John tells us about how he went from working for the big three in IT to becoming Chief Development Officer for his family business Scimar who are working on detecting preventing and even reversing type 2 diabetes. He explains why mistaking human errors for tech errors is the biggest blunder a business can make. And why pandering to investors isn't always the best advice to follow ..

John's recommendations:

Inside The Breakthrough (podcast)

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Hello and welcome to this week's episode of BWB Extra, where we get to know Chief Development Officer at CYMA, Mr.

John West, a little better.

We're going to wind the clock back and start with young, fresh faced John.

How did you end up doing what you're doing?

Did you go to university?

Yeah, so I went to university to become a software developer.

And I like Scotty on the Starship Enterprise.

I wanted to work in enterprise software where the, where the problems were, were very large and, and complex.

And, uh, back in the late 90s, um, if you wanted to, Uh, work with the latest technology and you want to have access to the most powerful software and systems.

You did that in an enterprise.

You would go to a large company and work for a large company.

It's kind of funny.

I was just realizing that somewhere around 2010, all the fancy and best technology was just out here in customer electronics.

You know, and we had these old antiquated mainframes at work and I'm using an iPhone, right?

You know, we were using our Xboxes to have video conference calls.

Video conference calls didn't happen in corporations until like, you know, 2015 or something.

But back then, you had to go into a large enterprise.

So I was a database developer.

I worked on software that would be used by organizations to make that organization, you know, more efficient or to avoid risks or to identify customer segments.

And, uh, and so my first job was with, was with a company that was a dot com.

And so in 1998, it was the first year, that Christmas around 99 was the first year that people were willing to put their credit cards into the machine.

Like, they didn't think, oh, putting my credit card on the internet would be crazy.

And like in 97, no one would do that.

So they had a, this company had a fax.

Uh, and they would send out catalogs to people.

And, uh, so they say they hired me as the second or third employee.

Uh, for this new internet engineering thing.

And it was family business.

And they put the, um, they put the, the brother in law in charge of it.

The one that was like, you know, kind of the, you know, the, the fuck up.

The problem, the problem of the family member.

Yeah, give him this.

I think give him this department.

And so, you know, it was it was a couple of guys with goatees and and ponytails And uh, and we started typing up and created a billion

dollar dot com company that sold computers and computer accessories We created the first Auction website before ebay that was ever created.

Uh, of course amazon, you know, 10 years later Amazon would eat their lunch and then of course ebay would do it would do it, right?

So I was there for the big 1999, 2000 dot com craze, and we saw what we were able to do is we were able to just copy and paste the code from one site into a different site, rebrand it and call it a different company.

And so all the lawyers came in and they created these initial public offerings and that's when I fell in love with that idea of, wow, you could spin off, you could have

a startup, which we were working in, and then you could spin that startup off into an IPO, and then you get things like shares and options and all this type of stuff.

And so I was like 20 or 22 at the time, and had, you know, um, millions of options and all that kind of stuff.

So I walked away from that company with, With, uh, lots of options and shares on the table.

But enough, enough in my pocket that, uh, And I could see that the wheel was about to come off of this whole dot com thing.

And so I started my own software development company.

That just worked in enterprise software, not in dot coms.

And then the next year everything crashed.

And, uh, you know, it was really great for hiring.

We put out an ad.

For hiring, we get a hundred applications, uh, come back, and, uh, that was in Los Angeles, and so we, we ran that company, my wife

and I ran that company for, uh, seven or eight years, and what I learned is that You can have a startup, or you can have a child.

You have to choose which one, because it takes the same amount of time.

So we sold that startup, moved to Canada, and had our daughter.

And then I worked, I just worked for, uh, kind of the big three consulting companies.

I ended that stage of, that chapter of my career at IBM.

Uh, working in what was called Big Data.

Which is giant data warehousing and we're working for with fortune 100 companies to help them to understand how to sell, you know, more to customers and that sort of thing.

And it's during that time that my brother in law and my father in law were moving all this intellectual property out of Symar.

And they were saying, geez, you know, I think we've got an investor, a venture cap, we have a meeting with a venture capitalist and they're asking us for like business cases and.

You know, business plan and all that kind of stuff.

And I'm like, well, I can do that, you know, like that's, this sounds very interesting.

So when it felt like it was starting to move forward, I jumped on board, not realizing that it was going to be three or four years of talking to venture capitalists before we got our first investor.

So it's always takes longer than you think it's going to be.

And on that note, so what is your longterm goal?

So the long term goal is to end this disease in the early 2030s.

Like, if you look at, um, infections, you know, before penicillin, they were on the rise, people died of infections all the time, then penicillin happened.

If you look at scurvy, before they understood that it's vitamin C, people were dying more and more of scurvy, and then all of a sudden, all of a sudden, they weren't.

Same with smallpox.

And so diabetes is on this curve where it's going up and up and up.

And it is due to fall off a cliff.

And so we're here for the longterm.

We're not going to exit the company until we're absolutely sure that this disease has been solved.

And, uh, luckily, you know, our family is a majority shareholder in this company.

We still have full control of the company.

Over the next ten years, we will retain, uh, full control over the company.

And we will solve this problem.

We're, and we're not going to be swayed because we're not going out to public markets.

We're not going to be swayed by those same forces that we're talking about in the insurance industry or in Big Pharma.

And so until that mission is done, we're not going to stop.

And of course we will make a huge return on investment for our investors.

You know, fortunes will be made, but that's not where we're in this for, you know, the founders of the company are in their seventies.

It's not like they're going to go out and buy a yacht.

You know, I'd be happy to go buy a new kayak or a new paragliding wing.

We're not in it for the money.

We want to really bring this discovery all the way out.

to the people that it can help, and that's the goal.

And what do you think the most misunderstood thing about the business is?

The most misunderstood thing is that everyone is a scientist, and that everyone must have white lab coats on, and the whole thing is, is, is, is full of science.

And it is.

Like, science drives us, and the scientific method we use all the time in business to understand if something is, is working or not.

But in order to, to move forward, I mean, just this Regulation A offering, Requires skills that are far from science, and you understand marketing, you understand the difference between

marketing and sales, and you understand lead generation, you understand all the securities laws, you need to understand all the accounting, uh, that needs to happen, and all of the auditing,

you know, the, the legal contracts, and, you know, e commerce, all this needs to come into play, and that's not something that most scientific companies So we need to have creatives.

We need to have, you know, accountants and administrators.

You know, we talk about the business, but that's like three different people in our company that work on the business.

The company's relatively small.

I think we have fourteen or fifteen employees.

So five of them are scientists, and five of them are kind of in administration, and five of them are in the creative business side of the company.

So it doesn't take a large company.

In fact, a small company might be better suited at this stage.

And it's not all just Science, science, science.

I mean, for every ounce of science, we have a pound of regulatory talking to everybody and getting permission and working

through ethics and, and trying to figure out how we recruit for clinical trials and are we allowed to take blood samples?

Can we store those blood samples?

Can we freeze those blood samples?

No, no, you can't do that.

You gotta get permission.

So there's a lot, you know, it's easy to say clinical trials, but you know, there are 50 people that we use as contractors that spend their entire life trying to plan them.

There's those two words clinical trials and that extends into entire company.

What's your business thing about climate change?

All of our products.

We've we've gone through three different prototypes of our products that are behind me on the shelf and each one of those Revisions have reduced the packaging by 40 percent.

We make sure that the pills are packaged in ways whether we're not shipping air When we ship our pills out and our test meal is a test meal That's powder and you can you can you mix it with water right before you give it to

the participant But you know instead of shipping water all over the place and then all the packaging you can throw into the recycle bins All it's all blue bin ready, but it sounds like you've thought about it quite a lot.

Okay In terms of the packaging, etc I mean to be fair if you find a cure for type 2 diabetes and you can Actually sell that as an economic rate.

I think you're doing enough for the world . Yeah, I mean there, there have to be a lot of, you know, Einsteins and Elon Musks that, that have diabetes.

And if you could extend 10 more years of them being productive, maybe they'll figure out some way to make, you know, free clean.

So, you know, there's knock on effects, perhaps.

John, what's your, what would you say your biggest screw up is?

Is there something you've done wrong and learnt from?

It really comes out of my previous, uh, life, working as a software consultant, and being hired in to fix a problem that the, uh, client was sure was a software problem.

And, uh, the later in my career, the more...

I realize that this is not a software problem, this is a human problem.

If the people in the field think that the people back in the office are an ivory tower, and the people in the ivory tower think that

the people in the field are a bunch of idiots, then no time tracking system or task tracking system or software is going to work.

What you need to do is, is have the people in the home office go out in the field and spend a week out.

Living the lives of what the field workers are and vice versa and get a little bit of trust Built and then all of a sudden you don't need to have a system that manages or monitors what everyone's doing

So the application of technology for non technology problems I think is a lesson I learned over and over again and getting to the end of a project and realize I will you know Like it did it again.

I will never do this again And so in the later part of my software career I was the guy who got brought in at the very beginning to say whoa, whoa Whoa, are we sure that this is a software or technology problem?

and it's not just a a human problem or a market problem.

Your product sucks.

No amount of buying Google AdWords is going to sell your product.

This is not a technology problem.

This is a product or a human problem.

People don't like to be told their product sucks, though.

That's the problem.

Yeah, but sometimes it can save them a million dollars.

When I worked at IBM, it was one of the first weeks that I worked there.

We were acquired, and through this acquisition we went to a party at a very large Airplane manufacturer out of Seattle

and it was like they were popping champagne bottles and all the stuff and it was a fancy affair and everyone was partying.

It was a big party.

I was like, wow, this is great.

It's a kickoff party for the project.

Like, you know, like, but what is this for?

Like, no, this is a cancellation party because we cancel the project before we spent 300 million in the wrong place.

Like, whoa, that's smart.

More people should be doing that.

And now a quick word from our sponsor, business Without Bullshit is brought to you by Ori Clark, straight Talking financial and legal advice since 1935.

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What's your passion outside of your business?

My current passion, it might be an obsession, is a paragliding Wow.

Which is, um, kind of a parachute that's shaped like a wi shaped, more like a wing, and you get to the top of a mountain.

And you get that wing up above your head and then you just run right off of a cliff out into the air and fly for hours.

Wow.

How do you get back to where you started from?

Do you just come down somewhere random eventually?

We usually have an area that's designated as a landing zone and it has a windsock down there and That's usually where we collect so we'll try to wait until we get five or ten people that want to

go up together And hopefully there's a truck down there as well And we drive everyone in one truck up to the very top of the mountain so you can sort of aim For a certain point can you we aim yeah?

And when I first started I was like this is amazing like think about how smart people are that we all going off there And the winds blowing in all different directions.

We go all over the place.

We all land at the same place like that's Unbelievable, but you know, birds can do it.

I think probably butterflies can do it as well.

And then also, um, there's lots of mountains, but in the valleys it's all farmland.

Right.

And so as long as you're landing in a place that's not a vineyard, doesn't have like a horse or like a bull, you know, in a pen, you know, try to land somewhere where there's not any crops.

Then you're fine.

And the, and the farmers are very hospitable.

Like, you know, we smile, hey, and they're like, wow, did you jump from a plane?

And then, you know, you have to get no, no from that mountain over there.

And often they'll drive us back to our landing zone.

Well, if there's one thing we all know about Canada.

It's everybody's nice or that's that's the face you guys present to the world anyway Well, we had a we had a group just yesterday I was flying with a group from San Diego and

They're like they were telling us that like no It's a serious risk that if we land on a farm that someone's gonna shoot at us with a shotgun Like oh, no, not out here in Canada.

They might come up with a beer, you know, okay How are you guys doing?

You want to go back up the mountain, eh?

I remember when I was younger actually speaking of paragliding and I'm from the Canary Islands in Spain And they do a lot of paragliding over there.

Yes, they do.

It's one of the greatest locations for paragliding in the world.

I remember when I was younger, a guy used to...

I hope there's no kids listening, so if there are, don't, don't let your kids listen.

A guy used to dress up as Santa Claus and paraglide, paraglide onto the beach and then hand out all of our gifts and we thought that that was how Santa arrived, because none of us have chimneys in the Canary Islands.

So I thought when you started that story with if I hope there are no kids listening, I thought it was going to go kind of massively X rated, but no, it was a father Christmas story.

I'd like to anyway know what kids are listening to business without bullshit.

But there we go.

I was going the same, the same direction, Pippa, because, uh, you know, recently, I think last year someone lost a bet and had to go paragliding naked.

That must be cold as well though.

It's something you don't want to see.

Yes, but uh, yeah, they lost the bet and I was like, Oh, you better land in the landing zone because if you land out, you know, on the coast, you're going to come back in the top car.

What's the worst piece of advice you've ever been given?

The worst piece of advice is, um, and it comes from, it comes from either venture capitalists or the gatekeepers for them.

So if it's, uh, If it's a gatekeeper, any sentence that starts with investors want to see just stop listening, stop because they're, they don't know what they're fricking talking about.

We have 98 individual investors in our company.

Every single one of them are a different cat and they all want to see something different and they want to have, they want to just be told the truth.

They want honesty.

And other than that, it's not, you're not going to come up with some secret slide deck or some way to like adjust your forecast so that.

Everyone's happy.

There's no secret handshake.

There's none of that.

It's, you just gotta be yourself and, and don't change anything.

I, um, you know, so, so the other piece of advice, you know, so I guess that the larger piece of advice there is, is don't change.

Just be what you're gonna be.

Hey, we're a family company, we're a small business, we're not Pfizer, right?

But you know, that might be what you're looking for to invest in.

And pretending to be something you're not is just gonna end in tears anyways.

So, you know, just be who you are and don't, don't change things.

I mean, listen and learn.

And, you know, take advice, but don't follow it.

Everyone, for whatever reason, they want to listen to you for five minutes.

We've been working on this for 15 years, thinking about what investors want to hear.

And someone's listened to us for three minutes or five minutes, and they're going to tell us all the stuff that we need to change.

And they haven't even looked at it yet.

And so just be very, very aware of.

Of where you're getting your advice from.

I, I know I'm going on too long, but we have a, we have a, um, a data room that allows people to come in and look at all the, um, um, sensitive information.

After you sign a non disclosure information, you can see all of our clinical trial results and, and take a look at some more of those things.

And the best part about that data room is it shows us how much time they've spent.

And so we would, Have a meeting with a venture capitalist and say, Hey, did you have a chance to go to the data room?

Yeah, yeah, I spent like 20 minutes in there.

Like, no, you didn't, you didn't even open the, you didn't even open it once.

And so you're going to start this with a lie.

And then those are the people who give you the most advice.

Well, what you really should do is decentralize all these products or, you know, whatever it is that they think you should do.

So people come to you with their agendas and you have to be very careful of if you're just really getting good advice or if you're just getting, yeah, what one person wants.

What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

The best piece of advice that I was given was given to me by my mother in law and this is back when I was 22 or whatever and I just started off in my

career and She was a very successful lawyer partner at a law firm and you know had a very successful Career, and I I said something like how do you do it?

Like what's how do you get to the point where you're making all this money and you're in?

Such an enviable position and she says, you know, find find really hard problems and solve those problems And the heart of the problem that you solve that makes you more valuable What

I thought when I was 20 was that you know Rich people were just like Montgomery Burns and they're like, I hate excellent And they would try to they're just trying to steal money from

from poor people and that might happen or whatever but that's not really where most people make their fortune they make their fortune because You know, Steve Jobs created the iPhone.

That iPhone is worth a billion dollars a day in value to all of us who use it every single day.

And then, so, you know, if he takes a billion dollars a year out of that, no one notices.

You know, just take a small portion of the value that you create and everyone's happy.

Wow, you created a thousand points of value and you won three points back?

That's fantastic.

And what advice would you give your younger self?

Well, it's kind of a corollary to that, but like, um, you can't get to success in straight lines.

You can't just go right from here to there.

You gotta kind of travel in an arc through, through value.

So, figure out where the value, where you can provide value, and focus on that.

Like, I wish I wouldn't have been swayed by high paying jobs.

I wish I would have taken more internships.

To learn the skills, because the skills are really the most important pieces.

The high paying jobs, you learn a lot in the first couple weeks, and then they just work you like a dog until you leave.

And so instead of just going from A to B, like just going right to the high paying job, give yourself permission.

Especially when you're young, you don't have, you don't have a mortgage and children and those responsibilities.

When you're young and you're outside of university and you're poor anyways.

Just, uh, offer to work for free in order to, to learn, and then in the three or four months when you learn everything, leave and go someplace else.

Once you learn how to provide that value...

Then being rich or successful or those things will follow naturally, but you can't go, you can't go straight from here to being successful, you've got to figure out how you build value along the way.

Have you got any recommendations for us for things to read or watch or listen to?

Yeah, actually, so as a side project, Symar produces a podcast called Inside the Breakthrough, how innovation comes to life.

I'm a lover of history.

I love all those old stories.

So this podcast focuses on Um, one or two individuals in the past.

It's kind of like a mystery of who it is we're talking about and the work that they were doing, how they made the discovery.

And, uh, and then who they are at the end.

It's like a little bit of a reveal.

And, um, each one of those podcasts end in a moral theme or lesson about, oh, what did we learn here about this?

And so there, we've got two seasons that are out right now.

They've won awards.

They're very popular.

People listen, uh, to the podcast all the way through.

We have 100 percent retention rates on, on all of our episodes.

And, uh, we're about to release season three.

And we'll release that when our Regulation A offering opens up.

Uh, it's not about Symar.

It's I'm not the host.

We have a professional host.

Um, it's not about our science.

It's all about these other discoveries.

But if you listen closely, the first 10 episodes are the 10 hardest questions that we've ever been asked as a startup.

Why does this take so long?

How come no one else, no one else is doing this?

You know, how do you know that you're right?

How do clinical trials work?

Like where did that even where did that even start?

How do you value Uh, a discovery like this and, and is it ethical to, to make money off of curing a, a disease?

All of those are really, you know, baked into the, into those stories.

Uh, but they're just fun stories and, uh, 20 minutes long, it's called Inside the Breakthrough and you can find it on any of the podcast, uh, apps that are out there.

And that was this week's episode of BWB Extra.

And we'll be back tomorrow with our finale for the week, The Business or Bullshit Quiz.

Stay tuned.