Welcome to the Venture Catalyst blog!
Thanks for reading. We hope to share clear & useful insights (from us, our partners, and perhaps even clients!) that will help you & others improve the odds of venture success. Please let us know how we’re doing and how we can improve or add more value to you, our readers.
Much like any startup, we see a need, align with the right people at an opportune time, and start working.
Ok, let's have some fun with more details of what that need is, how we align, why it’s the right time etc.
BIG NEED
Eric:
“Check out the problem, yo I'll solve it.” (Vanilla Ice)
I had an issue... In college, I started out premed at Brown University and always wanted to help people with their health but stopped being premed as I didn’t love a number of things I saw when working in hospitals in NYC & Dallas. Instead, I went to work in the business world (CBS, Goldman, Amex, eBay, and a number of startups before and after business school at Stanford),
However, I still wanted to do something meaningful in the healthcare world. In 2009, I joined a nonprofit called BensFriends.org that helps 100k rare disease patients per month. I’d invested in a number of companies as an angel, including healthcare related ones (such as Kinsa, the world’s smartest thermometer that’s backed by Kleiner Perkins) but the fund I work with - Indicator Ventures - specifically doesn’t invest in regulated industries like healthcare. I was seeing an increasing number of deals, and a growing number in healthcare. Aside from a few investor friends in the space, I needed an outlet for them.
In Spring 2016, I’d just finished up a great project... I found a cool company, Bond, that our VC fund invested in and led the A round after which I ran partnerships and soon thereafter we sold it (for very positive IRR) - all within 15 months. After this project, I began thinking about my next step and about the healthcare deals I see. I’d heard from a number of friends in healthcare that it’s hard to get things done with all the compliance, restrictions, and regulations that exist.
After a lot more conversations with people in healthcare, I confirmed what our fund knows - it’s hard to get things done with all the compliance and regulations. Friends have left general tech to break into healthcare and bring creative ideas that work in Silicon Valley. There is some success doing things differently, but more often they left exasperated. There must be a better way and there’s still a huge need.
RIGHT TIMING & RIGHT PEOPLE
“Right Here, Right Now” (Fatboy Slim)
At the exact time I was thinking about what to do next and having conversations with friends and others in healthcare, I met Jeremy. Luck is sometimes described as when opportunity meets preparation ('chance favors the prepared'). I got lucky; thinking about healthcare at the time and meeting the right person.
One feature important in identifying the right people is trust. Trust is vital. Jeremy and I met through his best friend in NYC, who is my oldest friend (we’ve known one another since preschool!). Like dating, it's usually better to go through friends. We both were able to start building trust because the connection came through a trusted source.
A second, and equally important component is being aligned on principles & values... People do not always agree, and we definitely don't, but we outlined and agreed upon common principles and values that we use to aid in making decisions and working together.
Jeremy:
One of those core values is a desire to constantly improve. Ourselves, the work we do, and the outcomes and value we add for those we work with. In order to do the kind of work we do at Venture Catalyst, we need to be an interdisciplinary team. Without it, the complex problems new ventures, founders, and investors face simply cannot be solved.
All of my career I’ve spent creating, managing, and being a contributor to interdisciplinary teams tackling thorny and complicated problems in a variety of sectors (though with a larger number in health/biomedicine/technology). In college, graduate school, working in government, academic medical centers, with investors, and startups; I’ve developed a broad understanding in a bunch of areas, and a deep understanding in a few. My expertise is at the intersection of research, science & technology, policy, and regulations.
For me, it starts with curiosity inspired by seeing something that either I want to understand, or I want to change. When I started graduate school at Duke for biochemistry, I was (and still am...) concerned that decision-makers were not able to make the highest quality choices with the aid of scientific or technical information. It’s what inspired me to get a masters in public policy in addition to my PhD work. It’s also what landed me on the Institutional Review Board at Duke Health at the age of 23 (ethics board that reviews research conducted on human beings, like much of the medical research).
I am still on this interdisciplinary path. From 2006-2009 I brought together a team of scientists, engineers, virtual reality programmers, and visual artists to create KinImmerse – virtual reality software to display and interact with macromolecular models in a 6-sided virtual reality facility. Working and learning together across disciplines on that project got me hooked!
At the same time, I did a stint in the Office of Management and Budget in Washington DC for the Bush Administration working on revising how the US Army Corps of Engineers plans, evaluates, and selects water projects for the United States, then another stint helping the Transition Team for the Obama Administration and crafting the Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research Policy and updating the US governments bioethics commission. In 2012 I took on a role for the City of New York in their procurement shop, and with wide consultation wrote their emergency procurement policy and green procurement policy in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. A year later, I joined Mount Sinai as an Assistant Professor in Population Health and became the youngest IRB chair in the country at a top 15 academic medical center.
While at Mount Sinai, I contributed to the development of the Apple ResearchKit platform with colleagues and co-designed the first eConsent platform on a mobile device (and I’m advising developers using ResearchStack for Android on the same thing!).
Since stepping away from Mount Sinai to work on Venture Catalyst, I’ve also been working with colleagues at Memorial Sloan Kettering, UPenn, Dana Farber Cancer Center / Beth Israel Deaconess, and Cedars Sinai to develop technology for population level genetic screening for cancer.
Every step of the way, I’ve seen an interdisciplinary and learning focused approach lead to great results for the teams I’ve led or been a contributor to. I’ve also learned a lot of technical and regulatory skills and become an expert in a few areas. What’s great about teaming up with Eric is that we complement each other in terms of skill and the two of us together cover a lot of ground for those we work with.
Why’d we start Venture Catalyst?
Eric & Jeremy:
In one word, ALIGNMENT. It’s what we seek in everything we do - with our team, partners, clients, and even friends & family. We quickly realized trust existed, and alignment existed.
Also, there is no time like the present; be it the stars, our values (which we’ll talk about in a future post), or something else, it is simply the right time.
Finally, a commitment to action. Neither one of us is a particularly passive person and once we saw the opportunity we agreed to a course of action and followed through.
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