Yash Sabharwal
Founder & CEO, QbDVision
GET TO KNOW YASH...
Hometown:
Rochester, NY
Alma Mater:
University of Rochester, then PhD program at University of Arizona
Hobbies:
Cooking, learning guitar, being a sports dad to two daughters
Q: What was your very first job?
A: I was a busboy at a chain Mexican restaurant. Talk about learning the value of hard work!
Q: What is a snapshot of your startup experiences?
A: QbDVision is my third startup company. My first was a high-end imaging platform for the biomedical space that I co-founded with other post-grad optical engineering students. After that, I went on to be a founding member of a startup called Xeris Pharmaceutical—which was my foray into the pharma world.
Q: What led to the creation of QbDVision?
A: As the COO at Xeris, I quickly realized there were no software tools available to scale and manage the multiple dimensions of a very long and complex pharma product development process. We were dependent on tracking processes in Excel and Word, wasting a lot of time and effort, and had poor program visibility because of dispersed and unstructured data. After a successful handoff to the next management team at Xeris in 2016, I was inspired to create a solution to fix this problem and approached my tech-savvy next-door neighbor, Ryan Shillington (former Trilogy OG), to help me. We created QbDVision – a digital product lifecycle management platform for pharma and biotech companies that provides structure to data and visibility into manufacturing development for pharma and biotech products, teams, and processes.
Q: What advice would you like to share with other founders?
A: There are a few things. First, people are not commodities. Hire slowly and carefully—and hire people that fit your value systems and trust them to do their jobs.
Second, build balance among your executive team, and find people that don’t think like you. The best ideas come from a “push-and-pull” environment. Third, try to minimize unforced errors that disrupt your momentum.
Q: Do you have any fundraising advice?
A: Always be talking to people about fundraising—even if you just finished raising a round. While you should be selective when choosing investors, sometimes I think entrepreneurs wait too long and are too worried about dilution. If the company has a strong foundation and you have a strong product market fit, there will be an opportunity to get a good return on their investment.
Q: As a founder, what is the hardest lesson you have learned?
A: I’ve learned, and am still learning, to get out of the way and trust my team. I’m not a patient person by nature, so it’s tempting to jump in and solve every problem my way. It takes courage to let go and trust your team.
Q: What was your first key leadership hire at QbDVision?
A: I am heavily involved in sales, which in the pharmaceutical industry requires a great deal of international travel, so my first key hire was a COO. In my world, you must have someone that is detail- and process-oriented to drive the business forward with execution excellence on a day-to-day basis.
Q: How do you manage a fully remote team spread across the globe?
A: It starts with culture and culture starts at the top with the CEO. It must be instilled on a consistent basis. We are a team of about 30 people that all work remotely, and we don’t have an individual dedicated to HR. I believe it is incumbent upon each manager to be responsible for their own HR management – not to hand off issues but to stay engaged with their people. As leaders, we need to make sure our employees know we care about them and their professional development.
Q: What do you believe has been your biggest career achievement thus far?
A: At Xeris, the first program we started was to develop an auto-injectable drug to rescue people with diabetes from severe hypoglycemia. It is like an EpiPen for people with diabetes to save their lives in an emergency. Seeing this product ultimately receive approval from the FDA was incredibly gratifying.
Q: What is your favorite vacation spot?
A: We have a second home in Loreto, Mexico. My family and I love going there to escape.
QbDVision is a first-of-its-kind Digital CMC platform, designed to modernize workflows, knowledge, and data management for life science companies. QbDVision enables development teams with a unified and comprehensive view of all these workflows – product/process development, material management, control strategy, tech transfer – to create a powerful combination of historical knowledge, risk-based analysis and real-time guidance to support data-driven decisions. QbDVision simplifies product lifecycle management helping life science companies efficiently and effectively accelerate therapeutic breakthroughs and realize the full potential of their science.
“I’m not a patient person by nature, so it’s tempting to jump in and solve every problem my way. It takes courage to let go and trust your team.”