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#16 Wadham Women in Science & Entrepreneurship

• Wadham College, University of Oxford • Season 2 • Episode 5

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Panel discussion chaired by Claire Brown (Oxford Science Enterprises), with alumnae panellists Sophie Costello (Chemistry, 1996) and Katerina Spranger (DPhil Engineering Science, 2010), current student, Diana Mandewo (MSc Applied Digital Health, 2024) and Professor Monika Gullerova (Wadham Fellow and Tutor in Medicine).

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as you have heard, I'm a partner with Oxford Science Enterprises, which is a venture capital group, and we invest exclusively in Oxford University spinout companies and we look to work in partnership with academics across Oxford to see what their entrepreneurial ideas might be and hopefully create companies out of them So but today, it's not about Oxford Science Enterprises It's about hearing about the four fabulous women that we've got here tonight to talk about their journeys and how they've got here. And as I was prepping for this panel, I was thinking of some of the statistics that I've seen recently around, women entrepreneurship and seeing that actually, it's a first time high that the UK has got one- nearly 2 million people self-employed in the UK, females, which is as of late 2019. And that is a huge achievement because there hasn't been many women taking that leap to be self-employed. And so I think that's that's something I think when we look at the FTSE 100 and 250, the ratio of male to female entrepreneurs have increased from 3 to 1. So that has been, just showing that women are starting to be out there and think about how they can start their own businesses. I think the growth rate of female founders and people in businesses has increased by a third, sorry, by three times, 30% now 150,000 female owned businesses in the UK. So I think these are some of the, you know, great statistics we see, but it's still not enough. We still need to get more women thinking, this is me. I can do this. I might not wear a fleece, I might not come from California, but I can still create a business and and be, you know, a viable entrepreneur. And I think these four women have shown how they are on that journey themselves. So I'm going to go along and we're going to talk on subjects that I think are quite close to everybody's journey, which is resilience. Some of the areas, some of the challenges people have found. But this isn't a session to complain and see what went wrong. But I think by understanding the challenges, how these women have built that clear resilience and to go to the next stage. So I think we'll touch on that through the panel. And then also not always having all the answers. You know, no man's an island. Nobody can build a business in isolation. So how do you get those other pieces that you can build into a business that will make it look and feel more viable to the outside world? And that can be particularly important if you're raising money. And we're going to hear from two different approaches. Katerina has raised money for her business from the venture capital industry. Sophie's built a business from scratch organically without having to raise any money. And so I think that's two different journeys you can take on this path that we'll hear about. And I think it's two different sets of challenges that they have. So I think it will be important to touch on that. But why don't we just hand over to to the group and hear from everybody? So obviously we can start with yourself, Katerina. So I'm Katerina Spranger, I did a DPhil here in... was matriculated back in 2010, and finished 2014. So more than ten years ago, very difficult to believe that that was ten years ago. Really. And, just maybe to quickly, you know, paint the journey So I came from a very technical background, but I decided to switch my focus into medical applications because I really felt that in medicine, this is where I can find my meaning and purpose and doing something with immediate impact on society because that was really important, for me, that my work had something with a purpose and then, so switched and did a DPhil here at Oxford at Wadham in biomedical engineering And this was kind of my, my research project was, at that time, the devices called [???] were extremely new to the market. The first device, I think, was deployed 2010. So I started 2000... sorry, 2007 and I started 2010, so super new. And the from engineering point of view, I was trying to understand my research, how these devices behave when they're deployed inside a human body. But then, after finishing the DPhil, it really felt that this project could be so much more, that not just being shelved as an engineering kind of, you know, interesting project on the shelf of the, engineering department, but could really make a difference in people's lives. And this is how Oxford Heartbeat was born with the help of the Royal Academy of Engineering in the UK organization who supports early-stage academics to start companies, and also with a fantastic support for grant funding from InnovateUK we started building the product And, some people who were from the very beginning there up here in the audience, and now Oxford Heartbeat is an organisation that has a product that is used in... what we do is, we... the technology which is software technology, it helps surgeons choose the right implant for minimally invasive procedures for every individual patient, so the doctors can go and perform the surgery more effectively and efficiently. It's now used in 14 different countries in Europe. We supported to date over a thousand surgeries. We just finished a clinical trial with fantastic results. But hi, I’m Diana I'm a medical doctor by profession, and I'm a current Wadham student and my background is in medicine. But my entrepreneurship journey started because of a fake vaccine card that my friend got. We were trying to cross the border from Zimbabwe to South Africa, and my friend forgot the actual vaccine card. However, someone got onto the bus and sold us a fake vaccine card. So from that experience, we realized just how much vaccine fraud was prevalent in Zimbabwe. 80% of yellow fever vaccine cards were actually false. So from that we started VaxiGlobal a digital health company that authenticates vaccine records using biometrics and using facial recognition features as a pilot in Zimbabwe. So that was good until Covid started and we ended up having to expand our projects across African countries, and we have a ten year partnership with World Health Organisation AFRO and partnership with Asean Development Agency and the World Food Program. So I ended up being head of operations for a Covid vaccine delivery system for 350,000 vaccine deliveries, as well as yellow fever vaccine deliveries for 18 million lives. I ended up in entrepreneurship as a mistake, but I realized that that's where I actually flourished as a person, I like leading, I like starting new ideas and coming up with solutions that have been different. And I'm currently studying digital health. My plan after this is to go into funding for women and making sure that women founders can also get the same access to funding as other people. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you My name is Sophie Costello, and I left Wadham 25 years ago although it feels like five minutes when I walked through the quad this afternoon. And I did a chemistry degree, and I was the first person in my family to go to university. So I think I sort of thought that I would get a degree and then someone would give me a job. But, when I finished my degree, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I knew that research and PhD route probably wasn't for me. I was never really good at the practical side of things. And so I searched around, I dabbled in accountancy for a little bit, but really missed science and and finally found the work that I do now, which is consulting for the pharmaceutical industry and the biotech industry as their drugs come to market. So helping them do systematic reviews of data. Do medical education for doctors, write up their clinical trials, a whole suite of projects that they need external expertise with in order to get their drugs approved and used. And I was working in that field for another company. And then, back in 2008, my brother, my younger brother experienced a very serious brain injury, a life changing event that meant, his life was going to change forever and that of my family's life. And that sort of caused a bit of a reassessment for me. I looked at the job I was doing and realized that while I loved the job I was doing, I didn't really love where I was doing it. And so I think that sort of thing in my personal life caused me to feel a bit braver about my professional life. And my husband, who I met at Wadham, said to me, I think you should do this, but do it yourself. I think you should start a company. So with really little idea what we were doing, we started a company, just the two of us. And... in the spare room of our house. And it's organically grown since that. And now we have 500 team members across Yeah, eight offices in lots of different countries. So it's been a really exciting journey and one that I couldn't have anticipated Hello, everyone. So I guess a few of you know me, I’m local here. I’m Monika, a professor here and Tutorial Fellow at Wadham College I come from a family of medical doctors. So throughout my early life, I knew I do not want to do clinical medicine, but I felt great passion for understanding how things actually work and, go basically smaller and smaller and smaller. And my subject then became molecular medicine. So I run a lab at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology of ten passionate scientists. And the molecule of my life is RNA. We study RNA from all sorts of aspects. And it's obviously a fundamental molecule in life. And, now it's becoming, quite a prominent clinical target. So fundamental discoveries that we make in my lab, we then try to sort of translate and understand how they could be used to help patients, ultimately. So, for example, one of my projects that we that we run in the lab, helped to co-found Dark Room Therapeutics in Oxford and now we are embracing a new challenge, which is obviously, absolutely dominating - the application of artificial intelligence. So we developing a platform that will help speed up, discovery for targeting RNA molecules by small compounds. And then, I have another project that I develop with or I'm developing with Cancer Research UK. Cancer research UK was funding my lab for the last seven years and hopefully will do still in the future. And we work on how to target RNA by another type of small RNA and that's sort of a very different strategy. But ultimately the umbrella is the RNA as a clinical target Thank you, guys. So as you can see we've got some really diverse expertise, very different journeys. I think the things that resonated with me during that introduction

was that... three things:

problem solving. Everybody here found a problem in the market or a problem that they wanted to solve. And thought, how does that help me come up

with a solution? Two:

I think there was passion. It came from something that made you think, I want to go ahead and get involved in this. It wasn't always a logical decision, but for many of our entrepreneurs here there was a passion that they felt they could get involved in, which I think is important when you are, you know, you've got a lot of late nights, a lot weekends given up, when you want to be an entrepreneur. And if you're not passionate about it, it's very difficult to keep coming up against it. And keep having to pivot and think about the new direction. And I think what Diana said was about you fell into entrepreneurship. It was a mistake or it wasn't something you planned for. And I think that's partly because, you know, what is this mythical creature that we think of as an entrepreneur? And I think if you watch Dragon's Den and any of these programs, there is very much a mold that people tend to affiliate and say, oh, that's what an entrepreneur looks like. But as we've seen, we've got some very different journeys and very different end points. So I think it's important that we actually just say anybody can be an entrepreneur. It doesn't matter where you've come from. Monika came from a family of doctors versus Sophie was the first one in their family to go to university, so I think I'd like to touch on that a wee bit and think, what was the point where each of you got to that point and said, I'm an accidental entrepreneur, here I am, I've made it. Or are you still on that journey? So I'd love to kind of hear a wee bit on how you actually got that that realization. I think that when we founded Costello Medical, we sort of went to a solicitors office and asked them if we could start a company, and he said, well, pay me 50 pounds and we'll do it. And we walked out thinking, what have we done? And we didn't really, in all honesty, know what we were doing, but we just started on that journey my husband and I, together, and I still honestly don't sort of think of myself as an entrepreneur because that's not what I set out to be. I found a work that I loved and had a passion for, and then once we started to have more work than we could do ourselves and we put a job ad out thinking, well, no one will apply because we have no track record. But they did. And then they came and they were good. And then we needed to employ some more people. That journey just sort of happened very naturally. There was no sitting and planning and going, we want to be this size or we think of ourselves as entrepreneurs. We just found something that we loved doing. And then as we started to run the company, the passion increased. Like the passion for working with all those people, for giving them great careers, for having people who stayed with us over the long term, for running a company that did a bit of good in the world. It kept increasing, which meant the company kept increasing, and that's what we're still doing. It was sort of need-led? Yes You grew the business in relation to that, which is probably very different from, you know, the other three founders in the room excepting that Monika’s also got a day job as an academic as well as an entrepreneur. But I guess maybe Diana and you, Katerina, you've raised money you know... What would what would be the journey that's different because you don't get that choice to say well, I’ll grow organically. You need money. You're not going to develop your product otherwise. So how is that different for you? Maybe to start touching on the entrepreneurship, and what it means kind of for me, for example, I think you're absolutely right. Entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurs come and should come from totally different shapes and forms and flavors, and I think it's very easy to make a mistake or get an impression now in society there's kind of like a very cliche Silicon Valley, you know, you know, university drop-out and raise a lot of money and multiple funding rounds and then grows the company super quickly and burns a lot of cash and then kind of exits or IPOs. So I think that is one pathway. But it's not right for everyone at all. And it should not be. And I think we should celebrate you know, that entrepreneurs come from all sorts of different areas of life and ... And this is the beauty of it, because this is where the richness of ideas and, and backgrounds and creativity comes from. But coming back to, I guess, my story, my parents are engineers, by background and entrepreneurs so I kind of grew up with this sort of witnessing how it was at the background and sort of backstage, you know, that father's coming, father coming home every week and something you some new challenge and problem unexpected like some, you know, issues and I guess kind of it showed me that how it is in reality that this kind of path is this is the path, it's the lows and the problems and hiccups are actually a default. It's a norm. This is how it is. And with like after five, six, ten“no, no”s you get a “yes”. And that yes will carry you through the next kind of roundabout. So I think that kind of gave me that, I guess resilience that is required, doing something that is very new and like just pushing through it is a finite resource, I have to say... you need some other, you know, support. But anyway, so that and... I kind of... I was not the type that, you know, at age seven was like selling candies to the neighbor and like, like I was not like that at all. I was also very academic. And I loved studying. I loved... you know, I wanted to study forever. So that was also my mindset. But I always thought to myself, oh, maybe like one day, but I didn't know when I didn't know how. I was also very practical. But then I think it was a combination of wanting to do it as a dream one day and also then stumbling upon this problem in my research here at the university, to see that this like, maybe this is it, maybe this is the project that could really be turned into a business because it clearly is a clinical problem that is acute. And also, you know, maybe it's possible, and frankly, it was also, at that time that, very new, very few people in the world... were thinking about this. And another contributing factor that I think helped me a lot and pushed me over that line was I was doing courses in the Said Business School So as a student here at Wadham in science, we were also allowed to participate in some business courses at the Said Business School, I remember the programme was called Science and innovation plus where we can go and attend lectures with MBA students and then and other lectures that were really teaching us how to do so-called customer development, how to go and talk to your customers, how to go and talk to your community even without before building anything, talk to your customers and kind of do this methodologically. And we had to do the assignment. So like really go with like empty hands and trying to speak to the users, to surgeons and I remember those conversations were painful, like extremely painful. Like, you know, talking to a student that doesn't have anything to show. And you go and to like a big ego cardiovascular surgeon and you say, oh, maybe I could improve how you do things. And they’re like, “what?” So that was painful. But on the other hand, it kind of gave us the toolset and reality check of what it will take. So when then, you know, with the funding[???] like there was no excuses like this is the just do it now, you know, that kind of confronted me with the realization, okay, there are no excuses anymore if you dream about it. And this is the problem that seems like worth solving. Just do it. So that was another contributing factor that really pushed over the line. Before we go to Diana... I guess what resonated is, like you said that, it's quite intimidating to go out to talk to if you don't see anyone that looks like you in the room and and be that VCs be that medics, whatever it might be, it can be, you know, a challenge. I mean, I think we talk to a lot of academics for projects that we might look to, to invest in. And I think what I always say to them as well, you don't have to be the person that comes and joins a company. We want you to be involved. We want you to advise, but actually you're doing exactly what you're good at, which is being an academic and coming up with the ideas. The execution piece can be someone else. And I think that is important and any good VC will look beyond the the sort of... presentation style shall we say, and how you present the story and actually look at the nuts and bolts because it's a people business. You’re looking in the eyes of that person and saying, I could work with them. I could sit across the table from that person for the next, you know, ten years until the product’s developed. Diana? I wanted to say, I started selling sweets when I was seven, but also that was not entrepreneurship it was because my dad lost his job when he was studying economics, which is very ironic I think I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur because it was just a problem that we were trying to solve with my friends. And even when you got the first round of funding, it was just like a oh yay moment, we get to innovate more. So it was never a moment of, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm doing this. I think it only stuck when you got an award from the [???] foundation, like, oh okay, we're actually entrepreneurs in Africa I think for me, entrepreneurship tied to my value and the value was that people in Africa deserve the same level of care. And digital health can still be used and there are creative ways of using digital health. So that value for me helped me face, you know, when you go into a room and you're trying to explain the content and no one is listening, I feel like if your values are safe and if it's a problem that matters to you, then it's something that you be willing to just take your time into. And of course people will say no, people will slam doors and there are rooms where I’ve walked into and I was either the only woman or the only black person there. And so the question is, what is your why and why do you want to do it? And I think that is what will sustain you. Maybe just to move on to that point. We've talked about resilience when things go wrong. I'd love to hear maybe Monika, you know, you've been both therapeutic and now reading with your machine learning, it would be good to touch on maybe the worst, the worst experience you’ve had? On this journey? and how you the whole list. Yeah, but how are you... Because you're balancing different things. You know, you're trying to be... you are being inspirational to the next generation that are coming along. But you're also trying to keep doing your day job. So I'd love to understand what are examples of the horror stories that you guys have encountered, I think would be important, and then how you've overcome them, because you're all still here, you’re all still powering through. So I think that'd be nice to hear. Well there’s so much going on through my head there... Okay. So, what I would like to say is that I'm a, you know, hardcore scientist. I'm an academic. I'm really passionate about the fundamental discoveries. And perhaps the entrepreneurial spirit inside me is simply my mom asking me. Yeah, okay. So you do that. Okay. What is it for? It's got to be actually useful. You know, it's got to help patients. So I suppose that's really deeply embedded in me. And the discoveries we we make in the lab. I'm trying to sort of like, apply and ask myself is this useful actually in any way? Throughout my life as academic, I think you really have to develop, and I think that's true for everyone who is in academia will agree is to develop very thick skin because you’re constantly judged you’re constantly, in fact, criticized. You know, you write a grant you submit the grant, you get the feedback back You don't get it, oh God, you know then you work maybe with your team five years on a story, on a paper, submit it to a publication, you know, you go, you aim very high, you get a review and there's always the bastard reviewer number two, who rejects the paper and each time you have these real high expectations, hopes, and then you fall flat, you know, and I think we need to basically learn is okay, didn’t work out this time But it's going to work out next time. It’s a marathon, not a sprint at the end of the day Because actually that's something in this country that we're all learning to be. If you are not embracing failure, you're not taking enough risk. And you sort of have to have a risk embedded, because if everything is safe and you've taken the big risk, Sophie, you know, you started a business, you went from something that was probably a fairly nicely paid job to say, let's have... let's do something else. So have you ... did that resonate? Do you have some real horror stories? Many horror stories. And I think, they've become less over time because we’ve... I've learned to deal with them better. So at the beginning we had situations sometimes where we had offered someone a job, that we work on kind of a project by project basis. So we could always sort of see six months into the future in terms of how much money we had and we had to employ people, but as soon as we employed them, this very strong sense of responsibility that you can't, you know, you've got people moving to live near you. We would employ people straight out of university, and just that feeling of, you can't offer them a job and then tell them that the money's not there to pay them. So and that in the early days, we have many situations where suddenly a client would pull a project or a drug would fail and the work not be there. And we'd committed to paying people. And thankfully we've never had to make anyone redundant. But I think what we learned quite early on was it was really important to sort of look the worst in the face. That's what we used to do. We used to sort of plan out if things don't go well, what's the worst that's going to happen and face it down and get used to kind of living with that level of risk and using it to spur you on rather than hold you back. And I think we made mistakes at the beginning, because sometimes that concern would stop us from pushing things forward. And we've learned over time how to do that better. And I think, one thing I had to learn was to not fall in love with my idea, because sometimes people are being mean, but sometimes people are actually right, their rooms to say no. maybe their tone was not nice, but they were actually right And it helped me to reframe how I looked at my idea. So that's just what I wanted to add. Also many stories, some of them... I can maybe give a couple of examples. The most recent one is, receiving a data that we need for the project of... it's a 20 month project. Receiving the data after the project was supposed to be completed. That's the recent one. Another one submitting a very important paper publication to the best journal in the field. Be rejected. Submitting to another one, being rejected, submitting to another one. And then the first journal publishes a paper that is a copycat of ours Like a year after we submitted that there. Another one was starting a clinical trial, in the UK, in Covid, that was supposed to last for two years. And then it was Covid so slow recruitment, patient backlog, NHS strikes, and basically finishing the trial you know, arfter three and a half years instead of two... many things like that. But again, I think what is important is to understand that this is the reality of how you do things, of how things are done, because it's, again, very easy to look at the kind of the high headlines of success stories and think that this is how it is. But it's like a tip of the iceberg and the reality of all of the things that are required to make it actually happen is so much wider. And ... again, so many “no”s to one “yes”. So the ratio is like the no is almost the default. rather than a yes. And it’s finding somebody that It's not you, it's me. It’s like dating. And I think you have to kind of say Well, actually, could I have chosen the right pool in the first place? the right investors to go to But I think that not to take it personally, that sometimes your idea does need tweaked. But often it's not like that. And I think one of the things we've talked... a lot about entrepreneurs, but also you’re a leader of people and I think, how do you guys... does anyone want to talk about you know, what it is to be a leader? Because you're not just leading a technical project, you're leading a team of people who put their trust in you. And, you know, when the shit hits the fan- excuse my French You know, you have to sort of hold that and not necessarily show everybody. You've got to have broad shoulders which is quite a lonely life as a CEO, I can imagine. Does anyone have any thoughts? or would like to... Sophie, you've talked a wee bit about, you know, that scary moment where we've got these 500 people on the payroll and how do we make sure that we can sustain them? I think for me, what I really learned is that, as you were saying before, you can look at entrepreneurs and leaders and imagine there's a sort of specific mold and a specific type of person, and a specific way of doing it. And I realized pretty quickly that actually, for me to do that, I had to do it in my own way. I had to be myself. Like if I was going to be able to lead an increasing number of people, I had to be able to do it in a way that was authentic to me. And so I probably wasn't like a hugely confident leader who would get up and give inspiring talks. I was somebody who found my way by connecting with individuals. Or if I was struggling with something, obviously put on a brave face and give people confidence that you were dealing with it. But I really learned that actually, my leadership style worked best when I expressed to people the things I was worried about, and got them to come and help me to get that feeling that we were all in it together. So, yeah, I think for me, that was it. Figuring out that to be an effective leader, I think you have to do it in a way that's authentic to you, primarily because you're living and breathing it. So if it's not who you are, it's too exhausting to pretend to be somebody that you’re not. And I think the vulnerability piece around, because, you know, a lot of VC led businesses, there's a runway and the money takes you so far. And I think if people are going to take a chance to join the business, they have to know, you know, realistically what could happen, what could go wrong. And it's an educated decision to still join a company. But I think you owe it to them because they've taken a chance on you. So you're bringing them along in the journey. And I think you need people who are going to come with you and do that. Otherwise you can't grow the company you need. People who are willing to say, it's going wrong I'll help you because they're the people who are the entrepreneurs alongside you. But maybe just in the last couple of minutes, I'd like to chat a wee bit about, the support, the network, who has helped on that journey to get you to where you needed to go. We've heard a lot about, you know, Sophie, your husband everybody’s usually got a very helpful spouse. But I think, you know, mentors play an important role. Sponsors play an important role. And it's a bit of a difference for a sponsor versus a mentor if people don't know the difference, but a sponsor, someone that will really advocate for you and make sure you can get things done, you can get recognized versus a mentor’s very inwardly looking at how they can help you in your personal journey. But I do think, you know, I'd like to touch a wee bit on who you've reached out to, where you found the council. Is it an easy place to find people to come and help you and advise on this journey, or is it still a lonely world? At the beginning, we were really trying to be part of some kind of a program from every year really starting from the Royal Academy of Engineering. That provided a year of fellowship. So I got a fellowship from them, and they supported, for the whole year. Basically, they gave infrastructure and mentorship and courses and all that, sort of that you need to, to be able to start the company. And then it was extremely helpful because at the beginning, again, it it really depends on the journey. Right. But for me, because I was straight out of academia, so completely clueless, also quite new to the UK really. So it was important to kind of embrace and be surrounded by that, at some point, it's helpful, but at some point you become kind of the expert in what you do and you know your business best of anything, than anyone else, really. And then at some point, the last program we were part of was actually not only not helpful, but actually quite unhelpful. So there is kind of there is a journey in there it's a dynamic process but at the beginning it’s extremely helpful. But also another amazing resource is like coming back to the last question is really the team, you know, startup environment is not for everyone, it’s extremely challenging. There is no, there's no straight like predefined path, for example, coming out of academia or through school, university. You kind of have a very defined path. And maybe in an academic environment or in a corporate environment, you kind of know where your next promotion is and how to get there etc Whereas in building a start-up or something quite innovative and very new where there's so much uncertainty from the regulatory environment to all the way to like carving your space in the new market, there is no predefined path and you're kind of like building the path as you go along. kind of like throwing next door and like jumping in the pond kind of to cross on the other side. So it's, there's a lot of uncertainty and it's not for everyone, you know, also the funding comes in, there's like the, you know, the prediction of the sales and how they will materialize. So that's why it's so important to surround yourself with people. And we have kind of also a rule in the company in the way we hire people. They all need to be also very, culturally a very good fit for us. And because otherwise... no matter how brilliant someone is, we will not hire not a nice person Because otherwise, when all these challenges arise that one bad apple can spoil everything and we had to learn the hard way. So now everyone like... it's a very kind of challenging process. But once someone is in it's really like you try to build(and I hope the team can speak to that) an environment that is really supportive, nice and kind of, you know, constantly working with not only to be a very meaningful what we do in terms of the journey, but also a nice environment to be with. I was struck with what you said about, you know, the Wadham experience and actually getting exposed to that from quite an early stage in your academic career to get courses at the business school. So, I mean, I think that's another area. How do you think Wadham itself has prepared you for the journey you’ve gone on, all of you? I just quickly will answer because I have the microphone. I also was MCR president one year in the end of my first year and the beginning of my second year that was also a great experience, to just see how the College is run. So that was, I think that helped me to kind of understand how how big organisations work and function. So as a proud current Wadhamite I'm so grateful that I got a mentor who understands the entrepreneurship journey Monika who’s here on stage and also the exposure to the Oxford Incubator program, which allows you to be around other founders as well courses in the business school, are quite helpful. But then when it comes to mentorship, I realize that it's more than what is on paper. It's also about your personalities with your mentor and mentee. If you guys can actually understand each other. There are people who are brilliant, but they might not be a good fit for your idea. And I just wanted to also, reinforce that idea that it's important to keep your own counsel so that even when you get advice, you know what works for what you're trying to do and what doesn't work. And so that you can also define those limits to what you will say“no” to and to what you adopt into a system, to what your values are and to what you're trying to do as well. you know, didn't know about what university life would be like I think when I think about how Wadham helped me. I ... so I was coming into something that I didn't know, my parents didn't know and Wadham was just so welcoming. So that sort of taught me that you can go into an arena where you perhaps don't feel like you belong, but if you pick the right arena, then you will be fine. And that's what it's been like for me in business, like when we went to get some advice at the beginning, sometimes I would sit in a room with people and just think they're very successful, but they're running things in a way that I don't want to. So if that's the way I have to do it, I don't want to do it. And so I think that sense of choosing whose advice you listen to is really important, because if you get pulled away from the values of what you're trying to do, that's always one of... the biggest mistakes I've made are when I've gone away from what felt right to me at the time, so I think that's another thing I learned in terms of advice, is looking to people who you feel connect with the thing you're trying to achieve and choosing where you get the advice from really carefully. Well, I’m still at Wadham so let’s see how far I get So, I think, Wadham is a really nice community. And there are loads of opportunities, I think of people and that's generally a perhaps, in Oxford, if people keep an open mind, the opportunity will arise. And the question is whether you spot it at the right time. And, obviously, we have loads of speakers. A lot of people come to Oxford to give talks. And obviously I also sit on two chairs. So Wadham is one chair but the other is Dunn school of pathology which is full of brilliant scientists. So, I'm very lucky to be exposed to amazing scientists from all around, all around the world to come and give talks at Dunn School One piece of advice people always gave me: Everyone can spare you 15 minutes, whether it's the CEO of Apple or, you know, vice chancellor. Everybody's got 15 minutes that they can spend time in their busy day to talk to you. So sometimes it's about taking gumption and doing that. I’d maybe like to go around, one sentence from everybody and then we can open up for some questions from the audience. What advice would you give to your younger self? Okay. My motto is never give up. Just basically keep going. And, if you fall flat, you know, as we do on a daily basis, just basically try to perceive criticism that's given to you as a way forward rather than just stopping you. I think the first bit of advice I'd give to myself would be, enjoy every day you had at Wadham because life will not always be as fun as that was. but also, I think just to be, you know, be professionally brave... it took something like very difficult happening to me to make me take that professional bravery step and to realize if it goes wrong, what’s the worst that can happen? So I think that kind of be brave and head towards the career that you want and this is an environment that’s got everything offering to you I'd say you have one life, so just go on the big adventure because you're just doing it once. So at the end of the day, we're all dying, so we might as well do what you want to do. Advice to my younger self... I would start earlier because it took almost like a year between finishing and actually starting the company. The year of thinking... Do I? Is this really... am I ready? I would have started earlier, and also be able to if possible, I would be less worried because I was really worried that it wasn’t going to work out or how like I was, you know... Yeah, if possible. But it's easier to, you know, in retrospect to say, why were you so worried? And just to, on that note, when I was in the process of, you know, thinking, do I? do I not? am I ready? I went to a panel. So I went to a talk and on the panel there was, one founder, female founder of a medical imaging company, and she was sort of, presenting. And after the talk, I went to her and I said, I have this idea, you know, kind of stemming from my research, but I'm not too sure to do it. or not to do it. And she said that if you don't do it, will you regret it? And I said, yes. She's like, well, that's I guess, your answer. So it's a very cheesy story but sometimes these things really matter. Sometimes a final word that, you know, that kind of piece of advice, at exactly the right time, you know, might move the needle and you're like, yeah, yeah. Like, what do I have to lose? Like, I'm going to do it now. And I think, you know, you'll always have a Wadham education. So you always have a network and, an ability to do something. So that's the worst that can happen is you start on idea number two.