Tal Zaks
speaker
203 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Tal Zaks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I know I've got a new medicine on my hand and I don't see the tools that we have today in the near future, changing that. Now, is there a version of the future where they will? Yes, absolutely. But that will require some level of evolution of our healthcare system.
That's a good question. So for us, again, I term us sort of as the collaborative spectrum of venture capital. We will invest at any stage, starting from seed all the way through public pipes. And so we've got a pretty flexible mandate. For us, I think the key elements as we look at an opportunity, it is investment. What is the thesis that this team is trying to do?
How much capital is required to get to the next value inflection point? What is that next value inflection point? What is the likelihood of achieving it? If it's already a drug in the clinic, okay, what's the transition? If it's an early bet on a target, what's the likelihood of that target panning out? And if it's a different strategy, then we look at that.
So it will depend by the stage of investment, but ultimately it boils down to what is the thesis this team is trying to prove for making the world a better place. How soon will we know that we've achieved some milestone that people will recognize the value inflection, the value created?
One of the most recent opportunities I had that I had to walk away with was a vaccine where it was an interesting idea and it was an early concept, but it became clear that the phase one data are probably not going to be de-risking. You're going to have to take it all the way to phase three to know
Okay, now you're asking me for a quantum of capital and a time horizon that is just not commensurate with the risk involved. I have to see my way to building value incrementally over the life of the investment and the additional capital that will be required. So it's got to be the content, the drug, the theme, the scientific content.
It's got to be the capital requirements, value, and it's got to be the people. What is the talent around the table? What are the missing pieces? Am I going to be able to help you uniquely from my experience to do that? Because I'm here not just to deploy capital, but actually to deploy my experience as well.
Granted, it's at the board level, but nonetheless, I'm not going to be making investments in fields that I know zero about or I'm not interested in leveraging what I do know. So I think these are the three elements. Now, in terms of process, and I don't think in that regard, we're very different. It's really interesting.
Being a venture capitalist, a partner at a firm, you've got two very different sides of the same coin. So the first part of the job is deciding where to deploy capital. So that's the diligence process. You look at an opportunity. You've got a team of junior folks helping you out. You bring in external experts for the stuff you don't know.
And it takes four to six to eight weeks, and you come to a decision on whether that's worth the investment. Now, if you decide to invest, the next part of it, the coin flips, because now the diligence team is not going to help you.
They may dive in and out once or twice, but actually you're there on a weekly, quarterly, monthly basis with the CEO, with the management team, with your other board members, which is why for me, looking at the syndicate of who my partners are for this investment is so critical because this is a long-term commitment. There's a lot of capital.
It's not over and it's likely not even over with this investment round. They're going to need more capital down the road. I got to make sure I got a reserve. I got to make sure I got other colleagues around the table who are also going to be able to be in it for the longer run.
And so making sure that that syndicate is the right one, that I've got colleagues around the table on the board who bring in complementary experiences and expertise to what I bring in so that we can help the CEO and this young management team actually get there. Those are the other elements that then become that second part of the job.
When I look at investments, I will often tell the folks, look, there are three pockets of capital in my book. There's government, which is what's there for the greater good, and I hope those investments are rational. There's philanthropy, and then there's us. I'm not in the business of philanthropy, and I'm not a government. So for me, the lens has got to be what it is.
But there are investments that are fit for philanthropy and there are investments that are right for governments to make because it's not an immediate return. Either the capital scale or more often the time scale and the risk is not commensurate with the money I need to return to my OPs.
You do, and I think your roundabouts are coming back to what I think is one of the central tenets that makes this endeavor so different, which is the number of different disciplines that need to come together to solve this is quite wide. I've not found... many or maybe any other industry where you need so many different types of expertise around the table to solve the problem.
I've spoke about physicians, you need biologists, you need engineers, you need, of course, the financial understanding of how this works. The number of disciplines that actually need to come together is vast. And frankly, it's been one of the fascinating threads of my career.
And to the degree that I've been successful, I think it's because I've always been curious not to approach it as the physician in the room, but to try to understand the language of the other functions that need to come together. So if you look at pharma, a project team that tries to make a drug, will usually get kicked off around a target.
And if they're successful, 10 years later, you will have a drug. But if you look at that project team, you will rarely find anybody around the table who was there at the start, and yet the thing works. So the great success of the pharmaceutical industry has been to build these multidisciplinary teams and enable them to progress this very complicated process. Yes, you can cut it short in time,
if you have the right technology, and we can come back to mRNA vaccines as the obvious example of that. But ultimately, you do need these different disciplines. And when I started, sometime during med school, I chanced upon a really interesting book, and it's by a Canadian philosopher called John Ralston Soule.
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