John Simboli

That's the voice of David Southwell, CEO of Volastra Therapeutics, headquartered in New York.

Listen in to hear insights from David about leadership in biopharma and how Volastra is working to discover and develop oncology therapeutics targeting chromosomal instability, a vulnerability of cancers.

I'm John Simboli.

You're listening to BioBoss.

Welcome to BioBoss, David.

As you gained executive experience, did you find yourself at any point thinking, you know, I'm really, this is a natural fit for me.

I'm really cut out to be a CEO.

Or is it a more organic kind of thing that just sort of happens?

I've asked a variation on where you are right now on several of the BioBoss discussions along the lines of, well, in a framework in an industry where there are so many things that are not under one's control as CEO, how do you reach decisions?

How do you just keep from being paralyzed by the lack of information or the lack of certainty?

I've had CEOs say to me, well, I just had to learn that I could always go back and fix it.

I've had other ones say, oh, no, the secret is to see around the corner and to anticipate the problems, have lots of options set up.

And I know there's no simple answer to that.

But how do you keep going when you don't know what you don't know?

When you were a younger person or maybe even a young person and trying to anticipate where your life might go, do you have any recall of those years as to any hints that you would end up being an entrepreneur, an executive, a CEO?

I mean, was there some kind of pattern that someone could look and say, oh, yeah, I know what David's going to end up doing?

When people ask who is Velastro, how do you like to answer that?

Do people ever say, gee, that sounds too good to be true?

Why didn't someone else do that?

When people...