Whit Bernard is a highly successful biotech CEO and a formidable leader in the exploding obesity space. His career path exemplifies the triumph of first-principles thinking and artfully applied generalist intelligence in building and leading high-science organizations.
After completing an undergraduate degree in Music at Brown and an MBA from Northwestern, he parlayed a stint in strategic consulting at McKinsey into a career in venture capital and biotech, culminating in his extraordinary success as CEO of Metsera, purchased by Pfizer for $10B.
Occam had a wide-ranging, richly textured conversation with Whit about the value of liberal arts training and the importance of persistent improvisation in realizing his potential as a leader. This interview is by turns a Bildungsroman, a meditation on well-wrought ambition, and a reflection on leadership in the biotech industry.
Bill: Let’s begin by talking about the early evolution of your career and executive persona. How did you get started?
As I see it, you have moved through stages as a business person. You began in strategic consulting, then mutated into an operating role, then became an investor, then an operator again — this time as COO, then as CEO of a private company you took public.
Then, further back, in terms of personal history, you started off as a half-ass musician — my words, not yours.
Is that depiction one way of launching your origin story?
Whit: I started out as a complete half-ass musician. Playing jazz as best I could. I mean, I really wanted to be a whole-ass musician, and then realized that perhaps I fell shy of the requisite genius for true artistic success. After college, my first job was as a business manager for an independent orchestra. Then, through self-reflection and absorbing that richly creative experience, collaborating with brilliant artists to build a business, commerce became the dominant note in my chord. So I pressed the restart button with an MBA.
Bill: How did you choose your business school?
Whit: Kellogg (Northwestern) in effect chose me. It was the best one I got into, after having cast a wide net. I went there just to get a generalist MBA, but got a whole lot more. What was and is great about the place is its down-to-earth Midwestern culture. A relaxed place with high standards. I came out with elevated self-esteem and a sense of direction. My inclination toward healthcare derived from the richness of the faculty in that sector.
Bill: Why, upon graduation, did you consult, rather than go to work for Baxter or Abbott?
Whit: Yeah, it's a good question. It’s complicated. Truth is, I wasn’t completely sure I was in love with healthcare just yet, and I certainly didn’t want to get pigeonholed in a corporate job. By that time, I was a little paranoid about narrowing things down.
Bill: It's a useful paranoia…especially early on.
Whit: My paranoid thought…what if I go work for some big company and end up not liking it? How do I pivot again? It was like, I've had this amazing moment where I get this opportunity to pivot. If I pick the wrong path, I can't go do an MBA again. My “Get Out of Jail Free Card” would have been punched. My felt need was to retain flexibility.
Bill: True to your musician roots, you were improvising your career.
Whit: For sure, I was making it up as I went along, listening to the beat of my own drummer, as it were. I don’t think I knew that people like you existed to help exit one place and go into another.
Bill: But consulting is a great provider/extender of optionality, right? Because you can still do anything without enduring commitment. It's like a post-doc in many ways.
Whit: Put more bluntly, it's a way to kick the can down the road on life decisions. It's like, somebody's going to pay me, I'm going to learn, I'm not going to have to make any important decisions. And yeah, I got really lucky with McKinsey.
Bill: How did you convince them to hire you?
Whit: At the time, I had all these transactional, case-based interviews at McKinsey. I was always analytically sharp, but not that experienced in business. The immediate result… two bad interviews. My third was with Anish Melwani, now the Chairman of the Americas for LVMH. He was old-school McKinsey and larger-than-life… brilliant, charismatic, a real leader. We had a half-hour improvised conversation on a variety of topics: music and stuff, and we just got along. Then came a deeply challenging exercise centered on first-principles thinking. He asked me how many subway tokens to buy at 8 pm on New Year’s Eve if the price of subway tokens goes up at midnight. It was an opportunity that suited a reasonably smart analytical guy with no real business experience. He then called me and said, “The other two interviewers didn't see what I saw; however, we're going to hire you anyway.” His lightning bolt saved the day.
Bill: Was your work healthcare-focused?
Whit: It became healthcare-focused because of the great people I encountered, including Tatiana Elphimova, David Quigley, Michael Silber, Rodney Zemmel, and Roy Berggren. I learned how to think about business from McKinsey because of the brilliant people and the rich culture. And then I got put on a big pharma account.. That was major.
Bill: How did you get recruited to The Medicines Company?
Whit: Yeah, it was the result of professional and personal factors. I had proven myself to a certain level with my work for Big Pharma. And my relationship with Roy deepened. He connected me with MedCo (The Medicines Company), and that's how I ended up joining Clive.
Bill: Clive is weirdly intuitive himself, isn't he?
Whit: Yeah, he's incredibly intuitive.
Bill: That leads us to the importance of relationships in business success and career fulfillment. You just never know when you're going to connect with somebody who will shape the future.
Whit: That was clearly true for me with Roy and Clive. I think the real kismet in my career has been fortuitous connections with great people who become great leaders and create incredible, unexpected opportunities that derive from genuine human connection.
Bill: I know exactly what you're talking about. The same was true for me with Jim Curvy and Ned Johnson at Fidelity. Such inspiring connections, however, are not something you can control. You must be open to such possibilities. They happen by good fortune, but your mind must be prepared to embrace such privileged moments.
Whit: Yes, you must be ready to make the leap and follow your instinct … it's been huge for my career to be connected to Clive.
Bill: So that connection would lead to your first corporate role at MedCo in strategy. Then, as that company evolved and was acquired by Novartis, you moved to the other side of the desk.
Did investing come naturally to you out of your operating experience? In my view, these two modes of commercial activity are informed by radically different ways of thinking and acting. Few execs excel at both.
Whit: I don't think I did or do investing at PHP. Strictly speaking, PHP is not an investment firm. No, it's beyond category. I call it a venture studio
We haven’t created nearly as much value investing passively as we have building things from scratch. It seems to me that we're way too passionate as entrepreneurs to invest in the traditional sense, and then just stand back and take a board seat. Clive's like this. I'm like this. We need to get excited about things, and then we need to get involved. So we build stuff. That's what we do.
Bill: So in the context of the “venture studio,” you’ve had multiple roles?
Whit: Yeah, depending on the company or “the investment.” The way we built PHP is... I mean, Clive, Chris (Cox), and I put the thing together. And convinced many of the best people from The Medicines Company to join us. And then a couple of great people who weren't at MedCo. It was and is a good mix.
And the idea was to basically build companies around prevalent disease. And it was all coming out of the work we've done at MedCo around Inclisiran. At the time, we were in an industry that was just not rising to that challenge because we were too concentrated on high prices and low volumes. We weren’t solving big problems anymore.
Bill: So you were thinking ahead of the curve of prevailing opinion, which focused on the opportunities in orphan disease.
Whit: That's exactly it. 2020 was an inflection point. At PHP, we were after big markets, products with a decisive impact on patient well-being and healthspan, and with macro-economic consequences. We decided to look at what's killing people and costing money in developed economies. It's cardiovascular disease. It's sugar. It's respiratory. It's prevalent CNS. This insight was fundamental to the point of absurdity. Then we also had a group of veterans from MedCo that were really good at late-stage drug development, and a set of proprietary tools that powered that work.
Bill: Let’s now talk about Metsera.
Whit: This was a new opportunity in the CV/Metabolic space based on an in-licensed compound out of a large pharma that, at the time, was strategically pivoting out of primary care.
Bill: That must have been music to your ears.
Whit: Yeah, it was really great. There were these exciting small-molecule GLP-1s. Clive and I had kind of built a map for PHP of what we wanted to go after. We just asked ourselves what the top ten drivers of disease in population health are, and you know, #1 is hypertension; #2 is high HbA1c; #3 is elevated body mass; and #4 is lipids. So, you're basically hitting the top three of the top four with GLP-1s.
We had seen the early Wegovy data on weight loss, and my instinct was, and this goes back to Kellogg, that this is going to be a big consumer opportunity — people want to lose weight. We believed this was gonna be bigger than just diabetes, so we put a team around it.
Bill: Were you aware of competitors in this ambition or opportunity?
Whit: So what's funny is that at the time, there was literally nobody else. We were on a single thread with this deal. This peculiar indifference was the only reason we were able to even advance the deal. Everyone saw the early GLP-1 weight loss data, but no one did anything about it beyond Lilly and Novo. So this is where the industry is strategically slower than we all had given it credit for. Even biotech is mostly either following science towards God knows what end, or it's following Pharma. And then, Pharma at the time was just not grasping the magnitude of the opportunity.
Bill: So this is all directly in line with PHP’s value proposition, isn't it?
Whit: I think it was at the time. The Pharma we had been engaging with decided at the last minute to nix the deal. The kettle started warming up on weight loss as a category, and you could see it on every earnings call. Negotiations had gotten protracted. It's taken a year to get this deal set up, but finally, they just said, “We need to keep these things” as the direction and magnitude of the market opportunity clarified.
But PHP remained committed. We had mapped the whole competitive landscape and turned that map into a shopping list. We then got an ARCH and Paul Berns excited about the idea of funding this thing a scale, and at the same time, excited a group of other formidable investors. The rest is history.
This is what PHP does best. We developed a strategic perspective on a large but underappreciated market, and then we articulated a comprehensive execution map. We had all the operational disciplines to design a big business, and we did it in like six weeks.
Bill: How did you proceed after the large pharma recanted?
Whit: They walked away, and we built Metsera out of whole cloth. We sought a new foundational technology.
Bill: And beat them at their own game.
Whit: What was so important for Metsera is that by then, we had spent a year thinking about this opportunity and the strategic space around it, and we’d been kind of stuck in the negotiation.
Bill: So, how did you chart a new course?
Whit: We were able to look at the field from first principles and just say, “Look, GLP-1s are going to be very big, and there are only two players. The Gold and Silver medals are taken. Let's envision what this market is going to need in 2028, design and build around it, and move at lightning speed to try to win the Bronze medal.”
Bill: And your competitive advantage was dosage?
Whit: Well, that ended up being our advantage. We came very close to licensing an undifferentiated but very advanced GLP-1 RA from a Korean company, but came to the determination that fundamental differentiation alongside speed would matter. We went back to the drawing board and looked for earlier assets that could address major gaps in a future market, and that we could leverage our capabilities to move quickly through the clinic.
Bill: How'd you find them? Just foraging about in your network?
Whit: Yeah, PHP has an excellent UK network with Tamsin Berry and Sir John Bell as key nodes, and as you know, the UK has an excellent scientific research ecosystem. We ended up acquiring a company founded by Sir Stephen Bloom, spun out of Imperial College. He had spent 20 years doing peptide engineering around various hormone pathways, and had done early work on GLP-1s and their effect on appetite in rodents.
Bill: Bloom’s idea was rooted in creative empiricism?
Whit: Yes, he had this big idea and created the company based on studying what happens after bariatric surgery. Basically, when you do a gastric bypass, everybody assumes you change the plumbing, and people lose weight because they're absorbing fewer nutrients. Well, it turns out that you dramatically change all kinds of hormone pathways by skipping a big part of the small intestine. Your physiology is altered. And as a result, patients’ glucose control improves in 48 hours. They lose dramatic amounts of weight not explained by the plumbing but rather by biology. They're not nauseous. They don't vomit. Bloom’s theoretical conclusion was to look at five or six hormone pathways operating synergistically on appetite and insulin regulation.
Bill: What was the organizational structure of Bloom’s company?
Whit: He built this great team of very diligent, salt-of-the-earth, British PhD students who had worked for him and were deeply personally loyal. Peptide chemists. Kids were injecting rodents with discipline. Scrupulously conscientious doers.
And Bloom said, “Look, guys, if we're gonna make these hormone combos of synthetic peptides, we can't use human hormones, and the drugs have to be cheap because we have to sell them to the NHS." So it’s necessary to make them really potent because it's expensive to manufacture peptides, and ideally, you make them as long-acting as you can, so you need fewer syringes because monthly is a lot cheaper than weekly. So, with just a basic insight into what the market wanted, he set this really high screening bar on a most opportune product development course.
Bill: All common sense-based.
Whit: Based on common sense for potency, half-life, and combined ability. I think this is a huge testament to the team that ultimately merged with us. They didn't have something like an AI engine to figure this out. It was discipline, agility, and perseverance.
Bill: It seems the opposite of AI.
Whit: It's the opposite of AI. And it's true agility. The rodent testing approach, in essence, embodied Clive's drug development approach: what are the bare essentials we need to do and how do we do it efficiently?
Bill: Occam’s Razor at work.
Whit: We ended up with the first monthly GLP-1 amylin combination. Bloom was right about everything. I mean, he just totally nailed the innovation opportunity, and all we did was find it, acquire it, build the right team around it, and advance it at what I'd like to think is pretty superhuman speed.
Bill: Is he associated with Metsera now?
Whit: Yeah, he's an employee. He's 83. And experiencing a new form of success.
Bill: And a new form of success for you as CEO. How long had you been in the seat…five months, six months? I mean, it's just an amazing story of intellectual insight and improvisation.
Whit: Yeah, I think that I distill our success to remaining fundamental, like the persistence in first principles thinking and just not getting distracted by fashion.
Bill: So what exactly inspired your transition to CEO from COO?
Whit: It was Clive who gave me the opportunity. He had a lot going on. At the same time, I didn't think that I was ready to be a CEO. Clive was determining what was happening at Metsera, and every day, he was handing me more and more to do. Then, suddenly, we ended up with early clinical data that was spectacular.
Now what are you gonna do with it? Well, you're either gonna sell it to pharma or you’re gonna take it public. We knew there was more value to inflect, so we decided to go public, and once it became clear that the company would be a high-profile biotech, Clive and the Board decisively and with confidence passed the baton. It was a daunting opportunity, but the team and pipeline we had built together set me up for success as a first-time CEO.
Bill: Well, things worked out great. What’s next? Even though your time in the CEO hot seat was brief, do you want to do it again?
Whit: I want to do it again. Yeah.
But the thing I struggle with is, you know, Metsera was just so big. Like, the whole thing was just so epic – the technology, but also the incredible team supporting me. I want to do it again, but I don't have the illusion that I can just go pick up a few random pieces and create another Metsera.
So, I mean, I'm now back full-time at PHP and very early in the journey of figuring out what doing it again means, together with Clive, Chris, and a large portion of Metsera’s leadership team. I think we learned a lot about how to create a phenomenal team and a winning construct. One has to be incredibly judicious about many things: whom you hire, how you onboard them the right way and create the right culture, and what technology you embrace. I feel wiser now. And, yeah, my team and I would love to do it again. We just have to be disciplined enough to find the right opportunity and the right substrate… a process which might take years.
Bill: Well, you’ve got the well-earned leisure to do it the right way. Thanks for the resolutely candid and righteously syncopated conversation. Onwards and upwards.
