Pete Zorn, Biotech Business and Legal Executive

 

92-140.Pete Zorn

Fri, Jun 27, 2025 3:18PM • 42:24

SPEAKERS

Will Bachman, Pete Zorn,

 

Transcript:

 

140.Pete Zorn
Fri, Jun 27, 2025 3:18PM • 42:24
SPEAKERS
Will Bachman, Pete Zorn,

Will Bachman  00:54
Hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe, class of 1992 I’m your host, will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Pete. Zorn. Pete, welcome to the show. Thank you. Will Nice to be here. So Pete, tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

Pete Zorn  01:16
That’s a long time ago now. So after graduating, I spent what turned out to be nine years in North Carolina. I went to law school at University of Carolina, North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and stayed for six years after that, as my wife was finishing medical school and the residency at what was then the Bowman Gray School of Medicine, I believe it’s now the Wake Forest School of Medicine. And about then we had had our first child and made the decision to move back to the Boston area, where we’re both from, and to move back towards family, although all these portions of our family had had sort of headed south at that point, we sort of crossed them on the highway, but most of our families were sort of back in the Boston area, so we ended up coming back here, and I stayed with my law firm remotely for a relatively short period before going in house. And I use that term in quotes because I was doing it remotely, well before it became chic. And I was working for one of my clients, which happened to be based in North Carolina. So I was I had just moved from North Carolina, back to Massachusetts, but took an in house job with one of my clients, my favorite client at the time, actually, and ended up taking that company public and staying there for 11 years. It was one of the highlights of my career expanded our family, had our daughter and from that point, sort of have jumped around a little bit. I’ve been with my legal career, sort of, I sort of found myself by happenstance in the biotech area. I say by happenstance, I wasn’t a science guy or had much of a background in science, but that was the work I started doing, or at least a portion of the work I started doing as a junior sort of lawyer. And there were various aspects of it that I really liked, and stayed with it, and it’s now 23, four, something like that, years later, and I’ve been with four different biotech companies in various business and legal capacities, and I’m currently president and Chief Legal Officer of a company called Genevant. I

Will Bachman  04:03
talk to me about what that means, even to be the president and chief legal officer of a relatively smaller company, right? Like, how many employees do you guys have right now? Tell

Pete Zorn  04:15
us, yeah, I’m sorry. I mean, interrupt it’s, it’s about 50 or so. Okay. I can get into what we do, if you’d like. But yeah, let’s hear it. Yeah. So Genevant is the leading nucleic acid delivery company in the world. We are what we’re best known for, something called lipid nanoparticles, which help deliver things like mRNA in the body, to get it where it needs to go and do its job. And we are in a position where we do a lot of partnering with biotech and pharma companies around the world, and that’s one of. Things that I sort of specialized in, in private practice and in house and various spots along the way. So that became my thing, and I was sort of elevated over time to the title that I currently hold. So I’m doing sort of the I’m sort of driving a very small business development shop from both a business and legal perspective, tell us a

Will Bachman  05:24
little bit more about what some of these things mean. So I guess you could kind of say that I was a science guy, but physics, so I nucleic acid delivery. What does that even mean?

Pete Zorn  05:36
Yeah, so nucleic acids, basically, you’re familiar with mRNA and other types of RNA and sort of genetic material. Those are all nucleic acids. Okay, so, so you can either mRNA is going to encode for a gene, and you can either you can address diseases that are deficient in that are evidenced by or manifested by a shortage of such a gene, or a defect in such a gene, or perhaps the gene is overexpressed and you want to silence it or reduce its activity. All of those things can be addressed by the delivery of nucleic acids. However, one of the great challenges for nucleic acids and for these types of medicines and, and, and, frankly, why the it took so long to get these sorts of treatments to the market is that they will degrade in the body if not properly protected, and so you have to get them from wherever they start to wherever they need to go to translate into the protein or gene of interest. And lipid nanoparticles are an emerging mode of doing that. They’re not the only mode of doing that, but they’re sort of the hottest, if you will.

Will Bachman  07:09
And a lipid

Pete Zorn  07:11
data particle is you can think of it as sort of a little fat bubble, okay, encapsulates or envelops the nucleic acid and protects it from the enzymes in the body when it can and then, and then help, and then steers it to the particular tissue or cell type that you’re trying to reach so it has the protection and the delivery function.

Will Bachman  07:35
Oh, so if you just inject in your blood, vet in your blood vessel, the nucleic acids like these mRNAs, they get, all of a sudden, they get attacked, or they get, you know, your body sort of sort of breaks them apart or something, right? That’s right. So you sell these tiny, little nanoparticles, very, very tiny, tiny, little, fat bubbles that will surround the mRNA, or the other kind of nucleic acid, so that it can get to the cell, and then somehow brought into the cell, and

Pete Zorn  08:13
then the body’s machinery takes over, and mRNA, whatever it’s encoding for, is produced, yeah, and that what it’s produced does its job, whether to over to address an over expression and under expression. And then there are sort of lit, you know, even more, kind of complex mechanisms where, you know, you have RNA being edited, or DNA being edited. And there’s you’re not just, you’re not just adding or blocking, you’re actually changing. And there’s lots of different sort of sub genres in that way, where various companies are taking the lead.

Will Bachman  08:51
Okay, alright. And so Genevant manufactures these nano fat bubbles,

Pete Zorn  09:01
that’s right, nano particles, but little particles, that’s right. Well, we don’t. We are the originator, and we own a substantial amount of intellectual property in the space, and we can manufacture on a sort of research scale, but we are not a commercial grade sort of GMP is what it’s called, manufacturing.

Will Bachman  09:22
Oh, I see or, or so you’ll like, license the technology to companies, and then in their plants they will, you know, they will be, they’ll be actually manufacturing the ones that are going to go to a patient, but using your technology,

Pete Zorn  09:36
that’s right, either them or contract manufacturing organization, someone who’s in the business of doing that. Business of doing that, but, but fundamentally, yes, that’s

Will Bachman  09:44
right. All right, cool. So you are involved then in establishing these complex partnership deals. That’s exactly right. All right, okay. So now that I understand a tiny little bit about the science what even we’re talking about, tell us about, um. Um, you know, for a lay person, what’s involved in these sorts of partnership arrangements? I imagine that they are like fairly complex kind of deals where you’re sharing intellectual property and, right, you know, all sorts of responsibility. What are some of like, the major discussion negotiating points or elements of these partnerships?

Pete Zorn  10:23
Great question. And I guess I would start by saying what they’re not or why they’re a little different, unlike sort of the classic mergers and acquisition sort of kind of arrangement, where your folk were basically your negotiating price, and then there’s other sort of sub issues that go into that. But in an M and A context, you’re basically negotiating what’s the price in a in a sort of life science collaboration, pharma collaboration, sort of deal, you’re negotiating everything, and you’re negotiating how the obviously negotiating price, but you’re obviously negotiating how the parties are going to work together, how an intellectual property is going to be split. It’s sort of an ongoing relationship that you’re negotiating, and frankly, sometimes the most challenging part from a variety of perspectives, unlike a lot of areas the time of the marriage, you’re negotiating the divorce, which is an unpleasant thing to do, but maybe one of the most important, because a lot of these collaborations, you know, end up ending for one reason or another, and you want to make sure that you’re in the right place when it ends.

Will Bachman  11:34
Okay, so list out the, I don’t know, sort of eight to 10 aspects of it, like, I imagine, one of them is, you mentioned, you know, the ongoing IP, so figuring out both sides are maybe contributing to develop the IP over time. So you have to figure out who’s responsible and how much credit do you get for doing that. And there’s probably governance issues and all sorts of things. What how do you think about the main categories of things to discuss?

Pete Zorn  12:05
Yeah, so it’s all of the above. I would say, obviously the two biggest, you know, one is the consideration and sort of how, how the license or is going to get paid, and how and when it’s going to get paid for the technology, and then the other sort of, biggest one, and this has branches, but you know what’s going to happen to intellectual property that arises from the collaboration between the two parties in broad terms, and every, every, every situation is a little bit different, but in broad terms, as I mentioned, we’re providing the delivery technology, and our partner is providing what I referred to earlier as the nucleic acid technology. Sometimes that’s referred to as the payload. So you’ve got the payload partner and the and the delivery partner, and the magic doesn’t happen without both of them. So how are you going to allocate on the front end, intellectual property that, by definition, you don’t know what will be specifically, how you going to allocate that going forward? And a company like mine, Genevant, we that’s how we expand our technology platform is through these deals. So it’s critical to us that that we own improvements to our platform. Okay, and there may be special arrangements included for, you know, for things that require the payload, or things that require our partner’s technology. So you end up with some fine distinctions, and it’s probably where a significant chunk of the negotiating and time to do these things comes from. But then beyond that, you have sort of all of the things that you would have in any sort of partnering arrangement you have, you know, you know, confident governance, as you mentioned, confidentiality representations from one side, from both sides to each other, commitments that are being made, you know, are what sort of arrangement is this? Is the other side sort of committing to do anything, or are they just securing the right to do something? So all sorts of considerations go into it. And then, you know, I mentioned the sort of how and when would the license or be paid. You know, there’s also various situations in which that the agreed amounts can change depending on external factors and how you’re going to allocate risk in that circumstance, are all things that are heavily negotiated.

Will Bachman  14:48
Okay? And how’d you get into this whole kind of world of biotech, and like the specialty of partnerships in the biotech world, a

Pete Zorn  14:59
great question. Question, it really was happenstance. I mean, at my earliest, and I was just sort of starting out, the partner who I worked with quite a bit was effectively Wake Forest’s outside general counsel, and he did wait at that time, Wake Forest was spinning out a whole bunch of startup companies. So when they spend on startup companies, that’s there’s a lot of legal work that goes with that, including the sort of financing of those companies, as well as the partnering of those companies. And so I just sort of fell into that man. Ironically, I was working when I first started. I was working with two partners, primarily, one was the one that I was just alluded to, the other one was doing sort of high dollar bank mergers. So I spent, I don’t know how the split was at that time, but, you know, a portion of my time, you know, negotiating billion dollar bank mergers, and a portion of my time doing these early stage startup stuff. So I became sort of a generalist, which was great, and then I sort of did more and more of these deals the Well, I was doing both kinds of deals at the time, but

Will Bachman  16:19
specifically these were all kinds of spin offs, not just biotech. No,

Pete Zorn  16:23
they were biotech. They were biotech, biotech in a loose sense. I mean, you know, life science, diagnostics and all sorts of those sorts of things, but certainly on that side of it, yeah, all right, but that was nothing that I specifically sought out. It just sort of happened and then it’s actually not I mentioned. I refer early to my first in house job after the law firm was with a North Carolina based client that was my favorite client at the time, my second favorite client at the time, and it was close. I liked both of them quite a bit. My second favorite client at the time was Blue Rhino, who makes the propane tanks that everybody’s got on their grill, right? Sure. So that was my I met. So that was sort of, I guess, a third sort of niche that I had, I was, so was those guys had a brilliant business model, and it continues to be a brilliant business model, like I remember sort of trying to think of, you know, what’s the next thing that like could be consolidated, like that, that everybody has, but the whole process could be upgraded in that way. And it was sort of brilliant on their part. And one of the things I learned in that regard, I’m sort of going off on a little bit of attention here. One of the things I learned in that regard is that, and I can’t, I believe this to be true, but I don’t know. I don’t know firsthand knowledge that, you know, the Home Depots of the world and all these folks, they get assessed by how much they make their profit per square foot. But the stuff that’s outside doesn’t count. So the Blue Rhino racks that sit outside, this is tangential to our conversation. Well, I’m sorry,

Will Bachman  18:06
but the love digressions, yeah, the

Pete Zorn  18:09
the racks that sit outside, they’re just bonus, like they don’t tell me they are only upside for them in terms of how they get assessed. So that Blue Rhino was able to leverage that and become a really great company. But in any case, I found myself in biotech and then one thing led to another, and I’ve been in biotech ever since.

Will Bachman  18:33
What’s tell us about you can certainly sanitize it if you know client confidentiality, but can you tell us about a deal that you are particularly proud of, where maybe you innovated on something or helped protect a client from doing something really stupid or

Pete Zorn  18:52
so what I mean, I can there are a few I could talk about, but I guess I would say generally first. So I have by design. I’m sure it started out initially by design, but it certainly has become by design. Become by design. Always been on the smaller company side. I enjoy everything that goes with being with a small, growing company versus sort of working with, you know, a bigger company that’s sort of well established, and you know, sort of isn’t going to live and die with any particular deal, and as a result, when you when you sort of when that’s your world, it is rare for you to have leverage in negotiating against one of the big guys. Okay, sometimes it happens. Those are nice times, but, but usually you’re sort of fighting upstream in that regard, and probably the very first deal that I did, you know, I was probably still in my 20s, and I was representing a company that desperately needed to do the deal, desperately needed to do the deal and the what. It was with a big pharma, and we were we had a particular technology that could be sliced and diced in different ways, and it was important to the company to be able to define what it is that the rights that we were giving to this other company in a way that would allow us space to do more ourselves and to work with other companies. And so that was the biggest component of the biggest the most complex thing with the deal is, how do we take this scientific area that’s evolving every day and draw fine lines that gives them what they need, but allows us room outside of that. And so that was the technical challenge. What made it a human challenge is my counterparts at this big company knew that we knew this area much better than them. By definition, we were the specialists. So there was everything, everything we said in an effort to try and draw these lines was met with great skepticism, like we were trying to put one over on as a result that phenomenon multiplied by a million different sub issues led to about a nine month negotiation and a 300 and some odd page contract. But it got done, and it was a seminal moment for my company at the time. That company has merged out of existence a few years ago now, but made it for many years, and that was its first sort of critical point. I’m not sure what would have happened had we not been able to get there. Able to get that deal done.

Will Bachman  21:45
That’s a cool story, yeah. What? What other kind of big wins are you proud of?

Pete Zorn  22:00
I guess the other one I would cite, when this the sort of context for this isn’t going to sound like much of a win, but from a from what I do for a living, it was sort of a win. That’s cool. I was with a company that had a I’m not sure you’re familiar with, sort of the phases of drug development. We’re okay. So I was with a company that had a very, a phenomenal phase two success. Phase two being sort of the first time testing your drug in patients who have the disease that you’re trying to cure or treat. And this company had a phenomenal phase two success in a heart in an area that new, innovative drugs were much needed, better options were needed. So that that success in a area that historically, people hadn’t succeeded in led to a very nice collaboration with a big pharma company. So that was all good, but, as sometimes happens, the phase three did not go as well, and phase three is what you need to support approval and get your drug on the market. So we had a phenomenal phase two, which led to a big deal, a spike in stock price, etc, followed by a fairly disastrous phase three. And when that happens, typically class action lawsuits follow. People lose money, and they, you know, even, and that’s the nature of drug development, that people lose money, and, you know, someone has to pay. So they look for all sorts of statements that were made, and was anybody misled, and all of this, we were not sued, which I took great pride in. I had something to do with how we sort of described everything we were doing and all that. So frankly, there had been some macro factors involved that helped too. But the bottom line is, we had a phase two success, a phase three failure, and it was treated for what it was an unfortunate scientific outcome, and we moved on. But that was, again, for what I do. It was, it was a successful thing,

Will Bachman  24:17
yeah. I mean, it shows that you did your legal job of protecting the company, right?

Pete Zorn  24:23
That’s right, and well, and that is one of the things I’ve tried to do over the course of my career. It’s easy to say no. It’s easy to say no. And a lawyer who says no, too much doesn’t get consulted after a while, because I’m just an obstacle. So the job, you know, my job, but the legal side of my job is to find a way to get to, yes, and find a way that you can accomplish the business objective while still managing the risk. And it doesn’t mean take no risk, because if you take no risk, you’re probably not going to advance very far. You take, you know, you take no risk, you never leave that. Dollars. So that’s how I sort of approached the legal side of that, and to do it in a way that allowed, that’s now, several years ago now, but it allowed that company to succeed and advance, and then when it all went bad, through no fault of anybody, you know, it just went bad, and there was no, there was no consequences from a legal standpoint, which, as I say, made me feel good.

Will Bachman  25:30
Tell me about any other kind of turning points in your career where, you know, some happenstance introduction, or just some, you know, some sort of random Butterfly Effect thing, you know, sent it in one direction where it could have gone in a different

Pete Zorn  25:48
direction. That’s a great question. I mean, I’ve certainly been events. I’m not, but they feel a little bit ordinary in the sense that they’re the kinds of things you would expect, not you know, for example, the company I was just describing, the deals with the company I was just describing sort of by the my next job after that was with my that my CEO At company one had left and started and got involved with company two. I went with them. That was also a remote job. We were planning to take that company public in the US as well. Circumstances change, and we ended up selling it. So I sort of worked myself out of a job, which, you know, sometimes happens and but the relationships I made in a relatively short time there led ultimately to company four. There was a company three in between, but led ultimately to company four, which is my current company. I’ve now been for about six and a half years, and frankly, the relationships that led to me being here, those folks are gone for one reason or another, but I’m still here, kind of doing what I do, which is sort of the deal making I mentioned earlier, as well as and you may find this interesting, my company, Genevant, is currently involved in some pretty prominent intellectual property litigation relating to the lipid nanoparticles I talked about earlier, which are used in or were used in the COVID vaccines. So use used to much success, I might add, in the COVID vaccines. So we’ve got some litigation ongoing with both of the major players in that in those vaccines. Okay,

Will Bachman  27:52
talk to me about the sort of world of chief legal officers in these biotech companies. I guess Boston area is a big hub for that. Do you kind of know a ton of those folks? Do you are there kind of get togethers where all the general counsel’s chief legal officers just kind of get to know one another? Or, I guess, by reputation, doing deals over time, you have a lot of counterparts that you’ve met more than once, maybe at different companies and so forth. Tell us about that kind of world that you’re in?

Pete Zorn  28:27
Yeah, no, it’s a it’s great question. It’s um, the world does exist. And, you know, I’ve been around long enough that I’m in it at some level, but I’m probably in it less than many people would be in my circumstance, I just for the way my career started out. You know, I started, as I mentioned, in North Carolina, and then I was working remotely for a North Carolina company from Massachusetts for about 11 years. And then my next job was also remote with a European company. So for those, for those years, I wasn’t sort of physically in the scene, if you will. And that’s not only so those are years where you’re sort of building networks and what have you. So I was sort of in a different situation for a bunch of that time. So again, I’ve been around enough and interacting with enough companies and enough people that I feel like I’m pretty well connected in the area, but it’s still a little different. So there are those sorts of events that you talked about. I partook in some of it, not a ton, frankly, as I was raising young children, and my kids are now in their 20s, but during that time, you know, I had, I had other things going on.

Will Bachman  29:41
So tell us, you know, that’s a good segue. Tell us a little bit about your life outside of work over the past three decades.

Pete Zorn  29:51
Yeah. So married with two children, my 24 and 21 I’m. Um, my son, my 24 year old son, has autism, and that has, that has been central to our lives for sort of the entire time, sort of trying to get him the best life that we can, and managing all that comes with it. So that was sort of central to everything we were doing. And frankly, one of the reasons that I wasn’t doing all the networking events and cocktail parties and those sort of things I had, I had places I needed to be. So that’s that he’s doing great now. He’s he spent many years at a place called the New England Center for Children in Southborough, Massachusetts, which is where you’d want your child to be if he or she had those issues. Really great place. He since aged out of there, and he now lives in a group home about a half an hour from us, alright? And my daughter. My daughter is a senior at Tufts, where she plays lacrosse, which, in addition to going to school, which is great fun for all of us, we’re pretty dedicated tufts woman’s lacrosse fans,

Will Bachman  31:22
any advice for parents of kids with autism based on your experience? Yeah,

Pete Zorn  31:32
so autism, as you likely know, is a is a spectrum, and it truly is a spectrum, and it means no two kids are the same. I mean, there may be some overlapping issues, but no, no two kids are the same. And it’s, I’ve experienced a few different phenomena over time, one of them, one of them was interesting, at least to me. And I don’t want to say anything too controversial here, but the, you know, it’s a spectrum, and at one end of the spectrum are, you know, higher functioning kids. Who the term for it, I think, is Asperger’s. I’m not exactly, precisely sure where Asperger stops and what have you, but Asperger’s is a subset of autism, but it’s it raises sort of different issues. I mean, kids have kids can live, you know, independent lives and what have you. They’re just, you know, a little bit, they see things a different way, and they’re maybe, maybe considered a little bit quirky, versus, you know, sort of at the other end, where you have real, you know, unable to live independently, need support to get through the day, etcetera. And both of those things, both at both ends of those of that continuum are sort of real things and present real challenges, but they’re different challenges. They’re very different issues. And I have witnessed advocates on one end, for example, advocates on the higher function end, the Asperger’s end, kind of take issue with words like disability and cure, because in their eyes, and I’m painting with a broad brush here, but in their eyes, there’s nothing. There’s nothing for their child to the child’s not disabled, the child’s just different. You know, there’s nothing to be cured or fixed. The world just needs to see them different, which is a completely understandable perspective if you’re sort of on the other end of the spectrum, you know, with a non verbal you know, the child who has trouble with all sorts of things. Those words are much less sort of offensive and challenging. They’re sort of the reality of life. So I’ve witnessed the sort of tension between those two things, which has been sort of a funny byproduct of this. But I would say my biggest a piece of advice is to it’s, it’s, you’ve heard this little phrase and other another context, but you know, it’s okay not to be okay, like you’re allowed to be frustrated and overwhelmed that time to do whatever you got to do, to deal with it. And there’s no, I mean, it does lead to, like anything else, you know, it’s you and your partner, if you have one will be, will deal with it differently. And that has to be okay. You know, there’s no one right way to deal with it and sort of managing through that, but you sort of acknowledging it and thinking about it in that perspective, and not being trying, not to be frustrated, because, you know, it’s almost like grieving, and people grieve differently. People deal with people deal with stress and. And people deal with issues differently, and there’s no one right way, and it’s, you know, that’s all okay. You just have to sort of rise above, sort of, my way is the right way? Kind of thinking,

Will Bachman  35:19
what did you find helpful, like parent support groups, or any kind of things that you found helpful, that you know, if parent finds himself in this kind of position with a special needs kid like you know, that you would recommend considering.

Pete Zorn  35:36
I mean, I can tell you, I yes to the first part, but no to the second part in the sense that, you know, I can tell you how I viewed it for me, but I don’t pretend everybody’s different. And for me, I did not benefit from those sorts of support groups, you know, where I benefited more from having the normalcy, you know, having my time with, you know, to sort of do what I would do if this weren’t my situation, you know, just, you know, to, you know, so that it wasn’t, I mean, obviously it becomes central to your life, but, but you Want to, you don’t want to define your life. You know, you want to have. You want the things that you enjoyed. You still need to find a way to enjoy. And that, of course, goes for your partner too. So, you know, it’s, everyone’s in a different situation. So people don’t have, you know? So, I mean, it’s, and obviously, you know, money becomes a factor. I mean, it’s an easier thing to manage through with fewer financial stresses than greater financial stress. So there are a lot of factors that go into it, and there’s no and I don’t begrudge anyone who does benefit from those sorts of, you know, support groups and the like, but it just wasn’t kind of my scene. It didn’t help me. Right?

Will Bachman  36:59
Let’s, let’s change gears. I want to ask you about any courses or professors or activities that you were involved in at um, at Harvard that continue to resonate with you.

Pete Zorn  37:15
Oh, that’s a hard one. Well, I can tell you what my favorite class was. That’s an easy one. I don’t remember the name of it, but it was a, it was a civil rights class taught by Julian Bond, okay. And it was, you know, it was so not only was there somebody, sort of on the top by somebody who’s on the front lines of all these seminal events, but it was, he was obvious. He was obviously, in addition to that, in addition to the first hand knowledge, he was extremely charismatic, powerful. Kind of speaker. So it was, it was a terrific class. But beyond that, I don’t I was a, I was a psychology major, and you know, my experience, and my daughter’s going through a little bit of right now, frankly, is, you know, if you’re not on sort of the Wall Street track, and you’re not on the med school track, you know, those are the, those are two major tracks. And if you’re not there, you know, it’s those are more defined paths. Yeah, and not that they’re easier or harder, but they’re more defined. And if you’re on sort of the humanities track, you know one, one possible path there is law school. And a lot of people go to law school, I think, because they don’t know what else to do, but it’s harder to sort of figure out. And I was sort of that, that guy was, I sort of got to my senior year and really didn’t know, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do. And when you’re out and when you’re at a place like Harvard, yeah, people are people from the outside are telling you what you can do. You’re Harvard, you can do whatever you want. It’s not especially helpful when you don’t know what you want. So, yeah, so I one of the best things I did, I mean, it didn’t feel great at the time, but one of the best things I did is I sort of consciously took a year off after college. Oh, you did, okay. I took a year off. And did, you know, like I waited tables. I think I did something very, you know, nuts and bolts, and kind of re energized, and, you know, it kind of reset things for me, in a way. I think if I had gone straight to I didn’t want to be that person who went straight to law school because he didn’t know what else to do, but after a year of things settling and you sort of start to see things a little more clearly, and decided it was the right thing, right thing for me.

Will Bachman  39:39
So you were not one of these kids who in fourth grade. They’re like reading Supreme Court briefs and dreaming of going to law school

Pete Zorn  39:46
stuff, no, but I will say, I mean, I’m in law school. No, I was not that kid, but I was, I think most, most, we could quibble about the specific percentage, but most people who want to go to law school, you. Uh, you know, are thinking about courtroom movies that they’ve seen, and, you know, you know, famous sort of lawsuits or what have you, and envisioning themselves in that role. And that was probably me, too, the fact that, you know, I mentioned biotech being sort of happenstance, even more happenstance than biotech was corporate law in the first place. Okay, I think when I went into law school, I sort of thought I’d be a litigator, because that’s what, that’s the way you think of, that’s what. It’s not everybody, but that’s what most people think of when they go to law school. And litigation is there’s a lot to it beyond, you know, the you can’t handle the truth, you know, the speech in the courtroom. Yeah,

Will Bachman  40:47
one thing that I think about sometimes is courses that I wish I had taken in college. And I’m curious for you, now that you’re in biotech, do you ever think, oh, man, it would have been useful to have taken, like, some biochemistry or something, or, or maybe not. Maybe no, no, like on the job training has been fine, and all I need, well,

Pete Zorn  41:07
I guess the answer somewhere in between. I mean, I was, I avoided the science stuff, pre, I mean, it was that was over. The last thing is, I would, I was the guy trying to find the least painful way to check the science boxes in college. So the fact that in a biotech from that perspective is a bit wild, but so would I have benefited from taking a couple of basic, you know, biology courses, or what have you the answer is absolutely obviously that may do without it and done okay, but you know, with the benefit of hindsight, that certainly would have been a good thing to do. All right.

Will Bachman  41:49
Pete, for listeners that want to find out more about Genevant or just follow your career and or catch up with you, where would you point them online? What websites or links Would you share?

Pete Zorn  42:00
Well, Gen events website is, as you might expect, www.genevantdotcom and you know, I’m on LinkedIn, various other social media platforms, but LinkedIn would be sort of the place to find me professionally.

Will Bachman  42:13
alright. Well, we’ll include those two links in the show notes. Pete, thank you so much for joining today.

Pete Zorn  42:19
My pleasure, Will. Thanks for having me.