After brokering the $10bn sale of the biotech company he led, Tony Coles planned to follow the well-trodden path of corporate high flyers who have shifted down a gear or two. “I wanted to take some time and think things through,” he says. “Spend time doing health policy consulting, or sitting on boards.”
The sale in 2013 of cancer specialist Onyx to Amgen, one of the biggest names in biotechnology, had netted Mr Coles a personal windfall estimated at $60m. Time was a commodity he could well afford.
When a former colleague, molecular biologist Susan Lindquist, contacted Mr Coles the following year to ask him to help her raise money for Yumanity Therapeutics, a biotech start-up, he agreed. However, he was clear about limiting his engagement with the project. She asked if he would run the company: “But there was no way I was going back into an operating job that soon. Doing a start-up was the last thing on my mind.”