My name is Bob McDonald. I’m on the board of Every Cure. When I was young, having been a Boy Scout, I wanted to serve others and I thought that going to West Point was a way to do that.

It was during the height of the Vietnam War I entered West Point in 1971. Went to the 82nd Airborne Division, Port Bragg, North Carolina. We traveled a lot and in 1980 decided to leave the military service after my commitment expired and was again looking for a job that I could, you know, serve others.

And the purpose of the Procter & Gamble company is to improve the lives of the world’s consumers. On any given day, five and a half billion people on the planet use at least one Procter & Gamble product and many of these products change their lives. And then in 2001, I moved to Brussels, Belgium where I managed our laundry and cleaning business globally.

And then 2004, back to the United States to become Chief Operating Officer, Chief Executive Officer, and eventually Chairman and CEO. In 2013, the Secretary of the VA had been forced to resign. So President Obama said, I need somebody who’s running a large, complex organization.

Procter & Gamble at the time was Fortune 25 and I need somebody who’s a veteran. And if you do that Venn diagram, there’s probably only one person in the middle and that’s me at the time. The vision of serving other people and watching that in action, watching you change someone’s life for a positive, having five veterans with no arms and no legs living productive lives.

The VA could do so much more in medicine than a for-profit system because we didn’t have the constraints of a for-profit system and we could treat our patients like we really cared about them and we want to really improve their lives. So I look at every cure as kind of like the epitome, the apogee of being able to do that, of being able to figure out these drugs that can be repurposed and save people’s lives. And David, of course, is the living embodiment of that.

I would think given my age, my years of experience, my match maturity, having been on so many different non-profit boards, for-profit boards, you know, lots of scars on my back, I’m hoping that I can help David and the board here at Every Cure avoid making the mistakes I made.