Today we’re in Munich at BIO-Europe to chat with one of the best commentators in European biotech, Mike Ward. We talk about the best and the worst of the European biotech industry since the 80s.
Mike has been in biotech content since the birth of the industry in the 80s. He has worked at BioCentury, Informa/Scrip and now Clarivate. I’ve known Mike for many years and I like how clearly he sees things while being no-bullshit and fun.
Transcript
Mike Ward: It’s just like wow, I’m not normally the subject. I’m normally the interrogator. The creation of humanized antibodies and what eventually became the best selling drug ever, which is Humira. That was the reason why people didn’t like me. I know more people who’ve gotten Nobel prizes than probably watched Love Island or whatever.
Philip Hemme: Hey, I’m your host Philip and welcome to a new episode of the Flot.bio Show. Where I interview the best Europeans in biotech to help you grow. Today, I’m in Munich at BioEurope. So you can see a bit from behind. To chat with Mike Ward, who is one of the best commentators in the industry. Mike has been covering this place actually since, what is it, the beginnings, in the late 80s.
Has worked with, with Biosentry, with… Script, and format, and now is with Clarivate. I’ve known Mike for almost a decade, actually, and I like how sharp and clearly he sees things without at the same time being no BS bullshit, and also being just a fun person. I thought I’d even call him the, the rock star, but it’s like, we will talk about the European industry really from the birth to now, and from the best things to the worst. Stories. So, let’s head and meet with Mike.
[00:01:32] The best and worst of biotech
Philip Hemme: Alright, welcome Mike, welcome to the show.
Mike Ward: Well, thanks for having me, Philippe.
Philip Hemme: As we were talking, now you’re on the other side.
Mike Ward: Not exactly, it’s an interview. It’s just like, wow, I’m not normally the subject. I’m normally the interrogator, so, so this is, this is gonna be an interesting experience. Not too stressful.
It’s okay. It’s okay. I’ll just do what I usually do. Tell the truth. It’s easy. It’s easy to remember.
Philip Hemme: That’s great. So let’s start with the truth. I think I want to start with, as you have covered this space since really the birth of the industry from, from the birth to now. So what’s kind of some of the best and some of the worst you have seen?
Mike Ward: So you’re right, it’s almost 40 years. So, so I mean, covering the sector, so, Europe was, there was hardly anything here in Europe. There was maybe about 10 companies. So we’ve seen a lot. The best and the worst, I, actually, I think there’s one thing that it’s almost two sides of the same coin. Yeah. And that is around, The creation of humanized antibodies and what eventually became the best selling drug ever, which is Amira.
And yeah, how this works is that one, obviously brilliant science, right? Greg Winter and his, his lab. Nobel Prize. They got the Nobel Prize for it and, and, and quite rightly so. But, and, and this was a time when nobody believed in antibodies. They’d been… They were used as diagnostics, but that was it. But what we actually had is a Greg Winter had come up with this, this science.
It was backed by the MR, the, the medical research council. So obviously that that’s the best, the best of things.
Philip Hemme: It was in Cambridge,
Mike Ward: in Cambridge, London, 90s, golden triangle, golden triangle. But what actually had was, is that science, it will also actually, it didn’t just. Yeah, wasn’t just around the creation of of Cambridge Anybody technology.
It was also morphosis Yeah in Munich. Yeah, and it was also a an Australian company called pep tech So that the the IP had kind of been spread around and that was part of the problem. Yeah, because Actually, there was a sort of a dispute between those two teams What you also had though was at that time in Europe funding Was, you know, if people think it’s bad now, it was non existent.
I mean, but the amount of money, the whole of the European biotech sector would raise, you know, these days you can see companies. Yeah. Could raise in a one series. Hey, and that was the totality. So money was really hard to come by and the public markets, for example, the London stock exchange, they had recently changed their rules to allow biotech companies to float, but even though you didn’t, they didn’t have a trading history, but they had to sort of demonstrate that they had assets that.
Were interesting and one of the ways you did that was doing a deal So what we had is we had Cambridge anybody’s technology at the time. They had a molecule called d2 e7. They’re a great memory It’s just we’ve just called which is which became Humira and they and they licensed it to canal which was an the pharmaceutical arm of Of, of BASF.
Yeah. And eventually that got acquired by AB Abbott, which became, became AbbVie. But we had this company that was struggling to get finance. Yeah. And, and more, FOIS was also in a, sort of a similar, in a similar space. Yeah. These guys are working on human antibodies. Okay. In the States, at the same time, we had Apgenix, and we had Medirex I think, and both of those companies eventually got acquired.
But at the sort of the, the turn of the 1999 or there abouts, these two companies were able to go to the to the Nasdaq capital market and raise a billion dollars or, or in that kind of order. Whereas Cambridge University Technology and Morphosis really, really struggled to raise a lot.
Philip Hemme: Was it in the hundreds of millions that worked? They raised.
Mike Ward: It was about that. I mean, that makes difference. But, and what, what it meant was that, you know, for example, for Cambridge antibody technology, they just basically ran outta steam. Yeah. They, they’d managed to do a deal with AstraZeneca. So AstraZeneca owned a big, big chuck. Yeah. And, but the company was eventually sold.
The, the price that AstraZeneca paid was about $400 million because they already owned a big, big chunk. Because AstraZeneca wanted access to antibodies. That’s it. Now, the, the, again, it was still early days for, for the development of Humira. And AstraZeneca sold that asset to AbbVie, or their share of that asset, for 400 million, which is about the equivalent of one week’s revenues peak for, for, for Humira.
But what we, what we had, we had a situation where… We had a little biotech company in, in the UK that created the best selling drug ever, which was probably the original, you know, pipeline in a drug because of all those different indications. And it struggled. So I remember once interviewing David Chiswell.
So I was saying, yeah, how does it feel to be the CEO of a company that created the world’s best selling drug? But he did it all. Yeah. And that, and that was the situation. So that’s where, what did he say? So it was the best of times and the worst of times. What did he say? He said, that was the reason why people didn’t like me, that kind of question.
I mean, he was only joshing, he was, he was in front of an audience, but, you know, the audience did go, Oh, whatever. And then he realized that it was, yeah, I think I sort of made, made a comment like, so I guess I’m off your Christmas card list, but it, it, it, it was all, it was all fine. But, but that’s just interestingly, you know, when we sort of look at the sort of the European biotech scene, I’m certainly brilliant at the science.
And potentially translating it, but it just, it just doesn’t seem to work because of, you know, the capital markets aren’t here. And, you know, there have been attempts, you know, to sort of see it, but, you know, what we’ve seen in in, in the, you know, for, for a lot of European companies to have been successful, they had to go to the States now.
And it’s worth remembering all that original science that in fact spawned the U. S. biotech industry. A lot of it actually originated here in Europe anyway. So, you know, for example, the sort of the monoclonal antibodies. That was, that was MRC. Genentech’s first products. Is it? There was tissue plasminogen activator.
Came out of Belgium. The human growth hormone stuff came out of Sweden. You know, it’s like, it’s… A lot. And then, if you’re like,
Philip Hemme: buy anything… M& A, lots of M& A come from Germany, or from Europe,
Mike Ward: yeah. Yeah, yeah, that’s, so, so, it’s, it’s, it’s, Europe’s always been great at the, at the fundamental science. It’s just always been, sort of, being able to, sort of, like, translate that into commercial success.
And, again, sort of, thinking about, you know, the best and the worst, that now and then, I, I would be asked by… Venture capitalists or, or, or, or CEOs of companies to sort of talk to CEOs who are pitching to other VCs and they show me their, their presentation because I’ve seen lots and lots of presentations and often it’s the first advice I have to, to the European CEO is you have to channel your inner American because you know, the number of times they’re, they’re giving the presentation and they’re already A. community. Telling you what the ends are with it and well, there’s this challenge and that challenge It’s not like oh, no this, you know, we’re this is gonna be the biggest change in Britain Which is why when you have people like, you know Abgenix and medirex who are able to raise a lot of money based on chimeric chimeric, you know mouse antibodies not human antibodies they’re able to do all that and yes and and it’s and it wasn’t because The, the, the, the CEOs that we had, you know, the sort of, the management talent wasn’t that they, they weren’t any good.
’cause, you know, Simon Maroni, who was running Morphosis, you know, a giant of European biotech, you know, David Chisel has been very, very successful in helping your mentor and grow other, you know, European businesses. It’s so, yeah. So, yeah, it’s a long answer to the
[00:11:08] The beginnings of the EU biotech scene
Philip Hemme: No, it’s great. It’s great. To start, actually, what, what strikes me is that. Some of the challenges that existed in the 80s, 90s are still here today.
Mike Ward: No, absolutely. So, so sitting in panels, and especially now that, oh, it will, everything’s really, really hard. You know, so I find that thing is whatever. And there are some sort of like VCs who were around in the 90s sort of thinking.
Well, you guys haven’t got a clue. You know, they said, you know, what happened between 2019 and 2022 in terms of, you know, the amount of money that’s gone into, into the, into the industry? That’s the anomaly. All we’ve actually gone back to is the pre pandemic norms. Because in, well, in the 90s, there was, there was hardly any money whatsoever.
I did a, a report for Arthur Anderson, right? When it was famous. I can’t think for right. Yeah Nothing to do with everyone but But we’d we’d written I’d helped them write a report on the state of the UK biotech industry and this was about 1992 and We’d come up with a projection that for the Europe for the UK biotech sector over the next three years it needed to raise a billion pounds and Okay.
I remember a member of the CEO who was a member of the BIA, the Bioindustry Association board came over to me and sort of says, well, you have single handedly killed off any potential for the UK biotech industry because That was kind of unheard of, right? The idea of to raise a billion pounds, and it was only over three years.
And that was the hot, everybody I don’t think we had, at that time, we had people like Celltech, right? And other, you know, sort of like, you know, companies that were You know, top of the, top of the class in, in, in, in European terms. And, you know, that was, that was the sort of situation. Oh, by the way, in that three years, they actually raised 996 million.
And I said, we’re only four, four million. You round it up, you’re at the… But it was because there was, there was already, we were beginning to sort of see the fruits. We saw the pharmaceutical industry at this stage, around 92. You know, this was, you know, Jan Leshley, Ed Smith Klein, et cetera, who began to bet on things like human genome sciences.
Kind of recognized that the future for the pharmaceutical industry was biological. Before that, it had been the synthetic chemists. Because, you know, most of those pharmaceutical companies were, in fact, the drug arms of big chemical companies. You just name any of them. It was the sort, they were, and they were…
The sort of sort of release.
Philip Hemme: I know at least from, I mean, Sanofi, all the history comes from, is from the What, Rogue Black? Health, which is basically, basically total. And then BASF is still the chemical company. They spun out, and Bayer as well, and Yeah, yeah, Rundpulak, and, well, so they had Rogue Black,
Mike Ward: and they had Hertz.
So Hertz went into, into, I mean, Sanofi was a whole bunch of people. Novartis? Yeah. Yeah, that was Sieber, and Geigy, and Sandoz. You know, they, they all, it’s, you know, to create their life science. AstraZeneca was your ICI pharmaceuticals. Yeah. And then they merged with the with this Yeah. ASRA for, from, from Sweden.
So you could sort of see all these, the, the, these, these, these these pharmaceuticals. But at that time it was, it was all, they had a chemical heritage. Yeah. And I remember sort of like in 19 88, 87, 88, you’re talking to. pharmaceutical executives and their view was that this biotechnology thing, while it’s okay for making you know, you know, some proteins that either had originally been derived from dead bodies or they were chemically modified from from pigs, i. e. sort of insulin and hemoglobin, but yeah, it’s, it’s, it, they’re never going to make a business out of it. And the early shots at trying to make therapeutic antibodies actually Really withered on the vine. Yeah. It wasn’t until 97 98 that you started to sort of see sort of change, but some of the early players though, were the likes of of of Smith Klein Beem.
Yeah. Which eventually merged to, with, with black. So to create GSK.
Philip Hemme: Well, you talk about, it’s super interesting to see the, the parallel, well, you talked about this biotechnology thing, and I think, I mean, in the. Late 70s, 80s. This, the term was not even really invented. Like, was it, or was it, or how, how was it like really described?
Was it corn? I mean, I think Genentech with IPO really kind of started that. Yeah.
Mike Ward: Well, so Genentech’s IPO must be, what, about 79? Yeah. The, what the the, I think the, the, probably the first biotech company was a company called Cetus. Yeah. Which is like, you know, well, became part of Chiron, which then eventually became part of novartis. But at that time, yeah, so the phrase was being coined because I, I actually, my first job was it had been advertised by a, a, a magazine called Chemistry in Industry, which is published by the Society of Chemical Industry. And the job advert said that they wanted a chemist biochemist who could write about this, you know, new thing called biotechnology.
because we believe it’s going to be kept consequential for the chemical industry. So, so in 84, it was there. But the whole point was is that, you know, for, for the pharmaceutical guys, it was an intellectual curiosity. For the ag, agrochemical guys, they kind of realized that, you know, the opportunity of modifying seeds, therefore, you know, people like, you know, Monsanto, or, or in fact, quite a lot of the…
Again, this is a perfect example that… Plant, bio biotech, agricultural biotech. It was, it was Rolan plant genetic systems in, in, in Belgium, Europe was way ahead of the game. Yeah. But of course it was the the, the sort of the, the antagonism towards this from the sort of the, the public, the regulation, the pol the, the, the, yeah.
The regulations said, which just killed it off.
Philip Hemme: I like, I like the, if we and. I, I have several things I want to jump into or even go from the past to today. One thing is this, this biotech term, like they’re calling the technology and the company a biotech and how you define it. I found it always like it works, but it’s pretty far from perfectly.
And now, and now you get like. Biotech means even a small re company, even something not really innovating. What do you think about
Mike Ward: this? Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, so it it, it it is. So yeah. Sometimes there is that sort of the enabling technology is Yeah, biotechnology, okay. Which covers everything. Right.
A whole, a whole raft of, of, of, of things. And then of course, which might be one of the problems that it’s had. And then, of course, then you have, you know, sort of the biotech company and, you know, what is a biotech? And I used to define biotechs as basically drug, R& D drug companies that weren’t making any money and actually had no, no chance of making money in the foreseeable future.
Philip Hemme: Not too bad, actually. Huh? It’s not too bad. I like it.
Mike Ward: Yeah, but it was, they were, they were emerging. Now, of course.
Philip Hemme: It’s kind of, let’s say in the startup world where a startup is anything that doesn’t have a, that is not profitable. As in the, at the end in the farmer world, you take the same parallel. I mean, giving you this definition, basically a biotech is a pharma startup.
Mike Ward: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s not profitable. Whereas now what you have is you have people that they are biopharma companies or we sort of see, Oh, well now they’ll call themselves a gene therapy company or so, but they’re still, it’s still kind of like. Descriptives. Yeah. And they could all still be lumped as biotech and yet they’re doing pretty different things.
They could be a cell therapy company or they could be you know, developing some sort of gene therapy for for hearing. It’s all, all, all over the shop. So it’s just a sort of generic term. And yeah, unfortunately I think that that again has been a problem because. Often, and, and certainly in the early days, a lot of these companies only had like, you know, one or two assets.
Yeah. So it was a completely binary situation, and, and, and you’d see someone that everybody was really, really excited about, because there’s all, there’s a huge, I mean, people sort of think there’s height and bubbles these days. In the past, it would be, people would get excited about hardly anything. A little, a little bit more, don’t they?
And it’s all… Yeah, sky high and then they get the result then and the company goes you just think that’s the basic Yeah, and of course what’s actually happened is by the time it’s it’s got all that hype and everybody’s really really excited by it You’ve got all the what they call the tourist investors or the generalist or they all reading real check retail investors I’ve come into the space and then they’ve got They lost their shirt and, and they say, well, and it take a few years for, I’m never, I’m never gonna do that again.
So it’s one of these things where
Philip Hemme: until they come back again in the try, I think in the cycles, you basically see,
Mike Ward: well, it’s a, yeah. Yeah.
[00:21:38] It’s all in cycles and echos
Mike Ward: So talk about cycles. So oh, crikey, what was his name? There was a, a, a, a famous Goldman Sachs banker who basically sort of described how it looked like the biotech sector was.
On a sort of, in terms of finance, it was on a sort of seven year cycle from boom to bust or whatever. And, and he, he had this theory that actually it was not much to do with the sort of science and the technology. It was more to do with the life cycle of, of analysts. So when the analysts come in, they’re all, they’re all really, really excited.
And, and, and sort of like you’re breathless about the sort of the science, et cetera. But eventually they kind like get jaded and they, then they decide they don’t want to do it anymore. They burned up for six, seven years and, and then, and then they’re gone. And they might go and join you sort of companies or, or, or, yeah.
Yeah. Do, do something. It’s, it’s not too hard on them. And then you get the new, the next crowd coming in and, you know, it, it’s, it may be apocryphal, it might be, it’s, it’s, it’s a fun story to tell. Yeah. But there’s probably
Philip Hemme: one, I mean, there’s probably one thing there as well of cycles, but not even just the analyst, even in VCs, even in the people, some people, I mean, even go in seven years, usually you have time to forget what happened or like.
Mike Ward: So, so of course I do. As you pointed out though, you know, I’ve been doing this for a long time, therefore he is just like, oh yeah, this reminds me of your X, Y, and Z. You know, so that’s the, or sometimes you get the CEO’s recycled or whatever, and you go, didn’t you used to do such and such with? But Oh yes.
So so, so you, so you, so you do see, see these cycles and, and then sort of the echo. So again, sort of coming back to the point of, you know, where we are now. Yeah, we, in 2000, 2001 when you know, a, after the, sort of the geno well, the, the sort of the in internet bubble, right? That, that burst. But also at the same time we had the sort of, the first little draft of the human genome program where Bill Clinton, who was the US president at the time, and Tony Blair, who was the UK Prime Minister, basically go, well, this is gonna be, this, this, and this.
And, and, and there was a sort of a sense of, they kind of like killed the potential because they, this was. Oh, the promising it, but it was also, Oh, nobody should be making money out of this. There was that kind of like that view of this has got like to democratize healthcare and, but with also with the, the internet bubble bursting, there was a nuclear winter for four years.
So it took four years to recover in 2001. And then in 2008, you know, we saw all of those back, I mean, you know, they were You know, big backers, you know, Lehman Brothers was, was you know, a, a strong supporter of, of your life sciences, et cetera. And, and I remember, you know, I was, you know by a century at, at the time.
And you, we had the meeting, you know, when, when Lehman’s went bust, it was, it was this a sort of, you know, an existential crisis for, for, for, for the sector. Because. At that time, still, we didn’t have companies, you know, making much money. I mean, there were some that were making money, but the sector still required, you know, tons and tons of capital.
And the idea is, is that, you know, if it wasn’t there, you know, there would be challenge. I mean, we did a, you know, and particularly in Europe, it was even worse. I mean, that’s why, you know, the sort of, when we talked about, you know, the sort of the tip, the tip of the iceberg, where we sort of did an analysis of The, the financial requirements, because when you look at the clinical trials that they’re doing, you can sort of say, well, okay, you might have raised this much money, but actually you need to raise an awful lot more to be able to push all these things through the clinics.
So, and again, if you look at, if you look at the sort of financing, it took about three or four years for it to recover from the 2008 crisis. So now when we look at, you know, where we are now. And with all the, sort of, the, the macro, you know, political externalities, you know, sort of, war in Ukraine, you know, war in the Middle East, you know, disputes with, you know, mainland China, and, and, and then other places, it’s, you know, you know, you see people, sort of, like, talking about, oh, well, you know, when the IPO market, you know, reopens, you know, it might be next year or whatever, you know, I’m thinking, wow, it’s, it’s, Yeah, it could be a bit longer and that’s the reason why you’ll see in the VCs who have raised tons and tons of money They’re raised crazy.
They’re able to raise the money. I’ve been worse raising a new fund But what they’re what they’re what they’re saying to their companies is You have to have financial discipline Yeah so we’re seeing them cutting back on their programs etc because they don’t know when They’re going to be able to start raising proper money again.
So therefore these, these VCs are having to deploy more or put more capital to back their existing portfolios. Which means that we will see, no doubt, a drop off in new company creation. And there are, there are companies, you know, we’re at, in the the BioEURA meeting, where there are lots and lots of companies running around.
You’re hoping to, you know, raise funds or, or at least increase their profile so that they can sort of, you know, raise funds and it’s, and it’s tough and, and of course they’re, they’re, they’re being told, Oh, there’s plenty of money, big farmer sitting on, you know, hundreds of millions of dry powder and, and the VCs, well, you know, billions of, of, of been raised, but the problem is it’s, it’s dry powder.
You’ve got to do something with it. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:28:14] Biotech of today
Philip Hemme: That’s good. Lot of things I want to jump on, but what do you think about the current, like, I mean since 20, what? 2020? It’s been three years that it’s been like really slow and wintery and to my feeling is also like longer than the, the previous ones, than some of the previous cycles.
I mean, you mentioned the 2001 that seems around 2, 3, 4 years, but let’s say 2007 or even the fixed from 1314, it didn’t last that long. And, and like, oh, do you agree?
Mike Ward: Well, so I, I, I mean, the, the way I, the, the way I see it, it, it’s, again, it’s one of those, like, is your, is, is your glass half full or half empty?
Yeah. Because I think that, you know what happened during the pandemic where the life sciences sector basically saved the world and therefore, and also it was like one of the few places that people got actually a, that was working, but, but actually people could put their money to work and or whatever. I think that what we, so everybody’s really, really excited and, and that kind of, it did, you know, create a bubble and, and, and now you have all these, these, and, and some of them who were saying this were actually responsible for this happening.
They’re sort of saying, oh, companies went out, they were, they were too early, they shouldn’t have done IPOs, they they, they raised at high levels and now people are having to take haircuts, et cetera, and I, and I’m sat there thinking, You were the guys who did that. So, it’s almost like, oh, you know, I, I, Nothing, nothing to see here.
It’s not my fault. So I think that where we are example, you know, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna name names because I’m still, I’m still where I am by actually, you know, not upsetting scary people. So can upset some nice people. Yeah, well that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that’s okay. You want to have fun, you know?
So, so, so watch it, Philip. All right. So So, so where we, where we sort of
Philip Hemme: just basically talking about some, some VCs, I guess some of the leading VCs were pushing companies to IPO to take the money when they was there and at the same time and spend more and at the same time, yeah, now they’re the same people saying, okay, watch out, the market is called
Mike Ward: if you just look at sort of, you know, the, sort of the, the, the companies that have gone out and floated, it’s, it’s about 85 percent of them are underwater and they’re not, and when you consider what inflation is, They’re really, yeah, probably, they’re, they’re probably moms almost all underwater.
So, the, the, there’s, there wasn’t so much discipline there, but of course, when people now try to float, you’ve got an awful lot of investors who went, well, last time I touched that, I lost my shirt. And, you know, and some of them have lost huge amounts of money. I mean, it’s just like, well, it’s, it’s incredible.
And, and of course, in hindsight, everyone goes, well, what did you expect? It was like pre clinical, you know? So Joe, that’s, you know, that, that’s sort of your part of the problem.
Philip Hemme: But at the same time, I mean, on that as well, I mean, it’s whether dancing chairs or like, I mean, when there’s money available, everyone wants to pick it and not be too late.
I’m not being left out. I mean, it’s also normal during COVID when, if there’s so many generous investors or people wanting to put money to go and raise it, I mean.
Mike Ward: Yeah. I mean, you know, I, would you, if there was money on the table, would you go, Oh no, no, I don’t, I don’t think it’s right. No, of course not. I mean, that’s, so the mantra always is take it , you know, never leave money on the table.
Yeah. Right. It’s like, yeah,
Philip Hemme: take, but your point is very don’t put, don’t take too much or don’t oversell. And then
Mike Ward: Yeah, well it came No, you have to, you have to deliver. Yeah. And, and I think that, that, that is the issue. So, so now I think that the, what we’re gonna sort of see is we’re gonna see some discipline within the market.
So companies will probably be able to, to, to. to do IPOs. Not, not in any way the sort of the volume that we saw for, for, for a few years. People are going to have to be exceptional, right? Not, they’re not good sides, exceptional sides. And, you know, people, and there’s got to be a clear route to, you know, what does, you know, how are they going to get regulatory approval for this product?
And are they going to get reimbursed?
Philip Hemme: I think it, at the end, it raises the bar, I mean. When there’s higher competition or lack of money, higher competition raises the bar. I remember from Holger from Forbian was saying basically the same thing as in so many new VCs were created and now, and there’s still some, a lot of LPs putting money, but still you also see the competition and at the end you see also the strongest surviving and you’ll probably see that with companies.
I mean, today you said that people being companies being underwater, but it’s crazy. I mean, when I looked at some Fort markets, most of the European companies are trading at cash
Mike Ward: or even below cash. Yo, yeah, no, no, no, no, what, what, what, what is it? Something like 40 percent of companies, public biotechs, are trading below cash.
So what, what they’ve got in the bank. That’s great. Yeah, I mean, have you seen that? Well, look, I mean, now, now and then, I mean, not, not in the same, not in the same volume. I mean, in the past you would sort of see it where you would look at companies and sort of say, Oh, they’re, they’re trading, you know, they’ve got more cash in the bank than, than, than their market cap.
Or I’ve actually seen companies that had spun out a a business where they still owned 20 percent of the stock. And in fact, the, the, the subsidiary they spun out was actually worth more than the, than the parent company in, in, in, in the first place. Yeah. I, I seem to recall a Oxford Molecular spun out a company called, I think, Cambridge Combinatorial, which was eventually bought by Millennium.
And when it first started the, the CEO of Oxford Molecular was a guy called Tony Marchington. Brilliant. I mean, as, as, as a journalist, he was the best. He sang like a canary . Okay. I would then sometimes he told me things for, I, you know, even I realized I don’t think I’m meant to write about this. Yeah.
And I would, I would actually phone up. Right. The, you know, the, the, the CFO of the company go, okay, he’s told me he’s gonna do this, this and that, . Sure. And, and I, and, and this is a public company, I said. Yeah, this is not in the, I just checked it, this is not in the public domain, is it? I mean, it, it was, it was like insider information or whatever, and he’s like, oh, no.
So, you know, so, I had to have like discipline in terms of, which is why again, sort of the longevity, you know, I never ever, like, basically screwed anyone over, you know, sometimes, but you know, sort of Tony was, you know, one of these guys, and and, and Cambridge Combinatorial was in fact a a business. I, it was called Cambridge Corporator set up by his brother.
Yeah. Allard Marching, who is now a, a vc, et cetera. And, and that company actually grew and and then was bought out by Millennium, because I remember the, the launch bot, Takeda Takeda, which came, yeah, it was now owned, owned by Takeda, but they. I remember the launch of, of, of Cambridge Combinatorial.
Yeah, so I was asked by the, the PR, Oh, are you going to write about it? And I says, you know, what do you mean? You know, so, but, but, it’s, it’s, it’s a combinatorial chemistry company. You know, it’s like, you know, it’s, it’s, okay. You know, I mean, the, the guys I think were all to be an ex fighter, etc. But it was, you know, it was interesting, but, and, and also, well, you know, well, Yeah, Oxford Molecular’s put a load of money into it.
And Tony Marlington was a The guy who’s the CEO of Oxford Molecular was a big, big fan of steam engines. And he, he bought the Flying Scotsman, which is one of these iconic British steam engines. And, and I remember saying to the PR person, What are you talking about? Tony spent more on his train set than he spent on his brother’s company.
Now, that was obviously one where I actually got it wrong, But Cambridge Conventorial, that was big. You know, went on to, to, to, to do well, but you know, initially it’s one of these things where, yeah, and you’ve been there where you have the PR, Yeah, and they’re trying to sell you something, and you’re like, oh, come on, you know.
Philip Hemme: I think we’ll talk about journalism in we can get there later. I think, I mean, yeah, there’s a lot of things we can cover there. If we go back to the cycle, I think if I summarize what you’re saying as well at the current cycle, you have this like, Hi from COVID. Lot of money coming in and at the same time kind of the seven year cycle and market instability and these two combining together makes it probably harsher slash lasting longer.
Yeah, if
Mike Ward: I summarize that’s yes and and and part of the true of the driver for that is the if those You know those externalities are not nothing to do with Yeah, the brilliance of the science or or the technical achievement for the market And that, so that’s the issue, that the, and, yeah, it, are we gonna see resolution in those?
Well, nobody, nobody knows, and that’s the reason why, because this, it’s completely out of control, flight, flight for risk, I mean, no, nobody wants to do, do anything, and, and even when you sort of see, you know, some chinks of light, somebody then manages to slam that window shut, it, it’s, so, you know, I, you know, At, at this, at, at, you know, this, this conference, there are, there are a whole bunch of panels and it’s interesting that there, there’s this kind of underlying optimism as like, you know, hey, yeah, everything’s going to be alright because there is an ecosystem, we’ve got, we’ve got VCs, we’ve got lots of money, we’ve got pharmaceutical companies, we’ve got lots of money, and we’ve got all this, this, this brilliant science, but when you actually talk to these execs on a one to one basis, it’s like, oh, Oh, it’s, I’ve never known.
It’s so bad. It’s actually how, and it’s only because they’ve forgotten that it actually, it has been worse. It’s better.
Philip Hemme: I mean, I’ve never seen something as bad luxury. I like it. I mean,
Mike Ward: are you a young boy? I,
Philip Hemme: I’m young, but I mean in, in, in almost 10 years of at least covering and looking at it. But it’s definitely way worse.
Mike Ward: Yeah. But yeah, in the last decade. In the last decade, you’re absolutely right.
Philip Hemme: And like by far, like it’s crazy. Yeah. And talking about Europe, it’s funny, like I remember last year in Leipzig, it was one of the big topics and people were like, okay, it’s winter, how long would it last? And people, some were like, okay, it’s coming out soon, like six months.
But most, especially the farmer were like, don’t expect anything by 2024, end of 2024, mid 2025. And now one year later, it’s basically the same words. And people are still like,
like, you know, it will take some time. It’s curious to me to see that even over 12 months, the situation was basically pretty much the same. And the uncertainty is pretty much the same as about the outlook, which is also a bit worrying if you think about all these companies were in the same stage, like almost one year ago.
Yeah. And, and we’re already trading below cash.
Mike Ward: And, and, and, and that’s the issue because of course, so one of the advantages, for example, the U S companies had in the past. Compared with their European counterparts is the fact that because they were able to access cash, big boluses of cash, much more than the Europeans could do, is it meant that they could actually really accelerate their efforts and And they could also try things out and okay, it wasn’t a disaster if, if something had to get sunsetted or whatever, but they were able to accelerate.
But what we actually now have is, A, we had the pandemic when it was very difficult if you wanted to start a clinical trial, unless you were doing something in COVID. And all these COVID trials. Yeah, but that was, but that was it. But you, you, so we already saw a delay there. And now you’ve, you’ve got the situation where.
You know, it’s at least 20 million to run a, you know, start doing, you know, first in human trials, et cetera. And if you haven’t got access to that kind of cash, then you’re held back. And the clock is ticking on these. You know, not only in terms of sort of the intellectual property associated with it, but also the science is moving so quickly.
You know, there’s this sort of, you know, there’s your innovation convergence. You know, that actually. The next wave, the next generation, is already upon us. I mean, you just sort of think about, you know, in the Hep C space, in 2020, 2010, there was nothing, really. It was like, you know, you got interferon and ribavirin or whatever.
And then also we saw the… Yeah, so the, the, the protease inhibitors coming along, it’s like, you know, Cefaldi and Harvoni or whatever, and they shot up nearly everyone. Because they were like, you know, nearby queues, completely killed the addressable market off in about five or six years. But you saw just the sort of the waves and waves of innovation.
It was and we’re going to see that again and sort of like, you know, look at CRISPR. Well, not CRISPR, but look at gene editing. Yeah.
It’s, what, 2012, Doudna and Achapentia, you know, published their paper, and then Zhang, you know, a little bit later you know, from the Broad Institute. That’s ten years, right? So it’s They’re almost, almost on their 90th month. And, and, and, December the 8th, right, we’re all gonna look out and see what happens.
Now, that’s for the CRISPR Cas9. Of course there is, there are issues around ip, around, you know, Chris, depending on whether you are based in Europe or whether you’re based in the US So small issues. So it’s just like, oh, I’ve seen this before, somewhere. You know, it’s that, that sort of, oh yeah, guys, resolve it.
Don’t put money in the pockets of the lawyers. Just play nicely in the sand pit, resolve it. Cross license. And everybody’s happy, right? Which is, you know, potentially your one solution. So, because there’s enough of a pie, but what actually is going to happen is that CRISPR Cas9 is affecting the first generation of this stuff.
And a bit like, if you look at the antibodies, you know, it started off where it was… Yes, straightforward. Mouse antibodies, then you had the chimeric, then you had what were called humanized antibodies, and then you had the human antibodies. Yeah. And it was every, every two or three years, you saw these breakthroughs coming through.
Yeah. And the results of that were more and more useful, to the point when, until recently, all the best selling drugs were all biologic, and were all effected in monoclonal antibodies. That human monoclonal antibody. Yeah, most now.
Philip Hemme: Most of us. Some enzymes are placed, I think, still, but most
Mike Ward: of them, yeah. But 20 years ago, zero, I think.
[00:45:12] Can biotechs make money?
Philip Hemme: You mentioned, yeah while we’re still on the public market, what do you think about Abivax IPO? I mean, Abivax managed to raise 200 plus million.
Mike Ward: Yeah, so, so, again, I think, I think that if you’ve got a story that, that resonates and, and again, you know, people understand now cause of COVID, et cetera, people got a much better understanding of, of vaccination and the, and the value of, of vaccination, et cetera.
So I think that five years ago, they might, it would be more of a struggle that it is, that it is now because of people go, Oh yeah, yeah. Oh, vaccines. Effective vaccine is good. So, I think that But I don’t, I don’t think that that’s the, oh That’s the, that’s the The window is open I think that that’s What
Philip Hemme: we’re going to see It’s quite surprising to see it in that timing I mean, it was surprising to me at least to see that they They managed to raise that much Right now
Mike Ward: Yeah, I don’t know how many insiders were involved.
Yeah, because that’s one of the things that you would, if I was now a journalist and I was sort of analyzing that deal, I would look and sort of see like, okay, so, A, how much was floated? Did it go out at the price or was it at a discount? And what… How many insiders actually participated in the round? It was a big party.
So there’s a whole, there’s a whole bunch of, so I, I saw it and I, but I, I, I didn’t necessarily you know, look into it in any, in any great detail.
Philip Hemme: I think, I mean, so Finola is behind and put quite some money in, but there’s some, some some U. S. crossover fund who also put, but also the market, and I think, After trading, they were at minus 15%.
Yeah, just after the first day. Which is a sign also the market corrected as well. But, I just thought about this. If we go back to the definition of biotech as well, I mean, we’re taking a bit of a loop, but, towards also what’s happening today, now you have biotechs who make money. And we still define them as big biotech or biotech, let’s say, whatever, I mean the biointech, in Europe you take the biointech, and…
I mean, the, the Argenics et cetera, also Moderna in the U. S., but it’s funny also how do you, just, even just from the term, how do you
Mike Ward: define that? So, so I wouldn’t call them biotechs anymore. We, so we call it biopharma. Okay. Right. Which also, you know, some of the pharmaceutical, well, in fact, now most of the pharmaceutical companies have a huge molecular biology, biology.
Most
Philip Hemme: of the pipelines also. 80 plus
Mike Ward: percent is that biotech, but you know, even, even some 15 years ago, there were though. Yeah. I mentioned, you know, people like Smith Klein were, were clearly on, on that route where others were still very much firmly wedded to the small molecule and weren’t necessarily involved in the sort of the, the, the molecular biology and the biology.
Whereas now they all deserve to be.
Philip Hemme: But you get to the biofarmer word, then you have to do, I mean, then it’s basically conflicting with the mid cap farmer, who all call themselves biofarmer. Yeah,
Mike Ward: so, so, so there’s, let’s
Philip Hemme: say, Epson, Servier, which for me is very different from a, a genmap is very different from a Epson, for example.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mike Ward: And, and, and therefore that, so, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of. Because obviously we always had to sort of like, you know, find some sort of like jam jar label that you could give these companies because you’re right, there are, there’s sort of, there’s almost like, you know, sort of what’s it, you’re mid to scratch or whatever there’s a, where there’s sort of mid tier of, you know, people like, you know, Ibsen, Servier, Almaral, and they tend to be, they’ve either, you know, come from a sort of like a private foundation, you know, Lundberg might also fall into this category.
Right. And have been located at, you know in a region and they’ve, they’ve supported that region, but never really globalized. So why Ibsen now is, has got global, you know, ambitions. A lot of the Japanese companies were Japanese and now you’ve got people like Takeda, Estella. Yeah, these guys have now sort of, you know, taken a much more sort of, you know, global view.
So those, you know, again, it it’s one of these sort, sort of their, you know, sort of mid-size pharma Yeah. Is, is, you know, how we would necessarily describe or, you know, sort a reach, re a re a regional player, right? So like Spanish pharma or a, you know, Italian pharmaceutical company or whatever. Then we have, you know, and I’ve heard for example you know, bio, the, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, it came up with.
Almost like how it was split in the market for what we would call biotech in terms of R& D stage companies and clinical stage companies to gain sort of like, you know, sort of differentiate that revenue,
Philip Hemme: revenue stage are profitable.
Mike Ward: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, well, I mean, there were no basic commercial stage.
Commercial. Yeah. Yeah. And, and that’s the, and it’s, you know, part of the evolution. So it’s a way of all this stratifying. Yeah. So, you know, it’s like we’re, we’re all, we’re all humans. So we’re all biotechs, but in fact, you’re what kind of, you know, you know, when, when we actually deep down and we start stratifying it.
So, oh, well, yeah, but you, you got, you know I like me to, you know, sort of be, you know, sort of end up with Alzheimer’s or whatever. You can sort of stratify it that way. So, so I think that, actually, what’s in an egg? A rose would smell as sweet by any other name. I was about
Philip Hemme: to say, but I was just curious to hear your definition and from seeing also these, these, Terms evolve over time.
Yeah, and where you are stuck. So at the end of the day, I agree with you I mean, it’s just a word it tries to encompass something and to help when you hear word, but it’s not a hundred percent If it’s such a
Mike Ward: so it’s a good going back. It’s like, you know when I was it I was a technical science of technology editor at European chemical news and I was writing about biotech so right about cell tech right which is a I’d originally been backed by the MRC.
It was an MRC chief. All the science had come from the MRC. They had a sweetheart deal with the Medical Research Council of the UK. And I was working on European California News, which was basically focused on, I mean, on petrochemicals. And ICI was the bellwether of the UK economy. It was the biggest company on, in, in, on, on, on the, on the FTSE 100, etc.
I remember one of my colleagues said, Why do you write about this thing called Cel tech? Like, who cares? And I, I sort of then said, So one day, Cel tech will be bigger than ICI. Now, what happened is in 92, ICI then sort of split into its, like, chemicals business, and then it split off its life sciences into what was Zeneca, which they’ve now asked to Zeneca.
And, over time, I think it was the next 5, 6 years, Chemicals became, you know, less and less important. So because ICI actually became smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller. And then one day, the Sultec actually got into the FUZIO 100. This was before it was acquired by UCB. Got into the, the FUZIO 100, and I boned up my former Just Talking about, man, you owe me a beer
That’s what I, so I said, I told you it would happen . So yeah. Let’s about, and you owe me beer. Yeah, that exactly. Yeah, I bet. Good. That’s
Philip Hemme: the good one. And stay on this like big biotech or biotech farm biopharma. I mean, I think that’s a really interesting development that, I mean, it never happened within Europe, where you have like biotechs who are still like standalone companies, let’s say.
I mean, Jen, Jen Jen expiring tech or worse north of 10, I mean, more than 10 billion and making actual, I mean, billion new revenues and are profitable and are still like, as a standalone and this, I mean, basically never happened. Well, I mean,
yeah, I mean, in the last, let’s say the last decade, this happened before never really happened. No,
Mike Ward: no, no, no, no. And.
Philip Hemme: So, so, so, so, so let’s put Italian as well in there, which was already profitable before being acquired by G& J. But basically, I mean, it’s like a handful of companies who made it commercial at the billion level in dollar or euro level
Mike Ward: and being profitable.
Also, what, what, what do they all have in common? When?
Philip Hemme: Biologicals. Most of them. They’re also European. Yeah. I mean, I’m focusing on the Europeans, but
Mike Ward: no, no, so yeah, I know because we’re. Yeah, we’re not going to go down there. But anyway, that route, but so, so, so the UK actually has always struggled to create businesses of critical mass because they get to a certain level and then all of a sudden, they just don’t get acquired.
And, you know, and that’s a shame. And I think that, you know, you look at, you know, and you mentioned softening over. Softening over were a big, big backer of… Yeah. Kelle and, yeah, and and Act When it was first created, the first Anto, think Antoine was called it on the board. Yeah, he was. He was.
Yeah. That, and you look at some of those other you Argen X and you know, a links. Yeah. But they got that growth Genmab, you know, these companies, they were backed by what you call clever man. Yeah. And actually by VCs who they are patient. I think,
Philip Hemme: I think Fabian was big back.
Mike Ward: Yeah. Yeah. And, and you can sort of see, oh, and who are the guys who are now able to raise you?
Significant. It’s the same guys. Yeah. You know, it’s, you know, the, the sort of the guys at Fabian and the guys and, and it’s, it, it’s, so when we always look at sort like Europe, so Yeah. The UK biotech sector and, and I’m now gonna get just a lot of people. So I go, what are you, what, why you sound like you have a bad mouth in the UK?
Philip Hemme: But if you just look at the facts,
[00:56:31] Funding big vs small
Mike Ward: but, but, but if you look, so, okay, while the UK takes a disproportionate share of in the funding, right? So it’s, you know, somewhere around maybe 33 percent Yeah Yeah, could be up to 40 percent and it always tends to be either number one or number two in, in the sort of the totality of the money raised
What you see elsewhere in, in Europe is that the investors actually, they put big bets on potential winners. So, you know, you, you might sort of say, Oh, Switzerland, Switzerland in this past quarter raised 250 million, you know dollars, right? In sort of VC financing. And then you look at it, and actually 240 went into one company.
And then, and, and that’s, so, so, so interestingly, the sort of the… These, these European VCs are actually operating the way that American VCs in the past operated. And, you know, I don’t sort of, I don’t sort of see the same, you know, big boluses of cash. Now, it might be because actually a lot of the interesting UK companies have already upped stakes and gone to the US.
So, they may still be headquartered in the UK. What actually, you know, what is the CEO, the CFO hangout? Yeah,
Philip Hemme: where is it? Let’s tell, yeah, I didn’t, I didn’t mean to really compare and I would, I mean, it’s an interesting point you make between, between the UK and the rest of Europe. But I was, I was thinking also really more from the like, today you have these like, I mean, whatever, three, four, five large biotech companies.
And this, I mean, this is a really interesting evolution at the end. Edit. As you said, a lot of this is made good returns on it, and also full of people. I mean, the people I’ve experienced in commercializing and bringing these drugs to markets and I mean, it’s, it’s, yeah. Super beneficial. Yeah. I mean,
Mike Ward: but it kind of makes sense though because if you sort of think about it Yeah.
Some of, some of the, the, the, the most successful pharmaceuticals of all taught companies of all time and certainly. In terms of innovation, I’ve been European. I mean, I mean, you look at Basel. Switzerland’s a tiny country. That’s crazy. And you, you look at, it’s, it’s capable. You look at Sweden. Again, a tiny country.
Or Denmark. These are, I mean, we’ll see, I know we’re Nordics now. Like the, the, the, the largest European pharmaceutical company. Markitcap. Yeah, by
Philip Hemme: Markitcap. Oh, you’re the largest Markitcap company in Europe. All right.
Mike Ward: Yeah, but it’s, it’s, you know, wow. That’s. Yeah, that’s good. You know, it, it, it, but it, but it, but it’s, and you can sort of see that there has to be, you know, cross fertilization where, you know, people sort of like moving around and, and I, I think that, you know, we, we, we’ve seen the sort of some of the recycling of of, of, of executives you know, et cetera.
And, you know, I think that. I think that’s interesting. I think that when we sort of think about Europe, I think we should sort of, yeah, sort of compare it with Massachusetts, right? The whole of Europe with Massachusetts or the whole of Europe with, with California, partly because, you know, the way that the VCs look at things is that yeah, I’ll go to things that I can sort of visit in an hour, an hour and a half.
And in Europe, you, you know, if you were sort of like in Munich, are they, we, we, we saw the sort of the strategic, if you’re in Munich. You can get to everywhere within two hours and yeah, if we saw a Western Europe as a cluster Then all of a sudden it’s like well, well, yeah, just no punching above its weight.
Philip Hemme: No, it’s good I mean my my point of it was also like I mean, maybe you you could think it would be a natural Evolution that some companies become billionaires But I think if I look back at it in 2010 or even 2015 was not obvious at all And you had the same discussion as it are In Europe, a bit like in the UK, all the assets get acquired much earlier because they don’t have access to, I mean, we, we know all the problems, not access to massive rounds, et cetera, but at the end, it’s not really what happened.
And you had, you have these like four or five companies who made it really big and prove that, that it’s possible. I mean, it’s more like a fact and it’s interesting to look back.
Mike Ward: And, but, but, but in most cases, it’s, it’s kind of almost, and it never happened. It’s by luck rather than design. I mean, it happened
Philip Hemme: five times.
I mean, by intake, I would guess there’s some reluctance from the pandemic that’s unpredictable. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.
Mike Ward: Okay. Okay. Okay. Gemma, right? Gemma is a really interesting situation. So it actually originally spun out of medirex. Yeah. Okay. And I actually remember being at the first ever pitch that Lisa Drayton, who was the CEO of Gemma back in 1998.
Yeah. Well, the first day of pitch, because in She was at an investor conference. She wasn’t meant to pitch. And somebody dropped out. And somebody said to her, Well, do you have a pitch? And she, she didn’t. But she came over to me, she said, Did I have, you know, access to the internet? And I, you know, was, I did.
So I had my, I was able to. You know, connect and we downloaded her presentation from the states, so she was able to give her a presentation, which basically meant I always got the red carpet when I visited Gen Map. Right. Because I, I was there at the beginning. But their, their product Darzalex? Yeah. Okay.
It originally was partnered with GSK and then there was, there was, there was some issue. GSK handed it back. Okay. Now you, when, when you were reported on a sort of day-to-day basis, and you saw. a company, a pharma company, hand back an asset, 80
Philip Hemme: percent of the time, it’s, it’s a bad
Mike Ward: thing. It’s, it’s, it’s not good news, right?
Oh, we’ve got all the work that they did on it. We’ve given us all the sort of the, the, the material files, et cetera. Oh, it’s like, and, and we got that money as well. Yeah. But what we’re, we’re, and the vehicle was really, really brilliant, right? With the fact that he then managed. To license it to Johnson Johnson.
Now, Darzalex is one of the top 10 best selling devices in the world. Now, the whole point is, is that the technology platform that was associated with Darzalex, yeah, it’s a platform company at Genmat, right? And obviously they’ve been able to actually sort of, you know, develop their own products. But it’s a really sort of…
It was one of those things that what looked like a, probably sort of an existential crisis for the company. Actually, it came out the other side, you know, all, all, all seeing all dogs then. So so Genmab is one of those companies that, you know, it’s, I’ve, I’ve really, really, like, like Biontech, I’ve really enjoyed watching their progress because I saw them at the start and how it’s grown.
And. You know, I’ve I, you know, one has one’s faith, and you sort of, you want them to do well, right? Because you like the scientist behind it, or you like the CEO, or, or whatever, and you just sort of, yes, go for it. I mean,
Philip Hemme: yeah, it’s a good, positive, I think, involvement, and it comes back to what you said at the very beginning, and then, it’s the same, I mean, you’re in the phase of the coin.
Sometimes there are great news and bad news, but the bad news becomes the best news ever for a company like Genmab, which is amazing. And it’s, I think, a great kind of closing on this, like, let’s say, biotech sector.
[01:05:06] Biotech and journalism
Philip Hemme: And I want to go a bit more on the personal side, and I think we mentioned journalism, and you mentioned here as well as like, okay, there’s a bad news, and how is it twisted, or how a lot of, you get pitched a lot, and a lot of stories, and a lot of stories that are really interesting a lot, so I thought I’d…
And I think, I mean, journalism and biotech, I mean, I would say from talking to people in the space, it’s not that well understood how it is in media. I mean, media first is not that many media, but also it’s not that well understood how things work in the background also. So maybe we can talk about this stuff, like I, yeah, what was your experience like, it’s probably a very general question, but like, what’s, should to explain to someone, let’s say like a, you know, someone like average, Managers or average attendee here by Europe, like what is really happening behind the scenes and, and how, how’s the media slash journalism actually works and in biotech specifically.
Mike Ward: Yeah. Okay. You’ve got one hour. Oh, okay. So, so, so the process would work, you know, something like, like, like this, because there are different, like, again, there are different, like, almost like tiers of yeah, probably. So there are those who. are effectively just telling you what happened, and that’s it. So, get the press release, and this is what happened, and don’t actually challenge anything, okay?
And you see them, and in fact, you know, sometimes, they even still keep the, you know, the signature around the press release, and contact, blah, blah, blah, at the end. You know, and I’ve seen that, and I’m thinking… Oh, come on, you could have at least edited that off. So, so, so, so, so you have that. But those, those, there’s no value in them.
20 years ago, so, so, so again, what’s actually happened in the sort of the time I’ve, I’ve, I’ve been doing it. When I first started, a fax machine was, wow. This, this was, this was like, you know, at Houston, landing people on the moon. I mean, having a fax machine. The closest we had to sort of fancy technology before that was the Telex machine.
Okay? But most, most of the…
Philip Hemme: You’re getting out of my… Yeah. memory.
Mike Ward: Well, no, that’s the point. But what would happen is that most of the stuff that would come in would be papaya mail, like snail mail, run like you’re fast. Most of it was snail mail, and it would be… And you get a press release. But of course, nobody had that, you know, the only way that people would ever actually know what was happening was what they read in the newspaper or what they read in the trade press.
That was how, you know, they, they, and, and, and, so that, that was the first thing. And of course, how people differentiated themselves was getting on the phone and talking to people. And, you know, asking the right questions. Okay, so, so that, that’s, you know, I have a necklace. It kind of got a bit quicker and a bit quicker, but, you know, even, you know, in the late 90s, it was, you know, the press releases would come out on Factorship, you know, very, very few people were, were using the internet as a resource, and there wasn’t much there on the internet anyway, and if you did actually have access to the internet, it’s, you know, pages come down the screen, it was like, it was agonizing, and of course, most people didn’t actually have sort of web pages, What we’ve seen since the sort of, you know, in the last two decades, or certainly in the last decade, is also, everybody’s now got access to all this information.
Therefore, it’s become, information has become commodified, and, and therefore, what has actually been required is for people to add intelligence in some way or another. And you can do that either by Actually looking at sort of the fundamental data that you, you’ve collected, et cetera. Yeah. And therefore putting something into context or actually getting out there and actually talking to people.
So if somebody was to sort of say to me, well, so you know, how, how did you do what you did? I said, I spent a lot of time talking to people, but I spent more time listening. To people. So, you know, I would say to my journalists, you know, you’ve got, you’ve got one mouth and two ears, use them proportionately.
Yeah, yeah, I like that. And, and the, and the, and the other sort of, you know, key was, you know, make sure that you understand what is being said to you. Yeah. Okay? And don’t be frightened. Unless this is like the guidance I gave to the journalists. Do not be frightened to sort of say, look, yeah, I, I don’t get that, I don’t understand.
Or, you. Repeat back what you think you’ve heard, and they’ll correct you. Now, I said, you know, okay, the person that you’re interviewing might think, this person’s clueless, right? They don’t know what they’re doing. I said, but at least, right, if they then explained in words of one syllable, what they’re trying to say, when you write it up, everybody else is not going to realize that you’re clueless.
Everybody’s going to say, oh. You seem to know what you’re doing. I’ve been getting away with it for decades. That’s sick. It’s, well, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s again, it’s, it’s about, about having the, sort of like, an open an open relationship. And, you know, one of the other things I would say to, like, for example, company CEOs, et cetera, about, you know, when dealing with the media, is you have to understand what is the motivation of the person who’s interviewing you, okay?
What, what are they, for example, on their own career path? Are they looking for the shock horror probe that then gets them, you know, a, a position on a much more high ranking sort of like daily newspaper where they can now write about, you know, Kanye West or, you know, and that kind of stuff? Or are they actually sort of serious?
Because, you know, one of the… One of the sort of the, the, the, the important things, sort of the relationship that I had with the, and this is partly ’cause I kind of grew up with them. I mean, you know, a lot of the people who are CEOs and VCs or whatever, I met them when they were, you know, brightly minted PhD students or brightly minted postdocs.
It’s and now they’re, you know and people sort say, oh, you must be so smart. I way, if I was that smart, I’d now be, you know, living on an you an island in the Mediterranean. So. Now all I’ve done is I’ve just been there, so I’m going That’s interesting. Oh, that’s interesting. So,
Philip Hemme: but also you have been there for such a long time as well, that you have a compounded value of like every year you stay analyzing, you add contact, and you see the same people again and again.
And even last, I mean, I don’t know how many times we’ve met, but 10 plus time and Okay. You get a feeling for the person and you know. What has worked or not? Same for the CEOs when you already know them. I mean, you said Genmab, but some CEOs or some VCs, you know them from other deals, from running other companies and you see it.
I mean, there is definitely something there as well, but
Mike Ward: Yeah, no, no, no. And it, it, it helps. But there are two things that are important because it’s, it’s about us having that, that, that, that relationship. So somebody will sort of said to me about. So do the right and I said, yeah, sometimes it’s what I haven’t written is more, it’s more important than what I have written.
Yeah. And they go, what do you mean? I said, well, well sometimes, you know, again, when the PR have been very impressed PR companies have been very, very successful at pushing a story. And, and I haven’t believed in it. And you know, I just thought they, wow, they’ve all, they’ve all been drinking the Kool Aid, right.
They’ve all taken this on board. And you know, what actually happens in that, in a situation is that. Yeah, if I haven’t written about it, it’s because I have made a conscious decision not to write about it. And, and when I had the team, right, when I was running teams of journalists, there had to be, when we were looking at sort of the information that was coming through the door, or through the window, or through the, through the internet, when we had that information, they couldn’t just sort of say, oh, not interested.
They had to have a reason why. I’m not going to spill any ink on their story. So there had to be a sort of conscious decision what we were going to write about or what we’re not going to write about. What we wrote about is, did we have something to say that was interesting that would move the, the conversation on and develop the conversation because there’s no point us wasting our time just repeating what everybody else who’s, some of the stuff that is free.
So therefore it was And, and, and then the next question would be, okay, this looks really interesting. What else do we need to do to make the story even more interesting? And the way again is by having the sort of the network, one can phone people and sort of saying, did you see that news? What did you think?
And that’s, you know, a sort of, you know, a sense of. Or getting a sanity, I call it getting a sanity check. But yeah, sometimes also, you know, even with the PR companies, you know, one eventually builds a relationship where, you know, they send you and I sort of say, right, you’re not going to try to sell me a part because you know that I will never talk to you again.
And, and they believe me, right? So, I mean, I would ask them and they would, I sort of say, look, am I going to look an idiot if I actually ignore this? Yeah. And I have a relationship with, with some of them that, that go, yeah, it’d be all right. Yeah. Don’t, yeah, yeah. I’m not, I’m not going to push it, right? I’m not going to say, oh, you must do it, you must do it.
Philip Hemme: I think that’s an interesting point as well. I mean, you, if you take for the PR agency. So, I mean, for those who don’t know in really the communication agencies work, trying to get the message out and obviously talking to media, trying to convince usually that the story is interesting and sometimes adding background as well.
[01:16:15] The EU biotech world is very small
Philip Hemme: But, and if you expand it also, I mean, all the, like, let’s say executives or all the network, it’s a really small world, the biotech world, especially if you think European biotech is extremely small. And you want to be, have good relationship and not screw up people, you want to be friendly, but at the same time you want to remain, like, to your values or like, stick to, to what’s most interesting and not bend this.
And I think this is a very tricky bit.
Mike Ward: So, yeah, so, no, you’re absolutely right. Because I remember once, there was one CEO where his company had some really bad results. And in fact, it was an existential crisis for that company. Eventually, right, yeah. It managed to, like, limp for about the next two years, but eventually it died.
But at the time, the CEO sort of said, Oh, I’ve seen your story. And he goes, wow, you really stuck the boot in. And he said, but, You’re right. Yeah, it was fair. Why? It, well, I, I didn’t, I didn’t overreg it. It, it, the, the, and, and also, they had the opportunity. So, if ever, you know, I saw something, I always gave the CEO, you know, The CEO didn’t see it for the first time in the publication.
I gave them an opportunity. This is what I am writing. Yeah. Okay. You have an opportunity to respond to it. Yeah. Was, was, was part of that. The second thing is also is that the, the, I mean, there were times when I would, I would come across some information or I would triangulate Yeah. And the, the CEO or, or the investor would go, this is.
Because you know, none of the stuff that we were writing, it was like, you know, we are going to break the world or whatever, but it was, you know, they would sort of say, it’s, it’s a really, really, yeah, you’re, you’re absolutely right. This is what’s happening, but it’s a really, really delicate situation.
Could you hold off? We’ll give you the exclusive when it’s, you know, ready, ready for pride time. And, you know, that’s what I did. Or sometimes when I’m sort of like pursuing a story, the CEO would give it. Give me some information off the record, confidential for my information to help me understand. I couldn’t write about it, but what again, it at least enabled me to write my story.
Right? That, you know, it, it, it was on, it was on solid ground. It, it, it, it was sound And coming back to this thing about that,
Philip Hemme: that’s where it’s tricky that you’re like, it’s like. We’re helping you, but at the same time, you can help back, but not help too much, it’s,
Mike Ward: it’s, it’s… No, well, you, you, you… I find it a very tricky thing.
You’re part of the ecosystem, but the, but the whole point is, as you sort of said, everybody, you know, it, it took, it, it takes 40 years, right, in my case, to build up a reputation. Yeah. And, you know, what, stitching one person up would be… It would disappear in a moment because people say, yeah, don’t talk, don’t talk to them.
You can’t trust them, et cetera, et cetera. And I know that that’s how it to people, you know, because I’ve always been interesting in sort of seeing, right, who’s, who else is in the space.
Philip Hemme: I like that a lot. Like you’re, you’re really, I didn’t perceive that part of you that much. I mean, I, I enjoy, and I enjoyed how you dance and how you stay like the bss, but I, I didn’t see the behind the part of like, where it’s quite conscious and really long term.
You, you’re in the long-term game and you’re playing that for, for quite a while and it helps your benefits. That’s very interesting to see actually,
Mike Ward: look, I mean,
Philip Hemme: and that was, and now it seems very in hindsight, but
Mike Ward: it’s, yeah, that was my, yeah. My view that I, I am always going to, you know. I always sort of saw myself in this space.
Philip Hemme: I like this part also, that’s the, between someone who’s serious, someone who, who like, will jump to something else. Same for me, I mean, I can see myself in the biotech space for a very long term. And then, you make your decision differently. And definitely also, it’s also a good filter for, you want to work with a person or not, or like, what’s happening.
Mike Ward: I like that. I mean, it’s an easy, it’s an easy thing to do though, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s like, wow. You know, Yep. I love what I do. Yeah. Okay. I still, I still love what I do because I get to, to talk to people who are super smart, who eventually go to win Nobel Prizes. Yeah. Okay. So, you know, I sort of say to people, you know, you do know that I’m actually connected and, you know, to a whole bunch of people who’ve got Nobel Prize, that I got more, I know more people who got Nobel Prizes than probably watched Love Island or whatever.
Right. In my, in my friendship crew. It’s, it’s stimulating. No, no, no. The great thing is, is that it, and it’s evolving, and you’ve got new people coming through all the time, and it’s, it’s fun. Yeah.
[01:21:45] The changing media landscape
Philip Hemme: What I like also from what you said, and maybe I can add a bit from the, the media landscape, I mean, you had a particular view also coming from, let’s say, Scrip, or even Biosensory, which is always premium journal, so paid for publication, so.
Really, the audience pays for premium content, pays the journalist, and so its publication will tend to be more high quality, more high analysis, versus some free publication, which now tend to be, at least, probably the most read now, let’s say, I mean, oh yeah, if you take the, the, from the older one, from the fierce, fierce biotech, which is still around and still very popular, to, to even the Endpoints, to La Biotech, to, still La Biotech today, to some others it’s more the free, but I mean, there’s still some analysis done, but typically it will be a bit, let’s say, lower, lower, lower analysis, or more like the journalist had spent a bit less time on the story to really get all of it, more or less.
Yeah. And sometimes the model would be, it’s more to give context to the audience, so it would be free or there’s a freemium model, let’s say for endpoints. Yeah. And then you have really the free, free or more like press release directories. I’d say biospace in the U. S. still mostly do that. Some others, I think, those ones today are like, more like, less than whatever.
Mike Ward: You can have a Google alert and, and get as much context. And you have everything, yeah.
Philip Hemme: Yeah, yeah. And at the same time, you have, I think, one interesting trend as well in the last several years, but really social media. Let’s say LinkedIn, especially TwitterX, also, but mostly LinkedIn, where You can get access to some stories, which is interesting is that you can get access sometimes to the personal backstory from, let’s say, the CEO sharing and like where they were, and sometimes it has some angle to it, which is not obviously not journalistic, but has some context, interesting context, so it’s more like to to give the whole like landscape.
Mike Ward: Interesting. So for example, yeah, a young journalist starting out today. That’s what they should be tracking. Yeah, yeah. Right? I mean, I would look at, obviously, where people are moving to, etc. In the old days, I mean, one of the things that, you know, how I started, trying to work out what companies were up to, is that they would advertise in the back of Nature, in the back of New Scientist, PhD studentships that they had.
And it would be in areas. And then I’d look and go, Okay, is that an area that they’re already in? Or is this a new area they’re exploring? And of course these companies, you know, then when I would go and interview them and I go, so, so yeah, well, what are you thinking about this space? Whatever. And all of a sudden you can see them going, how do you know that
And it’s because, you know, they, they, they, there’s, there’s a lot in the hiring. You, you advertised it. So I, I, I think that’s that. But, but coming back to the the sort of the various tiers, what was interesting is. You know, with, with Biosentry and, and also with, with, with Scrip and on all those publications.
Even though there was all this free content that was actually, you know, potentially competing. All it actually did was destroy the potential for display ads. Right, so yeah, Scrip, when it was, because it was, and it just forced us to go. You’re digital only and not even produce a hard copy because in the past the hard copy would be there and it’d have Display ads and classified ads in the back, etc People were still and they are still willing to pay for highly curated quality Contents the economist for example, you know, it’s its revenues have gone up It’s got more subscribers than than it used to have Okay.
Now it’s available, you know, on, on, on, on your, your iPad and, and, and whatever. So they, they kind of like digitized it as well, but it’s not cheap, but people are willing to pay for your quality analysis. And, and I, and I think that that is, so therefore there is still a, a, a, you know, a space for that. I, I, I, but you know, to come back to it.
So, you know, again, sort of how people deal with the media, you know, I think one of the things, and I think one of the hardest, so a lot, a lot of journalists. They kind of, what I call it, they retire, and they go into PR. And it’s because they sort of say, oh, that looks a lot easier than, than what I do.
Because they obviously would just be, you know, hanging around, having parties, etc. And they all sort of think, oh, and also they tend to get paid probably a bit better than, than most journalists. I sort of say, well, no, hold on, you don’t realise that you’ve got to get up probably at 6 o’clock in the morning to make sure that the press release went well.
That’s what I’ve been working on. You’ve got to chase around. You’ve got to deal with… Journalists and analysts, are they going to write the story, etc, etc? You’ve got to deal with the flak if they’ve actually misinterpreted what was in the press release. Because, if everything goes well, it’s because the CEO and the company are brilliant.
Anyway, so that would happen. If it goes wrong, it’s your fault. And also, if you go, you know, as a journalist, you know, if you come to a survey, I mean, people want to talk to you, right? Yeah, everybody’s, yeah, I’ll talk to you. Because they, they won’t. Like coverage, et cetera. I said, but if, if you are a PR guy and they see you, they say, well, I’m not your clients, therefore you are probably gonna pitch to me.
And therefore they’ll, they’ll walk at the other provider. Yeah. I said, so it’s a, it’s, it’s a sort of, it’s a, a tough job. So again, you know, it’s one of these things where, you know I have respect for, for, for the PR guys, but I did also sort of say, never ever just use that. Never tell me AP, right.
Because.
Philip Hemme: But this year, you never stick. Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s, I mean, I think deep down also, you two things we haven’t talked about in media is the value it provides to readers. And I tend to think that it’s, it’s very high, whether it’s a premium publication or not. I mean, there’s a lot of value in like people knowing what’s happening even for us at La Biotech.
I mean, we had 150, 000 readers a month and we had so many like deals and financing rounds and whatever that happened because They read and they know, oh, they discovered the company, or discovered the fund, or the startup got discovered, and all the people kind of connected. I think from an ecosystem point of view, this has a crazy amount of value.
Yeah. I remember Jørn Aldaik telling me from, from now he’s at Hoopipa, was telling me, I think the European ecosystem would have grown much faster with a European biocentury. And I was in like, in the U. S. Biosentry had a huge role and they were like super early and new role in build and like connecting the ecosystem.
We were saying, okay, like biotech, you had a bit this role, but like, I mean, we have that much and et cetera, but yeah, it was basically everyone was like, okay, media, even that has, has an impact on the ecosystem. So, so it’s very hard to quantify. Yeah.
Mike Ward: So with the European, you know, Biosentry, well, I was, right.
So what happened with, with Biosentry was that. Around about 96, where we saw sort of like the creation of the Neue Markt, etc. Dave, Dave Flores and Karen Bernstein, they kind of recognized that Yeah, something was going on in Europe that was going to be potentially called Sprague Shop. And so therefore they had in their, on their board, they had a number of Europeans either from pharmaceutical company or from VCs, like, you know, David Lethers or whatever.
And what they said was we need a journalist, right? We need somebody in Europe to cover. Yeah, biotech, so what they did was and everybody said, Oh, well, well, you need to talk to Mike. But the problem is that Mike has got his own newsletter. So I had my own newsletter, which was called biobusiness, which was because I’d seen biocentury and I thought, well, I’m not going to bother competing with it.
But what I would do is I would just focus on European biotech. So I had conversations with, with Dave. And, and then Karen and, and they sort of said, tell you what, why don’t we acquire your, your newsletter? You work for us, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll pay you a salary. You just keep doing what you do. Everybody who was a subscriber to your newsletter will switch over immediately to, to, to buy a century.
And, and also I, I had a kind of a, a, a burnout deal on, in terms of not only the Yeah, the renewals, but also any new subscriptions. Okay. Okay. Now the whole point of this is that my, my newsletter cost 200 pounds and this was like 2000. Right. So it was a huge difference. So getting, getting a 10 percent royalty was actually, it was just the same anyway.
Philip Hemme: It paid a bit of set on the island.
Mike Ward: But so, so I had a, I had a superb incentive to get in this many, many readers and also. That ain’t like hell for European biotech. I didn’t know this story. So what happened? What happened is somebody once sort of said to me Oh, do you, you know, sort of Yeah, so you, you’re, you’re the European correspondent.
I said, no, I’m, I’m the rest of the world correspondent for, for, for biocentury. And, and they go, oh, oh, well, yeah, what’s that? What’s that mean? I said, yeah, anything outside the Bay Area. Because in that, in those, because Massachusetts wasn’t even that big. Right, we’re talking about 97. Yeah. And, and it was, you know, Biocentury was absolutely fantastic.
Yeah. Why, it was great fun. Every day we would have a meeting, half past four European time. Yeah. Half past eight in the morning, where we would talk about what had happened that day, what we thought was important, what would we need to do. To move the story forward. How would we, how were we going to, to, to do this?
Who should be responsible? And that’s, and at the news room, we did that every day. That’s cool. Okay. And it was, and, and you know, the, the, you, you’ve, you’ve, you’ve, you’ve met them, right? Yeah. Those go all. absolutely brilliant place to work, where also we knew. So, so it’s interesting what Jorn said, because we knew we were making a difference because at that time, there wasn’t really much, much else out there.
Philip Hemme: It’s a great start. I think the, the, the second point of the media was, is actually also money. And I mean, even for me, just knowing the background at Labaretek or so it’s. It’s not easy to run a media company and journalists are not the highest salaries, highest paid, but still it’s, it’s a lot of money to run these stories and it’s, yeah, it’s, it’s actually tough business.
And if you look, even if you zoom out, I mean, journalism basically one of the first industry that got completely disrupted by internet media in general or at least disrupted as in like had to change big times. And, and also even from the, from the business point of view, I mean, most of the media companies even today are like struggling or like,
Mike Ward: And, and, and, and it’s because it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a question again, sort of, you know, sort of, you know, reinventing you know, oneself.
So yeah, by a century realized, you know, always had to add value that was done. And, and when I joined Informer and sort of was the already sort of script set. That was exactly, you know, we, instead of writing every story, right, printing all the news that was fit to print, we actually focused. On the most important.
And, and it was one of these things where, and because we had access to lots of other data sets, then that obviously could inform, you know, what we were doing. We, we had opportunities to talk to the analysts. So that’s what, that’s what in the informer group what we were doing. And now Clarivate, so coming back.
You know, the, the great thing about Caravate is what I’m doing is that I’m now able to write, you know, what I like and sort of, you know, write, you know, thought leadership pieces, you know, talking about sort of trends, et cetera. And I’m, I’m able to dip into all the data sets that we’ve got at Caravate and it, and it covers the whole waterfront.
It’s huge. It’s absolutely huge. And, and it’s, and it’s free. That’s the point. For, for, for, for people to download by the sort of the content that we produce and, and, and, and it’s because, you know, what we’re doing, it’s almost a sort of like the reverse model of the, you know, sort of the fierce or whatever, where what they actually really do, they were, they were harvesting email addresses, which then could then be used for marketing purposes, et cetera, et cetera, and sold on for, for, for, for those purposes, whereas for us, it’s, it’s a way of actually Getting people thinking about, you know, what, what does this company do?
Because most people don’t necessarily know the name, but actually then go, Oh, oh, they’re part of you. I, because it’s a sort of this archipelago and different sort of data sets. It’s all decision resources.
Philip Hemme: It’s high quality content. It’s a form of content marketing. In a way, as in, you raise awareness, you raise people to come to you and, but it’s interesting because you’re doing, it’s content to serve a goal, as in sell intelligence products, versus let’s say messenger, which is content, selling content directly.
Yeah. So
Mike Ward: it’s just interesting. So what it is, it’s, it’s a soft sell. So the idea is, you know, frankly, it’s a, you know, A, if they’re giving this stuff away for free, how good is the stuff that, We have to pay for it. That’s, that’s part of it, but it’s also just so that, that actually Clarivate is invited to be part of the conversation.
So, so, so, so my, my view in, in what I’m trying to do is I’m looking to bring together other thought leaders around, you know, topics that are keeping the executives awake at night. And the idea is, is that we don’t have all the answers, but at least we. You open up a conversation and, and it also then brings other people in and sort of say, Oh, well, we saw this.
And again, it’s, it’s like, you know, sort of like you’re moderating panels at these conferences, et cetera. It’s, it’s, it’s part of the same process. You know, I’m not there to just get, show these, you know, give these guys an opportunity to sort of say, my company’s doing this, my company’s doing that. We want to move.
The conversation or we want to trigger you know, thinking elsewhere, we want to create debates because, you know, even if people sort of says, I think you’ve got it completely wrong. I’m not offended by that. I say, okay, why explain why
[01:38:35] The rockstar of biotech
Philip Hemme: it’s great. I think we’re coming out of time, but the last, the last question to, to wrap up is, I, I mentioned in the intro and I’ll stop it a bit, someone called you, you’re, you’re the, you’re a rock star of biotech.
Mike Ward: Ah.
Philip Hemme: But as in, it’s one thing that I like a lot with you actually, you’re very like, very sharp and you see things very clearly, but at the same time, relaxed, no BS, fun, I mean, I don’t know if people can see your, your shirt, I mean, you always have something there. What, what do you think about it? What’s like?
Mike Ward: So, so again, it’s, it’s one of these things where. Actually, no, just be, just be honest, you know, it’s, just be yourself, okay? Some people, you know, might
Philip Hemme: It’s easier to be yourself than to try to be someone else.
Mike Ward: Well, that’s it, you know, and I, and I think that, you know, it’s somebody once said to me, so like, oh, you know, they came up to me and said, you know, what, at one of these conferences, you know, you know, why do you wear such wacky shirts and, and, and jackets?
And I says, Well, this is why and then what do you mean? So what you just call up to me? So that’s fucked away Okay, and that’s just and that’s the whole point. I said, you know if I was anonymous Well, I wore a suit or whatever. You wouldn’t come and talk to me. I guess you’re
Philip Hemme: fun I mean, but it also expressed a bit deeper.
Yeah thing of like, okay, like let’s not be too boring I mean the industry is frankly quite conservative and quite boring So, like, also, like, let’s just be yourself and adding a bit of this twist.
Mike Ward: And, and so, so, so I’ve had a sort of a couple of occasions where you know, sort of one you sort of in fact, it was the same boss that it was once where we were going to meet the new CEO of the company and, and therefore, you know, some board members.
And he said to me, he said, Mike. Any charge you’d wear a suit and a tie. And I said, I don’t have a tie. Well, I said, the only suit that I got is a, a, a dinner suit, . And, and I said, and I’ve got the tie to go with it. And he goes, oh, well, well, he said, no, you can, you can borrow one of my ties. I said, no, it’s okay.
I don’t need to do that. So anyway, we rock up around next morning and my, my two colleagues who are there, they’re, they, they’re dressed like funeral directors. Yeah. And, and I’m dressed as ico. And then in comes the CEO and his, his posse, right. Of other board members. And they’re always sort like, you know, polo shirts and, and, and, and Chinos and I, and I said, I turned to, to, I said, he feels a bit over dress.
And then there was another time we went into just sort of a, a marketing company. And again, it was, we we were, we were doing some. They did a lot of stuff for brand awareness, for like, serial gummies or whatever. And we went in, and everybody else in the office was dressed like me. And, yeah, I, my two, my two colleagues were dressed, yeah, like, again, funeral directors.
They stuck out like a sore thumb. So that’s part of it. And it’s just, again, it’s just to sort of say, right, okay, this, this is how it is. It does, it does get conversations going. Yeah. And, yeah, it’s. The, the, the challenge is, is that I can’t wear the same jacket two days running, so it’s a bit like that, that school, school uniform thing of like, well, if you’re wearing the school uniform, you don’t have to worry about what you’re wearing tomorrow because you’re going to be wearing a school uniform.
Think about it then. If all you do is wear a dark suit, white shirt, and a dark tie, or, you know, some kind of tie, you know, nobody notice. Yeah. But, you know, I I remember your shirt. Well, this one, yeah. This is good. This is one of my favorites. It’s good. It’s good. So, so it’s good. So, yeah, so, but again, the whole point is, is just also making it comfortable for people to come and talk.
That, that’s, that’s art. And of course, the best way of actually gathering information is, as I say, is through us. Cool.
Philip Hemme: It’s a great conversation. Thanks, Mike.
Mike Ward: These have been a lot of fun. I don’t know how this is going to go, but this is great. great.
Philip Hemme: Thanks a lot.
[01:43:18] Thanks for listening
Philip Hemme: Thanks for listening to the end. This episode was great fun, but also quite stressful as there was a bug in the audio and we almost basically lost the microphone audio, which would have been able to publish the episode.
Quite some luck there. But overall, I mean, I really enjoyed the discussion. Mike has really that, that clarity and has seen over 40 years, but still able to deliver it in a very, like, clear, fun fun way and and, and enthusiastic way, which is great. Yeah, if you, if you enjoyed the episode, please hit the like.
Subscribe, share, button, any any of these actions would, would help. You can also leave a review on non Spotify or Apple. And I would also be curious to hear what you, what you think. So please, if you can, comment on YouTube or Apple or Spotify or you can just send me an email to syllop at flot.
Alright, that’s it for now. See you in the next episode.
