Hunter Goble (MBA 2022) did not enroll in Harvard Business School with dreams of becoming an entrepreneur. After earning his MBA, Goble intended to return to Eli Lilly to continue to work building brands and launching products. He envisioned himself leading a big, established corporation like the pharmaceutical giant one day—not creating a company from scratch.

But Goble was determined to explore the wide variety of opportunities available to him in his time at HBS, so when he read about a nonprofit life sciences entrepreneurship program in an email newsletter from one of the many of the School clubs he had joined, he decided to apply. “It was just curiosity,” Goble says.

The program, now known as Nucleate, which is dedicated to empowering the next generation of biotech leaders, hosted what Goble remembers as a kind of “speed dating” event where would-be founders had two minutes to pitch their experience and skills to each other. That’s how Goble met Dr. Wayne Lencer, a Harvard Medical School professor who had spent a decade developing technology to enable the oral delivery of biological medicines—therapies created from living organisms—that typically require injections or infusions. These delivery methods can be painful, time consuming, and costly. It was a subject of great interest to Goble who, prior to HBS, had been involved in bringing injectable biologics to market at Eli Lilly. From that meeting in Batten Hall at HBS would come Transcera, a now two-year-old venture-backed biotech startup in Cambridge that Goble leads as CEO.

Goble says his transformation into a startup founder would not have been possible without the support system for entrepreneurs he discovered at HBS. He originally thought of his partnership with Lencer as an interesting side project and extracurricular learning opportunity while he pursued his MBA studies until the team entered the HBS New Venture Competition in 2021. They won the Tough Technology Prize, an award that came with $10,000 and, more importantly for Goble, a stamp of approval on the undertaking. “It was a huge vote of confidence that what we were working on resonated with people and was important and valuable and venture-backable,” he says.

Soon after, the team’s venture (then called Karivez Bio) won the student Health & Life Sciences Track at the 2021 President’s Innovation Challenge, a University-wide competition hosted by the Harvard Innovation Labs, which identifies student ventures with significant potential. The experience “was a huge catalyst for us, and it gave us an opportunity to test different ways of telling our story and gain feedback from an audience of potential investors,” Goble says. The victory also came with $75,000, a sizable sum for the young firm facing basic company-formation costs.

The enterprise became part of the Harvard i-lab Venture Program in the summer of 2021, which enabled the founders to access its workshops, funding opportunities, advisors, and student entrepreneur community. Goble also took advantage of the resources of the Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab, part of the Harvard Innovation Labs ecosystem, which provided a wet-lab bench to the burgeoning biotech and served as the company’s meeting space and first official address.

“That’s more important for a company than you think,” Goble says. Additionally, he benefited from the financial support of the Rock Summer Fellows program, and in the fall of that year, the venture was chosen to join the Rock Accelerator, which offered additional coaching and peer support. (He also received a need-based award through the Rock Center’s loan forgiveness program, which benefits select graduating entrepreneurs.)

Goble was still in his pandemic-delayed second year at HBS in the fall of 2021 when the team raised $1 million in pre-seed investment. “That was the point at which it was abundantly obvious that this was the best career opportunity for me,” he says. “It’s when I fully committed to entrepreneurship.”

Today, Transcera has four full-time employees including Justin Wolfe, the company’s cofounder and chief scientific officer. It is based at LabCentral, an incubator space in Cambridge’s Kendall Square, which is also an operating partner for the Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab. The company is currently in the process of raising a seed round to double the size of its team and make what Goble calls “an important transition in the life cycle of the company”—from proof of concept to platform and product development. It plans to focus first on creating oral versions of peptide hormone drugs used to treat rare endocrine and metabolic diseases.

Although Goble is no longer a student at HBS, he is still an active part of the School’s entrepreneurial community. In June 2022, he was named a recipient of the Blavatnik Fellowship in Life Science Entrepreneurship, which offers HBS alumni and Harvard-affiliated postdoctoral students the opportunity to advance the technical and commercial development of their existing scientific research. As a fellow, Goble receives one year of salary and benefits from the School while building Transcera, which “enabled me to take the risk of pursuing an entrepreneurial endeavor rather than returning to a potentially more stable career in pharma,” Goble says. “But beyond that, what I have valued most from the fellowship program—and from my time at HBS—is the cohort of peer founders and the ability to compare notes and share stories and challenges.”

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