Building an AI-Powered Pharmaceutical Services Business: VIDA CEO Susan Wood (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Did you work in engineering all through this period?

Susan Wood: No. When I left Hopkins, I actually worked in a business capacity. It was a very technical sale. I probably wasn’t as heavy on my programming ability as a lot of the people in the company. I started learning my MBA on the street at that time.

Sramana Mitra: Technical selling is a fabulous training ground for a tech career. They tend to be very good product people.

Susan Wood: It taught me a lot. It gave me a different lens on a business in a hurry. I was in product management in R2. It was a business unit so had R&D work.

Sramana Mitra: Fast forward a little bit, where are we now?

Susan Wood: I went to a company called Vital Images. Vital Images exited to Toshiba. I initially was on the Board of my current company VIDA. One of my advisors from graduate school left the East Coast, went into the center of Iowa, and started this world-class imaging center. He wanted a CEO who knew the science. I came full circle. Vital was a public company.

Sramana Mitra: What stage was VIDA in when you got involved?

Susan Wood: They had a little bit of money.

Sramana Mitra: How many were involved?

Susan Wood: Seven.

Sramana Mitra: They were all scientists?

Susan Wood: Mostly scientists and people working in clinical management.

Sramana Mitra: What was the technology that they had built when you came on board?

Susan Wood: It was an imaging-based analysis – finding biomarkers in the lung that identified health and disease. It was largely working with academic grants and programs. It wasn’t commercial at all.

Sramana Mitra: One observation I have of scientific stuff coming into the commercial domain is, it’s a very smart way to do science. You have the fund to do the science portion. I was talking to someone yesterday who spent four years of Ph.D. research and then built technology and then took the technology to start a company without staying to finish the Ph.D.

The good part of that story is that you do have technology built and scientific research done. It’s not a bad way to build early-stage technology that needs a lot of R&D.

Susan Wood: Excellent point. Not only did we have the research from our academic partners, but we also had some SVIRs. The really important thing going into this quasi-bootstrapping mode was that because of the work that we had done at R2 I learned early the importance of data agreements and data. We spent a lot of money on clinical trials and clinical validation that were paid for by the company.

A lot of that validation work can get done and funded by these partnerships that are validating their solution. You’re getting the development offset because you’re not paying a third party to do it. We got very strong data agreements early on.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent point. Doing all that on a venture timeline where VCs are trying to go from zero to $100 in five to seven years is a problem. If you can get that done before entering the venture timeline, that’s excellent.

Susan Wood: A lot of people say why is it taking longer? Part of it is getting these foundational pieces.

Sramana Mitra: What year are we in now in this story?

Susan Wood: Probably maybe 2014.

Sramana Mitra: 2014 is when you have enough clinical validation?

Susan Wood: We probably had enough to go commercial. The challenge is how to get it to market. We’re a Midwest company. It was founded as a spinoff of the University of Iowa. It’s not as lucrative as Silicon Valley obviously. I had a great partner at bioeconomic development.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building an AI-Powered Pharmaceutical Services Business: VIDA CEO Susan Wood
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