don't want immune response to exactly.

I was just just proving the concept right because I think there's definitely people who are like, this isn't going to work.

There's no way.

And look, if I'm wrong, then if it doesn't matter if I put fifteen things in, if each one's below the dose and they're not interacting like I was hypothesizing, then you should see no immune response.

Right, So I could have just been wrong. That's the other thing I was testing, does the principle hold? And the answer was definitively yes.

So okay, So you have this idea that it works somewhere around here, you sell I don't know which one is the side hustle and which one is the main hustle. I guess vaccinating pigs in Guatemala sounds like a side hustle, even though it's the thing you really care about. Right, you sell distributed bio and you've spin out sent to vax the vaccine company, right, and then what then where are you?

Yeah? So it was a good time.

So we got the Gates Foundation awarded us this in the Pandemic Threatgrand Challenge award to test the vaccine no longer in Guatemala, but up in American facilities that had biosafety containment, so that we could challenge the animals who've been vaccinated with these strains that had evolved after the mixture. So we deliberately pretended it was two thousand and seven and only included strains up to two thousand and seven.

That's a big question, right, It's like testing something that's out of the model, right, Like it's saying, Okay, we give somebody this vaccine and then there's a new kind of flu. Does it work? Yeah? Yeah, And it.

Felt that that was essential.

By the way, those same pigs we pulled their serum out of the freezer over the last couple of months and they neutralized the H five and one that's currently outbreaking in cows and chickens and some people.

Huh the bird flu.

The great super broad immune response.

So the timing was good. CR wanted to buy. I was happy to do it, and my condition was I'm like, look, I want to take this universal vaccine technology with me to a new company, and they agreed to that. That was December thirty first, twenty twenty is when when the sale completed, and so basically January first.

That is a remarkable time to go all in on a universal vaccine. December thirty first, twenty twenty.

We transitioned over January first, twenty twenty one. I'm now the CEO and founder of Cinevacs, and I started calling an army of geniuses of the best people that I've worked with to gather together, and I was like, look, this is going to be the big one.

Where like a like a heist movie, like, oh it's eleven.

Yeah, it was like the best people of my entire career I worked with.

You don't need a lot, you just need every person to be exceptional, and like, if we do our jobs right, we touched the long arch of history.

Yeah, so what have you figured out? Like, what have been the key things you've figured out? Since then?

We identified a couple extra people we brought in, including Jerry's Sadoff. He's this guy who has more vaccines approved than anyone alive. So things like guarda cel MMRV that all children take. You have the coronavirus vaccine from J and J the one shot, and you know, I think fourteen vaccines have been approved under his watch. It wasn't just that he had done a huge amount of like

Was unusually high.

And that told me I wanted to work with them, And so I called them up and went out to have dinner with them, and I was like, Jerry, you told me this universal vaccine technology is the only thing you thought was worth a damn like, come join me and like, let's kick a hole in the universe. And so he came. And the reason I'm telling you this is that he didn't just come in with phenomenal clinical plans,

Huh.

And he said, I think that that's just a critical thing. You want to trap these spikes in their stable forms so the immune system can target what the spike looks like before it a tax a cellar before it falls apart to confuse the immune staff.

So, just to be clear, like the spike proteins, it's the hema glutenants that are in nature on the outside of the of the of the flu virus. They have a three dimensional shape, right, Yeah, they can change three dimensional shape, and that actually turns out to be important for sort of simple mechanical like a key fitting into a lock. Reason right, and it's and they don't if you rip them off the virus as you are when you're presenting them in this vaccine necessarily stay in the

They're kind of like a little three prong grappling hook and they change shape in order to like hook into the cell membrane and then tear it open. And they're designed kind of like with hinges because they need to be able to be mobile and make changes. And so this protein is not inherently stable, but what you want is you want the thing very stable because you want the immune system to train on defeating the trimer when it's in it's sort of cocked and loaded, but prior

And so anyway, Jerry came in was like, we should do this with flu.

I had a bunch of experience stabilizing proteins from work we did stabilizing antibodies Advisor and then also at my company, a distributed bio and so we ran a quick campaign and we identified these great stabilizing mutations and they had like a pretty stunning effect on the quality of the immune response.

So you're doing this basically atomic level engineering of the proteins, right, yeah's the thing. Go on? What else?

And then the other thing.

The major thing we've done is we started the manufacturing, we advanced the program not just for flu, but we're also we have data validating the universal coronavirus vaccine, We're testing on HIV, we're testing on a malaria and a number of other pathogens right now to.

Be able to create a portfolio. So those have been some of the major activities in the last couple of years.

When are you doing human clinical trials?

Yeah, so we've got about nine months left of manufacturing or eight months of manufacturing, and then you spend a month getting permission from the FDA to start your study and then we'd start human trials.

So okay, so next year you're starting human trials. Next year. So when you think about the future, the future of the company, of your work, like, what are you worried about?

So I worry about less and less things, and then the things I worry about evolve. So in terms of is it going to be safe. I worry about that extremely little. We have been vaccinated with influenza HA protein since the nineteen forties. It's actually the best validated, diverse class of versions of HA compared to any other vaccine that's been tested.

And it's that's all. The history of safety has been extremely good. We're using the.

Advisor Biointech mRNA chemistry, so you can get a non exclusive license to it.

That's the same one they used for the COVID vaccine.

Yeah, it's been in billions of people, so we know what the safety profile is. So safety I'm not concerned about in terms of efficacy, like how well it works. I basically don't believe in any one animal's immune system because you could always overfit the immune system, could overfit in a certain bizarre and unpredictable way. And so we've tested this in pigs, but also ferrets, also rats, also mice, also cows, and also human immune organoids, which is organ

But I honestly I won't sleep well at night until I get that data and I'm like, Okay, yeah, we're on solid footing.

We've done everything I can to de risk it with these other organisms and even human immune organoids, and now it's time to run it in humans.

Fundraising is always a headache where we've got.

Now at least multiple groups gathering around with sheet options and we're looking at them. But it's it's been, just to put it lightly, a difficult period for biotech fundraising, and we've managed to survive where a number of other companies have not. But you know, I've probably gained some gray hair and probably you know, took away some of my health span as a consequence of surviving this period.

I mean does that last thing mean you're afraid of running out of money? That's what I mean.

Every company worries about that. That's the nature of adventure.

We've managed to pull it together and we just got this grant which covers us. But the fear is that we're stuck, that we need to go continue raising money so that we can go pay for the rest of manufacturing and pay for clinical and and armed for the next parts. And to be blunt, this has been an absolutely terrible period in biotech. So we got seventy five percent off on all of our equipment for my entire

And you know, I've benefited from it.

I've benefited from being able to hire remarkable people that otherwise we're struck to find an opportunity because of it's we've basically lived in this like a little bit of a biotech hangover after I think there was too much investment and sometimes in some pretty goofy stuff during the pandemic for biotech, and I think we're in this like a little bit of a headache, a little bit of a macro economic global uncertainty area, and those things are

Yeah, it's okay. What's the happy version of the story.

The happy version is that our vaccine works the same as it has in all those animals and organoids that we've seen. We bring it forward universal vaccine just becomes the vaccine because that's suddenly a vaccine that you take and you don't get sick. The first thing it does is it creates a massive improvement in global health. And then the major impact of you know, flu kills people, right, It.

Gets a lot of people sick. People lose a lot.

Of time from school, pregnant women in their second trimester to get flu, or seven times more likely to have a child with schizophrenia and they're adult.

Like. There's a bunch of like squali and consequences.

But the biggest effect is that when this gets out there, the pandemic era is over.

And when you say pandemic you mean flu pandemic.

Yeah, the flue pandemics are over, which is our most common source of pandemics. We had five in the last hundred years. We had two or three per century before then, so they got faster. We have a lot more people.

We have these pig megafarms, like we need to fix this. And with this vaccine, you no longer have a pandemic era because you have a decent proportion of the population that's already immune to the new virus strains before they hit. And that's what the new world looks like. And so that's the happy version for flu. But our intention is to do that for every pandemic pathogen, to just one by one go and in the pandemic era, to come up with countermeasures that first protect the world from pandemics

Were not possible. And that's the future we want to build.

We'll be back in just a minute. Let's talk about snake bites.

All right, let's do it.

How'd you get into the snake bite business?

Yeah, so it was twenty seventeen, and I think it was because the World Health Organization was announcing, you know, the neglected tropical disease nature of snake bite, kind of declaring it a neglected tropical.

Disease, basically saying, hundreds of thousands of people are killed or very badly wounded every year by snake bites. It's not just some weird thing, and not enough.

People are trying to develop countermeasures.

And I think what had happened because most of the people who are who die or are severely injured are super poor.

Yeah, yeah, that's.

It reminds me of a Mandy python where they have the Roman Senate and someone goes.

What do we do about the poor?

And then all in unison they put up their hands. They're like, fuck the poor, all right, next.

That's a neglected tropical disease story.

And the fundamental problem. Yeah.

I think also that I'm to be fair, I don't know to be fair, but like the companies that make anti venom, most of them are kind of doing it as a public service, as a loss, because most of the people who need anti venom, of the millions of bytes per year, they're poor. They're subsistence agriculturists and their children and people who live in rural environments. And if you take that market, which is probably like five to six hundred million total per year, but it's fractured across

Just to be clear, because you need different anti venom for different snakes different Yeah, there currently is.

No universal anti venom on the market.

So people had started ending programs to make certain types of anti venoms, and I think that was happening in twenty sixteen. So then in twenty seventeen the World Health Organization brings some attention to this, and then I started.

Thinking about it.

I you know, in my village we had snake bites sometimes, and I just like, I like topical diseases, particularly if they interface with cool bioengineering. And I'd been working on the universal vaccine work, and so I started wondering, I'm like, you know what, I wonder if that same idea of the conserved Achilles heel that's found across all flu or all HIV.

I wonder if snake venom.

Toxins have that, Because if that's true, maybe you don't need to make six hundred and fifty different anti venoms. Maybe it's actually that you only make one cocktail of broadly neutralizing antibodies and it could work against all snakes.

A universal anti venom. And so I did a little you know, playing around on my computer, and sure enough, there's basically like ten major toxins that all snakes use. Nature's lazy.

And then when I pulled up a bunch of sequel is from a bunch of different snakes and I compared where they buried, where they mutated relative to each other versus not again, I found a little conserved spot and it's it's the business end, right, because these toxins can mutate, except they can't mutate right where they need to go bind your neurons, your nicotinic casido colon receptor to paralyze.

You and so forth.

And so at that point I got pretty stoked, where I was like, I'm pretty sure this is and like at the time, no one had been talking about broadly neutralizing anybody's outside of viruses.

And I was like, this is so cool.

And so then I was like, all right, where do I find a person who has been met a couple times?

Right?

And I was like looking for a clumsy snake researcher, Like there's like a site in Costa Rica. There's a place in Arizona. There's some places in India where I was reaching out and like I was kind of coming up empty, and then I don't know how, somehow, like I desperately just started like Google searching, and I found these insane articles about this guy named Tim Freedy who had spent like at the time, over seventeen years self immunizing hundreds of times with sixteen different species of snake.

Him because no one lives people. You can't live from a mamba bid it. He'll kill you. Yet he is able to take it. You see that video.

What you don't see is he spent about nine months building up immunity against it by starting with microgram trace doses.

That's crazy. So you're like, that guy is walking universal anti venom.

Yeah, if anybody has.

The secrets of universal anti venom, it's pumping through this guy's veins right now and so I was like, I have to meet him. I couldn't find his contact information anywhere online, and so I contacted the reporters and one of them put me.

In touch with them and had his number.

And so I had this call and I told I remember it super clearly, and where I was just like, look, I know this may be awkward, but I would love to get my hands on some of your blood.

And his response was I've been waiting for this call for a long time.

And and so what happened, and.

Then what I do is we just scheduled twenty eight days apart two blood draws and each one was for twenty mili liters, so that there was no risk as to the blood dramaut This is like a couple of tubes. And so then that that got sent over to my lab. I then processed it in my and I separated out the serum and the cells, and from the serum, I wanted to check his work. I think, you know a story, you know, seemed credible and stuff what I wanted to confirm. And so I had ordered a series of snake venoms.

Which, by the way, it is suspiciously easy to order.

The bit of mistakes, I have learned during this project. I was like, this should not be this easy anyway. So I had a bunch of panel of snakes, some that he said he'd immunized against, and I also picked ones that he never had.

Oh interesting, this is testing the universality.

Yeah, yeah, And so I tested his sierra and I also tested mine and a couple other control serra on this on the venoms. Now, the control people like me who have never been bit, we had no response to this serum. He had blazingly high responses to all the venoms, including the ones he had never been exposed to, including new genera like very different snakes.

So, based on this, right, you come up with this anti venom cocktail that seems like it could work against not all venomous snakes, but a lot a lot of different kinds of venomous snakes. You publish a paper about this in the journal Cell. Where does it go from here? What happens next?

We've reached out to the Welcome Trust and so some other groups that might be interested in this. We've also reached out to I guess I won't say their names, but there are some pharmaceutical companies that develop anti venom to try to see if this is something they'd be

Dollars per year market.

But to get there you have to go spend at least ten and probably more like twenty million dollars on GMP and some other early activities, and then twenty five million for clinical and I think it's hard to imagine who's going to put that money up front for what is a relatively small profit, which is the whole frustrating aspect of neglected tropical diseases, and.

That's why they're neglected. Yeah, we'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. Okay, last thing is the lightning round. So, as I understand that you dropped out of school to run your family in hotel restaurant when you were in high school, or you took a year off high school, what's one thing you learned from that. Yeah.

I think one thing I learned is that people on teams don't that people do not crave chaos. I think people want to know what the people are calmed down by knowing that they're rules, even if the rules don't benefit them. And I dropped out to go run the restaurant, and I was like fifteen year old kid, and you know, initially people didn't really listen to me.

You know, it was just like a crazy time.

And that was crazy for the employees because the employees are like, I don't know, like your son's here, but maybe, you know, maybe David's going to die and my dad's going to die.

And then my mom was like, let's just shut it down. I can't deal with that. I'm like, Mom, we need the money to be able to go pay for the bill, the medical bills. You know.

So everyone was acting chaotic and it was like extremely difficult to manage the team and try to keep people focused to do their jobs. And you know, this thing happened where one evening, one of our cooks was like walking out and he had this big bag and I went over and I was like, what the hell are you doing? And I realized he was stealing a bunch of steaks, like it was just stakes, but it was with a bunch of the other chefs, and I was just like, I didn't do it for a tactical reason.

The hell out of here.

And like what I was not anticipating is the next day everybody showed up for work and suddenly there was actually everyone was calmer, And I think it was the transition of perception of power that they were like, they want, you know, I did something harsh, and yet suddenly everybody's performance improved, partially because they're like, Okay, now I know, like the hand that feeds, But it was also like

That's not absolutely the way to go. That's not leadership.

But I think what I did learn is that when times are difficult, people prefer to know that there's a plan and it's organized and there's a solution, even if it's rules that don't benefit them, rather than having opened into chaos. And I think that was counterintuitive to me because my personality is different actually thrive in chaos and having those sorts of complicated choices and I resent confinement of any form. But I think that that actually for

And I think that part's important.

So that's something you learned running the restaurant that has helped you as a CEO. I know you recently bought the restaurant, so now you're a restaurant owner. Is there something you've learned running a biotech company that now helps you running a restaurant?

Oh so yeah, yeah.

Well externalizing responsibilities so I don't run the restaurant. I bought the hotel and restore or the restaurant and some of the properties, not the full hotel. Some other people bought some of the bungalows. And then what I did is I basically wanted to maintain the value of the property and increase it and make sure that all the people who some of us have worked for our family since my childhood, that their jobs weren't compromised, which during the pandemic.

Where tourism was like really bad, like there was a risk of that.

And so I run it essentially as a it's a cooperative. It's really like, I don't extract financing from it. I have basically a guy we worked with for a long time and another team member. I've just told them, like, look, my objective is for you to maintain the reputation of the place. Just keep running it well and make sure I don't. And my one requirement is I need to not think about it at all.

Huh.

And I'm working on the universal vaccine techt so maybe i'll, you know, in the future, I'll want to go and settle around and be a restaurant tour but like right now, I just needed to not think about it.

Her to use the word hard ass a few times in other interviews, are you a hard ass?

I think on myself and on an expectation of detailed I think research needs to be done in a very particular process. I don't think my team would say I'm a hard ass.

I don't I think that, or maybe I've evolved over time.

I think I have exacting standards of expectation of how to get things done. But it's not like it's more like me driven of anxiety than me going in.

And like I don't bark at people or anything. I'm like, guys, we.

Have to have this anxious hard as.

Yeah, I have to be like, look, we have to have a set of standard you know, controls, and then we need to run this in a certain way and we need to have things documented. Otherwise we're just walking on quicksand and we'll just mess up every time. So now I don't think I'm a hard ass. I think

Jacob Glanville is the founder and CEO of Centovax. You can email us at problem at pushkin dot fm, and please do email us. I read all the emails. Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang, edited by Alexandra Garriton, and engineered by Sarah Bruguer. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem