The Pitch to Investors and Partners
This article covers the essentials of constructing and delivering a “pitch” of a business opportunity to potential investors or corporate partners. We advocate constructing an effective pitch first and then using that as a guide to prepare your business plan. The content of the pitch itself as described herein in effect comprises the elements to be incorporated into a business plan as a more comprehensive documentation of the business. Therefore, focusing efforts on creating and delivering the components of a compelling pitch will provide the essence of what you will then need to put into prose as a business plan. So, our mantra is “pitch then plan”, i. e. don’t waste your time writing prose until you know what you need to write. Furthermore plans change many times between the first writing and successful implementation.
Full details at the Journal of Commercial BiotechnologyWhat Every Biotech Entrepreneur Needs to Know about VC Due Diligence
Due diligence, as it applies to venture capital, is actually imprecise. Origins of the term are based in banking case law. Due diligence to the attorney is more of a precise concept. A better term is “homework.” Better indeed, because the burden of this homework weighs far more heavily on the entrepreneur than on the venture capitalist. The odds of getting funded by a venture capital firm are somewhere between 50: and 100: 1. In most instances, the funding goes to companies that already have some connection into the community of venture capital funds. Does this mean that all others need not apply? That is hardly the case. Good venture capitalists know a good opportunity when they see it, but sometimes it is not always obvious. Either the business plan is flawed in strategy, format or content, or the due diligence process reveals a team totally unprepared to fulfill their own vision. Elsewhere in this special edition of JCB is an article on the business plan and the pitch book. This article teaches, in a manner of speaking, how business plans get read and pitches gets heard.
Full details at the Journal of Commercial BiotechnologyBuilding Teams in Entrepreneurial Companies
This article focuses on the essentials of building effective, collaborative, team-based organizations. The entrepreneurs and innovators who found and build technology-based organizations comprise out target audience, but most specifically we address the biotechnology and biomedical field. Two perspectives are provided in the article: 1) advice based on the experiential learning provided by years of experience of building and growing entrepreneurial organizations; and 2) identifying the keys to building effective teams based on some selected the academic or scholarly literature on building effective teams. Our goal is to provide a perspective that blends real-world lessons filtered through a more scholarly approach based on case literature and other research-based studies. The material summarized herein is presented as a learning module to the participants in the Biotechnology Entrepreneurship Boot Camp. Our pedagogical approach in the Boot camp is to lead with the background material and perspective contained herein, and to then have a moderated panel discussion around these and other topics. The moderated panel consists of the key members of a real company consisting of key C-level officers and founders and a venture capitalist who funded the company. Thus the “theory and practice” of team-based innovation come together via a real-time case.
Full details at the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology
Partnering With the NIH: Now Part of the “Value Proposition” for Start-ups
For many years the United States has led the world in government support for non-military research and development (R&D), especially support for work that directly relates to health and human development. A focal point for such federal investments to date in biomedical research has been the National Institutes of Health (NIH) along with other government laboratories and university-based research programs. Base funding provided by the NIH alone reached $31.2 billion (excluding economic stimulus funds) in fiscal year 2011 with approximately 10% of this funding spent on internal NIH R&D projects (intramural research) utilizing the work of about 6,000 scientists. The balance was used to support the work of 325,000 non-government scientists (extramural research) at 3,000 various colleges, universities and research organizations such as Johns Hopkins University and others throughout the world. Each year this biomedical research leads to a large variety of novel basic and clinical research discoveries – all of which generally require commercial partners in order to develop them into products for hospital, physician or patient use. Thus federal laboratories and universities need and actively seek corporate partners or licensees to commercialize their federally-funded research into products in order to help fulfill their fundamental missions in healthcare, medical education and training.
Full details at the Journal of Commercial BiotechnologyGet updates by email
Editor
Yali Friedman lives in Washington, DC and is author of Building Biotechnology and other books; founder of DrugPatentWatch; and chief editor of the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology.
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