Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to today's episode of Bench to Boardroom podcast. I am your host, Cynthia Steele, and today's conversation is really, really interesting. It's with my very good friend, Dr. Julie Tetslaf, who is the chief operating officer at Diverge translational science labs in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Diverge is actually a company that Julie started with her husband, Dr. Mike Lawler, about a year and a half ago. And so far, they've managed to make it a really great success. But before that, Julie's taken a really interesting turn in her career, from being a bench scientist to joining a startup company, going back to academics, and now she runs her own company. And you'll hear in my conversation, Julie talks a lot about how much she enjoys building things and creating things and then letting somebody else run.
So a lot of really good wisdom that she shares in this podcast. A lot of good advice, and I hope you enjoy listening. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. Julie Tetslaf. Dr. Julie Tetslaf. Welcome to bench the boardroom.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you for asking me. I'm so excited to be talking to you today.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: I am so excited to have you. So we have known each other for, oh, my God, it's been almost 20 years, right?
[00:01:23] Speaker B: At least. At least 20 years since graduate school.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: I was a first year grad student in the same lab that you were working in.
Just young, idealistic 20 somethings, right?
[00:01:39] Speaker B: It was a good time, lots of.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: Fun, and a very tolerant office mate.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: Oh, gosh. We were like, planning weddings and just having fun.
[00:01:51] Speaker A: Oh, my God, so much, girliness. And she just tolerated all of it.
Colleen, if you're out there, thank you.
[00:02:01] Speaker B: Thanks for putting up with us.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: So for our listeners who don't know you as well as I do, please introduce yourself.
[00:02:09] Speaker B: Sure. Okay, so my name is Julie Tesla. What do you want to know? Do you want me to launch into my history?
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Say, what was your PhD in?
[00:02:21] Speaker B: So my PhD is in neuroscience, and I got that at Loyal University in Chicago.
Let's see. Right? Yay. From there, I went on to do a postdoc at Massachusetts General Hospital. I did my postdoc in Parkinson's disease, and then I helped start a biotech company out in Boston, and that was Seaside therapeutics. We studied fragile X syndrome.
Gosh, should I just keep going with my history?
[00:02:54] Speaker A: Well, actually, this is good because when we met, you loved teaching. Yeah, I remember you loved teaching, and so it seemed to me like you wanted to stay in academia. So what made you take the leap?
[00:03:09] Speaker B: Interesting.
Yeah, I do love to teach, and I have incorporated that into every aspect, every career stage that I've had. And there have been many changes.
But in graduate school, I had really decided that I wanted to go into industry. And even though my advisor at the time discouraged that, I just really felt passionate about going into industry, and mostly because I liked that feeling of high throughput really helping people on a large scale. And I got a taste of that in graduate school in the lab that I was in.
We were looking at the effect of android. Sorry, it's been a long time, testosterone on peripheral nerve injury. And I thought, well, this is really cool. If something like this, like a therapeutic took off and could help just a number of people at once, that's what I'm in for. That's what I want.
And so then I started really thinking about industry, and that's where I had made the switch, way back in Grad.
[00:04:16] Speaker A: Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, that's excellent. So then you moved to Boston because your new husband got a residency at Mass General, right?
[00:04:29] Speaker B: He got a residency out there, and it was supposed to be in California, but it turned out that he matched in Boston, so that slightly different.
I think the theme of what we'll be talking about today is you just have to adapt. You have to follow your heart, and you have to adapt and just figure it, know no one's going to do it for you. You just need to figure it out. So all of a sudden, we're on match day. We're expecting to open this envelope for California and be out on the West Coast where his family and no, no, the envelope said Boston. And we were like, what the heck? Neither of us had been to Boston. We're like, what are we going to do with this?
So we just moved to Boston and then I started scrambling. I needed a postdoc, and luckily, I mean, it's Boston, so there are just.
[00:05:17] Speaker A: Dozens of universities, a few well known universities out there.
[00:05:21] Speaker B: It was, you know, so I just started finding a postdoc and luckily know, a couple of, you know, it was a wonderful time in life. He was really busy in his residency. I could completely immerse myself into a postdoc. And we were just having a great time. No kids, nothing, no dependence. It was amazing. A great time in life.
[00:05:42] Speaker A: I remember. Didn't you move like, the day after your wedding or something like that?
[00:05:48] Speaker B: We sure did. And we paused our honeymoon for like a week or so. My fantastic parents drove to the East Coast with us and like a U Haul and our stuff, which, I mean, we didn't have a lot of, but so we drove to Boston unpacked real quick and then went on our honeymoon.
[00:06:11] Speaker A: I remember your wedding day saying goodbye to you and being like, that's right, I'm not going to see her again. We're not going to show up in the lab together tomorrow.
This is goodbye for a while. That was rough.
[00:06:26] Speaker B: That was rough.
Yeah, right? It was a hard goodbye and being far away, and I had intentionally positioned my life in the Midwest every stage. My undergraduate career, my graduate just I wanted to be in the Midwest. I wanted to be with my family and my friends. And that was just everything to my the relationships in my life are very important to me. So going to Boston was a challenge.
[00:06:58] Speaker A: But I think actually I really like that because it seems to me and this is something I talk with my husband about a lot because he's moved around considerably, and up until about five, six years ago, I hadn't I did the same thing as you, just centered my life around my hometown. And so I feel like that's something that a lot of people in the Midwest, it seems like they do.
You can go within a few hours of where you grew up, but in general, you stick around and you hang out there. But you just said when you got to Boston, it actually ended up being amazing. And certainly when I left the Midwest, some amazing things happened as well. So I think that's something that I want to emphasize to our listeners is I never liked the idea when people would say, oh, you're geographically restricting yourself.
If you find a postdoc, you do a postdoc in the same lab. You do a postdoc in a nearby lab. Don't geographically restrict yourself.
It works out. There's plenty of success stories where it works out just fine, but taking a chance and doing something unexpected like U Haul and driving to Boston can actually end up being a pretty amazing and.
[00:08:12] Speaker B: You know, not only is it fantastic for, you know, because you convince yourself, oh, wait, I can do this. Okay, this is going to be fine.
But on the other side of things, I have observed that it makes you more attractive to hiring managers, really, because you have now a different perspective. You have a different type of know, you've kind of proven yourself that you're willing to take.
So when I came back to the Midwest and I was looking for faculty jobs, that was actually the people that I was interviewing with, they were very excited that I had been out to Boston and that I had trained in a great area, and that was very good for me, worked out really well for me.
[00:09:03] Speaker A: Awesome. So then tell us about Seaside. Yes.
[00:09:09] Speaker B: Oh, my God. That was one of the best times in my mean, aside from the kids I have now and the family now, which is the best, it just keeps getting better. It's ridiculous.
But seaside. So gosh. It was time for me to leave my postdoc. I had been there for about three years, and I had done what I needed to do. I wanted to do a short postdoc.
And let me just make this point real quick that if you do think you want to go into industry, it's a good idea to do a shorter postdoc and just kind of get that postdoc experience in and then start looking for jobs right away. If you want to go into academia, in my experience, it's better to do a longer postdoc and try to get those grants and try to get some funding that's going to set you up to get that faculty position that you want.
So anyways, I did a shorter postdoc and I was in Boston. I was in the perfect area and ecosystem to just hop into an industry job and man, I found a gem in Seaside Therapeutics. There were only two other people in the company. There was a CEO, there was a CFO. They had just gotten some capital and they were looking for a research scientist. And I'll tell you, I don't know well, here's where the imposter syndrome comes in, people, because I don't know why they hired me. I don't know why they were studying Fragile X.
I'll tell you maybe why they hired me.
They were studying Fragile X.
I had no experience in fragile X. They wanted me to build the lab. I had never done that.
I don't know why they hired me. Man, what a great group of people.
But I'll tell you and here's another little gem. If you are interviewing, do your research. Okay? Do your research. So I got online, I looked up, I interviewed a bunch of people because they had a lot of consultants working with them and whatnot. And so I looked up everybody.
I took notes on everybody. I read some of the publications. I looked into their histories. I learned everything I could about them. And I interviewed with one person who was the acting CSO.
And I knew that he was from Wisconsin and I knew that he liked the packers.
So we're in the elevator, we had arrived at the interview at the same time when we were going to go up, they were in this virtual office space, or not virtual office space, but they were in like an office space. They were renting. They didn't have a company or a lab or anything. And I knew what he looked said, and I was like, hey, I think I'm interviewing with you. And so then I managed to work in the packers immediately. And his face lit up.
It just lit up. And then there we go. And then it was natural and fun and we were laughing. And Bret Favre was the quarterback. And he was good. He hadn't been weird yet.
He was a good quarterback.
It just set the tone perfect.
[00:12:14] Speaker A: I love that.
I'm going to second that to definitely do your research because I've had that benefit me in interviews, but I think it still stands out in my head. There was a guy that we were interviewing for a medical science liaison position, and I sat down with him and the first thing he did is he opened up his folder, pulled out one of my manuscripts and pushed it across the table and said, I used to research fibrosis and this paper is fantastic. And I was like, done. You're hired.
[00:12:49] Speaker B: There you go. Yeah. When do you start?
[00:12:51] Speaker A: When do you want to start? You're amazing.
1000% Echo. That if you can find something that you can connect with another person, not only can it make it a more enjoyable interview, like you said, you go from talking about the packers and maybe hating on the Bears a little bit or hating on the Vikings a little bit. I'm sure there was some of that. And then you can just ease in to the actual conversation. I love that as a tactic, as a strategy, that's so you're building a lab at Seaside, and we're working on was it assay development that you were doing?
[00:13:32] Speaker B: Oh, my God. It was crazy.
So finally we ended up we seen a space that had lab space and office space, and it was just completely empty. And so I walked in and there were just, like, six benches and nothing.
So I had a budget, and I started ordering things and supplies and filling up the lab. I had to figure out the plumbing. Something was wrong with the sinks. I mean, I had to get the freezers in. I had to set up safety. I had to set up all this stuff that I had never done before.
I had an amazing female mentor who was just incredible. And she knew, of course, that I was coming from academia. So after every meeting, she would just take me into her office and we would just break down the language. Like, what words didn't you understand? And I'd be like, Most of because back then, there really weren't podcasts and YouTube videos you could watch right now. I have done so much self education for the role that I currently have and the resources that are available, they're just incredible. Like this podcast. I lived on podcasts while we were starting this company, and they were everything to just hear the language and hear people talking about that wasn't around when I was with this company.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: I agree. And we normalized. I feel like we've normalized. Googling. Anything?
[00:15:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
Chat GPT. I chat so much.
[00:15:10] Speaker A: Just asking Siri your random questions.
No, I completely agree. So you had a mentor who guided you through the process.
[00:15:22] Speaker B: She was amazing.
[00:15:23] Speaker A: What do we need? How much of it do we need?
[00:15:28] Speaker B: Yeah, it was a challenge, but what a great time in life, because, again, my husband was still doing his residency and it was very demanding. And so that was the time in my life, the only time in my life when I worked just around the clock, nice weekends.
That was the only time in my life that I did. But I'm glad I did it. I did what I needed to do, and it was exciting and I learned so much, and I was constantly panicked and I constantly felt like I was drowning and that I was underwater and I was young and I didn't know what I was doing, but I learned so much from it, and it was amazing. They gave me that opportunity.
[00:16:08] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:16:09] Speaker B: Because without that opportunity, I would not have the company that we have today. Absolutely. It just would not have been something that conceptually, I would have thought we could do.
[00:16:21] Speaker A: Yeah. No, I understand that. And now that I'm remembering a little bit more about that time when you were in Boston, everything that you're doing now with Diverge makes perfect sense.
[00:16:33] Speaker B: Yeah. It would not have been possible because I lived it. I saw it. Oh, I loved it when you would come visit me in Boston.
[00:16:40] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh, we had so much fun. We had so much fun.
[00:16:46] Speaker B: Wine and movies and your dog stealing my Eminem party stealing tissues.
[00:16:55] Speaker A: Julie's Cockapoo had a thing for napkins and Kleenex. And I would forget every time I'd come and visit, and I'd always be in your purse.
[00:17:08] Speaker B: Yes. He would go right into your purse.
[00:17:11] Speaker A: And just grab a wad of tissues and run off with them like, you.
[00:17:16] Speaker B: Try to take them, and then you'd be like, growl. Oh, my God, marty stole a napkin.
[00:17:22] Speaker A: Out of my hand at a party you were having just standing off.
Heck, he was such a strange dog. But love Marty. I don't care what your husband says. I love Marty.
[00:17:37] Speaker B: Yeah. Marty didn't love my husband.
[00:17:39] Speaker A: No, he didn't. No, he didn't. Because you got Marty when he was in his surgical when memory is amazing. No, because I remember because when Mike came back from his surgical rotation and there's this dog there the dog's like, who's this?
[00:17:55] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:17:56] Speaker A: Who the heck's this guy?
[00:17:57] Speaker B: So we sit on the couch, and then Marty would have to sit in between us.
[00:18:04] Speaker A: You never quite gave up the interest in being the alpha male in your life, did he? Not even till his last day. He was still trying to be the alpha.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: That's right. Our current dog is super submissive and adores.
It all worked out.
[00:18:21] Speaker A: All right, so then was it Mike who then got the job at Medical College of Wisconsin? Or how did that transition back to Milwaukee happen? Because as I recall, you didn't really want to go to Boston, but when it came time to leave, you were kicking and screaming.
[00:18:37] Speaker B: Yeah. No, I did not want to leave Boston. Boston was the ecosystem for me to be in.
Seaside was literally in a building, a four story building that was just loaded with startup, mid size, small to mid sized companies. So I knew that when if Seaside was going to start going under, no problem getting a job, I'd just go down to the third floor and see if they needed a to. It wasn't going to be a problem. I didn't want to leave. That's where I saw my life.
I loved Boston. I liked the opportunities there. Public transportation, diverse thinking diverse know, I didn't want to go back to the Midwest where I was pretty sure it was going to be slow and I didn't have the patience for that pace anymore.
So anyways, Mike's time up at Mass General. His time was up at Mass General and he know, well, probably start it's time to look for faculty meetings. And he was just at a dinner when we were back visiting and he had mentioned something and then to someone, I don't really remember the details, but they had know, why don't you interview at MCW in Pathology? And so we thought, okay, fine.
The department chair was amazing.
She agreed to interview both of us. And actually it's so interesting how life works out because she loved my industry experience, she knew and I had projected that I was going to bring that kind of pace and that developmental mindset to a faculty position at the medical college.
So I think she really recognized that, I think a theme in my life. Okay, so I've done a whole bunch of different jobs.
[00:20:34] Speaker A: Yes, you have.
[00:20:34] Speaker B: But a theme in my life has been building. I love to build. I love to build something and then I like to walk away from it. And this has started way back in graduate school when I would love to set up a new methodology in the lab, whether it be a Western Blot or a paraffin embedding station or whatever it was. I'd love to read about it. How do you do it? Then I would do it, write out an SOP and ask someone else to do it because then I was done with it. I was done. I was not interested. So I helped start up this company. Kind of done.
And so the chair of the psychology department, she knew that I would bring that spirit to my position. And then we had talked about a couple of projects that needed building in the department and I was very excited and kick those off, and that included grants and core facilities and things like that. And it really grew from there. So again, another really great female mentor in my life that really I don't know if took a chance on me is the right word, but she really believed in me. She believed in me and I was grateful for it. At that time in our life, we needed a change.
We had a baby.
And I'll tell you that my dad was starting to get quite ill and being in Boston with no support, with one child and no money wasn't really a sustainable situation.
And it was very hard for Mike to get a faculty job there. But it's very competitive and also not a rewarding place to be a faculty member at certain so, you know, coming back to the Midwest was something that I didn't think we'd be able to do, but managed to pull it.
Yeah. So then we both ended up in the pathology department at the Medical College of Wisconsin as assistant professors.
[00:22:46] Speaker A: Yeah. And then you started the Alternative Careers in Science seminar series for the postdocs. Right.
[00:22:54] Speaker B: Well, I will say that okay, so that series was already going on by another amazing mentor, and he really had the foresight to know that's what was needed at the time. But anyways, that job came later. So you're alluding to a job that I applied for about five years into my time at the medical college, where I again wanted to build something and develop something programmatically, this time at an administrative level. Got you. I realized that that's kind of where the power for change was.
Faculty members were powerful at the institution, but I wanted to get into administration. I wanted to experience that. And so I had applied for an assistant dean position of postdoctoral education. And so that's when I got to do a lot of programmatic development for alternative careers and lots of other things. But the work I did with the alternative careers and the consulting group is something that I am very proud of.
[00:23:58] Speaker A: That's right. Do you still feel like that's something that, say, my target audience doesn't hear a lot about alternative careers in science?
[00:24:08] Speaker B: I feel like people are talking about it a lot more than they were. And I know at the medical college, people are starting to become more accepting that not everyone's going to go into academia, nor is it sustainable. There have been many landmark studies that have shown that only 13% to 15% of postdocs even go into academia. Right. And that's largely because, well, there aren't the positions to go into it.
We have a lot of postdocs, we have a lot of PhDs. There's not enough faculty jobs. And so I think people are more accepting of it. The challenge I see, though, for postdocs in certain labs is that the Pi doesn't want them to be distracted by other pursuits. And so to go out and be part of a consulting group to get some experience or to go to a seminar or to get some other training or maybe do a little internship in a company PiS still a large number of PiS that aren't really supportive of that diversion of time expenditure.
[00:25:19] Speaker A: That makes sense. Yeah.
On one hand, I can understand that. But on the other hand, as you say, you have so many grad students in each class, and then you have so many PhDs and so many postdocs, and yet once you have tenure I mean, we knew so many professors who were brilliant and absolutely wonderful, but they had so much lab space that went unutilized.
Now, granted, they could still ask the best question in the world. Even after sleeping through your entire research and progress seminar, they could somehow wake up and come up with something earth shattering.
[00:25:59] Speaker B: I know what you're talking about.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: You can say that. Right.
But these people also just tended to have a lot of the best office spaces and a lot of lab space. And so you're right, it's not sustainable to graduate so many people when those spots are not being vacated, or even if one Pi has, let's say even four postdocs, five postdocs at a time, or graduate students and postdocs at a time. Eventually, when that person retires, that only opens up one.
[00:26:32] Speaker B: So there's not enough space, and it's really not incentivized in a meaningful way. So I'm thinking about the NIH, for example.
A lot of Ro, one justification relies on what have your trainees done? And if your trainees aren't in academia, the NIH still views that as kind of a fail, and that could be a negative. So I think that, again, it's starting to change, but slowly, because it's academia, and that's how things change.
[00:27:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
So now tell us about Diverge.
[00:27:11] Speaker B: Oh, my, Diverge is just amazing. So this is a company that my husband and I co own. We yeah, right. It's in this really hip area in Milwaukee in the Third Ward. Very neat space in, like, a historical old brick building. Anyways, we have ten people total, soon to be eleven, and we're kind of like a boutique. CRO.
We provide scientific experimentation to biotech and pharmaceutical companies that don't have a lab or they don't have the bandwidth or the expertise to do the experiments that they need for their clinical trial work and their preclinical work.
[00:28:00] Speaker A: CRO being commercial research organization.
[00:28:03] Speaker B: Clinical research.
[00:28:04] Speaker A: Clinical research. Oh, I only saw a commercial.
[00:28:07] Speaker B: All right.
[00:28:07] Speaker A: I learned something too.
[00:28:12] Speaker B: But anyways, it's basically an organization that kind of high throughputs data for companies that need it.
[00:28:23] Speaker A: How does this start?
Where did you guys even come up with this idea?
[00:28:28] Speaker B: Oh, this is great.
I'm going to be careful with how I phrase it.
I'm going to be a little bit careful here because I really still value the relationship that I have with the Medical College of Wisconsin, where I'm still employed part time, and it's no has.
Mike had a lab at the Medical College with a number of employees, and he felt, rightfully so, that they could be compensated better and that the work that they were doing was more of kind of on an industry level than an academia level. And so he tried to fight for increased compensation, and he was not very successful. He wasn't successful. He tried for a very long time, and then he tried to create kind of a spin off inside of MCW, and that just couldn't really be conceptualized by senior leadership or maybe they weren't interested know? I think the employees were starting to get restless. And the thing that makes Diverge successful is the employees, they can do the techniques like nobody else. It's unbelievable. So you can't lose the people. Otherwise you're gone. And Mike, he was already working with about six different companies, and he had contracts and he was just kind of stuck, and we would just kind of talk about it over dinner. He's like, I think I need to move out. I think I need to do my own thing. And I'm thinking, oh, my God. Wow. This seems really risky. I mean, in retrospect, it's easy for me to say, wow, but in the moment, I was terrified is the reason I stayed 50% medical college, because I thought, if this thing fails, then I can go back to being a faculty member and one of us can still have a job. I was terrified. We have a nine year old. We have a 13 year old. We sat them down and said, if this fails, we may have to get a different house. We will have to get different cars. We invested all of our personal finances into this company anyways, so it was a huge risk. But we just started talking about it and talking about it, and then he asked me I remember it was over Christmas break, and he said, will you do this with me? And I thought, no, I won't. I can't. This is way too risky. I just can't. And then I thought about it, and I thought, I'm really the perfect person to do it, because I've had this experience and because I can see it. I can see every step. I know exactly what we need to do. I can just see it all.
And I knew that I could do it. And the key was for us to do it together, because if he would have brought in an external business person, he would have had to probably answer to what they advised and what they thought. And plus, it's expensive, and my salary is pretty reasonable.
[00:31:51] Speaker A: For now.
[00:31:52] Speaker B: Yeah, we have enough. We have enough.
And just he and I, sometimes we don't even need to talk. I know one of your prep questions was, how is it working with your husband?
And a lot of times I don't even have to ask his opinion on if I have a question, oh, should we do this or this? I know what he's going to say. I've known him for over 20 years. I'll check in as a courtesy.
I know what he's going to say and vice versa. So that just to be in sync with your business partner, like, that is incredible.
[00:32:28] Speaker A: Wow.
Because I know you, I assume that there's still part of you that's saying, what am I doing?
We should emphasize you are the chief operating officer of this company, and obviously now that we know about your history with Seaside, to an outside person, we would say, well, yes, of course, you're the COO. It makes perfect sense. But how do you wake up every day and just say, like, no, I can do this, and I will do this?
How does one even get into that mindset? Or how do you get into that mindset?
[00:33:05] Speaker B: I was. Terrified every day for the first six months. I mean, I was not sleeping every day. I thought, I'm going to mess this up. It's going to be my fault, it's going to fail, and it will be because of me.
[00:33:22] Speaker A: You all know this feeling very well.
[00:33:24] Speaker B: Oh my God. It was just every minute of every day I thought, now great. These people are relying on me to get paid so they can live their lives. Like, what if I mess all this up because I have an error on a spreadsheet? And it's like, oh, sorry, we don't have that much money. We really have this much money. My bad, sorry about that.
I was just constantly living in my spreadsheets and recalculating, but it was really through things like this. I listened to podcasts every day during my workouts, during my commutes, every spare moment, I would listen to a business podcast.
I did a lot of online training. I did continuing education. I had to learn financing, accounting, HR, I had to learn all of it. And then as I started getting that education and I started to talking to people and I just started doing the job, I thought, okay, all right, I can do this. I haven't screwed up, okay, I can do it. And then I just gained confidence. And now it's been over a year and I keep up with my education.
And I think that's an important component of it is just to keep learning and challenging myself in that way.
[00:34:44] Speaker A: So for our listeners who are interested in learning a little bit more about the business side, because people like you and me, we know a lot about the science. But maybe in my case, I went and I got an MBA. In your case, you did the much less expensive route, which admittedly, a lot of people told me, you don't need an MBA. You can go online, you can buy books, you can listen to podcasts, you can talk to people, and you can get your education that way. What are some of your favorite podcasts or books that you would recommend for people who just maybe want to learn a little bit more about the business side of science?
[00:35:26] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, I'm looking at my stack of books right now.
[00:35:29] Speaker A: Yeah, you have a lot of books there.
[00:35:30] Speaker B: I have a lot of books there, right? So, yeah, I did a lot of reading from a business startup. The whole Lean Startup model is something that people talk about a lot.
Basically just kind of what are the minimum number of steps you have to go through to start a company? That's a good book. It's a good foundational book. I listened to a lot of podcasts by women. I mean, literally just Googled women in business because I wanted to hear a female voice.
I wanted to hear it.
No offense to the men out there, but it was important to me to hear that and so a couple of podcasts. You belong in the C suite. Why not now in the suite? I mean, just these great podcasts from these confident, articulate, intelligent women. They helped me. It helped me to hear the words, hear the language, and then I started speaking in the language. And then I did take a number of continuing education classes at the local university and just kind of immersed myself into a certificate program for business administration, which has been nice because there were definitely areas where I needed formal training such as bookkeeping and accounting and finance because that is just a right way to do it. And a wrong way to do it. And I thought, okay, there is a right answer.
Yeah, there is a right answer.
Fortunately, through my administrative career at the Medical College of Wisconsin, I had received a lot of managerial training, conflict resolution, know, so I was able to use all that training, project management, time management, crucial conversations, all that training. And I could use that in my current role. But really kind of look around where you're at your university or your institution probably has on demand classes that you can listen to, start looking at your resume and your CV and looking, where are the gaps? Can I do a couple of trainings here? That's going to set you apart, that's going to make you look really good? When a hiring manager is looking at your CV and they think, oh, this person's done a crucial conversations, or they've done this training or that training in their spare time to improve themselves, that looks really right.
[00:38:03] Speaker A: All right, that's good advice. Are those things able to be done virtually, or does it have to be done in a university type setting?
[00:38:12] Speaker B: So every university is different. In the Medical College of Wisconsin, we have both on demand, virtual recorded classes that you can take and there's also in person and zoom classes as all. I think since COVID our institution and probably just about every other one has really strengthened their online offering.
Yeah.
[00:38:40] Speaker A: And are these things expensive?
[00:38:43] Speaker B: So at the Medical College, they are free.
[00:38:47] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:38:49] Speaker B: Or there's also another tier where you could have like, a departmental training, and then your department pays for it. You'd have to convince your department administrator to bring that to your department. But a lot of that stuff can be free. Of course, the classes that I'm taking for continuing education are not free.
So you just have to kind of determine what your investment is. But then again, if you're a trainee at an institution, you're probably getting some kind of compensation for educational enrichment.
[00:39:21] Speaker A: True.
[00:39:22] Speaker B: There should be a program.
Well, if there's not, you can advocate for one and put that on your resume. But most programs have a kind of an educational payback for employees and training.
[00:39:37] Speaker A: That makes sense. So you and Mike have started your own company, and you're interviewing young scientists so what do you look for when you interview people? If you're looking at somebody who's just trying to make that first step or maybe even back at Seaside, when you interview these folks, what do you look for?
[00:40:04] Speaker B: You have to be you have to be willing to drive yourself. If I don't see that drive, that spark, that enthusiasm, I'm not going to be super interested. Okay.
I really feel like you can teach anyone pretty much anything, and I've taught people so many different things over the decades and decades.
True. You have to have that drive.
I have to see the spark. Okay.
And again, the research, if someone comes in and as you say, they put the manuscript on the table, it's highlighted, it's dog eared, it's read.
Doesn't have to be understood. Make the effort.
[00:40:52] Speaker A: True.
[00:40:55] Speaker B: You have to have that spark. You got to have a drive.
[00:40:58] Speaker A: Okay.
And then I guess amongst all this so let's think about where you're at now, because I think, as we talked about before we started recording, I think a lot of people imagine that a young Julie Tetsla kind of saw herself in this type of position. And I think over the course of this interview, we've established that. No, you did. Not necessarily. But I guess let's go back to talking about adaptation.
How does one just trust the process in a way and just kind of follow their path? I guess what kind of advice would you give for somebody who's just like, I can't do that. I don't know what I want to do.
How does one maybe would just take that first step? Do you have any thoughts?
[00:41:53] Speaker B: There are a couple of things, a couple of ways to answer that. I would say first and foremost, you have to follow your passion. It can't be your grad school advisor's passion. It can't be your parents passion. It has to be yours. At the end of the day, you have to drive it. And if you're not driving it, you're not going to succeed. You have to want it, and you don't have to know what you want specifically. You don't have to say, well, I'm going to be COO of a company by the time I'm 30. I mean, if you want to do that, great, but you don't have to have that path. I mean, my path was crazy. It was all over the place.
But I always did follow my heart, whether that be following my husband or going into industry, so I could really help people on a larger scale or going back home because I wanted to spend more time with my dad and I wanted my kids to know their grandparents.
That was part of it. And just following your heart and your passions.
But there are ways you can be smart about it. And so this kind of gets to the other way that I want to answer your question.
How can you figure it out. And I've advised just hundreds of postdocs. And I've mentored so many people at this point in my life what I tell them if they really don't know what they want to do and they're really struggling, look at your network and start doing informational interviews.
Start looking at LinkedIn and say, oh, I know some people who are at some companies that I might be interested in. Send them a message, ask them minutes of their time, you know, and you never know. You never know what's going to happen. If someone messaged me on LinkedIn and said, I think your career looks amazing. I want to talk about it. I would talk about it for hours, okay? I mean, give me a cup of coffee. Let's sit down. I'd talk about it for hours.
Just have the courage to make those connections and to do those informational interviews. I think that's a great starting point for anyone who just doesn't know.
[00:44:01] Speaker A: I love that. I absolutely love that, because one of the things that I always emphasize is that connections are key and you never know what connections will eventually come back and help you out in the future, whether it's through business.
And you're very good at doing this, connecting people. So if I needed to find somebody for X, I know I could go to you. And chances are with your very extensive network, you could say, I know somebody or maybe that person knows somebody.
Keeping connections and keeping friendships close, I think, is such an important part of the career journey. And actually, yeah, how do you manage to do that too? So with everything else going on, you're a COO, you're a mom, you're a fitness fanatic, you're an excellent cook.
How do you decompress? What do you do for self care?
How do you keep your friendships going?
[00:45:04] Speaker B: Yeah, you kind of have to prioritize and just be really efficient. So when I'm at work, I'm at work, and I only work really during regular business hours.
And at the end of my day, when I'm done at around five or whatever I'm done, I don't work anymore. I put my phone down, I'm just done. And that's when I'm with my kids because they're the most important thing to me. My family is the most important thing to me. And so, yeah, we're going to make a nice dinner. We're going to sit down, we're going to talk. So having that family time, mike and I both don't work nights and weekends. I mean, when we started the company, we did, we had several months when we did, but now that's over. We don't work nights. We don't work weekends, typically. And that's really important. We put our phones down and we're just together.
And that's been really important. That's wonderful.
And maintaining relationships, and that's really critical for me. And yes, I am pretty busy, but I do find that if I just put it on the calendar I have regular phone calls every week with my mom and sister. It's a highlight of my week.
I have the Cliche sorry, the Cliche Book Club with the girlfriend last Friday of every month. But I'll tell you, just chatting with those girls, it's uplifting whenever I'm driving home from book club, I just feel good.
I just feel good.
So just maintaining those relationships but making time for it, saying this day of the week, I do this and do it.
[00:46:56] Speaker A: You have me reminiscing about our discount spa days that we used to do in grad school and postdoc and when we could afford to go get a pedicure together, we would take that opportunity.
[00:47:10] Speaker B: Those were the days. Right. We need to do that again soon, right?
[00:47:16] Speaker A: I need to come back to Wisconsin and visit you. I do.
[00:47:19] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh yeah. We can upgrade our spa experience, girl.
[00:47:23] Speaker A: We can upgrade that.
[00:47:24] Speaker B: We can upgrade a little bit.
[00:47:29] Speaker A: And I love this idea that we can leave our listeners knowing that there is a life beyond twelve hour time points and working on weekends and ducking in on holidays.
There can be a life beyond that. There doesn't have to be. If that's your thing, then that's great.
My last guest, Alicia Case, said, look, if you want to be answering emails at 11:00 at night, have at it. You absolutely can have that life. But if that's not the life that you want, then doesn't have to be that way and I love it. That's wonderful.
[00:48:08] Speaker B: I will say that I spent a lot of my time in administration at MCW Abolishing, what people call the hidden curriculum. And that is where your advisor says something along the lines of this is what I had to do, so this is what you will have to do.
It's just not appropriate anymore. It's abusive, it's traumatic.
It's just not how things are done. I mean, this generation rightfully so, they have Hobies, they want free time.
Everyone deserves hobbies and free time, no matter who you are.
And I would say just have the courage to be upfront when you're interviewing because it can be a very sensitive topic. But if you don't want to work 24/7 around the clock, say that, because if your hiring manager has that expectation, neither one of you will be happy.
Courage.
We're hiring people now, right now. And certainly I tell them that it's not an expectation and I'd want to hear that from them. But again, if that's what you want, great. That building period when I had nothing going on and I was working, working, one of the best times in my life. That worked for me, builder, and I loved it.
Would I do it now? No way. My kids are amazing. My son's going to leave the house in four and a half years.
[00:49:36] Speaker A: Oh my God.
[00:49:38] Speaker B: And he wants to go to the Netherlands.
What?
Every Sunday I go to coffee with him and we talk for hours. And it's one of the best times of my week.
[00:49:49] Speaker A: Your kids are amazing, by the way.
[00:49:52] Speaker B: And he wants to hang out with me and have coffee and chocolate mousse cake. I mean, come on, that's where it's at.
[00:49:59] Speaker A: I love that. So the women out there who are worried about balancing career and family.
[00:50:10] Speaker B: You.
[00:50:10] Speaker A: Should tell them that quality time. Take that quality time and it'll all be okay.
[00:50:15] Speaker B: Take the quality time. I'll tell you, it's not easy in the beginning. And I was blessed with very good babies and very good kids, and I dropped them off at daycare when they were eight weeks old, as early as I could. And I got back to work not eight weeks. Twelve weeks. Twelve weeks.
[00:50:35] Speaker A: Twelve weeks. Okay.
[00:50:35] Speaker B: And I got back to work, and that's what worked for me. But at the end of the day, I was ready to see those.
Um you can do it.
[00:50:45] Speaker A: You can do that.
[00:50:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:50:49] Speaker A: So, Julie, if anyone wants to learn more about Diverge, where should they go?
[00:50:55] Speaker B: We do have a website, so I can share that with you and you could maybe post it somewhere. It's Divergent.com. All right.
[00:51:05] Speaker A: And any other bits of advice, little nuggets of wisdom you want to leave for our listeners before we sign off?
[00:51:14] Speaker B: I would say just keep pushing yourself to be better, keep evolving yourself.
As soon as you stop doing that, you kind of get into a rut, and then you're not challenging yourself, and you're kind of living up to your level of competency. You just want to keep raising that bar for that. Yeah.
[00:51:34] Speaker A: I love well, Julie Tesla, thank you so much for being my second guest on the bench to boardroom. And someone who literally has gone from the bench to the boardroom. Is that just a figurative title?
[00:51:49] Speaker B: I guess I didn't realize that I did that until I saw the title of the podcast.
[00:51:53] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:51:53] Speaker B: So proud of you for doing this. It's really going to help so many people. I wish something like this. I really do.
[00:52:01] Speaker A: I hope so.
[00:52:02] Speaker B: Thank you for doing this.
[00:52:04] Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you for coming on today.
I want to thank Dr. Julie Tutsloff again, so very much for spending so much time with me today on the podcast. And thank you all for listening. Have a great day. See you next time.
