"Biotech and Inclusion" with Carolina Alarco

The deep experience Carolina Alarco has gained in the biotech industry now informs her work as an advisor to startups and as an angel investor. Her incisive contributions at Walnut Ventures made me eager to learn more about her story and approach. 

Highlights:

  • Sal Daher Introduces Carolina Alarco

  • SYTE.bio and What it is Solving

  • SYTE.bio Founders' Backgrounds

  • Why Invest in SYTE.bio?

  • Verbina

  • Latinos in Bio

  • "... I do want to say that Latinos in Bio will be raising awareness of some lack of representation of Latinos in the industry..."

  • Carolina's Background

  • "... I came up in the '90s. I came to study a graduate degree in International Management Harvard..."

  • Advice to the Audience

 

Transcript of “Biotech and Inclusion”

Guest: Carolina Alarco

Sal Daher: I'm really proud to say that the Angel Invest Boston podcast is sponsored by Purdue University Entrepreneurship and Peter Fasse, Patent Attorney at Fish & Richardson. Purdue is exceptional in its support of its faculty for its top five engineering schools, in helping them get their technology from the lab out to the market, out to industry, out to the clinic. Peter Fasse is also a great support to entrepreneurs. He is a patent attorney specializing in microfluidics and has been tremendously helpful to some of the startups which I'm involved, including a startup that came out of Purdue, Savran Technologies. I'm proud to have these two sponsors for my podcast.

Sal Daher Introduces Carolina Alarco

Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations of Boston's most interesting founders and angels. Today we have with us a very experienced person, a very experienced advisor. Welcome, Carolina Alarco.

Carolina Alarco: Thank you, Sal. Perfectly pronounced. Thank you.

Sal Daher: Thank you. Carolina is a highly experienced biotech executive who works as an advisor. She is co-founder of Bio Strategy Advisors. She is also active co-founder of Latinos in Bio. First, I must thank our friend, Arrigo Bodda, for connecting us. I'm really interested in how to better support early-stage life science companies. A particular subset that interests me, biotech companies. You have a lot of experience in this area so I thought it would be really interesting to have a conversation with you. As a way of introducing you to our listeners, let's talk about a few startups, biotech startups that are of particular interest and highlight the focus of your work.

SYTE.bio and What it is Solving

Carolina Alarco: Sure. Thanks, Sal. I'm very excited to work with a few startups in different aspects. I help startups from company formation to corporate strategy, preparation for investors, for fundraising, and also preparation for continuing to build the company. A few of the startups that I'm really excited about lately is one called SYTE.bio, that's S-Y-T-E dot bio. They are a startup that has proprietary synthetic biology platforms and that is a linear DNA platform and a circular RNA platform.

If you know, for example, the Moderna vaccine for COVID, that's based on RNA. I think that that particular startup is very exciting because the future of science, I believe, is going to be nucleic acid based therapies and anything from DNA and RNA, of course, with appropriate delivery vehicles that can actually make the patients themselves manufacture their own therapeutics.

Sal Daher: Before we get too deep into it, let's just step back and get a little context for our listeners who have not recently taken a biology course. DNA encodes genetic information. Think of it as storage of data on your computer. RNA, think of it as a mechanism for taking the information that's in the DNA and taking it to the sites where that information can be turned into something which is active, which are usually proteins.

The DNA codes for RNA and RNA codes for proteins in the cells. The machines and cells that create proteins and proteins are what do everything in the body. All the action that goes on in the body is done by proteins. What SYTE.bio is doing is it has proprietary platform for the design and creation of new forms of DNA and RNA, which might be useful in some process in pharma.

Carolina Alarco: Yes, that is correct. Normally, DNA-based therapies are used for genetic diseases and things that require a very long-term expression. RNA is used for, for example, oncology vaccines, which requires short-term expression.

Sal Daher: Right. The DNA would be, for example, for some kind of gene therapy.

Carolina Alarco: That is correct.

Sal Daher: Now, what is SYTE.bio? Is it a wet lab platform? Is it an AI platform? Because we hear a lot of exciting things about design happening in the AI space.

Carolina Alarco: It is a wet lab platform. The company engineers their DNA and RNA molecules in the lab. However, I do have to say that they do use a lot of bioinformatics information in order to make sure that they are encoding the right DNA sequence, for example.

Sal Daher: That's part of synthetic biology. Built-in is the bioinformatics, which have to do around wet lab work. It's not just in silico work. They're doing wet lab work informed by some bioinformatics. Biostatistics around that. Very good. The founders, what's the background? Who are they?

SYTE.bio Founders' Backgrounds

Carolina Alarco: The founders are actually Argentinian scientists and the company started in Argentina.

Sal Daher: Argentina. Wow. Interesting. They started doing this down there and you helped them come up to the US and establish their activity here. Are they still back down there? Where are they located?

Carolina Alarco: They are located in Buenos Aires, Argentina. They have a lab and offices there. They contacted me to help them with a soft landing, as we call it in the United States. I'm helping them locate a lab and offices here in Massachusetts. They have selected Massachusetts, of course, because it's one of the main biotech hubs in the world.

Sal Daher: This is the capital of biotech. Let's not be shy about it. There are other hubs in the world but this is the capital. Harvard, MIT, and all the associated institutes around it. This is the nucleus of biotech. Very interesting. What are their names?

Carolina Alarco: The CEO and founder is Martin Williams. He is actually a solo founder. He has a group of scientists working with him in the lab in Buenos Aires.

Sal Daher: What is his background? Is he an academic? Was he in the industry?

Carolina Alarco: He has a PhD in just science. He's a very young founder. First-time founder. These are the type of founders that actually I love to work with because they are young and there is an ability to mentor them and to work with them closely in order to build their company and to bring the therapies to patients, which is actually the ultimate goal.

Sal Daher: That's really helpful. Company formation. Company formation for a software company. There's a little bit of sophistication and so forth and there are lawyers that can do that like that. Not a big deal. A lawyer will help you with it and that's it. Company formation for a life science company is much more complicated. Usually, you're transferring technology.

I've seen the problem firsthand where founders are on the faculty, they might be postdocs on the faculty of an academic institution and they have to transfer, they have to get licenses of that technology in their startup, they have to have a new lab, and they have to figure out a way to separate where the IP of the university ends and their IP begins. Intellectual property, I should say. IP.

It is an extremely complicated process. It is not a straightforward easy process. Then lawyers are not necessarily 100% conversant with all the details of this. I think that it really is very useful to have someone who's been around the block a few times to help this because this is a very-- I've seen this to be a very difficult time for founders making that transition. I've seen it a couple of times. Some really superb founders.

Carolina Alarco: Sal, you're right. A lot of the companies spin out of universities like MIT and Harvard, for example. In the case of SYTE.bio, what is also exciting is that the intellectual property is proprietary from the company. They are not licensing it from any university and the inventor is actually Martin Williams who works in the company, so the IP is very unencumbered. It's a little bit easier to work in that way.

Sal Daher: That is a blessing because people can waste a lot of time. It's a blessing but it's also a curse because you have to spend a lot of money building your portfolio of intellectual property.

Carolina Alarco: Correct. Maintaining those patents is very expensive as well. That is actually one of the reasons for which I was interested in the company and I started working with them as an advisor and then I became an angel investor and a board member of the company.

Sal Daher: Oh, so you invested in the company?

Carolina Alarco: Correct.

Sal Daher: This is very interesting. My podcast is sponsored by Purdue University, which is very active in the life science space, and also by Peter Fasse, who is a Patent Attorney at Fish & Richardson. He is also very familiar with this sort of thing and he has also invested. He's an angel investor. He's my brother-in-law, I should mention, and he's invested in quite a few of these ventures that I'm involved with, and he's gotten me into quite a few of these ventures. I'm very familiar with that whole process, and having good patent law representation and having good advice on setting up the company and strategy of the company, was really very useful. Tell me a little more about what's the future and why you're invested?

Why Invest in SYTE.bio?

Carolina Alarco: I see tremendous potential in SYTE.bio. I think that once they establish their lab and office in Massachusetts, and they create here their hub for global operations, that platforms that they have, they have many applications, all kinds of gene therapies. Right now, they are hyper-focused, I would say in epidermolysis bullosa, which is a dermatology rare disorder, and in oncology, in melanoma. Those two platforms have potential to treat many, many different diseases. I truly think that again, those platforms are just the beginning of what could be in the future, the future of gene therapy, the future of cancer immunotherapies, for example.

Sal Daher: What is their business model? They plan to develop these two platforms and then to find a strategic collaboration, maybe licensed technology out of them?

Carolina Alarco: That is always an option. What the plans of the company are right now, to focus on moving operations to Massachusetts and pitching to investors, angel investors, institutional investors, venture capital. They are currently raising a $5 million seed round and with that, I think we can submit the INDs to the FDA. We are also talking to potential strategic partners.

Sal Daher: Let's clarify that. IND is?

Carolina Alarco: Investigation on New Drug Application.

Sal Daher: It's a first step in applying for FDA approval for the things that might come out of the platform.

Carolina Alarco: Yes. The IND is actually the green light from the FDA to enter human trials.

Sal Daher: Is there anything else that you want to say on SYTE.bio?

Carolina Alarco: I think that it is very important to mention that it is very hard for Latino founders, under-represented founders, to raise funding. I think venture capital and other investors are providing a ton of support for the traditional founders or founders that have had a ton of experience in biotechnology startups. I do have to mention, it's just very difficult for women founders and under-represented founders to raise funding.

Sal Daher: Just founders that don't fit the exact mold. You're not coming from one of the American institutions here. You're coming from overseas and so forth. Elon Musk, I think, likes to say talent is evenly distributed across the world, but opportunities are not. America's a place that's very high opportunity, a lot of opportunity, but we need to create ways to have access to the talents from different descriptions, obviously, geographies or jurisdictions and different backgrounds and so forth. Great. Is there another startup that's much on your mind?

Verbina

Carolina Alarco: Yes. As I mentioned, I like to work with unusual founders, if you will, or non-traditional founders. I'm working with Verbina, which is basically an app that collects messages of support and care for patients that are undergoing a difficult time. It's a platform where the patient or the caregiver sets up or opens up a collection, what it's called, and then people, families that want to support them, upload videos of support. This works very nicely in children and obviously, in any patients undergoing cancer therapy, chemotherapy, et cetera.

Verbina has been founded by a woman who used to be a teacher and was a caregiver herself to her daughter. She's just wonderful, and she's making a lot of progress, not only on the technology side, but also, for example, talking to Mass General Hospital and other potential clinical sites to test the app and see if it works as a digital therapeutic to improve the outcomes of patients that are undergoing these treatments, and see if this support from families and care from family and friends will actually have an impact, a positive impact on the clinical outcomes of these patients.

Sal Daher: Interesting. There are a lot of apps right now that help collect the sentiments and so forth, and also you can send a contribution and things like that. But this one, having an approach to support the therapy, that is very interesting. How does it do that?

Carolina Alarco: It is a proprietary platform, similar to what you could say TikTok or other platforms that collect videos, and you can upload them. This is a specific technology where the videos are only visible to the patient they're supporting. They are very personalized, of course. There are a lot of great things about this. I think this is a platform that can really help patients. It's at the intersection of a social media and a mental health app and care tech. It's really an interesting company that I'm working with, and the founder is wonderful.

Sal Daher: Is it generally just to provide connection for the patient and the emotional support, or does it have some design in it to help compliance with therapy, support, that sort of thing? The workflow aspects of it.

Carolina Alarco: For now, I think it's only messages with emotional support, but I think this could evolve to something more. It's yet to be seen. We first want to make sure that we have proof of concept as it relates to mental health and the state of mental health of patients. The founder, Beverly Klau, is fantastic.

Sal Daher: What's her last name?

Carolina Alarco: Klau, is K-L-A-U.

Sal Daher: Interesting. She comes from a background of having been a patient, you said?

Carolina Alarco: A caregiver to a patient, yes, but she is a teacher by training.

Sal Daher: The reason I'm thinking about this is that at a certain age, I've had a few colonoscopies in the Mass General system, and they use a workflow platform for walking people through the prep. I've actually interviewed Mike Singer, who was an investor in the company that built that workflow, and entered detailed videos. It might be a video from a gastroenterologist explaining why the prep is so important. There's a process before you do a colonoscopy, you have to clear your system of food and so forth so that they can visualize your innards properly. A gruesome process to go through.

This workflow and these videos and so forth, is text messages, it's email messages you get, actually help improve the prep, and therefore, better results in the long term for patients and for the people who are delivering the care through the surgeon and all the supporting staff.

Carolina Alarco: Correct. We're going to validate that with a team of investigators, and we need to select the principal investigator to conduct those studies.

Sal Daher: You're looking for a principal investigator?

Carolina Alarco: Correct.

Sal Daher: Okay, so a lead researcher who runs a lab and who would like to take this in. So message to anyone for whom that rings a bell. Contact Carolina Alarco and let her know if you know someone who might have an interest to be the lead investigator in doing a study using Verbina to see if it improves patient outcomes.

Carolina Alarco: Exactly. Thank you, Sal.

Sal Daher: Is there another startup that you want to talk about?

Latinos in Bio

Carolina Alarco: I would actually prefer to shift gears to Latinos in Bio.

Sal Daher: Okay. Tell us about Latinos in Bio.

Carolina Alarco: Latinos in Bio is actually a non-profit, which we are running as if it was a startup, but we incorporated it in Massachusetts as a non-profit in 2021, and obtained our 501(C)(3) tax exempt status from the IRS. We started with 15 Latinos that worked in biotechnology, who still work in biotechnology, and who are now the actual board members of the organization. Now we are about 650 members.

Sal Daher: Oh, wow.

Carolina Alarco: Yes, it's impressive. All Latinos that work in biotechnology and some that also work in medical technology and other fields related to the life sciences. We are a large group of Latino talent. I do hear companies tell me that they cannot find a Latino talent that is qualified to work in biotech, but I would beg to argue, if we have 650 people that are members of the organization, I'm sure we can find talent for these companies. This is one of the areas that we partner with our sponsors. We have sponsors like AbbVie, Career Farm, Alnylam, Genentech, and many other companies in the biotechnology space or in the biopharma space. We are helping them identify talent for select job openings. We are also helping them raise awareness of the need for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the life sciences.

We are working together co-sponsoring many events and in programs like mentorship programs. We have a summer cohort every year where we pair up young Latino professionals in the life sciences with, I would say, more experienced Latino professionals in the same function. If you are a young Latino professional in science, we pair you up with a more experienced scientist in the life sciences. If you are a young Latino professional in finance, for example, we pair you up with a CFO, and so on and so forth. The mentorship program runs in the summers. Then we also have a C-suite ready program to make sure that we are continuing to develop the careers of Latinos in the life sciences. We are going to launch a board-ready program very soon in the month of March.

Sal Daher: Oh, this is really important, getting people on boards as well.

Carolina Alarco: Exactly.

Sal Daher: When did you co-found Latinos in Bio?

Carolina Alarco: We informally started getting together in 2019. However, we incorporated the organization in 2021 in Massachusetts.

Sal Daher: Where are they to be found on the web?

Carolina Alarco: It's latinosinbio.org.

Sal Daher: Latinosinbio.org.

Carolina Alarco: Correct.

Sal Daher: Very good. Carolina, is there anything else you want to say on that topic?

"... I do want to say that Latinos in Bio will be raising awareness of some lack of representation of Latinos in the industry..."

Carolina Alarco: I do want to say that Latinos in Bio will be raising awareness of some lack of representation of Latinos in the industry. For example, Sal, as you know, Latinos are about 25% to 30% of the US population. However only about 10% to 15% work in the biopharma industry. When you look at the C-suite, something like 1% to 3% of the C-suite executives are Latino. The board is even worse. I think it's about 1% of the board members are Latinos. We want to close that gap and make sure that the life sciences looks a little bit more like the population of the United States.

Sal Daher: I wasn't aware that the disparity was so marked, but I'm not surprised. Very good. I think this is a very worthwhile effort that you're making. I think there are a lot of very energetic and capable Latino professionals that if shown a little bit of support, can enter-- See, that's the thing. My work is convincing angel investors to think about investing in the life sciences, but it's also a little scary for other people just getting into it. People think, "What do I know about the life sciences and so forth?" There's so much to be done in the life sciences. I think we need also to get away a little bit from the, "Every person in the company has to have a PhD," in some area of the life sciences before they can even contribute. [laughs]

I'm the last person to underestimate the value of being a scientist and being highly specialized. In a startup, we need a scientist, but we also need business people. We need finance people. We need all types of people. There's one large pharma company that I know. I joke it's like even the janitor has a PhD in molecular biology or something. It's incredible. Unless you have a PhD in some area of biology, you're not a human being in the company, which is funny.

Carolina Alarco: I think that is a misconception. Having worked for 15 years at Genzyme, which was one of the pioneering companies in biotech, and then having built two other startups with a team of people, that is what you need. You need a multidisciplinary team of people. You need people in finance, you need people in human resources, people in commercial. All kinds of functions and functional areas are needed to build a real good startup. At the same time, you need people from diverse backgrounds. There are many, many studies that show that companies that are diverse are a lot more successful than those companies that are not in terms of functions and heritage.

Sal Daher: I think the biggest barrier in the life sciences is just the fact that biology's so daunting. Of the basic sciences, it's probably the one that has the most siloed knowledge. If you work in one field and someone who is in an adjacent field transferring from one field, it is really hard because the knowledge is so particular. One set of molecules behaves completely differently from molecules that are similar, but they really are very different because it's an evolved systems and so forth. Biology is highly siloed. In contrast, for example, in engineering physics, for example, material science and so forth, there are a lot of overarching principles that if you know the physics that there are analogs in it. The information is not as siloed and you can have more visibility. Maybe I could say it's a very foggy science. It's a very particular science.

It's daunting, but at the same time, I think it also should give people a little bit of modesty that if you have a PhD in one area in biology, you'll have a hard time reading a paper in a slightly different discipline within biology. I think that is a message to people that in biology, you are always having to bone up on the particular science of whatever you're doing. That's the peculiar thing about biology. Don't be scared because everyone is in that boat to a certain extent. Even someone who is a scientist, they're boating up on that particular thing because you can't keep all the stuff in your head because it's so particular.

Carolina Alarco: That is correct. The message that I would send to investors here, Sal, is that I know that biotechnology can seem very complicated, but I think investors need to look at the potential in a particular technology, or in a particular approach, the potential for the future and the impact that something can have in patients, that is very important. For example, I like to compare it to investors that just focus on tech. I don't think investors necessarily understand all the platform and the technology and the coding behind a certain app, but they do know how that will impact.

Sal Daher: See, there are principles that they can get their heads around, but biology's so weird.

Carolina Alarco: It is.

Sal Daher: It's evolved systems. They're redundant. They're overdetermined. It's not clean and neat as physics or chemistry and so forth. At the same time, this is what creates opportunities. I made so much money investing in bonds that people would take one look and run away because, oh, my gosh, defaulted debts of Russia, defaulted debts of Nigeria. Are you kidding me? The government of the country. No way you can make money in that. I said it's exactly why you could buy those things very cheaply and then make a lot of money when they're actually restructured in the stuff that paid. I've seen this dynamic before. Stuff that is really, really hard for people to buy, and yet it has tremendous potential.

What's happening in biotech is that there's a democratization of these technologies that's happened. It doesn't take $50 million to develop some interesting technology platform that might be really valuable to a big strategic player. As I say, I'm on the board of a company called Savran Technologies. They have a micro-fluidic technology for counting and capturing extremely rare cells. They've raised $4.5 million and they're involved in collaboration with the strategic right now and several other strategics I'm looking at, because this technology has a potential to 10X or 100X existing businesses for them.

Carolina Alarco: That is correct.

Sal Daher: They can do stuff they could never do before with this technology that's taken a few million dollars to develop, to take out scientifically. It's a Purdue technology. Technology developed by Purdue. Originally, it's a Purdue company. Now, it has its own lab, LabShares in Newton. Shout out to LabShares.

Carolina Alarco: I think what you're saying is totally right. There's so much potential and, of course, there is risk. Biotechnology is high-risk, high-reward, and you need patient capital. That's why I think investors are calling that patient capital because it does take a couple of years, a few years to go through all of the studies that you need.

Sal Daher: We have to get biological samples and run them to a lab. Set up the lab in the beginning to begin with and all that. It takes a little bit more time, but it reduces the number of competitors. It's not just a downside. If you have a really capable founder, technical founder, and the providing business support for that technical founder is something that angels really could do. Carolina, I would like to just do a very brief promotion for our podcast. Then I would like on the second half, to get into your career and how you came to where you are today, because that can be a tremendous model. You're talking about getting people from under-represented backgrounds to work in the life sciences. I think maybe highlighting your path to where you are now could be useful.

Anyway, this podcast is a learning vehicle. We are in our seventh season and we launch every Wednesday. Every week there's a conversation with someone who has done a lot of work to build startups in some way or another, either as an angel or a founder or an advisor. If you find a conversation to be particularly valuable, you can upvote us. You can get us more prominence by doing a couple things. First, follow us. Follow the podcast. Follow Angel Invest Boston podcast so it shows up every week in your podcast stream. The other thing you can do is leave a rating. We'd love five star ratings. Thank you. My mom asked me to say that, that we like five star ratings. [laughs]

Also take the time to leave a written review because the algorithm sees a five star rating and then sees some text. You don't have to write much. One or two sentences, put a subject line and one or two sentences. You can even be critical in your written review as long as you give five stars, because the algorithm isn't that sophisticated. It doesn't pick that up. It just sees that something has been written and it's five stars. Bingo. It gets shown to a lot more people and it helps promote the learning mission of this podcast.

That's why we do this. That's why someone like Carolina who has so many things going on in her life makes time to be on the podcast. That's why I tear myself away from my other businesses to be involved with this, because this is a really important thing we're doing, is building the capacity for creating new startup companies. Anyway, Carolina, let's go on to how you came to where you are now. You're not from the US. Where did you come from?

Carolina's Background

Carolina Alarco: Yes, I'm Peruvian. I was born and raised in Peru.

Sal Daher: Peruana.

Carolina Alarco: Peruana. The best food in the world, by the way.

Sal Daher: The Peruvian people are really nice. It's just a friendly place and the food is outstanding and the landscape is so gorgeous. Peru is a beautiful place.

Carolina Alarco: It is a beautiful country and Peruvian people are very friendly and Peruvian cuisine is recognized around the world as one of the best cuisines in the world.

Sal Daher: Well, let's highlight a few of your favorite dishes.

Carolina Alarco: As every Peruvian, I also cook a little bit and one of the dishes that I love to make is Lomo Saltado, which is like filet mignon sautéed with onions and tomatoes and served with rice and French fries. The other dish that I love to make is aji de gallina which is like a stew with chicken. Actually it says gallina which is hand, but it's really made with chicken and it's a stew that is served over potatoes and it has pecans and special aji sauce that is the Peruvian typical Aji Maria sauce, yellow chili pepper. Those are two of my favorite.

Sal Daher: Yes, there's a tremendous biodiversity in the Peruvian Highlands. All these interesting peppers and interesting corns and interesting things.

Carolina Alarco: That is correct.

Sal Daher: Yes. That shows up in the-- and do you venture into ceviche at all?

Carolina Alarco: Well, ceviche is actually very hard to make in the United States because we can't find the typical lime that is small, very acidic lime that actually cooks the fish so you don't need to cook it separately.

Sal Daher: Ceviche is fish that's cooked in lime juice.

Carolina Alarco: Correct.

Sal Daher: Lime, lima is a small relative of lemon that came from Peru, which I love, which is very much the basis of Mexican food and so forth.

Carolina Alarco: Yes. Ceviche is amazing.

Sal Daher: Growing up in Brazil we had the lime and also a hybrid of lime and orange, like a lime orange. It's like a green lime tasting orange, that was orange from Lima, Peru.

Carolina Alarco: Yes, so much variety in fruits and vegetables.

Sal Daher: Interesting. You can't make the ceviche here because you don't have the lime that's sufficiently acidic because all the lime have been bred to be less acidic, so they're more accessible.

Carolina Alarco: Yes. The lime here is sweeter. If you make the ceviche, it can probably taste like a lemonade instead of--

Sal Daher: [laughs] I was looking for a fish cooked in lime juice and it tasted like lemonade.

Carolina Alarco: Yes. Very difficult. I know there are places and restaurants that have figured out how to make Peruvian ceviche, which is actually the best in the world, but making it in the house is very difficult.

Sal Daher: How about anticuchos?

Carolina Alarco: I would love to make anticuchos but you can't find heart in the store.

Sal Daher: Chicken hearts. [laughs] I know.

Carolina Alarco: It's actually cow heart. It's also pretty difficult.

Sal Daher: I've had chicken hearts.

Carolina Alarco: Chicken hearts is also good. Yes.

Sal Daher: Yes. Well, growing up in Brazil we used to have chickens wandering around the backyard and eating chicken heart and chicken gizzards and all this stuff in the soup was very much part of our of growing up. Very good. Anyway, so you left behind all the food and you came to the States. When did you come up here?

"... I came up in the '90s. I came to study a graduate degree in International Management Harvard..."

Carolina Alarco: I did. I came up in the '90s. I came to study a graduate degree in International Management Harvard. During my studies I realized that there was this new industry that was just really starting in the United States, which was called Biotech. Biotechnology was really starting at that time. Some of the pioneering companies like Genzyme and Biogen were located in Massachusetts. Right next to Harvard Business School, the new Genzyme manufacturing facility with bioreactors was being built. It really caught my interest and started studying about the industry.

I had been working in Peru in Abbot Laboratory so I did have a pharma background at Abbot. I was a division manager for Abbott, Peru. I was convinced that I wanted to stay in the biopharma industry because it was really a very fulfilling experience to work on therapies for patients and work with doctors to find solutions to unmet medical needs.

When I heard about biotech, I thought, oh my God, this is the future of medicine. It happens that one of my classmates was a scientist at Genzyme and we were speaking about my background. He was actually from China. We were speaking about my background in pharmaceuticals and he said, "I think Genzyme is planning to open offices in Latin America. Why don't you give me your resume and I'll pass it around." Genzyme called me the next day, literally, and started interviews. Interviewed with everybody. Very well known people like Henry Tamir, who was the long-term CEO of Genzyme who actually passed away suddenly a few years ago. I was lucky to join the company when it was a small company. It only had one product approved by the FDA.

We were very few people, maybe 100 or 200. In the 15 years that I was with the company, the company grew from like 100 people to 10,000 people and from 1 product to about 40 products that we brought to patients around the world. We also expanded to about 80 countries around the world. I was so happy to be part of that and really bring innovation to patients around the world. That's really a great mission. My Genzyme colleagues to this day, we consider ourselves friends or even family. We get together often and we have a Facebook group going and we stay very connected till this day. I stayed at Genzyme until it was acquired by Sanofi. Then I stayed for about six months to transition and then I went on to form another startup.

Sal Daher: At that point it became big pharma. Genzyme was one of the singular life science startups here. 100 employees is still pretty small compared to what I do as a late stage startup. Most of my startups have single digit employees, but very interesting, it's like the perfect time to get into biotech. Tell me a little bit about how you started becoming an angel investor. Picking up a pen and writing a check, perfectly good money into something that is unproven, is not often done. What got you to get off the sidelines and actually do that?

Carolina Alarco: Sure. After Genzyme, I got involved with a company called Aegerion Pharmaceuticals. The company had just gone public, and we were still raising money and doing investor presentations and things like that. I realized how hard it is to raise funding to start a company, especially when your product is not yet approved by the FDA, and it's not marketed. After the product is marketed, of course you have the income from revenues, but before that, you need to keep the company going and the lights on basically.

One of the most important jobs of the CEO and the board members, and all the executives in the company, is really to help raise funding from investors. That's why now that I work with smaller startups, I know how important it is to secure at least one or two years of runway to get to the next value inflection point and be able to provide some validation to these investors, and then continue to build your investor portfolio, if you will, with people that you like to work with, that you appreciate their advice.

I think angel investors are so critical for small startups, because angel investors are normally like you and I, Sal. Very experienced with many, many years, more than 20 years of experience. I think that the real world experience that we can transfer to these first-time founders or young founders, I think it's invaluable and companies benefit tremendously from that. I think that angel investors are critical.

Sal Daher: You came to angel investing from being in a company that was raising money at the time, that was a startup, and you saw that from the side of being in a late stage startup. Subsequently, you were willing to actually go in as an investor.

Carolina Alarco: That is correct. I appreciate the risk-taking and the need that these founders have to find people that believe in what they're doing, and that are willing to risk their capital to see their technologies or their products come to market and benefit either consumers, or in the case of biotech, as patients.

Sal Daher: Tremendous. Carolina, as we think of wrapping up the interview, take a moment and think what you'd like to communicate to our audience of founders, of angel investors, of advisors to early stage companies, that might be helpful to them.

Advice to the Audience

Carolina Alarco: Sure. My final message would be to young founders, to find people that have been there and done that and really listen to advice, and really get mentorship and sponsorship from people that have a lot of experience in what they're trying to do, and be open to the advice and be malleable, if that's a word, to really--

Sal Daher: I think the word is coachable.

Carolina Alarco: Coachable, exactly.

Sal Daher: I think about advice because a lot of founders say, "Oh, I get so much advice. I couldn't possibly follow everything." You know what? You have to understand, keep a perspective. People who are giving you advice, are giving experience they've had, and they're communicating to you to say, "This reminds me of a situation that's like this." Not necessarily going to be applicable in every instance. Their read of your situation may not be exact and so forth.

But let me tell you, if someone tells you something, and then two weeks later, someone else tells you something very similar, I would jump on that immediately. That means you are tripping on your shoelaces and you don't know about it. Pay attention. If you are a founder who's raised money, communicate with your-- Even after you raise, like regular communication with your investors, I think is really important. Have you found that to be an important thing for your startups?

Carolina Alarco: Absolutely. Founders tend to be extremely busy with the day-to-day operations and forget to communicate to their investors and supporters.

Sal Daher: I think they overthink it. They think it has to be this ground shaking. No. Don't spend more than 30 minutes on it.

Carolina Alarco: [laughs] Exactly

Sal Daher: Make sure it ties into what you said last quarter. Other than this, so read your last report, and let's spend 30 minutes figuring out what's happened since then, and put it out to investors on a regular basis.

Carolina Alarco: Yes. A nice email would do, or now with a technology that we have, like a Zoom call with all of your supporters, I think that will go a long way.

Sal Daher: I'm a big proponent of emails, because I've invested in 50 companies right now. I couldn't possibly be on so many Zooms, but I can read a lot of emails. If it triggers something, maybe I can help the company or whatever, then I'll do the Zoom. Make the zooms available, absolutely, but don't expect that everybody will pick you up on the Zooms, because that's a big time commitment. Anyway, so Carolina, I think that that is very wise advice to seek help and to know how to take help.

Carolina Alarco: For investors, especially angel investors, Sal, I do want to send a message here that they should really consider looking at first-time founders and founders of color as people that they'd like to support with capital, because it is very hard for them, as I mentioned, to raise funding. I think that investors are quite skeptical and used to investing in the type of founders that they are more comfortable with. If the future of America is going to be with this very talented founders that possibly don't look like people that you're used to, so they're probably, either Latinos or Black founders or female founders. I would really send a message to investors to make an extra effort to take a look at their proposals, at their pitches, their technologies, and make an extra effort to try and support them.

Sal Daher: Yes. Remember that talent is distributed evenly across the world, across ethnicities and so forth. If you are concentrating on investing in a sliver of that, you're missing out on opportunities, and just for selfish interests. If you have some founder who comes from an underrepresented background and is working really, really hard and is highly committed, you're probably getting a bargain. Someone who is going to outperform because they've jumped through a lot of hurdles. I see this with a lot of women founders.

The number of women founders that are just outstanding is just, they're overrepresented in the group of outstanding founders in my portfolio. I think part of it is because they've had to overcome these barriers. Yes, I second that. Carolina, I thank you very much for making time to be on the Angel Invest Boston podcast. Carolina Alarco, advisor to biotech companies, highly experienced biotech executive, who works with new biotech companies that are getting set up as an advisor and sometimes invests in them as an angel. I thank you for making time to be on the Angel Invest Boston podcast.

Carolina Alarco: Thank you, Sal. Thanks for having me. I really appreciated our conversation.

Sal Daher: Tremendous. This is Angel Invest Boston. I thank you for listening. I'm Sal Daher.

[music]

I am glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.