By Dennis Ford, Founder & CEO, Life Science Nation (LSN)
There is a line between deciding to pursue investors and partners and pursuing them. Most people believe they cross it the moment they decide. They don’t. Deciding is private. The line is the part the market can see, and the market only sees behavior. You can be completely certain you are committed and still be, as far as anyone outside your own head can tell, standing exactly where you were a year ago.
The market doesn’t care what you declare. It responds to what you do. What it reads is presence, whether you are in the room when it counts. There are moments when it counts more than others, when the people who fund and license and partner are not scattered across a thousand calendars but gathered in one place at one time, looking for their next opportunity. Those moments are real, and they are on the calendar. The wave forms whether you are ready or not. The only question it puts to you is whether you are in the water when it arrives.
Here is the part that surprises people. The companies that are serious about this do not try to be efficient about it. You would think the sophisticated move is to be selective, to take only the meetings that obviously matter and skip the rest. It isn’t, and there is a hard reason why. The meeting that changes your company does not announce itself going in. The lead investor is hidden inside a large number of conversations that look, beforehand, exactly like the ones that lead nowhere. The licensing partner is buried in a stack of introductions you cannot tell apart until you are sitting in them. You cannot reason your way to the one that counts and avoid the others. The only way to reach it is to go through the volume. So the serious company does not look for reasons to take fewer meetings. It looks for reasons to take more, because every additional relevant room is another draw from the deck the one card is hidden in. Most of the draws are blanks. That is not a flaw in the method. That is the method.
Activity guarantees nothing, and no one who has done this for long will tell you otherwise. What inactivity guarantees is the opposite. The company that is not in the room is not weighed, and ends up passed over. It is simply never seen, and the market does not hold a seat open for the company that didn’t show. It gives the seat to one that did. Which brings me to the week of June 22 in San Diego. That is a week the market gathers. The city fills with meetings, events, and venues all competing for the same hours, and RESI, on June 22, is built for exactly the thing I have been describing, a room assembled out of investors, licensing teams, and business development people who came specifically to find companies like yours.
Some of you reading this are already going to be there. You have a reason to be in San Diego that week, and you still have not decided to be in this particular room. Sit with that for a second. You will be in the same city, on the same days, with the market gathered a few miles away, and you are on the fence about walking in. There is a word for standing that close to the water, dressed to swim, watching the set roll past. The word is not caution. It is hesitation, and from the outside the market cannot tell the difference between a company that hesitated and a company that was never there.
The line we started with is not crossed by deciding you are ready. It is crossed in the open, by being where the market is while the market is there. If you believe you are ready, the week of June 22 is where that belief becomes visible or doesn’t. Register for RESI San Diego, June 22.
Don’t underestimate the importance of the line.
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