Sheila Gujrathi, MD on Leadership, Biotech Innovation & The Mirror Effect for Women Leaders

Hello, and welcome to the biotech 2,050 podcast. Biotech 2,050 is a think tank chronicling the disruptions changing the biotech industry over the next several decades. I'm Rahul Chaturvedi, cofounder of this podcast and today's host. I'm also the founder and CEO of Chlora, a platform that enables biotechs to build a fractional workforce to accelerate development. You can check us out at chlora.com. This episode is proudly sponsored by our friends at Quartsey. Quartsey helps life science organizations streamline their operations by combining inventory, procurement and ordering into one simple platform. Get a special offer from them at quartsey.com/biotech20fifty. Again, that's quartzy.com/biotech20fifty. I'm very excited to welcome Sheila Gudrati, a physician scientist, serial entrepreneur, and author of the recently released book titled The Mirror Effect. Thanks so much for joining us today, Sheila. Thank you so much, Rahul. It's great to be here. Sheila, to kick us off and before we get into some more involved topics, I'd love if you could set the stage and talk to us about how you initially got interested in biotech and the arc of your career since that time. Thank you. And I'd love to talk a little bit more about my career journey. It wasn't intentional, and I'm a big fan of intention. You may hear more from me later today. But when I started in my career pursuits, it was really around medicine. I had a strong cultural background around the medical field. Both my parents are physicians. I was told from a very young age I was going to be a doctor, and then I kind of embraced that fully and went into a seven year medical program at Northwestern and was thinking that would be my career, really a life of serving patients and their families, doing academic and translational research as well. So academic medicine, clinical practice, that was really what I thought was going to be my work. But along the way, with an open mind, I had a lot of different experiences, and it actually led me to listening to my own voice. And I ended up leaving academic medicine after all my training, which was very scary thing to do, but found myself really being drawn to explore fields and industries which allowed me to have a greater impact. And through that exploration, I believe in academic medicine after training at the Brigham and Stanford UCSF, going to McKinsey for a few years as a management consultant, being exposed to many different career roles and industries within health care, ultimately deciding that biotech is where I wanted to spend my time and energy and really focusing on innovative drug development. And so I joined Genentech. This is back in 2002, and I really haven't looked back. Wonderful, Sheila. Talk to us about that initial decision of leaving medicine, and this is particularly for those folks that perhaps are in medical school or pursuing a career in medicine and are biotech curious about that decision …