Speaker 1:
Welcome to TV Cowen Insights, a space that brings leading thinkers together to share insights and ideas shaping the world around us. Join us as we converse with the top minds who are influencing our global sectors.
Yaron Werber:
Thank you for joining us for another exciting episode in our Biotech Decoded podcast series. I am Yaron Werber, biotech analyst at TD Cowen, and I'm super excited to be joined today by my long-term friend, ex-colleague, and competitor, Ron Renaud. In this episode, leading Biotechs to Success to discuss his path to becoming a biotech entrepreneur, CEO, chairperson and leader. Ron is Kailera Therapeutic's president and CEO. Prior to joining Kailera, he served as Cerevel Therapeutics's president and CEO, where he guided the company to its acquisition by AbbVide in 2024. Previously, he was also a partner at Bain Capital Life Sciences, and before Bain, he led Translate Bio as chairman and CEO through its acquisition by Sanofi in 2021. Ron was also previously president and CEO at Idenix Pharmaceuticals through its acquisition by Merck. Earlier in his career, he was a biotech equity research analyst at JP Morgan, Schwab Soundview and Bear Stearns.
Ron also had several roles at Amgen early in his career in clinical research, investor relations and finance. Ron, so great seeing you, and thank you so much for joining us. We've known each other now for literally, as we say, over two decades from when we both started as sell-side analysts and we've followed each other for a long time. You ultimately left, became CFO and CBO at Idenix, and we were covering the company, and you were very instrumental in really turning it around, putting it on the right path, and ultimately its acquisition by Merck. And then went to translate. We had breakfast right after you joined the company. Had an amazing platform. Really was a little bit shapeless as to where it's going with some challenges, and you really managed to turn it around, find a new strategy, a new technology platform, and ultimately shepherd that to its acquisition. And then, of course, Cerevel, which was a great outcome. So thanks so much for joining. We appreciate it.
Ron Renaud:
Yeah, Yaron, thank you very much. I've been lucky to know you for this time period, measuring decades both as a competitor, but more importantly as friends. So thanks for having me.
Yaron Werber:
Yeah, we're both diehard Boston fans, so it makes it easy.
Ron Renaud:
Exactly.
Yaron Werber:
There's a lot to talk about with you. We want to talk about leadership. We're going to talk about key learnings from both sides of the fence. We're going to talk about strategy, how to shepherd a company towards success. So let's start with Kailera. You were a partner at Bain Capital and ultimately decided to step over right when Kailera was getting founded, $400 million series A at the end of last year. Really one of the most exciting new biotechs that's actually a late-stage company in obesity. What was interesting, why did you join it?
Ron Renaud:
Yeah, no, it's a great question. As I sat and thought about every company that I've had the good fortune to be a part of, you just highlighted some of those. Idenix, getting there before the hot period that was HCV drug development. I mean, you remember, it was like the wild, wild West developing novel at HCV antivirals and that turned out really, really well for patients with HCV. So going to the next thing you're right was I started thinking about what was something that was novel, was new. I didn't want to go into something necessarily to really turn it around. And you're right, we started with RaNA Therapeutics, and we ended up with Translate Bio, which was an mRNA platform focused ultimately on vaccines. We did some work in the rare disease space, but think about it, being at the helm of a company developing mRNA vaccines when COVID hits.
So, again, it was like out of the frying pan and into the fire. We know how that turned out. And so ultimately did some time over at Bain Capital with Adam Coppel and the team over there, and that was just a tremendous experience, just a great, great group of people over there. As I got to oversee the portfolio there, clearly Cerevel was a standout. Tony Coles was stepping down, he was retiring, and that was an area of great interest to me. And if you recall, we're probably still in it, but this Golden Age of developing new neuropsychiatric drugs. And so really, really a great time to be there in the situation that ultimately ended up unfolding there with our sale to AbbVide. And so I really started to think deeply, Yaron, about what I wanted to do next. And I really liked being at the forefront of these hot areas, and what was happening in 2024 and is still happening today is really this intense focus on obesity.
And I think for the first time, we are now in an area where we are addressing what has been a tremendous unmet medical need. It is now, I think, last week obesity has now passed malnourishment as one of the single biggest drivers of disease in the world, not just in the United States. But if we think about just the United States, obesity rates continue to grow. People living with BMIs above 35 represent the fastest growing segment of that patient population. So you take this great unmet medical need. and then you combine that with a portfolio of metabolic assets that are the most advanced and the most diverse outside of big pharma backed by Bain Capital, Atlas, RTW and Hengrui themselves, it's a tremendous recipe. I would've been crazy to not jump at this.
Yaron Werber:
We're sitting here, for those of you listening in the future so to speak, this is our early September 2025, and literally the European Association for the Study of Society of Diabetes is going on, and Kailera and Hengrui actually just showed some data. This is the ongoing studies out of China, both in diabetics and obese without diabetes. And the data continues to look really, really strong. Your lead compound is essentially a more potent version of Mounjaro. This is KAI-9531. It's a GLP-1/GIP receptor agonist. Can you talk about the data a little bit and the construct, how it's differentiated and what are the next steps? And of course you have another oral coming right behind it too.
Ron Renaud:
I can talk in a moment about our collaboration and our relationship with our colleagues at Hengrui. 9531 as you point out is our lead asset, and this is a GLP-1/GIP receptor, just as you had mentioned, dual agonist. And this is advancing towards not only has it moved through phase three studies in China and is now sitting before the regulators in China, but it is now moving towards phase three studies globally. So here in the United States, we're having very productive discussions with regulators about how to move that to phase three studies as well. And this is based on the data that has been generated by Hengrui in China. It's demonstrated class leading efficacy in phase two and phase three studies. And as I mentioned, those were all run in China. And we start to get excited about is at doses that are less than half of what we see with tirzepatide, maybe a little bit above half of what we see with tirzepatide, we see just under 24% mean weight loss in phase two studies.
And these are at much shorter durations. And so we're seeing this very early in these studies. And as you know in the United States, we've got to run these studies for much longer periods of time. And so when we look at this data coming out of China, which usually we know historically from some of the multinationals that have run obesity studies, they translate very well coming from China to the western world. And so you're putting up 24% average weight loss at 36 weeks with only 12 weeks at that maintenance dose with no plateau, that starts to get us really, really excited for what this could look like in studies in the United States. And I think what sets this apart, the data's already showing us best in class potential, but it's because the drug was designed to do just that.
This is a drug that was designed by Hengrui to be better than what was available. And that is longer half-life, a stronger bias on the GLP-1 side, about three times as much on the GLP-1 side than we see with what's on the market today. And then on the GIP side, about half as much. And so you take all of that and you put it together, and you start to think about what this means once you start getting it into patients. Well, the data's starting to really play out that way. So we're excited because in the United States you've got to do your titration up and then 52 weeks at your maintenance dose. And so if we're seeing 24% at only 12 weeks at the maintenance dose, it gets me really, really excited for what longer term studies will look like.
Yaron Werber:
Yeah, without signs of plateauing either on the efficacy side.
Ron Renaud:
Yeah, this really has the potential to set a new benchmark in obesity.
Yaron Werber:
And so we're now clearly seeing the data from the next compound. This is 7535, the oral compound, the oral GLP-1 showing a very nice reduction in A1c, about negative one-sixth and obviously also showing weight loss. This is at 16 weeks, by the way. So this is still very preliminary data with a very nice A-E profile that essentially rivals ORFO more or less. Can you talk about that program, and what are the next steps and maybe some of the differentiation too?
Ron Renaud:
Yeah. So 7535 as you point out, it's an oral small molecule, and we've got two oral approaches. We've got an oral small molecule, and that's something that's a little bit earlier is our oral peptide, but the small molecule and the data that you highlighted coming out of Europe today is a small molecule GLP-1 agonist. And this program really aims to add the convenience of oral administration with competitive efficacy as you just pointed out. And so with that program, we're preparing for a global phase two program. That one is a little bit earlier, but we really see our lead program 9531, and I think this is the data that's starting to emerge globally is that injectable dual agonist is the backbone therapy. That is going to be the foundation for I think all patients who want maximal weight loss with tolerable side effect profile.
And then the orals can come in as maintenance therapies for lifespan. So as you think about getting to target weight, then you want to be able to potentially have patients if they so desire, go off the injectable. And what really starts to set Kailera apart is we have that potential best-in-class dual agonist that doctors and patients are now really, really comfortable with. And then we can follow that up with an oral small molecule that by the time we get to market, patients will also be very, very comfortable with, and hopefully we'll have best-in-class efficacy and tolerability potential there as well.
Yaron Werber:
So the company Kailera was founded in the fall of 2024, and it was really a spin-out, as you mentioned with Jiangsu Hengrui. Hengrui is one of the founding investors in the company as well. And China in the meantime has really become an operational and innovation hub on the global scale, especially actually in many ways in obesity. What are some of the challenges and benefits when you're licensing late-stage compounds scientifically, operationally and very much from a regulatory standpoint from China?
Ron Renaud:
It's a great question and, look, in a lot of ways, Hengrui has been the best partner, the best collaborator I have ever worked with. Despite being completely the other side of the world, they are just tremendously great people to work with. It goes without saying, they are a top 50 global pharma company. I think people forget that even within China there is some great innovative R&D that's going on there. They hold the eighth largest pipeline globally, and this is a company that's been around for 50 plus years. There's 6,000 people in R&D, and so they can move quickly. Especially with what we are doing, they've got deep expertise in developing best-in-class medicines. They've got peptide chemistry expertise that runs very, very deep, and they can move into clinical trials very, very quickly. And they're following now and they have for the better part of the last decade, they're following a lot of the same exact regulatory guidelines, clinical guidelines, as we follow here in the United States.
Some of them are a little bit different, but the homology is probably better than 90% in terms of what they hand off to us in terms of lining that up with what we need. That's the foundational part of it your own. Then where it gets really, really good is having them develop these programs, roughly two quarters, three quarters, four quarters ahead of us enables a steady stream of data and milestones. And so it puts us in a unique position. So think about it, we're developing an injectable dual agonist, an oral small molecule, an oral peptide, and then we've got an injectable triple G. So perhaps you don't need to have all of these in the arsenal, but in the event that you do, we have them.
And in the event that you don't, Hengrui is going to be always ahead of us, so we're going to be able to draft off of their data. It's like getting the answers to the test before you even get the questions. So we can make really thoughtful strategic clinical decisions about our program based on the data that Hengrui generates, and then we can also make well-informed capital allocation decisions. So you don't need to introduce two orals to the market. So we'll get to wait and see which one is the best and take that forward. And so from a competitive standpoint, we only view the big pharma companies as our competitor. That's it. There's nobody else in our periphery. We just look at what's on the market today and how do we get past that.
Yaron Werber:
The best day in med school is when you go take an exam, and it turns out the exam they're giving you is a repeat of a previous year's exam that was in the practice test packet. Those are the happy-
Ron Renaud:
Yeah, I mean, but it's real. I mean, if you think about where Hengrui is this summer, they completed a 48-week phase three study, and that data was terrific, and that is now sitting before the Chinese regulators for approval. Now, we can take all the learnings that they've had from that, and they are incredibly transparent with us around all the work they do. We are engaged with them almost on a daily basis. We share ideas, we share thoughts, and so that really, really helps us think about what we want to do and how we can take things forward expeditiously, but more importantly strategically so we can think about what the markets might look like only a couple of years from now.
Yaron Werber:
Yeah, terrific. We'll continue to follow that very, very, very closely. I mean, you'll have continued to have cadenced the data, and as you mentioned, Hengrui is actually going to be filing and launching in China, and so it's a very unusual situation to already be in phase three studies with essentially an approved drug that's going to be on the market elsewhere.
I want to turn over now and talk about your career a little bit and some of your key learnings because there's so much to talk about. So for the listeners, just to orient, everybody knows Ron, but just to put this in context, when you sold three companies to big pharma for combined 16 billion, it's very unusual in all in different areas and all the different time points. So Idenix was acquired by Merck for 3.9 billion. That was for Hepatitis C. Translate Bio sold to Sanofi for 3.2 billion, really an mRNA/infectious disease platform for vaccines during COVID. And finally Cerevel, which was acquired by AbbVie for 8.7 billion. And that's essentially a novel neuropsychiatric platform and pipeline. So I guess the first question, and we'll go into later on, how do you navigate towards success because none of those were straight paths, and there was challenges across the board. The first one is, what are the biggest lessons you've learned from each M&A transaction?
Ron Renaud:
I think first of all, there's no boilerplate M&A transaction. They're not the same. All the situations that we've found ourselves in in these strategic transactions have really, really been truly unique. They're a point in time. And so you find basically it's a coincidental point in time where you have something that somebody wants for a very specific reason. And what I learned early on back in the sell side days, and I even go back to my early days at Amgen before I went to Wall Street, I worked with some really savvy business development people. I worked with a great CEO named Gordon Binder. And Gordon was very, very thoughtful about how he approached acquisitions. And again, what he basically said is, "It's got to be something that we really, really need and/or we can't build it ourselves." And so that always stuck with me. And as I thought about what we were doing at Idenix, we were in a very competitive space, we were in a competitive space in HIV, HBV and HCV. What we were really, really good at was nucleosides nucleotide pro drugs. We were trying to develop protease inhibitors, non-nukes, you name it, NS5As. You remember all of the stuff that was going on there.
At the end of the day, it was a nucleotide pro drug that cured HCV. And again, I'm not a scientist. I was competing against all of you physicians and PhDs and all that. But what I really started to think about was, what are we good at? What are we really, really good at? Build the company in the best way around what you're really, really good at. And you can't build it to sell it, you've got to build it to go a very, very long way. And there's been books, and people talk about all this stuff all the time, but you've got to build a company that it's about doing the right thing, getting the right people, and trying to go for the long term. All the rest of it as the saying goes, companies get bought, they don't get sold. So build the best you can every step of the way. Every brick that you put into that foundation, that building, is incredibly important because if one of them is cracked, one of them is broken, it can all fall apart at any given time.
Yaron Werber:
And maybe during to stand just on the M&A process itself, because that's also never a straight shot process, right? There's many different forms of dating, and sometimes you date and you get acquired quickly. In other cases, it's a long-term conversation until the match is struck, so to speak. What advice do you give other CEOs as they navigate the process for the first time?
Ron Renaud:
Yeah, I mean, expect the unexpected. You can get term sheets, and people can walk away halfway through a transaction. Decisions get made for reasons that you'll never know. And again, I always think of things that are point in time, and so if somebody's really excited about something in the spring, these deals take a long time to flourish, if you will. And so that excitement in the spring could wane in the fall. And so you can have a discussion with somebody somewhere about something, and it seems like, okay, this is imminent, and then it falls away. And if you think about HCV as a perfect example, there was a lot of excitement in 2011, 2012. Companies got bought and sold in 2012, big transactions. Idenix didn't sell until 2014. You do a lot of dating, you have a lot of conversations, people tell you what they think and whatnot, and you go along with it. But you got to just understand that deals can fall away. As quick as someone shows up on your doorstep, they can walk away. And so I think these things happen when you least expect it.
Yaron Werber:
And Idenix got acquired, and it wasn't the first asset. It wasn't even the first set of assets that really drove that acquisition, but to your point, it was when you refocused the company and developed the next slew of assets that that really catalyzed the success in the deal.
Ron Renaud:
Yeah. So you just hit the nail on the head you're on. And one of the things, like I said, I'm not a scientist, but I was having a dinner with Roger Perlmutter after we sold the company to Merck. Roger said what was really ironic about this is that you're not a scientist, and yet it became a much more scientific organization. That is, you let the scientists, you let the chemists, the biologists, you let the clinicians do their thing, do what they're really, really good at, and step back and just guide the process and provide the right financial and human resources, any trusted data, make sure you trust the data and let the data guide your decisions. It'll work out.
Yaron Werber:
Yeah. You've alluded, you actually started your career at Amgen in science and then finance and IR, then to Wall Street, then to being an operator and ultimately being a member of a board and being chair of boards. As you think about it, what were some of the key ah-ha moments, the key learning that really shaped your approach?
Ron Renaud:
For me, it's about people. It's about who you really want to work with, who inspires you. When I was younger, you get this you call them the Sunday night scaries, the Sunday night anxiety where you're thinking about all the stuff that you've got to do during the week. And a lot of times that comes from you got a crummy boss or you got somebody who you know when you get to work on Monday morning is just going to put an inordinate amount of stuff on your shoulders. So at Amgen, I didn't have that. What I had were people that really inspired me and got me excited about the work we were doing there. And so I've just always taken that forward.
And I think to myself, if I want to be on a board, I want to be a board of a company where I really, really like the management team, where I think the management team is going to make good clinical decisions, strategic decisions, ethical decisions, and that the rest of the board is a good group of people that is also going to let the management team do their thing. And our job as the board is to help them along and make the right decisions and protect shareholders. And if it's private, it's usually the shareholders that are on the board. And if it's public, you're there to protect the public shareholders. And so I've become a lot choosier over time about which boards I'm involved with. And I'm really, really fortunate with the boards that I'm working on right now. I really love the management teams, and I love my fellow board members.
Yaron Werber:
And so from a company perspective, so it's the people, it's critical, and as they say, people develop great drugs. Sometimes great drugs can develop people, but that's not always simple. Great team can develop success. I remember during Hepatitis C, there was a lot of conversations about what defines success. And sometimes developing the things that are hard really brings out the best in people. If you're developing Lipitor, all you got to make sure is the patient take the drug, but you need to have a good pipeline or you need to have some kind of a technology. Can you talk about that? As you do the work to decide where you want to be involved in, I imagine you can only get 50% of the knowledge ahead of time, so how do you really decide where to go?
Ron Renaud:
Yeah, I mean, that is the million-dollar question for our entire industry. And what I can tell you, you're on, and you've known me for a really, really long time, what I am really good at is knowing what I don't know. And so I am really good at trusting data. I love the experience of so many of the people that I have an opportunity to work with, but we all get dogmatic about things. You say, "Okay, why are we doing this?" Well, because that's the way we did it at Merck, or that's the way we did it at Amgen, or that's the way we did it at Pfizer or whatever. And you say, "Okay, but what does that mean here? What does that mean now? And what is the data telling us? Is the data telling us something different?"
And so it's really staying focused. It's making sure you do the right things and let the data drive the course, the map if you will, and rarely will you get taken down the wrong way. I think what happens is for a lot of folks, things don't turn out the way they expect, and you get worried about what are the investors going to think or what is the board going to think or did I do this the right way? And generally the data tells you everything. And when you start to question it is when you start to get into trouble.
Yaron Werber:
Right. As you think about strategy, at least two of the companies we're talking about had some turbulent times. Idenix at some point, some of the pipeline wasn't working. You inherited a situation that was not necessarily easy. Translate, the initial technology platform was super innovative, and you had some real challenges, and you had to pick up the trains and literally move them into a totally different track. What are the key learnings from navigating biotechs during turbulence? Because that's really not that easy. The employees are apprehensive, they're anxious, they need leadership. Investors are all over the place. Obviously boards can get fairly emotional. How do you navigate this?
Ron Renaud:
So you hit all the key constituents in doing that successfully. So first and foremost, you've got to have a board that has your back. I mean, think about Idenix. I had a great board. I had a board that trusted me, let me as a non-scientist in an incredibly deep science organization, make some very important decisions. I mean, we really changed the complexion of that company in a relatively short amount of time. Again, we got focused, we pared it down, we became incredibly efficient. And what you've got to do is is you've got to make sure the employees, your team, there's not one person in any company that's any more important than anybody else. I don't care what anybody says. You can be the CEO, you can be somebody in the lab, you can be somebody who's installing software, you can be somebody who's doing bottle washing, every single job has the exact same level of importance.
As long as you understand that and you bring people along the way and you let them know what you're doing and why you're doing it, as long as you're moving in the right direction, you're moving forward, I find that you will find success that will lead you to a place where people will have your back. And so boards have to trust you. You've got to trust your employees, and in turn, your employees will trust you. And the investors, it takes time. I mean, not just investors. A lot of times if you're getting barked at by an investor, it might be because of the company you work at. You've been on the operating side. You know what that's like. But a lot of times when you're getting the crummy end of an investor sentiment, it could be of something else happened in their portfolio, and now they're going down and they're saying, "Okay, I'm going to get mad at somebody else." I'm going to go punch the pillow here. And today it's Ron Renaud. I don't know, tomorrow it could be Yaron. So right,
Yaron Werber:
Probably was me right before they got on the call with you.
Ron Renaud:
But again, you have to also understand, for me, having spent all that time on the sell side and also now having spent time at Bain Capital, I get it. I understand it. And so I'm very sympathetic to it when it happens.
Yaron Werber:
Yeah. Give us a sense, what's been the biggest high of your career and maybe talk about that experience.
Ron Renaud:
Specific to my career, I've had a lot of really high highs. I've been incredibly fortunate in this industry, but I would say, I'll go back to the Idenix days, and we had some drugs that didn't work and hit the wall at a hundred miles an hour. If you remember, we were going for viral cures, and I remember when we had switched gears, and we had brought some new nucleotide pro drugs forward. And in our first phase two study with the new compounds that were under our watch, and we had some viral cures, and I remember our CMO, Doug Mayars coming in and telling me, "We've got a runner here, and this is working," I was almost brought to tears. Maybe that drug may never see the pharmacy shelf, but in a clinical trial, somebody somewhere had their Hep C cured. And to just know that you had some small finger on that is incredibly gratifying. I'm feeling the same way here at Kailera with the assets that we have here. I cannot wait to get our programs underway.
Yaron Werber:
You actually can meet the patients. I mean, it really is. That's something that's a life. What was some of the biggest lows, and how do you pick yourself up?
Ron Renaud:
Yeah, I think I've had a bunch, right? And I think anytime you have to restructure your organization to save capital, and you've got to look somebody in the eye and say, "Look, we can't have this many people here. We've got to conserve capital," that is horrible. It's awful. You never get used to it, and hopefully you don't have to do too many of them. But I think just about anybody, if you're in biotechnology, if you're developing platforms, you're developing drugs for any extended period of time, we all have to cross that abyss at some point. And it never gets easy. It's always very challenging, very difficult.
Yaron Werber:
Yeah, it's very hard, especially in a small company, you really get to know the employees families. It's really not easy.
Ron Renaud:
Yeah, that's right.
Yaron Werber:
So you've been a first time biotech CEO, and I think the latest stats are 65% of CEOs are first-time biotech CEOs or so. What's your biggest advice to a first-time first timer?
Ron Renaud:
Yeah, I mean, again, it's surround yourself with good people. I had the great fortune. When I became the CEO at Idenix in October of 2010, I was in the seat for about eight days, and I got a call from John Maraganore. I didn't know John from a hole in the wall. I just knew Alnylamn was right down the street. This guy's calling me up, and this was back when we all had phones on our desks. He just said, "Listen, you don't know me, but I just heard you became the CEO at Idenix, and if you ever need a hand, if you need ever need help, you want some advice on something, don't hesitate to give me a call." And Henry Tamir did the same thing from Genzyme. And I was not Henry's biggest fan as a sell side analyst. I mean, nobody gave him more grief on Renagel numbers than I did. And Henry did the same thing. I took both John and Henry up on that, and they gave me some advice then that still stays with me today.
Yaron Werber:
Amazing. Amazing. Yeah, Henry really had the touch. And I think many people obviously know Henry Tamir. Henry is probably single-handedly one of the biggest giants in biotech. And he was really the beginner of the orphan business model. No drug is too small for the patient population and the beginning of the foundations of biotech. He's an amazing person.
Ron Renaud:
Him offering his time was endless.
Yaron Werber:
Yeah, amazing. All right, I want to get to my favorite part of each podcast, and it's really a little bit of a personal touch and humor of really getting to know the guests. And I think with you, I know a few things. I might know how you would answer this, and I might actually X out one option just to make it a little difficult. So maybe the first thing for you, what's one non-scientific finance skill that's been very surprisingly useful in your career?
Ron Renaud:
I touched on it a little bit. Like I said, I'm really good at knowing what I don't know, so I have no fear of saying, "I don't know. Please explain that to me." And a lot of times I might have an idea of what it is. What I want to hear somebody say is to give me a real reason for why we're doing something. I had a colleague that I worked with at Idenix, and he told me, he's like, "It's your best quality, is your ability to just say, 'I don't know.'" Unashamed to say it. A lot of times I'm absolutely astonished at what I learned.
Yaron Werber:
Okay. That's really to say I don't know. Please explain.
Ron Renaud:
Yeah.
Yaron Werber:
All right. And if you were not involved in biotech at all, and I'm going to caveat this further, and you can't be on your boat with your family and your kids if you're on the boat on all, what else would you be doing?
Ron Renaud:
You hit on it. I probably would try to become a true offshore fisherman, but I think I would like to teach. As I get a little bit older, I think about, I've had a great experience across so many different jobs. I would love to share that with young people and let them know that you can zigzag around. My career path, there's not one single straight line in it. It just zigzags all over the place, and I've had a blast doing it, and it's unconventional. It's been unorthodox, but I'd love to figure out at some point how to share that with others.
Yaron Werber:
The third one is, if you had to jump out of a plane or scuba dive to the bottom of the ocean, which one would you do and why?
Ron Renaud:
Oh, I'd scuba dive to the bottom of the ocean because at least if I got halfway down and something broke, I'd figure out how to get my way back up. But skydiving helicopters not for me. There's no way to save yourself. At the ocean, at least I know what's going on there.
Yaron Werber:
Right. There's no need to jump off a perfectly good moving airplane.
Ron Renaud:
No, exactly.
Yaron Werber:
Ron, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us. Really appreciate it, and we'll be in touch.
Ron Renaud:
Yep. Thanks, Yaron. This has been a real treat.
Speaker 1:
Thanks for joining us. Stay tuned for the next episode of TD Cowen Insights.
