tl;dr key takeaways:
Life’s challenges make you, you.
Identify what makes you uniquely you and make that your superpower.
Don’t wait for permission to achieve greatness.
Not everyone will understand your vision. Align yourself with those who get it.
As a child, my evenings were spent chasing fireflies by moonlight, mango juice dripping from curious fingers in the sticky Zambian heat. My next phase of life placed me in Lincoln, Nebraska, where my family, once creeping towards the upper echelons of society in Zambia, now shared a two-bedroom apartment among six people, as my father completed his graduate degree in organic chemistry. Food banks and charity shops were threaded through our life’s fabric as we adjusted to life in America - the first in our extended family to immigrate to the United States. The forgiving nature of childhood ignorance made the reality of our poverty virtually nonexistent to me. Through it all, my mother, previously a teacher in Zambia, instilled a love of learning in her four children. Together, we would trek one hour each way, through snow or near hundred-degree temperatures, to the local library, where we loaded the baby stroller with books, as they were our main source of entertainment (cable television was not in the budget). In retrospect, I am happy I experienced this difficult season as it inspired me to impact underserved communities positively.
My early years in America resulted in one key lesson:
Lesson 1. Life’s challenges make you, you.
(It goes without saying that this mindset was not one I consciously held as a 6-year-old)
I will skip over the middle of my life (middle school through college), as it was fairly vanilla. I went to college and landed a full scholarship to attend the University of Cambridge. I jumped at the chance to experience life outside of America and accepted the offer.
In graduate school, I drastically shifted my risk-averse persona to embrace the unknown. Academia, specifically the Ph.D. level, is a component of society that is essential for discovery, innovation, and progress. That said, I wanted to commit to something other than a career path that largely defines success using parameters (e.g. publications, citations) that are rooted in a flawed system (my hot take for the day) (Source 1,2).
Instead, I embraced components of the Ph.D. experience which were transferable beyond academia, namely:
Hypothesis-driven problem solving
Inter-disciplinary research and collaboration in multistakeholder programs
Autonomy in ideation, development, and completion of a multi-phase project with intermittent key deliverables aka project management
Getting projects done with high-quality results
Whilst academia was not an option for me, I fell in love with the hustle and grind of entrepreneurship (I'd argue that completing a Ph.D. shares many similarities with early stage entrepreneurship) and set my eyes on a career in venture capital because I wanted to empower founders who were developing the next generation of impactful life sciences technologies. No one in my family, myself included, had a finance background, and I’d never taken a finance course, but the vision was set and I sought to do everything in my power to achieve it.
The year was 2020 - I was living in San Francisco writing my thesis, having left England due to the pandemic. The job market was a mess and venture capital job applicants had a <1% success rate. While initially daunting, I understood that my unique skill set and life experiences were not a commodity (lesson 2).
Lesson 2. Identify what makes you uniquely you and make that your superpower.
I sold most of my belongings and against my mother’s pleas, bought a one-way ticket to Mexico, where I crafted a self-guided ‘break into venture’ curriculum and action plan which I completed between underwater cave dives and jungle expeditions.
I also forged my personal philosophy during this time (lesson 3): don’t wait for permission to achieve greatness. I was living life as a venture capitalist before I had a full-time role as an investor. I built an investor and founder network through cold outreach and spent my days analyzing and highlighting my favorite seed-stage startups, a few of which became unicorns in the years following (sadly, I only had belief at this time), and completed fellowships at Civilization Ventures and Alumni Ventures. After only ~1 month of active job searching, I landed a full-time role as a biotech investor at an amazing venture capital firm, Hummingbird Ventures, which invested in Unicorns including Deliveroo, BillionToOne and Kraken…and future decacorns like Enveda.
What is less known is that before landing the role, behind the scenes, several people I respected were telling me to give up on my venture goals (lesson 4).
Lesson 4. Not everyone will understand your vision. Align yourself with those who get it.
After 16 months at Hummingbird, where I evaluated hundreds of companies and founders and invested in compelling healthcare companies, I caught the itch: an innate, restless desire to build a company. I quit my job to join the team at Enveda, a series B-stage Hummingbird portfolio company (series C-stage as of December 2024).
Enveda was one of the few companies I had full conviction in, and after ~1.5 years on the inside, my conviction stands firm. It was a tremendous opportunity for global impact mixed with the essential traits for company growth: a strong investor base, transformational technology, and an amazing team and culture. My move was a no-brainer. I had the unique opportunity to write my job (I struggle to say job because what I do does not feel like work but an extension of self) description for my role as Director of Policy & Development. With the blessing of our leadership team including our amazing CEO, Viswa Colluru, and Chief of Staff, Daniel Wee, I’ve built a multifaceted experience that encompasses global health, sustainability, government relations, business development, and investor relations. My work has taken me across the world from Switzerland and Indonesia to Kenya and London as we seek to fulfill our mission of bringing hope to millions of patients globally.
I’m having the time of my life and learning so many valuable lessons along the way. The goal of this blog is to share my insights across healthcare, business, and culture as I continue on this adventure. I encourage readers to engage as we learn together.
Signing off,
Dr. T