Return Of The Renaissance Man: Industry Hopping Entrepreneurship
Executive Summary
Lars Christian Wilde, a 2021 In Vivo Rising Leader, is president and co-founder of Compass Pathways, a psychedelic medicines company developing psilocybin for mental health disorders. An entrepreneur who began his career in finance before launching an athletics company, two cooking supply companies and an investment fund, among other achievements, Wilde describes himself as ‘a generalist who surrounds himself with amazing people.’
In an age when specialization often commands the highest salaries, it can be easy for bright young students to lock themselves into specific career paths. The harder road is to remain open to detours, particularly career changes; it requires risk, a desire to learn new things, and a willingness to meet and to listen to other people.
In Germany, where Wilde was born, the prevailing view is that a person should study one thing, and then do that thing for the rest of his life, says Wilde, who has taken the exact opposite approach with regard to his own professional career. “I hope I can encourage folks that are stuck in their lives, that you can make a career change and really have an impact in a different field,” said Wilde. “That is possible.”
If Compass Pathways can successfully bring to market COMP360, the company’s psilocybin therapy that is in Phase IIb trials, it will almost certainly have an impact for patients with mental health disorders, such as treatment-resistant depression. COMP360 received FDA Breakthrough Therapy designation for treatment-resistant depression in 2018.
Treatment-resistant depression, as the name suggests, is notoriously difficult to treat successfully. The rapid onset of psychedelic treatments, such as ketamine, MDMA and psilocybin – the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms” – represent a departure from products like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which can take weeks or months to provide symptom relief. (Also see "Translating Psychedelic Experiences Into Targeted Health Outcomes: Optimism And Concern" - In Vivo, 7 Jul, 2021.) An increasing number of companies – over 50 now publicly traded – are developing psychedelics for the treatment of entrenched disease.
As with several of Wilde’s prior ventures, personal experience led him to co-found Compass Pathways with George Goldsmith and Ekaterina Malievskaia in 2016. Following the sudden death of a close friend, and a family health scare, Wilde was prescribed a tricyclic to treat his generalized anxiety disorder. But he only felt more depressed. Wilde decided to leave Springlane GmbH, a direct-to-consumer cooking supply company and publisher he founded and led as CEO. After speaking with the board of directors about his reasons for leaving, Christian Angermayer, a board member and friend, reached out, and asked Wilde if he had considered psilocybin as a potential treatment. Wilde had to Google psilocybin to find out that Angermayer was talking about magic mushrooms.
Angermayer, a fintech investor and co-founder (along with Wilde, Florian Brand and Srinivas Rao) of Atai Life Sciences, an umbrella organization that funds companies developing mental health treatments, including Compass Pathways, helped facilitate a psilocybin session with Wilde. “It actually got rid of my anxiety disorder, and the depression. I fully recovered,” said Wilde. “I think I got lucky.” Not long afterward, Wilde was introduced to Goldsmith and Malievskaia, and Compass Pathways was born. Wilde hopes COMP360 will be approved for use in 2024 or 2025.
Testing The Waters
Wilde is a life-long athlete and was on the rowing team in high school. When he graduated, Wilde was not sure what he wanted to do, so he sampled prerequisite classes in the early years of university, and realized he wanted to “do something international.” Settling on business administration, Wilde moved to the Netherlands, where he received a bachelor’s degree in international business administration from the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University.
Wilde then completed programs in finance at the University of Michigan, and took advantage of several internships. Wilde said he wanted to go to the US because there is a “bias to action generally in the US … people have the feeling that they can build things and get something going.” Of his several internships – including stints at Deutsche Bank, HSBC, and BCG – Wilde said he learned something everywhere he went. The internships also “taught me what I don’t want to do with my life,” an invaluable lesson.
While doing an internship at Waterland Private Equity, and simultaneously enrolled in a master’s degree program at IE Business School, Wilde helped Waterland start a group of in vitro fertilization clinics (now called VivaNeo) and got to help the fund build the company from the ground up. The experience “made me realize I’m much more of the person that wants to get his hands dirty and build something.”
Kitchen Community And Gym In A Bag
Wilde likes to cook – he calls himself a “hobby chef” – and after leaving Waterland and receiving his master’s degree, he started thinking about what he could do in that space. “I love good food, but gastronomy was too difficult,” he said. “So, I thought, maybe I can build a platform for hobby chefs.” The result was Springlane GmbH, which Wilde co-founded with close friends. It began as an e-commerce platform for cooking, kitchen and garden supplies, and published visual content online about interesting foods and recipes, among other things. Then Amazon came along and started selling kitchen equipment, and “there is really no competing with Amazon,” said Wilde.
Springlane had to make painful workforce cuts, but Wilde reinvented the company as an engineering business, which started producing its own kitchen equipment. He built a community around motivated hobby chefs, and Springlane’s publication, which helped readers become better chefs, “became Germany’s largest cooking magazine. We had at peak close to 10 million monthly readers,” said Wilde. “Once they were converted, they could also buy the products directly from our company.”
In addition to publishing constant content on Instagram and Pinterest and other specialized platforms, Wilde built a “very big data infrastructure to constantly screen the web” for interesting food ideas. “If something new came to Melbourne … we could bring it to the Europeans and tell them all about it,” he said. If you live in Europe and have eaten a cronut – a croissant-donut hybrid pastry – you can thank Wilde. “We popularized [cronuts] in Europe, and then we sold the right tool for people to create their own cronuts at home. It became a really big thing quickly, and we scaled from a couple readers to close to 10 million unique views per month.”
The success of Springlane led to the founding and launch of Otto Wilde Grillers, a “high-end barbecue company” selling grills to cook the “perfect steak.” It was a family affair; Wilde’s father, an engineer, worked on design, his wife and brother joined as consultants, and a co-founder at Springlane joined as well. Last March, the German high-end cooking and appliance maker Miele purchased a 75.1% share in Otto Wilde Grillers.
Wilde went on to build additional direct-to-consumer companies, including Pakama “based on a similar business model, and in different areas, where we felt like products don’t have to be so expensive. We can make them much more affordable by just circumventing expensive retail outlets and going direct to consumers, once we deeply understand the consumer need,” he said.
Pakama, an athletics company known for its backpacks containing mobile exercise equipment began as another hobby project. “I was traveling a lot. And not every hotel has a good gym. We basically figured out how to create a gym that you can take with you, in a bag.” One of Wilde’s friends, a referee in the German football league, came in as a co-founder. In addition to the bag and exercise equipment, the company also offers an app with personalized training plans, and a magazine targeted to potential Pakama customers.
Responding to a question about the industry sectors he chooses to operate in – whether he sees a need in the market first, or simply peruses his own activities of interest – Wilde said the starting point was always “scratching my own itch in a way … I believe you’re best when you’re actually creating something that you yourself would use, or where you have a strong understanding” of the market. Some of the most amazing entrepreneurs in cancer research, he noted, have watched family members suffer from the disease.
Building Platforms
Now a “hobby scientist” at Compass Pathways, Wilde spoke confidently about the company’s composition of matter patent for its polymorphic form of psilocybin, the way it binds to the 5-HT2A receptor, DEA and FDA processes for evaluating schedule 1 substances, data generated by other psychedelic medicine companies, and future plans for the “platform” Compass is building, which will encompass the physician-guided delivery and setting for the treatment. “We need to train thousands and thousands of therapists when psilocybin gets approved,” he said. (Also see "Translating Psychedelic Experiences Into Targeted Health Outcomes: Optimism And Concern" - In Vivo, 7 Jul, 2021.)
Part of the platform Compass is developing includes a portal and online education for training therapists digitally. Wilde wants to record therapy sessions to see how therapists are doing, and so they can be retained where necessary. “What matters most between the therapist and patient is creating a therapeutic alliance, really building a human bond between them, so they trust each other,” said Wilde.
There is also “room to create a digital therapeutic” for patients, which could include the tracking of “behavioral biomarkers.” Wilde sees digital tracking as a key aspect of improving patient health outcomes, in all diseases, not just psychedelics. Treatment-resistant depression patients, for example, “are likely going to have a certain behavioral pattern that will be reflected in how they use their mobile phones, and how they interact with friends,” said Wilde. “We could measure how close in proximity they are, for example, or how much they sleep.” By creating two distinct profiles, patients could be managed by comparing the old profile with the new profile. If the new profile starts to slip back into some of the old behavioral biomarkers, that could prompt an intervention. “That would give us the ability to ping them and say, come back to the clinic, we believe your mental health might be worsening,” he explained.
As a comprehensive treatment platform grows, including a growing number of clinical sites around the globe, it also opens the door to new areas of study, such as bipolar disorder, body dysmorphic disorder or anorexia, for example. “Once we have built out that infrastructure, we then have a machine where we can take these novel compounds and very quickly drive them through Phase I and II programs, then very quickly into late-stage clinical trials.”
Wilde said it costs between $17,000 and $25,000 annually in the US to care for patients with treatment-resistant depression. Often when emerging psychedelic medicines are discussed, the focus is on safety, regulatory approval and drug scheduling hurdles. It may turn out that the most compelling case for psychedelics, among payers at least, are the cost savings. Long term data will also prove valuable, such as measuring depression scores over time and through follow-up studies. “That is really valuable data that we can then share back with payers in order to work with them on reimbursement,” Wilde noted.
Benefits Of Being A Generalist
Mentors are important, but “I think you can learn from anyone,” said Wilde. Trying to figure out what exactly makes someone especially good at what they do is a useful learning exercise. “I’m not really an expert in anything, but I have the benefit of surrounding myself with amazing people, and hiring great folks,” he said. The last two years have been chocked full of learning about chemistry, pharmacology and regulatory drug development; before that, Wilde was working with developers to build big data engines and automated marketing algorithms for his direct-to-consumer businesses. “I have a kind of four-year cycle, where I’ve had people around me that I could learn really interesting new things from,” he said.
Some of the greatest mentors for Wilde are the authors of the books he chooses to read. “The people that took the time to sit down and write what they’ve learned in their lives … there is so much to learn there,” he said. Wilde’s key takeaway from the past 10 years, is that “you can learn anything. I went from finance to tech, to engineering and now to biotech, both in late-stage development and early-stage drug discovery.” Without a deep scientific background, Wilde has been able to co-found a company that could upend mental health care and improve patients’ lives, at a time when innovation is desperately needed. “Compass gave me the platform to do that, which is amazing.”