Be Bombastic To Get Ahead

Of course. When I look back on everything I've done, I've been a bit shocked — it's almost an out-of-body experience. I can't believe fifteen- or sixteen-year-old Ala was doing this. Like, who the hell do I think I am? But it's really important for me to just go and do things and not think about it. That's what being bombastic is — putting aside the worry about how it's being perceived, the ego element of it, and just doing stuff without thinking.

I don't know how I came across the word, but it immediately comes to mind when I think about some of the decisions I've made. And if we're going to go deep into it, my first thought of someone being bombastic is my dad. My dad is a fantastic guy — super Khaliji, Middle Eastern guy. He'll haggle anything. My favourite story of him is something so basic: my dad has a package at home that pays for internet, TV, calls, everything. And he pays less per month than I do for just internet — and we're on the same provider. I was like, dad, what are you doing? All he does is pick up the phone: "This is too expensive for me. I've been a customer five years. Can you make it cheaper, or I'll go somewhere else." I thought he was being so bombastic — I was embarrassed. Dad, put the phone down, this is a set price, everyone's on the same thing, just accept it. But my dad never accepts things as they're presented. Ever.

And that's really informed my whole life. Whatever's given to you is just a first offer — or it's only the offer that person's creativity allowed them to extend. If you want something more, ask for it. And it's not just ask for it — facilitate it, make it easier for people to offer it to you. So being bombastic is all of those things: trying to go after something that's not necessarily there, so you have to create it. It's a creativity and an audacity kind of fusion.

I have to be super careful about what I say — I have a lot of respect for them, and it was a great episode. But I was really disappointed when they said that. I thought it was boring. It's boring, it's uncreative. To say that academics, PhD scientists, are this great monolith — they're all the same, super analytical, need to perfect their craft — it's so far from the truth. It's almost contradictory to their own practices. You can't say there are these exciting biotech companies pioneered by brilliant professors and PhDs and postdocs who've come up with a great business idea, and then in the same breath say scientists don't understand business and don't get how to make great companies. Which one is it? Are they people who just don't get it, or people who can understand it and pre-see it?

There are different levels of PhDs and academics, with varying degrees of interest in being extremely academic, entrepreneurial, or operational. There's great diversity within the scientific and medical and healthcare community. And to say they don't know how to make these decisions — I don't know how to respond to that. It's obviously not true.

It's also something that bothers me in VC more widely — this idea of gatekeeping the identity of what a VC can be and how it should look. You have brilliant IB kids coming into VC who can whip up a financial model, a discounted cash flow that tells you the value of a company. Great — we need those people. But do they understand the tech? The business? The go-to-market? So having a team that's 100% PhDs is not great, and a team that's 100% IB and financiers is not great. It's all about the diversity of the team. Some of the best investors I know have that scientific, deeply technical background — and the field is waking up to this. In VC they say they want to see more operators, because they value that operational experience. It's the same with science.

What happens if we take out the technical side and just bring in investors to look at a business model and get external help on whether it's a good idea? You get companies like Theranos, which went all the way through without ever getting a single penny from an actual technical investor who understood the space. So I disagree wholeheartedly. Having PhDs is great. What do you think?

I think it's because it's so nuanced — there's no one-size-fits-all answer. When I say how important it is to have domain knowledge on investment decisions, it feels very critical in the early stages. In the early stage of a funding lifecycle it's all about the product. There's not a lot of business modelling going on; financial forecasts are touch and go. You're just looking at the product: is the IP good enough? Does it make scientific sense? Is there a market? Is there product-market fit? That's when you need your technical experts — not a professor who's been in a research lab for thirty years, but entrepreneurial scientists who understand what product is needed right now.

I speak for myself here: I wouldn't be comfortable, or even think there's a need for me, in the late stages of VC when it's all about growth. That's when the IP people and the financiers come in — now we need the models, the proper bottom-up market sizing. But in the early stages, you need the technical expertise.

So going back to your question — at the beginning there's definitely a need for more scientific knowledge, especially in TechBio, where understanding the product and the science helps you. But it's not enough to have a good idea to get it to blow up. Then in that pre-Series A, Series A space, you need a specific skillset, which is why you need diverse teams — some product people, some operators, and a lot of financiers — to figure out: now that we know the product works, because it's passed the regulatory approvals and the big milestones, is there a market? What are the customers saying? The final stages are just the modelling to understand how it scales. Different horses for different courses.

It's so difficult. I've been in this space as an investor for the last two years, and I can't tell you if I'm a good investor — because I haven't seen a lot of the companies I've invested in raise their next round yet. We'd have to track how many completely collapse, how many go on to raise big rounds and potentially exit. It's a job where you can't rest on your laurels — you're only as good as your last deal. To say someone has a Midas touch in investing is a fallacy. No one's so good they can always pick the best companies. The people I'd have considered the most incredible investors, because they made bets that turned into unicorns two years ago — those companies have been extremely devalued and are no longer unicorns. So are they still a good investor, or was it a hype deal?

The only way I like to assess an investor is to understand their due diligence and their thought processes — I buy into that over someone's track record or how much money they made, although ultimately that is the end goal. So there's an element of luck. There's a thing called the power law — the assumption that most of your portfolio will fail, and only the top two or three companies out of ten are the fund returners. If you look at the pure data, it seems like most of it is luck. So you have to hedge.

It's super hard. When I joined the fund I'm in now, it was just me on the investment team, starting from zero. No one really knew about the Life Fund. Ascension has a big name — one of the earliest, longest-standing pre-seed funds — but the Life Fund was very new. So a lot of it is creating awareness. Luckily, a lot of that happens online and on social media now. Post-pandemic, most people get their information from LinkedIn, webinars, whatever.

The way I've approached it is multimedia. I'll go to conferences where I'm invited on panels — I always hate going, because I'm like, what am I going to say? But it puts my face out there. Sometimes I'll be addressing a hundred founders who talk to each other — it's a network effect. I'll take interviews. And every time I invest in a company, I put out a LinkedIn post, in the knowledge that this is the profile of company we thought was good enough to invest in. I hope people building something similar think, "She's invested in company X — we're company Y, let me approach her." So networking can be passive or active. The passive is putting myself out there through social media, conferences, dinners. The active is going out to certain people I think are brilliant in their field — professors, postdocs — the KOLs in a space like pancreatic cancer biomarkers. Anyone building in that space will try to contact them at some point. By building that network of academic partners, they might say, "Two weeks ago we spoke to a startup building in this space — you should reach out." And that builds your deal flow.

So deal flow comes through different networks — academic, your friends in the industry, passive means and social media. But also getting my own portfolio to work for me. With all the companies I invest in, I try to be really useful to them, hoping they'll tell their friends and recommend they talk to me. That's been some of the best-qualified deal flow we have.

By being accessible, and by having the background I have. Some of these founders have been building products in their research labs for ten, fifteen years. They'll go to investors who ask: how much money, what's the margins, what's the market size? And it dismisses a lot of what they've built. I have this deep information anxiety — I want to know. Ever since I left academia I've had a chip on my shoulder: what am I missing? What's the latest paper I can't see? So my first calls are almost exclusively about the product. I want to know your research. How did you get into it? What did you find? What are the big pain points? Show me your early data — have you published?

Just by having that empathy with the founder, understanding the journey and the core product — which is the science — it's helped me build my reputation and win deals. Showing genuine interest in more than just the returns. That is something I definitely ask by meeting two or three, but at the beginning I just want to know the science.

At the Life Fund, the reputation we've built is that we do deep technical due diligence and ask questions other investors don't. These founders graft in the labs, apply for grants, do all this crazy work — and then to have someone say, "Okay, is it clinically approved? FDA regulated? Cool, let's move on" — that's a checkbox for them. But that is the product; that's the star of the show. I always try to understand it out of my own curiosity more than anything.

It's like operators, right? You'll see cool investors who are ex-Uber, ex-Google — everyone wants an operator, someone with startup experience. What founders are looking for is that empathy: do you understand what I had to go through to get here? And do you appreciate the field enough to afford me the flexibility to do what I need to do to get this product to market? A lot of investors see a semi-complete product and go, "Yeah, cool, let's get it out there." There has to be a balance between how much time you commit to R&D and how much to commercialising — and understanding that balance is very important. It's one I'm still trying to get my head around. A lot of these academic founders and spin-outs just want to make sure they can continue doing what they're doing without being hindered. So yeah — it's a massive empathy piece.

Me personally? I wouldn't go into a space unless I'm deeply passionate about it. You need something to get you out of bed and deep in the trenches with these people. The easiest way to get into these clubs — because they can be very exclusive — is to have a deep passion you can genuinely pursue. Unless I was really into LLMs, I probably wouldn't try, because you need to be in the trenches: understanding, building, contributing, not just taking.

But here's one thing I was passionate about that I got into — AI drug discovery and drug design. Knowing I had an interest and wanting to learn more, I did my own desktop research. Back to the lab, PhD days. I read all the biggest articles, reached out to the authors, asked for fifteen minutes of their time. Most people who put something out there would love to talk to you about it — they've spent a lot of time on it, it's flattering to them, and to me it's super educational.

I reached out to key players in AI drug discovery — from startups to the people who helped build them, the coders, the biologists. What are your struggles? How can I help? And I tried to give something back, because you don't want to be a massive taker. Would you like connections to VCs? Would you like me to share my findings at the end? So I did this massive literature deep-dive, a lot of interviews, then started talking to founders. I had an absolute goal to speak to every single pre-seed AI drug discovery company in the UK. I had time on my hands and I love talking to founders — I'd say I covered 90% of them, the ones with an electronic footprint. Show me your deck, this is what I'm interested in, I'm building up some thought-leadership pieces — what are your struggles, how are you different? It took a lot of grafting, and a lot of people being suspicious: what are you trying to do? But to get into a new space you need to dedicate time, show passion, roll your sleeves up.

It's going to sound terrible: just be bombastic. I hear you — I never want to be just a taker either, to take from someone and not give something back. But you just have to ask, and then ask them how you can be useful. Some people don't want anything in return; they just want to pay it forward because someone helped them. You have to get out of your own headspace and just ask.

Outside of VC, I was so intimidated coming in — it seemed like a boys' club, all closed off. Once I got in, I realised it was a different reality.

If someone doesn't respond, it's not because they hate me or think I'm nobody. Most of the time they're super busy or something's happening. So leave it, come back a few weeks later: "Hey, so sorry to bother you, just checking in, is everything okay?" Be more dynamic and proactive. Asking isn't hard once you get over the hurdle in your brain — the difficult, imposing thing it seems to be. Let people decide for themselves whether they want to help. If they're busy, they'll let you know. But if you don't ask, you'll never know, so you're probably missing out. The worst thing that can happen is they say no. For you it's just a bit of a bruise — "oh, shit" — but once you drop the ego part, it's fine. It's probably a precious connection you don't want to burn, or something they don't have capacity for right now. No worries — I'll get to that person through someone else.

Good question. There are a lot of layers to it — being a woman in VC, and then being a woman of a certain ethnic minority in VC. I think it helps having the background I do. There are a lot of mediocre investors in VC — a lot — and no one really asks how they got in. They're just in because they have a connection, or someone did a favour for them; their networks help them out. When they took a bet on me, I had to be better than the rest. I had to be completely excellent. They were investing in a PhD student from Cambridge working at a pan-European accelerator, and I think that made the decision easier. It's really telling that I don't see a lot of mediocre ethnic-minority investors — and that's where the inequality is.

Being a brown woman in VC has become much easier in London, because there are phenomenal network groups — women in VC, Asians in VC, ethnic minorities in VC. There are enough of us to band together and talk about it.

The hardest part has been getting into the VC part. Once you're in, I haven't faced as much discrimination. There have been moments — in a deal, they'd want to speak to a partner and not to me, even though the initial decision has to pass through me; I'm the first-pass filter. I'll tell a company it's not a fit, and they'll try to go over my head to my partner. But I think that's less about me being a woman and brown, and more about titles and seniority.

I haven't given it much thought, honestly. There are people fighting the good fight, thinking about it, trying to make it more equitable — they have my full support. But for me, the way I like to do it is not to think about it too much, because I don't want it to be a blocker. In my head I'm trying to be like, everything's mine, everything's accessible, I can get whatever I want. That's got me where I am. But systemic racism is absolutely here. It's getting better — but it's one I probably couldn't speak to you too much about.

It plays into it. I don't want to think about it, because it negatively affects me — it makes me less confident in an interview, makes me second-guess their decision-making. I'd rather just go about it, and if I get rejected, think, well, what did I do wrong? It probably is the racism part, but I won't let myself acknowledge it, because it would affect the way I go about things — versus me protecting them or saying they're fair.

It was a self-reflection piece for me. I get a lot of questions from people coming up through the ranks — PhDs looking at entrepreneurship, at VC — asking, how did you get this? How did you get that? And I wish I could just tell them that the way I got into this position, or my internship at Amazon even though I had zero of the entry requirements, was because I applied and I got it, and then they accepted it. Everything I've done has been an extremely proactive approach to getting where I need to go. There's no set path. This is what I mean by taking what you want. If you have a passion to get into a space, and you're doing it for the right reasons, you can't wait for the perfect opportunity to open up or for a position to magically appear — especially in VC, where there aren't a lot of job openings because they're limited by fund sizes. If you want something, you have to create your own luck.

When I was working at EIT Health, the accelerator, one of the things I loved doing was due-diligence deep-dives. Some of the people in our network were VCs, and I loved what they were doing — it was all about trying to understand whether a company works or doesn't.

But I could never see a position open up that said "we're looking for a healthcare or life-science investor." It just wouldn't come around — one a year, maybe. If I'd waited for the opportunity and gone through the traditional route, I probably wouldn't be in VC. So I took it. And the way I did it wasn't knocking on their door saying, "Hi, do you have a job for me?" — this world is extremely transactional. It was a more creative approach that would get their attention. It's all about reverse-engineering a problem. What are a VC's problems? There are three core ones: finding a good deal, understanding whether it's good, and getting into it. Now that I know the problems, I'm going to address them. That was my long case study, my long interview.

So I reached out to half of the UK and some European investors: "Hi — not asking you for anything. I run an accelerator, I have some really cool deal flow. Let me just send it to you, no strings attached." And they'd say, "Yeah, cool, send it." Once I'd built that relationship, I reached out to a few: "My background is in breast cancers, metastasis, all this good stuff — do you have anything in that space? I'm happy to DD it. I miss being in the research lab, I'll do it for you." So I got to do a few due diligences.

By the time I'd built the relationship, I could be a bit more bombastic: "I've given you these cool deals, you've seen what my due diligence looks like — what are you saying? You've obviously made a few investments in this space. Bring someone on more full-time." And that's how these roles get created. They think about it, and they create a space for you. That's an example of taking it — trying to be useful to people, showing them who you are ahead of time, de-risking yourself as an investment for them. Effectively you're pitching yourself like the startups do.

Do you know how humiliating it was when I got into VC and started to meet all these people I used to bombard? They'd be like, "Oh, I know your name" — no, no, don't worry about it. Hi, let me introduce myself again. I was just that pest sending you deals. But I didn't mind, because it got me where I needed to get to.

One thing people always respect is someone who's trying to hustle. I can tell the difference between someone who slips into the DM — "What job do you have going? Can you give me a job?" — versus someone who says, "Hey, I've started this student group looking into VC, it's something I'm so passionate about, you've done X, Y and Z, just give me ten minutes." You have to respect that. It's infectious — you want to be around exciting people, people who are going to be the next big thing in VC. So if that's who you are, you should have no worries going to these people, because they respect it. They know a hustle when they see it.

I don't think of it like that — maybe it's a personality trait. And first of all, I do think I'm really up myself sometimes; I have to check myself, like, relax, you're getting ahead of yourself. But for me it's honest intellectual curiosity. The reason I love VC is the founders. These people are creating novel ideas, coming up with brilliant concepts I've never thought of, pioneering things that are super high-risk. And for me it's just — what drives you? How do you do it? There's this need to understand who they are and what they do. And you're one of them: you're creating this podcast that's very differentiated in a saturated world. I want to understand — what's your motivation, what are you thinking? Brilliant people are so cool to be around, and you learn so much.

The biggest way I've set aside my imposter syndrome is by realising it's not about me. Imposter syndrome can be extremely self-serving — "Do I belong here? Do I?" Instead, I think: oh my God, I'm so lucky to be here, because even though I don't know anything about podcasts, you do — so teach me your things. I'm a massive information consumer. What do you know? How do you know it? I want to be this patchwork of all the interactions I have moving forward. So it's not, "Okay, I've spoken about myself enough, let me ask about your stuff," which feels inorganic. For me every interaction is: you're so cool as a person, what's your story? You say it's hyping — which I didn't realise I was doing.

I think you've built something really cool and I'm privileged to be part of it, but I genuinely love it. It beats — you should see me around boring people. Around boring people I just lose the will to live; it's not my scene. But when you meet people like you, it's easy to want to learn more. So this is my main character energy: trying to understand other people, get people, empower them, lift them up. Because that's really cool. Venture capital is a people business, ultimately, and I love people.