Maria Cho, A Diversity Leader And CEO Of A Company Vying For Global Food Security And Treatments Against Diseases Of The Future

Q. What were your first memories of what you wanted from a career and profession?

A: Maria Cho: Growing up, I was always deeply intrigued by science and wanted to be a medical doctor. I spent the early part of my life planning and thinking about becoming an MD. 

I genuinely believed I would become a surgeon. I was really good with my hands and very detail-oriented. I did very well in school and always had excellent grades.

However, my family was not the most well-off. I applied to several top-tier and Ivy League Schools and was admitted to a couple of them, but we couldn’t afford for me to attend.

Instead, I went to the University of Florida, where I studied both Chemistry and Music Performance. I had an ear and eye for music. I really enjoyed it.

My next step was to go to medical school, but I had to pay for bills, so I began working as a medical assistant at a doctor’s office, where I experienced the medical environment. Six months into my job as a medical assistant, I decided I did not want to be a doctor anymore. I realized my passion was more about the process of creating drugs rather than being a prescriber. So, I began thinking about how to get involved in creating products to help fight diseases worldwide.

A friend recommended Thomas Jefferson University to me because it’s a medical-focused graduate school. I attended and obtained a Master's in Biomedical Chemistry, which was almost a complete Ph.D. focusing on research emphasizing pharmaceutical management. It also focused on the drug development cycle. 

Parallel to my studies, I began working as a full-time research assistant at a lab. And because I had a very good relationship with my supervisor, I did my thesis there.

I did my work, and then during the nights, I did my thesis work, including the experiments and things I needed to do for my graduate degree.

It was a very energizing time of my life, and it helped me move away from the things holding me back. I saw a genuine future for me.

Q. So, fond memories as a student?

Maria Cho: My time at the University of Florida was one of the best times in my life. I had two guys as roommates and got along with them really well. We had an exceptional family-type environment. I truly enjoyed being part of that community. We had an open-door policy. People could visit whenever they wanted. We had meals over the weekends and allowed anybody to stay and even sleep on our couch if they needed a place to stay.

I needed to supplement my scholarships in school with some income so I applied to work at a movie theatre and didn’t get the job.  So I ended up becoming a Cutco knives sales rep. It was a direct-to-customer sales job that helped me get through school but also helped me grow in a very early way in my career. Selling knives was a really cool experience. I sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of knives and opened a new branch office for them during the summer in Ocala, Florida near my college. I recruited a hundred sales reps. We ended up being the number three office in the state of Florida in sales that summer. I was only 19 years old, and this was my first real business.

Q. That was a promising opportunity for you as you demonstrated talent, skills, and aptitude for sales and entrepreneurship in sales. Did you not think that was the path for you to take?

Maria Cho: Yes, I gave it some thought, but then I believed that if I became a doctor, I would make enough money to care for my family and myself. At the time, I was not even contemplating running a business long-term, even though I was conscious of how good I was at selling knives. Some weekends, I had ten to 12 appointments and made $10,000 in commissions. That made it possible for me to leave college debt-free, in stark contrast to my days in college when I didn’t even have enough to pay the rent. One day, I was on the floor of my room counting all my pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters when my roommate walked in and asked what I was doing. I told him that was how I survived. He offered to pay my rent. That was a defining moment when I told myself I would make sure I was never in that situation again.

Q. You have worked so hard to get where you are today. What are you most proud of in your career trajectory? 

Maria Cho: Coming from having nothing to working hard for what I needed to do for myself and something meaningful more globally. 

I enjoyed selling knives and could still perform a demo today, but I knew it wouldn’t be impactful. 

I wanted to build on the difficulties I went through that made me stronger and more resilient.

I was convinced I would do something I would be passionate about, and so this was a pivotal moment in my career.

Q. Let’s talk about diversity and inclusion. When did you realise that as a woman, you would have to work harder than your male counterparts to get to where you are today? 

Maria Cho: Now that you ask, I realise that, yes, I’ve had to work harder to stand out from a sea of men. At Fujifilm, I was in a commercial role for some time and reported to a woman. She, however, fell ill. And then, after an internal restructuring, I began reporting to a guy named Andy … a great friend and a great mentor to me, but he had no experience running a commercial team .. he’d never sold a thing in his life. 

So, I found myself with some 15 years of experience reporting to someone who had no experience in the field. We would joke about how it was a boys club.

I became a senior director of Commercial and US Sales, most of whom reported to me were directors. I asked myself why I was not a VP. Why are all these guys VPs?

I was doing the job of three or four people by running the entire sales organization, selling hundreds of millions of dollars and still was only a senior director.

There was another female colleague of mine who was also a senior director in charge of Marketing.

I realised then that I would not be allowed to become a VP even though I grew the business year after year, exceeding any of my male colleagues.

At that point, I was not loving the corporate world. It felt oppressive in some ways.

I had an incredible amount of respect for my grandfather. He was a World War II veteran. He’d been in the invasion at Normandy in charge of organizing the beach patrol. I wouldn’t be where I am today if it hadn’t been for him.

One day, very early in my life, he told me that setting limits for oneself allows others to control your potential. That made me understand that I needed to control my own potential.

With that in mind, I decided to leave Fujifilm and founded my own biotech startup along with a co-founder to solve specific problems. We focused on solving a personal problem, which was acne, which I had suffered with almost all of my life. I thought of the incredible potential products that failed for different reasons.

The company was called Phi Therapeutics. We had a small lab out of a garage, where we invented a microbiome editing technology.

For the first time, I was directly in control and responsible for ensuring this business moved forward with my co-founder, who had a solid scientific background and a  Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins.

I used all my pharma experience, and we succeeded in manufacturing the acne product and getting it to market in the middle of the global Covid crisis. We had super fun with this and succeeded in doing things we’d never done before.

I proved to myself that being a woman was no obstacle and felt satisfied that I could finally control my destiny.

I would no longer allow anyone to tell me no. 

Q. Why do you feel getting more women involved in the tech sector is important? And how is diversity working out for you in your present role as the Triplebar CEO?

Maria Cho: Diversity is incredibly important to me. I believe women frequently don’t think they're worthy of an opportunity like this because we’ve unfortunately been in a man’s world. They’ve been in charge and in control for so long. However, in the US, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, women can thrive in research, science, technology, and engineering.

I’m convinced that it starts with women knowing and understanding that they have a voice and an opinion and that they are worthy of the opportunity to effect change and succeed.

I am thrilled that I am in a position where I can foster diversity and help women overcome their insecurity and fears of speaking up and sharing their ideas.

I love that I have created an environment that, at Triplebar, we call psychological safety, where anyone, woman or man, can contribute.

Our founder, CTO and Founder, Jeremy Agresti, also believes in diversity. We understand that the best, most effective teams are those that work in a psychologically safe environment.

We have four senior leaders in the organization. Two men and two women. My male counterparts are incredibly committed to this diversity mission, and elevating women in the workplace.

We’ve got some extraordinary women here. I am very proud of this achievement.

Q.: What about the rest of the sector over the last few years? Are you seeing more women in the industry that feel comfortable and are in leadership roles? Is there progress in this regard?

Maria Cho: Yes, there is progress in several sectors. I’ve seen more women CEOs in pharma. Diversity is more prominent in the food sector.

However, we are not entirely there yet. We need to understand that we need to end the stigma of race, gender, and sexual orientation.

If you have a skillset and are incredible at what you do, you need support to grow and elevate yourself. We all need to work together towards a joint mission.

I want this vision to become a reality.

Today, however, I attend events and conferences, and other people see me with a male counterpart and direct themselves to him, thinking that he’s “naturally” in charge. He’ll tell them that I am actually the boss, which feels good, but at the same time, I feel this needs to be addressed. There needs to be a change in people’s mindset.

Q.: Is there anything else that can be done to change that mindset at a societal level? How can we pave the road for women to get the top jobs they deserve?

Maria Cho: I don’t know of one thing we could put our finger on, but there has been progress, and there are more women in bio and more organisations leading with diversity. 

As women, we need to continue leading by example. I want to encourage women to continue to be exceptional, and eventually, we will break out into a diverse workplace where there are more women in management and leadership. 

In this context, it is crucial to have leadership with empathy. From my life experiences, I bring a unique eye to empathy and understanding that positively impacts the workforce. We can work together to deliver goals. 

People tell me that one of my superpowers is to coalesce a team. One of my colleagues called me the Queen of Convergence. I am happy to have this ability to bring the team together. Working a diverse team cohesively helps solve problems, and solving problems impacts the world, and that’s what I want to continue doing.

Q.: Let’s talk more about your legacy because you’ve successfully built trust by leveraging relationships and elevating natural bias. What legacy would you like to leave behind as a CEO of a leading biotech company?

Maria Cho: People and human capital are the biggest asset for any successful business. That is the case at Triplebar. We are proud to have a culture where people can thrive and succeed professionally and personally. We are happy to offer everybody at Triplebar the opportunity to take charge, control, and own their growth.

I want our company to be the first one in history that, thanks to this culture, has grown over time.

I would like to be on the cover of Time Magazine in five years, highlighting our company’s success thanks to diversity, our culture and our environment of psychological safety. We believe that diversity and supporting all our team members on their path to growth and success will lead to the company's success, and we see that already. And this is as important to us as developing foods and drugs to solve world problems.

I want my legacy to be about having food products and drugs that are helping people globally. By 2050, I want Triplebar to have helped feed the world with products we have helped develop and help cure disease with safe therapies that we discovered.

Q.: The recent fundraiser has been an unmitigated success. As a CEO, how did you find the whole process?

Maria Cho: There are so many things to say in this regard. It was challenging and I do think I had encountered resistance because of being a woman CEO. I didn’t fit the typical profile of a CEO and that is because of my gender. Fundraising has been an interesting process for me and I never stopped emphasising our mission and vision. We are building a successful business and neeed the right partners to help us reach our goals while sharing our vision.

The fundraising phase also happened when market valuations plummeted and businesses were not getting funded.

VCs were highly cautious. All this created the perfect storm of how to get the cash to build a reasonable business like ours.

This created a mix of scenarios, emotions, and difficulties. But ultimately, we aligned with some incredible investment partners that I am really proud to work with to build this business. 

I am very thankful that we stuck to our plan, mission, and vision to transform the bio-economy.

Q.: How difficult is it to be the CEO and also lead the fundraising efforts simultaneously? Usually, these are two different roles.

Maria Cho: Yes, I agree. Running the business and raising money are two jobs. I was constantly pitching the business and not as involved in operations as I would’ve wanted, so it was a significant challenge. However, I had great confidence in allowing my team to run large portions of operations while I was fundraising. My colleagues knew I was there for anything they needed, including meetings and to make strategic decisions, and this helped forge exceptional relationships with them. 

It was exhausting, but raising the money needed to come from my executive team and me because we demonstrated to investors our passion for building and solving food and drug problems worldwide, which is what investors bought into. We built incredible relationships with our investment partners. 

Q.: Triplebar now has some incredible investment partners and new board members, which is exciting. Tell us what you expect in the next 12 months, and where do you see Triplebar by 2025?

Maria Cho: Our business model as a venture-backed company is focused on success. The ability to expand our product portfolio to work on more products and really start driving deliverables in the three product verticals in bioactives, cultivated meat, and antibodies is really where we’re landing. We will expand our product portfolio from a handful today to a dozen that we are already developing.

We’re incredibly excited because one or two partners will launch their products commercially in the near future. That speaks to the momentum we've been building over the course of the business. The train is on track and building speed.

Q.: That leads to our next question perfectly. With more stakeholders, media coverage, and two huge events in which you are participating, is it excitement building, or is pressure increasing?

Maria Cho: We have an obligation to our stakeholders to deliver. So, yes, there’s increased pressure. But my team and I have incredible confidence and excitement about our deliverability. We have an outstanding opportunity to really prove ourselves. Although we should celebrate that we have just completed a very successful Series A round, we should focus on delivering, which is more exciting for us. However, we celebrated for a few minutes and immediately after focused on building, delivering, and making an impact.

Q.: There is a lot of talk in the news about humankind and that we are at a pivotal moment in history. Do you share that sentiment? And in this context, where do you see Triplebar?

Maria Cho: We are at a pivotal moment. People ask me what keeps me up at night. Two things do: how will we feed the world by 2050, and how will we fight the diseases of the future? Humankind has lived at pivotal inflection points. The industrial age was one of those pivotal moments. Now, we are entering the biology age. I want Triplebar to be part of building the foundation of the biology age, leveraging our platform to create products to help solve these problems we face today. The need we have to feed and heal humanity. If we do not innovate now, then we will face crises.

Today, we face a concerning loss of biodiversity, the emergence of different diseases, and the climate change crisis. These factors demonstrate we need to innovate to prevent these crises from becoming unmanageable.

Triplebar is at the forefront of innovation in bio and food tech and is the leader in moving humanity into the biology age.

Q.: What is your company’s key differentiator and what clearly distances you from other companies with which Triplebar has been wrongly confused or compared. 

Maria Cho: We’ve been characterized as a synthetic biology company. Scientists in the industry believe we're smart enough to know enough about metabolism to design solutions. We know enough to do a couple of genetic code tweaks here and there. Let's use some editing technologies. Let's rationally design the outcome to help us solve our problems. However, that only takes us so far. 

We know that evolution is an incredibly powerful algorithm with the power to evolve a single-cell organism all the way through to establishing the human consciousness. While this algorithm is incredibly powerful, in biology we are only asking it to help us with a few things 

At Triplebar, we take a hypothesis-free approach versus a rational design approach, accepting that we don't know everything about metabolism. We can't truly understand all the complexities of what metabolism can do, but what if we could actually break into and look at the entire biological design space that evolution uses to create things? That’s what Triplebar’s platform accomplishes and in fact we are only asking the evolution algorithm to do tiny things. To make a specific protein at a higher titer, make cells float in a bioreactor and make an antibody that is functionally active against a target. 

We're asking Evolution to do these very small tweaks, but until now, we did not have the technology to access that design space. And that's where Triplebar has stepped into and is changing the game on how we approach biological design and engineering.

Triplebar sees itself taking this technology, accessing the entire biological design space, and doing it at three to four orders of magnitude faster, less expensive and more sustainably than ever before. 

We can progress at this critical intersection of innovation and how we make biological products. 

Even our scientists have come from a places where there has only been the use of rational design, and we've have even done a few experiments where we've introduced rationale design into our workflows. And every time evolution wins, every time hypothesis-free design wins.

Our platform has proven that it has the power to do what we say it can do to achieve meaningful progress for humanity. This is critical, and it differentiates us from the others in our industry. We have miniaturized this test process in biology and sped it up to hyperspeed and therefore can look at tens of millions to hundreds of millions of tests in a single day or, in other words, tens of thousands of times more testing than any other firm in our sector. 

We have significantly reduced the footprint, plastic, and other hazardous waste that our competitors would generate with the same testing we do and also do this in 10% of the time.

Our impact on climate is significantly greater than our competitors. The testing time is also significantly less.

This progress has put us in a position to hit this 2050 vision because we’ve tapped into this evolution algorithm for the first time in history. We're the next generation.

Q.: Everyone is currently talking about AI. Some companies are trying to shoehorn it into their strategy. What part does AI have in the future of Triplebar?

Maria Cho: AI is an incredibly powerful tool if it's trained properly. Triplebar creates data sets that are large enough to train AI algorithms to leverage machine learning for biology. The genotype-phenotype link we create in our datasets is the first of its kind, allowing us to make meaningful progress. There's lots of talk of generative AI by many companies, but they all have the same problem: they need large data sets. Triplebar has those data sets. We are generating those data sets as we continue to move our programs forward. We will make meaningful progress with the data sets we generate in the future, as well as be able to leverage those algorithms to speed up the process even further.

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