Alex Gelbert

Alex was a senior at McGill with an offer from one of the world’s top PR firms when he decided to start his own company instead. His advertising internships had landed just as digital and video were taking off, much of that work for healthcare clients, and the same thing happened on every project: the agencies were brilliant at the creative and lost the moment the conversation turned to the science, the medical, legal and regulatory review, and the compliance environment those brands operate in. That gap became Let There Be.

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The agencies were brilliant at the creative and lost the moment the science entered the room. Twenty years later, that gap is still the whole business.

Alex Gelbert

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, had essentially no track record, and found himself working alongside some of the best agencies anywhere on the consumer education effort. The work played a real part in explaining the drug to the people who would now be buying it off a shelf instead of collecting it from a pharmacist, which was early proof that the idea held, and the beginning of what has since become its own category.

He was primed to notice that gap. 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 without ever being the scientist in the room. He was the one who could explain it at the dinner table, and the opportunity turned out to be exactly that, scaled up: making complicated ideas simple and memorable without losing what made them true.

Running a company was the part he had to learn from nothing, and two decades in, his conclusion is an unglamorous one, which is that it only works when good people know how to work well together. The curiosity that started the whole thing has not gone anywhere either. He will still talk at length about epigenetics, and about cars, which he considers the rare kind of art you are allowed to drive.