It All Starts with the Story

By Alexander Vassallo, Manager of Business Development West Coast (US), Entrepreneurial Education Lead, LSN

The best entrepreneurs are the best storytellers. Irrespective of the industry or discipline you find yourself in, the ability to deliver a compelling and powerful narrative of your unique technology or product, highlighting clearly why you’ve undertaken a new business venture, is one of the most important skills a fundraising executive must have. Last week’s fundraising bootcamp – “It All Starts with the Story” – delivered by members of LSN’s BD team, Greg Mannix and Alex Vassallo, offered a deep dive into one of the most critical determinants of a startup entity’s success.

Potential partners you may approach during your global fundraising initiatives will be looking for entrepreneurs who have not only managed to portray their company’s unique story into a cogent message threaded through multiple modalities, but they will be looking for authenticity. Finding your voice and being able to inspire partners to learn more about your company is part and parcel of undergoing the transformation from aspiring scientist-entrepreneur to successful life science executive. However, only those entrepreneurs who truly commit to the process and come to terms with the importance of entrepreneurial agency will be the ones who find success in the shark tank.

Finding your voice and developing a compelling narrative goes beyond the obvious benefits of highlighting your startup’s unique value points to potential partners in a meeting. In fact, undertaking this process successfully prepares you to speak different languages within the context of a deal, allocation, or partnership. And by different languages, we don’t mean Spanish or French, we mean business and science. From speaking generally to the gatekeepers who will evaluate the possibility of progressing your investment opportunity down the deal chain, to the navigators and evaluators with whom you can speak more scientifically, and eventually the decision maker with whom you will be speaking a heavily business-centric language, if you can net out your company’s unique story in as little as a 5-7 word tagline and as extensively as a 2-page executive summary and a 10-12 slide pitch deck, you truly will have found your voice.

Most importantly to consider when approaching your potential partners, even more so than the estimated ROI of your opportunity or the unmet medical need being addressed, is the fact that investors will always bet on the team. Investing in a company is commonly referred to as getting into bed with the company or investor; this is a relationship that could last anywhere between 5-15 years, and unless investors see that you have an inspired team behind you that shares your vision and believes in the same compelling narrative, they will be dissuaded from viewing your investment opportunity as a tangible relationship that can grow and develop throughout the years. So not only do you need to get your story straight to bring to potential partners, but to be successful in the early-stage life science arena, you must be able to inspire your colleagues to share in your company’s narrative.

All of this and more was covered in LSN’s Fundraising Bootcamp, “It All Starts with the Story”. If you are interested in learning more, have a look at the recording of last week’s session. We are the industry leaders in connecting early-stage life science firms with active investors and strategic partners, and it is our pleasure to share the story of what we have learnt over the past decade with the next generation of leading industry professionals.