On making the leap from IT to biotech

Micah Rosenbloom Micah Rosenbloom co-founded SimplyDone Business Solutions/Hand-shake.com, an online scheduling research firm, and Brontes Technologies Inc., a developer of 3-D scanner innovation for dental impressions, which sold to 3M Corp. in 2006. He is founding partner of Founder Collective, a seed-stage venture capital firm. In May, he joined Novophage Inc., a Cambridge startup working on antimicrobial treatments for bacterial infections, as CEO and chairman.

Serial entrepreneur

Andy Palmer Andy Palmer is a serial entrepreneur, who has been involved with seven startups in 16 years. Most recently, he has served as a founding member of the board of directors of Recorded Future, a startup working on organizing the web, and he currently holds two other founding board member roles, with cloud computing software firm CloudSwitch and Goby, an event search engine firm. Palmer co-founded and served as CEO of database software company Vertica Systems Inc.

Palmer: I think you’re dead on, right. It’s one of the things I love, as someone who has nearly an insatiable appetite for risk. I think it is one of the most transparently high-risk, high-return businesses on the face of the planet. And you know, this sort of landscape is littered here in Cambridge and out in California and all around the world with biotech companies, exactly pharmaceuticals that have raised tens of millions of dollars and, you know, gone nowhere. And biotech investors in general, relative to tech investors, are very tolerant of placing those kinds of big bets. Now there’s a fundamental motivation on the pharmaceutical side, which is that the efforts of a lot of those companies are spent and invested in trying to make a difference in the lives of patients. That’s a very valuable thing for society. And every sometimes you get a drug like Velcade that becomes a multi-billion dollar drug, and it keeps people investing in these business that are, you know, in sort of an irrational way. However on the commercial side I think that there is an possibility to structure these companies in such a way that the risk profile is different and where you can mitigate a significant amount of the risk without giving up a whole heck of a lot of the upside. It’s as a matter of fact a valuable place for tech entrepreneurs like yourself to play in bringing and questioning some of those business models within the biotech industry and being creative. Rosenbloom: You and I both affectionately have entrepreneurial ADD, I think, where we have run two different projects. Yet I think it does create some balancing act questions just around, how do you do it all? How do you kind of stay sane and continue to add value in something that might be a web company and at the time the at once day be contributing at your biotech company? Palmer: I think it’s both a blessing and a curse. People like us that are mission driven, as opposed to just sort of doing a job and collecting a paycheck, are intrinsically drawn towards projects, and probably more than one if you’re successful and competent. And at that time deciding how many of those projects you can afford and that you need in order to sort of satisfy your interests and keep you growing intellectually versus having too many and having it be such a distraction that you’re not doing any one of them very so then, and not creating any value very then, I think requires a lot of discipline...You know, I’ve pushed as high as trying to do seven or eight projects at a time and that was radically out of whack. To cut a long story short, for me personally I’ve settled into three to five, depending on the day. Nevertheless I’ve been ruthlessly specific about expectations that any one of those projects has because in an entrepreneurial setting any one of these early stage companies could consume all of your time or my time and however have a lot of risk associated with it.

Rosenbloom: Yeah, I think, it would have been my then and there question and I think one I continue to grapple with or to continue to think about it: How much do you stick to your knitting as an entrepreneur, and what is your knitting? And I liked what you said about thinking of founding as a functional role. Because I think to tell the truth that’s a good way to frame it for what we do. You get it going, you create it. Get the team, the mission. I think for me you’ve got to date previously you get married. And I was working on a whole bunch of projects, two of which I’ve stayed active as an advisor. I was doing a bunch of stuff for Founder Collective. I had exactly according to instructions been involved in three or four usually healthcare-related, because I deep down did want to stay particularly on the health care side. I had been working on a project and I gave them about three or four months. You know, went to trade shows, met with leading doctors, met with senior people at Partners and all these places. And I really killed a number of projects. And that was very difficult, to be honest with you... And all the during I was helping out Novophage, among other things. And the data kept coming back good. You know, I kind of liked working with the team. And I sort of felt like, yeah, all these big companies are saying there is a big problem here. And in fact it’s a lot like pharma in that we’re kind of a disruptive research to the mainstream chemical company with a biotech background.

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