IBM, AMS and CCC

Tuesday morning I attended “Connecting Companies with Capital,” one of a series of events at IBM’s Innovation Center in Waltham designed to, well… connect companies with capital. This one was co-hosted with AMS and was focused on life sciences. The morning session consisted of networking (to which I was an hour late, thanks to the inability of New England drivers to remember from one week to the next how to drive in a little snow, and that a Statie giving out a ticket on the Pike is not cause to stop and rubberneck) and two great panels. The stage was set by IBMer Karen Parrish who provided an overview of their interest and commitment to life sciences, and provided some staggering statistics about waste and inefficiency in the “system,” which of course, represents tremendous opportunity. (They also gave a plug to their centennial celebration which you can get a flavor of from this YouTube video.)

The first panel on funding for all stages was moderated by my good friend and colleague, Dan Davis at AMS:

• Michael Greeley – General Partner, Flybridge Capital Partners
• Peter Fair – Principal, Velocity Financial Group
• Bernadette Michaud – Team Leader, Northeast Life Sciences Team, Silicon Valley Bank
• Peter Handrinos – Partner, WilmerHale;

and the second, on how to build your company, was moderated by my other good friend and colleague (yes, I have more than one), Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers:

• Stuart Haber – CEO, Infoscitex Corporation
• Mike Webb – Executive Chairman, Virtify
• Lauri Halloran – Founder and CEO, Halloran Consulting Group
• Larry Wittenberg – Goodwin Procter, LLP, and the always entertaining
• Rob Jevon – Managing General Partner, Boston Millennia Partners.

So here are some of my takeaways.

Karen spoke about the importance of standards for a collaborative community. I immediately thought of the VHS/Beta battle, the CDMA/GSM debate and many others. I agree with her entirely – they’re necessary for collaborative interactions. But when there’s a profit motive involved, all bets are off. The biggest impediment to a true EMR system in my mind? the reluctance of hospital systems to relinquish patient data to another hospital system. What’s in it for them?

Michael spoke about the increase of Pharma deals as an exit for startup biotechs. A million years ago at Feinstein Partners, we used to sit around and speculate that Pharma would swoop in and pick up struggling biotechs every time the IPO window closed, which, in those days, was measured in months, not years. It never happened, but I agree with Michael and believe that as Pharma continues to shed their bloated and underperforming R&D, they will increasingly (finally) look to biotech for pipeline.

Bernadette talked about the increase in tranched deals. My thought was “why wouldn’t you?!” Every time we have an economic downturn, the screws get turned a little tighter, and become the new standard. We’re running a much tighter ship than we used to, and we’ll continue to get better. It’s the silver lining of a recession. Rob made a similar point about a prospect he went to visit but never did after discovering on arrival that they had valet parking. Although, having said that, if I hear one more person talk about capital efficiency, I’m going to hurl.

She also spoke about the need for a short path to a strategic deal, and speculated that Venture is returning to truly “venture” investing. I certainly hope so, because God knows we need someone to take some risk around here…

I asked the second panel about building teams after their endorsement of virtualized companies. Mike took me to task a bit, and I guess we’ll just have to disagree on this one. I’m all for unbloating companies, but in a startup particularly, I believe there’s immeasurable value in having a team that can have hallway conversations and work together in the same space and share an occasional beer after work. I agree that it’s different if the team has worked well together before, and may not need to be in the same physical location, but it can be very risky. Rob, at least, agreed, and shared his story of an investment that failed because it took a year to discover that, despite the overseas R&D team’s insistence that the prototype worked as intended, it was, in fact, trash.

Finally, we heard from Ron Newbower, CTO and Strategic Director of CIMIT after lunch. In a very approachable and entertaining style, he made some great comments about the overall state of healthcare, but I won’t elaborate except to point out my main takeaway. The reason the word “system” is in quotes at the end of the first paragraph above is that as Ron correctly points out, the healthcare system is not a system. He gave Air Traffic Control as an example of a system. It’s a great point. If left to individuals, there would be a lot more plane crashes. Maybe what we need is a similar approach in healthcare – a patient advocate role? Or primary care physician? Oh, wait. We tried that. Didn’t work because of profit and turf battles. Silly me.

Enough about me. What do you think about me?

This installment is a summary of a number of recent events, many of which, for the purposes of full disclosure, I had something to do with. Sorry for the self-serving plug, but I just had to – the events were really good! In chronological order:

Biotech Breakfast Club Annual Holiday Party

As many of you know, I run a small breakfast club of professionals in the life sciences industry. We meet every other month to discuss emerging trends or current hot topics in the industry. Every year, instead of our December breakfast meeting, we host a holiday party for leading executives in the Boston area. The event is “free” to the extent that we don’t charge anything to get in, but we do suggest a donation to a local charity. This year we raised over $1,500 for the Worcester County Food Bank. Interestingly, it was a bit lighter than last year’s raise, but part of that may have been because we were frankly not as well organized about collecting donations this year.

What was most interesting to me was that this year fell on the same night as another important seminar right down the road – one that I wish I could have attended. Just as the speaker would have been taking the stage, I noticed a swarm of people coming into our party. I asked someone about it and they admitted that a group of them left the seminar early to come to the party. I like to think it was because of the rarefied atmosphere at our soiree, but maybe it was just for the free beer…

Totally self serving, but it was really a great event.

Our “Grand” Genome

The next night (no, I wasn’t drinking when this scheduling was decided) The Bioscience Network, where I serve as a founding member of the Board of Directors, hosted a panel discussion with George Church, Phil Reilly and Kevin Davies centered on the topic of Kevin’s latest book, The $1,000 Genome. As I said to the audience when I introduced the panel, if you don’t know who these folks are, you’re probably in the wrong room (or reading the wrong blog). This one was really a winner. Kevin set the stage brilliantly (and the book is a great read, btw), and he, George and Phil followed with a very interesting and, at times, provocative, discussion. I confess that I had some difficulty getting one audience member off a particular topic, but other than that it was a lively discussion with lots of audience participation.

I took the moderator’s privilege and asked the panel if they agreed with my notion that since all the action will ultimately end up with proteomics, is whole genome sequencing the fax machine of molecular medicine (I made the analogous argument in my blog on biofuels). They didn’t necessarily disagree, but didn’t really agree either. Leave it to a bunch of PhDs to waffle on a question…

Pre- JP Morgan

Prior to The JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, the Super Bowl of life sciences conferences, there’s a skiing boondoggle at Squaw that I managed to get invited to this year. It was great fun to see so many young professionals out of context. For you snow fans, one of the days was the best snowboarding I’ve had in two years, which includes trips to Banff and Kitzbuhel. The background of my Blackberry is now a visual reminder of this epic morning with the clouds hanging gingerly over Lake Tahoe, perfectly groomed slopes and the sun rising above the mountaintops. Sorry to rub it in.

Not that I didn’t suspect so prior to the trip, but it was nonetheless noteworthy how a relaxed atmosphere can completely change the tenor of a meeting. Without going into too much detail, I had a particularly great interaction with a person who had been particularly prickly prior to the trip. Riding with a bunch of Type As is a trip in itself, but when you have the opportunity to laugh and relax, the business end of the networking just kinda falls off the bone.

JP Morgan

There are certainly lots of ways to measure how JP Morgan stacks up on any given year, but I tend to prefer a back-of-the-envelope method. Since 2009, which was a funeral, the mood has grown successively more upbeat. This year’s events were energized, with lines (!) to get into some of them. The Cooley event appeared to be the hottest ticket in town, but plenty of other events were buzzing, and the volume level at “the clock” was as high as it’s ever been. Despite the worst travel experience I’ve ever had trying to get back to the east coast during the blizzard of ’11 (which included a charming experience at a sketchy hotel near the Philadelphia airport), it was a fantastic trip with lots of new leads.

For a more concrete measure, my good friend and colleague, Doug MacDougall of MacDougall Biomedical Communications, reported very encouraging news. As a courtesy to their clients, they rent a couple of floors at a hotel near the St. Francis for the clients to meet with investors, bankers or other financial types. The same number of clients availed themselves of the service this year as last, but they experienced a 30% increase in the number of meetings. Perhaps the money is starting to flow after all.

Startup Downhill

Last one.

On January 26, the first annual Startup Downhill took place at Wachusett Mountain. This one was knocked out of the park if I do say so myself. At the risk of totally blowing the lid off what is an exclusive event, my fellow organizers (Doug Macdougall and Jon Eddy of Silicon Valley Bank) and I worked tirelessly to get this off the ground. (Thanks also to our other sponsors: Chris Denn at Goodwin Procter, Michael Barron at DLA Piper and the Crowleys at Wachusett.) I wish I could take full credit for the idea, but I shamelessly borrowed from others, and had the expert counsel of Doug and Jon, and we managed to pull off a great day of networking, and more importantly, deal making. As with the trip to Squaw, the relaxed atmosphere greatly facilitated interactions and constructive outcomes.

The weather cooperated well, but the coming storm scared off a few folks (they should have listened to me and not the weatherman). Still, we ended up with about 40 entrepreneurs and investors sharing ideas and making connections on the slopes at Wachusett. We’ve received nothing but positive feedback from participants, and are already planning next year’s event. If you need your life sciences company funded in New England, this was the place to be. Leading VCs, good food, a perfect venue, and some fun on the slopes. The non-skiers even had a productive and fun day.

Sorry to ramble on about how great I am. Maybe you can comment how great I am…

Health Advances Advances

I was privileged to be invited to the Health Advances panel last night on “Patient-Driven Healthcare: New Commercialization Strategies” at the Mandarin in Boston. As always, Mark, Skip and the crew put on a great event in a spectacular venue. The networking over wine and aps was so engaging that it was difficult to get people in the ballroom to hear

• Alfred W. Sandrock MD, PhD, SVP, Neurology Research and Development, Biogen Idec,
• Jamie Heywood, Chairman, PatientsLikeMe, and
• Marie Schiller, Partner, Health Advances

discuss this timely and important topic. They finally managed to herd us into our seats, and Skip Irving led a lively panel discussion.

There has been a lot of gum flapping about personalization for many years, but not a lot of solid progress. Yes, I’m aware of Herceptin et al., but Dx/Tx combos are still quite uncommon. I was initially a bit skeptical that this would be more of the same gum flapping, but was most intrigued by the part of the title after the colon: “New Commercialization Strategies.” The discussion thankfully turned out to have less to do with personalization, as the topic is commonly beaten to death, and more about the role of the patient in future healthcare.

In his opening comments, Jamie noted that Skip’s choice of words (“…patients at the table for these discussions”) reflected a misplaced focus, and should be turned around (“…patients allowing others at the table for these discussions”). I could hardly bite my tongue and wait for the Q & A.

I never did get the chance – the discussion ran significantly over, but everyone was enjoying it. Here’s my problem: with all due respect, I think Jamie is wrong.

I am reminded about a talk at an American Neurological Association meeting many years ago. In 1997, Allen Roses (who, by the way, completely disagrees with my prior snide comment about personalization) left Duke after leading the team that discovered the ApoE alterations associated with Alzheimer’s Disease to become SVP of Genetics Research and Pharmacogenetics at GlaxoSmithKline (where he remained until 2008 when he returned to Duke). Shortly after the announcement, he was giving a keynote lecture at the ANA meeting and started off by, well, not exactly ‘warming up’ the audience. Through a bit of a snarl and with a wagging finger, his opening lines went something like this: “I was stopped in the hall on the way here and a former ‘colleague’ asked me how it feels to be a whore, apparently referring to my recent move from an academic position to the crass, commercial GSK. Well let me tell you something. I am not a whore. Drug companies make drugs. Doctors don’t make drugs.”

I think Allen hit the nail on the head (although I may have said it a bit more politely). No party to this effort can take another for granted, but frankly, patients don’t make drugs, either. Yes, they have sometimes been seen as a tool to serve the purposes of a drug company in their commercial efforts, but there are also plenty of examples of true collaborations between a patient group and a drug company that served the needs of both parties. And yes, the patient groups are, will continue to be, and rightly should be an important part of the equation, but let’s not underestimate the need for a commercial partner in bringing a product to market.

Having said that, a system that delivers a product to the market only after investing $1B and 15 years of effort cannot sustain itself much longer. And what I was a bit disappointed about last night was that nobody cared to opine on that part after the colon. What are the new commercialization strategies? I have my own ideas, and have blogged about them before, but I would have really liked to have heard from the panel about their vision for the future of the drug development paradigm. Particularly on the heels of Fred Frank’s comment yesterday proclaiming the end of big biotech (I think he’s wrong, too).

The best comment of the evening? I’m not sure if everyone caught it, but Al made the provocative suggestion that we may soon see an outcomes-based reimbursement system. Could you imagine going to your healthcare providers and telling them that you’re only going to pay them if you get better?

Patient-driven healthcare is a good thing  …to a point. Years ago when I was at Athena Diagnostics, I led the team that launched the first test for neutralizing antibodies to β-IFN. At the time, the interferon therapies (Betaseron® and Avonex®) were the only options for patients with MS, and both were very expensive. Our assay identified patients in whom the neutralizing antibody titer was high enough that they were no longer deriving the benefit of the therapy (arguably the first personalized medicine test).

It was like selling ice cubes to Eskimos.

Athena Sales Rep: “Doc – use this test to see if your MS patients are responding to the drug.”

Neurologist: “Lemme get this straight. You think a patient with MS will allow me to stop the only hope they have for relief of their symptoms? Don’t let the door hit you on your way out.”

Now once the interferon alternative, Copaxone®, came on the market, it was a different story. But prior to that, no doctor would have stopped the therapy, no matter what the antibody titer. That would have been the correct decision, but it would never have been tolerated by patients.

All in all, a great event. It’s always better when there’s something to talk about. And that’s coming from someone who really knows how to flap gums.

Nice Guys Finish Better

This morning’s peHUB Wire has a great article on Reid Hoffman at Greylock. (ok, so I paraphrased this blog’s title from the cover story in VCJ. Sorry.) I don’t know this guy, but I like him already. Look, I get it. We’re all busy. But does that mean we can’t take the time to be civil and to help others out? It sounds like Reid and I share a fault: we may err on the side of being completely unable to say “no” (I once got called into Peter Feinstein’s office back at Feinstein Partners where he told me that I was the “biggest sap” in the office because I couldn’t say “no”). It’s funny – as a recruiter, lots of people don’t have any time for you …until they’re looking for a job. Then they’re all too eager to “meet to explore my next steps.” So here are some of my gripes and suggestions. In no particular order.

• If you tell someone you’ll get back to them “early next week,” get back to them early next week. And here’s how that works: “Early next week” is from 8:00 Monday morning until noon on Tuesday. “The middle of next week” is from noon on Tuesday until noon on Thursday. “The end of next week” is from noon Thursday until 6:00 on Friday. Even if all you can do is drop a line that says “I got tied up and now won’t be able to get to this until Thursday,” take the 6 seconds to do it. You’ll be happy you did.
• How long does it take to hit the reply button on an email? And yes, I get it. We all get ten thousand emails a day. But have the common courtesy to respond, even if it’s to say no. You can still do so politely, and we’re all adults and can be told no, but it’s annoying and unprofessional to be left hanging. As a recruiter, I take the time to call back candidates who were in the final running but were not selected. I can’t tell you how many times people thank me for taking the time to do so, since most in this business don’t. More importantly, it’s a reflection on my client. At the senior level, my client is likely to run into these same people again in a business transaction, and it wouldn’t be good to leave them with a bad taste in their mouths about the client.
• Is it really going to kill you to spend half an hour with someone who is willing to come to your office? Of course, there are cases when you are particularly happy with a service provider or other vendor, but are you really saying that it is not possible that another service could be better or provide something that you’re not currently getting? Frankly, I have to turn down lots of requests from candidates who want to meet to discuss their career plans, because I simply don’t have the time to meet everyone, and the meeting is only relevant when we are on an appropriate assignment. When one does come along, I’d do the interview all over again anyway, so it’s generally not a fruitful use of time. However, if I have the bandwidth, I’m usually willing to grab a quick coffee with someone.
• Say “thank you” every now and then. I am constantly amazed when you do a big favor for someone or a company and it’s not even acknowledged. It’s not that I’m fishing for compliments, it’s just 1) nice to hear it and 2) what I would do were the tables turned. Take that extra 30 seconds to pop off a quick email to say thanks to someone. They’ll remember it.
• Respect others’ time. I, like Reid, would be happy to meet you on a weekend or evening. But remember that you’re taking time away from my family and down time, so don’t overstay your welcome.

It is possible to have balance, get things done, and be a “nice guy.” Reid has obviously done it, and I bet he and I are not the only ones (that is, assuming you think I'm a nice guy...).

Shameless plug: Come join us for a great panel discussion with George Church, Kevin Davies and Phil Reilly on the revolution in whole genome sequencing on 12/9. Register here.

Hire the Nerd

I recently completed a search for a finance role and had an interesting discussion with the client about a candidate (let’s call him John). He said, “You won’t appreciate this, Chris, because you’re not a finance person, but I really liked John. We had a long discussion about expense reports, and we were really on the same page.” My client figured that I wouldn’t appreciate the arcane details of expense reporting. (Little did he know, but that’s a separate story.) His point was that only finance people could spend an enjoyable half hour discussing accounting for employee expenses, and that non-finance people would rather have their teeth cleaned.

There is some truth to his statement. However, as a recruiter, I look for enthusiasm as one of the differentiators among candidates. And one of the best ways to assess enthusiasm is to see how jazzed the candidates get about their area of expertise. That is, are they nerdy enough?

As a technology nerd myself (with academic training in math, computer science, biology, psychology and neuroscience), it would be very easy for me to drift into technical discussions with candidates. I have trained myself to focus on the management skills of the candidates, but I do allow and enjoy the technical discussions, and purposely cover that in the process.

Why? For two key reasons. First, I have long argued that all roles in a technology company are technology roles. Everyone in a technology company needs to have some level of grounding in the technology. As an example, I’ve often heard CFO candidates argue that numbers are numbers, and they should be considered for life sciences opportunities. Well if you’ve never heard the term “third party payer,” or don’t understand the long development timelines and capital requirements, or don’t know what a “burn rate” is, you’re going to have a tough time in a life sciences company. It’s the same reason you wouldn’t hire a CFO for your public company who didn’t have post-SOX public company experience. There’s even a recent example. Jolene Varney was hired from The Dr. Pepper Snapple Group to take the reins at Mylan Pharmaceuticals last year. Hunh? What were they thinking? It’s true she did the heavy lifting on the $4B demerger from Cadbury Schweppes, and I’m certain she’s very talented, but she had no experience in the life sciences! Not surprisingly (to me, anyway), she lasted three months. Now of course it’s possible that she took a look under the sheets and didn’t like what she saw, but at least one analyst wrote that “…Varney's departure was driven primarily by fit issues, as compared to something more serious. As a reminder, Varney had been with MYL since May 28 and had no prior CFO or generic industry experience."

Second, I want to hear the candidate’s level of enthusiasm about the technical requirements of the role. In John’s case, I was glad to hear that he got jazzed talking about expense reports. For a CTO or VP, R&D role, I want to hear excitement in the way they want to drill into the technology. In a Marketing role, I need to feel the excitement about their last campaign. You get the picture.

Having said all this, too nerdy isn’t good either. I once walked into a lunch interview and knew in about 7 milliseconds it wasn’t a fit. The candidate was way too nerdy for the culture at the client company. (Of course, I gave the candidate the benefit of the doubt and diligently conducted the interview, but it was only further confirmed by the time the check arrived.)

So hire the nerd. And in a shameless plug, it’s why you’re always better off with a recruiter who understands the client’s business. The life sciences industry is just different. Trust me.

Gen-O

We’ve had Gen-X and Gen-Y, but now we are about to have the onslaught of a generation of people who grew up with Linux and Napster and Firefox and so many other open source technologies that I wouldn’t be surprised if this generation comes to be knows as Gen-O (for "Open").

Myriad Genetics filed a Notice of Appeal on Wednesday in the suit brought against them by the ACLU challenging the validity of the BRCA1 and 2 patents. The ACLU claimed a first round victory on March 29 when a New York district court held that genes are products of nature and therefore not patentable. My friends at Choate, Hall and Stewart have a great summary of the case in last week’s GEN.

In October of 2007, Radiohead released their album, In Rainbows using a unique pricing policy: pay what you want. Fans were able to download a complete digital version of the album and only had to pay what they thought was fair.

How exactly do these things relate? And more importantly, relate to life sciences and cleantech? We are about to experience a sea change in the way technology businesses are conducted, and it will be driven by an open souce mindset. We have, for decades, operated under the model of patent protection for technological innovations, and so far it has worked quite well. Why is the US arguably the world’s foremost center of innovation? Because there has long been a clear, consistent plan for encouraging entrepreneurship through the patent system. In the case of Radiohead, it’s copyright law that applies, but it has the same net effect. That clear path is about to get a little murky.

The music industry was caught unawares when technological innovations made violation of copyright law as simple as a click of a mouse. Radiohead’s response was unique and innovative. The life sciences industry has been seeing this coming for some time. Years ago, I served on the rare disease sub-committee of the (HHS) Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Genetic Testing. Nucleic acid patents were (and still are) under attack from the likes of Mildred Cho, Deborah Leonard and John Merz who were making the case that there was no inventive step in developing a diagnostic test based on alterations of a gene. (Wanna know the truth? 1. It’s about the money. Academicians who had a side business of testing patient samples were mad that a commercial organization could block them from performing the test in their lab, despite the fact that the commercial organization had paid to license the rights to the patents from an academic center and was incurring the cost of developing, marketing and distributing the test, not to mention those of prosecuting the patents. 2. Their stated goal was to increase “access,” but that is precisely what will not happen. Patients and physicians would somehow just know that a particular test was available in someone’s lab? Quality Control and Quality Assurance is enhanced by having numerous academic labs across the country performing the assay using different standards? 3. They went after diagnostics first because the argument is reduced to triviality if you apply the same logic to therapeutics, but I’m sure it won’t be long before they start down that path. But I digress.) Now, the successor to the SACGT, the SAC on Genomics Health and Society, is arguing for exemption from infringement for certain categories of people and is taking on genomic data sharing. Heaven help us.

The Myriad case will be overturned on appeal, but it’s a shot across the bow. The nucleic acid patent hand-wringers have an accidental ally in Gen-Oers. We will continue to see attacks on nucleic acid patents, and concurrently, will see approaches similar to that taken by Radiohead in new settings, but most commonly in industries where intellectual property rights are important to de-risk investment and to foster innovation. Do I believe we will move to abolish patents or move to a system like India or China where there is a patent system but effectively no enforcement? Clearly not. The early results from Radiohead and other similar experiments (like video games offered on a pay-what-you-want basis) were not great. Most people paid something, but it was far less on average than it would have been had they sold through traditional channels. (The analyses I’ve seen don’t account for the reduced production cost when offering the product as a download, so the net to the artists may actually be better.) However, a generation of people who grew up with an open source mindset will certainly continue to challenge the existing model, and technology industries will feel the pressure the most.

Is this a bad or a good thing? It’s a little of both. In fairness, I fully agree that there are quite a number of nucleic acid patents that have no business being around. Remember all those EST patents in the late 90s? When a point mutation in a gene is found to cause a disease, it seems to me it’s a novel and perfectly patentable discovery. After the fifth or seventh or tenth point mutation in the gene is found to cause the same disease, is it truly novel and patentable? I’d argue no. However, invalidating patents based on completely novel disease gene discoveries will result in less, not more, access to commercial products, including, and very importantly, diagnostic testing.

Oh, and one last thing. Did you know that Francis Collins, who has been behind this jihad against nucleic acid patents from the beginning, is an inventor on the original patent protecting the discovery of the gene for cystic fibrosis and about 20 other patents?

I'm just sayin'

The New Talent Pool

A couple of weeks ago I was invited by a group of bioscience graduate students at The University of Washington in Seattle to give a talk on making the transition from academia to industry. It's an interesting organization - a group of UW grad students across a number of bioscience disciplines who are exploring careers outside of traditional academic roles. They receive funding from a number of academic departments and bring in folks like me who have made the transition to talk about their learnings and (hopefully) provide some insights. If you have an hour to kill, you can watch the video, although the audio is pretty bad, especially at the beginning, and until the end, it's just video of my slides. Very exciting.

Prior to the talk I was meeting with Anson Fatland of the Allen Family Foundation who asked me why I agreed to schlep across the country for a 45 minute talk. I responded that I believe the children are our future. Seriously, though, these folks are the VP R&Ds, CSOs, CTOs and for some, CEOs of the next wave of bioscience companies. I'm happy to make the investment. I only hope they took away some pearls of wisdom...

At one point, it was evident that the whole investment world was largely unknown to most of the young people in the room. I wish I had this link the week before; Rob Day at Black Coral Capital, an alternative energy / cleantech investment firm, just posted a nice article on his Cleantech Investing blog that would have been helpful. It wasn't the main focus, but it gives the uninitiated a few good handles with which to figure out a little bit about how venture capital works. By the way, If you're into green/clean, it's a great blog and you can sign up for the feed (although I must say I find the GreentechMedia site impossible to navigate - at least in IE8).

Another group focused on cultivating talent is PropelCareers, whose goal is to connect employers with academic talent. They've already had some great success connecting companies and interns, some of whom have turned into FTEs at the companies where they interned.

I guess I've always tended to see the long term picture better than the here and now. Most retained recruiters wouldn't bother spending time cultivating such early stage talent, but I see it as an investment. And I fully recognize that I'm helping current and future competitors of mine, but I believe there's enough work out there for everyone, and we'll get our share.

When I was a lot younger (when emails were produced using line editors), I belonged to “The Young Scientists’ Network,” which was an Internet-based group that in effect, was a group whine about how tough it was to find meaningful employment with a PhD. There were huge debates about which side of the fence had greener grass, but for the most part, we thought rather poorly of industry. Years later, as Director of BD at Athena Diagnostics, I was galled every year at the Academy of Neurology annual meetings when a particular immunologist used to make disparaging public comments about our technical acumen. These comments came from an academic who likely had his lunch in the same fridge he kept research samples in. We consistently had the highest possible ratings from organizations like the American College of Medical Genetics, the College of American Pathologists, CLIAC, NYSDOH and more. What happens when he made a mistake in an assay? He ran the experiment again. What happens if we made a mistake? We give a doctor and patient an incorrect diagnosis; we couldn't allow it. The stakes were much higher on our side of the fence, and there’s a big difference between running an assay in an academic lab and making a commercially viable, bulletproof diagnostic assay. Most PhD candidates and post-docs simply don’t recognize that critical difference until they get a peek behind the curtain. There are data to support this. At this year’s MassBio annual meeting, a young post-doc presented a poster showing significant changes in perception about industry employment after spending a day at a biotech company. The work was supported by MassBio, and won top honors at the annual meeting of the National Postdoctoral Association. The abstract is available as a .pdf here (link to the annual meeting program book and search for "MGH"). It is important to continue to show these bright young minds that there is true purpose in taking discoveries that would otherwise sit on a shelf in a dusty corner of an academic lab and transforming them into commercial products that can help patients.

Aaahhh, it’s so touching watching them grow up.