I am a big fan of Steve Blank. For those who are unfamiliar he's an entrepreneur and startup thought leader who has created and promoted relevant timely programs revolving around startup strategy, fundraising, and iterating small business.
A recent focus of his is i-Corps, an audacious effort supported by a number of government organizations and spearheaded by the National Science Foundation. The goal of this program is to help early stage innovators make their ideas and technologies into real products.
Steve really stresses being "market-focused." I am simplifying here, but he teaches how to go about validating the market for a product. He is a proponent of polling and surveying techniques that help scientists determine if there are potential clients or users for a particular product. He then encourages scientists to find large groups of these potential users and vet them...
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Life Science companies pitching investors have a tough job: It's not easy to convince people to invest in a capital-intensive industry with a low rate of product commercialization. Then there's the challenge of conveying an extremely specialized and complex idea to people who want to net out the technology quickly. To be successful, companies must work hard to communicate complex ideas at a level that is easily understood by all potential investors, not just the "science-literate." As Charles Bukowski once said "Genius could be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way."
The first place this needs to be accomplished is in a company's tagline. Taglines are ubiquitous in the industry, but very rarely does a tagline accurately summarize that "special sauce" that makes a company so exceptional. Prospects should be able to read a tagline and grasp the goal of the company...
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By Alejandro Zamorano, VP of Business Development, LSN
One of LSN's Investor Platform clients recently provided some insight on his fundraising campaign. We encourage feedback from our clients as it helps us to validate our methodology and to integrate improvements into our product. Our client is a molecular diagnostics company looking to raise $3 million to $8 million to expand and perform some key clinical studies. We first met the co-founder a few months before he elected to subscribe to the LSN platform. At first, like many emerging biotech and medtech entrepreneurs, he relied on the executive team's personal network and referrals to find potential investors... |