Hari Kiran Chereddi Podcast Transcript

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Hari Kiran Chereddi Podcast Transcript

Hari Kiran Chereddi joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.

Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.

Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Hari Karan Chereddi. Hari Karan Chereddi is currently the Managing Director of HRV Global Life Sciences, India and CEO at New Horizon Global, GMH, Switzerland. Hari was part of the Forbes Global CEO list in 2010.

Hari has served on several prestigious industry bodies, including the prestigious Columbia Law School Task Force to promote U. S. India Clean Energy Investments, CII, Bureau of Indian Standards, Bureau of Energy Efficiency, and Hyderabad Angels. Hari is also an angel investor and mentor. In addition to being a consummate senior executive, he has authored over 50 professional articles and delivered over 50 speeches at various professional forums around the world.

His career reflects the success in the corporate world and entrepreneurship coupled with the best of breed academics. Hari is a computer science engineer from India and has an MBA in supply chain and finance from the U.S. As a professional badminton player Hari represented India with over 25 international tournaments in the men’s double circuit with a career best BWF world tour ranking of 56.

Well, good afternoon, Hari. Welcome to the show!

Hari Kiran Chereddi: Thank you, Brian!

Brian Thomas: You’re very welcome. I really love doing this and I appreciate you making the time hailing out of India at the moment. So, we’re doing an international podcast. I love these. Probably my favorite. Gets to traverse the globe. Really fun stuff. So again, Hari, I appreciate that. And we’re going to jump right into your first question here.

Hari, you left a senior role at Bank of America to embark on an entrepreneurial path. Founding Sujana Energy and later leading HRV Global Life Sciences. What drove you to leave the corporate world? And how did your experience at Bank of America shape your approach to entrepreneurship?

Hari Kiran Chereddi: That’s a whole lot packed into one question. Thank you, Brian. I’ll try to, I’ll try to do my best. Leaving my senior role at Bank of America was driven by a desire to create something that was personally fulfilling and impactful. At Bank of America, I was leading business operations, which gave me a lot of insight into leadership, large scale operations, and financial management.

While it was rewarding, I felt a growing need to step outside the corporate world and pursue innovative business models that could really drive change in key sectors across the world. That’s when I actually chose energy to start. The transition to founding Sajana Energy was fueled by my belief that renewable energy is potential and the desire to pioneer industry defining innovations in the renewable energy space.

I leverage strategic, financial, and operational skills that I had gained at Bank of America. To quickly build one of India’s top 10 clean energy companies. And then my corporate experience came in handy a lot of times where it helped me evaluate risks, manage teams efficiently, and also drive execution.

But entrepreneurship did add a completely new layer, which is about resilience, adaptability, and willingness to challenge the status quo. Now, I was not very happy with being in only one business. That’s when I actually sold this company. And that’s when I thought there’s a great potential in creating company in pharmaceuticals.

And I actually did manufacturing company in genetic drugs. And then I sold this company a few years ago to a large industrial corporation. And when I sold this, I was thinking that, you know, everyone who’s doing the generic manufacturing in India looked at business models only one way. That’s when I actually started my latest avatar, which is a company called HRV global life sciences.

HRV stands for RX for human and veterinary. So that’s the reason why the word three letters, HR and V. So, my corporate background in operations and building these companies helped me scale to creating one of India’s first virtual active pharmaceutical ingredient company. And in a span of six years, we’ve gotten to a 75 million in sales.

Where we actually created a completely innovative business model, and we’ve been leading the pack with market expansion, doing niche novel molecules, some orphan drugs, and assured supplies with deep customer relationships. So today, you know, I would say that this has only helped me shift to entrepreneurship.

Bank of America paved the way to actually create a very high level of structured thinking and coupled with creativity and hands on leadership needed to build this business. So, the journey one has only been enriching by, you know, having created these companies and also now my latest newfound passion of mentoring startups, contributing to academic research and also participating in international leadership community.

So, all in all, it’s been a great transition. And when I look back at. A little over 24 years of my career spanning both corporate and entrepreneurship, it’s been, it’s been more rewarding than the best I could ask for.

Brian Thomas: That’s amazing. And thank you for giving us that background and your journey from working in corporate world over to entrepreneurship.

And obviously you’ve been very innovative in the energy sector and then of course in pharmaceutical. So, I appreciate that. And Hari, as a professional badminton player who has represented India in over 25 international tournaments, how have your experiences in sports influenced your approach to business, leadership, and decision making?

Hari Kiran Chereddi: Badminton has been a very important part of my both physical and mental journey and in fact it has instilled discipline, hard work, and perseverance, one. And number two, training for a national tournament and especially representing a country like India, which has over a billion people. It does actually bring in a lot of competitive landscaping play, and one of the greatest things that I have learned is how to focus under pressure, how to be resilient in the face of setbacks, and how is it that you do consistent effort, these qualities are just as essential in business.

And, you know, you face market challenges, competition, unexpected obstacles in both arenas. One of the things that you do is that you keep pushing forward with a clear strategy that eventually leads to success. Now, even though badminton is an individual sport. Playing men’s doubles at the international level requires synergy with a partner.

The business is much like doubles, it’s all about working well with your team, trusting them and aligning them to common goals. Now, leading these organizations, I’ve actually realized that building and empowering a strong team is essential to drive any large-scale initiative. And with that said, competitive spirit in sports has shaped my mind for making decisions.

In a badminton match, you really need to think quickly. And especially in the world’s fastest sport, which is badminton, you really have very, very little time to adapt to your opponent’s strategy, take calculated risks. Similarly, in business, being able to assess a situation, think on your feet. And make informed decisions for most of the times and the pressure, there’s going to be very, very crucial for me, the stakes in business might be different, but the underlying mental approach to navigating some of these challenges and optimizing performance is very similar to what I’ve experienced on the badminton coach.

So, all these lessons are from sport. Which is resilience, teamwork, adaptability, and strategic mindset. I’ve only been very, very invaluable as I’ve led these multiple businesses across global markets. So, I’m personally very, very thankful for having, you know, that sport as part of my journey has been more rewarding than what I could ask for.

Brian Thomas: Thank you. And I love that story. We, we’ve had some professional athletes and various people that have been on the podcast to talk about very similar stories. And I appreciate that your resilience and perseverance. And of course that translates from, you know, the badminton court over to business world.

So, I appreciate the story. I really, really do. Hari. HRV Global Sciences has become a leader in helping Indian pharmaceutical companies expand into opaque markets worldwide, including Europe. Could you share the strategic vision behind HRV and what sets it apart from other market expansion firms in the life sciences sector?

Hari Kiran Chereddi: Strategic vision, you know, when we started out was to help companies address markets, which were relatively opaque and complex, especially within Europe, Middle East, and even, you know, Latin America. Most people did have access to countries like America and, you know, other, other easier regulatory frameworks were very well defined.

If you would see India has a strong active pharmaceutical ingredient manufacturing base or the bulk manufacturing base. One of the biggest challenges that we’ve always seen is that utilizing vast unused capacities are also navigating the regulatory frameworks, ensuring compliance, establishing reliable distribution networks in foreign markets presented significant burdens.

What we did when we came in was that we actually bridged this gap by offering a unique market expansion model. As a virtual API company, we were able to operate with a lean capitalized structure, focusing on strategic partnerships, rather than large scale manufacturing infrastructure, which was already existing in India.

So, this allowed us to remain agile, scalable, and highly responsive to the needs of our clients. We help companies overcome entry barriers, establish strong distribution channels, and ensure regulatory compliance, especially with markets which are traditionally being, you know, difficult to penetrate. So we have teams in seven different countries across the world, including United States, Europe, Middle East, and even in Turkey.

With that said, we have on the ground experience with navigating local regulations and building strategic relationships. So, the advantage for us has been that we have actually helped focus both on sustainability and on digital transformation, which help our clients that remain competitive in both the developed and the developing markets.

So, we’ve not only helped companies look at new technologies, we also have to bring our strategic vision to combine Them with innovative business models with deep understanding of global market dynamics, thereby helping Indian companies to actually access international growth and, you know, international markets, which they did not see before.

And you know, for us, the in summary, if I were to look at it, I’d say our largest competitive advantage is that we are a great platform for API companies to actually go expand themselves to the world. And number two, try and use their unused capacities, which we underwrite from these companies to have a long-term patient centric entrepreneurial engine.

That’s been a very interesting and close to our heart vision for a long, long time. And then this has only become more and more stronger as years went by. That’s how I put it as Brian.

Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. I like how you are in the heart of the business. And I know that you’re really close to some of those operations but having feet on the ground in those countries and those regions to have a better pulse on the heartbeat, whether it’s, you know, the local community, regulatory, whatever it is.

I appreciate that. Hari, given your extensive experience in the pharmaceutical life sciences industries, what emerging trends or innovations do you foresee having the most significant impact on the global pharmaceutical landscape over the next 10 years?

Hari Kiran Chereddi: That’s a big landscape to cover. What’s been personally things that I’ve been watching, you know, I’d summarize it into four major trends, you know, probably the next decade, if not a little longer, we’ll look at some of these.

One of the things that I should say, which I’m sure you would, you’ve heard about, you know, in various places and people talking about is about gene therapy and about personalized medicine. One of the most transformative shifts in pharmaceutical industry is the move towards personalized medicine, where treatments are tailored to individual genetic profile.

With the advances in gene therapy and genomics, we are opening therapies to target the root causes of diseases, particularly in areas like oncology, rare diseases, and autoimmune conditions. If you see, most of our drug focus has also been in rare diseases and in orphan drugs. For example, technologies like CRISPR that we’ve been talking about where next generation sequencing and gene interventions are being talked about, we are offering hope for potentially looking at cure for untreatable conditions earlier.

Over the next decade, personalized medicine will become mainstream. I’m very, very confident that this will actually drive the, you know, era for precision healthcare across the world. With that said, I quickly move on to the second part, which is, which is something that we’re personally doing a lot of research in, which is in the area of antibody drug conjugates.

We call them ADCs. Which are, for example, breakthrough and targeted cancer therapies by combining targeted capabilities of the antibodies with cancer killing power of chemotherapy. So, ADCs precisely attack cancer cells while minimizing damage to any other healthy tissues. This is a major leap in oncology treatment and over the next decade we’ll actually see a big rise of ADCs.

As ADCs progress, they’re actually going to become biologics, where their large-scale complex molecules derived from living cells will actually come in to play a big role. And companies excelling in the development and scaling of biologics and biosimilars will definitely have a competitive edge over the others in the market.

Now, you know, how could I not say this, you know, as I, as I move forward is the most talked about acronym of late, which is artificial intelligence or AI and machine learning. So, we’re actually talking about how AI and ML can actually be integrated into the pharmaceutical industry by revolutionizing how drugs are discovered, developed, and thereby brought to market.

Now, I don’t know if I can say this, but, you know, over the next few years, I would not say a decade. AI driven solutions will actually be at the heart of drug development before we find the next big thing around that. So, I am going to say that, you know, AI and ML probably will not even need a decade for them to take over.

One of the other big parts, which is something that is very close to my heart, is that we are talking about how some of these manufacturing setups have to keep sustainability as the critical focus and as the critical core of their manufacturing footprint. Where we talk about adopting green chemistry principles, and we talk about minimizing carbon footprint, we talk about ensuring environmentally responsible supply chains.

So, the shift towards sustainability will not only reduce environmental impact, but also improve the resilience of supply chain. Case in point, as we have witnessed during, during COVID 19, the number of disruptions we had in supply chain resilience. Now, over the next few years, all of us in the, you know, pharmaceutical space is looking at how to bring green manufacturing processes, sustainable practices, and probably make them a regular norm.

So, with these said, the four pillars are these four pillars that I spoke to you about, which is personalized medicine, ADCs and biologics, digital innovation and artificial intelligence and sustainability will be the four pillars that will shape how companies operate. Develop new therapies and meet demands of patients and regulatory agencies across the world.

With that said, I’d say we are extremely well poised with these trends and we’re helping, you know, our clients succeed in this rapidly evolving environment, you know, in the pharmaceutical domain. That’s how I’d summarize it with the four header that I’m looking at.

Brian Thomas: Thank you, Hari. I appreciate that. And you highlighted several new technologies, stuff that we haven’t unnecessarily, you know, not heard before, but there’s certainly going to be some leapfrogging in some of this technology as, as you know, with the explosion of AI and ML in the last couple of years has been a really a game changer, but I really do like you highlighting some of that stuff in the, in the life sciences space.

I think it’s really important that we can improve the lives of people around the world. So, thank you. And Hari, it was such a pleasure having you on today. And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.

Hari Kiran Chereddi: Likewise, Ben. Thank you for having me on your podcast. It was really a pleasure. Thank you.

Brian Thomas: Bye for now.

Hari Kiran Chereddi Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.

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