IPO and Capital Raises Effects on Financial Leadership

PE: How does experiencing an IPO and multiple capital raiseseffect the approach to strategic financial leadership?
Smith: Biotech is unusual amongst industries, because the more successful you are, the worse your cash flow is, until you reach a certain level of approvals and commercialization, when you immediately flip to profitability. So you go through these big extremes, and understanding how that evolution works is a really hard it's a really hard lesson to learn, and it's a big part of reality. The fact is that your first opportunity to raise capital, whether in the public markets or the private markets, is rarely the last amount of capital you're going to need. And in fact, if you're successful, you'll need more capital than you needed when you were less successful. So thinking about that evolution and recognizing that the the number, the dilution of the pie, the dilution of the opportunity, the the absolute share count and the the the scaling of the opportunity, really matters. So you have to grow the pie, but you can't cut it into too many pieces.