How Did You Do That?

Loren Peterson’s path to a successful startup company began on a Nebraska farm. It was a half-mile from the nearest neighbor, 1 mile from where his Swedish ancestors homesteaded, and several miles from the closest town of 600 people. He spent a lot of time hanging out with his two siblings, stacking hay and irrigating cornfields in 100-degree heat, and reading books from the school library and the Bookmobile. Loren graduated from the University of Nebraska with an accounting degree and found a job at a big accounting firm. He left to become the chief financial officer of a St. Louis pharmaceutical company — and found the industry in which he would make his mark. After leaving the big pharmaceutical company, he moved to increasingly smaller companies. First, he headed and sold a respiratory drug company. Then, he was hired by a venture capital firm to turn around a struggling startup that was developing enzyme therapies for lysosomal storage diseases . He raised much-needed funding in a