Alex Gelbert

Alex started Let There Be as a senior at McGill University. During college he had a few internships in advertising, right as digital and video marketing were starting to take off, and a lot of that work happened to be for healthcare clients. What struck him was that the agencies often struggled to help those clients make the move.

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They were great at creativity, but they didn’t deeply understand science, medical and regulatory review, or the compliance environment healthcare brands operate in. That planted the seed for Let There Be.

Alex Gelbert

Coming out of college he had an offer to join a top global PR firm. He declined it and took the risk on his own idea instead. The first project was a major Rx-to-OTC switch for one of the largest consumer healthcare companies in the world. He was twenty-one or twenty-two, the company had basically no track record, and they were suddenly helping support the consumer education effort around a global switch. The work played a meaningful role in explaining the product to consumers, which was early proof that the idea could work, and the start of what became its own category: science marketing.

His father is a PhD chemist and a lawyer who spent his career in healthcare R&D and drug development, so Alex grew up around science. He never saw himself as the scientist, though. He saw himself as the storyteller, and eventually realized that was exactly the opportunity: he was good at taking complicated scientific ideas and making them simple, memorable and understandable without losing what made them true.

Leading a company and a team was the skill he had to build from nothing, having never gone to business school or run anything like it before. What he learned is that a company only works when you have great people doing great work and those people know how to work exceptionally well together. The science that fascinates him is epigenetics, the layer sitting on top of the DNA you inherit that helps determine which genes are switched on and how strongly they are expressed, which makes biology feel far more dynamic than he understood growing up. Outside work it has been cars for as long as he can remember, art you can drive, as he puts it, sculpture you can rev.