With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1515520
47 B C B U S I N E S S . C A M A R C H 2 0 24 before he left to become a day trader on Wall Street. "As a young kid in your mid-20s you're pursuing things in hopes they'll bring you happiness," he says. "You may quickly see that you're making more money than all your friends. But you realize that's not really the limit. It's way higher, way bigger dollars. And the scale of everything just gets huge." So that money didn't bring happiness? "I didn't stick around long enough to get there, but you do feel that everyone around you isn't overjoyed," he recalls. The financial crisis came in 2008 and Polak, like many of his colleagues, was fired. "It ended up being a great thing. It's like a treadmill, right? You've got to keep going. If you only know one track, you only know how to run on that one track." Polak found a job with an Israeli agri- cultural finance startup that took him to Brazil. He went back to Toronto for love (he and his wife are now married with two kids) and started his first company, Datapoint Diagnostics. "We were doing psychiatric diagnosis with an engineering approach—using big data to try and disen- tangle peoples' response to medication." He doesn't mince words when asked how that venture went: "Horribly. Psychia- try is very hard. We ended up selling some of the assets to a big pharma company, but it was nothing to brag about." Shortly after that, Polak and his fam- ily moved to Vancouver—"I never liked Toronto and my wife had always wanted to live here, so I said, 'Okay, let's try it,'" he says. In 2018, he joined Mesentech, which has an office in Vancouver's Mount Pleas- ant neighbourhood and a lab in Burnaby, as CEO. Mesentech was founded by renowned chemistry expert and SFU professor Robert Young in 2013 to develop novel therapies to treat bone diseases. This year, the com- pany dosed the first patients with its Phase 1 study for a new bone-regeneration drug, MES1022. The novelty of the discovery is the The Innovators " As the CEO of a company, your job is to be the rock—investors rely on you to always be there to pick up the pieces. If people see that you're also human, that can be hard. They don't want humans, they want superhumans. I don't know if they exist. There's certainly lots of them on social media. I'm not a very good actor."