A nurse by training, with a degree from Georgetown University, Diane Tager ’03 has encountered her share of emergencies that require quick thinking and steely resolve. This background now serves Tager well in her role as chief operating officer at Penquin, a stealth biotech therapeutic startup, a position that tests her mettle daily.

For the past 18 months, Tager has helped launch, fund, manage, and expand a business in a market that has not been the kindest to burgeoning biotechs. Her day-to-day management of the start-up takes her from troubleshooting with the IT department, to interfacing with key investors, to purchasing IT systems, to developing benefits packages, to onboarding new staff. Just before the interview for this story, she spent two hours poring over an analyst’s report to track market trends and conditions.

Fortunately for Tager, she thrives on the unpredictability of a schedule where no two days are the same. “There are a lot of different functional areas that roll up to me,” she said. “No one notices if it’s functioning well, but everyone notices when it’s not.”

Tager’s career path has been unconventional. Where she saw opportunities, she took them, and believes that a good network is critical to advancing your career.  After working as a nurse for several years, Tager realized she didn’t want to continue bedside care and switched to public health for three years, working with impoverished communities and at-risk teens in a low-income neighborhood. She planned to return to school to earn her master’s in public health, but a family friend persuaded her to pursue an MBA, offering a broader skill set and more opportunities.

While obtaining her MBA from the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, Tager applied for an internship at Celgene Corporation, a biopharmaceutical company specializing in cancer therapies. At the time, the company offered a portfolio of eight products. She was exposed to various departments within the organization, from working in the three-person channel marketing group to sales, to project leadership —the unit that manages their clinical trials. This allowed her a good vantage point from which to learn all phases of the business. While she worked in project leadership, she was exposed to many other areas of the company that she hadn’t known existed.

By 2019, Tager was working in Celgene’s business development group, managing their equities portfolio, when Bristol-Myers Squibb acquired it. When the acquisition was announced, Tager connected with a venture capital fund that was about to fund a small startup, Volastra Therapeutics, a New York City-based oncology company with a product that targets various solid tumor cancers.

The venture capital (VC) group needed someone to start Volastra Therapeutics and tapped Tager to build the company from the ground up. Tager said the groups scour academic labs to find opportunities to invest; they then license the technology and build the founding team to operate the business. Tager noted that often, such VC groups invest between $5 million and $10 million of seed money, designed to get the company off the ground within the first six to 12 months. Once the company is more established, it raises its Series A. In the current market, anything in the double-digit millions is a win for a small biotech. After the company reaches certain milestones, the VC group can exit in two ways: with an initial public offering (IPO) or an acquisition, Tager explained.

“That start-up was at ground zero, and I was the first employee at Volastra,” she said. “Building from zero to a 40-person team was definitely a learning experience. You just don’t know what you don’t know.”

Because of  Tage’s positive track record at her first two companies and her growing network in the biotech space, she was given the opportunity to start  Penguin. The team has grown from 10, mostly researchers, interrogating early scientific discoveries in the lab. Due to the team’s small size, the company plans to utilize external consultants to help develop its programs. So far, Tager has not seen any delays in submissions and approvals with the FDA, even though the current administration has downsized the department. However, she admitted that the environment is still unclear and is keeping an eye on any changes.

“It’s a good time to be privately funded,” she said. “You need to provide a lot of data showing that your drug works and is safe. It sounds like a simple task, but it requires a lot of man-hours, and you have to submit numerous written reports to the FDA. Any health authority takes putting new drugs in people very seriously.”

Tager believes in building a strong culture with a foundation of values at Penguin. And those values start at the top and set the tone for the organization. Tager said her faith as a Christian sets her moral compass and wouldn’t permit her to be deceptive, like Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, who manipulated data and exaggerated claims about the accuracy of her blood-testing technology. “You can’t bring a drug forward and lie and deceive the people involved,” she said. “It’s very short-sighted if you’re doing that. In the long term, nobody is going to succeed or benefit.”

Since start-ups often have to function with few employees, Tager sets a high bar for the people she hires and is careful to bring in individuals committed to the company and its culture. She said building a cohesive team of highly flexible individuals is imperative as, ultimately, the team drives success. ”If you want a job with a narrow scope of work and your expectations lie only within that scope of work, that’s not going to work,” she said. “People like that usually don’t thrive or enjoy start-ups because you’re called on to do many different things, wear lots of different hats daily.”

Tager also seeks highly collaborative individuals with a strong degree of integrity who can creatively think through solutions. Everyone needs to be in sync with their coworkers, she said, prioritizing support for one another throughout the process. “When you hire somebody who’s not collaborative or does not have the integrity or humility we are looking for,” she said, “it can spoil the whole team. 

Managing a successful start-up might feel like a lonely journey, but it’s safe to say that no one goes it alone. Tager said she has been fortunate to have several trusted ride-or-dies by her side – individuals who left Celgene and joined startups in the biotech industry – who have helped lighten her load. Once a quarter, these former colleagues would call and email one another to share insights, discuss payroll, benefits, IT, finance, and any unforeseen challenges. 

“Everyone would respond and weigh in, and they were so supportive,” Tager said. “If you’re doing your first start-up, you need people around you who are either doing the same thing as you’re doing or have done it before you.” 

Part of those phone calls also involved trading war stories, because failure is an inherent aspect of starting a business. Tager said that, in her first start-up, she faced multiple setbacks, so a deep reserve of resilience is crucial.  “Part of being in a start-up is knowing that you are not going to succeed all the time,” she said. “You are going to hit roadblocks. You need to move on effectively and pivot quickly.” 

Tager works in a highly male-dominated industry with men who have significant field experience. “Typically, it’s me in a room with seven men who have over 40 years in the business,” she said, “so it took some time for them to trust me. Although she now has a strong relationship with these colleagues, Tager had to earn her stripes over time.  She says you need the humility and self-awareness to know you don’t have all the answers. And if she doesn’t know the answer, she said she makes sure to get one within 24 hours.

“When one of the senior staffers gives advice,” she said, “ I have to pause and be like, ‘They’ve done this five times. There’s probably a good amount of merit in what they are saying.’” 

Tager reiterated this advice to those students assembled at a Power of Women event at KO. She explained there is a distinct difference between cockiness and confidence. She knew she could build the company because she had done it once before. “Don’t discount your skills and experience,” she said, “because they probably match many other men in your industry.”

The fight to develop effective drugs and bring them to market is a formidable challenge, and with her fortitude, expertise, and savvy, Diane Tager is determined to take it on and succeed.