💉 Issue #50: Needle-Free Injections
Heather Potters shares her entrepreneurial story from investing in Poland to creating needle-free injections with mom at PharmaJet
💬 Welcome to issue #50 of Between the Lines
This week Claremont entrepreneur and investor, Heather Potters, shares her story on the founding of PharmaJet, thoughts on the current state of the FDA, and her perspective on spending decades at the same company. 👇
~ Josh & Miles
👤 Community Spotlight: Heather Potters
Heather Callender-Potters attended CMC where she had a somewhat untraditional and self-directed experience that led her to two internships, a study abroad, and eventual early graduation. After Claremont, she attended business school at Wharton and then left for Warsaw, Poland to join an experiment created by President Bush Sr., and the US government to create an investment fund to stimulate the private sector, which at the time was nearly non-existent. She spent the next 20 years in Poland investing out of three closed-end funds, eventually covering all of the CEE-CIS countries. After Poland, Heather returned to the US to focus her attention on PharmaJet, a needle-free injection technology company that she co-founded in 2005. PharmaJet focuses on immunizations broadly and has also developed technology to drastically improve vaccine efficacy and vastly reduce the dose normally required.
For those of us who are unfamiliar with PharmaJet, could you share a bit about the company’s origin story and how you helped co-found it?
Although it was somewhat of a trade secret, my mother and I were co-founders, and she helped spark the idea for the company. She was a caregiver and she, like many, had experienced the first-hand problem of needle-stick injuries. Through international medical mission volunteer positions, she had also observed needle-reuse challenges. The world also realized these problems and challenges, which ultimately resulted in the WHO issuing a call to action to solicit innovators to create a needle-free solution for immunization.
Needle-free was not necessarily a new concept since a much older tool had been created in the late 50s and used into the early 90s to immunize US military troops. It was also used to address pandemics, and used extensively by the WHO in other immunization programs and to eradicate smallpox. Eventually, however, the old technology was deemed unsafe, with the metal tip touching each patient and contributing to cross-contamination, and it was discontinued from use globally. But, because of the rise in immunizations to curb disease and provide more coverage in countries without much immunization, the observed challenges of more needle-stick and re-use ultimately prompted the WHO to solicit that safe, new and improved solutions be created. PharmaJet decided to develop its technology with that objective in mind.
My mom essentially told me that she would really like to do this and asked me if I would help her make a serious impact on global health through technology. The convergence of impact, investing, and technology was something I had been doing, and currently still do, so we embarked on research and development that led to the formation of PharmaJet.👇
🤝 Pardon the Introduction: Zuleyka Strasner
Zuleyka is a friend of Claremont and graduated from Oxford before moving to the Bay in 2016 where her initial foray into tech was Chief of Staff at Felicis Ventures. She went on to work as Chief of Staff at a challenger bank, Varo, before founding Zero in 2019. Zero was the fastest and cleanest online grocery offering. They had 2hr delivery in SF and LA of 3,000 SKUs from dairy to meats, produce to homewares and even alcohol. They raised $16.5M, employed 250 people, did business in two cities, scaled the company to $5M ARR, and had 6k+ Zero members. While she had to shut down the business earlier this year, Zuleyka is a superstar operator and founder.
Now, Zuleyka’s thinking about what’s next and is an honorary Claremonster who’s tapped into the Claremont community numerous times in her past investor base and hires. She wants to join an early-stage team who can leverage her experiences in GTM, U.S expansion, growth, and marketing to finance, org design, prod/eng, and Chief of Staff responsibilities.
She’s currently digging in on web3 and DAOs, the intersection of web3 x consumer, marketplaces, membership models, and community building, as well as looking specifically at community tooling, dev tooling, and interesting software applications for the future of work.
If you are interested in connecting with Zuleyka - email her here! 📧
💼 Who’s Hiring?:
John Kodumal and Edith Harbaugh are Harvey Mudd Alumni and also the founders of LaunchDarkly - the first scalable feature management platform for developers. Their new class of software development tools provides a holistic framework for feature flag-driven development, A/B testing, and experimentation, enabling teams to use flags on a massive scale across a variety of use cases. This is why enterprises like Square, Intuit, and NBC choose LaunchDarkly for feature management. LaunchDarkly has also been named on the Forbes Cloud 100 list, InfoWorld’s 2021 Technology of the Year list, and the Enterprise Tech 30 list. Doug Gould, another friend of Claremont and Head of Ecosystem Partnerships, is currently looking to hire some Claremont talent on his team for the following roles. If you’re interested, shoot us a note or apply below.
Ecosystem Developer Manager (Remote)
A good fit is someone who is excited about working across players in the devtools space, looking to work closely with product and engineering teams, and helping define strategy.
Project Manager, Ecosystems (Remote)
A good fit is someone who is excited about building programs from the ground up, being creative in operations with things like no-code tools, and excited about working at a late-stage devtools startup with a lot of open opportunities.
Sydecar is a frictionless deal execution platform for venture investors. This platform handles back-office operations for venture investors, automating banking, compliance, contracts, and reporting so that customers can focus on making deals and building relationships. Co-founded last January 2021 by CMC alumnus, David Meister, Sydecar is a tight-knit early-stage team that's focused on delighting its customers. They’re big on building a strong culture and they’re currently looking for early joiners who will have a big part in shaping how their team works. Learn more about them and their openings here.
Make sure to check out the other 5,000+ open jobs at 400+ Claremont-affiliated companies here on our Storyboard. Plus, make sure to create a profile and enter your preferences to get alerted to new job postings relevant to you, be they the 750+ remote jobs, 180+ internships, or 30+ part-time positions available. We’ve published research that shows that Claremont-founded companies that disproportionately hire Claremont talent outperform — so pay attention Claremonsters!
As always, if any of these roles catch your eye 👀 , apply and mention Between the Lines. Or if you are an employer and are looking to hire tip-top Claremont talent, fill out this form to have your jobs featured.
🗣️ Conversations on the Interwebz:
This week’s top listens 🔥
Leah Wald is a Pitzer alumnus and the CEO of Valkyrie Investments. She tuned into Yahoo Finance to share some thoughts on the Crypto downturn and why she thinks now is a great time to be building. Valkyrie Investments is a specialized alternative asset management firm at the intersection of traditional finance and the emerging cryptocurrency sector - they also just raised an $11M Series B round from BNY Mellon and Coinbase Ventures.
Maddie Hall, CMC alumnus and Founder of Living Carbon, shares with Climate Tech Cocktails how she fell in love with plants: “Our little portion of human history is small compared to all of the plant life this planet has seen.”
Everything else you need to know….📖
Matterport, Co-Founded by HMC alumnus Michael Beebe, is leading the digital transformation of the built world. Their groundbreaking spatial computing platform turns buildings into data, making every space more valuable and accessible. They also just recently announced a partnership with CGSince to provide AR and VR training for Frontline Workers.
Congratulations to HMC founders John Kodumal and Edith Harbaugh and the rest of the LaunchDarkly team. LaunchDarkly was just recognized as CODiE Award Winner for “Best DevOps Tool.”
CEO of LanzaTech and HMC alumnus, Jennifer Holmgren, will be speaking this year at the GreenTech Festival - the global platform empowering changemakers and fostering innovative green technologies for a sustainable future.
Can’t get enough of Between the Lines? Follow and connect with us on Twitter!
🍽️ BTL Snacks:
♵ Goodbye Plastic - Hello PDK….. A new type of plastic resin could replace traditional plastics, and HMC alumnus Brett Helms heads the lab that is leading the change. As principal investigator and co-founder of the Helms Group, a division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Helms is the creator of polydiketoenamine (PDK), which can easily be recycled and uses less energy than traditional plastics, while giving off less CO2 emissions. Brett is also the co-founder of Cyklos Materials.
💻 B2B Tech Hiring Tracker For 2022….. B2B companies *were* hiring aggressively in 2020, 2021, and Q1 — markets look much different today. How will hiring look going forward? Adam Schoenfeld, a serial founder, and CMC alumnus has created a new B2B Tech Hiring Tracker to try to help with that question, focused on sales & marketing roles. Adam has a decade+ of B2B experience and is the co-founder of PeerSignal.
🤖 The Robotics Trailblazer….. Whether she’s running tests on a glacier with robots or serving as a top dean, CGU graduate Ayanna Howard has blazed trails in robotics, AI, and leadership. Howard has held positions at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, served as program director of Georgia Tech’s first-in-the-nation multidisciplinary robotics Ph.D. program, and flexed her entrepreneurial muscle as the founder of Zyrobotics. She has also been named to the Forbes list of America’s Top 50 Women in Tech and recognized by Business Insider as one of the 23 most influential women engineers in the world.
🚗 GM Giving Tesla & Google A Run For Their Money….. GM-backed Cruise, co-founded by Daniel Kan (CMC), beat Google by offering free rides in its fully autonomous vehicles in February, and the company also bagged approval for monetizing the rides in early June. Thanks to their strong 3,000-person team, GM disclosed "rapid scaling" phase for Cruise would start in 2023 and GM chief Mary Barra expects Cruise to grow from zero to $50B in revenue by the decade's end.
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