Meet The Disruptors: Michael Schrader Of Vaxess On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
When you look at why many people remain unvaccinated, a couple of the main causes are simply that vaccines are either inaccessible, or people have needle-phobia. Because of the work Vaxess is doing, we will show the world that the future of vaccines is injection free, and accessible from the comfort of your home.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Michael Schrader, CEO and co-founder of Vaxess, a life sciences company developing a shelf-stable, sustained-release vaccine patch.
Michael has spent his career transforming complex technologies into transformational products. Prior to Vaxess, Michael spent time at Google and Honda where he helped bring a range of products to market and earned more than fifteen patents. Michael received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University and his M.B.A. from Harvard.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
As an HBS student in Professor Vicki Sato’s Commercializing Science class, I wanted to tackle an unmet global health care need by applying my engineering and business skills to a solvable problem. Working with my cofounders, we saw an opportunity to supply much-needed vaccines worldwide without refrigeration or cold storage using silk. During our first year as a bootstrapped startup, Vaxess won the inaugural Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge, as well as several other business competitions. A decade later, Vaxess has adapted and innovated our business model. COVID-19 showed us that to be prepared for the next global pandemic, we need to make a fundamental paradigm shift in the method of vaccine delivery in two major ways, administration of and access to vaccines. Vaxess has moved to a platform vaccine delivery company, owning a new method and instrument of delivery.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
The days of vaccines being associated with making appointments, traveling to clinics, and receiving uncomfortable shots will soon come to an end. Vaxess is working towards a future where vaccines for the majority of illnesses — from flu to COVID — move out of the clinic and into remote locations, ranging from workplaces to schools to the home. Instead of going to a pharmacy or doctor’s office to receive a vaccine via needle and syringe, we envision a future in which you’ll have a vaccine patch mailed right to your door.
Vaxess Technologies, along with teams at Tufts University and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have developed the MIMIX platform. This technology changes vaccine delivery from a needle-and-syringe to a patch-based format. Patients apply the patch as simply as an ordinary Band-Aid. This means no more needle and syringe injections, no more wasted vials of vaccine, and no more children or adults afraid to get a shot!
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Very early on in Vaxess’s history, I made a funny mistake related to our partnerships.
When Vaxess started, there were four companies that we wanted to partner with — two based in the U.S., and two in Europe. For all the American companies, we invited them to meet us in person. When they got to our incubator, they basically said, “You want to do our vaccine formulation work, but you have no lab?” Needless to say, we didn’t get deals with any of the American companies. When we were doing business development with European companies, all the discussions were on the phone. They understood that the science was sound and that we could communicate well on our plans. We ended up getting deals with the European companies because we were in the “Harvard i-lab,” which they perceived to be a lab facility.
The lesson I learned from this was it’s not just the best science that wins the day: It’s the total package of the science, the company, the team, and the way you present yourself.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
I’ve had so many incredible mentors. Here, I’ll just name a couple:
One mentor who’s had a big impact on Vaxess is Vikram Lamba, who was CEO of Zosano when I first met him. When we first started looking at this drug delivery technology, every other player in the space was trying to convince Sanofi, Merck and GSK to work with them. Vikram told us to forget that, control our own destiny, find a molecule that you can bring in house, own outright, and take forward on the platform yourself. It was a totally different vision and approach to operating in the drug delivery space than anyone else I had talked to. It changed the trajectory of Vaxess.
The second is Vicki Sato, who was a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School when we met and is currently on President Biden’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Vicki advised us when we were students, and her support for Vaxess has never wavered. When we’ve had points where the company was on the brink, Vikki’s always been our biggest supporter, doing whatever we needed to help us move forward. She was always our rock, no matter how early we were or no matter how hard things got.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
In the industry Vaxess is in, the need for disruption is clear. Today, more than 1.5 million people globally die each year from a disease that has a safe and effective vaccine. In this case, I’d argue that disruption is absolutely necessary to help bring this 1.5 million annual deaths statistic down to zero.
When you look at why many people remain unvaccinated, a couple of the main causes are simply that vaccines are either inaccessible, or people have needle-phobia. Because of the work Vaxess is doing, we will show the world that the future of vaccines is injection free, and accessible from the comfort of your home.
I respect some of the early comments that Elon Musk made about disruption. He wanted to do electrification so well that every other automaker in the world would want to follow. Our goal is not to say “Vaxess needs to make every vaccine in the world,” but to push forward this technology platform to the point where all vaccine makers understand that the future of vaccine delivery is shelf-stable and injection free.
Can you share three of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
- Become a cockroach company: I had a mentor advise me to forget about trying to become a unicorn company, and focus on trying to become a cockroach company — meaning a company that simply will not die and continues to find ways to iterate creatively until they find their path. You think of companies in the vaccine space — historically, this was not a desirable space in the venture community, and very few pharma companies were investing in vaccine startups. Then Covid hit, and all of a sudden the vaccine space is a hot and exciting area. Oftentimes, building a successful company is not about racing to unicorn status, but continuing to find ways to keep science moving forward and programs moving forward. Then, when circumstances do move in your direction, you are ready.
- For entrepreneurship, you have to have a longer time horizon that you might think: When I was first contemplating starting a company before Vaxess, one of my mentors who was an entrepreneur asked if I’d be happy doing this job in 10 years. I laughed, and said “absolutely not.” I hoped to build a product and quickly flip it. He laughed at me and explained that, when you look at startups, the majority go bust within a year or two, and a very small percentage have rocketship takeoffs. The startups that don’t fall into those two buckets grind it out for a long period of time. At Vaxess, we just crossed our 10-year anniversary, and some of our most crucial inflection points have occurred in the last few years of the company.
- Understand the incentives that motivate prospective investors, partners, and employees: My main focus when I’m engaging a prospective partner, employee, investor, or grantee is trying to understand what motivates the person at the other side of the table. When we were first starting, I would take VC rejections personally. I’d get frustrated, and think, “How can this person not see this is a really big deal?” What I learned over the years is that the individual I was trying to get something from has their own incentives, and oftentimes when they’re declining it had nothing to do with what we were building at Vaxess. It was simply that the incentives they have to pursue — whether it’s a VC with a specific fund priority, or an employee with a certain family situation, or a partner that has corporate strategic priorities that were passed down — did not align with ours. The sooner you can understand the incentives that motivate the people and organizations you’re trying to work with, the fewer headaches you’ll have as an entrepreneur!
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
When you’re developing a new technology, the first step is understanding the first opportunity for applying that technology. For us, flu is a phenomenal first opportunity — we’re very excited to have recently started a clinical trial, and will release results of the trial in the coming months.
Once we’ve proven that the MIMIX patch is safe and immunogenic for the flu vaccine, we will have more to share about applying the MIMIX platform to a number of other vaccines and therapies.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
One book that’s changed my thinking significantly is Who by Geoff Smart and Randy Street.
In a startup ecosystem, you simply cannot afford to make hiring mistakes. This book talks extensively about the key things that organizations need to be doing when they’re not hiring, all the way through engaging employees’ networks to interviewing candidates. Who has had a transformational impact on how Vaxess hires.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Family is not an important thing. It’s everything.” –Michael J. Fox
I simply couldn’t do what I do without the love and support of my family. They’re everything to me, and I do my best every day to prioritize them relative to my work.
In watching many of my peers in the entrepreneurial community grow up, what I’ve seen is you get many shots at a career. People who do not prioritize family, I think, in many cases, struggle with that in the longer term.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
What Covid has made me acutely aware of is that vaccine deniers are few, but they’re very loud. My message to the greater community is that it’s ok to be proud and loud about being part of the pro-science, pro-vaccine community. There’s a lot of people out there that understand the science behind the vaccines, and understand the safety profile behind vaccines is very strong — encouraging more people to be positive and vocal on that would be good for all of us.
How can our readers follow you online?
You can follow me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/TheRealSchrader. You can also reach me on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelschrader/.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Meet The Disruptors: Michael Schrader Of Vaxess On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
