October 6, 2022
Welcome to Perspectives, Leerink Partners’ signature podcast, where we share our insights and interview leaders across the industry to get their perspective on how they’re driving innovation. We’ll also be digging into the backstory to learn more about what has most influenced their success. Be sure to check out all episodes by Leerink Partners.
Thad Davis: Hello, I’m Thad Davis, Senior Managing Director at Leerink Partners and it’s my pleasure to be joined here by Priya Abani. She is the CEO and President of AliveCor and let me just give a little bit of background for everybody before we jump into a whole set of Q&A that we’ve sort of mapped our here. So, Priya, outside of being the luminary leader of AliveCor was previous actually another leader over at a little-known service called Alexa, where she was the general manager and a founding member of the team there and did a lot to expand the scope of the partnership base of Alexa which has been one of, I think personally, probably one of the better elements of Alexa. It’s just woven into everything out there. Previously, Priya cut her teeth, so to speak, in a wide variety of other roles, primarily at Intel, where she was part of the platform and the mobility team. And then, has a master’s in computer science as well as an MBA. And then recently, I think it was in the last year Priya, you were brought onto the board of Jacobs as well, if I’m not mistaken. So, it’s great to be joined by you today and I just want to say that this is a fantastic kickoff to this podcast series. It’s great to have an inspirational individual such as yourself to start off with so thank you.
Priya Abani: Thank you so much Thad for the wonderful introduction. I’m honored to be your first guest, I’m lucky, and I’m excited to share my perspective with you and your listeners.
Thad Davis: Excellent. Maybe just for a few seconds out of the gate for everybody, just walk us through AliveCor and kind of what the company’s about, what you’re into, and then what you’re trying to do with the technology and the product and the mission of AliveCor.
Priya Abani: So, some of your listeners may know this, but the ECG, or the electrocardiogram is the primary diagnostic tool that physicians use to evaluate what we would call the electrical activity of the heart. But what some people may not know, is that this is the basic technology and by most accounts it’s about 150 years old. So, this is part of what inspired our founder, Dr. Dave Albert, who was an inventor when he devised a way to create a portable, personal ECG device that could pair with a smartphone and deliver an FDA cleared medical grade ECG, anytime, anywhere. So, at the highest level, that allows us to redefine the bounds of remote cardiac care, using our sensor technology.
Thad Davis: And then AliveCor has expanded into a total vertical stack around, not only just collecting what I would call the telemetry, but also just a complete care vertical stack around the product itself, which I think is an important aspect around that, especially even at the retail level and at the institutional level. Correct?
Priya Abani: Yeah, so I mean think of us as the virtual cardiologists for the 99.9% of the time you’re not in front of your physician. Right? So, we start off with sensor technology, which allows us to tell patients that they have 6 of the most common heart arrhythmias. We are also able to tell you if your heart rate is normal which is very important for peace of mind. And then you don’t have to be calling the physicians or rushing to an emergency room or rushing to an emergency room when it is required for you to do so. And there’s so many different products. So, there’s hardware products, there is AI, there are subscriptions, there’s entering new global markets. There’s just been a lot of development at AliveCor, very, very exciting.
Thad Davis: So, I think what we wanted to try to hit on is taking your experience and what you’re doing at AliveCor and learn a little bit more, frankly, about you. So I think that the smashing lead-up that I gave you here and then a little bit of background of AliveCor, I think opens the door to a lot of listeners’ interests in what factors are kind of behind you leading this company, the path that you took to get here, and then we can talk about a little bit more about that path and the leadership that you’ve brought to, and continue to bring to the development of AliveCor. So maybe just going back to formula here, can you just give is a little bit about where are you from? Where did you grow up? What makes Priya tick?
Priya Abani: A lot of things, but I grew up in Mumbai, surrounded by family, my parents, my sister. My parents instilled strong values in me. I have so many memories with my grandmother, so it’s amazing. I grew to cherish all of these parts that you take for granted when you’re growing up. I was always social, rather extroverted as you realized when I met you and similar personalities. Being in a hectic city like Mumbai, I was very lucky to have parents who gave me my freedom and independence and allowed me to explore both not just the city, the friendships, but also different things I could be doing. And that kind of made me the personal who was ready to come to America to study.
Thad Davis: So, sort of a natural sort of inquisitiveness was gathered in Mumbai and then at least a sense of adventure to say the least.
Priya Abani: Definitely, yes.
Thad Davis: What was the decision to come to the US? Was it just educational at that point? Or were you like, I’m going to the US and pursue the Comp-Sci degree? Because you went, you did your bachelor’s at Victoria Jubilee and then leapt over to Clarkson if I recall, correct?
Priya Abani: Yeah, so actually it was education, the reason why I chose to come here. I learned computer science form my dad when I was 12. And although he was a physicist by training, he taught himself coding in those days and would teach classes out of a local high school. So, growing up, I used to attend his classes, but you know how it is when you attend your parents classes, you have to sit in the back bench and kind of make fun of them, which was really foolish when you think back. But I learned a lot. So, he taught me BASIC, and the first thing he taught me is what it stands for which is Beginners, All Purpose, Symbolic, Instruction, Code. The first word is very important, its beginners, like you’re just learning. We went to Pascal and then we went to COBOL and then my interest in computer science really sprouted. So, it was not just the programming languages, but the math and the algorithms that go behind it. So, when I was applying to Clarkson, because of their math program, I undoubtedly knew that computer science was the avenue that I wanted to continue to explore. And the work that I did there actually led me to get my first job at Intel.
Thad Davis: So, what type of computer science were you doing? You were doing instructional level types of things? Because to make the move over to a chip manufacturer, you’re down at a very low level at the computer science level. Are you doing down at the assembler level or something like that?
Priya Abani: So, I learned assembly coding in 11th or 12th grade. The most fascinating part of learning when you are at that age and you get to play with registers, but the most fascinating part of learning computer science in the United States, to be honest, in a master’s program, is that you’re not bound by just the courses, right? So, I decided to do, and frankly I have no idea why when I think back, I decided to do my thesis in what was called Binary Decision Diagrams, where you kind of traverse all the possible paths in a decision diagram to find all the different paths in it. You’re talking about millions and millions of levels at this point, so millions and trillions of combinations. And that led to my job at Intel, which is where I wrote like a force validation tool which helped us traverse all the paths that the microprocessor could potentially go through, and then find and write tests for each one of those paths.
Thad Davis: It’s like a case testing tool, effectively. Run massive tests, run every possible permutation through the chip to make sure that the chip instructions are set, and the behavior is resilient to what it’s supposed to do or what it’s receiving. Binary Decision Tree design is effectively ancillary to process design. You have to understand the process about where you go from and where you go to. How do you make, like you were at Intel, you started out in the mobility team, which I’m assuming is like cellular chips or wireless communication, basically mobile device communication chip design. And then as you look at your resume, you progress through, you effectively made a decision or the titling changed, I don’t know the background, but your titling changed at some point. You moved from building to leading building, like where was the transition and why go from the tech seat to the leadership seat?
Priya Abani: To be honest, Intel was such a new and exciting place for me, as I said I had just come to a new country, I was on the east coast. So, imagine going from average 90 degree temperature weather to 30 degree winters, that place is just beautiful, it’s just gorgeous right? And I got my job just after my first summer at Clarkson at Intel, very excited to finish the whole thing in about 16 months and moved to California to join the job and my highlight was watching a business update meeting with Andy Grove leading it and I just could not believe that this person that we all admire and read books on, watch on different screens, is a legend. And that was the last four months that he was still CEO when I had just joined, and I got to see him, and I can never forget that experience. But I was just so much in awe, I was just like, wow. So, I came across this thing on an internal portal where it said apply for an MBA in entrepreneurship and I remember going like a couple levels around me because everyone was scratching their heads saying you’re a perfectly good engineer and you’re going to keep doing engineering and why would you want to get your MBA and kind of go to the dark side?
Thad Davis: You’re like, Andy Grove did. You’re like oh that’s a good example. You’re like oh yeah that guy.
Priya Abani: I was frankly not smart enough to use his example, but I was just like, there’s something about this. My intuition is telling me to do this, and I can learn this part of the business, then I can actually help Intel out in multiple things. So I got someone much higher to approve a pretty big check size, got to get an MBA in entrepreneurship, and the moment I joined the program, I had someone tapping me on the shoulder saying you know what, we have this division, which is a new division in Intel, which is making chip sets for PDAs, which are actually not based on the Intel architecture, do you want to come and join? That’s where I got my first pseudo application engineering role where you are running or you’re understanding engineering, but you work with customers for enabling your technology within their ecosystem.
Thad Davis: Because the difference between the X86 line that was widely distributed, forged for a lot of different computers so pre-penny would’ve been 386. But then the PDA, you’re basically designing the Palm Pilot. Not to make a joke, but it was designing both the Palm Pilot and the chip for the Palm Pilot, but the chips had to work with the Palm Pilot, so I had to know what the Palm Pilot did.
Priya Abani: And by the way, get software vendors to write their code for those new architecture. Right? So that was my first kind of experience with oh there are software vendors in the mix and the chip was just the lowest part of the thing, right? Because when you’re first doing the job, you’re like this is the most important thing, it’s the brain of the computer and that’s when you realize there’s a whole ecosystem that is sitting on top and thriving on top of what you’re building, which is just fascinating. So again, the fact that the company had this culture of collaboration, let me try out my hands on these different kinds of jobs and teams and if you look at my portfolio, I did 4 different things. But I also got to watch experts in different disciplines which gave me a lot of respect for those disciplines. But I also learned from watching them and what they were doing and how they were doing it.
Thad Davis: Count yourself lucky, I mean, it sounds like a very unique time to be at Intel. I mean, Intel is a terrific springboard for kind of doing increasingly more entrepreneurial endeavors.
Priya Abani: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Thad Davis: So, you’re in the platform group at Intel and then a small venture funded startup called Amazon comes along and says, we’re beginning to look at many of the things here and you’re like oh I’ll go from chips to the everything store. How did that transition occur there? I make a joke, it’s like when Amazon calls, you’re like who? Yeah, I’m sorry say that name again, I’m not familiar.
Priya Abani: Yeah, no, actually, when they called me, I said please call me in 6 months, I have a lot of sorting out to do. And they did call me in 6 months.
Thad Davis: That’s good follow-up by HR there.
Priya Abani: Absolutely, and I was in an interview on that Monday, and I was completely unprepared. I’m just going to go wing it. So, because of the work I was doing with Intel, as I said, like very comfortable operating across multiple disciplines, but what I also realized is my core definition as a leader. What do I like to do? So, what I like to do is I like to take complex technologies, simplify them, and then scale them, and then scale them globally. And that’s exactly what Amazon put in front of me, right? So, at that point, the Echo product was already in the market and Alexa was beginning to gain some traction. And I knew some product managers who had the product in their house, and I was fascinated. There’s no question, I was like, I had gone to their house, and we’ve been doing this, Alexa telling me the weather, Alexa, what is my calendar? All of those things that it was just like, wow, this is so cool. So, when they asked me to come and run the group where we would expand it to third party devices and, I had to write the first document that said, how do you put Alexa in every single sound system in the world? For example, I had to take this, new unifying piece of technology. And frankly, I think voice is a unifying piece of technology, right? Because at that point it was also AR, VR, a lot of these other things that were happening and they continued to happen by the way. And I hope all of those technologies take off. But I thought a voice is something that unifies people versus something that isolates us from each other, right? So, getting an opportunity to take something like that, where we’re all listening to music together, when we’re all in a room together and asking different questions and having conversations around those. And then taking that, simplifying the deployment across hundreds of hardware configuration, and multitudes of operating systems, I mean, talk about wanting to solve a crazy problem, right? And then scale it to sound systems, headsets, cars, PCs, televisions, microwave, toilet seats, what have you.
Thad Davis: As you go through Intel and then Amazon, and then til now, you’re almost like a specialist in entrepreneurial management because you can see the tech, how to scale tech, or to make the tech itself relevant to some type of end partnership, customer, et cetera, that the chip and the Palm pilot. I understand the tech. I can make this a practical application. Amazon, I understand the power and the reach of this. Do you consider yourself a pure creator or just a next generation entrepreneurial manager?
Priya Abani: So, this is something I always have to think about. If I ever become a founder, like starting from scratch, right? What would we build versus every single job I’ve taken as there is a baseline technology, which has a lot of promise. And I have to see that promise and I’ll have to believe in that promise. And then I can go and scale it, and then obviously build a lot of products based on top of that, like that innovation can never be lost. So, for example, at AliveCor, we also want to be always going to be the company that builds the NorthStar products for cardiology, and sometimes we’ll partner and make sure that our tech works with other people’s techs that are already in the market. But we want to have that full end to end customer experience that we provide, which is the best for the consumers. So, I’m kind of like, you know, answering your question in a way I like to do, I like to do both.
Thad Davis: You know what? It’s all binary systems design. You’ve been deeply trained, this is a leading question, but you’ve been deeply trained to take something and rifle through every possible outcome and then select the best outcomes and then you have the opportunity to kind of work through the reorg, the organization of the outcomes, and then pursue those outcomes in that sense. And there’s like a bunch of situations has been presented to you that re purpose-built for that type of thinking. So, what do you think about that? Summed you up?
Priya Abani: I think this is probably the best explanation of what I am. So, thank you this is a very clarifying podcast.
Thad Davis: Oh yeah, exactly. You’re like I haven’t thought about that. Everything leads back to process design. So, you spent time at Alexa. The one thing also that sort of leaped out on this, not only is this systems design thinking that you have, but you are a master of ecosystem design as well, because every, Intel is at the core or a major component of an ecosystem of products. Alexa was an ecosystem platform. And more importantly, I think that’s been a large private success it’s ubiquitous, and then Alivecor also, as you come into the AliveCor, that is also an ecosystem company you are integrating in doing things with the core product that you otherwise would do. So are ecosystems as I keep using this word, is that a big part of your thinking as you take on these opportunities and you have good vision into this sort of partnership aspect.
Priya Abani: Yeah. I mean a hundred percent. Right? So, this goes back to the customer, right? So, when we are inventing at AliveCor, we don’t want our solutions to be working in a parallel universe than what the customers are used to. And it’s very easy to do that. And I think we’ve done a very good job of actually creating that parallel universe. For example, we made an announcement that we want to get our devices output flowing back into, for example, the GEMU system, which is the cardiology management system for the resides in like 80% of the US hospital systems. So, we did the same thing when we put our EKG technology on third party devices, such as OMRON’s blood pressure cuff. Right. So we’re kind of building everything up as an SDK, including hardware, which is very hard to understand and believe, but that’s really how our mentalities when we build things so that we can take any element, whether it is our part of her app, whether it is our AI, whether it is subscription and we can connect it to other devices and outputs from other devices, whether they’re a hospital-grade EKG or they are EKGs that are now produced by consumers, other consumer electronic devices
Thad Davis: And an open design, which goes back to some of the Alexa’s an open design. Core SDK has proprietary elements with the same thing with what you have. So, when you made the switch over to AliveCor, like I would assume when you were at Amazon at Alexa. Does every recruiter on the planet call you or is it just like no recruiters call you and is it like you just got called by some recruiter, I have this unique opportunity for you, and you’re like, yeah, sure it sounds good when can I start? How did you go from Alexa to AliveCor?
Priya Abani: Yeah. I mean, it’s a classic Silicon Valley story, right? I got connected to our chairman Vinod Khosla through an investor who is a friend of a friend. His name is Neil. I keep thanking him for somehow making this happen that I got this job, but he made the first connection to Vinod. And when I met Vinod, I spent a lot of time explaining to him in that first meeting that I’ve never worked in healthcare or a startup. So, the fact that he was present during this opportunity for me, is that the right decision, but anyway, he’s super persuasive as we all know. So, here I am, and I think it’s the most fascinating thing I’ve done. So, what really sold this for me is that AliveCor was already doing some amazing work and there was a mission behind the work. Right? And for me, it resonated because it brought me back to my dad who had passed away during my time at Amazon. And I thought about like AliveCor’s foundation technology. And I frankly probably did not even know how to spell electrocardiogram when I was doing the interview, but then I learned really. So, I went back on Amazon, and I started reading all the reviews on this device and I was just astounded, like every second review said that this device helped save my life, save the life of someone I love. It helped me get to the hospital on time. And there are literally thousands of these reviews. And I was just intrigued and inspired. And I said, you know what? Although I have the best job in the world, which is what I was doing then working with 250 consumer electronics companies to put Alexa in the devices. I said, I am getting this opportunity in front of me. I need to take this. And I decided to join AliveCor.
Thad Davis: I mean, a general manager at Amazon has P&L responsibilities and has a tremendous amount of reporting responsibilities, but the CEO seat fascinated you, I’m sure this was an opportunity to kind of do that. Was it a tremendous transition out of that from a major manager within a large corporation, which provides a lot of autonomy, to the CEO seat you have now?
Priya Abani: Well, the best autonomy is in the CEO seat and the highest responsibility is also in the CEO seat. So, you just don’t know it unless you do it. And that’s how I found out. But I feel like I’ve been preparing all my life and all my jobs for this job. And everything that I’ve learned along the way, different technologies working with different, disciplines with different kinds of leaders, building teams, hiring the best, working with ecosystems, listening to our customers, all of that has culminated into what we are doing here at AliveCor. And it’s just amazing to get this opportunity.
Thad Davis: In terms of talking to executives, the AliveCor, you’ve got the Kardia mobile card, the latest thing to roll out. I noticed that the broader ecosystem has had a major update around the subscription-based application. Just take us through kind of where you’re at on the journey at AliveCor around the product set. What’s next down the product roadmap? And where’s the organization heading right now?
Priya Abani: Yeah, no, thank you so much. So, I mean, as I said, we have a single lead ECG device. We now have this beautiful, sexy looking cardio mobile card.
Thad Davis: Pretty cool. It’s very cool I think it’s fantastic.
Priya Abani: Thank you so much. I get so many messages from people now carrying it in their wallet and, taking pictures and putting on social media and just, we just listened to our customers because a lot of, Although our other devices are a very, very good form factor. We’re still losing them. So, this just goes in your wallet, it just stays there and every three years, the battery dies, you chuck it. We send you a new one and we’re all good to go. Right? So that’s what it is listening to the customers. So, one of the things we did is we introduced this thing very near to my heart. It’s called a subscription service called Kardia Care. And what it did is it’s on top of telling you what your EKG data is and determinations, it goes to the next step, right? So, it tells you the six of the most common arrhythmias it tells you whether you’re normal or not. But then it also lets you do other things. It lets you share your EKG with your doctor, with your inner circle, So, your family members, your caregivers. In some cases, grandchildren, we actually have examples of grandparents sharing their EKG with their grandchildren who are in the medical profession. It’s just amazing, the kinds of messages we receive from people. You’re able to also get a cardiologist overread. So, your heart is having palpitations. The determination, the AI is saying that you’re feeling normal. So, you’re not really satisfied. So, you can actually send that EKG to actual cardiology technician or a cardiologist, who then tells you what that EKG is truly saying. You can also set up a meeting and talk to a cardiologist within 24 hours. So, I give full credit to my product team. And obviously my chief product officer Alfred who came and joined me right after, right as I left Amazon. We now have greater than 150,000 subscribers on Kardia Care. And every single day there is a set of people who, you know, sleep, stay awake, I guess, is the other option, thinking about how to make Kardia Care, more valuable, how to increase engagement, how to increase retention, how to add things that people really care about, like education materials or better AI, or just become in a way the goal is to become the brand that people think of they’re having issues with their heart. Then obviously we have expanded in the enterprise space. We’re doing a number of projects with clinical research organizations, biopharma companies. Our devices are now part of clinical trials, which otherwise would never include EKGs outside the hospital is like the first time this is happening. And we kind of took all the stuff that we knew. So, think about the device, the AI, the subscription, added coaches and cardiologists. And just launched a new enterprise offering called Kardia Complete for self-insured employers and payers and health systems. So, I mean, there was so much going on.
Thad Davis: I think that’s actually one of the interesting things about AliveCor. In the time that we were on stage at health, that’s why I actually, I think we came here because the unique element of AliveCor is it’s in the medical device world, it’s not common to see a device that spans direct to consumers. So, the consumers interfacing with the device, they can also interact with device on their own. So, they have their ownership of their data. They have the insights; they can help manage themselves. And there’s a whole institutional side to the product as well. And then, further out there, they’re on a complete heart care stack across from consumer to institutional. This is rare. I mean, you see this in the diabetes arena. You’ll see some of this crossover, institutional things like today during topically, Metatronic and DaVita push a bunch of components, a bunch of pieces of each other together into a NewCo, but that’s unique about AliveCor. When you look across the personal, institutional. One of the things we’ve talked about historically, you and I as is the data elements of what you’re doing and kind of driving this sort of pooling and pooling more data, data enablement. We just talked about the consumer data enablement. Can you just talk a little bit about the health tech data is always a topic, but what’s specific about. AliveCor that brings that data to life or something unique about how you’re thinking of it in a product and data analytics set.
Priya Abani: So, first of all, as a consumer and a customer, I want access to my data. Like that is the way I think, and we have tried, we try very hard every day to make sure that of the data, the customer’s data is available to them, right? So, I think what sets us apart is, we provide the tools to obtain this critical heart health data, but then the fact that we are now investing into, the pipe where this data can be both accessed and actioned across the healthcare continuum. Whether it is cardiologists or other member of the care team and the payers, and that’s where the partnerships and the collaborations become so important. And I’m really happy, frankly that, the healthcare industry is opening up to companies like us and helping us integrate, because they’re also getting a lot of this data that’s coming to them from own customers and patients. That they’re taking data created from over devices and going into the hospitals. So, there’s a recognition of the fact that we have gained enough traction, just to give you some statistics, we have sold more than 2 million devices as a company. We have on average people taking 18 EKGs per quarter, that’s a very big number. And there’s nobody is telling them.
Thad Davis: It’s actually incredibly good. Yeah. I was like wow.
Priya Abani: And by the way, the subscribers are taking 30 EKGs per quarter, but remember
Thad Davis: Yeah. If you’re a subscriber, it’s a daily management thing. you have a reason to be into your heart so to speak, it sounds like it sounds like a song, but that’s an amazing stat.
Priya Abani: By the way, nobody’s asking them to do it. That is the beauty of it. It’s self-managed right. So, I think there was a recognition in the healthcare institutions that this is happening in this parallel universe. And now we need to connect these two dots and I’m really, really pleased with all the nice partnerships that we’re making. And our enterprise sales team is pretty busy picking up the phone from all the healthcare institutions who want to deploy our devices.
Thad Davis: Yeah. I mean, the applications are, substantial. I mean, heart arrhythmia and other cardiac events, tracking is absolutely essential to clinical research because many drugs, devices and other things can and do cause heart issues. That alone is a whole business model in itself. Let alone all the other things AliveCor is into.
Priya Abani: And Thad, just to that point, like we just got approval for our QT prolongation algorithm detection, and we’re talking about now so much beyond cardiology. There are 29 drug categories and about 42 million patients on a yearly basis that take drugs that basically, have this impact to your heart. And there is no way to measure it right now, unless you go to the hospital and that’s what with the fact that you can do this remotely is where we are coming in. And that part of our business is just growing tremendously.
Thad Davis: Yeah, that’s the beauty of it. The applications are, once you have the stacks settled and you have the knowledge of how to do this in the field, in a mobile sense, then at that point, it’s sort of what can’t we do? And what’s the priority, what’s the prioritization of the product set at that point where, yeah. As we wind down here, there’s going to be many people here that are looking to have the success that you’ve had. What is one piece of advice that you would give to somebody that’s sort of at the Intel, let’s say the early Intel version of you. Where would you send them? What kind of thinking would you have them try to explore.
Priya Abani: Let me just start off by saying that being a CEO makes you feel really old. So, I already feel like an eighty-year-old person in my head.
Thad Davis: You’re so wise, tell us everything great oracle, great oracle. If I would like to be rich and famous like you, what shall I do?
Priya Abani: Anything but that, by the way, but one of the advantages of getting older, and I guess we’re all going in the same direction is that you gain so much more clarity. Right? So now I know that every single time in my career, when I trusted my gut, it let me do some really good professional work, learning, growth, fulfillment. And like I don’t rate success because everybody has a different metric, but I would rate growth and learning because once you get those two right, you’re always going to be set up for success. So, if I were to go back and talk to my younger self, who used to look much younger than I do now, I would tell myself to be very comfortable following my intuitions and trusting my instincts because there were times that I did not do that. Maybe I would have joined a startup much more sooner than I eventually ended up doing.
Thad Davis: Yes, but that’s difficult. If I knew then what I know now, I would have done everything very differently.
Priya Abani: Yeah. And isn’t that what we try to teach our children, but they don’t listen to anything. So, they go through their own journey all over again. It’s just so funny.
Thad Davis: Life is the ultimate educator. And then last question here. What’s one thing that’s unique about you, like non-work like outside of work, are you into collecting small widgets of some type or do you fly all over the planet and exploring, trying to find like big foot or something crazy like that?
Priya Abani: I don’t think it’s a unique trait, but it’s something I like to do. So, I’m a big fan of concerts and live performances. Both me and my husband, we try to go and see as many artists as we can. So most recently we watched Macy Gray, fourth row, live, unbelievable performance. We saw some ex-members from the Grateful Dead, Bob Weir, and Mickey Hart. And so, I think after going through the COVID spell, I realized that you can just cannot take anything for granted. So, two artists that I’m hoping to travel and catch this year or next year are Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel. So, I hope I can make it happen.
Thad Davis: We’ll do the Madison Square Garden thing. That’d be great. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time, here today, to speak to us, Priya Abani. Thank you so much for joining on the inaugural podcast and look forward to speaking to you again here soon.
Priya Abani: Thank you so much Thad. Thank you.
Thank you for listening to this episode of our Perspectives podcast. If you are interested in participating in future podcasts or would like to learn more about Leerink Partners, please email us at info@leerink.com
