I'm posting this while sipping a Sam Adams Seasonal brew at Newark airport and waiting for the flight back to Seattle, hoping my flight gets out before the sultry weather turns to thunderstorms. It's been quite a day, actually quite a week. We are racing to make a sizeable investment in a vaccine and I was honored to be trusted to be part of the negotiating team to make the deal on Global Access, which is a commitment by the manufacturer to supply a certain number of vaccine doses at a specified affordable price to developing countries in return for getting Gates Foundation funding. My negotiating partner is an incredibly experienced and accomplished former Baxter executive who heads up the foundation's Life Sciences Partnerships group, which is our version of Business Development.
I've been working hard all week to pull together numbers with our internal team, who could not have been more accommodating. It was difficult to get everyone in the same place, as so many people are on the road traveling. Anyway we managed to get everything together just in time and I hopped on a red -eye flight to New York last night, got to the meeting place a couple of hours early to prepare, had a very successful negotiation with the prospective grantee and am now heading back to Seattle. It feels like a great culmination of the last three months work.
Tomorrow I have several meetings, an 'au revoir' celebration, then I have to return my rented cello to the music shop and hope that all my clothes and accumulated 'stuff' will fit in my suitcase as I vacate my apartment to fly home on Saturday.
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