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Deposition Transcripts · Segments · #9470
id
9470
deposition id
12
segment index
21
speaker
Page 22
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end seconds
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Mr. Walkinshaw. James Walkinshaw, 11th District of Virginia. Mr. Spectre. Thank you, Mr. Gates. And, again, we'll come back to some of those topics. And my apologies, we're probably going to bounce around a little bit. We're going to try to have some sort of -- some semblance of chronology here. Mr. Emmer. We've had another member join. Can he please announce himself for the record? Mr. Burlison. Congressman Eric Burlison, Missouri. BY MR. SPECTRE: Q So we've already begun talking about Dr. Nikolic, but for the record, who is Dr. Nikolic? A Dr. Nikolic, he is a person who worked at the Gates Foundation on the diagnostic strategy for a period, then he left the Gates Foundation and came to work in my private office, which was one time called bgC3. It's been renamed to Gates Ventures. It's the same private office. So he worked there as -- I think his title was science adviser, from something like 2010 until through -- when was his last day? End of 2013? Yeah, until the end of 2013. Q And just very briefly because we're going to be discussing his employment dispute, but why did he leave his employment at the end of 2013? Just briefly. Did you fire him? Did he resign? What exactly occurred? A Dr. Nikolic, when he worked for me, had decided that he wanted to become a venture capitalist, and so he had said, hey, you know, working for you, I can just make a salary, I understand about biotech companies, which ones are going to be successful. I think both in terms of impact and making money, that's where I should go. And so more than a year before he left, we talked about that. I said, you know, why don't you stay another year, you can make some -- up to three investments during the time you're with me, you know, sort of a practice venture capital-type investment, and we'll share the profit of those investments.