Biotech Companies paved the way for Jennifer Jarrett’s

Startup Biotech Companies must strike a delicate balance between growing the company and establishing profitability and long-term viability. As an investment banker with Credit Suisse and Citigroup, and then as head of corporate development and capital markets at Uber and chief financial officer at Medivation, Jennifer Jarrett, chief operating officer at Arcus Biosciences, helped several firms achieve that balance. Biotech and high-tech have a lot in common. Everyone in the tech industry believed that spending money was a good thing. So please spend a lot of money.

However, money cannot be spent indefinitely. It would help if you eventually become lucrative. “It was a combination of instinct, gravitational pull, and luck,” she said of her transition from finance to biotech. My father was a doctor, so I grew up in a medical environment. I went to Dartmouth College to study premed but ended up majoring in economics, namely investment banking. She worked on a paper examining adverse event reporting systems while doing her MBA at Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

This rekindled her interest in healthcare and led to a job at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette (DLJ), an investment banker bought by Credit Suisse in 2000. Biotechnology was still gaining traction at the time. Because most investment bankers weren’t interested, I became a biotech specialist and assisted in developing DLJ’s life science business on the West Coast.

She joined the industry immediately after working with Biotech Companies on the finance side, becoming CFO of Medivation just seven months before Pfizer acquired it. Arcus CEO Terry Rosen, Ph.D., contacted Jarrett when reports of a possible acquisition surfaced. ‘It appears you won’t be remaining at Medivation for long,’ he added as he courted me for Arcus.