Welcome to season three of Rooted and Reaching, where we talk with dreamers, doers, and difference makers building an innovative future right here in the South Bend Elkhart region. Entrepreneurs know that where we're rooted matters, and where we're reaching matters even more. Today we're talking with Milad Alakozai, Purdue grad, neuroscientist, and serial entrepreneur. Let's start up.

Great.

I am thrilled to be here this morning with Dr. Malad Alakozai, who is visiting us from parts far away from San Francisco, California, or in the Bay, let's say the Bay Area.

That's good.

He was connected to us through Plug and Play and has an Indiana connection himself and came into town to be part of Idea Week this year and just got off the stage with two of his colleagues, presenting a pretty fantastic panel that inspired a lot of people in the audience. So, Milad, tell us, how is it that you are here actually today?

First, thank you, Marty, for having me. And I feel like I'm just coming off that panel, so I'm filled with energy and enthusiasm, and it's a great place and a great time to be where I am in life, to be able to see the excitement and enthusiasm in the room. You know, it's really interesting. I haven't spent a lot of time in this part of the region, but despite spending most of my activity in the Bay Area, I actually spent my early education in Indiana. I ended up going to Purdue for my undergrad, did my doctorate at iu, then spent some time at Harvard, and then most of my career has been Silicon Valley. But I've never really lost sight of the impact that Indiana had, not only in my education, giving me the foundations of being a great neuroscientist, but also a lot of those values and just the community aspect and the collaborative nature. I'm so grateful that that hasn't changed.

That's great.

But it's been great to just see the exciting technology changes and capability changes and just the development that's happened in the last, even five, 10 years, 15 years. It's been phenomenal. So it's super exciting to be back when IdeaWeek came on my radar. These days, I only try to attend things where I feel like there's a true impact and there's something that can be gained from me attending as well and learning from those around me. And so the. This was just a wonderful opportunity and a confluence of so many things that it was an exciting thing not to pass up. So it's exciting to be here.

A little jet Lag, but well, appreciate that. Really lucky for us that you had that Indiana connection, I think. Right. That sort of made this possible and a leap of faith for you to look at IdeaWeek and say, I think this might be a good fit for me. We're working really hard to make IdeaWeek into something valuable for the whole region. And we can't do that without bringing in. Well, we're trying to do a few things. We're honoring local expertise, we're honoring regional expertise. But we would be mistaken if we didn't think we need to bring in outside expertise as well. Outside perspectives, outside experience. And you kind of hit a lot of check marks in the sense that you have a regional connection, but you also have very wide ranging experience outside of the region that you can bring and share with us. So thank you so much for being here.

Thank you. That's very kind of you to say. And you know, it's so critical as we think of any of the types of work that I'm excited about or focused on. It all starts local and it all starts regional. And there's just so much we've seen as a nation on a global scale where at the end of the day, the local is often the most important. And it requires a lot of different voices. And some of those voices are from the region, some of them are outside. And those different perspectives and point of views can really shape some super exciting things that are already in the works or haven't even been thought of to be developed. And that's what I get most excited about when I travel across the U.S. but in particular, of course, I still consider myself a Hoosier and those are my sports teams. And so I still.

That's fantastic.

As someone who deeply cares about our state and it also represents the backbone of America. And there's a lot in the what we have as values and what Indiana represents that go beyond just our state, but I think is a really interesting reflection of entrepreneurship, small businesses, medium sized businesses, and regional development opportunities that others can learn from as well. So there's more benefit for me to be here than I think others give me. Maybe too much credit for, but I always appreciate the lessons there.

Yeah, I think one of the things we do well here or are doing increasingly well here, is we are talking to one another at a local level, at a regional level, and people know one another and they're making the connections. And I think that can sometimes be harder in a bigger area. The Bay Area. You were out in Boston. I don't know if that's harder or not, but I suspect it is. We do a really good job here of connecting the dots, introducing folks. We're small, you know, there's not a ton of capital flowing through the region, but where we can we make the connections and folks know one another and want to help one another.

Absolutely, yeah. You know, it's interesting, Marty, when I think back at it, it's very analogous to the startup world in the sense where you don't have as many people, you don't have as many large companies, but you have enough diversity of small, medium, large, and stakeholders from all different walks of life. And I think the magic that makes startups so nimble and the ability to move so fast and be capital efficient and how they think about what to focus on, that represents this ecosystem in a great way. So we have a lot of trade offs in every ecosystem, the Bay Area and Boston included. And the trade offs and the positives that you guys have as an ecosystem here represent a lot of what I see and why I make investments in early stage companies. And so that's the kind of excitement I get. And you can see the impact in such a short amount of time, whereas I don't have to wait 30 years to see what happens in Indiana almost on a yearly basis. You start to see newer and newer things and technologies and opportunities. So it's very exciting to see where that's coming across.

Yeah, great. So let's take a step back. You went to Purdue.

That's right. Studied neuroscience.

Neuroscience. And then you got a PhD in neuroscience as well.

I actually ended up getting a master's in immunology and public health. I did that as a Mitchell Scholar. It was Purdue's Rhodes Marshall Mitchell got a nominee and then ultimately went on to win the Mitchell Scholarship. Becoming produced first. That sent me to Ireland, of all places, to do more of a neuroimmunology focus. And then I came back to do my doctorate at iu, where I did that in public health and bioinformatics and using some of the latest and greatest tools, applying that always on a computational lens. And then at Harvard, it was synthetic biology, spending a lot of time in translation, looking at what we can do when the world of biology is seen as an engineering discipline and how do we construct things in ways we didn't think before. So very eclectic mix of all sorts of fun projects. I can hear that it's kept me quite busy and quite sporadic in a sense.

So as you move forward with your education, did you see yourself on an entrepreneurial path or an educational path. And at what point did your work start to become truly entrepreneurial in nature?

Yeah, it's a good question. When I was growing up, I mean, as an immigrant family, I saw my parents by default. You almost have to be entrepreneurial. Whether that was taught to us in a textbook or is just a way of life, in some respects, it's a survival mechanism in many ways. And so a lot of those values that they instilled in my siblings, myself growing up are reflections of what I often see in the best entrepreneurs. And so growing up, I never thought I'd be an entrepreneur. I never even knew what the word venture capitalist was. All I saw was a path where intellectual curiosity was the fuel for what I wanted to do, and the challenges my family faced on their healthcare journeys that others have faced in theirs. There was a real, genuine desire to want to work in medicine, and I initially thought that would just be as a clinician. Then it became.

I was wondering about that.

That's right.

As a doctor, when you were younger.

I was pursuing that path. And then I started to realize that if I were to make the impact I'm really thinking about, and because of the experiences I had at Purdue, at iu, even in my master's programs overseas, there was this element where I got introduced to what technology could do. And I just fell in love with the notion that we could go after really complicated problems, where the end of one as a clinician could then be extrapolated in an order of magnitude to impacting many lives and tools and technologies can truly reshape how we think of medicine, how we think of our experiences through the healthcare system. And I just fell in love. And in some ways, I never looked back. And I sometimes joke with my younger siblings and others who've known me for long time, where for them, it just felt natural I'd be an entrepreneur where I am today. But for me, I just continued to pursue the intellectual curiosity element. I found academia to be a little slow oftentimes, and those frustrations and bottlenecks caused me to realize, what is it that I'm looking for? That moved me from academia to translational research. I worked in translational neuroscience labs, multiphysics labs, projects that brought in a commercial lens and focus. And at Harvard, the Wyss Institute is world renowned for translation that naturally then fed into more and more of that. And my companies, the very first set of them, everything was around, how do I take this technology and how do I get it into the hands of patients? And as simple as that, Northstar Was I then had to figure out how to do that. It just so happened to be the path of an entrepreneur. And nowadays it so happens to be as the path of an investor. But I never sought out to be one. And I think that often makes the best ones. All my mentors that are acclaimed investors that have done really well in their careers never really grew up saying, I want to be an investor. And so it's an interesting kind of perspective to make and tells me a lot about careers. Right.

Something of an evolution.

That's right. And driven by data points as opposed to just feelings a certain way.

So let me ask you this. I know all of this work is very collaborative and obviously you're bringing your own expertise and genius to the things you do. But what was the first translational project that you worked on as a team member that really inspired you and then what was the first one that you led?

Yeah, so it's interesting. I feel the. When I was, when I was at Purdue, we worked and I sat in neuroscience, but I spent a lot of time in biomedical engineering. Engineers in general often are trained to be very practical and pragmatic problem solvers. Problem solvers. The project I got to work on, even in my undergrad days was a large multicenter grant from the Department of Defense around building stents for aneurysm and pseudo aneurysm for often wounded veterans. Walter Reed is a phenomenal institute for a lot of our men and women for treatment for their health care. And we were working with a team of neurosurgeons there. I was probably the lowest rung on the ladder in terms of got to start somewhere. You got to start somewhere. Right? But because I genuinely think the collaborators of that project, as big of a deal as they were in the pedigree that they all had at the time, they involved me because I just would be willing to do whatever it took. I was the guy in the lab that at odd hours was pipetting things, learning cell culture on the fly cell based assays. And I would approach every meeting with ideas and I was in an environment where that was welcome. And I think that gave me the confidence I needed to not feel conflicted with sharing my thoughts or opinions. And oftentimes, even if they weren't great, it led to discussions. And everybody in that room, we had neurosurgeons, we had biomedical engineers, nuclear engineers, I mean, you name it, we had at the table. And it brought to light something where you couldn't get it in a textbook or an academic classroom. It gave Me an opportunity to think about this. And that was the first project. And that project then ended up commercializing. We had patents filed. The work was multimillion dollars. It was an amazing grant. It was a big deal for Purdue and others around. And that project, we got to meet with patients at Walter Reed who were thinking of being able to be part of the clinical trials. That was an amazing experience. And again, my name is probably not going to ever be mentioned by any of those things, but I didn't do it for the acclaim or the fame, and it was probably the most difficult project to work on, but I threw myself in there, and it just so happened to lead me to trying more things. And then it wasn't until many years later that I started my first company. And that's when I felt the. This notion of leading. And it's a lot of pressure. You know, as a scientist, we're not often trained to be leaders. And like any career path, leadership comes from experience. And many times it's experience of what not to do well.

Right. You know, I'm thinking about your. Your. Your initial experience there, like, what a great growth environment that you experienced and how powerful that probably was for your later journeys, because so many people model what they saw. You know, if you had a bad boss, if you had a bad experience, like, that's what you saw. That's what you think leadership looks like.

Yeah.

It sounds like you had an early experience of what great leadership could look like.

Yeah. Yeah.

And then I'm assuming you probably brought some of that thinking to what you tried to do as a leader.

It's. It's often what I teach a lot of my founders today, where, you know, my form of leadership is if I can truly trust a team. You know, you have a good team when you trust them to the point where you can delegate out the most important responsibilities and not feel like you're running everything. Often I see founders who burn out because the founder, the CEO, he or she is just doing everything and doing far too much. And it all is on the shoulders of that person. And it's the wrong mindset for the type of grand challenges we have today in the world to try to solve. With entrepreneurship and technology, you can't do it alone. And leadership is often a quality that is. It's understated how important that is. And the best companies. I found this lesson very early in my career where you could have the world's greatest tech, but if you don't have a team that trusts you to execute against that, it's all about execution. And if you can't execute well, could have the mediocre tech, and that tech could then be commercialized versus the best tech that sits on a shelf.

Right. Because you had the right team to do it.

So it's very true. And I'm very blessed and fortunate to be in a position in life where I can work with people I truly trust and care about. And growing up, it wasn't about money. It wasn't about objects. It really was purpose. And that purpose has now fed into this element of working with people that inspire me, that I get excited about and that I think shapes something very unique to bring your best game. Yeah.

Right after I met you, I very quickly love this about you because you were inviting in colleagues and giving them a lot of respect and saying, like, these are my teammates. These are great people. These are people that I've mentored, and I'm continuing to invest in them. And not everyone does that, you know, that is. That is a kind of leadership that you don't always see. And I love that about you immediately, because I could tell you were very sincere about it.

It's kind of you to say, Marty. It's a value that I grew up learning. In Indiana in particular, a lot of people gave my family a chance. Before any of the accolades or pedigree or successes or exits. I was just another person. At the end of the day, I'm still just another person that's trying to just make it in the world type of thing. Growing up, there were people like Senator Dick Lugar who took a real chance on me, didn't have to. I was a nobody. He spent time with me. He would give me handwritten notes. Anytime I would meet with him. It would be about a myriad of random topics that were well outside neuroscience. It was my thoughts on, you know, domestic and foreign policy, how I think of agriculture. But he was just someone who was just intellectually curious.

How did that relationship start?

It was interesting. I feel like I started getting noticed. You know, when I was at Purdue, Martin Jischke had a big influence. He was a former president of Purdue University. Martin Jischke was somebody similar to what you just described as a quality you liked about me. He was someone who, despite being a freshman and despite not having much to my name, he saw a real talent or he saw something. It took me later in life when we became closer and closer friends, to figure out what that was.

But some spark.

There was a spark, yes. And he's quite a large figure, and he's a Big personality. And he was the person that opened so many doors for me. You know, he. I came in and said, okay, I get a 4.0 at Purdue. I'm working really hard in my classes, taking more classes than anybody else. Said Milad. I don't care about any of that stuff. I know you're talented. You're going to be great in school.

Right.

But what I need from you is you need to get in front of other people that you can learn from, and you're not going to just do all that in a. In an academic textbook.

Sure.

It really changed my perspective. And when you meet with people like Senator Lugar and other. Mitch Daniels is another good example of this. Those folks could care less about what my pedigree was, how smart I was, what my IQ is, what your gpa, what your GPA was.

Yeah.

They stripped it down to who are you and what are you about and what do you want to do?

And what a great lesson to learn.

To not be transactional. I just learned so much from these amazing titans of industry. And yes, they're from Indiana, but I kid you not, even to this day, if I go to the Bay Area, people will know who Mitch Daniels is. People will know who Martin Jiske is. And those were the folks that believed in me before anybody else, and they took the time to say, how do I pronounce your name a lot? How do I, you know, where are you from? What is your story? And I to this day have tried to take those lessons and instilled them in. And that's what matters. At the end of the day, strip it all away. That value set. If I lost everything today and the bank account was zero, those are the values I would instill and apply and be able to do what I did.

I love that. I love that.

That's a. It's an inside look on how I think about it that often isn't always shared.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Love that. That's fantastic. And that's a good, good lesson for all of us to hear, honestly, even those of us who maybe didn't grow up with that experience.

Sure.

But to, like, think about that, that is. That's a very powerful way to move through the world.

Yeah. Very blessed. It doesn't. It truly happens with. Just working hard. And I got noticed and lucky by the right people, but they wouldn't have wasted their time or they wouldn't have continued to meet with me if I didn't continue to put in the effort and the time and the energy and. And to do Something bigger than myself. And I'm so happy. Later in life I figured out what that was and it all connected. It now looks like a really interesting sequence that just was a buildup right before. It was definitely not that feeling. And I with Martin, Jesse and Mitch and I'd say I have no this is what I care about this. And they would always tell me the path you're following is not one that you can just find from somebody else. You got to organically build it. And I'm just so blessed. And that's why I love working with the younger generation and and seeing them and mentoring them. That mentor mentee relationship is so critical.

Yeah. Ye well, thank you for bringing that. Is there a specific startup that you worked on that you exited that you were particularly excited about or proud of or that you felt had a real impact? So that when you exited you were like I'm putting this thing into the hands of people who are going to help others with the technology or the ideas.

You know, it's interesting. A lot of the early companies I worked at it's interesting the impact I feel like I had was building some of the playbooks early. So my early set of companies were in the convergence of where at the time we'd call it machine learning. AI has kind of been around for a while but the new version of it today that we think about large language models. I was at the era at machine learning and thinking about probabilistic modeling and high throughput screening when we were at Numerate doing business development activities there. Numerate later got acquired by Valo Valo Health that's based in Boston. It was a great exit. That company at some point is also going to I'm sure go continue to could thrive in number of clinical trials drug development. It's a company that uses the latest in drug discovery technologies in silico modeling is a way to use simulations of what we think drug behavior will be and not only helps us find potential drug candidates we didn't think of before to target certain things we start to understand pathophysiology and how do we understand how drugs interact or how the may interact in a way that doesn't rely a veteran 50 year drug hunter from a big pharma company to say I think we should work on this drug and we should spend all our money on it. We try to insert a level of technology to help us make those decisions rapidly and iterate on them. So Mike, that makes sense, makes a big difference and helps someone like me who isn't 80 years old trying to make drug development decisions. Right. And we would build the platform and the data layer and we would train data models based on patient data, drug data, and we would then inform decisions on which direction to then build out. So that company has a huge pipeline now. Many diseases, different disorders. That was for me, my first foray into raising capital, building a great company, and then being able to hand that off at the right time to now focus my efforts on investing. That led me to then start my newest company. So that would be the one. When you talk about the hands of patients, most people don't come back to start another company in the traditional way or as quickly as I did. But I fell so much in love with a problem space and a need in the world of transplant. And this is my newest thing. So Revalia Bio is really where, despite the fact that it's a young company, we already are seeing impact to patients in a sense that the company was built around the patients in mind. And this is a company where any of us who've dealt with a loved one passing away, if you've ever dealt with organ transplant, oftentimes the transplanted organ, the organ donor, the organ doesn't end up being transplanted. And it's a bit of a horrific experience all around in the entire situation. But the worst thing is the gift of legacy and life is often lost and the organ just gets discarded. And so rather than discarding the organs that are non transplantable, this is a company that has built an organ donation infrastructure where those organs are now being used for research. And the research we use them for is to help influence our drug development process through digital twins that before we'd have to run animal studies on. And I remember growing up, I think we've cured every disease in mice by now, right? But we unfortunately have barely cured that translation over to humans and it's just not suitable. And we as a country on a global scale shouldn't be content with that system. And so that's what Revali is doing and that's what I jump back in for. And the CEO of that company is an incredible human being who left academia, tenured track position at Yale, left all of that to pursue this company because.

They were so passionate about what could.

Happen here, the loss of his family and loved ones and what happened through his situation in transplant. It just was such a compelling story that investing wasn't enough, had to jump all in. And that is a perfect example where what we do is an unmet need and there's a Patient experience element to that. And it's not about the money. These guys could be making money. Any of those co founders of this company or anyone there. There's way better ways to make money. Way better ways to get objects in the world that you want. But that purpose is very hard to find.

So I will say, when we read your bio, I think it was the one on your Harvard website, several people commented on the digital twin part of it, and we're kind of fascinated by that.

Yeah.

Can you help us understand what that means in the context of what Revalia.

Yeah, Revalia.

Revalia does, yeah.

So the way it works is that, you know, the Revalia team was initially a team out of Yale that was focused on organ perfusion transplant services. And what that means is that organs that were used for research, they've built apparatuses and systems and protocols to be able to take those organs and maintain them and mimic the human body in a way. So you will have, for example.

So this is like if I have in my driver's license an organometer and I die in a car accident.

Yeah. If that unfortunately were to happen, if your organ, which oftentimes over 95%, 99% of organs in this country yearly are not suitable for transplant, for example, if you have any comorbidity, if you have any. If you have, you know, any type of metabolic disorder, they will not transplant your organ. And oftentimes transplant surgeons, they don't have many decision making skills. Sometimes it's instinct. They say, this is, I don't think I can transplant this. I don't think it's a good. I don't think it's the right one.

Wow.

And so when, then when that happens, oftentimes they won't be used, and they can be either discarded or they can be used for research.

Got it.

The Yale team is the world leading team. For the last decade, they've been using them for research. I came across them from reading their publications. They work with one of my other companies. And the way that they work is that they've set up systems to perfuse these organs. And what that means is they take these organs and they mimic the human body. They take the actual liver, the kidney, the lung.

It's still alive.

It's alive. They bring it. They sustain that life through this intricate engineering system that they've built out. It's such a beautiful lab that they have, and they've been doing it for so long. They're the world's experts at this. And so not only do we keep that organ preserved. But we can run tests and experiments on it that otherwise you'd have to wait until clinical trials to do.

Right, that makes sense. From mice to humans. Right? Exactly forward then.

That's exactly right. And often we've tried to do cell based assays, we try to do organ on a chip, organoids, 3D printing organs. I've heard of all sorts of ideas people have tried, I've invested in some of this stuff. But true leapfrog, they're never going to get better than actual organs themselves. We've learned so much about demystifying biology and there's so much to be learned and to be able to impact this space and to build a company that is all around the data and building the software that others, other innovators, other developers can use. That's the purpose of this company. It's not to build drugs, it's not to develop our own therapeutics. It's truly to enable other collaborators to finally have the tools for the best and smartest and the brightest of our generation and the next to come up with the newest drugs to target and go after. And so we're giving them that.

What a great story.

It's a very easy one. Now you can see why I jumped into it.

Well, I can see you're getting more animated too.

I mean I love it. It's yeah, the best. That's my version of vc. When people say oh you're a vc and they think of this certain stereotypes. For me, I just invest in things I absolutely love and Revali is a perfect example. And if you meet any of those co founders of that company, the CEO in particular, it's very hard not to fall in love. And it's so beautiful to see. When we talk to pharma or hospitals or other groups around this as stakeholders, it just captures the imagination. Yeah, it's at the fundamental truth. It's about legacy and giving legacy to millions, if not billions around the world to build infrastructures and tools so that others can come up with the latest and greatest technologies. What better legacy than that?

The legacy of the donor, of the.

Donor, of the donor, of the team.

That cares deeply about. That's beautiful really.

Gift of legacy, super purpose driven behind it. And it's the reason why we've been able to scale the way we have in a short amount of time despite market conditions. We've raised about 20 million as a seed round, which is very difficult to do in any environment.

Yeah, I know and I know. Extra challenging nowadays.

Extra challenging nowadays. Well, it's the team. It's completely the team's efforts. It's been beautiful to watch. Yeah.

So I hate to cut this short, but I do think we need to move on to some other things here at IdeaWeek.

Sure.

So thank you again for coming out for this. Really, this was great. I know you had a whole other set of conversations on stage with Tayo and ABHI as well, which was pretty fascinating.

Thank you so much. Marty. Glad you're here. Yes. It's such a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. I can't. I can't wait to be back in the ecosystem. And congrats to everybody, everybody, next year. I can't wait.

This is fantastic.

Thanks so much.