Christian Cobaugh / Vernal Biosciences
Start Here Podcast | Episode #75 | 7/6/2023
Today, we are joined by Christian Cobaugh, the founder and CEO of Vernal Biosciences, a groundbreaking mRNA production company located in Colchester.
With Vernal recently securing an impressive $20 million capital raise, Cobaugh shares the company’s remarkable achievements and their unique features. Cobaugh delves into the importance of moving swiftly and outlines an ambitious vision for the future of Vernal Biosciences.
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Transcription:
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
We started out in an 800-square-foot lab, looking at each other thinking, what do we do next? This was during COVID when the supply chain was brutal. We would barter with former colleagues at UVM and trade gloves for pipette tips, and conical tubes for other consumables. And this would be done through the darkness of night, and then promise mRNA if we could get things. We still deliver on that. We love our friends and partners at UVM, and we’re now a 65-person company.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
From the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies, it’s Start Here, a podcast sharing the stories of active, aspiring, and accidental entrepreneurs. Today we sit down with Christian Cobaugh, the man who brought mRNA manufacturing to Vermont when we needed it most. Welcome. This is Sam Roach Gerber –
DAVID BRADBURY
And Dave Bradbury.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Recording from the Consolidated Communications Technology Hub in downtown Burlington, Vermont. Hi, Christian.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
Hi, Sam.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
It’s good to see you.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
And you too.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Happy spring.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
Thank you for having me.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
I’m thrilled that you’re here, and so is Dave, I think.
DAVID BRADBURY
On a sunny spring morning like this, Christian could be found mountain biking at Cady Hill. So this is a real fortunate moment for us, to talk about your company and your story. So thank you for coming.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
I was going to start with, “Why are you here?” But that feels a little bit rude, so I guess I’m going to start by saying, how did you come to live in Vermont, and what were any sort of hesitations or concerns with moving here and starting a business here?
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
So my wife and I have been corporate vagabonds for the last 20 years. It’s hard to say that one singular place is home. When COVID broke out Vermont seemed like a great place to decamp, at least for the summer, with our family. We settled into a nice cadence of work and life. I was interested in starting this business long before then, and started looking around at what we could do here, including space, hiring, and investors, and it all came together.
And in my view, we could set this up in a lot of different places. In fact, strategically there might be a reason to say, hey, let’s go a little bit closer to where most of our customers are. But when we think about work-life balance – and that doesn’t just include working less and living more – it includes perhaps working the same amount but having access to the finer things in life, such as the great outdoors and everything else that Vermont has to offer, including quality of life outside of work, which I think is unparalleled anywhere else. So for me it was an opportunity to do that personally, but to also focus on what we could build here in Vermont and give other people, including our staff, that opportunity.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Preaching to the choir here.
DAVID BRADBURY
Pretty cool, right? Can you talk about your career leading up to Vernal? I know you have a PhD in cell and molecular biology from the University of Texas-Austin. Hook ’em Horns!
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
Hook ’em Horns!
DAVID BRADBURY
What’s it like working in life sciences? Do you go from company to company over time? Why are you so good at what you do, basically I want to ask.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
Well, I like to say there’s been a lot of attrition, and eventually somebody has to take some leadership. But I also mean that. My advice to a lot of people is to work hard and be patient. People do retire. New ideas do need to come up.
So I do have a PhD from the University of Texas-Austin. We went out to California to the Bay Area, where I really leveraged the expertise coming out of that PhD in antibody engineering with a startup out there. Antibodies were hot at the time, and I was recruited to go to a mid-market biotech company in Central Connecticut called Alexion Pharmaceuticals, which had just gotten its first product approved and was really expanding the company with the cash from that. I ran antibody discovery and development, but also got kind of attached to the business development office, and research and evaluation. That’s where I got very excited about the business and the commercial aspects.
DAVID BRADBURY
What a neat opportunity to blend both sides.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
Yeah, so career advice: Look for those sorts of temporary or unofficial internships within your parent company. It’s never going to be unappreciated, especially if you can get your day job done. But as part of that, I led diligence on several RNA medicines companies that we were thinking of buying or partnering with. And one of those was a company called Moderna, which is now sort of a household name in the life sciences due to their approval of the COVID vaccine. After signing that partnership, I ran research in that partnership and just got hooked on mRNA. I mean, I was really lucky to be at that moment, at that point in time, because they were really just getting going.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
And when was this?
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
This was in 2013, 2014. We announced the partnership in 2014, but I was already tasked with it in 2013. I got to look underneath the hood and really actually work collaboratively with them – they were looking for ideas from outside as well – and work collaboratively with them to sort of build their platform and their capabilities.
And after two years, we wound that partnership down just due to a change in direction at Alexion, and that gave me an opportunity to take what I had learned, both good and bad, and start doing this for smaller companies in the mRNA space. One of those companies was in San Diego, and so I went out there for a couple of years and built their mRNA program. I did some partnerships with larger companies.
I brought that skill set back to Boston, the Boston area, and then continued to scale what my labs were capable of doing, primarily on the manufacturing side. Supply of mRNA has always been an issue, has sort of constrained the field, and so those who have supply can do much more amazing things.
And so when I was recruited to run external manufacturing for a company that didn’t have the ability, the capital to do internal manufacturing, I was a little bit surprised at how little external manufacturing capabilities were out there. That’s what led to starting this company. It was to really provide and democratize access to what I was really passionate about, and that passion has now been validated with two approved products. And we have many more coming along the way, not just to do vaccines, but to treat rare disease and to cure rare disease – like on a permanent basis, to treat immune oncology, which we’re seeing amazing clinical data out of some of the more established mRNA companies.
And so my personal journey is now very linked to where Vernal is and what we’re trying to do, which is to just expand access and to make it easier to externalize a pretty specialized type of manufacturing.
DAVID BRADBURY
Could you just – my mom and dad like to listen to the program – in layperson terms, what is mRNA? Why is it magical?
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
mRNA is a biomolecule that every cell in every organism produces. Every cell has what many people are familiar with, which is the genome. It’s the blueprint for how that cell acts, what it makes, and what its purpose is? And then mRNA transcribes that blueprint and takes it elsewhere in the cell, to be turned into a really active biomolecule called a protein. That’s key. mRNA’s purpose is to transmit the data that’s in the genome into a physical protein that can do all sorts of amazing things. There are tens of thousands of proteins that humans make, and each one of those has its own unique and very specific function, finely-tuned. It’s really a beautiful thing.
And so when we think about mRNA medicines, they’re what we call a prodrug, or something that’s not completely active. It’s the protein that gets produced once the mRNA has been taken up in a target cell that is the real active element. So in the case of COVID vaccines, the protein that’s being produced is a little piece of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The body says, “That doesn’t look like something that should be here,” and it develops this attack mechanism through the immune system to just that little protein, but it’s enough that the immune system can clear the entire virus.
Again, it’s the mRNA that’s making the protein. Proteins have been the basis of drug targets and drug discovery long before we even knew what proteins were. mRNA is just playing into that long narrative, and it’s reprogramming the body or the cells it’s going into to make the protein, versus traditionally if we want to use a protein, we’ve made in a bioreactor and then injecting it directly into the body. But this is a much more natural way to do it, and you can get to areas of the body that proteins cannot.
DAVID BRADBURY
Get it now?
SAM ROACH-GERBER
He’s good. He’s so damn good. I love a PhD that can explain something.
DAVID BRADBURY
I can’t wait until my next dinner party, just to throw down. We do screen to make sure there are no molecular biologists at our table!
SAM ROACH-GERBER
So really, Vernal came from creating access to this important thing. What I’m curious about – and getting into Dave and I’s area of expertise, thank God, before we drown here – is what are you all doing that’s better or different from other mRNA manufacturers? Or is it just creating more because there’s a huge demand?
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
So before we manufactured mRNA, we started by figuring out how to evaluate the quality and purity of the mRNA. The unfortunate thing about mRNA is that a lot of viruses are made out of RNA or have an RNA genome. Our bodies are sensitive to RNA from other sources. When you make RNA synthetically in a lab and try to put that into a lab animal or even a human, it better be really clean, to look like natural RNA.
We started by hanging our hat on the purity and quality. There’s a level expertise and experience that’s required to get you there. Now, a lot of these concepts are out there in the public domain, but it’s pulling all of those together. And when you were there from day one, that’s not a big reach, but if you’re coming in after having done something else for a couple of decades –
DAVID BRADBURY
A heavy lift.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
It’s a big lift. Now, the other element where we’re differentiated is we can package the mRNA into a protective vehicle that we call a lipid nanoparticle. And almost none of our competitors – in fact, in research grade, we’re the only company that I know of that has both elements. And so we can deliver a finished product to our customers instead of our customers having to figure out how to package it.
Now behind the scenes, there’s a lot of secret sauce, trade secrets, and IP that are being generated, but mostly in order to create higher purity and higher quality. And so we continue to refine the process, but we also continue to refine analytical methods which cycle with one another.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
So as you’re improving your processes, you’re building up the company’s IP portfolio and creating more protections. The main goal is to create access, but also purities that the body responds better to this mRNA.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
Correct, that’s exactly right.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
I basically just got my PhD.
DAVID BRADBURY
Pretty much.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
Pile higher and deeper!
DAVID BRADBURY
And then you wrap lipid nanoparticles around it, which I think is sort of this fat layer basically, that the body says, “All right, that’s cool. It’s not as bad as we think. Let’s just sneak it in.” And then as that dissolves – I’m clearly out of my realm – then the proteins get to do what they need to do.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
That’s correct.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
We’re on fire, aren’t we?
DAVID BRADBURY
Which is weird. I’m pretty well-known, words over four syllables I have a form of narcolepsy. I just tune out.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
You’re doing really well.
DAVID BRADBURY
What is Vernal Biosciences? Just tell us a little bit about the company, the team, where you’re located, a little bit.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
We just turned two. Where’s my birthday cake?
DAVID BRADBURY
Yes, happy birthday. Well, we have a leftover baby shower cake.
DAVID BRADBURY
Is there enough room for two candles on it?
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Of course, there’s always enough room.
DAVID BRADBURY
Yes, you did turn two in April.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
So we turned two. It’s fun to think about where we started. It was me and two other people, one a recent PhD grad – actually, I think I pulled her through her thesis committee – I said, hey, I need you to graduate, wrap it up, and tell your advisors it’s time to go. And so she’s with us now. And then I recruited another UVM alum who had grown up in the Boston area. He went off to work at Moderna, but when he found out that we were up here doing mRNA, he said, “See ya,” and came up to join us.
And we started out in an 800-square-foot lab, looking at each other thinking, what do we do next? This was during COVID when the supply chain was brutal. We would barter with former colleagues at UVM and trade gloves for pipette tips, and conical tunes for other consumables. And this will be done under the darkness of night, and then promise MRA if we could get things. And actually, we still deliver on that. We love our friends and partners at UVM.
We’re now a 65-person company. We’re still based in Colchester. We are on two floors of a building overlooking Burlington, the lake, and the Adirondacks, a beautiful site. We are scaling the company and creating the operations to do clinical drug manufacturing, which is essentially the same processes that we use for the research-grade business, but under a much tighter set of quality oversight. That’s a pretty astonishing amount of paperwork, systems, and personnel. And then our goal is to also fit up a site that we have leased over in Essex, which will be fully committed only to the GMP business, and that will be a 40 to 60-person site. So within a couple of years, we should be around 120 people.
We are over 50 customers served, and that ranges from little biotechs that unfortunately may not be around anymore, to well-funded biotechs, all the way up to pharma. We have a real diversity in terms of the customer base, and we have different levels of solutions for all those folks. The fun part about being part of this business and where we are sort of in our growth is, when we hear about opportunity, we can act if it makes business sense. And sometimes it doesn’t make business sense immediately, but we can still act, because we’ve got people who are excited about doing new things and creating new opportunities for themselves, for the company, and for the field.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
How are these people finding you?
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
So customers are coming to us through old school marketing. There’s new school too, if you count social and other Internet channels. I mean, it’s a lot of Internet marketing. You’ve got to be top of the heap with search. Then a lot of conferencing as well. We try to go to as many conferences that make sense where we think we can make an impact and add value. My network is bigger than I thought.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Yeah, it’s always a nice surprise.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
For the first year and a half we didn’t have any salespeople. It was me late at night on LinkedIn, making sure that everybody in my network and everybody in their network knew that we existed. And so I think we’re past the point where brand awareness is an issue. We’re now trying to do more targeted marketing. We see opportunities and want to go there.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Not to call you out, but it wasn’t that long ago that I was like, Christian, I need a logo for our website, and you were like, “Oh … hang on …”
DAVID BRADBURY
Let me go to clip art and find one!
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Exactly. I mean, it’s been two years. It’s just crazy how much you’ve done, and it doesn’t feel that long ago that that happened. So, how cool.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
The team is amazing.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Let’s talk a little bit about that.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
The team is incredible.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
So when I say that Dave and I are obsessed – and I mean obsessed – with the way that your company announces its new hires on LinkedIn. I am not exaggerating at all. Like, Dave and I just send them back and forth to each other.
DAVID BRADBURY
It’s so different, powerful, and effective. Again, it must lead to culture, it must lead the customers, and lead the new hires and all the rest.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
For our audience, it’s a beautiful photo of this person. It’s about who they are, and why they’re at Vernal, what they’re excited about, and what they do for fun? It makes you feel like you get to know –
DAVID BRADBURY
Their college. Did they come to Vermont for school? Do they ski here? Or where in the world have they come from? Because it has pulled from abroad. I’ve been stunned by how many folks with some sort of Vermont tie have a life sciences experience, connection, or degree, that are finding their way up.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
So my question is, how did that come about? I think that’s kind of unusual for your industry. And why is that important to you as a founder?
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
Well, I mean, let’s talk a little bit about who these people are. They’re locally raised in a lot of cases. We know that the secondary school system in Vermont is top of the heap. And traditionally if they’re college-bound, if we’re lucky, they stay and go to UVM. And obviously, they also go elsewhere for college, and then often they take a look at where the jobs are and they’re not able to come back home.
And one of the interesting things about students and kids who grow up here is, they love it here. Why wouldn’t you? Burlington is like the greatest college town on the planet, as far as I’m concerned, and I’ve spent a lot of time in Austin, Texas. There’s that appeal for the frontline workers and middle management. We do have senior leadership that’s moved here, and they’re so thrilled to be here, whether it’s the lake, the mountains, or Burlington itself and the livability, and the cute little five-minute traffic jams that we occasionally have.
But you asked then, why is that important to us? First of all, these are real-life human beings. These are not commodities. These are people that are making a commitment. Every one of us has an interesting backstory that is great for us to know, but it’s also great for the world to know. When customers come to Vernal, we want them to understand that we’re not just a vendor. We’re a collection of really unique people who are committed to their success.
I think it’s hard to have a narrative around shared success if it’s just a faceless crowd of people. My personal history, I’ve carried vendors with me from one company to the next, and that’s all relationship-based. You get in because they’ve got a great and differentiated product, but you stay because when things go sideways, you can pick up the phone and have a conversation about it. You may not fix the problem and you may not be satisfied, but at least you know somebody cares.
One of the greatest customer service experiences is something I had recently where I called up a vendor, and I thought they’d be too big to care, and when I said I was having a problem with the spotting scope – it was for bird watching – the guy said, “Oh, no, how can we fix that?” And that’s the mentality that our people have. But we need to put the people first, and show the world that these are real people who have a backstory and they care about what they’re doing. They’re here for a reason.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
The empathy piece of it is often lost in the process, and I think it’s so important. Especially attracting new staff, too. It’s not just about customers and how you’re perceived by them, but about getting more people like that.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
Yeah, I mean, that’s its own unique sales and marketing. And as we scale, it becomes even more important. You have to get it right. You have to, I’m not going to say “maintain” that culture, it’s about scaling that culture. We have different schools of thought internally about that. And what I’ll tell you about that is, it’s not top-down. There’s no consultant that’s going to come in and say, “These are your values and this is what you should do.”
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Implement it.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
Implement it, put it on people’s objectives that there’s these five core values that they have to execute against. We’re actually looking for that to come from small groups, from individuals. We don’t want to build a cult of a company, we want to build strong, tightly knit groups that can rely on one another. That probably scales a little bit better than the top-down.
DAVID BRADBURY
Well, they might have room for a couple of mediocre podcast hosts at some point, and they’ve got those baller green lab jackets too, which are great, that everybody has.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Those are pretty smooth.
DAVID BRADBURY
So keep it up on LinkedIn. I send that to all of our other portfolios. I’m like, this is how you announce. And our portfolios are like, “I don’t want folks trying to poach my team.” And I’m like, well, one, they’re going to do that anyway, so give your team a reason to feel welcomed, included, heard, and part of the future. So good on you for that.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Dave, can I actually ask you a question? Can you tell me about your first interaction with Christian? How did you hear about him and what was he asking you?
DAVID BRADBURY
It was during COVID, and I believe he had searched for us on Google or something, or was searching for something in Vermont on Google, and maybe another local investor or two of them sent them our way. And we got together and just started talking. It turns out he was running the house half a mile away from where I live in Stowe off a dirt road. And then Eric Mackey is like, “Oh, he’s in life sciences. You should meet people during COVID.” Because it was a pretty isolating time, being a new family in town.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
How did you know he was the real deal?
DAVID BRADBURY
I did some homework, some reference checks with other people. They were friends or friends who had worked together with other companies down in the Hanover area and in Boston. But just getting to know each other, and trying to realize, why do you want to do it here? Are you staying? Is the family going to like mud season, right? Because you don’t know, these are all big “ifs.”
We started talking about your seed round and pulling that together, and you made room to include us, which was great. I’d like to think that a lot of our conversations were sort of around demystifying this weird little thing called venture capital and outside investors, because by design it’s meant to be confusing and intimidating for first-time entrepreneurs, particularly from the science side of things. So I think the more that people like Sam and me and others can just say, just come as you are with what you got, let’s just talk and we’ll sort it out – because it doesn’t have to be hoity-toity.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
The demystifying, Dave, was the most effective types of conversation we were having. I was just shocked about your availability, and how you could quickly get to the point of the matter. Another thing that I really enjoyed learning about was how to align, and that money can really align people in a way, and looking to use the money as a way to get in personally with investors, just to see greater levels of alignment, to get to transparency and the candid conversations. But the availability of Dave – and it continues to be the case – has been a real critical element to my success, which I think is clearly part of Bernal’s success.
DAVID BRADBURY
And you did a really intentional and nice job of sort of compiling a syndicate of investors. Some were institutional. Others had been in your shoes as an entrepreneur two or three prior times. Early on, I think the seed round was a million and a half dollars, and that was announced. But it had chops. It was money plus something else, right? It might be access to customers, or technical help, or validation for partners to take a look. I give you a lot of credit for that, being deliberate, saying no to some and saying yes to others. Do you think that set you up early on? It took a little bit of extra front-end work, if I recall, but has it been worthwhile?
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, the investors so far have been partners as much as they’ve been sources of cash and capital.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Can you actually just take a step back and talk a little bit about what your strategy was for your capital path? Because obviously, this is something you knew was going to be capital-intensive. So how did you approach that?
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
And unfortunately, debt is only available for companies with a lot of collateral and a long track record.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Proof of what they’re going to do, right?
DAVID BRADBURY
You had these cute little vials of powder. Like, what do I do with that?
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
And so yeah, we knew that this was going to require investment capital. The seed round came together pretty quickly, which was good.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
And how much?
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
That was a million-and-a-half of invested capital, and then a little bit of debt to go alongside that. But we really had to watch the spend. And thank goodness I had patient, kind of DIY-type staff at that point. That was also intentional in terms of hiring. We could have kind of recruited people who had been around for a little bit longer, but their expectations would have been misaligned with the resources we had.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
And did you have a good idea of how far $1.5 million would get you, and were you correct with that? Because I think that’s a big, scary kind of thing for early-stage, first-time founders.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
Where we started, I would say, yes, we knew how much we needed, but no, we were wrong about how far it would get us. But that’s because we’ve changed our plan. We’ve accelerated our plan, because it’s becoming increasingly competitive, part of this business is a boat race.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
A sense of urgency.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
The urgency, but also where our customers were going. We were going to get left behind by customers if we didn’t continue to bring in more cash.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
You’re stressing me out, Christian!
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
Yeah, well, that was stressful. But we did get into a situation where we had multiple institutional investors that were willing to invest, and so we had some options there. And the key for me was like, which one is going to, potentially lead to the best long-term outcome for us and the field?
And we’re very happy with the choices we made there. We have a lead investor that has successfully scaled companies that are kind of similar to us – that is their bread and butter – and then we’ve had some VC money that has had a lot of success in the tools and services around life sciences, and has a lot of board-level and executive-level experience there as well. We could have looked elsewhere for capital, and we had opportunities to go there, but in terms of what they were bringing to the table outside of the capital, it just didn’t compare to where we had to –
DAVID BRADBURY
Those weren’t easy choices, because it was it multiples of more money than was disclosed a year ago – about $21 million, not quite a year ago, came in through a more formal round of strategics and VC and the like – and that’s not easy. How did you reconcile the, “Take less money?” What was the benefit of sort of doing it at the time? Was it control, and setting the vision, and setting the culture of the company?
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
I think it had less to do with control of the board and the shares, and more to do with control of the company. We could figure out a lot of things, including the market, how to scale the company, who we wanted to hire, and the technology. A little less pressure when you take less cash.
But I think longer term though, you might end up with more dilution by tranching or staging your raises. Look, if this weren’t my first company – my first capital-intensive company – I think I would have been more comfortable going deep, going big earlier. But you’ve got to know who you are as an entrepreneur. You’ve got to live to fight another day on some of these, and just put your head down and execute.
I come to this with a lot more humility than I might have earlier in my career, where I’m thinking, hey, I can do this. I can do it alone. I can do the whole thing. I didn’t want to put myself at the level of risk that I think would have been needed to be successful there.
DAVID BRADBURY
That’s great. Hey, we’re thrilled to play a small part in that as an investor and fan of the company and team. Again, a part of me does smile that we’re the only Vermont investor other than family here. I can’t wait to see what’s next for the company and its long-term pursuit.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
How much time are you spending in the lab these days versus hitting the pavement?
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
I walked through the lab yesterday and had a conversation with somebody, and she ended the conversation by asking me why I was in the lab. Not, “Who are you?” but, “Wht are you doing down here?”
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Is your soul okay?
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
Yeah, it’s fine.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Are you enjoying it? Okay, good. I always worry about that with founders that have sort of been there.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
I’ve satisfied that curiosity to do new things by doing new things. The career, the garage door kind of came down on hands-on science and managing science, but when I look back, I can be satisfied with what I had done previously. Now I’m doing investor relations, I’m helping with HR, I’m doing commercial. My curiosity and that intellectual pursuit are still going on, it’s just being redirected. I’ve got really capable people doing the science.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Listen, I do have to tell you, it started with asking, “What you were doing in the lab?” and then the next time it’s going to be, “Christian, please, don’t touch that.”
DAVID BRADBURY
Right – and we already heard that he’s into bird watching.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
Yeah, I tell them, you don’t want me pipetting. I was never that good at it. A secret, I was not that good at it to begin with, but I understand the scientific method. That’s actually an underappreciated part of being a scientist, that ancient tradition of the scientific method, which has proven to be timeless. I can break it down, I can ask questions still with the best of them. I start really basic. What are we trying to do here? What observations have you made? What’s your hypothesis? I apply that to everything. It drives my wife crazy. She’s like, “Can I just create here without a purpose?” Do I have to have an objective here? But in the world of business, there’s nothing that we do that can’t benefit from that logical workflow.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
So true.
DAVID BRADBURY
Well, I’m still waiting for him to figure out how to stack a woodpile, when I drive up the road and see it splayed across the yard.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Tough to watch.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
My 13-year-old and my 16-year-old have gotten good, but they’re not fast.
DAVID BRADBURY
Any local resources here in Vermont that other founders out there or teams should access, that maybe you did, either state, manufacturing, or alliances?
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
I think it all starts with workforce. I think that the educational partners here have been really helpful. They’re looking to the future. Champlain College, for example, is interested in starting an applied biology program, which is really interesting because they are business first. They’re not just about degrees, they’re about finding jobs for their students, and we’re really excited to see that happening here.
There is nothing that could prevent Burlington from becoming a small but important hub of life science and engineering. We’ve got biotech that’s long been here. There’s another handful of what I would call contract research companies here in town, they’ve been here for a while. Viatris is a major player in contract drug manufacturing up in Saint Albans. We’ve got a rich history of technical manufacturing here that continues. And this is an old tradition, it’s not just natural resources and teddy bears – which are important – but there’s a really rich history up and down the I-89 corridor, and even parts of the Route 100 corridor, of technical manufacturing.
In terms of partnerships, we truthfully have not done a ton with the state. The non-dilutive, publicly available financing is a specialized thing, and when you’re trying to go fast, it can be hard to tap into. And so greasing those skids a little bit, making that a little bit easier –
DAVID BRADBURY
There are trade-offs, like the [00:40:48 veggie] program. That incentive was something we looked at, but it was just a little distracting and a little bit different, company-oriented, along the way. I think it’s been really cool, Sam, to refer students from Middlebury that have been hired, or Saint Mike’s, or UVM, VTC, and others. Again, we know this because they tell us when they introduce their employees on LinkedIn regularly.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
We work with so many students that want to stay in Vermont. If they’re interested in a certain industry, sometimes there’s only a couple of places you can refer them – or none, which breaks my heart – and so Vernal coming along and actively hiring was such an exciting thing for Dave and I. Especially Middlebury, which has so many of those students that are interested. Yeah, it’s just been such a satisfying thing to say, yes, you should talk to Vernal. It’s a sign of the times, I think, showing that it is a sector in Vermont that’s growing, and much of that is thanks to you.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
I appreciate it. I mean, we have a paid internship program. I look at it as sort of a minor league experience, because we want to hire those people. The internship programs we have, we had a student from Saint Mike’s and Middlebury last year. I observed them, and I was like, they’re doing well. And then they gave a presentation at the end of the summer, and I was so disappointed that they were sophomores and I couldn’t hire them for two more years. One girl, I was like, can I talk to your parents? Because I think college is overrated. You need to start making money right now. That’s good. That’s good, both out-of-state students that I’m sure want to stay here.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Oh, my God, wow.
DAVID BRADBURY
Well, it’s exciting to see you and Vernal here, and I can’t wait to see where it’s at a year from now.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
Yeah, me too. We need to move fast. Patients are waiting for treatments, and unfortunately waiting means bad things for some of these diseases. And treatments are limited by a lot of things, but manufacturing is one of them. So we’ve got to get there, and we’re going to get there with help from our investors, help from the advice that we get, and putting the word out that we’re here and we’re working urgently to build this business.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Amazing, so inspiring. And now that I basically have my PhD, you’ll see my application later today. Dave, can you ask Christian our final question?
DAVID BRADBURY
So everybody gets asked, “magic wand time,” superpowers. Well, he obviously has superpowers first, but just pretend you have additional superpowers. If you could change one thing about Vermont, what would it be?
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
We can do a little bit better job transportation-wise. The airport, getting flights to some of the major hubs, and that includes Boston.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Name some specifics of what you want, because we have a lot of clout here, so these sometimes come true.
CHRISTIAN COBAUGH
I think flights to Boston. Senator Leahy visited here last year, and I brought that up with him candidly. His response was kind of a frustrated chuckle, I think. But yeah, transportation’s probably a big one. When we’re recruiting, sometimes we’ll have to settle that they may stay in Boston, North Carolina, Florida, wherever, and that could be neutralized with an airport that has more connections. We do well with DC and New York.
DAVID BRADBURY
Seasonally Detroit and a few other places, yeah. All right, I’m down with that.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Yeah, it works for me.
DAVID BRADBURY
Hopefully the electric planes will get us back and forth to these short-haul markets a little bit easier. Thank you very much, Christian, for coming out today and sharing your journey so far on this.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Thanks, Christian.
DAVID BRADBURY
This has been the Start Here podcast, sharing the stories of active, aspiring, and accidental entrepreneurs. This series is made possible by the support of the Vermont Technology Council and Consolidated Communications. Sam, let’s go tell everybody about mRNA.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Will do.
