From Tagging Sea Turtles to Cannabis Biotech: The Bold Path of CEO Caitlyn Krebs

287. From Tagging Sea Turtles to Cannabis Biotech: The Bold Path of CEO Caitlyn Krebs

[00:00:00] Ellen Scanlon: This podcast discusses cannabis and is intended for audiences 21 and over.

[00:00:06] Caitlyn Krebs: I just love being on the cutting edge of science and technology, and I believe cannabinoids are the next thing. They’re like vitamin 70 years ago, nobody knew what vitamins did or what they were for, but now everyone takes ’em and we’ve got, you know, vitamin E and D and K.

[00:00:22] So I, I think cannabinoids are exactly the same as vitamins.

[00:00:27] Ellen Scanlon: Welcome to How To Do the Pot, the award-winning podcast, helping you feel confident about cannabis. I’m your host, Ellen Scanlan.

[00:00:44] You just heard from Kaitlyn Krebs, the CEO and Co-founder of Nalu Bio, a San Francisco based biotech company unlocking the power of the endocannabinoid system to support women’s health. Kaitlyn is also a mom of [00:01:00] two young boys and with Mother’s Day coming up this weekend, I wanna wish a very happy Mother’s Day to all the moms listening.

[00:01:09] Becoming a mother was not easy for me. It took me nearly four years to get pregnant, and the diagnosis I was given, unexplained infertility turned out to be wrong. What I actually had was endometriosis, which affects one in 10 women. I talked more about it with Caitlyn in a recent episode, and if you haven’t heard it yet, I hope you’ll go back and listen.

[00:01:33] My son just turned seven last month, and it is with a lot of gratitude that I am sending love to you wherever you are on your own motherhood journey. I first reached out to Caitlin last year because I wanted to spotlight more women in CEO roles and to talk candidly about what it takes to build a company in a still evolving industry like [00:02:00] cannabis.

[00:02:00] Women hold just 11% of CEO positions in venture capital backed startups. In the cannabis industry, the numbers are a bit better. Nearly 40% of executive roles are held by women, but female CEOs are still very rare, and that is, despite plenty of research showing that more diverse leadership leads to better outcomes.

[00:02:28] So in the spirit of, if you can see it, you can be it. I hope this episode inspires you to support women-led businesses or maybe even start your own. In today’s show, you’ll hear how Kaitlyn’s early years growing up in Hawaii shaped her love of science. Why she believes in the future we’ll all think about cannabinoids like vitamins and how career advice she heard 20 years ago still guides her path as a CEO and a mom.[00:03:00]

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[00:03:46] Caitlyn grew up in Hawaii, the child of hippie parents from the east coast who moved there and never looked back. Her love of nature and the outdoors led her to science and marine [00:04:00] biology.

[00:04:00] Caitlyn Krebs: I love the outdoors. I love to swim. I love to hike. I love the ocean. My parents used to call me a fish, like I would just spend, you know, hours in the ocean and it made me love biology, Marine biology.

[00:04:14] I’m a biologist by training. It impacted, you know, who I am today and what I’m doing today as well. I. I spent my elementary school days outside all the time playing outdoors, and so I’d always loved to be out in nature and it was probably Mr. Rice, my marine biology teacher, where I really fell in love with science and I had a marine biology class in high school and we would tag turtles and so you would go into this brackish water.

[00:04:46] Lagoon and at night you dive down free dive, you grab the turtles, you bring ’em up, and there was a University of Hawaii researcher and we would measure them and weigh them and tag them because at that time they’re threatened. [00:05:00] And I just absolutely love that. That really I think started my love of science and biology.

[00:05:06] I still go back to that bay with my kids. It’s called Kiholo Bay on the big island. I take them there and I show them all the turtles. There used to be like one or two, and now there’re like 20 or 30 turtles in the bay.

[00:05:16] Ellen Scanlon: I asked Caitlin if marine biology was a common path for women. I.

[00:05:21] Caitlyn Krebs: There was one other woman, she and I were the outliers for sure.

[00:05:25] It was mostly men or boys at the time. Right? Who didn’t mind camp? Yeah. I didn’t mind camping. I didn’t mind sleeping outside. I wasn’t scared of the ocean at night. My friends thought I was crazy. I. We had something called the headmaster holiday. So in high school, the headmaster would call just a random day.

[00:05:42] It was like a snow day. But you know, we don’t have snow days in Hawaii. And I decided I wanted to go turtle tagging on my day off. And they’re like, why would you ever do that? Like it’s a free day.

[00:05:53] Ellen Scanlon: Kaitlin left Hawaii and moved to the East coast for college at Brown. After graduating, she found a [00:06:00] job at a startup in San Francisco in 1999, just in time to experience the first.com boom.

[00:06:08] Caitlyn Krebs: So it was 1999 and I found an entrepreneur who is starting an internet advertising company. I applied for a job and he offered me the job because I had coded one website in college. I was the third employee of this little startup here in San Francisco, and we were making a technology for banner ads.

[00:06:31] You know what you see on, on websites? He and I really hit it off and I realized, you know, we were pitching to like Red Point Ventures for $15 million with just a PowerPoint presentation. I mean like no prototype, nothing. And I was like, wow, this is really fun. Uh, I loved it. I love kind of the rush of it and I love the networking and I got the entrepreneurial bug and then I just went from kind of startup to startup and it.

[00:06:58] I knew I, I wanted to found a [00:07:00] company. I knew I wanted to be kind of leading a company and I had a few other ideas before Nalu, but founding Nalu was really kind of the culmination of a lot of hard work at startups, and, and I knew what I was getting into.

[00:07:14] Ellen Scanlon: Kaitlyn loves being on the cutting edge of science and technology.

[00:07:19] When she started seeing CBD everywhere without a lot of data explaining why or how it was helping people, she recognized a big opportunity. I.

[00:07:30] Caitlyn Krebs: The reason why I got into this is because this was four or five years ago. You know, CBD was everywhere, right? It was in, it was in coffee. It was in chocolate.

[00:07:40] Mostly C, B, D, obviously THC, depending on where you are in the country as well. People were using it. It was a huge market, but there was really no science and data behind it. That’s really the issue, but when consumers are pulling for things, right, you don’t have to push it on them back pain, you know, [00:08:00] elbow pain, maybe cramps, right?

[00:08:02] There are so many different use cases for cannabinoids, and so I just love being on the cutting edge of science and technology, and I believe cannabinoids are the next thing. They’re like vitamins. 70 years ago, nobody knew what vitamins did or what they were for, but now everyone takes them and we’ve got, you know, vitamin E and D and K.

[00:08:22] So I, I think cannabinoids are exactly the same as vitamins. I. The reason why I think the time is now is from a regulatory perspective, you know, things are changing. The stigma is going away from cannabinoids. We’re proving the health benefits of them. We also have a part of our business where we’re creating therapeutics that will go through the FDA, but that is a much longer road.

[00:08:47] But today, there’s great opportunity for just naturally occurring cannabinoids. When I say naturally occurring, we actually do everything through chemistry. Back to the vitamins analogy, the vitamin C that you take [00:09:00] today doesn’t come from an orange, doesn’t come from citrus. They’re all synthesized, they’re all made in the lab, and so they’re pure, they’re consistent, they’re cost-effective.

[00:09:11] And so we’re doing the same thing for cannabinoids. We’re mimicking nature through chemistry. So everything that we do is actually a chemical synthesis or chemistry derived.

[00:09:21] Ellen Scanlon: Chemistry is driving Nalu Bio’s products, and Caitlin explains how the process is similar to baking a cake.

[00:09:30] Caitlyn Krebs: We have a bunch of very talented chemists and biologists, and we said, we wanna recreate CB, D, but we don’t wanna take it from the plant.

[00:09:40] We don’t wanna extract it, we wanna make it through chemistry. And basically what you do is you take two chemicals, you put them together in a four step process. It’s like baking a cake really. Like if you bake, you’ve got your flour, your sugar, you put it together, maybe you’ve got eggs, right to bind it, and you bake it and you get a [00:10:00] cake.

[00:10:00] If you follow the directions, you get the same thing every time. And that’s the same thing with chemistry. If you do the exact same thing every time, it’s consistent, it’s pure, it’s reliable.

[00:10:09] Ellen Scanlon: Cannabis regulations vary by state, and we still don’t have any kind of consensus on CBD, which is not federally regulated.

[00:10:19] Nalu Bioo is working to create the safest, purest ingredients for their clients who value knowing exactly what is in their cannabinoids.

[00:10:28] Caitlyn Krebs: When you are not extracting something out of the plant. So plants, you know, they soak up what’s in the ground, right? So some of them have heavy metals. There’s pesticides that they use to grow the plants.

[00:10:40] There can be mold right in the housing of the hemp or the cannabis plant for sure. And so. In a very controlled lab, we can make sure, well, there are no heavy metals, there are no pesticides, just because we’re not growing the plant, but we can control the temperature and the heat. In fact, we do, you know, we’re very [00:11:00] precise about temperature and catalysts, so it’s ultra pure.

[00:11:14] Ellen Scanlon: Caitlyn knows a lot more than most people about the 140 cannabinoids in the cannabis plant. I asked, which are her favorites.

[00:11:24] Caitlyn Krebs: I’m a big believer in cannabinoids in general, whether people wanna take THC or the 140 other cannabinoids, I use C-B-D-C-B-N for sleep with or without THC, just a little bit of THC for sleep.

[00:11:41] I want people to be using these things so it provides them a health benefit and I think. What people don’t realize is there’s a tremendous amount of benefit from these cannabinoids. I don’t think of them as a drug at all, actually. I think of ’em in like another medicine.

[00:11:57] Ellen Scanlon: Caitlin is also really excited about a [00:12:00] cannabinoid I haven’t talked much about on the show.

[00:12:02] It’s called THCV.

[00:12:05] Caitlyn Krebs: THCV. It’s a varin for weight management. So there’s been some later stage clinical studies that show it can help with appetite suppression. So you know, there’s this whole ozempic GLP one craze going on. I actually think that there’s a cannabinoid that can provide something similar, maybe not as potent, but could help pain.

[00:12:27] I’m always a big fan of cannabinoids for pain, like hand sound. People are using it for pain, anxiety, stress.

[00:12:34] Ellen Scanlon: In 2023, Kaitlyn and her team raised a $12 million series a round from investors. And while that is a major vote of confidence in Nalu bio, the cannabis industry has had a surprising reaction to the work they’re doing.

[00:12:53] Caitlyn Krebs: Most of this industry looks at me like I’m crazy when I tell them we’re doing this through chemistry, right? Everyone is in love with the [00:13:00] plant, right? People have this like emotional attachment to the plant, and I just care about the end product. I haven’t experienced that in other kind of sectors that I’ve been in, that people are just love the plant and I love plants.

[00:13:13] I love nature.

[00:13:16] Ellen Scanlon: When I meet female founders, I’m always curious about their management style and how they face challenges in running their business. Caitlin fills me in.

[00:13:26] Caitlyn Krebs: I really believe in collaboration. I’m a collaborator at heart. I think that that’s kind of one of the keys, particularly in a new industry like this, where you have to figure out how to work with all the players, even if they’re not your ideal partners.

[00:13:41] But with my team, I’m really collaborative. I respect all opinions. Trust is at the, is at the forefront. If you don’t trust your team and your partners, things can be really challenging. So I think the way that we’re gonna change this industry and really elevate it and bring the therapeutic [00:14:00] potential of no high cannabinoids is really through collaboration, because we can’t do it alone as a small company, as a startup.

[00:14:08] I’m also a really good listener. That’s what people tell me. I listen a lot. There’s a lot to learn if you listen.

[00:14:16] Ellen Scanlon: It takes a lot of passion and perseverance to found and run a company and to be a present parent. I asked Caitlyn how she structures her days and finds time to be with her young family.

[00:14:30] Caitlyn Krebs: I have two little kids.

[00:14:31] I have two boys, 8-year-old and a 10-year-old. And I love to exercise, so I start my morning off at 5:00 AM either doing CrossFit or I run and I get home and I get my kids off to school, and then I have the pleasure of walking to work. Then I’m in it for many hours, many hours as zooms and calls and investors, and board members and team [00:15:00] members.

[00:15:00] And then I pick up my kids. My kids keep me balanced. Having, I think young kids who need a lot of care and feeding keep me balanced, but I also have a super supportive husband, so there’s no way I could do this without someone who allows me to travel and be flexible and be on calls, you know, in the evenings, in the mornings, in the weekends.

[00:15:22] But I really love what I do, so I integrate kind of work and life as one that allows me to balance it in a weird way. I.

[00:15:30] Ellen Scanlon: Not every kid has a mom who is a CEO. I asked Caitlin how she talks to her sons about her work. I.

[00:15:38] Caitlyn Krebs: They know that I have a startup that I started it. They, I think, are very proud of me.

[00:15:44] It’s very cute. They like to talk about it. They talk about Nalu bio. I also tell them that they are part owners in Nalu bio. They love that they have stock that like really excites them so they kind of understand that. I don’t [00:16:00] yet have to talk to them about cannabis. You know, they’re still kind of too early.

[00:16:04] You know, I just simply say I develop products and medicines for people and make them better. They can understand that and appreciate it. They come to work with me and they see my office. They experience the other side where I’m traveling and I’m gone, and I can’t be at a school function most of the time.

[00:16:21] They understand that, you know, they allow me to take time from them and put it into the company.

[00:16:27] Ellen Scanlon: Nearly 20 years ago, Kaitlyn went to a work-life balance panel and what she heard there has stuck with her ever since.

[00:16:35] Caitlyn Krebs: There was someone from UCSF, someone from Genentech, or someone from a big lab, and they all shared their work life balance stories and they were all completely different.

[00:16:45] One woman, her and her husband lived apart actually, and they would like come together for weekends. One other woman, you know, had a husband who just sat on the couch and like drank beer all day. So she was this high performing Genentech professional. And [00:17:00] so I realized at that point that like there is no.

[00:17:04] Work life balance, stereotype or norm, you just have to figure it out for yourself. At least that’s what I believe. And so I think it’s just taken me time and it changes all the time, right? You just have to be flexible. Some weeks are much more heavy on work. You know, sometimes my kids are sick and they need me or my husband or my family, so.

[00:17:26] I think I’ve just kind of figured it out over time, but it’s, it’s not easy. I live my life by like minutes. I block out my entire day and you know, time is the most precious resource. I’ve also learned to just be more fluid. Like I can take investor calls. On the weekends or I’ll schedule things, you know, if I’m at a soccer game, you have to integrate because if you have these, at least in my opinion, these are really clear walls.

[00:17:56] Like, okay, I’m at work now. I can only talk to you at work. You just, you can’t, [00:18:00] you can’t get it all done. And I just do a lot of, a lot of scheduling to try to, to try to fit it all in. I always wanna do everything I can’t, but I try.

[00:18:09] Ellen Scanlon: The cannabis industry has moved toward legalization at a slower pace than many expected, and yet there is progress.

[00:18:18] Kaitlyn shares what she is most looking forward to as federal regulations become more clear, I.

[00:18:25] Caitlyn Krebs: I am most excited about combining cannabinoids and other, I’ll just call it bioactives like vitamins and probiotics because the issue is people are scared to take, I’ll name a ma, C-B-D-T-H-C-B-C-B-N-C-B-G.

[00:18:45] They don’t know what they are, but when you pair it with, let’s just say. B six or B12, people know what that is or, or even something more esoteric curcumin or maybe even like [00:19:00] vasalia, some of these things that people are trying anyways. So I’m excited to pair them because it brings the consumer along.

[00:19:06] It’s, oh, it has cannabinoids in it, huh. That’s kind of interesting. Like I might try that. So I actually think there’s a lot of synergy between things people are already using and cannabinoids to provide. Weight management, pain, anxiety, stress, and no one’s done that yet just because it’s such a new nascent industry.

[00:19:27] So I’m ready for cannabinoids 2.0 or 3.0 just beyond the cannabinoid itself.

[00:19:34] Ellen Scanlon: Thank you to Caitlin Krebs for sharing her story for this series about women money and power. I’m excited to see what magic she can make with cannabinoids in the future. Who should we feature next in our Women in Business series?

[00:19:50] Please reach out to hi@dothepot.com or DM us at Do the Pot. And if you like this episode, please share it with a friend. [00:20:00] We love new listeners and are here to help everyone feel confident about cannabis.

[00:20:08] Thank you for listening to How to Do the Pot. For lots more information and past episodes, visit do the pot.com. Are you one of the thousands of people who love how to do the POTS newsletter? If you’re not getting it, please sign up@dothepot.com. And if you like how to do the pot, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

[00:20:31] It really helps people find the show. Thank you to writer Joanna Silver and producers Maddie Fair and Nick Patri. I’m Ellen Scanlan and stay tuned for more of how to do the pot.