For more than two decades, Barbara Kosacz has constructed several hundred biotech deals as partner and head of the life sciences practice at Cooley LLP, a firm that touts itself as the place where innovation meets the law.

Kosacz, who has been called the “smiling tiger,” is known as a firm, but fair negotiator.

“Negotiating is a conversation you have with people across the table about what you need and about what they need,” she says. “I think if each side feels like they left something on the table in a biotech deal — where they could be collaborating for 20 years — this is a good basis to begin a partnership.”

Two years ago, she left the high-stakes, deal-making game and joined Kronos Bio as chief operating officer and general counsel. Her transition to the C-suite was seamless as she applied many of the lessons learned in putting together strategic partnerships for her clients and working with the highest levels of management in the boardrooms.

“What attracted me to Kronos Bio were a couple things. One is Norbert Bischofberger [a PharmaVoice 100], our president and CEO, and his leadership in every aspect of that word,” she says. “Two, I loved that we are focused on what I call high-hanging fruit. We are not here to move the needle a little bit, we want to get to the operating system of cancer. We’re dealing with what’s called transcriptional regulatory networks. These are basic concepts that regulate all of biology and when they dysfunction they lead to oncogenic activity and cancer. Although this is challenging, it's very gratifying.”

Kosacz recognizes that biotech is a small yet global tide pool, and believes she has the responsibility to bring her “A-game” to everything she does while mentoring the next generation of leaders.

“People are counting on me to do that,” she says.

One of the lessons she continues to impart is one she learned early on in her career: “You can’t optimize in two dimensions at once. It’s so important to understand what it is you are solving for and think through carefully what gets you there. People get caught up in a lot of stuff on the side versus understanding what their mission is.”

Another important lesson, which she learned from her father, is to make oneself “essential” whatever the job is. For Kosacz, that means seeing different people’s perspectives and knitting everything together to synthesize the next steps of any arrangement.

In today’s WoW podcast, Kosacz shares her experiences negotiating multimillion-dollar biotech deals, Kronos’ approach to developing therapies that target dysregulated transcription that causes cancer and other serious diseases, and her keys to leadership and career growth.

Welcome to WoW, the Woman of the Week podcast by PharmaVoice, powered by Industry Dive.

In this episode Taren Grom, editor-in-chief emeritus at PharmaVoice meets with Barbara Kosacz, chief operating officer and general counsel, Kronos Bio.

Taren: Barbara, welcome to our Woman of the Week WoW podcast program.

Barbara: Well, thanks so much. I’m delighted to be here.

Taren: We’re delighted to have you here. Barbara, let’s get right to it. So, what is it about the biotech sector that excites you so much that you spent the majority of your career providing guidance to emerging companies?

Barbara: I think it’s kind of two things. One was, I’ve always been, well, maybe three things. I’ve always been really interested in new technologies and kind of cutting-edge science and technologies. And when I first started out my career I was much more in the tech sector. But then I realized, when I started to become exposed to biotech companies, what a fantastic industry this was in the following – you were doing good while doing well and you could have a real impact on society and there were incredible women in the field, honestly. Compared to tech in particular, I felt like there were many more, still not as many as we might all like, but many more women who are in senior leadership positions who were technically trained and brought sort of incredible skill sets both on the technical side and on let’s call, the soft skills side. And they were very inspiring to me.

Taren: That’s wonderful. And so, when you talk about those exciting companies and getting excited by the sciences, is that a curiosity that you’ve had throughout your life or how did that develop for you?

Barbara: Well, it’s funny because I’m not a science person. I’m your classic kind of liberal arts. I was a classics major as an undergraduate. I did a lot of theater and language arts and sort of non-science systems, but I always loved science. And I think in part, I was really drawn to anything new and anything that looked like it could have a big impact on society.

Taren: You’ve had quite the intersection because you are also a top lawyer and have received numerous awards for doing so and being so. So how did your pursuit of the law coincide with your pursuit of the biotech sector?

Barbara: Well, mine is a pretty circuitous path. So other than watching like Perry Mason, when I was little, I had no interest particularly in being a lawyer. I always thought I’d be a teacher. I’d be some of the other kind of classic things young girls thought about especially in those days. I did though get very interested in business when I started working as a paralegal with a lot of emerging companies, again, more on the tech side and I realized what a role lawyers could play in the sort of formation and growth of these very cool emerging companies.

And then that drew me to law school and when I was at law school, I met a number of friends who had maybe been PhDs in chemistry or biology and were also doing law. And I found their backgrounds really, really interesting. And when I started to work at my first law firm, that law firm had a patent practice that was very focused on some of these seminal patentable inventions and biotech. And I just found it amazing and that drew me into working more in biotech. And then I started talking to more people who did that, and one thing led to another.

Taren: It’s still unusual to have somebody who is a general counsel or a lawyer stepping in to lead a biotech company and you spent more than two decades as a partner at the life sciences practice. You headed up the life sciences practice at Cooley LLP. So what made you make the pivot to join one of the companies that you were talking about, Kronos Bio as chief operating officer and general counsel?

Barbara: Well, first I just want to say that, being a lawyer in a large over billion dollar revenue law firm isn’t just about doing client work and maybe doing deals. I mean, I was managing a large practice and a large group and then was also on our management committee. So in some sense that experience of managing groups and thinking about all the various issues you have to think about whether they include compensation, other issues around how you motivate people, how you evaluate people, how you manage to a budget, how you set budgets, how you think about marketing. All of those were still highly relevant. I think the decision to step away really was one where I just, you reach a certain point in your career and you get a bit saturated with what you’ve done and you feel like the learning curve which was steep for decades begins to flatten out a little bit and life is short and you’re thinking – I think I have one more thing in me here. And I’d like to do something else and I like to think of myself as having a growth mindset. I really wanted to honestly, apply what I knew, but also be in a position where I could learn more skills.

Taren: That’s awesome. Let’s dig in a little bit to more about some of those skills that you learned while you were at Cooley before we jump into your current role, if you don’t mind.

Barbara: Sure.

Taren: You talk about some of those things that were key learnings through your experience at Cooley and how they helped develop the skill set that you were going to need when you got to the C-suite. So can you talk about some of the things you learn by working with other life sciences companies and what were some of those interesting deals that you were a part of, if you don’t mind me asking?

Barbara: I feel so grateful to have worked with so many amazing people. Honestly, when I look back, several come to mind, but there are so many. One of the most recent companies that I worked with really right before I left was a company called Principia. Principia actually was the subject of a sale right as I was leaving Cooley and pivoting to Kronos Bio and I had done the underlying deal, that’s kind of led to that sale with a company called Sanofi on the other side.

The thing that you learn – I was probably in literally hundreds of board meetings with hundreds of different companies; and while all of them were different and had different kind of personalities and group dynamics, you do see there’s a real pattern recognition piece of it. And you start to see similar kinds of things that people might trip up on or that people did well or that partners might not understand about what it means to be a biotech company. And just when you’ve been through so many of those there is a kind of… maybe it’s patience, but there’s an ability to kind of wait and see and not overreact that I think is critical, especially in these times, because things are pretty challenging right now as you obviously know in biotech. I think it’s  really important to both be able to act and act decisively, but also not overreact.

Taren: I think that’s really important is being able to maintain that equilibrium while under duress.

Barbara: Right, exactly. Like how do you withstand the pressure in a way where you’re still cracking jokes in the hall and you’re still keeping it light is so important I think. So, helping other companies, but again, I wasn’t in the hot seat. So the whole point of view difference, now I’m here, I’m making those decisions. I’m seeing if I could take my own advice.

The one thing I learned too about being a lawyer is, there’s always all these things you can identify and that’s what you’re taught to do, identify risk, identify all the various things that could and should be done.

But when you’re in the company, you know like look to the right, look to the left of me, who’s going to do that work? There’s only a few of us to get it done. And so while it might be easy to say, here’s what you should do, I think when you’re in the company the view is, what can we do? What can we actually get done and then you have to be in that triage mode of what’s my order of operation? What’s most critical? And that I think my years of experience really helped me see, like what really matters here versus what’s the thing that feels easiest to do or the thing that maybe abates my anxiety, but doesn’t actually move the needle.

Taren: I was going to ask you, if you had a mirror so that you could ask yourself these questions would it be, “Barbara, what did you do here?” So that’s an interesting conversation to have.

Barbara: My ex-Cooley associates who many of whom I still mentor, I had a chat with some of them and one of them was saying, “we have a saying around here now which is “what would Barbara do?”

Taren: I love it. I love it. And so, what advice would you give yourself if you got into a tough position? I know we talked about not overreacting. But what else would you be looking to achieve? Like what’s the best advice you would give yourself?

Barbara: I think to take a minute and get as many inputs as you can in the time allowed. So what I learned really early on in my career was you cannot optimize in two dimensions at once. You can kind of go for speed, but you can always go for the best terms. So I think it’s so important to be able to try to understand what it is you’re solving for and actually, think through carefully what gets me to that. So it’s kind of like eye on the prize. I think people get very caught up in a lot of stuff on the side versus what am I actually, what’s my mission here? What am I really trying to do, if I take all the emotion out of it?

Taren: I’ve never heard that term – you can’t optimize in two dimensions. But I would have assumed that it’s akin to just avoid this world that’s happening to your right and on to your left and as you said, focus on what’s next.

Barbara: Yeah. It’s sort of like saying, if I’m trying to do one thing and do that one thing really well, it’s often the case that I can’t do a different competing thing. So, in deal terms when I did, I spent seriously, a huge majority of my waking hours in negotiations and in structuring deals with the companies I worked with. Again, we can go and try to get this deal done really quickly on great terms, but it might not be the best contract. It might be a little dirty, so to speak, and not a perfect document, or if we’re going for more perfection and this thing has to be very risk-proofed and future-proofed then you can’t also do it fast. So you decide. There’s like the slide rule there like, which is it you really care about optimizing for and the rest will do our best job on. But it’s almost like, what’s my true north? What’s the key thing that matters here? And maybe there’s more than one but often, if you really par sit down and talk to people, there is a single point that you’re really trying to solve for.

Taren: Absolutely. It makes total sense. If you had to guesstimate how many deals you did over your career, are we talking 20? Are we talking a hundred? Are we talking a thousand?

Barbara: I think we’re talking several hundred.

Taren: That’s exciting.

Barbara: Oh, yeah. It’s funny because some of them I can remember so clearly just certain moments in them. It’s just funny how they stay with you.

Taren: What are some of those most memorable moments?

Barbara: One time, I was representing and this is I wasn’t even a partner yet, I was a kind of senior associate. So I’m about six or seven years into my practice and I’m with this small company because I was always on the small side. So I’m always representing the David to Goliath. And we had, I believe it was Pfizer on the other side. And the business development team at Pfizer at that time was a pretty tough group and they kind of bully you into a point, so to speak. This is a long time ago. And my client and they got into it over some point, and I seriously thought the guy from Pfizer was going to punch my client in the nose. And so, I stood up and said like, ‘we have to take a quick break.’ And pulled people out because it was really not going in a positive direction. And sometimes you just got to, like, cut that circuit. Take a moment and kind of reset. And often I felt like that was a lot my job of trying to facilitate overall this kind of interaction. Now, mostly, they were much more positive than that, but that definitely stands out.

Taren: Would you consider yourself to be a tough negotiator?

Barbara: So, I have a client who used to call me – the smiling tiger. And I think I probably am a firm negotiator. I’d like to think of myself as being very clear in what I’m negotiating for and I don’t even think of negotiating as this thing like capital and negotiating and you got to gear up and you got to get game face on and all this. To me, and I was just talking with a group, business development group about the same topic. To me, it’s really a conversation you have with people across from you on the table about what you need and about what they need. And again, if you can think of it that way and you’re consistent. First you understand what you need and you understand, maybe what you don’t have to have, and you can hear what they actually need. Then I think that leaves you a lot of room to try to bring something together.

Taren: Absolutely. There’s some conflicting views about negotiations that if everybody walks away feeling if they gave something up, there was a renegotiation. And then there’s the other point of view that if you haven’t negotiated, like the negotiation hasn’t fallen apart almost three times or four times, then you didn’t negotiate hard enough. So where do you fall in that spectrum?

Barbara: Probably in the middle. I think actually if each side feels like they left something on the table in a biotech deal where you are collaborating for what could be like 20 years, then you have a good basis to begin with. If you feel like you got one over on the other guys, I call it the partnership tax. Like if they’re paying too great a tax even though they agreed to that at the time you got the deal signed, if they are paying too great a tax to you, you can declare victory but in the end, it’ll bite you in the butt. Because they will come back. They will renegotiate. They won’t move forward. Whatever it will be, it’s too much. So I think you really have to find that space where you both leave a little goodwill on the table. Because I promise, you will always be back at it. There’s always an amendment to be done, situation changes, facts change. You’ve got to leave something in it.

Taren: Such an interesting perspective and I agree with you that, otherwise it just can lead to resentment and then it’s not a good part.

Barbara: You don’t want to start this deal with everybody hating each other, even though it will get handed off, typically to outside the deal team and each of the companies will get handed off to people who are actually running the research development, et cetera. But still there’s this kind of flavor that I think can continue of distrust or just unhappiness and I’m not saying everybody has to do kind of kumbaya and feel like, “oh yeah, whatever you say.” But no one negotiates like that. But I don’t know that it has to fall apart three times and I don’t think that at all. Although, every once in a while they do fall apart. In M&A, I would contrast that and say, in almost every M&A deal, there is the falling apart part and then the getting back together. In a collaboration, hopefully, you can keep it steadily constructively moving toward culmination.

Taren: I think that’s really such a wise piece of advice. So thank you for sharing that. And I love that you’re the smiling tiger. So is the smiling tiger as you stepped into the C-suite, what was that experience like?

Barbara: In some ways, it wasn’t very different at all because I spent so much time in boardrooms and working with companies at the highest level of their management. But it was definitely a little bit of kind of inside baseball in terms of now being around the table, trying to make these decisions and work through these more deeper operational matters that when I was a lawyer externally, I would just see the output of that. I would just say, well, so what we’re deciding is we’re doing X, Y, and Z versus well how did you get to that decision? What were the tradeoffs you had to make? Who was pissed off when you made that decision? Like, did someone feel like they had a different decision they wish had been advanced. How aligned where people in making that decision? And so, that’s been new and terrific to see.

Taren: So you’re sitting around the table and you’re making some pretty significant decisions and you’re building teams. What are those qualities and those team members you look for that are additive to a high-performing team?

Barbara: Yeah, I think you really, everything depends on everything else. So, you’re trying to build out a group that compliments one another and isn’t over waited in one sort of personality-type or communication-type or skilled-type. And so, you are trying to have that balance, where you have people who can listen, can talk to one another, can be open-minded and flexible, but also who have their own deep subject matter expertise, and who are comfortable speaking their truth in a sense and also comfortable taking feedback.

Taren: Absolutely. Now through your experience at Cooley you could have had the opportunity to join probably any biotech company you wanted to. Why Kronos and what’s it about their pipeline that makes you excited?

Barbara: Yeah, that’s a great question and I have worked with so many as I say great companies, I think, what really attracted me to coming to Kronos Bio were a couple things. One, Norbert Bischofberger, our CEO and his leadership and in every aspect to that word. And two, I loved that we were focused on what I’ve called high hanging fruit. We are not here to just kind of move the needle a little bit, but really try to get at, you could think of it as like the operating system of cancer versus sort of a software application. I mean, we’re really dealing with what’s called transcriptional regulatory networks. So these are basic biology concepts that regulate all of biology and that when they dysfunction, lead to oncogenic activity and cancer. And it seemed so sensible to me, although very tough to get at and challenging, but very gratifying. If we can really make an impact in that way.

Taren: So talk to me a little bit more about the science, if you don’t mind. What make that different than other approaches to understanding that operating system, as you said for cancer?

Barbara: So as I mentioned, we’re focused on mapping and then trying to drag dysregulated transcription factor network. So these transcription factors work in kind of neighborhoods or systems, and there are cofactors and other interactors with those transcription factors that have an effect ultimately on this oncogenic activity. We’re focused on cancer primarily, certainly at the moment and other serious diseases eventually. But trying to sort of find a little bit like a root cause analysis. Where you’re trying to find out what’s really making, creating that oncogenic activity. And if I understand that in context and I understand what I’m going for and then I can screen that and we have a very proprietary screening system called small molecule microarray, SMM that came out of Angela Koehler’s lab at MIT who’s one of our co-founders. We do whole lysate screening, meaning in context, we screen for small molecules that can then interact with those actors, if you will, that we find through mapping these dysregulated transcription factor networks.

So the product that we have currently in a phase 1, phase 2 called KB-0742 targets CDK9 and that came out of and off of our platform that I just described to you. We have clinical portfolio of SYK inhibitors that we actually acquired from Gilead that Norbert was very familiar with. When he came over we did that deal actually, did that deal still in my lawyer days right before joining the company. And those get at similar regulation of something called HOX/ME and we’re in a pivotal study on our product we call ento, entospletinib and a phase 1-2 study on our other product called, lanraplenib, which is like a better ento in a sense, next-generation ento.

Taren: Exciting science. As you said, you weren’t looking to make incremental kind of leaps. You are really looking to change how things, the overall.

Barbara: Yeah. So for example, on ento, the clinical trial we have right now it targets a very specific population within AML. AML is very challenging disease. And is made up of people who have very different, if you will, flavors of AML, different mutations of AML. So we target a very specific mutation and if we are shown to be effective and I certainly, hope that will be the case, this drug will have curative potential for people in front line. So it’s not the case where you’re doing a drug that you target to people who failed therapy 1, 2, 3, and 4. You’re really trying to get in the front of the line to people who you hope you can have an actual curative impact and that’s where it’s at.

Taren: So as you are thinking forward over the next couple of years, and we know drug development is it has a slow…

Barbara: A slow game of chess as someone once said to me. Yes.

Taren: Slow game of chess, absolutely. Where do you see yourself in the next five years? Do you think, like will you see the realization of all this work?

Barbara: Gosh, I sure hope. Well look, I understand acutely where we are in terms of, a biotech company like ourselves is dependent upon the kindness of strangers. Those strangers being people who want to buy our shares and help us in our mission by giving us capital. So we’re not free to do exactly what we’d like to do as though we were a profitable company with revenue. We’ve got to be smart. We’ve got to try to deliver value and grow the company by achieving milestones. And yeah, I really hope we see the fruition of all this. I hope we see more compounds coming off our platform and we’re able to take and have the capital and are able to raise the capital to take those forward. Because I really think we have a team and a mindset and the skills and experience to really build something special here. And I hope we’re allowed the chance to do that.

Taren: Fantastic. Can you tell me about the name of the company? What do you know about that and how did that come about?

Barbara: Kronos Bio, well, that was named before I got here, by our chairman, Arie Belldegrun, who you may be familiar with. He’s certainly incredibly well-known. He had been the CEO at Kite. He runs also Vida Ventures and his own home office called Bellco Capital. And I know that Arie named Kronos Bio and I don’t know much more than that in terms of why that name actually came about. But I think it was based on some project name for something else he had done prior.

Taren: It’s an interesting name, I just thought…

Barbara: It is. It definitely is.

Taren: Well, speaking of people who are influential in the space, I know and understand that you are quite the mover and shaker in San Francisco. What does that responsibility mean to you? Because you are out there, you have to talk to investors and you have a very hefty bio behind you.

Barbara: I guess, one thing I’d say is, I think biotech is a small tide pool and it’s a global tide pool, first of all. So I don’t think it’s really related to like San Francisco region or Boston or wherever, I worked with companies all over the world and all over this country. But I think that responsibility that I feel is kind of twofold. One, I feel like I need to bring my A-game to everything that I do and that people are counting on me to do that. And two, I need to work on next-gen leadership in whatever organization that is. So here at Kronos Bio, how do we better enable, how do we best enable our leadership here and make opportunities and create those and advance people in those opportunities. And even again, I was saying, like at my old firm, I still mentor a number of people. I certainly like to think of myself as doing that. And cared deeply about them and their careers and their trajectory and giving them advice on the side or a shoulder to cry on or whatever it is. We are kind of all in this together. So I think that now in my career feels really good to do and I really enjoy that.

Taren: That’s wonderful. And I was looking in the research looking at Kronos’ leadership page on the website and it looks like you have a fairly diverse senior management team. Was that purposeful or did the company just look out?

Barbara: It was definitely purposeful and we got lucky. So, look, talent is everything in this business and you hope to attract people with opportunities and the mission and the leadership team and I think we’ve been really fortunate. But I also think like attracts like and so, if you’ve got some diversity going, you’re going to get more. And people who can begin to see themselves in a management team and feel like, maybe this is a place I can make my career too. So I think we are fairly diverse. I want to see more of it personally, but I’m delighted with where we are.

Taren: That’s great. And you talked about being a mentor and how important that was to you. What are some of those best lessons learned coming out of those mentoring relationships? If somebody were looking for a mentor such as somebody like yourself, what’s the best way to go about that?

Barbara: Best way to find a mentor?

Taren: Yes.

Barbara: I think people need to…I think women in particular can be a bit anxious about reaching out directly to others. And I think, if anything, I just want to encourage, when I get a reach out and I’ve had quite a few and interestingly, from quite young women, I always respond. I’m delighted to respond. And so, I’ve had people reach out to me either because I’m in-house and they want to know what that was like or they reach out to me because of where I went to school and they’re an alum, or what have you. And I think people get in their little silos and sort of forget like, wow, I really love this person. I saw her speaker or him speak or whatever, but I don’t know, I’m kind of a nobody, and they’re not going to respond to my call. And it’s really not true. I think people are really happy to help.

So, I think reaching out if you see something you like, if you hear someone speak, if you read an article, if you’re in a negotiation and you just see someone or any kind of meeting, you think, wow, I loved the way that person handled this particular issue or how they led that meeting or how they showed up. Contact them and I think they’ll be more than happy to talk to you.

You can also have many mentors. And some of them might be kind of issue-specific, if you will, or certain skills-specific. How do you handle this kind of thing? How do you do that sort of thing? Subject matter versus just interpersonal relationship wise mentors. And sometimes you’re being mentor and you don’t even know it. So later, you think back and you realize, like, wow, that was a really important conversation and you didn’t even kind of view it as that at the time.

Taren: That’s absolutely right. We talked about your interconnectedness and about the biotech pool being so small. And that really also leads to one of my next questions is, about that network and how you make those connections and how important is that to you do you think in the world that we’re living in today, especially for women?

Barbara: So I think it’s really important, but I think it gets overplayed. And maybe I just I’m old-fashioned, but I think you’ve got to sort of do both. You want a solid network, but not just a Rolodex for the sake of a Rolodex and saying, you have this many people linked into you, and you don’t even know them. I think you want people who genuinely know you for who you are and what you can do. But I think most importantly, you need to be excellent at your subject matter, like whatever it is you need to really focus I think in your early years on just being great at what you do. And that resonates and people start to talk about you whether you know it or not like, wow, someone did a great job on this thing and did you hear so and so? If you don’t have that, having a network is kind of a vapid exercise, I think. You’ve really got to have those skills and then hopefully build that network. So people can rely on you that if they do refer you or recommend you, they know you’re solid.

Taren: Excellent advice. I agree with you, I do. I think it’s almost like building your own advisory board. It’s those trusted relationships.

Barbara: That’s it… that’s so right, yeah. I really think it is like an advisory board and that’s why I say, certain people bring certain things to the table and you can benefit from those. And it’s not an exclusive relationship, mentoring.

Taren: Absolutely, agreed. And sometimes as you noted before it’s situational too.

Barbara: Yeah, absolutely.

Taren: You tap those folks on the shoulder when you’re in need of that particular piece of expertise, so excellent. What is the best piece of leadership advice you ever received?

Barbara: So I think the best piece, I’m going to sort of answer it in two ways. I think the best piece of career advice I ever got was from my dad, who said, make yourself essential. Whatever environment you’re in, whatever job, this one, I’m like 16 years old – make yourself essential. Now, having said that, sometimes you can become too essential. So the other thing that I think is really important and that I learned sort of later in my career when I became a partner in the law firm was, you can’t do your own job if you’re doing someone else’s job. And so, it’s really important to be clear on kind of who’s doing what and let the person who’s got that job, do that job even if it’s hard for you because you might do it differently or what have you, it’s kind of, you can’t micromanage. But I think for some people that’s a very tough lesson. And if they’re doing that job, then you have an intended different job and you need to be able to fulfill that role. Otherwise, it doesn’t get done and that could sort of lead to disastrous results.

Taren: That’s very true. And I think sometimes women do it certainly more than men where it’s just easier to do it ourselves.

Barbara: Exactly. And that’s why I say, but if I do it all and I’m doing your job and doing my job then, where are we?

Taren: That’s right. You open the door to my next question then and I’ll give you a minute to think about it. But what makes you essential?

Barbara: It’s kind of cheating, isn’t it – no. I think I am very good at knitting things together and seeing different people’s perspectives and different things we’re trying to achieve and help synthesize and be decisive about what our next step is or what we are, in fact, going to do. So I think my judgment. I think my communication skills. And I think, I’d like to think my ability to connect with people.

Taren: I think those are very essential skills, so thank you. I ask you about the best piece of leadership advice you ever received. So now I’m going to ask you, what is the best piece of leadership advice you provide to others? Is it the same?

Barbara: No, actually. I mean, it could be but I think about this a lot. And I think my best advice to people is that they have to learn how and always exercise their ability to listen first before anything. So they need to not come in with the answer before they’ve even heard the question. They need to hear what the other side is saying and really open their mind to it before they’re busy formulating some objection back or answer back or whatever it is. And I think as a society, we’ve really lost the ability to listen given the kind of multitasking and sort of overwhelming media we’re subjected to. But if you can listen, then I think you can save a lot of time. You can really try to get to the point and address what really is on the table. And sometimes when you’re listening you’re actually hearing about the things that are purportedly on the table and at issue, but really there’s something underneath. And what you’re always trying to do is get at what is the real issue here, the real concern, the real fear. So, that’s my advice.

Taren: That’s going back to all that lawyering again. I can see that happen and that’s a definite, I see that’s coming specifically from your training as a lawyer.

Barbara: Yeah. I think, you’re right, actually.

Taren: That’s what lawyers do, they listen. And they listen for all those nuances and it’s a real focus.

Barbara: And you’re listening to all different types. So you almost have to take it to zero. Next person, hear what they have to say, not kind of bring too much pre-populated, if you will, into the discussion.

Taren: I think that’s great advice. I think you’re right. I think if we listened more and kept our mouth shut, listen more and talk less, then we’d be in better shape. I agree. Sadly, we’re coming to the end of our time together. So I’m going to ask you our final question, which is always about that, wow moment that either changed the trajectory of your career or has left a lasting impression on you. And I’m going to challenge you to name one, if you can narrow it down.

Barbara: So for me, we’ve kind of touched on it, but it was really that moment when it was COVID, I’m on Zoom calls constantly. It’s like, June in COVID, I’m doing deals back to back to back day and night, working on really challenging transactions and just getting up, it’s 5 o’clock in the morning, I’m getting the signature page in from the other side on a deal that has been crushing in its complexity and just level of effort. And I just had this moment where it was like, incredible clarity – I am done. I am done with this part of my life. I am done with doing these kind of things. I have reached saturation point. I really feel like I love this industry, but I want to play a different role. I’ve sort of seen this one through and I need to make a change. And that was to come here to Kronos Bio.

Taren: It’s very brave to be able to admit that and to be vulnerable enough to admit that, you know what I’m done. And now…

Barbara: It was so interesting and maybe it was because I was sleep deprived and it was 5 a.m. and I don’t know what it was, but for me, it was really the right decision and I haven’t looked back. And I loved my time at Cooley and I love the people there, and I love this new chapter of my life as well, and that withstanding the challenges we all face.

Taren: I love the 5 a.m. epiphany. Those visions come to you at the strangest hours.

Barbara: And you can imagine the plates of food around you and just like, you’re just in such a extreme state.

Taren: Absolutely. Well, I am glad you made the leap and to guide the company to this next level and great new science. It sounds extremely exciting. And I want to wish you and your team continued success and good fortune. And thank you so much for spending some of your time, talent, and treasure with us for our WoW podcast.

Barbara: I so appreciate it. And I just want to let people know if they want to know more about the science, you can come to our website, kronosbio.com. Also, we’re very active on LinkedIn. And actually, we have a really great story about one of our women scientists. It was very interesting, back story on LinkedIn and you can find that there.

Thanks for listening to this episode of WoW, the Woman of the Week podcast. For more WoW episodes, visit PharmaVoice.com.