The Cure by Geeta Anand

Author:Geeta Anand
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353051495
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2018-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

16

Losing Support

Winter 2000–Spring 2001

Cambridge, Massachusetts; Oklahoma City,

Oklahoma; San Francisco, California; Princeton,

New Jersey

John couldn’t afford to let Neose’s displeasure demoralize him. He kept telling himself that the company had no real power over him. Neose, after all, didn’t hold a voting board seat. All that really mattered, John knew, was the support of his board. If he kept that, the Neose debacle would just be a bump in the road.

But what was brewing on the board would prove more dangerous than anything Neose had handed him.

Unbeknownst to John, one board member, Gus Lawlor, a partner at HealthCare Ventures, had begun his tenure particularly skeptical of the young CEO. HealthCare Ventures, one of the most respected health investment funds in the world of biotechnology, had invested in Novazyme over the initial objections of Gus, who at that time had been the venture firm’s newest partner. Gus had opposed the Novazyme investment for one and only one reason—John. Gus saw John’s conflict of interest as an insurmountable obstacle.1

“I don’t believe the guy can be a good businessman and a good father at the same time,” he had told his partners. “I don’t believe it because I don’t think I could do it. What’s going to happen if the question is whether he should spend our money wisely or get his kids the drug? He’s going to spend away our money.”

Gus’s partners had argued that that same conflict of interest made John immensely motivated. John’s urgency, combined with the fact that Genzyme would likely have to buy Novazyme, made it an excellent investment, they argued. In the end, Gus had reluctantly agreed to the investment—his first as a venture capitalist.

When it came time to decide which partner would sit on the Novazyme board, however, Gus’s colleagues decided it should be him. As the most skeptical, he would watch the company the most carefully.

The board membership made Gus nervous. While he was about ten years older than John, it was his first assignment as a partner at HealthCare Ventures, and he was determined not to let it end in failure. He hadn’t been born rich. He’d grown up in the old mill city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, the eldest of four sons born to a pharmacist and his homemaker wife. He’d graduated from the University of New Hampshire and the Yale School of Management—like John, a hard worker and a shrewd businessman.

But unlike the younger man, Gus already had more than a decade of experience in management at four biotechnology companies. And he was now responsible for making profitable investments for HealthCare Ventures—and protecting them. He didn’t have sick children; nor, from his position, could he afford to let anyone’s sick children affect his business judgment. Gus resolved to watch John’s every move.

Everything John did in the first few months after the venture investment seemed to confirm Gus’s fears—and worse. In addition to the huge conflict of interest, Gus found John inexperienced and arrogant.

The first thing Gus noticed was how quickly John was filling senior management positions with people who had no experience in the area they were supervising.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.