Gregory Mark Hill, Managing Partner at GCH Partners

Jesus Moreno (00:02.229)
Welcome back to Global Trial Accelerators, the podcast where we dismantle the barriers to clinical innovation and explore the strategies driving the next generation of life-saving therapies. In the pursuit of successful clinical trials, we obsess over data integrity and side activation timelines. But the most overlooked risk factor in any trial is the leadership burn rate. When a C-suite is a misaligned

or the study team is operating from a place of chronic stress, we see direct correlation with protocol deviation, poor site engagement, and ultimately a failed milestone. Joining us today is Gregory McHill, a veteran advisor who has navigated high-stakes scalings from Silicon Valley to the world's most complex healthcare ecosystems. Gregory has spent

decades helping CEOs and investors realize that inner alignment is a leading indicator of operational excellence. And on today's episode, we're going to explore how conscience leadership is the missing link in accelerating clinical success. Gregory, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you with us.

Gregory Mark Hill (01:26.52)
Thank you, Jesus. Really look forward to talking with you today and connecting with your audience.

Jesus Moreno (01:33.579)
Thank you, Gregory. And I would like to start by taking a look to your background and you've navigated an incredibly, you've navigated a incredible trajectory from managing over a hundred billion in finance transactions from iconic brands in Wall Street to leading venture capitals initiatives in Silicon Valley. Looking back,

Gregory Mark Hill (01:47.854)
Thank you.

Jesus Moreno (02:02.909)
at that arc. Was there a specific moment where you saw a perfectly structured capital raise or multi-million dollar clinical program get derailed not by the data or the science but rather by the internal friction or misalignment of the leadership team?

Gregory Mark Hill (02:28.514)
Yes, so this is a really important question, Jesus, and very important for your audience. In fact, there is an enormous amount of capital out there that wants to find its place, find its home and secure its way into these types of opportunities. The one consistent issue over and over and over again is the leadership team, the management team that is governing and stewarding the process that is very well known.

through the clinical trials, through the development processes, through the building of those research teams, there always seems to be a breakdown. In fact, no breakdown, no breakthrough, as we like to say. But what ends up happening is when you have a lot of intelligence in the room, a lot of academic prowess in the room, there tends to be a struggle. And this is...

particular to the pharmaceutical and healthcare and health technology industries, but it's really everywhere. What ends up happening is there is an incredible desire to be right. There's an desire to be right and then ready to go to a fight about it as well. So we're ready for a fight and then we want to be right about it. And we don't see often if there's a way to be okay and all right about it. I'll give you an example.

We're ready to go to war of a parking space, Jesus. And then want to be right about it. I don't care if you were looking the other way, you're on your cell phone, I was here first. I don't care if there's another open slot two spaces down, you take that spot, I was here first. And as funny as that says, we're ready to go to war of a parking space and be right about it. It's the same when we have teams that we're governing and leading in the R &D, healthcare and pharmaceutical arena as well.

There's a lot of tremendously talented, smart folks in the room. And there's also a lot of self-cherishing ego in the room. And that self-cherishing ego I talk about in my book, I'll just share with you, which is called Samsara and its impact on the entrepreneur's dreams. And I share that because Samsara is a 4,000 year old mathematical and spiritual language. Samsara in Sanskrit means suffering.

Gregory Mark Hill (04:49.878)
actually cycles of suffering when one is attached to the material world. And I don't just mean Ferraris and Gucci bags, Jesus, but for your audience, this is important takeaway. I mean, when you were attached to outcome, attached to the data results, attached to the financial results, the capital investment, attached to the relationships we were developing along the way. Now here's the funny thing. When we don't get the result that we want, the outcome that we want, even though the data is there to support it.

We don't get the capital that we need because the governance and the leadership is creating roadblocks. We suffer on the inside. On a conscious level, subconscious level in particular, we suffer on the inside and then we carry that suffering out into every experience that we have. We carry it into the seminar, the webinar, the zoom call, the teams call, the department meeting, into the investor pitches, into the

strategic partner relationships into the clinical trials. We carry that suffering and we're emitting a negative charge and we don't realize that what's in the way, the roadblocks that are in the way, it's not the market. It's not the capital. It's not the partners. It's us. You and me are the roadblocks in our own way to realizing our dreams, realizing our goals, getting that clinical trial approval, getting that strategic giant partner.

from the industry to come in and work with us. Now, this is the height of the intersection between capital, investment, data, and the marketplace. This happens over and over again. And I'm going to say it again, when we have an opportunity and we don't get the result, the outcome, and the relationship that we want, we suffer.

And then we carry that suffering out into the world and to every experience we have. And we express it in the form of self-cherishing ego, in the form of anger, upset, yelling, tone, annoyance, distraction, even the victim card. It's your fault, not mine. I can't believe that happened. You didn't understand the data correctly. You didn't present it correctly. lot of finger pointing that is expressed through the self-cherishing ego.

Gregory Mark Hill (07:17.9)
And to have a takeaway right now for your audience, this is very important. In that moment, that that challenge that are front, that difficulty, that problem arises because they always do. Problems arise every day, every week. When you're going through the process of getting to that result that you want, the FDA approvals that you want, when you're going through that process, challenges, problems arise. And what we don't realize is

in working with our teams and working with our capital partners and working with our strategic partners. Hey, in two minutes, two hours, two days, two weeks, two years, sooner or later, the problem actually gets solved either on our own with our departments, our teams, with our partners, outside consultants, outside attorneys, counsel, sooner or later, that problem gets solved and

What we don't realize that whether it's two days, two months, two years, and that problem getting solved, there's freedom if we know that the problem is going to get solved. What that means is those problems aren't really problems, Jesus. They're actually just situations that we're facing in the moment, a series of situations that we're facing in the moment. And if we know it's going to get solved sooner or later with our teams, our department, our research, our data, then do we really need to be upset and angry?

and play the victim card and yell and scream for those two weeks, two months, two years, all you're doing is repelling the very ideas, people and possibilities you need as opposed to being a magnet to attract the capital, the teams, the R &D, the data, the technology that you need to solve that problem. So what I offer you in this, and we can talk about it more, but what I offer you in your audience,

is in that moment. Take a breath.

Gregory Mark Hill (09:14.656)
Literally take a breath and ask yourself this question. I share this in the &A world, the leverage financing world, the venture capital and private equity world, the hedge fund world. I share you take a breath and in that moment you ask yourself this question, which is who am I being in this moment with this problem, this challenge, this difficulty in front of me? And is what I'm about to say to my team, my R &D folks, my processors, my programmers.

my scientists, my medical team, is what I'm about to say and do going to push them away, repel them, or attract them like a magnet. That's the key. This is the takeaway in terms of conscious capitalism and to a conscious leadership. Yes, it's not just the data showing that the result is accurate. It's the entire process along the way. If you were repelling people with your self-cherishing ego,

Repelling the ideas and people and teams that you need to solve the problems. You don't get the approvals. You don't get the approvals at every level internally, externally, federally. And then finally the capital that doesn't show up, even though they said they were going to be there. This is very important and applies not just to the pharmaceutical health care and health technology, VC and private equity world. It applies to everyone every day.

Suffering is every day. So thanks for taking a moment to listen to that.

Jesus Moreno (10:47.809)
Absolutely. I think that could be a wrap up for this interview. It definitely goes beyond setting the groundwork for our conversation. And you perfectly address what one of the questions I was thinking about in preparation for our conversation.

I wanted to post it to you and confirm based on what you just shared with us. I arrived at the right answer. My question was going to for our audience.

that lives and dies by clinical outcomes, recruitment curves, protocol adhesion, safety profiles, efficient signaling, and ultimately regulatory approval. That's the objective. Well, your book talks about releasing attachment to outcomes. You just explained that.

Gregory Mark Hill (11:54.136)
Yes.

Jesus Moreno (11:59.084)
when a C-suite executive or a trial leader holds the intense responsibility of patient lives and patient safety in their hands and their decisions have a real world tangible impact on the lives of that cohort of patients. And they have to balance that with the pressure, the trial, the...

the pressure of the trial endpoints, how do they not become psychologically hostage to achieving those data points and those milestones? And from your explanation just now, I understood that it's that moment of pause and of...

quiet self-reflection of how am I going to present myself to my team, to my stakeholders, and how am I going to behave in a way that I don't compound the problem, but rather...

Gregory Mark Hill (13:07.852)
Solve and Attract.

Jesus Moreno (13:08.513)
Solve it. I want to use the word flow. I don't know if this word is relevant or carries some more meaning to it in this context. I flow with what I'm facing and understand that this is part of the process and I don't need to subject myself to the weight of it, but rather accept it and move past

past it. Does that sound like a good restatement of what you shared with us?

Gregory Mark Hill (13:45.43)
Absolutely. It's a beautiful restatement. And in fact, I've had a lot of experience with the chair and the leadership of these R &D and healthcare and pharmaceutical departments and divisions and sectors that are under such tremendous stress that in fact, they can't even emote and connect to their own team because they feel their team.

is looking to them for the absolute guidance and they're supposed to know everything. And what they end up doing is they end up getting not life coaches or business coaches, but they specialized coaches that understand the sector, the industry, and they have private talks with them and emote all their problems because they don't want to look bad in front of their teams.

So when you're in a dynamic where every moment of your day, 24, 7, 365, you feel you have to look good, know everything, that's a tremendous amount of pressure. That's a tremendous amount of self-induced doubt that is happening every day. What you said really nicely, and it's very important to confirm and reconfirm and share with your audience is that the levels of stress are so high and then the levels of feeling that you need to know everything

Where focus goes, energy flows. Where you look, that's where the energy goes. Where you direct your body, literally that is where the energy goes. When you think about something all day long, that's where the energy goes, positive or negative. The energy doesn't know, but what you are bringing your teams, if it's negative, that is what's going to come out. And it will literally ripple, spiral out of control. And I've seen it happen.

Exciting thing is when you go through the process from animals pigs and sheep in the clinical trials before you get to the human trials There's a process there and it's stressful at every level because that the regulatory the federal level They want to know what you're bringing to the market is safe They want to know that lives are going to be responsibly managed. There's going to be a fiduciary and a direct responsibility

Gregory Mark Hill (16:05.006)
for the impact you're bringing into society, into the world, for the healthcare arena. To be responsible for that every day all the time and not have a practice of your own, and this is literally what I'm talking about, people get into trouble. And so when I talk about taking a breath, it may sound simple, but I'm gonna add one more thing and share for your audience. When you actually take a breath, you can do it in the elevator, you can do it in the bathroom, you can do it in your car, bus, home.

Office close the door When you do it once a day, can do it multiple times a day But when you do it once a day, you string a few days together. You have a week You string a few weeks together of taking that breath and pausing and reflecting You have a month You string a few months together and you have a quarter you string a few quarters together and you have a year and that you know what you have now You have a personal practice You have a personal professional practice

And I dare say from the heart, have a personal, professional, spiritual practice that fills you up and gives you the strength and the energy and power to be able to face and manage the affront and the challenges that are coming at you, whether it's data, whether it's teams, whether it's external commentary, whether it's capital partners, whether it's pharmaceutical strategic partners, I mean, the ability to be your customer and to invest. That's what I mean by strategic partner.

you are able to face and manage those challenges with much more aplomb, swash and grace and professionalism that actually attracts people to want to be around you. They get to the point where they say, I don't know what it is about that Jesus, but I just like him. He's a good guy. I want to be around him all the time. And when people want to be around you, especially as a leader, your research teams, your technical teams, your processing teams, your legal teams.

Your consultant teams, when they want to be around you for extended, longer periods of time, trust grows. Creativity happens. The energy for that creativity and trust blossoms and problems get solved. That's actually what happens. It's important to share that.

Jesus Moreno (18:27.893)
Another concept I would like to drill down on and we might have covered it already, but I want to make sure that if there's a distinction we highlighted is personal alignment. Can you give us a short definition of what personal alignment is and its relevance in this conversation?

Gregory Mark Hill (18:31.192)
Yes.

Gregory Mark Hill (18:41.123)
Yes.

Gregory Mark Hill (18:50.274)
Yes, so personal alignment is very key because it ties into what your personal aspirations are, what your personal motivations are. When you are personally aligned with the project you're trying to build, the answer you're trying to get, we move from a state where the work is no longer work, but you realize whether you're getting paid a dollar,

$100,000 or a million dollars, you'd still be doing that. Then you know you're in alignment with yourself and the work that you're trying to do. This is very important because where people step out of alignment with themselves is when they get attached to the outcome. They get attached to the project. They get attached to the income that they think they're going to get from it. And I'm going to use a very simple example. When you're working on a project and you're about to get

enormous amount of funding, millions of dollars of funding. And you know that the royalties that will kick in will actually not just go to the institution, but your team also typically benefits in getting some of those royalties from the pharmaceutical, healthcare, new technology that you're bringing into the marketplace. Now, what happens is when you're out of alignment, when somebody else comes in, a competitor comes in and they get to the result faster than you and they take away the project,

And those royalties, let's just say that your team was going to get a million dollars of royalty split between your teams. Do know what we've done? We've gone out and we bought ourselves a vacation, a new car, presents for our children, a remodel of our kitchen. Now, why am I saying that? Because when you lose the project or the result to a competitor, that's one thing. It affects our career outwardly, affects our titles, maybe our bonus or salary.

But when we've gone out and spent that million dollars of royalty that we thought we're going to get, we've now lost our vacation, our presence for our wife and family. We've lost our remodeling of our kitchen, our new car. We've actually gone out and lost all those things that we didn't even have. And then we suffer again so greatly that sometimes you meet people and they say, is everything okay, Jesus? They don't even know what happened, but they can feel it and sense it. And when you are out of personal alignment,

Gregory Mark Hill (21:17.954)
with your aspirations, with your motivations, you get quickly attached to the external world. You don't even realize how fast it happened, but that's what happens. And so when you have a personal practice of your own, and I'm making it easy, but I go into more detail in my book. When you have a personal practice of your own, I talk about mantras and mantra is another Sanskrit word. Man means mind and tra means tool.

So mantra isn't just words that you say over and over again, which people connect to. A mantra is a tool of the mind to assuage and calm you during difficult situations. So that when you are saying those words, those phrases, perhaps those sacred texts, you're connecting to the energy that those words carry for you. And you get to pull that through your body energetically, positively.

And it calms you down. literally reduces your cortisol levels, pharmaceutical healthcare speak, to a level that actually calms you and puts you in a position to face the problem, to lead your team, to manage the investment capital crisis that happens to be there, the legal issues that are there, the regulatory questions that are being asked of you. You get to a state where you're calm and that leadership comes through. So when you have personal alignment, it is important.

It's not just about the external. The personal is key.

Jesus Moreno (22:52.629)
Thank you for sharing that with us. And I'm curious to learn how did you come to this realization? Can you maybe share with us an anecdote of specific boardroom moment you recall where a company hit their financial benchmarks? It was a successful moment for them.

But you can see that the clinical team was internally unfulfilled or misaligned better and that the next step, the next phase of the trial was, for lack of a better word, doomed to failed and in jeopardy. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. And what are some

Gregory Mark Hill (23:32.514)
Jeopardy.

Jesus Moreno (23:42.081)
In other words, what I'm going for is what are some expensive trial related mistakes that trace back directly to that leadership misalignment that we were speaking of?

Gregory Mark Hill (23:54.542)
Okay. I can give you an anecdote and I'll give you a story that will go along with it. So there was a strategic &A dynamic where the partner was actually going to come in and be a customer and actually invest, but it's going to actually merge two different clinical teams. Right. There's two different facets that were going on. And I was advising one of the healthcare, health technology teams and literally 18 people in the room, super smart.

lot of PhDs and they're literally yelling at each other in the &A boardroom meeting. There's supposed to be a merger happening between these two companies, right capital involved, it's going to change the lives significantly of the people, the team that's in there, they literally start yelling at each other. I mean, we had gone through animal trial testings from pigs and sheep, they're getting ready to go into the

non-small cellular lung levels and ovarian cancer levels. So this is going on in real time. And you have 18 members of the team literally yelling and screaming at each other. So I said, we need to table this, right? We went into one of the side rooms at the law offices that we're at. I said, the CEO and the founder team says, Gregory, we really need some help here. This thing is going to go, we're to lose everything.

not just lose this partnership and customer, we're gonna lose the capital and our lives are gonna be significantly impacted for the worse. What do we do? And literally at 18 professional adults, men and women, lot of PhDs the room yelling and screaming at each other. So I said, let's take all that yelling and screaming. And I literally said, let's take that and table it and put it on this table, this nice boardroom table next to us. So let's just pause for a moment.

and put all that anger and that energy on the table next to us. And I literally went around the room, all 18 professionals in that room, and I said, please give me one word that is describing what your issue is or how you're feeling. Because I wanted people to have an ability to emote and to speak because people didn't feel that they were being heard. Everybody wanted to be right. They weren't being heard. And so they're ready for a fight. They're literally fighting with each other, going to blow this huge deal.

Gregory Mark Hill (26:18.318)
Right? Huge life changing deal. So we go around the room one by one and they get it. They get it off their chest. They literally get their issues off their chest. Stop pointing the fingers and give the people literally it didn't even take more than probably a good hour or so, but we got people to give the chance to speak their issue and it didn't really matter. I mean, some of the points were just literally personal emotional. There's a lot of stress in the room. What ended up happening?

is people I said, okay, now you're ready to go back into the room because the board is on that side of the team is waiting for us. Are you ready to go back in? I said, we can talk about all this anger afterwards. Table it, get it off. Let's go back in. So shortly we go back in. People are calm down. And it takes a couple of hours. Close the deal. Consummate the transaction, the merger happens.

right? Everybody's excited. Now we go. It's success. But we go back into the side room after this several hours and late into the evening. It's literally, you know, past the midnight hour. Because we had to we had to close the deal. We didn't have much time. It had to be done that week. Literally said, well, all that anger and upset and not yelling is still on the table. Do you want to show me? Should we sort of bring it back up? And should we let everybody yell at each other and scream now?

Jesus Moreno (27:20.981)
success.

Gregory Mark Hill (27:47.054)
And it was like, no, no, we're good. We're good. But they needed some dynamic where somebody, a third party advisor like myself to be able to come in and help them remind them what was going, this actually happened. The yelling and screaming in a boardroom going to blow the deal because people wanted to be right as opposed to understanding literally what's happening there. And so I use that an example, but I want to share a simple example that we talked about.

last time that kind of brings it brings it home because people are carrying the energy of that negativity. They don't realize it. They're carrying that energy of wanting to be right and they don't realize it. And I often share the story of two monks, a senior monk and a junior monk. Normally they go out for these walks and talks and philosophize, but it had been raining for weeks and they were unable to get out there and do their normal talk. Finally,

The sun comes out, the rain stops, and the senior monk goes to the junior monk, let's go out for a walk. They go down to the stream that they normally walk by, but now it's an overflowing riverbed, it's raging river. And they see a lady down there with a bundle of sticks trying to cross the river. The senior monk sees what's going on, walks down there, picks up the lady, swoops her up in her arms, carries her across the river, and places her down on the other side. She smiles a thank you.

Now all the while the junior monk is witnessing this episode, this activity, what just happened. Several hours and several miles later, the junior monk finally brings up and gets up the courage to say to the senior monk, you know, it's not in our way and our culture and our philosophy, our tradition to have contact with a woman. How could you pick her up in your arms like that? And the senior monk looks at the junior monk and said, I picked her up, carried across the river.

and placed her down on the other side. It's been several hours and several miles. Are you still carrying her in your mind, in your heart, in your way of being? That is how we are as humans. We carry that. We carry that energy. We carry that emotion. We carry that desire to be right. We carry it and we create baggage. Sometimes we create cargo loads of it and you have to put it down and let it go.

Jesus Moreno (30:14.261)
So let go of the unneeded loads to move past critical junctions.

Gregory Mark Hill (30:18.476)
You have to let go. That's right.

Gregory Mark Hill (30:25.186)
Because what ends up happening is, when the baggage becomes cargo, it slows you down, literally. And it gets in the way. It creates the roadblocks in your communications, in your leadership. It creates roadblocks that literally stop the funding. It stops the approval. It stops the energy to come in to help you close the deal.

Jesus Moreno (30:55.967)
I see. And I think that's particularly relevant in the market we're in currently. We've described it as a capital winter for biotech, where efficiency is the only metric that seems to matter. And from your vantage point, how is this economic pressure changing the culture of clinical trial teams?

Gregory Mark Hill (31:04.568)
Yes.

Jesus Moreno (31:23.763)
Are we pushing teams towards a state of survival mode that actually compromises data integrity and in the worst cases, maybe even patient safety?

Gregory Mark Hill (31:38.072)
So it's a very important question because what's also happening is you now have AI that's being brought in to process and analyze the data that we're looking at. And again, AI is a machine learning language processing tool, but it is a tool and you have to train it, you have to teach it. It does not understand what's going on. And if you just let the AI...

go through the data and come up results. It gets to a point, and you've heard this in the industry, where it hallucinates, meaning it gives you incorrect answers. And we're probably, I'm going to say, 95%, 98 % of the way there of what the learning language models can do, what the AI can do in its current form. And that's because, and I'll give you a simple example for your audience to relate to,

When you give your AI a simple test, you have an 18 wheel truck, it's got 400 gallons of fuel, it's driving 55 miles an hour, how many miles can it go? And it'll spit out an answer, right? But in a clinical trial, there are so many more variables that are going on than just the size, the weight, the gas, and the speed. You have the truck.

And you know this, the truck driver is experiencing his own emotions in the car. You have wind speed, have topography, you have up and down, have, you have gravity, you have wind resistance. You have so many other factors, variables that are happening, like in clinical trials where you need petabytes of data to analyze. The next thing that's going to happen in the world of the biotech and the

healthcare industry sector is going to be moving from just AI and LLMs or learning language models into convergence models where the new models are going to be able to take all these additional variables and actually bring in the wind speed, the gravity, the weight of the truck, the topography, the other that are on the road, where the mindset is of the driver. What did he eat? What did he drink?

Gregory Mark Hill (34:01.836)
I'm using that as a case study example is when you go through the federal, the FDA trials and clinical trials, there are so many factors and so many layers of data you need to understand to be able to process that to get to a point to get to approvals where everybody's looking for, well, we spent 50 million to get here. If we can get the final approval into clinical trial two and then three, a giant pharma is going to come in and buy us for a billion dollars. Right. That's the ultimate dynamic.

But where we are right now is there's so many missteps along the way that the people who are doctors that have seen the clinical trials fail, many doctors are actually moving into the money world and becoming the hedge fund managers themselves. Literally it's happening and they know the trials, they know the missteps and they know where to put the capital to work.

And so you're actually seeing that happen because of exactly what you shared. You have a winter of capital frozen, not sure in which way to go. so the doctors who are specialists have actually had success are literally moving into the arena of advisory consulting and capital investment. That's what's happening now. I've seen it personally.

Jesus Moreno (35:25.377)
That's that's a would you say that's unprecedented or do do you know if there's been a similar environment, similar similar market where this has happened and and what lessons that we potentially learned from from that previous experience. Do you have an intuition about that?

Gregory Mark Hill (35:46.966)
I do have an intuition about that, but it's also because I'm out in the world and I'm meeting with the lawyers, I'm meeting with the IP lawyers, but I'm also meeting with the investment banking teams that are in the pharma, healthcare, technology, biotech world. And now the banking teams, the research teams are literally hiring doctors themselves. They're hiring doctors from the field to come into the banking teams, right? To analyze.

the venture capital and private equity guys are hiring doctors to come into their teams to analyze and understand. So now you have far more intelligence than you ever had before in terms of a equal footing on both sides of the table, if you will. So now what ends up happening is now that you have doctors and PhDs, not just on the entrepreneurial drug or technology or biotech side equation, you have

Doctors and PhDs sitting on the other side the investment side the strategy side of the equation What ends up happening is it gets back to the fundamentals of what is the business plan? How are you actually going to make money? Who is the team leading this process through these clinical trials through these phases? What ends up happening is you people the doctors the teams they get so excited about the research and the possibilities of data That they forget and they lose sight of what's the actual business?

What's the actual problem that's being solved? And to get capital, to get strategic partners, you have to be very clear as a team, what's the problem we're solving? What is the solution we're bringing? How are we executing the delivery of our problem solving solution into the marketplace? Who is governing and stewarding that process of bringing it into the marketplace?

It can't just be, we'll get to the point where big pharma comes in, they solve our problems. No, the bankers, the investors, the strategic partners want to know. Yes, you have the technology, the biotech research, the data, but you also have the team to execute the delivery of the problem solving solution into the market. And if you don't have that, that's why there's a winter and there isn't capital coming in.

Jesus Moreno (38:13.345)
for lack of clarity or specificity in that definition of what the objective, the solution, the problem that's been worked on is. That's very insightful. Thank you for that. And keeping that trend of digital.

Gregory Mark Hill (38:31.342)
You're welcome.

Jesus Moreno (38:36.289)
revolution, let's say that the centralization of clinical trials mediated by AI driven monitoring. As this technology becomes more and more human, excuse me, and more human depend less. There's a better way of saying that less dependent on humans. What is the biggest challenge for leadership teams trying to

maintained that human-centered culture in the midst of a digital first environment.

Gregory Mark Hill (39:13.774)
It's a really important question. It's a challenging one. It's a difficult one. We're moving into a hybrid state where we're human and computer and human and AI are interfacing at accelerating levels. We're moving from an arithmetic growth rate to a geometric growth rate to step function growth rates. The human dynamic is lost when humans are just relying on the answers being spit out by the models.

The models need to, as I shared before, they are trained by the wisdom and the experience of the people that are putting it together. If you just leave it up to the models and the AI itself, yes, it can help you win a chess game, right? Faster than a human, but you still need to understand the human, has to be the human, not just the empathy, but the human touch and the wisdom I've experienced.

to bring in, otherwise there isn't an understanding by the computers of will this impact the life, right? It takes too much. We're not there yet. I believe we will get there and are getting closer, but we're not there yet. So right now the human interaction is paramount to keep training and teaching and educating the AI, the technology to evolve and get there.

And that's where the convergence modeling will come into place and take it to the next level. So I'd say we have a good eight to 10 years of hybrid activity and a lot more training that is needed before we get there.

Jesus Moreno (40:57.493)
So as the sophistication of the tool progresses, that dependence grows stronger and ultimately we're going to rely on the technology or do you see a scenario where the focus shifts and we just trust the tool to do its job and we focus our attention elsewhere?

How do you see that relationship playing out?

Gregory Mark Hill (41:28.174)
I think there's an evolution there, Jesus, in terms of, so when I was young, I wanted to be a surgeon, which is why I'm attracted to this conversation. And one of things that they share with me early on when I young is that my hand doesn't move. So you need to have a steady hand. People who have a shaky hand are not going to be the best surgeons. But now we're actually using technology at such a level where we're using technology to do.

the work to do the surgery. So that means the surgeons themselves are going to the next level. So what ends up happening is there is going to be not just a bifurcation or a trifurcation, there is going to be a reality and a delegation of what the technology can do and do extremely well and what the human instinct and the human insight and wisdom can also do. So there'll be a changing and an evolution of roles and understanding.

that happen. It's changing fast every day, but we're still at the early innings of where we are here. The efficiencies from AI, it's still not there yet. It's still not there yet. The training is still happening. There's such an overflow of competition that there's a lot of rhetoric and noise out there that people can't quite see clearly just yet. So the human dynamic is going to remain vital for these first couple of years.

Jesus Moreno (43:00.193)
That's very important nowadays, specifically because of what we were discussing previously, that capital winter we're going through. I would like to hear your thoughts on, again, having AI, the tool, handle the bulk of the data crunching.

and insight deriving from the data sets. How do we measure the financial ROA of researcher leaders in a clinical research team? And again, how do we strike that balance between distinguishing what AI is good at and where that technology is currently and how it still needs to mature to be

let's say, equipped to be leading the answering process that comes after gathering the data. And how do we, in the sight of that, the current state of the technology, how do we measure the ROA of having a research leader

with certain amount of experience and certain amount of training versus an upcoming research leader that's just arriving at the scene and it's faced with a very powerful tool that seems to compensate for his lack of experience. How would a CEO or a venture capital firm

go about balancing, analyzing that scenario, yes.

Gregory Mark Hill (44:58.432)
analyzing the situation.

Yeah, what? Yes. So what it really comes down to its sequence and timing, and it also comes down to the volume of the data that needs to be analyzed. So if you have one person trying to solve one problem, that's one thing. And I'll give you an example, which is may seem out of context, but it brings it home. So in the not for profit arena.

There are literally millions and millions of 501 C3 not-for-profits in America. And there are multiple overlapping not-for-profits. Let's just say in the area of like brain cancer. Okay. What ends up happening in the not-for-profit arena is you don't have just one, but you literally have thousands of not-for-profits in brain tumors because somebody's family gets sick.

They start with 501c3, they do a fundraiser, and they start to collect data in that one particular 501c3.

All of these different not-for-profits and there are thousands of them I'm just using brain cancer as an example, they don't communicate with each other. They don't communicate. So all that data is disparate. And so even though AI can pull one by one by one, it doesn't have access to everything. A human can't do that. You have to keep getting to a point where that data is uploaded. That data is actually there.

Gregory Mark Hill (46:31.81)
the AI can actually then take the thousands of different 501C3s in brain tumor, not-for-profit foundation work, and start to aggregate that data if it's connected. But right now, it's disparate and disconnected, and so the AI can't even do that. Humans definitely don't do that, but that's where the AI will actually play an important role. When you get to the level of Merck, Pfizer,

Glaxo these giant pharmaceutical they are literally having they're literally analyzing Millions and millions of rows of data. You can't do that with a human anymore. It's been a while already What that can do is process the data But you still need somebody right now that can actually Take a look at the trends and look at that to train the models to get to the next level. So still right now

The models still need the human impact to train to get to the next level. Eventually it'll start to evolve, but we're still are in the early innings. And so you, you are at the point where, uh, these medical teams, these research teams are no longer hiring thousands of people. They're hiring hundreds. They're shrinking down the number. So that means there's going to be a talent drain and you still need to keep bringing these people into play because.

You have to have a knowledge transfer from the senior experts, the senior PhDs to the new juniors that are coming in. What that means is from an ROI and an ROA perspective, from a venture capital perspective, it comes down to leadership, again, management, operations, processing and stewardship, because at the end of the day, the technology can't govern itself yet. It can't run itself yet. We'll get there.

It still needs the wisdom that needs to be ported into how do you do this? So it's, we're still in the early innings, Jesus. So all those issues you brought up juniors, seniors, ROI, ROA, it's sequence and timing. We're still early. So we're still making bets. So you have to step back and look at strategically, where are we from a government perspective? Where, what is the government looking to do?

Gregory Mark Hill (48:54.508)
What is the government looking to solve at that scale? That's what changes the impact of how capital is deployed.

Gregory Mark Hill (49:06.626)
to help you understand that. Go ahead.

Jesus Moreno (49:06.657)
So as we... Okay, go ahead please.

Gregory Mark Hill (49:11.054)
To help you understand just a little bit, you know, and the tangential related, the giant defense companies in America really have been around for a long period of time. Like the pharmaceutical giants have been around for a long time now. And the new technologies that are coming out of Silicon Valley in the defense and technology area are aspiring and they're getting funded. But there's been a change.

recently where the giant defense technology companies are now becoming customers and now becoming buyers of that technology. And now they need that new technology to the point where the next 25 years of capital allocation will be moving into defense technology at an accelerating rate. The pharmaceutical companies now they used to look at the aspiring new technologies that are being invested in.

And they didn't know actually what to choose. was too much of a scattershot approach. What AI can actually help do, and they're doing this now, is actually focus in on all of these investments, these small investments, small companies, small entrepreneurs, and start to analyze and literally, I would say today, only 5 % of all the data that is out there is being evaluated to be used to make an investment.

into a new biotech arena. With technology, we'll be able to access the, I'll call it 90, 95 % of the other data that's out there to make a better decision, a better choice for investment. When that happens, it will open up the winter that we're experiencing because the efficiency and the aggregated data and the aggregated knowledge will be there to help investors understand

and move from, know what you know, to you know what you don't know, to the biggest 80 % portion of that pie is you don't know what you don't know yet. And the AI models and the technology is going to open up access to the 80%, 90 % that's not being used and will help evaluate companies at an accelerated rate, which means it will open up the treasury coffers of the venture capital, private equity and hedge fund areas to start investing in.

Gregory Mark Hill (51:40.44)
what they see happening more intelligently. That's what's going to get you ROI, your return on investment, your ROI, your return on your assets and accelerate the return capacity. So we are at that inflection point, which is coming.

Jesus Moreno (51:55.092)
And I'm sure the CEOs and entrepreneurs listening in are hoping for that day to come sooner rather than later. But in my mind, Gary, there's an additional, I don't want to say conflict, maybe tension that exists with the scenario you're describing, which is when the technology

achieves that level of sophistication and we were able to comb through those petabytes of data and were able to correct, extract the features and clearly classify what's a winning bet from what's not. It almost seems that the technology would also be at a point where it can

Gregory Mark Hill (52:33.539)
Yes.

Jesus Moreno (52:52.171)
copy the methodologies and copy the techniques. And then the question arises, what is the moat? What is going to distinguish one of the hundred or thousand nonprofits that are working on a specific cancer project from the rest? from our conversation,

I would propose that potentially the moat is going to become that true base culture across the leadership of those teams is that alignment with themselves, the understanding of what problem

specifically they want to solve and how they've organized their teams to achieve that. Would you agree with that conclusion or do you see it playing out differently?

Gregory Mark Hill (53:58.388)
I agree 100 % with that. In fact, there really is no other way when the team itself is not aligned on an individual and a team basis. I've read the later chapters of those books many times and it doesn't end well. It really does not end well for those teams. What's happening is you have an acceleration of information that's coming in.

And what ends up happening is a lot of teams and entrepreneurs and new ideas, they get caught into, they think they can go into the same competitive market and have a better, faster, cheaper product in that market, which is highly competitive already. What will distinguish and AI will help here as long along with aside humans as well is when you're creating.

opportunities and you're creating your new market and a new technology, a new opportunity where you create your own market and you run fast as opposed to trying to create one more thing that's just going to be bought in the traditional process of let me do this, get to phase one, phase two, and then phase somewhere between phase two, phase three, I get bought by a giant pharma. That model is so competitive and so bureaucratical and so complicated.

that the new winners and the new entrepreneurs that are going to get the capital are not just going to be going through that same modus operandi anymore. They're going to seek new opportunities, which AI and technology is going to afford. And that's where the human comes in and say, I see all this data, but have we thought about this? Because the AI is not going to be able to do that because it's not trained yet and doesn't know that. I had an uncle who was

one of the most foremost research scientists in fundamental analysis of the study of the auditory canal and amphibian life, or as he liked to say, the study of hearing in goldfish. I said, why aren't you a Nobel laureate? I told my uncle this, says, I just look at the data. He says, you need the brilliant person to come in look at all the data and say, this is interesting. This is the opportunity.

Jesus Moreno (56:08.161)
You

Gregory Mark Hill (56:22.862)
And then he's the Nobel laureate or she's the Nobel laureate. The same thing with what's happening now. You have a lot of, uh, you know, research scientists, uh, do when they move into alignment with themselves and have the entrepreneurial spirit to create something new and look at the technology that can help them see new markets, new opportunities. That's what's going to get the funding. That's going to be exciting.

Jesus Moreno (56:49.601)
That's exciting to think about. And for the CEO, CMOs and head of clinical that are listening to our conversation right now who recognize themselves in this, hating those trial milestones on paper, but feeling internally depleted. What would you recommend as a very first step for them?

Gregory Mark Hill (56:53.708)
It is.

Gregory Mark Hill (57:05.9)
Yes.

Jesus Moreno (57:17.697)
What can they realistically do in the next week to start realigning themselves without compromising the integrity or timeline or even the investor confidence that they're responsible to carry?

Gregory Mark Hill (57:36.59)
I'm going to go back and say, read my book. But I will say, know, humor and kidding aside, I'm serious. What I shared at the very beginning of our talk for your audience, challenges, suffering, samsara is every day and everywhere. And you can't just look at the problem, bang your head against the wall as Einstein says, and think you're going to get different outcome. You actually have to start with your personal alignment.

Take that breath. Literally, take a breath.

Pause. Ask yourself, who am I being with this problem, this situation I'm facing in this moment right now? Who am I being to myself? Who am I being to my family? Who am I being to the team around me? Who am I being? How am I being? Am I yelling? Am I screaming? Is my tone judgmental?

When you blame and shame and judge in a science setting, in an R &D setting, you shut down creativity. People mistake the fact that creativity does happen with numbers. It happens with data. People can take a look at data and be creative with it. If you are blaming, shaming and judging, you shut down that creativity. You block it. And your teams of talent don't have the ability and the wherewithal or feel that they're able to express themselves.

you lose out on possibility. This is key. When you are a at a chair level, at an R &D leadership level, at a department level, at a manager level, at a supervisor level, governance level, you need to take that breath.

Gregory Mark Hill (59:22.552)
Hold it.

Let it go. Who am I being in this moment? Is what I'm saying to my team, repelling them, shutting them down, or attracting them? Magnet. Repel or magnet? That's what I would share again.

Jesus Moreno (59:43.029)
Gregory Mark, hell, sincerely thank you for your willingness to pull back the curtain on that human cost of this industry and for providing us with the clinical perspective and the boardroom perspective and understanding the most important protocol we can follow.

is the one that keeps us, the leaders, aligned with our purpose. Thank you so much for sharing with us your insights and for our audience, the link to Gregory's book and strategic coaching framework are going to be in our show notes. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for listening and until next time, keep accelerating.

Gregory Mark Hill (01:00:34.808)
Thank you, Jesus. A pleasure.