Shashidhar Kori and the art of starting again

On a rainy November evening in 2010, Dr. Shashidhar Kori had a small ceremonial task. At Fremont High School in Sunnyvale, California, he lit the deepa, the lamp that opened a Deepavali celebration. There were flowers, music and families gathered for the evening. Kori was the chief guest, and the gathering congratulated him on that year’s VSNA Professional Award. For a moment, a long professional career had a very local stage.

The scene offers an appealing place to meet the future co-founder of Novilla Pharmaceuticals. Business profiles tend to introduce people through their most recent title, then hurry backwards through a list of employers. Kori’s story rewards a slower reading. Before the company bearing his latest title came universities, published work, established corporations and smaller ventures. There were departments to organize and colleagues to work alongside. Founding arrived after years of employment, teaching and administration.

His name appears as both Shashidhar and Shashi. The shorter version is the one Novilla uses on its team page. The longer professional history helps explain why a story about a founder might begin with a school auditorium rather than a pitch deck. By 2010, he already had enough of a career behind him for a community to celebrate it. The Novilla collaboration was still nine years away.

An education in institutions

Kori earned his medical degree at Kasturba Medical College in Mangalore, India. His professional education continued in New York, and his LinkedIn profile lists Cornell University for 1978 to 1980. These are the early coordinates of a working life that would move across institutions and across the different expectations they place on a person. The degrees and appointments came first; the founder label came much later.

His academic career included appointments at Duke University, Case Western Reserve University and the University of South Florida. He also worked at Memorial Sloan Kettering. By the time he moved to GSK, he had spent 24 years in academic work. That is a considerable opening act. It gave his subsequent corporate career an earlier history of teaching, research and administration, rather than an origin confined to company management.

Consider the difference in the work those settings ask people to do. Teaching requires an explanation that someone else can follow. Research requires a question that can survive scrutiny. Administration requires arrangements that other people can actually use. Those are general demands of institutional life, but they give useful context to Kori’s progression. His later responsibilities brought several of them together. The work kept crossing the border between knowledge and organization.

The department that had to be built

On August 10, 2007, MAP Pharmaceuticals announced Kori’s appointment as vice president of clinical development. He arrived from GlaxoSmithKline, where he had been a senior director. His new assignment included strategic and operational planning, coordination across functions and interactions with global regulatory authorities. It was a role with many constituencies. A good idea would have to travel through several departments before it could become a company decision.

One part of his MAP tenure is especially telling: he built its Medical Affairs department from the ground up. The phrase is easily passed over in an executive biography. It describes work that predates the reassuring boxes on an organization chart. A department needs a purpose, responsibilities and working relationships. Someone must help turn a broad obligation into a set of jobs that people can do together.

A colleague’s recommendation supplies a smaller view of that work. Kerry Zampa, who worked with him on learning and development, recalled: “He brought practical experience, detailed knowledge, & strong support to our partnership”. Her account describes a colleague whose contribution reached into another team’s work. It is a useful detail beside the executive title: the value someone brought was experienced in a working relationship, at the point where one group needed help from another.

Kori also oversaw a publication strategy and worked with the external professional community. His responsibilities connected internal operations with people outside the company. The pattern is useful when reading his career: he repeatedly occupied jobs in which expertise had to be organized, communicated and put into practice. The department-building chapter gives that pattern a concrete form. Long before co-founding Novilla, he had already helped create something inside another organization.

He built the Medical Affairs department from the ground up.A documented responsibility during his MAP tenure

The names on the door change

MAP became a subsidiary of Allergan in March 2013. Kori’s career includes vice-presidential service at both companies. The corporate transition provides a reminder that a résumé can change even while a field of work remains familiar. An employer’s name sits prominently on a business card. The relationships, routines and responsibilities underneath it can have a longer life.

In January 2014, Autonomic Technologies appointed him chief medical officer. His remit included work in the United States and Europe. The company’s announcement described experience extending beyond development into publication, external relationships and discussions with regulators. By then, the academic and corporate parts of his career were both relevant to the job he was being asked to do.

Trigemina announced his appointment as chief medical officer on August 4, 2015. Its account of his earlier work highlighted the department he had built at MAP. That detail had travelled with him. So had the experience of moving between universities, a large corporation and smaller companies. The sequence makes an interesting counterpoint to the tidy career ladder. Here the same skills were being used in organizations with different histories and different arrangements.

A ladder is a convenient drawing, though real careers rarely provide equally spaced rungs. Kori’s appointments form a sequence of new settings for related kinds of work. Each title tells us who employed him and where responsibility sat. The earlier assignments help explain what he could bring into the next room. The transitions are worth reading as part of the story, rather than treating them as punctuation between company names.

Two careers meet in 2019

Novilla dates its founding collaboration to 2019, when Kori and Eric Fossel brought their separate innovations together. The company now lists Kori as chief executive officer and Fossel as co-founder. That pairing gives the founding story its central relationship. Two people arrived with work already in hand and decided to pursue it together.

Kori’s position had changed. Earlier, he had joined institutions, directed functions within them and built a department. At Novilla, he became one of the people responsible for the company itself. The distinction matters because a company creates a wider set of obligations than a single department. Its founders have to give their collaboration a durable organizational form.

The team around him includes managing director Ajay Kori, product development leader Tracey Rapp and computational chemistry director Lorin Gutman. Their titles show different kinds of work sharing one company. For Kori, that combination has a recognizable precedent in a career spent coordinating across professional boundaries. The CEO role places those relationships within a venture he helped establish.

There is a temptation to give a founding date too much explanatory power. It offers a clean anniversary, and anniversaries are useful. Kori’s earlier career supplies the less tidy preparation: academic work, a senior corporate role, department-building and successive executive appointments. Novilla began in 2019. The professional experience brought to its beginning had been accumulating for decades.

The work beside the title

His professional connections continued across company boundaries. In July 2020, Tonix named him as a consultant and identified his earlier Trigemina role. A 2021 co-authored publication listed an Exalys Therapeutics affiliation. These entries show a working life that cannot be described entirely by the name of one employer. Collaboration and advisory work sit alongside the executive sequence.

There is also the work of evaluating other people’s proposals. Federal peer-review lists for 2022 and 2023 identify Kori with Novilla. His 2024 professional disclosures list consulting relationships and grant-review service as well as his Novilla involvement. Such entries describe another audience for experience: organizations asking someone to assess work beyond his own company.

His public LinkedIn profile places him in Clover, South Carolina. Earlier professional records place him in Mountain View, California. The geography supplies another small correction to the usual portrait of entrepreneurship. A founder’s professional network can span companies and institutions while the person has a particular place to call home. Kori’s current public base belongs in the story alongside the California appointments.

Another beginning, with company

The Sunnyvale celebration offers a different audience again. There, the professional award was part of a community evening, sharing a program with performances and a meal. Kori addressed the gathering after receiving its congratulations. The occasion placed professional recognition in a room organized by volunteers, among people who had come together for reasons wider than anyone’s job.

It is a useful companion to the executive chronology. One record tells us when a company appointed him. Another records an evening when a community welcomed him as its chief guest. Neither scene needs to stand in for his whole personality. Together, they make room for a person whose public life has involved more than appointments alone.

Kori’s current chapter is the co-founder and CEO role at Novilla. The long route there changes how that title reads. It carries the classroom, the publication, the department and the succession of teams behind it. Starting a company can look like a first step when viewed from its incorporation date. Viewed through Shashidhar Kori’s career, it is also a later step taken with years of practice, earlier colleagues and a new collaborator beside him.