I’ve learned more from my failures than from my successes - Andy Porter

Professor Andy Porter is a part-time academic and director of the Scottish Biologics Facility at the University of Aberdeen. He also holds exec and non-exec positions in several life science and drinks businesses in Scotland.

In this episode Andy shares the highs and lows of 20 years in academic entrepreneurship from his first big venture Haptogen to the portfolio career he has today, including:

• Why his first business venture was more about preventing brain drain than making money
• How a Royal Society of Edinburgh Commercialisation Fellowship changed his life
• The experiences and failures that have made him more calm in a crisis
• Why he still finds emerging science more exciting than anything else

Find out about Andy’s various academic and business ventures -

· Scottish Biologics Facility at the University of Aberdeen
· Therapeutic drugs company Elasmogen
· Diagnostics company Microplate Dx
· Microbiology company NCIMB
· Cultivated meat company Roslin Technologies
· Aberdeen cocktail bar Orchid
· Porter’s Gin distillery
· Cocktail retailer White Box

Follow the Academic Adventures podcast on LinkedIn.

This podcast was a collaboration between the University of the West of Scotland, Converge and Sarah McLusky. The podcast team includes Orla Kelly, Adam Kosterka, Jen Black and Sarah McLusky. Proudly supported by the Scottish Ecosystem Fund 2023-24.

Transcript

Andy Porter

At no point in this process did we think about making money.

When you have really difficult pinch points, that's when I think I've learned the most. And also I think the fact that I've got through them means that I'm much calmer about them when similar things come along.

Nothing's completely ever put me off being an entrepreneur.

Podcast Intro

Welcome to the Academic Adventures podcast. This podcast is all about people who have embraced the opportunity to combine their academic work with entrepreneurial ventures. You’ll hear about the highs and lows, balancing responsibilities and grabbing opportunities, plus advice for anyone thinking about following a similar path.

Sarah McLusky

Hello there I’m your host Sarah McLusky and my Academic Adventurer today is Professor Andy Porter. Andy is based at the University of Aberdeen where he is Director of the Scottish Biologics Facility. But he is also a serial entrepreneur with interests in a number of life science and drinks businesses in Scotland.

Andy’s entrepreneurial journey begins over 20 years ago when he co-founded biotechnology company Haptogen, mainly as a way to stop the brain drain of researchers being poached from his labs. He credits both an entrepreneurial mother and a Royal Society of Edinburgh Commercialisation Fellowship for his business savvy and he says experiencing failure has helped to make him calm in a crisis. But despite all of his business acumen, Andy still finds the emerging science more exciting than anything else which is why he keeps one foot in the academic world.

Sarah McLusky

Welcome along to the podcast, Andy. Thanks so much for coming along and telling us about your experiences. So I think as good a place as any to start is to hear a little bit about what you've done in the world of academic entrepreneurship.

Andy Porter

Wow, okay. So I guess it all started, I think 1998 was the first time I got involved with the university spin-an and that was with colleagues here in Aberdeen. And for me, it wasn't a great success. I didn't really enjoy the experience. It wasn't quite what I'd anticipated. being an academic entrepreneur was going to be all about i felt a little isolated from what was going on in

the business and sometimes quite frustrated about that and so i took the decision basically to give all my equity back walk away and then do it myself do something else but do it myself and so probably in some ways best known for that second business, which was called Haptogen. And when I say I did it myself, I set it up. There was a hell of a lot of people who worked along the way in making Haptogen a success. So I was the main academic founder of that second business, but there was a lot of other people involved as well. That was a success, made some money, and dabbled, I suppose, in entrepreneurship and being an academic entrepreneur ever since. Everything from trying a little bit of investing, which I again wasn't particularly good at, to now helping and mentoring younger businesses and sitting on quite a lot of boards, helping them, people, raise money, helping people with intellectual property portfolios that sort of thing.

Sarah McLusky

Excellent. Lots and lots of experience then to draw on. And clearly that first experience when things didn't quite go to plan didn't completely put you off,

Andy Porter

No, I think it was, I mean, I, from my experiences, I don't think I've learned much from my successes. I think I've learned a hell of a lot more from my failures. So, and I'm pretty resilient. Become more, much calmer as I've got older about things when they've gone wrong. I was pretty explosive in my youth, but less so now. And yeah, nothing's completely ever put me off being an entrepreneur. I've quite enjoyed it. I became an entrepreneur, I don't know if you would like to hear how that second business came about by really complete chance. So I was, when I first started as an academic here in Aberdeen and chair of genetics, a guy called Bill Harris, who was a great mentor for me. And Bill had his own company outside of the university. And it was one of the very few that were around at that time. This is going back quite some time into the 90s. And I enjoyed that experience. And then Bill went on to retire and I formed my own academic group. And it became quite large.

So we were about 25 people and I was in an area by chance because of Bill, I suppose, in something called antibody engineering, which was a really strong area of growth within both, I guess to a certain extent in academia, but mainly commercially. And the big two centers of academic antibody engineering at the time was Cambridge and Aberdeen.

And in Cambridge, there was a growing culture of spin-out. And a lot of these spin-outs were popping up in this space. And the phone in my lab would go all the time and would make offers to my post-docs to go down and work for Cambridge. And some of them were pretty loyal and said no. And then they phoned back again and then caved in as the salary increases went up and up. And I was getting offers as well to go down.

And there was I had two very senior postdocs in the lab as well at the time and we went out and we just got drunk one weekend and to try and decide what to do we met on a Sunday afternoon with hangovers back in the department here and Decided that we would set up our own company at no point in this process did we think about making money. I mean, that's the daft

thing about this. This wasn't a company to make money. This was set up originally to stop a brain drain of people going south to Cambridge. And yet it turned out to be commercially the most successful thing that I'd ever got involved with. So that was the way I almost stumbled into the area. And although it was hugely time consuming, huge hard work, my goodness. And when I think about the time commitment that I made to that company, it was also very enjoyable.

But I think fundamentally I'm a bit geeky. So it's the science that still is the big driver for me rather than necessarily, making money that the, the money important part is very important because it allows you to do the science, but it's not the be all and end all for me.

Sarah McLusky

Excellent. I think it wouldn't be the first business, I'm sure, idea that came out of, you know, a conversation down the pub. And it seemed like a good idea at the time. But

Andy Porter

Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, it was, yeah, I guess we would, we talked about what we were good at and what we did that was different than everybody else. And we decided we try and turn that into a business. And in the end, it was successful. It was bought by Wyeth. So it was top 20 pharma that bought the business then now part of Pfizer.

Sarah McLusky

And I think it's interesting that this idea that, you know, you have to have a business plan and you have to have all this investment and things like that, but that stuff can come down the line if you've got a good idea and you go for it.

Andy Porter

Yeah, I think we were just hugely fortunate we were in a very hot area, you know, so that made a huge difference. I was interesting listening to some young academics the other day talking about how they felt that all the science that was done in industry was somehow second class compared to what gets done in academia. And probably about that time I might have said something similar.

And then in 1994, I think, I went to a meeting in San Diego. The first time I ever realized that there were science meetings that were dominated by companies rather than just academics. So it was maybe 80% company and 20% academic. We stayed in this fantastic hotel on Coronado Island in San Diego. The hotel where Some Like It Hot was filmed. and it was a four-day conference and I spent the whole day, the whole time open mouthed at the quality of the science that was getting done in these businesses. We really felt that we were pretty good and I came back realizing that we weren't anywhere near as good as we thought we were and that these amazing businesses were popping up and they were accelerating their science because they were fully funded.

Cash wasn't necessarily an issue for them or it didn't seem like it was I'm sure it was because they were running around raising all this risk capital but wow the signs just blew me away at the quality of it all.

Sarah McLusky

Yeah. Oh, that's fantastic. And I think a lot of people will probably be surprised to hear that, what I imagine. So going back then to, so this business that you're talking about now, that was like your second attempt at this.

Andy Porter

Yeah, the first one was a pretty abortive attempt from my point of view. Yeah.

Sarah McLusky

But what happened that meant it didn't work out and what learning did you take to the second business?

Andy Porter

So it's difficult, isn't it? I think the first thing that I got wrong about the first business was that I didn't insist on a board position.

Andy Porter

So I was more junior than within the university and there were more senior academics involved. And so I felt separated from the decision-making process a little bit.

Some academics are not very good at doing commercial stuff. I think I came from a background that I had, you know, I had some sort of commercial training through my life at home. I have quite an entrepreneurial mother. And when the boards happened, it was a bit like sitting outside the headmaster's office waiting to be invited in. I absolutely hated it, you know, and it absolutely reminded me of that feeling of kind of knocking on the headmaster's door.

So yeah, I got frustrated by all of that and decided that I think at the time I described it that they had a business plan that was today Grampian, tomorrow Tayside, route to world domination. It really wasn't going to, didn't really fire me up in the way that I thought some of the other stuff in the biotech space was happening.

Sarah McLusky

Yeah, and so in the end, did that company continue and you just chose to step away?

Andy Porter

Yeah, it continued. I mean, it was eventually, I think it exited. I gave all my equity back. It was just it was a clean break. And I don't think it set the world on fire. But I mean, it did okay. It was Yeah, it did. Okay.

Sarah McLusky

Yeah. So it's interesting then one thing that we're interested to dig into with this podcast is the different roles that people take within these kinds of spin outs. So you said the thing that's been really key for you then is having a decision making role in the businesses that you've been involved with.

Andy Porter

Yeah, I think so. Doesn't necessarily have to, well, I don't, a decision, I need to be part, I like to be part of the decisions that are made. It does, I don't, I don't, I've not really been a leader. I take a chairman's role at the moment in a very interesting company. But I think I like to be part of the decision-making process. I think I'm reasonably commercially savvy, which is unusual for some scientists that have come through the more academic route.

But I also enjoy, I still enjoy the science. I'm hopeless, you know, I get very excited by it. I struggle to focus. And I get very, and I'm quite excited about the intellectual property side of all of this. So for another business, I look after their patent portfolio, which is quite an extensive portfolio. But there is something for me satisfying about capturing an idea in words and also not just capturing the idea but capturing the breadth of that idea so that you're trying to get as big a chunk of IP space as possible. So I know a lot of people find that fairly dull but actually it's quite interesting to be able to do that and then also being doing the business development side of that taking that intellectual property and using it as an asset to the to then drive a commercial gain from. Quite enjoy all of that as well.

Sarah McLusky

I think it's interesting, I think intellectual property is one of those things that really scares people from what I understand and also I think from what I've heard it can be the downfall of some spin outs if they don't take that side of things seriously. So perhaps that's also something that's been key to your success is just your interest in that side of things.

Andy Porter

Possibly. I mean, I think it's, I just have a lot of experience of that now. It's one of these things that I didn't really know an awful lot about when I started. I've worked with some people that have helped me understand the importance of intellectual property. And also it's, I think, very important that you work with the right patent attorneys.

Different patent attorneys have different expertise in different areas and trying to work out. It's difficult, you know, to find them. But once you've been doing it for 20 years, then you kind of know where to go if you're doing AI or if you're doing diagnostics or if you're doing, in my case, biologics drug discovery. There are certain go-to firms and also it does make sense, actually often to go to a London firm rather, some of these bigger firms, some of the smaller firms. There's a lot of commercial importance around intellectual property. And I think, so the firms that I like to work with kind of want to know the business model of the business as much as understanding the prosecution of the patent. Some firms are more about patent prosecution.

But I like to work with these firms that actually kind of get the commercial or business model of the small biotech they're working with and therefore they can advise, I think more accurately on how to prosecute the patent portfolio and stuff.

Sarah McLusky

And so having legal support then has been really important to you. Are there any other kinds of support, training, people, you know, practical things that have helped?

Andy Porter

Yeah, so the patent side is one side of the legal support. We've had good lawyers as well, and we were very fortunate when we started out to find a company in Scotland that specialized in life sciences. And then one of the then young guns in the firm went down to London and continued their career. And we moved with them and grew with them etc and they've continued to grow as a law firm and we've stayed with them and in fact have taken quite a lot of business and that's so that relationship again it's all about I think that relationship of not being scared to pick up the phone and say hey, you know this is the problem whereas and go for a drink with them and see them see them at conferences and all of those sorts of things and have a that kind of relationship with the lawyer is important.

In terms of, yeah without question the most important thing I ever did, and unfortunately I don't think it exists in the same way as it did in my day was something called the uh Royal Society of Edinburgh Commercialization Fellowships and this was a 12 month programme. Reasonably competitive to get. I got one of the first and quite frankly it changed my life. It was 12 months of Learning about how to set up a business and run a business fund the business, to put a business model together that was likely to be successful or funded. But with the time to do it so it's the time to step away from being an academic for 12 months. You don't step away completely, but to step away, certainly more than half of my time. And yeah, it was transformational for me.

And I think that was the time when I thought, actually, this other business that I'm involved with is probably not what I want to do. I want, it was actually sort of dismantling and then rebuilding what I wanted to do as an entrepreneur during that year that gave me the confidence to step away from the other business and to set one up myself.

Sarah McLusky

And sometimes it is these moments where you learn, you don't know what you don't know. And it's only when you learn, oh, okay, so this is how it should work, or this is how it should feel when it's going well. And that helps you to realize that maybe it's not quite right

Andy Porter

Yeah, no, yeah, I think that's true. Sometimes you have to have a real crisis, and then you have to work your way through it. I think scientists in general are pretty adaptable to those sorts of situations. They're quite good at thinking their way around problems.

I don't want to give anybody the impression that I've done this on my own. I mean this has been with a huge teams of support even when we set up the other, the first company Haptogen that there's a lot of teamwork around all of that and now I I'm just a team player. I'll just sit on boards and I'm part of that process and try and pitch in at the right point in conversations with the expertise or experience that I have.

Sarah McLusky

And so saying that you've mentioned all these different things that you're involved in now and then you know you're previously this opportunity to step away from the academic commitment. How do you juggle these things? How do you fit these two things together? Has that changed over the years?

Andy Porter

Well, one of the ways is I'm a part-time academic, so that's one of the ways that I do it and have had a huge amount of support. Actually, throughout the whole of this academic, entrepreneurial journey, I've had a huge amount of support from the university. They've been great. I think they just gave up on me, actually, and thought, well, he's not really manageable. We'll just let him get on with it, unless he does something terrible. We'll just let him play, sort of thing. So that's what they've done typically and then several Principals have done that.

Sarah McLusky

You must be doing something that they value. Yeah.

Andy Porter

Yeah, well, I mean, I guess I've made the bits of money over the over the years. Not a huge amount, but I don't think I've cost them money. And certainly they've probably got a lot of PR and profile out of me over the years as well. So it does probably mean that I feel a bit more confident to stick my head above the parapet and say things on occasion and Which I'm sure they don't always appreciate but in general, I think they tolerate me

Sarah McLusky

And it sounds like, I mean, obviously at the stage you're at in your career now, you've got that experience behind you, that track record. Early on in your career, you mentioned that your head of department or your head of facility was interested in this kind of spin-out side of things as well. So that helped set you on the journey.

Andy Porter

Well, sort of. So it was, yeah, Bill Harris was the, he was the chair of genetics. He had his own company at the time. And then that, unfortunately, that company didn't succeed. But it had a little bit of a fire in me, I think. And I didn't immediately then jump into an academic entrepreneurial journey, I built my academic group. And it was only then that I started to, as I said, as people started leaving and going to Cambridge, that I started to see the possible benefits of doing something up here in Aberdeen.

And there was a big ecosystem of people with the right skill sets in the city at the time because of this slightly strange setup where some of the two big, then, academic centres in this particular biologics drug discovery was Cambridge and in Aberdeen. So it was slightly weird that people in Aberdeen had no idea that there was this drug discovery expertise within the city but people in San Diego did you know it was that it was it was slightly mad.

Sarah McLusky

Once you get into this niche world, that's the way it goes, isn't it? So you hinted earlier that sometimes it takes a crisis to set you on a particular path. Are there any particular moments during your journey that have been really pivotal, either for good or bad?

Andy Porter

There's been a few, there's been a few, we were down in London with the, with, Haptogen, and we were in discussions to take that company onto the AIM market. I think a lot of people may know this story, but, I woke up turned on the TV in the hotel I was in to see that there had been a crisis, a real health problem within a phase one trial in London with two patients seriously ill. And the library footage they showed was of kind of pill packs with, you know, popping pills out of packs. So I thought, okay, not great timing, but at least it's not an antibody. And then my phone lit up and people were going, Andy, did you know it was an antibody?

Basically the float was taken away from us that day so we I did a little bit of sort of scientific digging and the kinds of antibodies they were using were very different than the kinds we were using, very different in terms of their mode of action but and so I went armed with this information to talk to the brokers and the guy came from one side of the table to my side of the table he put his arm around me and he said Andy I have a music degree. They work on antibodies you work on antibodies The floats not happening.

So that was a that was a particular crisis a crisis that we got through because of really enormously hard work from the rest of the team. It wasn't I didn't really get us through the crisis I just got to hear it firsthand, but the BD guys did an amazing job of bringing in additional money,

which bridged the gap for us to do another deal. And the deal that we did was then to be bought by Wyeth. And in some ways, whilst it was a crisis at the time, it was a real lottery win for us that we didn't float at the time because we might not have been purchased in the way we were purchased. So that was one particularly difficult period we went through a long time ago now.

Sarah McLusky

As you see, these, the things that seem like a disaster at the time or a huge challenge at the time often turn out to be for the best, don't they?

Andy Porter

Yeah, yeah, I'm, yes, I think that's true. There are other things, some of them are a bit difficult to talk about in almost from legal perspective. But yeah, some of the more interesting crises I've been involved with have been huge learnings. Much more so than things where things all go smoothly and you know, the money's flowing in and that, that yeah, when you when you have really difficult pinch points. That's when I think I've learned the most. And also I think the fact that I've got through them means that I'm much calmer about them when similar things come along. Now it's part of it's that okay I've seen this before but a lot of it is well actually I've seen this before and therefore I'm not going to get quite as stressed about it. So I am much calmer than I used to be.

Sarah McLusky

I think that leads nicely into a question about what does success mean to you now and is that something that's changed over the years?

Andy Porter

I think it has actually and also, I don't honestly think I've been successful. I think I've had been very fortunate you know everybody links back to the one big exit and I've only had one really big exit. And like I said, I see that more now at the time. I thought wow, this is amazing but now it's I see I can see what it was which is almost like a lottery win I mean, it really was very fortunate that everything aligned just at that point in time and we happened to be in the right place at the right time to be to be acquired by a large pharma company.

What does success look like now? I still it's slightly strange but I still think I get the most joy out of seeing an experiment work and things like that you know and they're just and I'm not doing them. I quite like looking at data, I don't necessarily get a white coat on and generate any, I haven't done that for 25 years probably. But there is something hugely exciting about seeing something progress scientifically through this. It takes a long time to go from that first experiment to getting approval of a drug. And you're always kind of one experiment away from failure on a 10-year journey, so managing to keep that moving or I think, you know, one of the words you put in your introduction to me was about pivoting. Well, I guess in Sands, we pivot a lot, probably more, I know in business, people pivot, but in Sands we're doing that a lot where

we're taking something that doesn't quite work in one direction, but we see another opportunity and we push it down another route.

And a lot of the businesses I work with change uh their lead programs depending on you know the data that came out at the end of the last month or that they're taking their lead programs in a slightly different direction all the time i yeah i think i still get the biggest buzz out of out of the science i struggle with with focus i get i see all the i was trying to think about this when i saw some of your questions come in.

All the businesses that I enjoy working with are platform companies. So they have a technology that can be used in lots of different directions. I've never really been one of these people who has been really focused. We've got this one drug that cures this one type of cancer, and we're going to go through this journey where, and they're probably the, that's probably the best way to be in some ways because having that kind of laser focus on the commercial goal, but I just get ‘This is amazing what it can do. We could do this with it, we can do that with it.’ You know, so that's probably more my personality.

Sarah McLusky

It definitely sounds like you're the ideas person. You're the kind of discovery and the possibility and the...

Andy Porter

Yeah, I don't know if I'm necessarily the ideas person, but I think I can spot good ideas when other people have them sometimes. I mean sometimes I have my own, but sometimes it's about recognizing the good ones from the bad ones, and I think I'm reasonably good at that. And one of the exciting things I like doing as well is when you've been working on a technology for a bit, and then you let it out into the world it’s amazing what comes back because people would go if you can do that you could do this for us you know and it could be a whole thing that we've never even thought of but they're seeing different ways of how our technology could be used to benefit them

Sarah McLusky

and seeing where that journey takes them. It explains why you've stayed in academia rather than going off to become, you know, director of a company or something like that. Yeah.

Andy Porter

Well, I'm a non-exec director on lots of companies, but I've, yeah, I mean, a lot of people say that I've done it because, you know, I'm scared of the risk, as it were, to go out and, no, I don't buy that at all. I think it's because I like to be close to the science. I like to see where the next opportunity is coming from. And we're working on maybe three spin outs at the moment that are coming out of the work that we're doing within the Scottish Biologics Facility. And I just like being part of that, almost like, I don't know, engine room of generating.

Sarah McLusky

Yeah, the process of creation. Yeah. Excellent. Oh, well, to wrap up our conversation, I wonder if I could ask what advice you would give to anybody who's thinking about starting on an entrepreneurial journey.

Andy Porter

So I think talk to a lot of people, listen to what they have to say to you. Sometimes actually take that advice, sometimes if it maybe don't. Well, the biggest advice I could give anybody is never do personal guarantees on anything. And I did that once and that was way back when I first started and that and there was a point. In time where I realized as an academic I was about to either Lose my home or make lots of money and that was a very stressful period And so I wouldn't recommend anybody taking personal guarantees

There is loads and loads and loads of fantastic training out there now and there are loads of mentors and cohort groups of young academics that are thinking about going on this entrepreneurial journey. So there’s Converse Challenge, I think there are still some opportunities around the Royal Society of Edinburgh's commercialization fellowships, but I think they're limited to a smaller number now. But they but those sorts of training that there's training within Scottish enterprise. But getting that level of exposure. Going on the journey with other people, hopefully in non-competing businesses in terms of their technology areas and learning as a cohort from each other and from mentors. That's probably the advice. And yeah, just ask people, you know. So one thing that my mum taught me, I think, is if you don't ask, you don't get. You know, she's been very entrepreneurial and that's one of the things that pick up the phone and ask people.

Sarah McLusky

Yeah, good advice, I think. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come along and have a chat.

Podcast Outro

If you’ve been inspired by this podcast head over to our LinkedIn page and tell us about your biggest takeaways. You’ll find a link in the show notes or search for Academic Adventures podcast.

This podcast was a collaboration between the University of the West of Scotland, Converge and Sarah McLusky. The podcast team includes Orla Kelly, Adam Kosterka, Jen Black and me, Sarah McLusky. It was funded by the Scottish Ecosystem Fund 2023-24.