A Day in the Life with Allurion’s Shantanu Gaur
What’s it really like to be an entrepreneur? When the work never ends, how do you juggle running a company, bringing in new customers, interacting with investors, and having a life? This series takes a look inside a typical day for Romulus’ portfolio founders. Today, we’re following a day in the life of Allurion’s co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Shantanu Gaur.
I snuck up behind Dr. Shantanu Gaur at his office on a recent summer morning.
“You caught me!” the sports-lover said, gesturing to his computer screen, where he was toggling between emails and a live-streaming cricket match. Hints of Shantanu’s passions pepper his office; memorabilia from Pittsburgh teams line his walls, competing for space with images and models of gastric balloons. The latter is a little weird, décor-wise, but also weirdly beautiful in their curved simplicity.
That is perfectly fitting for Allurion, the company Shantanu co-founded when he was a Harvard Medical School student, and which constantly balances its role in two distinct spaces: medical and cosmetic. Allurion is the creator of the Elipse, a “procedureless” gastric balloon that requires no surgery, endoscopy, or anesthesia for its insertion or removal. Currently available in Europe and the Middle East, the Elipse has already helped hundreds of patients lose thousands of pounds, offering the most frictionless form of meaningful weight loss currently available. We recently led Allurion’s $27M Series C, and the company will use those funds to begin its pivotal FDA trial, which would allow the Elipse to be used in the United States.
For a global company that is manufacturing medical devices, working with doctors worldwide, collecting feedback from patients, and preparing for an FDA trial, it stands to reason that there is no “typical” day. Shantanu, Allurion’s Chief Scientific Officer, opened a window as wide as he could for me to see what a day in his life is like, when he’s not traveling worldwide for medical conferences, speaking engagements, and meetings with doctors and patients using the Elipse.
6am
“On a normal day when I’m not traveling, I usually wake up between 6 or 7 in the morning, kiss my wife goodbye, get in the car, and on my way into work — usually a 30–40-minute commute — I listen to ‘Mike and Mike’ on ESPN radio. I’m a big sports fan, as you can see,” Shantanu says with a smile, gesturing to the afore-mentioned sports memorabilia bedecking his walls. “It’s also some time to take my mind off Allurion as I head into the office.
“I get here, and I do a couple things every morning. One is I get a report from PubMed, which is a database of medical articles, on anything related to balloons or obesity. Typically for obesity there are 10–15 articles per day that are coming into my inbox. So, I’ll pick one or two that look interesting and take a read, and any time anything on balloons comes in, I’ll give that a read. I read the Fortune Brainstorm newsletter every morning, and I get the Pitchbook newsletter as well. I’ll also always have a cup of Indian tea,” he says, pointing to the stacked boxes of teabags on the table behind me. “It’s full of cardamom, which gives it a nice flavor.”
10am
“Depending on which day of the week it is, we have a lot of weekly calls. We have a weekly partners’ call with me, Jon, Sammy, and Ram, which goes over some big strategic questions for the business on a high-level. We also have a company-wide interdisciplinary team call, which forces every department head to crystallize the 2–3 projects that are most meaningful for the company and allows everyone to share everything with the whole crew. We started that call with just four people, and now there are 30 people on it, which is really cool. And it’s a good opportunity to share some corporate updates, which may not necessarily reach everyone on the staff but are important for people to know about: new sales initiatives, new countries the Elipse is in, any press we get, new clinical data — there’s a lot of news flow, and it doesn’t always get communicated to everyone. So that’s a good way to get everyone up to speed.”
When Shantanu founded the company with his classmate Sammy Levy in 2009, it was a seedling of an idea they had from the confines of their med school campus. I asked him how daily life as an entrepreneur has changed as the company has scaled from two students putting their heads together to a company of more than 30, fresh off its Series C.
“It’s become a little more structured around our departments,” Shantanu explains. “Before, Sammy and I were each department, and we had 20/20 visibility into each of the ongoing projects. Now we’ve had to adapt ourselves to take a little bit higher-level view of how things are going and encourage our team members to do the operational work and report it out and summarize the progress, the challenges they’re facing, etc.
“I think my role has evolved to be more high-level and understand from a strategic standpoint whether things are going in the right direction. And the other role that all of us play is to make sure no silos develop in these departments. It’s great to have a team that’s really focused on one task or project in particular, but our job is to make sure that there’s still really good cross talk. And beyond that, I do a lot of work to motivate and inspire our team, which is especially important as we scale.”
3pm
Shantanu’s afternoons are spent variably; in meetings, networking with other people, and carving out time to focus on brainstorming.
“As you know, we’re planning our FDA study, so there are a lot of ongoing workstreams related to that,” he says. “And then the rest of the week is very focused for me on meeting with my network. As you know, the people you know are some of the most valuable assets for a company. I try to be out of the office 2–3 times a week meeting with people in my network who could be helpful or beneficial to Allurion, or people who are doing something similar, fellow founders or entrepreneurs who are struggling with the same things we are and succeeding at the same things we are, just to compare notes.
“And then, typically on Wednesdays in the late afternoon and early Thursday mornings, I do a whiteboard session by myself on things that are on my mind that I want to chalk out.” He gestures to the whiteboard behind him. As it is a Thursday morning, I can clearly see the fruits of his labor — the board is filled with colorful notes, drawings, and diagrams that indicate that Shantanu is constantly thinking about how Allurion can improve.
An interesting component of Allurion’s campus is that it also includes a warehouse where the Elipse balloons are produced. That’s a significant change for the company since its founding, when Shantanu and Sammy were outsourcing production.
“It became very apparent to us in the early days that outsourcing our R&D work was very inefficient,” says Shantanu. “We were dependent on someone else and someone else’s schedule in order to get product made, in order to make changes to the design, etc. We realized very early on that we needed to bring manufacturing in-house. We were lucky to find that plant across the street and set up our manufacturing processes there, and that dramatically accelerated how fast we were able to iterate, how fast we were able to change designs and get new product into a clinical trial or out into the field.”
Shantanu visits the warehouse space at least once per day, so he can interface with the team and monitor how things are going on the manufacturing floor.
“The R&D team and the quality and regulatory teams have adopted this agile approach from the software world where things are released more or less on a release cycle, where things are prioritized on unmet need we’re seeing in the field,” he explains. “What’s cool is that we get to assign problems and rank their importance, and the team can just pull those problems and start projects, so everyone is working on high-priority stuff at a given point. So technology still enables us to be a very cohesive team, even though we’re separated across the street from one another.”
6pm
How does Shantanu unwind, and is he ever able to remove any of the various hats he wears as CSO at Allurion? He tries to be intentional about focusing on family when he’s not at work. “I try to leave on the later side to avoid traffic going back to Boston,” he says — the plight of the suburban commuter! — “and I’ll call my parents on the way home. That’ll take about half the car ride, then the other half I put on ESPN radio and see the news I missed during the day in the sports world.
“When I get home, Neha [Shantanu’s wife] and I will cook dinner together, and she has a rule that I love, which is that we’ll eat dinner together — cell phone off, TV off, no distractions. And it’s amazing how time flies. We don’t have kids right now, so there are no distractions, and an hour and a half will go by with us just talking, and before you know it it’s 9:00. Then we’ll watch some TV or read or go to the gym together. Typically, we don’t do any work until 10 or 10:30, and then we’ll usually take our laptops out and get some things done so the next day starts off on the right foot.” The expectant dad shakes his head with a rueful smile. “Now I’m looking forward to seeing how having a kid will change that daily schedule, because I imagine it’s going to very different. Then we’ll establish a new normal.”
Want to know more about Shantanu, including the least-glamorous part of his job? Check out this 2-minute video:
