Rowan Wilkie serves as CFO for a company on the cutting edge: Nutromics is a med-tech startup developing wearable devices, enabling continuous diagnostic monitoring for a wide variety of conditions. Being at the helm of an operation with the potential to shake up healthcare, and save lives, is no small task.
Wilkie joins Jack McCullough to reflect on his wide-ranging career journey, the most valuable lessons he learned from his mentors, fundraising and financial strategies and why purpose and people were at the top of his list when it came to finding a dream leadership position. Listen by clicking below. The Q&A, lightly trimmed and edited for clarity, follows.
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Welcome to the show. We have a fantastic guest, a nice and interesting fellow. This is my first guest from Australia as well. Rowan Wilkie is the CFO of Nutromics, an Australian medtech company. Rowan, welcome to the show.
It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Nutromics I
I’m glad too. I was thrilled to reach out. Your PR people told me that you were the funniest CFO they’ve ever met. Not to put any pressure on you or anything like that, but that was a big hook for me. Nutromics is one of those companies that has the chance to be a real difference maker. It’s fair to say certainly not a lot of Americans know about it. Most of my audience is American. What can you tell us about Nutromics at the 10,000-foot view?
I would love to give an overview. Nutromics is a company that’s based in Melbourne, Australia, but we also have a laboratory and some operations in San Diego, one of my favorite places in the world. We’re developing a medical wearable that can monitor any diagnostic target, including drugs, proteins, biomarkers and hormones, continuously and in real time. We call it a lab on a patch and is what we think is an extension or a next-generation version of what many people see, which is a continuous glucose monitor. Unlike glucose monitors, we can monitor many other molecules.
We’re in our first clinical studies at the moment. I’m embargoed around that. We have some very exciting developments. We have a huge pipeline of products that can monitor multiple molecules in real-time. We’d raised about $4 million by the time I arrived a few years ago. By now, we’ve raised $35 million. One of the big aspects of the platform is that we’re building what we think will be one of, if not the world’s largest molecular data set to enable AI-assisted new product discovery and ultimately make a big impact on healthcare outcomes and save lives through a lack of continuous diagnostic monitoring.
Other than that, nothing important is going on over there.
It’s a huge mission.
Do you have about 60 employees?
Yeah. We have about 60 employees.
It struck me when I was on your website and from our prior conversation—you’ve accomplished a lot in a pretty short period of time.
I’m hugely proud of the team. We have an incredible technical team, which is augmented by a biosensor advisory board that contains the best of the best in synthetic DNA. That comes from the University of California Professor Kevin Plaxco as well as Columbia University, Johns Hopkins, the University of New South Wales here in Australia, but as importantly, our internal team of engineers and scientists in Melbourne and San Diego. They amaze me every day.
Looking Back
That’s fantastic. We’ll get back to that. I want to ask a little about you. You grew up on a farm in Australia?
I did.
Not a common thing for CFOs, at least that I know of. I’ve met more than I might have thought. What was that like growing up on a farm?
I grew up in a small town outside of Melbourne, Australia called Ballarat. It’s famous for an 1850s gold rush like California. That’s in, for your audience, the very south of Australia or south of Sydney. I spent a lot of time on our family farm, which has a lot of quintessential Australian animals, eucalyptus trees, kangaroos, koalas, platypus and many more. One of the reasons why I love San Diego is seeing a little bit of home in the trees there.
That’s interesting. Those animals are so exotic in my mind that you mentioned, the kangaroo and the platypus. It’s almost like they’re not real animals. I know that they are, but they seem so exotic and out of the norm that it’s amazing when you come across one as an American. That’s cool. Did you grow up in a big family?
Yeah, I did. I have four siblings. I have two older sisters. I have a younger brother and a younger sister as well. We have a large family.
Like most CFOs that I know, you went to college and studied German. It might have been tough for the eighteen-year-old Rowan to envision that he would be the CFO of a medtech company one day. What was the plan when you were studying German?
I studied a mixture of commerce. German was an interest of mine from school. I spent a little bit of time there growing up. I’ve returned from a business trip to Germany and other places, including the U.S. I had the chance to stretch my German for the first time in 25 years. It finally became useful in some business discussions, which was wonderful. I went to the University of Melbourne and studied commerce and German, not necessarily a super traditional pathway for a CFO.
Career Path
On your LinkedIn profile, I only saw what I wanted to see because I didn’t pick up on the commerce part. I saw the German part, which as a guest on a CFO show was intriguing to me. Let’s chat a little about your career path because I know you’ve had some great experiences that led up to you being the CFO of Nutromics. I know you worked at Goldman Sachs, for example, and a few other places along the way. What are some of the highlights that got you ready for the role?
One of the most important decisions I made was—I graduated college in the wake of 9/11; it wasn’t necessarily the most buoyant of economic times—I chose to join Ernst & Young or EY as a graduate along with a very good friend of mine, Ben. We were the first two graduates that EY ever took on that were never going to be accountants. We never studied to be accountants and didn’t have the qualifications to be a CPA or a CA.
What that gave me was a fantastic technical grounding though across their transaction services team. Back then, many years ago, we called it corporate finance across valuations, mergers and acquisitions, advisory and due diligence. I had some fantastic mentors who pushed me around attention to detail and personal quality of work. I was told I was pretty good at being fast but that pretty good wasn’t good enough. Everything needed to be right. The thing that I took away from Ernst & Young before I went to Goldman Sachs and the institutional investment research team was a focus on attention to detail and getting the numbers right as a foundation. That has stuck with me.
It’s interesting. I worked at Peat Marwick & Mitchell, now KPMG. Somebody made that observation. They thought colleges taught the wrong way. Everybody should have to get 100 on every test, but the grade is based upon how long it takes you to get that and how much input you need to get along the way. Eighty-eight percent might sound pretty good in academia, but in the real world, it’s going to get you fired pretty quickly.
That’s exactly right.
It’s interesting. You set it off at EY. They charted accountants in Australia?
They charted accounts.
We call them CPAs here. Fair enough. Where’d you come off next after your tenure at EY?
After that, I joined what was then Goldman Sachs & JBWere, which was an Australian investment bank that was acquired by Goldman Sachs. I joined the institutional investment research team covering consumer and retail stocks. It had nothing to do with healthcare. It was consumer and retail stocks across the Australian market.
That covered all types of retail from grocery to hard lines, soft lines, and food and beverage suppliers. It was a whole mix of things. It allowed us to really dive deep into the entire sector, including the entire value chain and unlisted private suppliers all the way back up into Asian sourcing. We did lots of analysis of North American and European private-label grocery trends. I could bore you with hours for that. What it did teach me was deep sector expertise and deep sector knowledge. It was incredibly valuable.
That makes sense. What are some of the other experiences you had along the way? Those are two 100 percent name recognition with this audience.
After that, my career could be summarized as I took the view that I wanted to branch out from writing reports and advising other companies and people on what they should do to figuring out how hard it was to get involved in the operation side of corporate. I joined a company that, for your American audience, is most analogous to Aramark out of Philly. It was a facilities management company in Australia, the largest one in Australia. I was head of investor relations and corporate development.
I really entered finance in the corporation side of things from an investor background. That’s the Goldman Sachs part. I then quite quickly branched out into other aspects of operational finance as well as operations leadership. Over the next nine years, I ended up selling the company to private equity, IPO-ing the business back. I ended up as a CEO at 32, working out of London, running a business for a major private equity firm briefly and then selling that business, coming back home, and doing the IPO of that business. I learned a huge amount in my first corporate role after the advisory stint.
Zooming across from 2015 to 2017, I was the first CFO of Australia’s largest digital healthcare company, which is owned by Telstra Health. The most analogous North American business is Telus Health, which is a fantastic Canadian-based digital healthcare business. That taught me a huge amount about entrepreneurs. We had about eight entrepreneurs across a dozen businesses and 40 software, IoT, and hardware products in that portfolio.
It was a very major attempt at Australia’s premier telecommunications company to create a new pillar of growth in healthcare, specifically healthcare technology. That is where I found the nexus between technology, which was and is a fantastically exciting place to be, but also healthcare, which uniquely is a sector that is filled with people who build with a mission and purpose far beyond making money.
Mentors And Mentoring
The nice thing is you can have that mission and still make money. I get that. The motivation is a little bit different. It’s more humanitarian, to say the least. I’m curious. You’ve had a great run. Who are some of the critical mentors that you’ve had along the way that really shaped you to become the leader that you are?
I’ve got to do somewhat of a cliche and come back to both my parents but specifically my father in terms of his passion for investing, and from a leadership perspective how they treat other people and how they interact with other people. That’s hard to avoid. From a commercial leadership perspective, there are a couple of leaders at EY that I appreciate now more than I did for boxing me around the ears teaching me the value of that discipline and focusing on getting the numbers right because I wouldn’t be where I’m without that personal brand and trust.
From a mentoring perspective, there are a couple of people in that stint at the facilities management company that I’m really grateful for who mentored me. I won’t mention their names. They’re in large private equity firms at the moment. They mentored me and took the time to advise me on different career roles. They have been referees for me multiple times in jobs in the ten years since I left that company and have been fantastic supporters of my career over a very long space of time.
It’s great that you’ve had those types of relationships. I’ll go out on a limb and guess that you’re probably a pretty sought-after mentor yourself. Are you mentoring any young professionals at this point in your career?
Yes, I am, and I could do more. There are a couple of things that spring to mind for me. I get a huge amount of pride out of seeing young analysts that I’ve mentored in the past become divisional CFOs. With two of those, I’ve been proud to be referees for them to become group chief financial officers of private equity-backed companies from that initial genesis of hiring them out of a couple of professional services firms, one out of KPMG and one out of Citigroup investment banking, and watching their careers flourish. They’ve done all the hard work. I had a huge amount of pleasure in watching their careers flourish and have perhaps given the odd piece of advice along the way.
I spend a lot of my time coaching and mentoring my team. That’s where I get a huge amount of enjoyment. That spans far beyond the day-to-day, “What are you doing this week? What are you doing next week?” We’re thinking about their career planning and thinking ahead around more challenging assignments that we can create for them.
Outside of that, I’m also a non-executive director on a venture capital-backed business that a couple of my friends founded. I’m stewarding that from a non-executive chair for them and enjoying watching the management team there execute. I also have a fantastic group of non-executive directors that I learn from as well.
Nutromics II
That’s fantastic. I want to come back to Nutromics. I’m curious. What about Nutromics attracted you to the role?
I first noticed Nutromics through our wonderful head of PR who had placed an article in the Australian equivalent of the Wall Street Journal. I immediately zeroed in on a new tech startup that was developing a wearable, but it was for a drug called Vancomycin, which is the most used IV antibiotic in the world and the most used IV antibiotic in U.S. hospitals. One in six patients in the ICU in the U.S. get this. I recall very vividly that my father had been given this drug related to a heart operation and had, frankly, nearly died from a complication of infection. This drug was part of that mix. I was super interested in what the team was doing.
As most of us do, I went on LinkedIn and found out that a former colleague from the digital healthcare company I was speaking about earlier was there. I reached out to him and, and said, “I have to meet the founders.” I realized that they were searching for a junior finance person. I talked my way into hiring a CFO. I had to meet the founders and talk them into taking on a CFO far earlier than many startups do. I was employee number 15. We’re at 60.
That’s a great story. I’m sorry your father went through that. The fact that you sought out the company and then talked yourself into a role that they weren’t really hiring for, that’s incredible. We could write an entire book on that journey.
I do want to clarify. As a CFO, I was also really excited and could see the massive potential that the business could have commercially in addition to impact. What I saw was a genuinely generalizable platform. It’s the most exciting technology I’ve ever seen, let alone have the privilege to be involved with, and saw the closest thing that I could see to software economics in the hardware world. I still say that.
Culture
That’s fantastic. When we spoke, you mentioned a little bit about how important the culture in Nutromics is and how you only look for people who you think are going to buy into the culture. Can you share a little bit more about that?
Yeah. From my perspective, when I was looking for my next challenge, I was looking for purpose, people and product in that order. I was looking for a mission. I have a couple of young children and wanted to do more than the next mid-cap private equity turnaround business, which is great but not necessarily life-fulfilling. From a people perspective, I was looking for people with a huge amount of ethics that were easy to work with over the long run. I wanted something that could stick and that I could see through for a long time. From a product point of view, I was looking for a genuine platform or network business. Sometimes in life, things come together. I’ve managed to find all three.
Peter Vranes, the co-founder, and Hitesh Mehta, the other founder of Nutromics, have built a fantastic culture based on what they call radical transparency. It’s very open. They still hire every single person or meet every single person in the business prior to their hiring. Beyond that, they have managed to build a coalition of people that all coalesced around the singular vision and purpose of the business. That’s our biosensor advisory board as well as employees. One of their superpowers is attracting great people and motivating those people around that vision. They’re doing so in a way that we also have fun along the way and enjoy each other’s company. We do spend a lot of time together.
CEO-CFO Relationship
When you think about it, you probably spend more time with your coworkers than your family. You all at least have a little fun and enjoy each other’s company. On that note, if you pay any attention at all, the key relationship in a lot of companies is that between the CFO and the CEO. I’m curious what your relationship with Peter Vranes is like.
We have a really close relationship. We have an extremely close daily alignment. If we don’t spend that time, we can quickly get out of sync in a scaling technology business. I’ve returned from three and a half weeks one-on-one with Peter across the U.S. and Europe. We go overseas together four times a year or every quarter for a couple of weeks, particularly to the U.S. to visit our team and investors there.
We do lots of coffee walks together with Hitesh and many hours in meetings. I spend a lot of time in meetings utterly unrelated to core finance but are crucial to their decision-making as directors of the company. As CFO, I have a very close engagement with Peter’s co-founder, Hitesh, who’s the COO. Both of them are on the board. It’s a multifaceted relationship. It requires tough conversations at times as well, but that cuts both ways. That isn’t one way upward to Peter. That’s certainly true for me as well.
As we’ve developed our relationship over the last few years, that alignment and context is everything. Making sure that we’re all aware of where each other is coming from allows us to make really high-quality decisions. That’s the other superpower of our co-founders and the success of Nutromics. It is getting the big calls right. We spend a lot of time agonizing over those decisions and making sure we get those big decisions right.
Fundraising Strategies
That makes a lot of sense. I want to chat a little about your fundraising over at Nutromics. You raised a relatively good-sized round. I’m curious. What was your fundraising strategy? What’s your plan for leveraging these investments for future growth?
When I joined, the business had raised $4 million to date in equity capital in U.S. dollars. We’ve raised a total of $35 million from a fundraising strategy. As an early-stage startup that is pre-revenue and several years away from FDA clearance and real revenue scaling, the strategy has always been to be transparent with investors with respect to how we see that roadmap, the length of time and the amount of capital required. Also twinned with that are the prospects for returns and getting investors focused around a platform investment and aligned with how we see the business.
We screen a lot of investors out if they’re interested in a small medical technology business that is incredibly light and that is more akin to what they tend to see day-to-day around a new stent or a new orthopedic device because that’s not us. For us, it’s really around the alignment of capital. We know a year or two years after we raise money from an investor that thinks that way, we’re going to have problems. A lot of what we do in screening investors is making sure that there’s a two-way alignment and that that conversation is worthwhile pursuing.
We largely have raised money from Australian venture capital and highlight with investors. We also have a large medical device company on our cap table. I won’t disclose their name at this point due to confidentiality, but they’re a great company. We’re also talking to a range of U.S. venture companies and U.S. strategics around our next round, which will be a larger series B round in 2025 after we conduct our next phase of clinical studies which we’re excited about. Peter and I have spent the last few years developing those relationships with particularly U.S. venture capital firms. I like to say we’re better known in Silicon Valley than we are in Sydney. We spend that much more time in America talking to American investors rather than Australian capital.
Financial Strategies
You mentioned you and Peter did a tour of the States not so long ago. You were in the Boston area. I want to chat and get back to Nutromics. You’ve got this money. What are some of the biggest challenges and opportunities that you face? It sounds like you’re one of those companies where your fundraising is a big deal. You’re going to be raising money. It’s a core responsibility. Aside from that, how do you balance investing in R&D but also being financially sustainable at the same time?
It’s always a really difficult balancing act for a startup. What we’ve tended to focus on, and certainly one of the things that I’ve enjoyed doing, is sitting down with the team to flesh out what are the potential investment opportunities. I’m like, “What is the universe of potential investment opportunities that we have?” I’ll ask the team, “If I could raise $500 million tomorrow, where would you invest and why?” That process is always a fun process. It’s what I call putting all our poker chips on the table and then sorting and sifting them, to use the words of another mentor of mine, a former McKinsey partner, Rob Bland.
I then go through a process of prioritization with the team around what is the art of the possible. From that, from a capital allocation perspective, which is my big passion, I then have more confidence that we have the best possible investment opportunities to bid for the capital. In the finance world, we often call that sources and uses of funds, which is a bit mechanistic.
In raising the capital, the most important thing is that we have really clear milestones before we raise the next round. We have a clear value inflection. That is to say we’re not partway through a clinical study or we’re not partway through and have delivered something. We have very clear, demonstrable data-driven value inflection that investors and ourselves can point to to say, “Things have progressed and changed here. There’s a new leg to this.” That allows us to have a platform to raise that next round.
From a clinical and R&D perspective, that’s where the majority of our funds go. The team has been really fantastic in working together to deliver a strategy. We are very internalized in terms of our technology stack. We have an internal electronics team, internal engineering, internal firmware software as well as our chemistry. All of the subsystems of our technology are in-house, which is an important part of our strategy. It’s more capital-intensive. For us, when we think about the long-term vision, and we have a long-term plan, that’s about maximizing shareholder value in the long run and attracting investors who share that vision.
Financial Leadership
That’s fantastic. That’s great. I want to get back to a little bit about financial leadership generally. You’ve had a fantastic career. I want to get your insights on how the role of the CFO and financial leadership is changing generally and where you see financial leadership going over the next several years.
I was fortunate in my early and mid-twenties to have close proximity to leading public company CFOs at Goldman and EY. In terms of history, financial leadership has, for some time, required much more than scorekeeping and adding up the results. The modern CFO is moving beyond picking up investor relations and risk management and being a strategic adviser to the chief executive.
In addition to that, for the future CFO, the challenge will continue to be turning what are vast arrays of data, and we can talk about AI and machine learning, and the sheer volumes of data that are coming through both financial and operational. They are turning that into actionable insight. It’s not just insight, but insights that are actionable.
They are then helping the team to execute. That’s in part for the CFO playing a controlled role of keeping the team focused on capital allocation choices and then execution management. My big passion is capital allocation because where we spend our money and time is our strategy. Making sure that we’re doing a few things really well is a huge part of how I see my value in the business.
Artificial Intelligence
I’m legally required to ask you this question. How do you see GenAI and other cutting-edge technologies impacting the role going forward?
At the moment, GenAI is in its infancy. I hear a lot of people quip that it is the worst it will ever be. For me, it’s difficult from a human brain perspective to understand exponential growth. From a finance point of view, we call it compounding or talk about compounding. On a two-year-plus view, it’s going to have some very interesting impacts and applications. From a finance perspective, I don’t see GenAI or text-based GenAI as having a huge impact in the near future. As data sets grow and the quality of models improves, I do think that there will be some very interesting signals, patterns and actionable insights that will come from within businesses.
Historically, CFOs have owned enterprise resource planning platforms or ERPs. For me, the marriage of ERP structured data with unstructured data to drive actionable insights and patterns will become commonplace and part of our daily lives. The CFO will have to take on board teams and people to manage that and also capture value from that.
Whether that value in an industry accrues to the firm level or is competed away depends on your company and your industry. Ultimately, for us at Nutromics, we think we’ll be creating at a product end some very valuable proprietary data sets. From a finance management perspective, GenAI is the tip of the iceberg.
It’s almost an unfair question because we’re going to look back on all these answers five years from now and realize how far off we were. Either we overestimated or underestimated it, whatever it might be. You can’t not discuss it. It is the here and now. It’s the biggest thing since the internet. It may even prove to be bigger than that.
I agree with that. We’re probably underestimating its impact.
Work-Life Balance
I like to ask our guests, because it’s underrated for CFOs but so important, about work-life balance. I think it’s really hard for you because you’re the CFO of a high-flying startup. It sounds like you’re traveling a lot. You’re on the board of a different company. Is Jack your only child?
No. I have a daughter, Isabelle, who’s my firstborn and is a couple of years older than Jack. From a work-life balance perspective, at least in terms of working with my own team, I try and lead by example. I’ve never been a fan of office face-time for the sake of it. I would much prefer to demonstrate quality over quantity in terms of office time and connection with colleagues rather than slavishly being in the office all day all the time. The same goes for scheduling meetings and the timeframes of those.
For me, in terms of the quality of time spent with family, we are trying to have a meal together that doesn’t involve television or hunched over a coffee table and that we’re sitting up at the table. Luckily, I do almost all of the cooking at home because that’s my passion. I will admit there are some nights when I say, “Let’s throw the television on.” When we’re all exhausted, a quality conversation isn’t going to happen, but we do try and do that.
In terms of time spent with my wife, the most important thing that we do is go for a long walk. That’s where one-on-one we’ll download on each other. We’ll talk about not just household things but also anything that’s on our minds during that one-on-one time. The phones are at home, so we’re not checking our phones at all. For that hour or hour and a half, A) It’s a great exercise that’s much needed but B) It’s uninterrupted one-on-one time.
Advice For Next-Generation CFOs
That is so critical. It’s great that you and your wife are able to make time to do that because a lot of people don’t. I always love to conclude this with advice for the next generation of CFOs. I’m curious what you would tell somebody who’s either in their first ever role as a CFO or maybe six months away from being in their first-ever role. What should they be thinking about for a fulfilling career path?
In order to conduct or be the most valuable CFO they can be, seek out opportunities to be involved with the COO’s team and the CEO’s team. Go out to operations. Run a store or run a part of the operation. That allows you to empathize with the problems that your business partners are facing. I’ve been a COO. I’ve been a CEO. I’ve run operations before. That means I have some battle scars, and I understand some of the problems that my peers and business partners are facing. Empathy would probably be high on that list in a CFO aspiring to have an impact and delivering high-quality advice that has an impact.
That’s great advice. Empathy is so underrated for executives. Many years ago, if you said the main quality for a CFO is empathy, people might have snickered at you. Since COVID, it’s been one of the most important leadership traits that a CFO can have. This has been great. I appreciate you doing this for multiple reasons, partly because you’re busy but not the least of which is that it was 7:00 in the morning when we started this. Before we sign off, I’d love to give you the final word.
You said it really well. I appreciate the opportunity to have a chat. It’s no problem getting up at 7:00 AM in a U.S.-facing business. We’re used to it.
