🎧🍌 How to Build a Biotech with Celine Halioua, Founder and CEO of Loyal
Making dogs live longer, failing to raise a Series B, getting FDA approvals, how to build in a new market, why rate of growth is all that matters in hiring, and why Silicon Valley needs more deep tech
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Celine Halioua is the founder and CEO of Loyal, a biotech company developing medicine to help dogs live longer and healthier lives. And dogs are just the start - Celine thinks Loyal could one day do the same for humans.
She takes us inside what it’s like to build a biotech company from scratch. We talk through how Loyal’s longevity drugs work, the process of getting FDA approval, her biggest mistakes as a founder, how to approach building in a new market, lessons learned failing to raise her Series B, why rate of growth is all that matters in hiring, and almost not even starting the company in the first place.
Timestamps to jump in:
03:30 How a longevity drug works
06:08 Predictions around longevity
08:26 Why Celine cares so much about not failing
12:05 Differences between biotech and software startups
14:15 Sizing a new market
16:53 Why biotech startups are more dilutive early on
20:22 Getting FDA approval
22:57 Why its hard to prove longevity drugs actually work
24:48 The reason Loyal started with dogs
25:27 How Loyal’s drug slows aging
33:42 Working on longevity to increase free will
34:25 Culture shock at Oxford and dropping out of her PhD
37:18 What makes Josh Koppelman a good VC
42:35 Why rate of growth is the best indicator of success but the hardest to predict
45:29 Self awareness & how being a CEO is both fun and miserable
48:07 How Laura Deming convinced her to start Loyal
50:14 Finding the science behind Loyal
54:17 Deciding it was the right path to start a company
56:26 Lessons from failing to raise a Series B
1:02:14 Why Silicon Valley can build 10x more deep tech startups
1:04:45 What Celine looks for when investing in startups
Follow Celine on Twitter and LinkedIn
Transcript
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner Novak:
Celine, how's it going? Welcome to the show.
Celine Halioua:
Going good. Going good. How's it going with you?
Turner Novak:
It's going pretty well. I'm excited to learn about longevity, Loyal, life extension, how to make a biotech company. I think those are all the rough topics we're going to hit on.
I think the first one that's super interesting is longevity just in general. What is it? Why is it a thing? Why do you think it's even possible to extend lives?
Celine Halioua:
So, I'll say first what it's not, at least for my POV and then what I'm trying to do.
And so, we're not working on immortality, we're not working in radical lifespan extension. I'm sorry, Peter Thiel. I don't think Loyal is going to make you live to 150.
The way I'm really interested in working on longevity and anti-aging is really actually much more boring. It's preventative medicine for multiple, seemingly unrelated age-related diseases at the same time.
The way I usually describe it is, the majority of older Americans are on statins to reduce the risk of a certain category of age-related cardiovascular diseases with age. Can we create a daily pill that reduces the risk of, for example, cognitive decline, osteoarthritis and cancer at the same time, diseases that are historically considered very different mechanistically.
But, the aging thesis is basically that they're all underlaid and driven by the ways that our bodies break down and age over time. And the end-state disease is the finality of it, but you're actually building the foundations of these diseases for decades prior.
That's how we're working on. Maybe one day we'll get to radical lifespan extension, but it's not in the pipeline today.
Turner Novak:
So, a good way to think about it is maybe traditionally people think of longevity and they think live forever. You think of longevity as just, your cells age slower? And they break down slower?
Celine Halioua:
Yeah. The way to think about it is live healthier, longer.
So, we're explicitly looking at lifespan extension. As far as I'm aware, we're developing the first hopefully FDA-approved drug to extend lifespan and health span. Right? We're not looking at any disease cases, anything like this. But, the focus is really on extending lifespan by extending the number of quality years.
So, the focus, is can we take this organism in our case, spoiler alert dogs - and make them healthier for longer? And if the dog is healthier for longer in their period, they'll invariably live longer too. So, the lifespan extension is secondary to the quality of life improvement, which for both dogs and humans is what we actually want. People just actually want to have a higher quality of life, and therefore, then you also hopefully have the longer quality of life too.
Turner Novak:
So, this is a question I didn't want to miss, while we're on longevity.
From Fred Ehrsam, he's one of the founders of Coinbase. He wanted to know just what do you think are some realistic predictions around what longevity will look like, just over our lifetime? Assuming that's the next 50 years, I don't know, maybe average listener.
What do you think we'll see?
Celine Halioua:
In terms of the quantitative lifespan extension? That's a really, really hard question to answer on the human side, because if we wanted to extend lifespan in humans, on average, you actually wouldn't block and tackle age-related diseases first. You'd block and tackle basic care.
And from an actuarial perspective, that would actually extend lifespan much more effectively and with a much higher probability than trying to develop some existential niche, difficult longevity drug. So, I'm talking about things like obesity, metabolic decline, preventative medicine for different diseases.
However, most of the time when people are asking about lifespan extension, they're not asking about the preventative medicine aspect of it. They're asking about, "Okay. I'm already doing everything. I'm super healthy. I got one of those levels patches and an aura ring and an Apple watch and aid sleep and all this shit. Now that I'm in my optimized state, how do I get a drug to help me live healthier longer?"
And I think, what we're trying to do, candidly, is get the first drug FDA-approved first for dog lifespan extension. But, we're going to try to do this in humans too.
And I think the minute there's one drug that's approved for generalized lifespan and health-span extension, I think we're going to see many approved for this. And then it's going to start this space race, so to speak. And this is a pretty standard model in biotech.
We're seeing this right now with the weight loss drugs, with the GLP’s. Where there was a lot of work that when into see these drugs. They're actually pretty old drugs. But now that somebody's proven the TAM and proven the demand, now there's a bunch of gen twos, gen threes, gen fours that are potentially going to be way better than these first gen drugs. And I think that's going to happen as longevity too, we might see a really rapid increase from there.
So, I think the biggest variable is going to be when is that first lifespan extension drug get approved? Hopefully we do it, or hopefully we don't do it, not because we fail, but because somebody else does it faster. But, I think that's going to be the big driver of how much longer we actually get to live.
Turner Novak:
So, a little bit of a detour. I remember hearing you say once you were super cognizant about building Loyal, when you say failing. You specifically said you don't want to fail in a way that holds back the rest of the industry. Why is that so important to you?
Celine Halioua:
So, just a couple of things. One is I think there's a lot of responsibility when you're working on something novel. So, even in the biotech space, if you are working on a breast cancer drug and the breast cancer drug fails, nobody's going to be like, "You know what? It's not worth it to go after breast cancer anymore."
If you're working on, I don't know, B2B SAS for Salesforce competitor or whatever, and you fail, we're going to be like, "Oh, that's a hard problem. Here's another $5 million for your next shot." And they'll also fund the five other companies to try to do this, right?
When you're doing something weird and novel, the baseline assumptions that go into it are not consensus yet, like dog longevity, like longevity in general, failures are seen not only as a result of the luck or decisions that you've had in this shot and goal, but also the validity of the field.
And, I think Loyal has gotten far enough along now where if we imploded tomorrow, I would like to think that this idea of venture-backed longevity, dog longevity startups would still make it, because we've made so much progress. But, for a really long time, if we imploded, I think we would've burned out the area, not just for us, not just for me personally, for my career, but probably also more broadly for dog longevity drugs and least for a period of a few years until somebody came in and was able to do that.
I felt that a lot when I first started fundraising for Loyal for two reasons. One, animal health. There was a number of animal health startups that got started around dog cancer drugs, which we can go into it if we want, but at a high level is a bad idea, because dog cancer drugs actually make very little money. So, they're not venture scale at all. And so, a bunch of VCs lost money on those, and then we're like, "We're not touching animal health again." It's one of the reasons why we don't have a lot of biotech investors. And again, the assumptions are very different going into dog longevity drugs, but it's just an activation energy that's too high.
And two, not to bring up the ... I don't know what to call it, black sheep, elephant, whatever. Elizabeth Holmes really did this for female founders, and I'm really cognizant of that too. And I'm, in our very small niche, relatively high-profile, female, deep-tech founder. And if imploded for certain reasons, then people would be like, "Oh, it's a pattern."
Turner Novak:
Yep. That's true.
Celine Halioua:
Fuck women! Can't fund them. And of course, I get those questions all the time. I have been for five years. I react much more rationally to them now than I used to. But, yeah. It's a big responsibility.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I'm glad you're doing it. It's a good mission. As someone with a dog that is very adored by her family, we are very excited for her too hopefully to be able to live a little bit longer.
Celine Halioua:
We should have dog cameos. Where's your dog? My dog's asleep on my bed, but...
Turner Novak:
Mine does not come with me to work. Otherwise, I wouldn't get any work done…
Celine Halioua:
Mm. Fair. Fair.
Turner Novak:
I think the reason we first connected was you had written bunch of things on how to build a biotech startup, and I thought it was super interesting, because some of them were not intuitive. They made sense to me after I read through what you wrote, but it was just new for me.
So, at a high level, what are some of the biggest differences between building a biotech startup and more of a traditional Silicon Valley startup?
Celine Halioua:
So, there's a lot of things. There's this really, really good blog post from Sam Altman, that talks about basically this idea that doing hard things is paradoxically easier, and I 100% agree with that. I 1000% agree with that.
I think I have had so many tailwinds building Loyal, because what we're building is hard. And what we're building is what people really, really, really, really want. In a way that just nobody's going to care that much about software. Some software companies like Figma has really built a cult following behind it. But, the vast majority do not have people ... you should see the customer support emails we get, people begging us for the drug or early access and things like that. People are very, very motivated by this.
And so, I would say one of the big differences is that when you start a software company, and yet I've never run a software company. But, from what I understand, it's a lot of product market fit. Does the market actually want this? There's not really that many questions on, can you actually build this thing?
I'm sure there's nuances, and I'm sure there's some engineers getting really offended now. But, on average, can you build a thing is not a massive existential risk. It's the market that's the risk.
On the other side, in bio, we have a little bit of market risk, because nobody's obviously commercialized the longevity drug. But, in general, it's pretty consensus that if we bring a safe and effective dog longevity drug to market, that enough people are going to want this, that we'll at least make enough revenue to justify $1 billion-valuation if not much, much higher.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. It's kind of a rhetorical question, do you want to live longer? Yes or no?
Celine Halioua:
You would not believe Turner, how many people have passed on Loyal, because they don't believe in the market. Including some big tier funds, where they're just like, "We don't think people are going to pay for this." And I'm like, "Is this just your excuse? Do you not just like me? Pick another excuse, guys."
But, it's actually very common.
Turner Novak:
I found that sometimes it can be hard to digest consumer market size if something isn't there. It can be hard to take these subjective concepts, like let's just say mental health. Maybe if you go back a couple of years, it wasn't really a concept. People thought about it was stigmatized. I'm sure if you Google how big the market was, it was like a billion or two, and it was just therapists, it was services.
Maybe you could put this in a similar category? What’s the market size for longevity? It's people going to clinics and getting blood transfusions to live longer. It's a different market altogether.
Celine Halioua:
Yeah. This is one of the things I learned, actually, and I think I did really well in my Series B, and I historically did very, very badly at.
So, whether it's we have more data, we've got consensus, I became a better founder just talking about market sizes, which ... To finish your point, basically the big focus I had in the early days was, how do we do this? If we did it, we were pretty sure it was going to be valuable. And so, then it was like the "how?" And so, I was super, super focused on that for years. Now we're getting to this transition where, okay, we're pretty sure it works.
So now, it's like how do we bring this to market? One of the biggest things I learned is exactly that. How do you paint a vision of a market where there's no direct comparable? And previously the answer, realistically, was the only people who invested in the company were people who had dogs and who got it.
Now, I have finally started to get some not-dog people to invest in the company, because I understood how to make those comps. So, very specifically in my world, I had drugs that I had similar patterns.
So, for example, heartworm preventative. It's a recurring drug that gives to the dog the rest in a dog's life to prevent something that if the drug works, you never see it happen. You're not getting an acute benefit, you're getting the reduction of a negative. And heartworm preventatives are super successful. A third of US dogs, over 33 million dogs, are all heartworm preventative.
And one of the leading drugs, Heartgard, makes half a billion a year. And there's a billion competitors on the market, it's a super fractured market. So, the total class makes probably closer to two billion a year in revenue. And that's super high margin revenues.
And explaining the market and what the margin on that revenue is, all of these things and just basically being more quantitative about it went from, "Oh, God! Everybody's passing, because they don't believe in the market, at least at the face of it," to, "People really believe in the market."
And then, the question became on distribution and all these other things that were a bit more hard for me, because again, de novo doing all of this. But, in general, much more tractable questions to answer.
Turner Novak:
And then I think another really big difference with Bio is you raise a lot of money early on, versus compared to software. It's just a little bit more dilutive. Can you talk about that?
Celine Halioua:
So, kind of. It is and it isn't. So, I would say it's upfront more dilutive, back-end less dilutive.
So, upfront? Yeah. My seed round was $5 million. I sold probably about a third of the company, which knowing what I know now, I would've never done that. At the time I was like, "I want to get the money in. I think I have a hypothesis for what's going to work, but if I'm wrong, I want to have a few cycles." It ended up being that the first thing we looked at worked, which was nice, but very rare in biotech. And I wanted to be able to hire people from an industry in a world that's not super startup friendly. There was literally just a new biotech startup announced today, this AI thing started with one billion in funding.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I saw that.
Celine Halioua:
It's insane. And people who work on biotech startups often actually don't really have the cultural risk, desire or tolerance, or just normalization as you have in tech.
So, obviously I'm not going to pay somebody as much as a Seed stage company as they might get at Genentech, but I can't go that much lower. There's not a predisposition where, "Oh, I want to work for 3% equity." You have to give some degree of career certainty. And so, having that seed of $5 million was super important for us, even though we barely spent any of it before we went and raised our next round.
Turner Novak:
Why did that happen?
Celine Halioua:
Because we got the proof of concept and then basically right after ... So, I started the company January, 2020, we closed the seed, just me and that $5 million bucks. And then we started hiring. Then COVID hit and we raised a COVID SAFE that I think doubled. It was $6 or $7 million. That brought the company's value up significantly, I think it was $45 million. But also just gave us a lot more runway.
And we did that because we thought the market ... Everybody at this time was like, "Oh, God! The world's going to explode. We're done." We didn't realize at the time we were about to enter the biggest bull market in quite some time. If I had known that, maybe I wouldn't have raised that money.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. That's fair.
Celine Halioua:
But, to finish what I was saying here is that, yeah, upfront we need to raise a lot more. There was no hacking. I wasn't sitting in a lab pipetting. That shit doesn't work.
But, now as we're getting closer to market, if I'm actually correct in our launch timelines and the margins, we might never need to raise money again. So, we'll be at $125 million total and the drug should be throwing off significant revenues. And we're going to have competitors, but because of the FDA approval process, the challenges we went through become our moat.
So, realistically, it's going to be at least five years before there's another dog longevity drug on market. That's five years of exclusivity. And we have 10 years of explicit exclusivity on our drug. And so, there's no race at the bottom, there's no CAC ad, Facebook ad destruction.
And then the last thing is it's just way fucking harder to build. There are just not that many CEOs that can build this company. And not to be egotistical, but it's just true. You have to have bio context, you have to have the dog context, you have to have the consumer context. And there's just fewer people who have that, who also want to start a company. So, in the back end, hopefully our life is actually going to be a lot easier.
Turner Novak:
And I think you mentioned too, you specifically did the FDA route instead of just a supplement or something. You could have done that way easier. You probably would've been selling it already. Maybe you touched on it a little bit, but why the FDA approval? And then, how has that gone?
Celine Halioua:
Yeah. So, there's a couple reasons. So, the predominant one, in the ideas that I had worked on before I started Loyal was this idea of, how do we get the first drug FDA-approved just for lifespan and health span extension?
So classically, when you go for FDA approval, it's for diseases, diabetes or cancer or whatever it is. And then you try to impact that disease, you prove that a placebo-controlled trial. And if it works - and I'm super hand wavy here - you get FDA approval for treating that disease. That's great.
What I really wanted to show is that this idea of a drug, not targeting an acute indication, but instead targeting the inherent decline over time, which leads to these acute indications later on, is both more potentially tractable, right? It's easier to prevent something or reduce the risk of something, than it is to wait to 30 years until you have dementia and then loss of neuronal mass and all of these things, and then try to bring the brain mass back. It's a much harder problem.
So, I wanted to show that this is tractable. And I also wanted to show this wasn't crazy science. And so, I wanted to show the world that, "Oh, yeah. This idea that sounds like the fountain of youth or all of these things where there's all this shady marketing around help your dog, yourself, live a longer, healthier life, if you just buy this product or eat this supplement or do this magical hack." I wanted an objective third party that doesn't give a about Loyalty, doesn't give a about the aging thesis to be like, "The data shows that this is legitimate."
And I really felt like creating that regulatory pathway and subjecting ourselves to the highest quality bar, one of the highest quality bars in the world, was super important for legitimacy of the field. And I think it's made a longevity that the field has really been missing as a whole.
And then, I think also, candidly, from a legal perspective, I really want to be able to say we got the first drug FDA-approved for lifespan extension. I think that's a life accomplishment that I'll be very proud if we achieve it.
Turner Novak:
And then, why has it historically been so hard to get lifespan extension drugs approved?
Celine Halioua:
Predominantly it just takes a long time. And so, if you're going to claim something on a drug and a drug says it's for whatever it is, you have to show in a FDA sanction, placebo controlled, double blinded, randomized, etc. Basically, all these scientific integrity standards, that confirm the drug does what it says it does. And to do this in lifespan extension is really hard.
So, if I gave you a lifespan extension drug today, I'd have to follow you for decades. I don't know how long you are going to live. What if you decide that you're really into motorcycling and you crash your motorcycle tomorrow? You're on the drug. You're going to destroy my stats, because you died of a motorcycle accident, even though you were on the longevity drug.
And so, to quantitatively show that a drug is extending healthy lifespan would require one of the largest and longest pivotal studies. And just from a company feasibility perspective, what VC is going to fund that? What anybody's going to fund that?
Turner Novak:
You're a startup. You're four-and-a-half years old.
Celine Halioua:
Yeah. No. Totally. The patent life is done by that point, because you have effective patent life of 15 years, which is probably done at that point. Retention for that type of study. It's just a logistical nightmare, which is why you see all these people going after these shorter diseases, where you can prove efficacy much faster.
The cool thing about dogs is that you can see lifespan extension in about four years. And then you can see biological aging in about six months. So, you can see changes in well-accepted measures of age and functional decline in these dogs, which is still, from a tech perspective, you're like, "Oh, my God! You guys are four-and-a-half years old and you're still not making money."
But, from a bio perspective is hella fast. The average drug takes nine years to get on market. We're on track to have our first product in market four-and-a-half after founding. And knowing what I know now, we could have done it way faster. But, it's because the feedback loops are faster.
So, it was this, I don't want to say hacked, because it's also an extremely important thing to work on in its own right, but it was uniquely feasible in the canine population. And the TAM is so large that the combo made it possible to fund this moonshot.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. That makes sense.
And you've mentioned this before, I'll let you kind of talk through it. The reason that this actually works in dogs and it's super measurable, and all these differences and ages of the different species. Can you explain why it even would work in the first place with dogs?
Celine Halioua:
Yeah. So, there's a couple of reasons. What we started with, the original insight of the company was that the bigger our dog is, the shorter their lifespan is. So, my Rottie is going to live about 10 years. A Great Dane on average might live seven to eight years, while a Chihuahua might live 17 to 18 years.
And it's actually a really strong inverse, negative correlation. So, with every pound a dog gains from a body mass perspective, their expected lifespan actually goes down from an actuarial perspective, which is really strange. There's no other species that I'm aware of, where you have a two x differential and expected lifespan within this species. I'm not living double as long as basketball players, because I'm short and they're tall. There's really no other world where you see that.
And when you dig into the genetics, the kind of insight I had. And again, this is built off of decades of scientific work, so it's not like I discovered this on my own, but it's more of connecting the dots, that it looks like big dogs have an accelerated aging disease, that we inadvertently gave them due to historical inbreeding for size. So, when we were selectively breeding dogs to create all the breeds we have today. So, Schnauzers and Poodles and German Shepherds and Rotties. These are artificial constructs that humans have created. We created breeds by selective breeding, by inbreeding most of the time.
Turner Novak:
And this is over the last 1,000 years or whatever? We had no idea what we were doing.
Celine Halioua:
We had no idea. No. We were inbreeding ourselves. Right?
Turner Novak:
Yeah. True.
Celine Halioua:
And our dogs. And so, that's really effective at creating this diversity. That's why you see such a diversity in a three or four pound pom versus a mountain dog or something like that, or Great Pyrenees.
But, it also created genetic mistakes, which people are very well aware of, like the flat-face dogs have a lot of trouble breathing, German Shepherds get hip dysplasia, Goldens have certain forms of cancer, they get at a really high rate.
And the thesis was that, oh, when we selectively bred dogs to grow really, really big in puberty, which is what we were selecting for, they're like, oh, that puppy grew really big and that puppy grew really big, breed them together. It turns out the genetic pathways that drive that also seem to drive the rate of aging. So, a Great Dane and a big dog is just, we hypothesize, what we think we've shown, aging at a faster rate, losing resilience to age-related diseases at a higher rate, and then getting sick faster and dying sooner.
And the "Aha!" moment for me is that the genetic pathways that drive this are very well-understood longevity pathway, which... I don't know if you want to go into science, but at a high level, it's around basically these little proteins that circulate your blood called growth hormone and IGF-1, were the same phenotype as shown. So, Chihuahuas always have really, really low level of these growth hormones, so they don't grow very big in their infancy, if you make that change to a mouse. So, you can make a mouse having very low levels of growth hormone. You get a small mouse, it lives a super long time. In fact, the longest-lived mouse strain is low growth hormone.
And then the inverse is true too. So, if you take a mouse and make them have super high growth hormone levels, like a Great Dane or Pyrenees, you get a really big mouse, a Titan mouse they're called, that lives a short period of time. And this has been shown over and over again from sea elegans to mice.
And then there's even a correlation data, like Ashkenazi Jew centenarians have a genetic mutation that makes them like a Chihuahua. And they're obviously correlated with being centenarians.
So, it was the connection of all this really, really strong longevity data with this genetic data on dogs. And then, the understanding facilitated by some VC friends I had or things these they used to track me down honestly, being like, "People would pay for something like this. Because I didn't know anything about the dog market at the time, besides the fact that I loved animals. And so, the combo was like, "Oh, this is a really cool way to work on this problem."
Turner Novak:
So one more question on this. If the Loyal drug is successful, dogs taking it, are they going to be smaller just naturally? Or ...?
Celine Halioua:
No. No. No. So, you actually wouldn't want to give it to a dog in puberty. You can give it to the dog after they're fully grown. So, these pathways are super normal. If you are really big, you will grow higher levels of growth hormone. It's just that other organisms, it turns down after the animals fully grow and in these big dogs it does it.
Turner Novak:
Got it. Okay. The de-aging component of their DNA or their genetics?
Celine Halioua:
Basically you want to have high levels of growth hormone in puberty, because your growth hormone this little protein that binds to your cells and says, "Grow. Divide. Grow. Divide." And that's exactly what you want when a dog or a human or whatever is in puberty.
But, the problem is once the animal is fully grown, when you have these super high levels still it's saying, "Grow. Divide. Grow. Divide.". But, the way they think about it is a dog's just turning over at a fast rate. They're metabolically aging faster. And so, what the drug does is it reduces the concentration of these growth hormones in their blood to levels that are seen still in normal dogs. So, it's about the level of an Aussie Shepherd, about a 40 to 50% reduction. So, it's still within the bounds of what's seen naturally in healthy dogs, but much lower than what you see in these super-concentrated big dogs.
Turner Novak:
So then, just thinking then tactically or practically how the Loyal drug plays out in the wild, in a dog. And so, when we talk about preventative aging medicine, it just means that you are less likely to get a disease that is related to age, like cell age?
Celine Halioua:
The way to think about it is that it's slowing the rate of aging of these big dogs.
So, if a big dog that had an expected lifespan of eight years, versus a Chihuahua. And you can say that Chihuahua is the baseline, because another data point is that wolves, which are very, very large in captivity will live 16, 17, 18 years, the average lifespan of a Chihuahua.
So, let's assume that Chihuahua lifespan is 1X, which you could argue that it's not. But, whatever. 1X. Then the Great Dane is aging at a 2X faster rate. The drug is trying to bring that dog to aging at a 1.5X faster rate, for example.
So, we're probably not going to make Great Dane live till 18. We will find out when we complete the full life span extension study. But, we'll hopefully help them basically stretch out those healthy years and then, therefore, live a longer life.
Turner Novak:
I think I understand. I'm hoping everyone listening has a pretty good understanding at this point.
And I think the story about how this all started, it's really interesting too. I don't know where the best place to start with the story, but I'll let you decide how far back we go. There's a lot of interesting pieces. So when you tell people the story of Loyal, the founding story, where do you usually start?
Celine Halioua:
It's like the thing where you look back and you're like, "Oh, this totally makes sense that I was going to build a dog longevity startup," but it was not really, it was never in the plan.
Even I remember when I raised the Seed round for Loyal, I still feel embarrassed saying, "Oh, I'm working on dog longevity," which is funny. I love being like, "What do you do?" "Dog longevity." Right? It's such a funny two-word phrase. But, at the time, yeah, it was just a little bit less socially validated, I could say.
So, the quick background. I grew up a crazy animal girl, 15 cats, four dogs, hamsters, bearded dragons, fish, mice, everything. I'm a vegetarian.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Celine Halioua:
Yeah. I'm a really big animal person, which I think a lot of people don't realize. I actually like animals more than I like people.
I talk about the longevity stuff a lot, because that was ... I had decided early on that working ... The way I think about it is that age-related diseases and unhealthy aging, let's call it, reduce our free will and reduce our ability to do what we want to do with our lives. And I thought that was the most important problem to work on. So, I've always focused myself on that. But, I've always been this huge animal person. I just decided early on that just wasn't where I was going to spend my life's energy, so to speak.
I did an undergrad in neuroscience, that's where I discovered the aging thesis or learned about the aging thesis. Then started a PhD at Oxford on the economics of preventative medicine, which is where I was basically trying to understand the interaction between the economics of developing drugs and the financial incentives.
Which, maybe something interesting to talk about is how do you align incentives with what you want? I think you've seen that go really well and usually badly in a number of healthcare startups in the valley. I've tried to build a company where our incentives are 100% aligned is what's best for the consumer. We’re still optimizing to help dogs and our patients live a longer, healthier lives.
I had a really interesting time at Oxford, and by "interesting," I mean bad.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I've heard the story.
Celine Halioua:
Yeah. Which actually was in retrospect, the catalyst for me. Because I didn't grow up with money or parents who did anything entrepreneurial. My mom was a teacher, my dad's a construction guy. I didn't know any of this world.
And so, going to Oxford, I was always all like, "Oh, bow down to the ivory tower. I made it. This matters so much. All these letters behind my name." Da. Da. Da. Da. Da.
And then, going into that and it realizing that actually it's just all people and it's all people and their flaws. And that a lot of them actually didn't know anything. A lot of them did, to be clear, but a lot of them didn't and were just resting in laurels and politics.
It was extremely frustrating, but it also broke my brain in a way that made me realize that if these idiots could get this far, that I can do anything I want to do too. There's rules in biotech, there's ethical rules, there's biological rules, but the rules that I thought from a societal perspective actually didn't really exist.
And that was so super helpful for me to make me realize that I have autonomy in what I want to do and how I want to shape the future of the world and the vision that I think is right. So, that was the awakening for me, so to speak.
Turner Novak:
And then, is that when you met Laura at Longevity Fund?
Celine Halioua:
Yes. Yeah. So, I reached out to Laura because I was so frustrated about my situation at Oxford, which ended up being the most cold emails. Highly recommend them.
Turner Novak:
It was a cold email. Okay. Do you remember what you sent?
Celine Halioua:
Something like, "Hire me," and then I failed all the hiring interviews and she still hired me. That's a story for another day, but I was super incompetent. I had no idea what the hell ... I didn't know anything about VC.
Turner Novak:
Wait, how did you get a job if you failed everything and you were incompetent?
Celine Halioua:
Well, I was really passionate and I was really smart, but I just was not qualified to be an associate. I would argue, even now ... Obviously I know a lot more about the Valley. I still think I'd be a shitty investor.
Turner Novak:
Most people actually are, I think is-
Celine Halioua:
My Angel portfolio is doing pretty well. But it's just because I have interesting friends. It's not because I actually have any investor skill sets at all.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. That's fair.
What makes a good investor? You've worked with a bunch of VCs, Angels in your perspective. This is a total sidebar in the story right now. But, what makes a good investor? As a founder, what do you appreciate the most?
Celine Halioua:
I think it's a combination of humble, asks really good questions and then, strong in the stuff that they do have context for.
So, I think the investors that have struggled with Loyal are the ones where handling their ego gets damaged, or they feel uncomfortable about the fact that they don't understand the science. And then they get insecure and then they get worried and that doesn't work.
Versus, I'm not an expert in all the science who we're doing at Loyal anymore. I haven't been for a really long time. But, the reason I'm a good CEO so far at least, is I'm really good at asking questions and drilling down to the basics and understanding the principles of something, and then building up and facilitating a team and facilitating technical talent that's better than myself. And good VCs are that way too.
So, I think a really good example is Josh Kopelman at First Round. Josh has invested in a few bio companies. He has some frameworks, but I'm obviously much more technical than he is. But, he is so fucking good at drilling down into the principles and the basics and how I'm thinking about something, and the rationale and my how logic flows, that even if he has zero context about what we're talking about, he can point out the flaws in thinking, or the gaps, or the holes and just be like, "Consider this."
But then, he also gives me complete freedom to do whatever I think is best. And I think it's actually very impressive, is that he's let me make my mistakes. And Warren have I made mistakes? I'm a first time founder. It's been the biggest company I've worked at since three people. I didn't know that hell I was doing. But, he gave me guidance.
And really good VCs in general, give guidance, give context. "Here are the variables you may not be thinking about. Here's the world context." The macro was really important to me, because I had never seen a macro shift before ZIRP to whatever the hell we're in now. They'll give me the context and then they let me lead through it. And that's really, really, really powerful.
I think the ones that have failed are the ones that have tried to micromanage me, because just they can't. Even if they are smarter than me or better than me, they don't have enough context. And then, so they end up leading, or trying to lead the company into bad places.
Turner Novak:
What's the biggest mistake? You mentioned, you speed ran all of them.
Celine Halioua:
Oh, God! So many.
I had our manufacturing timelines totally wrong. I thought the drug was going to get approved in two years. But actually, it was a four-year timeline. And I had to tell Josh after he invested like, "JK, it’s actually a 2024 launch, not a 2022 launch." That was a bad one.
Turner Novak:
Why'd you get that wrong?
Celine Halioua:
Because it was an assumption. So, basically in human medicine, the efficacy timeline is what drives the timeline to market authorization and being able to sell the drug. And so, I was always thinking in that framework.
But, in dog drug development, it's actually the manufacturing that's the timeline driver. And so, I just hadn't thought about it enough, because I was like, "Oh, that's just the checkbox at the end." Because in human medicine a lot of that's front loaded. So, it's just a missing context combined with not having the right people around the table.
And then, I think the other mistake, I just did not know how to run board meetings. And I would say, actually, I think one of the best things I did was started having board meetings from day one at Loyal. So, every quarter since I started the company four years ago. And one of our investors told me over drinks a few months ago that our first board meeting was one of the worst board meetings he'd ever been to.
Turner Novak:
Oh, no!
Celine Halioua:
I know. It was very accurate.
Turner Novak:
So, what did you do?
Celine Halioua:
I just learned fast. My model for myself is I start lower than most people, but my growth rate is so much higher, that I iterate into a much better place much faster.
And so, I think now people around me for a while are used to that pattern. They're like, "Oh, she's probably going to fuck that up the first time. But then she'll learn really quickly and then do it way better the second time." So, we actually end up in a way better place. And I think that's honestly even better, because obviously everybody sets themselves. But I think it's nice, because then I learn super fast. I make a mistake once, but I won't make it again. I'll make a new mistake, but I won't make that old mistake. And that's really been the cycle.
And I think, again, to your earlier question, I think the good investors have helped me through that. And obviously I never lied about something, or was disingenuous or any of that, that should be a mark on my character. But, all these have been genuine mistakes, that have not been repeated. And so, it's allowed me to make my mistakes, allowed me to be forthcoming with my mistakes, which has also been super important with the board, because then I have an accountability to it.
And that also forces the learning, because I don't want to be like, "Hey, I want to say I fucked up six months ago. I did it again. Sorry, guys." I don't want to do that. So, I use that as a motivator for myself to get better faster, even when it's super painful to be like, oh, "I'm actually an idiot and messed this up."
Turner Novak:
And speaking of rate of growth, I know you said before the hardest part about hiring is predicting someone's rate of growth.
Have you figured out how do you measure that in someone? A candidate, just getting to know how fast they'll get better or learn?
Celine Halioua:
It's really hard. I think the only predictor is looking back.
I understand why VCs like co-founders. Because you have a double shot on goal of one of them, rushing into the person you need to be. Not be grim about it, but I think it's true. Then again, it depends on your personality type, but at least for personality types like myself, I'm actually pretty anti co-founders. I think it's super difficult to predict and bet on anybody's personal growth, but yourself.
And so, I've had executives at Loyal, I've had team members where I was like, "This person's changed me. I believe in co-founders now. They're so high growth. I'm learning so much from this partnership. This is amazing." And then they hit a growth wall and they just don't make it past it, at least in the environment they were in at Loyal. And it was really, really hard to predict.
And I don't know, maybe somebody better than me could have predicted it. But, I think the fact of the matter is an organization almost always moves at a higher rate than any individual can. And at a certain point, you can't give people the opportunity to make mistakes in the organization. You have to have somebody next seat who's already learned and you can do the right thing for the org.
And so, there's always this inherent tension. Learning management skills inside of a startup is really, really difficult, because I can't let somebody who's a first-time manager make that many mistakes, because we're trying to hit our milestones. We have things to do. I can always hire an experienced person to lead an organization, so why would I allow that person to do that? Of course, you want to grow your talents. There's always this inherent tension between the two.
So, I think the only thing you can do is have super-fast feedback loops. How that person takes feedback and integrates it and hopefully what they're inherently motivated by. But, in the end, I think you have to be okay with the fact that often a company will outgrow them. Again, I think it's less for lower level team members, but on the leadership side, companies will outgrow people as they scale, and you just have to facilitate that and be ... I don't know. It's been one of the toughest parts of Loyal, honestly, for me.
Turner Novak:
Really?
Celine Halioua:
It's really heartbreaking.
Turner Novak:
And this is even not really a topic a lot of people talk about. But, it's come up a couple times on the podcast of founders talking about understanding when they should remove themselves from the business, or when they should shift back roles, however you want to describe it. And that's a really hard thing to do.
Celine Halioua:
I hate to talk about self-awareness, because I feel like there's unself-aware people who are like, "I'm self aware." But, I try very much to set a standard with my executive team and with my investors of always opening the door for feedback, always opening ... Tell me what I'm doing wrong. Tell me why I'm going to fail. Give me this feedback, anonymously, to my face, written, verbal, however it is. And really anchoring myself and the team on the outcome, which is I want to build a pharma company.
That is my goal. I want Loyal to be a Fortune 500, a Fortune 100 company. That's the aging pharmaceutical company. High goals, but I really truly want to do that.
Where I am today would be a fucking terrible CEO of that company, horrendous, fired immediately. I know that I am not that person today. And I know I have to probably change a hundred times over to become that person.
And so, I just try to give people that permission to understand that I know that. I know I'm fucking things up. I don't know what they are, and I need your help to make sure I'm doing better and growing. And in myself just meditating on that end goal and not who I am today. I think the minute you get attached to who you're today, it gets really difficult.
And it's harder and harder the further along you get. Because where I am now, I could probably make a cushy amount of money and get interviews and all that shit for the rest of my life. But, it's still insufficient. Even though it's comfortable, it's still insufficient for where I want to go.
So, you always just have to ... I don't know. I think that's one of the reasons why being a CEO is miserable.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Is it miserable? Is it fun too, would you say?
Celine Halioua:
Yeah. I love it. I think it's an honor to be able to think I have no glass ceiling, I have no nothing. It's all up to me. And having that autonomy is really, really epic.
It's like the Dune scene. He is like, "I see our enemies at every side, but I see a path through. I think there's always a path, a path through. Even if our drugs imploded tomorrow, there would still be a path for the company to succeed if I'm clever enough, if I execute well enough, or I think it well enough through. There's no alternate universe. There might only be one in billions. But, there's no way, there's no universe in the world where there's success at the end of it. And I think it's really, really cool to be in control of that and have it within your scope of possibility that you can create whatever feature you want.
Turner Novak:
It's all really interesting to hear you say this when I know, and I think you mentioned earlier, but you didn't actually think you were going to start a company.
So, you started doing this research around longevity when you were at Longevity Fund and you were like, "Why has nobody actually done this before? Why has it never worked?" And then you found this research on dogs. Can you just talk through how this all happened and then getting the very first term sheet to start the company?
Celine Halioua:
Yeah. I was at Longevity Fund. I thought I was going to be a Longevity Fund forever. I thought my path to facilitating the longevity field was facilitating Laura. We were a really good combination, or are good combination. She's super genius and I'm the more practical, operational, execution combo. And that worked really, really nicely as a GP and Chief of Staff. So I was like, "This is who I am. I'm facilitating Laura's genius." I wanted to do that.
In fact, Laura had to convince me to start Loyal.
Turner Novak:
Oh, really? Okay.
Celine Halioua:
Really. No. She took me on a walk around, I think it was SoMa. It's like Harrison Street area where the Airbnb HQ is and whatnot.
And she was like, "You really should do this. You need to do this. This is the thing you should do." And I was like, "No. But, I want to stay with you. I believe in you, Longevity Fund." She really pushed me over the edge.
To skip ahead a little bit when I got that term sheet, I remember, so the term sheet was give to me by Greg, Greg Rosen. And I didn't reply for a week. And I think he thought I was shopping it and I wasn't shopping it. I actually just was not sure if I wanted to sign it or not.
And I remember I decided not, because of him, but because of me. I really want to do this. It was a really, really serious decision to decide to start Loyal. And I remember we decided in The Mill-
Turner Novak:
The Mill, the restaurant?
Celine Halioua:
The Mill. It's this coffee shop. It's infamous for having a $10 avocado toast.
Turner Novak:
I've gotten that avocado toast before.
Celine Halioua:
Yeah. And I remember the booths we were sitting in where I was like, "Okay. I'm going to do it." And of course, this was with Laura, her giving me that final nudge, that we wanted to do it.
Backing up a little bit, I'd been working for Laura and had been really interested in this biology around IGF-1 and growth hormone, because her mentor Cynthia Kenyon, who had discovered this genetic pathway in worms. Where if you modify this gene, which gave them really, really low levels of growth hormone, which is what we think Chihuahuas have that drive their extended lifespan, you actually made the worm live significantly longer.
And the inverse was true too. And there'd been all this foundational work for decades showing reducing growth hormone, extending lifespan. And I just didn't understand why this hadn't been translated out into humans. And I wanted to develop a drug.
Basically, at first, did a traditional thing where I was like, Okay. What's the disease that we can develop this for? Thyroid eye disease or IGF-1 driven cancer.
And I was like, "I don't want to fucking do this. This is terrible. I don't want to become the eye person for the next 20 years."
And I became really obsessed with like, well, how do we get a drug approved for lifespan extension? Because fundamentally, it looked like what this mechanism worked best for was lifespan extension, not anything else.
And at the same time as I was banging my head against the wall, trying to figure this out the human side, and I only had context for human biotech.
I found this paper that showed the genetic dog size lifespan association with these genes. So, basically that these small dogs had super low levels of growth hormone IGF-1 and these big dogs had super high levels.
And when you look at the genetic driver of dog size, there's only six genes that actually really control dog size. And four of them are in this pathway, four of them are related to growth hormone IGF-1.
For context, I couldn't sequence you and say how tall you are. There's really no human size gene. You can sequence a dog and tell within about 10 pounds of how big they are. That 10 pound variance is mostly just, is the dog overweight or underweight?
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Celine Halioua:
So, you can tell a dog's size really, really easily from a genetic way. And it's around these growth hormone IGF-1 pathways.
And so I thought, "Oh, this is really interesting. I know how to make big dogs live longer," because it was the connecting of these dots between this dog genetic pathway and the longevity work on the IGF-1 side.
And then, I went to this camping retreat that was led by the Embark Truck founders. And they had brought all these people together. And I was sitting at the campfire, didn't know anybody. So, I was just drinking and joking about how I knew how to make somebody's dog for that campfire live longer
And some VC there ... It was Dave Fontenot, Ryan Shea and Greg Rosen. I'm pretty sure there were three people who were involved. And one of them overheard me talk to the other one about it. And then, the other one ran into Greg Rosen at YC Demo Day.
So, thank you YC. Rejected me three times, but they still facilitated Loyal. Not for Loyal, but also for Loyal, and not just for Loyal.
And they told Greg Rosen about me. Greg heard about it and basically was like, "Celine, you've got to understand. This isn't just an interesting scientific insight. This is also a really, really big market," because he had just gotten a Goldendoodle. He was an early investor in Ro, which was this whole consumer pharma-side.
And he worked with me for three months, four months. It went from a very, very ugly pitch deck to an only mostly ugly pitch deck. And he gave me the first term sheet and then I raised the seed.
Turner Novak:
Didn't respond to him for a week? That's wild.
Celine Halioua:
I know. I feel bad knowing what I know now. Being naive, it's a blessing.
I just wanted to be sure, though. I think it's honestly helpful to have come from a background where I never thought I'd really be a founder and I wasn't really optimizing for that. Because, it was such a big deal to me to decide to do this, and to decide to take this amount of money. And I think it's not the only reason we've done well, but I think it's one of the reasons early on I was able to iterate so fast.
Turner Novak:
So this was actually a question from Julian Weisser at On Deck. He asked, how did you decide that this was the right path to start a company? Is there a specific decision? Or-
Celine Halioua:
So, I decided this was the right path for a couple of things. One is that it made so much objective sense and I couldn't figure out a reason why it didn't make sense.
And two, that I thought I was uniquely adept to start it. So, I don't think any of these thyroid eye disease or cancer companies or whatever ... I could do it. I could probably figure it out, but I wasn't the best person in the world to start those companies.
With dog longevity, I'm probably not the best person in the world. But there was an argument that I had a unique background that put me in a 90th percentile or something. I have the arts. We didn't talk about this, but I originally gone to school for art. I have really big design, and you can't tell from how I dress today, but I actually really care about aesthetics and beauty and consumer and UX and all of that, which is important for a consumer-led product.
I am a huge animal person, so I had empathy with the market and a desire to work on it. Which a lot of biotech people were dog people, but a lot of them want to focus on human. And I had the longevity background.
And aa number four, bonus, is that the kind of funding that we would need for this company was not going to be East Coast Biotech. It was going to be West Coast Silicon Valley. East Coast Biotech wouldn't really fund something like this for a multitude of reasons, doesn't fit into their economic model. I don't fit their founder model, things like that.
We were really a Silicon Valley-type of company and I was able to combine the technical competence to get this off the ground, but also the ability to communicate and think and lead a company in the Silicon Valley way. Which, if you've ever talked to East Coast Biotech funds, they wear suits, right? It's a very different vibe.
Turner Novak:
Meanwhile, for people listening and not watching, we are currently both wearing the same shirt, the same sweatshirt, same color. We're both wearing gray undershirts, which you can't see. We bonded over that earlier.
Celine Halioua:
Yeah. It's real fashion here.
Turner Novak:
So then one of the interesting things you mentioned was, this is probably about a month or two ago ... I'm trying to think about when this episode will air. But, you announced a Series B that you raised.
You actually told me that in the end of 2022, you tried to also raise a Series B and you failed. What happened? And what'd you learn?
Celine Halioua:
So, a couple of things. I'll break them into macro and Loyal.
So, macro is never insufficient or never sufficient. That thing where it's like you see the path. There was always a path where I should have had a successful series B in 2022. But, the background context of why it was so much harder is I think that was one of the worst quarters in history to raise a growth round.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I'm pretty sure it was.
Celine Halioua:
Lesson learned on that one. And so, basically people didn't want to invest in weird, hard things. And looking back at it, I call it the FTX effect, which is a bunch of people just got super embarrassed with their LPs by investing in FTX, because then went through this whole thing and I was in jail. And they didn't want to then go back to their LPs and be like, "Sorry about losing all your money in FTX. Now we're doing this dog longevity company."
Turner Novak:
Yeah. It's like, can you think of something even crazier than FTX? Well, here's an even similar level of craziness.
Celine Halioua:
We're doubling down.
And so again, that's not the reason why. But it did make it, I think it made the second category, which is me. Why I think I could have gotten away with it in another macro environment, but didn't get away with it in that macro environment.
So, this aspect on me is that I had a lot of the flaws of being a founder that grew up in ZIRP. I always was talking about the big vision or dog longevity and human longevity and pharma. And I didn't really have a conscientious approach to, "This is the money we're raising. This is the milestone in our locks. Here's the redundancy in case I'm wrong on the timeline. And here's why we're worth so much more once we do that."
I didn't have the empathy of understanding how a VC, especially growth stage VC thinks about an investment in that way. I didn't think about the fact that future financing risk, they all knew that the market was crashing. Everybody knew that. And so nobody wanted to be the last one on what's the negative of the last one on the train?
They didn't want to hold the bag. Because all of a sudden they were looking at the rest of their portfolio. And a bunch of them, they already are going to have to bridge them out. They were already struggling. They're having to do a bunch of layoffs. And they didn't want to add another company that was capital intensive to that stack.
And so, I came with this big pie in the sky vision, but no real details and empathy and thoughts of what we were going to do as a cash, and where it was going to bring us, and what it was going to bring us forward to there.
I also didn't understand company milestones super well. I would talk about milestones as the milestones that mattered to me. Which to be clear, mattered to a company, but didn't necessarily have the oomph as investible milestones.
So, for example, we have received the data from our big dog short lifespan drug that basically made me confident that we were going to earn additional efficacy approval from the FDA. However, I thought that was the investible milestone. That wasn't the investible milestone. The investible milestone was getting the FDA sign off a year later, which is what we got the end of 2023. And I was like, "Why? We know it. We have it-
Turner Novak:
It's already here. Yeah.
Celine Halioua:
It's here. Why aren’t we being valued off of this?
But, it's because for the investor, there was a huge, huge delta between - this lady is saying that this data is sufficient for the first-ever lifespan, extension approval or efficacy approval, Again, it's on a market yet - versus, "Oh, here's the one page from the FDA.”
The delta and the amount of diligence they had to do, the amount of work, the embarrassment factor. These are from people who have probably never invested in something like this before. I just didn't understand that, in that dynamic of when you go to your LP and you go to your partnerships and say, "I want to do this investment, and here's the risk we're taking."
So, when we took that risk off the table and showed it's called reasonable explanation of efficacy, we have the reasonable efficacy sign off from the FDA. That was a huge, huge moment where people were like, "Oh, shit. She's right. They actually are doing it." And then they were able to buy into everything else.
It was super fucking painful at the time. It totally knocked my confidence, because I'd always been a really, really good fundraiser. And that was like one of the first times where ... I failed a lot of things with Loyal. But that was a really egg-in-your-face failure. And then I had spent nine months, the summer of '23 raising a $8-million SAFE bridge to be able to fund the company through to LOY-02 launch. Which, I had historically raised that amount of money in 30 minutes, literally.
But, looking back on it, I'm actually so thankful it all happened, because it taught me how to operate in such a more rigorous way that we're now taking forward. We have a shit ton of money in the bank now. But I now will use that so much better than if that had never happened. So, it all worked out.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. It's like that one meme, it's like the Bain meme. It's like, "I grew up in the darkness." Do you know what I'm talking about? I can't remember exactly what the quote is, but-
Celine Halioua:
"I was shaped and molded by it. You merely adopted it," or whatever.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Something like that. You need to go through that in order to really appreciate it.
Celine Halioua:
I really had to.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. It's a good just forcing function.
And I wanted to ask this, because it stood out to me as a bold statement. You said think that Silicon Valley can produce 10 times more deep tech companies. Why do you think that?
Celine Halioua:
Because they're doing basically nothing right now.
Turner Novak:
Okay. So, you go from one to 10.
Celine Halioua:
Yeah. It's like the multiplier act.
So, I think probably since I've said this, it's become a lot more mainstream. The American Dynanism, the Aero stuff, the space stuff, these all counts. And I think they're going to have a similar thing to what I was talking about at the very beginning. Where they need to succeed, or at least one of them needs to succeed, or they're going to have a bunch of funds that fundraise around this American Dynanism, deep tech, hard tech, whatever deep says and then flop, like climate tech did, when I was in middle school. But, I've heard the stories.
So I think their success is going to be super important to the future of deep tech in the valley. Again, I'm not an expert on this, we could argue that some of the AI stuff fits into that. A lot of it's like discovery work on a different hill.
And I think we're going to have more weird companies that are going to get started. I'm really excited for it, and when we earn the approval and have this drug on market, because then people will objectively see. I've been saying this, "Oh, it's going to be high revenue. High market. High stickiness. No competition." But, if we actually have those numbers, I think that's going to be so helpful. Helping people understand, oh, this is why it's worth it. This is why you should go through all this pain, because what's on the other side is so damn cool.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. That's true. And something like this “new Salesforce competitor”, versus “helping people live a longer life”? The impact is arguably quite a bit bigger too.
Celine Halioua:
Yeah. And it's the kind of thing people ... We have a lot of family offers in high net worth investors, and a lot of it is because they want to be able to be proud of what they're doing with their money. And this is a really nice thing, where it's like there's a very objective path to a very high ROI, especially at the valuation we're at currently. And you're doing good for the world.
So, it's like venture-scale philanthropy is how I think about it. And I genuinely feel that way. You are genuinely funding important work that couldn't get done in any other setting. And, there's a path to making a lot of money off of it too. And so, I think when you can find those opportunities to make money and do well doing it, do well for the world while doing it, I think it attracts a lot of really good people around you.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Last question, you touched on you're oddly a good angel investor, even though you shouldn't be. You talked about big problems that people should solve. Is there anything you'd invest in, or anything you'd be like, if you weren't doing Loyal, if you had to start over, or if somebody came to you-
Celine Halioua:
Well, I don't really have money anymore... Well, I guess I have some money. But I am not willing to invest it in startups, personally.
So I used to have a Spearhead fund, which is how I did all this.
Turner Novak:
Oh, got it. Okay.
Celine Halioua:
So, I was the first check into Hadrian. Longer story, I made a lot of money off of one of my ex's companies Curative. Done well with people like that.
Again, I don't have time to do this shit anymore. All I spend time is on loyal. But, historically what I looked for is people were super mission-motivated and had a technical insight that was earned.
So, it's not like they were like, "Oh, I'm going to start a company. What am I going to start?"
But they had built context in something, found an opportunity, and landed on entrepreneurship as the way to realize that opportunity. And then had a degree of high growth. Immigrants also always help. Immigrants are always good at stuff like this.
So, yeah. That's what I looked at.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. That makes sense.
Well, cool. This was a lot of fun. I know you have to get going, but thanks for taking the time to chat.
Celine Halioua:
So nice to see you.
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