Most of Big Pharma have been trying to reinvent themselves as nimble Biotechs, at least in the eyes of Wall Street, in order to be perceived as being innovative R&D-driven companies.    Despite the restructurings, Big Pharma is struggling with that

Note to Readers: This blog post was co-written by Bruce Booth and Bijan Salehizadeh, who co-authored an article in the July 2011 issue of Nature Biotechnology, detailing the differences in returns between Life Sciences and Tech investing. Most venture capitalists think that

Compensation in startups is a subject where vague notions of the right comparable benchmarks (“the market rate”) and organizational inertia (“that’s what we’ve done before…”) come together to prevent useful transparency. Mountains of data are thrown at comp committees to

A great group of four researchers shared updates on their lab’s recent findings at this morning’s SciCafe in Boston.   Cancer, autoimmunity, stem cells – lots of great science. For those that don’t know SciCafe, here’s the background: Nature Biotech’s

Todd Zion, the founder of the adjustable insulin company, SmartCells, has done wonders for the Boston Life Science angel community – and reinvigorated their interest in funding therapeutics companies.  It’s a great story and Todd deserves the attention he’s been

Last week’s news about Orexigen’s Contrave obesity drug and its struggles with the FDA’s Division of Metabolic and Endocrinologic Products has left me puzzled.  Obesity is such an enormous epidemic, one has to wonder why the FDA is taking such

I heard AVEO Pharmaceuticals’ CEO Tuan Ha-Ngoc speak at Convergence last month and decided AVEO would be a superb company to profile as a way to highlight the triad we all dream of in biotech venture investing: great science, great

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

Matt Herper over at FORBES suggested I update and repost the “Glimmer of Hope” “Class of 2010″ biotech IPOs blog post, which I’ve now done, and the performance continues to impress: The average and median performance of this “Class” is 33%

Lots of great advice exists for tech entrepreneurs trying to pitch to VCs, but very little for the aspiring life science entrepreneur, especially for therapeutics startups.  Since that’s the type of deal we invest a good portion of our fund

Understanding the impact of different venture capital deal terms is not well appreciated by most Life Science entrepreneurs, especially in the early stage ecosystem.  Moreover, knowing what the “market rate” for these terms are is rarely data-driven and often more

Everyone knows that the biotech IPO market is and has been challenging.  But one of the most troubling developments, and the least transparent to the outside, has been the increased importance of significant insider participation to get IPO’s priced. In