Have you ever wondered if your clinical training could lead to a career in high-stakes investing? This episode charts the incredible journey of Meg Powell, who forged a unique path from pharmacist to venture capitalist. Meg shares the invaluable lessons, pivotal moments, and scrappy determination that took her from a small town in North Carolina to the executive suites of Big Pharma, the trenches of a successful startup, and finally to the helm of her own venture capital firm. We explore the core question: How do you build a multifaceted career in healthcare, and what does it truly take to transition from clinician to entrepreneur to investor?
In this deep-dive conversation, Meg Powell, co-founder and CEO of 501 Ventures, reveals the playbook for navigating a dynamic career in the life sciences. She details her foundational years at Eli Lilly and GSK, explaining why a transition from big pharma to startup life provided her with indispensable training and an unparalleled network. Meg walks us through the origin story of Target RWE, a pioneering real world evidence company she co-founded with Dr. Mike Freed. She shares the challenges of building a profitable company from the ground up with minimal funding, the importance of finding the right co-founder, and the strategy behind their successful exit. We also learn about her experience with imposter syndrome and how being a "scrappy entrepreneur" became her greatest asset.
Now, Meg is focused on the next frontier of medicine through healthcare venture capital. She discusses the formation of 501 Ventures with her partner Enrique Conterno (former President of Lilly Diabetes) and their investment thesis in the booming metabolic health and obesity market, fueled by innovations like Tirzepatide (Zepbound). A significant part of our discussion is dedicated to women in healthcare leadership. Meg speaks candidly about the "aha moments" that ignited her passion for mentorship, the challenges she faced, and how she is paying it forward with "The Fierce Collaborative," a network dedicated to supporting women and mothers in the life sciences. This episode is packed with authentic career advice, insights into the future of healthcare investing, and the inspiring story of a leader who has consistently broken new ground.
About our guest:
Meg Powell is the Co-founder and CEO of 501 Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on metabolic health. A PharmD by training, Meg began her career in Big Pharma at Eli Lilly and GlaxoSmithKline before transitioning to the startup world. She was the co-founder and CEO of Target RWE, a leading real-world evidence company that she grew from an idea to a highly successful exit. Meg is a passionate advocate for women in leadership and a mentor to the next generation of healthcare entrepreneurs.
Episode resources:
Introduction
Dr. Trevor Royce: Welcome to HealthTech Remedy. This is the next installment of our bonus series on investors. This is a special series where we sit down with investors like venture capitalists who focus on healthcare, allocating capital and providing guidance to enable the next generation of innovations that will ultimately shape healthcare. I'm Trevor Royce, joined by my co-host, Tim Showalter.
Dr. Tim Showalter: This is Tim Showalter. Today, we are thrilled to continue the series with Meg Powell, co-founder and CEO of 501 Ventures. Meg is a PharmD by training, successful life sciences executive, entrepreneur, and founder in the real world data space, and now a venture capitalist. She also serves on a number of boards.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Today, we'll be learning how these clinicians, founders, and now investors have navigated their career, what inspired them, what advice they have for others thinking about a career and investing, or even on the fundraising side. Meg Powell, welcome to Health Tech Remedy. We're excited to have you.
Meg Powell: Thank you so much for having me. Love this.
Dr. Trevor Royce: We should start with, as any good story does, at the beginning and would kind of love to hear, on a very foundational level, how you went down this healthcare path. And of course, we'll hit every step along the way, but what kicked all this off to begin with?
From Small-Town North Carolina to the Halls of Pharmacy School
Meg Powell: Well, if you really want to go to the beginning, you have to go to Statesville, North Carolina, which is where I'm from. Hence the accent and love being a product of Iredell County. I was always just good at science and math. Neither of my parents were in healthcare, but growing up in a small community, obviously a lot of the people I had the most respect for were in the health care community, whether as physicians or pharmacists.
I grew up in an era, I'll show my age, where the community pharmacy was a big component of the social network within Statesville. We had a couple drugstores that still had soda counters, and I can tell you I frequented them both often. So that was my beginning exposure and I wanted to find opportunities where I could continue to study science and math.
I had the great opportunity of attending the North Carolina School of Science and Math in Durham, North Carolina. It's a public high school. You go for your junior and senior year. And I will say this was really transformational for me and allowed me to continue to explore opportunities. Professionally, personally, I met other kids that were like me, a little nerdy, but had similar passions and were intellectually curious.
I would say we didn't have a lot of money growing up. So I was very scrappy when it came time for college, had to figure out how to make that work for me. There wasn't—I was going to be paying for myself.
Meg Powell: So I applied to Carolina, applied for every single scholarship I could get, including every $500 Key Club or Kiwanis essay. I wrote them. So God bless my guidance counselor and my English professor who wrote, I think, something like 35 recommendations for me for these essays. But it gave me enough money to put myself through the first two years of Carolina, which back then was about $6,000 a year. So it worked.
Meg Powell: And again, just continued down the path. I really thought I was going to go to medical school. That was the goal. But given that I was funding my own education and I am a very practical person, I looked at the prerequisites that I needed for medical school and realized that knowing that I was going to have to put myself through medical school, realized that there was so much overlap with medicine and pharmacy. And so at the time I was at Carolina, it was a bachelor's program for pharmacy. And I applied because I thought, hey, I can put myself through medical school. I can work relief one weekend a month. And this would help me get through.
Meg Powell: Long story longer, I got into pharmacy school. I ended up getting a scholarship to pharmacy school. But during my application process, they converted to the PharmD program. So it was now a six year program. So I did two and four. And I realized pretty quickly pharmacy school was hard and I was working really hard and I, quite frankly, didn't think I was going to make it another four years for medical school. So I started trying to figure out, okay, what am I going to do with this? And how do I pivot?
I also, that was the time pharmacy was starting to change. Chains were coming in. And it was becoming much less personal. You were much less of an entrepreneur. I didn't even know what an entrepreneur was at that point. But when you think about pharmacy in the late 70s and 80s, it was probably one of the best jobs there was. You were your own business owner. You were very prominent in the community. You had the mix of taking care of people, but knowing people, too, and having those personal relationships, which is a really important part of who I am and connecting with others.
And so pharmacy was changing. So I knew I didn't want to just go work in a chain pharmacy. And so I started figuring out how I was going to pivot. And a guy named George Abercrombie, who actually lives here in Chapel Hill, who was, at the time, the president of Roche North America, came to speak at the pharmacy school. And I went and he had done a pharmacy degree. And then he had gone on to Harvard Business School and had had this very successful career in industry. And I was like, that's what I'm going to do.
Meg Powell: I could see myself in him and he had some amazing stories and experiences and I wanted to do that. And so that's when I realized, I think that was really the end of my first year of pharmacy school, that I was going to try to go into the business of pharmacy versus continuing the medical school, medicine field. And so I just built my plan around that.
I was able to get an internship for a small chain pharmacy, Mast Drug Company. It's an independent. It was an independent in Henderson, North Carolina. But it was on the business and operation side of running the pharmacy. They had at one point 20-some stores across North Carolina and a big long term care pharmacy business as well. So I went there one summer. The next summer, I was fortunate enough, that's a story for another day, but to get an internship at Eli Lilly. And I launched Sarafem, which was for PMDD at the time. It was a rebranding of Prozac for PMDD.
Meg Powell: And then I went to GlaxoSmithKline the next summer in the U.S. Business. So my job at Lilly was in the global business and went to Glaxo, but then went back to Eli Lilly full time when I graduated from pharmacy school in global marketing. And so that was fantastic. I had some amazing mentors and sponsors who encouraged me to go to business school. So that's how I ended up at Stanford.
Dr. Trevor Royce: And when you were at Stanford, were you still with Eli throughout that or Glaxo?
Meg Powell: I was. Yep. While I was at Lilly, I started there in 2000 full time. And my boss and my now husband's boss, which we've been married 23 years, decided to set us up. So they introduced us, which, of course, you couldn't do in today's day and age.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Yeah, that wouldn't work nowadays.
Meg Powell: That wouldn't work so well. But his group came to present to our group and we all went to lunch and the rest is history. But Eli Lilly, my husband, actually had come into Lilly through a unique path as well, through a work-study program at a university called DePauw. And so Eli Lilly so generously, quite frankly, sent us both to business school. So we were married and sent us both to business school, but we did owe them five years on the back end.
Lessons from Big Pharma: Building a Foundation at Eli Lilly and GSK
But honestly, that was the best thing that could have happened. And I tell entrepreneurs this today all the time, I think I could have never started the companies or been as effective in the companies that I have, the small startups, if I had not had my experience in big pharma for a couple of reasons. One, I got amazing training. In startups, you don't have that opportunity or structured programs.
Meg Powell: Two, I met so many amazing people, which then went to amazing companies. And so when you're thinking about selling into pharma, you need a couple of things. One is a really good understanding of how they buy, whether that's by assets, whether that's by services, whether that's by data. But you also need to know people because it's still very much, in fact, I talk to entrepreneurs that are in the tech world and they don't get it when they try to transition to pharma. I'm like, no, it's still a lot of late nights at a bar and a lot of conversations and influence with regards to the selling process, if you will. And so being in big pharma for a decade, the first decade, really just provided a natural training ground that has been so critical for me to be able to spend the next 15 years as an entrepreneur.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Before we get into the next chapter and hear about how that pharma experience really set you up for your incredible endeavor with Target RWE and then now as a venture capitalist, there's two key themes that I want to tug on from the first chapter, so to speak. One is the North Carolina School of Science and Math. I just want to give that a shout out because it's amazing that you've been a product of this. And it's a public school with a competitive process for those that are exceptional at science and math. And it's just an amazing resource for the state of North Carolina. I don't know if you have any additional reflections on that, but I think it is worth highlighting.
Meg Powell: I could not agree more. It was started in 1980. I'm very proud. I will, full disclosure, did just roll off the board. But some of my closest friends today are still, we were all classmates together. And it was the first of its kind in the country. There are now, I think, 17 other similar high schools across the country.
But I give a shout out to Jim Hunt in 1979, when he was really changing the economy of North Carolina from textiles and agriculture to knowledge-based types of industries. And he had the vision, quite frankly, of a couple of things. That was the same era that the Biotech Center was formed and the School of Science back educating North Carolina's STEM talent and then trying to incent them to stay here. And I will tell you, when I came back to North Carolina after leaving Lilly, I wrote him a letter and just said, hey, thank you so much. This truly, my life was changed in a way that I would have never had if I had not attended. And he wrote a letter back and I still have it in my office. He's like, that's exactly—I was the 13th class. So I wasn't one of the new, the very first people, but certainly it was part of the experience. So anyway, thank you, Trevor, for that and giving me an opportunity to brag about it. I am a proud unicorn for sure.
Dr. Trevor Royce: I love it. I love it. And the other interesting concept buried in there is your experience going into the community and working in a community pharmacy, which is such a microcosm of how healthcare has changed over the last however many years. My sense is a lot of our listeners who are clinicians and thinking about having some outlet for this desire, this innate human desire to build and be an entrepreneur, some of these things like hang your own shingle as a radiation oncologist, pretty much doesn't happen anymore. So you have to find other pursuits and pharmacy a little bit feels like that where these community pharmacies just don't exist on the degree, at least that they used to.
Meg Powell: Yeah, no, it's unfortunate, but true. And I think pharmacy and part of the drive when I in the 2000s, early 2000s, when I was going to pharmacy school was for pharmacists to be mid-level practitioners, similar to a PA or nurse practitioner. And for a number of reasons, politically motivated, et cetera, pharmacy never has quite been able to live up to that. And as a result, in these, especially in rural communities, I think it's a real loss, because they could be such a health care extender.
And we're starting to see that now. Honestly, COVID, I think, provided more life back into the role of pharmacies, both chain and independence, especially in rural health care and the need for rural health care. So we're starting to see—we've started to see more authorizations and that sort of thing about what pharmacists can do. And so I still think that there is a hope that there is a play. But like everything, it comes down to dollars and cents. And as we all know, the entire ecosystem in which we work is incredibly broken and inefficient. And so we'll have to figure out who gets what percentage of what pie and who's going to win and then who's going to just continue to go away.
Dr. Tim Showalter: So it's an interesting perspective. And one other point that I think a lot of us saw during the pandemic recently is how is how pharmacists really stepped up with vaccination pushes, for example. It does highlight that they have a key role in the health system. I'd like to shift a little bit because I really want to hear about the Target RWE story, which I think is the next chapter. Can you sort of walk us through what led to you starting that and catch us up a little bit on the story for Target RWE?
The First Leap: Trading Corporate Life for Startup Scrappiness
Meg Powell: There's a story before Target, which is we had, my husband and I were both in big pharma, traveling all over the world, thought we were going to continue down that path. And Lily had been phenomenal. In fact, I'll get to this in a little bit. But my current business partner was my boss at Lily 16 years ago. So again, back to the relationships, etc. But in training, when we had our first child, our world was completely rocked. So I know Trevor has four kids, Tim, I know you have several kids as well. But my first year of my daughter's life, I was gone 100 nights. My husband was traveling.
Meg Powell: We couldn't figure out how to make it work, to be honest. And we tried it all. And I talk a lot, especially to women, but really just to new parents about how do you balance this? And there is no such thing as balance. Yeah.
Meg Powell: But it turned out—so I actually left Big Pharma for personal reasons. I took what I thought was going to be a year leave of absence, mainly because I had to. I was drowning in every dimension. I felt that I wasn't doing any of my roles well, whether that's a leader in work, whether that was a mother, whether that was a spouse.
And so I fortunately, Pharma has always, Lily, GSK, has been, I would say, very progressive and supportive of families. I actually, women and diversity, et cetera, DEI. Obviously, we're at a different place today, but that was always a core component of values, respect for people. And so there were a lot of programs where you could take a year leave of absence and still be able to go back.
And so that was my plan. My daughter turned a year, our nanny got a real job, if you will. We'd already been through three different child care situations. I was in Ireland on my way to India. My husband was on my way to London. And I'm like, I can't. We just can't do this anymore.
And so but I also knew I wanted to keep my hands doing something. I wasn't just going to be able to completely go from one extreme to the other. And so I, again, through some connections I had at Lily, knew this guy, Steve Butts, who had a small startup on therapeutics company in the triangle called Aerial BioPharma.
Meg Powell: And they were an eight person company. They had a phase two asset for narcolepsy. And so Steve and I had had coffee a couple of times, being back in the area. And he's like, hey, why don't you come help me? We're getting ready to read out our phase two. We need to sell this asset. I need somebody to come lead the project.
Meg Powell: And thank goodness I had no idea how much money I was making at GSK and what have you, because if I did the math, I made like a fifth of what I was making at GSK. But it allowed me the flexibility. And while I still worked really hard, it gave me a lot more control than I had in a large organization and a control of my schedule, I should say. And so I did that as a pivot, thinking that was just going to be for that year and that I was going to jump right back into the chaos of a big company.
And I joined this little startup and I joke, I was like, I left my job on a Friday and started at the startup on a Saturday because we had a scientific advisory board and I was running strategy at the time and my budget was about $50 million a year and we were a cost center. We weren't making any money. We were putting together, had lots of consultants running around, all that kind of stuff. The next day I fly to Dallas, Texas for this advisory board and we're not arguing, but discussing whether or not we should rent the screen because it costs $150.
Meg Powell: I can't tell you, I never once looked at a line item that was $150, even when I was an associate, my first role at Lilly. And so, but I loved it. There was just some energy, we were changing the slides right until we went into the room. We could immediately act on the advice that these guys were giving us. We immediately made changes to the phase two protocol.
Meg Powell: And all of a sudden, I could see the direct immediate impact of my work. Some days that was taking the trash out. And some days that was writing a press release, some days that was uploading a press release, all things that I had never did, even as the most junior person at a big pharma company. However, the next day, I was negotiating the $400 million deal. I'm like, now this is cool. So I loved all of it. Very few people, I think, have a mind for both. And so it's unusual. And sometimes, again, I think most of the time people are wired one way or the other. But I, quite frankly, find both really exciting.
So I joined Aerial BioPharma. We had this phase two asset. Turns out they did give me some equity. I didn't even know what equity really was, et cetera. I was like, OK, great. Thank you. But I'm learning. It's fun. And I have more time with my daughter. We had a phenomenal exit. So it was this great story, great mentorship. Again, [Could not verify with context], who was the CEO and then Steve Butts kind of taught me, OK, this is how you put capital together. This is what this looks like. This is a group of angels that I work with. This is the attorney, all of all of those sorts of things. So I now had a tangible skill.
And what I realized—I learned pretty quickly, actually, the first couple of months I was there, I was like, hi, I used to be a vice president at GSK or Lilly. And then all of a sudden I was like, these guys are actually much smarter because it's not the top line that matters. It's the bottom line that matters, really. And I just loved it. I loved everything about it. So again, it helps that that first foray was a huge success. We exited, we sold the asset to Jazz Pharmaceuticals. As I said, we gave our investors a 10x return in a matter of 27 months, I think. I guess that one was closer to three years. And I knew that I was about a year and a half in and I knew I could never go back to big pharma at that point. So similar to not having the energy to keep going to medical school, there was no way. I had finally found my calling. I think my true calling as much as I enjoyed my time at Pharma.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Just a quick question on that, because I think a core theme here is figuring out how to have a very fulfilling professional life while still having a fulfilling family life. And my sense is that you work just as hard when you joined a startup as you were when you were at Book Pharma. You just had more control over how your time was spent on any given day. And I think that is maybe something that is underappreciated a little bit when people think about doing something a little riskier, a little earlier on in terms of the company size.
Meg Powell: You know, the other thing that I have to give a shout out to my husband, because he stayed at Big Pharma. We had health insurance. We knew we could put food on the table. So I often have a little bit of imposter syndrome about being an entrepreneur because we weren't taking the risk that so many people have and do to make this choice. So it sounds great on this side of it, but during it, it didn't seem nearly as risky, perhaps, as it is for others. So, again, we have very much viewed our partnership in work and in our personal life as a partnership. And that's constantly tradeoffs, et cetera, et cetera. So, but yes, this was, that was the main driver for me to make this decision. And I'm so thankful, because it turned out to be the best professional decision I could have ever made, both financially, that little thing called equity mattered. And I was like, oh, I get it now. I should have asked for a little bit more.
Building Target RWE: A Real World Evidence Success Story
Meg Powell: And then also just a new skill set that I had. So now, it's 2014. I had, we'd had a successful exit. I had not been the CEO of that company, but had some skills, some network, etc. And actually, the CEO, [Could not verify with context], gave me my first $35,000 check when I started Target, because what happened was I just once we exited, I started looking around like, okay, I'm going to do this again. But I want to be the CEO this time. And I knew have all the skills, except I didn't have the idea or the product. So I had lots of coffees and met my co-founder, Mike Freed, who at the time was the head of hepatology at UNC.
Meg Powell: And he had put together. So, again, this is 2014, 2015, before real world evidence was any—nobody called it anything. And he had put together a very successful, he was a hep C expert, a worldwide KOL in the hep C space. And he had put together this large cohort of patients, real world patients. So as all the hep C cures were coming to fruition because the age old problem of, well, the studies don't represent my patient population, et cetera, et cetera. And he and a guy named Dave Nelson, who was also a co-founder, although less involved in the day-to-day, he's the head of—he's actually head of the whole medical system now at University of Florida.
But they had put this cohort together, but they did a couple things uniquely in the hepatitis C space. They, number one, they didn't take any NIH funding. So while it was designed like a NIH kind of study, they got all their funding came from pharma. Number two, they got the FDA involved really early. So the FDA was sitting around the table and understood how they were collecting the data, the data quality, etc..
Meg Powell: And three, they created an experience for everybody to sit together and have a different incentive for every person around the table. So KOLs now all of a sudden had access to this much larger database than they would ever have on their own, because they had a, it was syndicated, for lack of a better word, across 50 centers in the U.S. The FDA also understood the quality of the data. And in fact, the FDA started encouraging sponsors to use the—there are several examples of where this data was used instead of a sponsor having to do their own phase four study.
So we have responses from the FDA where they said, you can either access the target data or run this phase four study. And so obviously, from an economics perspective, time, everything, sponsors had an incentive to participate in this collaboration as well. And then the FDA had visibility because all the safety reporting, etc., they knew that they were getting access to that. So it was really the collective ability to put different incentives in front of different people, but all marching towards the same goal.
Meg Powell: And so Mike and I started having coffee and he had seen it work so well. And he was—he was in his 50s at the time. He had seen—he's like, I've done enough R1 grants. I want to do something else. He had always kind of had an idea. And so I said, well, look, I'm not a data person. But I know how to raise a little bit of money and I know how to put a company together and let's just do that. And so we did.
So in 2015, he and I would meet for coffee several times a week at Cafe Carolina, our first office, and figure out what we could do, how we could sell it, etc. And he and I, quite frankly, were just a great team because he had his lane. I had my lane. We very complimentary, but different skill sets. We both needed each other.
Meg Powell: Both had a huge amount of trust and respect for each other. I think we crossed each other's lanes once or twice. We had our little founders disputes and then we got back in our lane and life was good again. So anyway, no, he's still a very, very dear friend. But I think having us both look at things from a different lens was very important.
And so we went on the road and quite frankly, we raised a little bit of money. As I mentioned, [Could not verify with context] gave me a first $35,000 just to pay the lawyer, to incorporate and print off some business cards and that sort of thing. And we just started going on the road. And fortunately, we were profitable from day one. We had this amazing growth trajectory. We went from zero to 75 employees.
Flatiron, as you both know that story really well, was starting about the same time as we were. They were doing it on a much different scale. I think they raised something like two to three hundred million. We raised two million. I'm really scrappy, as I've said multiple times. So we ran the organizations a little differently. I'll just say that.
Meg Powell: But that kind of got to the same outcome. And we did everything but oncology. And so there was just a lot of white space. Well, there was no way we could compete with flat iron. No way. And then all the additional players in oncology. But there was so much else out there that we just started slowly. We first started with NASH because of the link to hepatology. So we knew all the hepatologists. We knew how to do this in this space. And then we just started growing and expanding from there with different verticals.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Just an amazing story. And we'd love to hear a little more about what you're doing today and how this kind of set you up for what you're doing today, what your focus is on, why what you guys are doing is unique and just fill us in on what Meg's brain is up to today.
Meg Powell: So let me finish the target story really quickly, because I do think that it's an important part of the story, which is, so we exited in 2018, we had gone from zero to 75 employees, zero to 25 million in revenue, 8 million of EBITDA.
Meg Powell: And I was exhausted again. So these marathons are sprints. And as you can imagine, I had—we had our second child during that time. I was on the road, as I said, we didn't raise much money. So we didn't have a big management team. It was kind of Mike and me and a PowerPoint slide deck most of the time. So I was looking to take a break. And I also wanted knew that the opportunity was there to exit. And because we were profitable, private equity was an option for us. I also, quite frankly, believe that somebody else, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm not an operator and thought somebody else could take it to the next level. And I kept seeing all this opportunity and how do you scale the organization? So we ran a process, we exited. At that point, I thought I was going to sit on boards and be done.
The Next Chapter: Launching 501 Ventures and Investing in Metabolic Health
Meg Powell: So I did that for a couple of years and then quickly realized that I was too young and that sitting in a boardroom, you're only as good as your last 10 years of operating experience. And I was too young to just do boards and then be done. So I started figuring out what I wanted to do next. And as we've talked about, there's a lot of inefficiencies in drug development. And having seen, done it both really scrappily and in big pharma, saw this inefficiency on both sides. I also, in all these conversations or in all this time, have met a ton of great scientists that have great ideas, great science.
Meg Powell: Found that there were two camps, ones that either got overfunded. So NEA came in and wrote a $100 million Series A check and they spend like they're a big pharma company or great science that never quite—the scientist couldn't tell the story quite well enough or got mispaired with their business partner, etc. And also recognized how critical the relationship between Mike Freed and myself was to the success of Target.
And so it started to put together a shared overhead model where, so I formed 501 in 2020. Of course, we all know what 2020 was, so I didn't do a ton with it. It also was a way for me to invest some of my money in some of these seed investments. So we did one project-based financing for one entity. We did two phase two studies. It was a drug device combination of 505B2, which for a huge unmet need, Trevor knows, the founder, the scientific founder of that company. Unfortunately, the drug didn't do its job, so we shut that company down.
Meg Powell: Earlier last year. And I was trying to figure out, okay, what am I going to do? I'm ready to have one more big push in me. And that's when I started having conversations with my current partner, a guy named Enrique Conterno. Enrique, as I said, was my boss at Lilly in 2010.
Meg Powell: He was the president of Lilly Diabetes. He is the reason the obesity market is what it is today. I was in the room when we created Tirzepatide, or Zepbound, as it's known today. He is absolutely perhaps the smartest person I've ever met. And similar to Mike and myself, we were always a good team because we couldn't be more opposite. And so we joined forces technically just earlier this year. I sold him half of 501 Ventures, and we are off to the races with a fund focused on what metabolic health.
So we believe that the obesity market today is just the tip of the iceberg. And we're starting to see that as we see all the additional benefits of the GLP, the impact on inflammation, the impact of inflammation then on all these other systems, whether it's Alzheimer's, whether it's colon cancer, etc, etc. And so we have put together a large fund focused on investing in that space. But taking advantage of some of the lessons learned from being a scrappy entrepreneur, we're only investing in companies where we can have very active operating influence. So not just a board seat, but we are taking trying to take majority control. We will still syndicate, but we will be the majority owners of these entities and plan to do more than just show up at a board meeting once a quarter.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Amazing. And what an incredibly exciting time to be in that area of therapeutics.
Meg Powell: It is. And do what you know, do what you know and do what you love. We just came back from EASD last week in Vienna, and it's really fun and exciting to see this whole area and the impact it's most importantly had on humans and patients. We get caught up in the science and the positioning and the numbers of all of this. But at the end of the day, when you think about the impact you're having on people's lives, it makes it all come into focus as to why we do what we do.
Dr. Tim Showalter: It's amazing to hear these different chapters of your life and I've got a suspicion that if you were to go back and ask the Meg Powell of deciding about pharmacy school versus the MD and lamenting the decline of soda counters, you probably wouldn't have predicted all of these chapters and where you are now. And so for someone who's at that early career stage, maybe a talented math and science student, maybe in North Carolina, who knows, if you can speak to your younger self, what sort of career advice do you have about making a really broad impact and having such an interesting and varied career and so many successes along the way?
Career Advice: On Hard Work, Luck, and Authentic Salesmanship
Meg Powell: I love that question because I think about it a lot. I'll be 50 next year. And so I think it's a time of life where you really are more reflective on that exact point. I never set out to do any of this. I set out to go back to Statesville and have a great life and contribute to my community. I never closed a door until I had to. So I think that that's a really important piece.
I worked really hard, and I got really lucky. And I think those three things are critical. I will admit I love Ina Garten. For anybody that's listening, I'm a big Barefoot Contessa fan. And she just wrote her book about "Be ready when the luck happens." And I think that that's really true. I think any entrepreneur that tells you that they were so skilled and so brilliant and that that's what drove their success is full of themselves. And I don't believe any of that. I believe you need to do all of those things.
Meg Powell: The stars have to align and you have to be ready for the luck. And that includes—so that means you've got to keep those options open as long as you possibly can, because there's so much value in options. And so that's what I did. Be curious. Ask questions, figure out what you're good at, what you're not.
I will say the other piece of advice I would give, which is a little separate but true, is I never in a million years want to be told that I'm good at sales. But being an entrepreneur, you've got to be really good at sales. And you have to do it in an authentic way. I think that's why I—and I finally acknowledge now that I'm pretty good at sales, whether that's selling a product, whether that's selling the company to get investments, whether that's selling people on why they want to come work with you so that you can attract the best talent. But I think learning that skill, and if it's not something that comes natural to continue to focus on or work on that and develop it, but the more you can authentically be passionate about something, you will be exceptional at sales. So finding the things that give you the energy that you can shine brightly will help others follow along, and I think that's critical.
Dr. Trevor Royce: There is one final topic that I wanted to give you the chance to reflect on, and it's related to what we just chatted about. And that's about your experience as a woman in this leadership role. And I know this is an area of passion for you. And you devoted quite a bit of time of mentoring and bringing up the next generation of women in health care, health technology and therapeutics. Anything to reflect on there before we close out?
Championing Women in Healthcare Leadership: Mentorship and The Fierce Collaborative
Meg Powell: Yes. Having grown up in public companies, I actually never thought twice about my gender. Good or bad. I never—I had plenty of opportunities. I'd look straight up my mind. There was always a significant focus on DEI in developing female talent. I probably had a lot more opportunities, maybe than my husband, even just because of the nature. I was a woman. And there were these special affinity groups that I participated in, etc. So I didn't think twice about it.
The first time I would say gender kind of played a role in my professional thought process was when we had children, as I've already told that story. And all of a sudden, I was torn in a way that I'd never been torn about the roles and how I wanted to play that and some of the emotion around that. So that was the first wake up and was able to make my profession fit so that I could find the balance I was looking for.
The second big aha moment was when I sold my company in 2018. And we were, when we sold, about 70% female-led, not because I set out to do that, but because I found the best possible talent I could and paid us what I could afford as a startup. We were scrappy, including my salary, et cetera. And so what that meant was I found a lot of great talent that had been out of the workforce for a couple of years.
Meg Powell: And by the way, that's where my social circles were taking me anyway, because I had young children. And so my general counsel ended up, I met her at the playground and so I gave the flexibility to our team. So I wanted everybody in the office five days a week. We were all there. But you know what? If you wanted to go at noon, there were no questions asked. In fact, I might see you at the hairdressers at two o'clock because that's the only time I could go to. But we're all back online at night etc because so we were—there was a shared experience. As a result, I got amazing human capital. And I didn't even—again, I wish I could tell y'all all that was intentional because it was a key component to our success, but it wasn't. It was a lot of luck as we talked about earlier.
But when I sold, within nine months, we were—all of us were replaced with men, white men specifically. And that was by choice. Most, all of us opted out. I sold because I was done. It wasn't that private equity came in and just said, oh, we're going to fire you, but more just the culture had changed so much. And so all of a sudden I was the only woman in the room, whether that be the board meetings, et cetera. And so I became much more sensitive to what that meant and being a female and saw even, for instance, in my search, we hired a prominent search agency and they showed up with two women.
Meg Powell: We looked at over 70 resumes, two women. One was a single mom and couldn't move. And the private equity company was like, sorry, we're not going to work with you. And one was that traditional feedback of being too aggressive and would not be be a good fit. And so those were the signals to me that, wow, my generation hasn't paved the road, but I'm looking at my now 14 year old daughter and I want to make this better for her. So that's really where I got passionate about it.
And the third and probably final straw for me was then during COVID when we saw women take on 32 hours of unpaid labor a week versus the average man taking on four. And just seeing that kind of imbalance and how that was impacting women—they exited, as you know, the workforce in massive amounts. And so the combination of those three events for me has made it important that we just talk about it. I don't have a predetermined goal other than, I wish I had had the opportunity to find someone that looked a little bit more like me while I was going through those pivotal points. So I am vocal about being available to help, to talk, anything that I can to support women.
Meg Powell: I'm really excited because I now have continued to expand that. So part of it was a very intentional way to mentor women starting during COVID. But again, that was stuff that used to happen at the coffee bar or the water cooler at work. And if women weren't back in the office or post the pandemic, how are they going to get that mentorship, et cetera? And so it started on February 22nd of 2022. And I said, look, I'm committed to having 22 in-person conversations this year, half of which are for me, for my own growth and mentorship. And I'm very honest about that. And half of them are, I'm putting myself out there that I'm here for anybody that. Reach out to me. And I have. So in 22, I had 22 conversations.
Meg Powell: Amazing. And let me just be clear that I learn as much from people that think they're learning something from me than the other way around. So we did 22, 23 conversations in 23, 24, and I'm on my path for 25 this year. I have had a significant number of women that are also repeating that. It's easy, low commitment, but it also is an intentional act. And we're culminating this year, we're doing an actual retreat in Tulum, Mexico. I've invited the group of women. I just, all I did was reserve a block of rooms and we're kind of calling ourselves now the Fierce Collaborative. I wanted to call us badass women, but my husband told me I needed to rebrand. So we're now the Fierce Collaborative and we'll be, hopefully this will be the first of what will be an annual retreat for women, specifically moms that work in healthcare or life science that need to have some fun and relaxation, but also need to have some professional and personal growth. And so putting us together in an environment that we can do both is hopefully the next evolution of this goal of making the road a little bit wider for the generation behind us.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Amazing. Thanks for sharing that. Your authenticity is so inspiring and it's just been amazing hearing your story today. So we really appreciate you taking your time. Cannot wait to see what comes out of 501 Ventures.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Likewise.
Meg Powell: Thank you guys for thinking of me. And I think it's great that you guys are doing this. As I said, conversations and getting people's stories is so beneficial to all of us to learn. And if anybody, if I can help in any way, shape or form to you guys or to any of your listeners. I've never, ever had a conversation with someone that I haven't learned or grown during the conversation. So I look forward to hopefully, this podcast will develop as far as more conversations and connections. So thank you.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Thanks so much.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Well, that'll do it for this episode of Health Tech Remedy, presenting our series on investors. Be sure to subscribe and follow us on your favorite podcast platform. And if you know an investor we should feature, reach out, and we'd love to hear their story. Thanks again, Meg.
Meg Powell: Thank you.
