Category Archives: New business models

Today we announced a pair of Corporate Strategic Partnerships (CSPs) with Amgen and Novartis, as part of our closing of Fund IX, with the aim of working closely with them during our venture creation process of starting new biopharma companies. 

Not a biotech conference goes by these days without a discussion about new models for financing or exiting companies, and BioPharm America in Boston this week is no different.  I’m on a panel discussing the topic on Wednesday afternoon. New

Debating the merits of various biotech business models is in vogue today, in part as a response to the proliferation of experiments around the right form and function of the companies themselves.  An often asked question: are we supporting CEOs

Corporate venture capital’s role in the new biotech ecosystem couldn’t be understated today.  They are a major syndicate partner for those of us in the early stage arena, and we couldn’t power up our startups without them. I’ve written on

Flying home from JPM 2012 and thought I’d share a few reflections from our early stage venture perspective on what we heard (or didn’t) around the year’s kickoff biotech event. While most of the attendees were focused on Inhibitex and

Today we announced a new strategic alliance with Shire Pharmaceutical’s to identify new opportunities for early stage venture creation aimed at addressing rare genetic diseases.  This collaboration brings unique expertise from Shire’s Human Genetic Therapies group together with our company creation

Biotech’s high risks have led to the conventional wisdom that it’s valuable to construct a diversified portfolio of products at the company level.  Reinforced by the “show me multiple shots on goal” mantra of the capital markets, many product-focused biotech

Virtual research-stage biotechs seem to be all the rage these days.  And they do offer interesting investment theses in some settings and with particular assets.  But there are a bunch of myths about going virtual that deserve attention. But before

Corporate venture capital’s rise to prominence in biotech over the past few years is now a well worn subject.  It was yet again debated this week at the Windhover PSA meeting, in part triggered by the recent widely-covered launch of

Earlier this week the Startup Genome project released a report on the DNA of internet startups.  Essentially what attributes lead to success or failure.  One of the things they found was that 74% of startups failed because of “premature scaling”.

We all recognize that realizing value from a biotech company has historically been geared to one of two paths, IPO or M&A, and that they’ve both been getting tougher.  There’s been a number of articles recently about some of the

Academic-industry partnerships are popping up all over the place these days to fund early stage programs as part of ‘”open innovation” initiatives and “external sourcing” of new pipeline projects.   Here’s a non-exhaustive list of a few such deals this year

Today we announced a novel alliance with Monsanto to identify new life science technologies and explore the potential for creating/investing in new seed-stage startups around them.  It’s an exciting collaboration that brings a complementary set of interests, capabilities, and access

Bill Gates has just backed one our new startups - Nimbus Discovery LLC – as part of an extension to the seed tranche. Here’s the press release. It might come as a surprise to some, but Bill Gates has been a long-time