BY TASNEEM PAGHDIWALA A native of Nigeria, Osagie Imasogie L’85 grew up listening to the ancient proverbs of his mother’s people, the Yorubas. Though he now holds degrees from the London School of Economics and Penn Law School, and lives with his own family in suburban Pennsylvania, he still feels the pull of those simple but powerful Yoruba sayings. Which he uses, quite literally, as business tools. During the latter phases of a twenty-five year career in the pharmaceutical industry, the last ten in the pharmaceutical industry, Imasogie has relied on “home truths” to develop an unusual and trademark approach to solving problems and raising venture capital. For example, when he became Vice President and Director of GSK Ventures at GlaxoSmithKline, he had been thinking about the hundreds of new medicines large pharmaceutical companies halt in mid-development when one of his mother’s proverbs came back to him: “A crumb from an elephant’s meal is a feast to the ant.” With that in mind, Imasogie formulated a system in which smaller biotech start-ups could complete and market the products gathering dust on the shelves of “elephantine” pharmaceutical players. They could then use their cash capital to fund the projects they obtained rights to under the model Imasogie devised, and repay the larger pharmaceutical company in equity. |
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