If you Google Osman Kibar’s name you’ll find pictures of him playing poker. It’s not that he was ever a serious player–just that in 2006 he won the first poker tournament he ever played in and then, a year later, came in second out of 3,000 players at a tournament run by the World Series of Poker in Vegas.
“I don’t get this,” he told a friend. “I’m going to enter another tournament just to check this assumption.” So he played one more tournament, won it and then quit. “While I’m playing, it’s you and the other players,” says Kibar, 45. “The cards are irrelevant. [But] when you just stare at cards 12 to 14 hours a day, you get this hangover effect.” He couldn’t think straight for days, he says, so he gave it up. Instead, for fun, he now reads higher-math textbooks and meditates.
Kibar, an engineering Ph.D. who emigrated from Turkey to the U.S. for college, doesn’t need to bet on cards for money. Samumed, the San Diego firm he has been stealthily building for a decade, is the most valuable biotechnology startup on the planet.
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