By Erich White, Business Development Manager, West Coast, LSN

Women in Bio is a sponsor of our upcoming Digital RESI June event, and I spoke with Lisa Iadicicco, Executive Director, Women In Bio and Sibylle Hauser, MAPS Vice Chair, Founders Forum of Women In Bio to learn more about their organization, their mission and why they chose to partner with LSN and RESI.

Erich White: How did the Women Founders Forum and Entrepreneur Center start?

Sibylle Hauser: The Women Founders Forum started out in San Diego, but now we have women entrepreneurs all over the United States attached to it. We will start more of these peer groups in other chapters now, as well. Lisa, together with the executive team, had the idea to grow the center, and I came from the bottom up with growing the Founders Forum into a national Entrepreneur Center. The primary goal for the Entrepreneur Center will evolve, but right now the Center offers resources, education, corporate leadership programs, and entrepreneur programs. The goal is to have three pillars. First, give women all the resources they need. Second, provide them with a roster of advisors. Third, provide them with pathways to access capital and financing. We want to prepare our women founders to really have a compelling pitch and give them an opportunity to showcase their technologies and present to as many investors as possible.

Erich White: Are you planning to use the Partnering Platform at Digital RESI to find partners for the Entrepreneur Center?

Sibylle Hauser: We are cautious not to take time away from the women entrepreneurs. Some of the investors have very limited time. Last month, during the Digital RESI 2-Day Partnering Event, I requested to meet with investors but decided to put the discussion aside to after the event. In fact, one of the outcomes form last month’s digital event was that we connected with three VCs wanting to hear more about WIB’s Entrepreneur Center, for which we have scheduled a follow-up conversation this week.

Lisa Iadicicco: We have a pretty targeted group of attendees at RESI that we want to meet with and we want to meet with anyone committed to enhancing the awareness of Women In Bio.

Erich White: Why did you decide to partner with LSN and RESI to sponsor your pitch session?

Sibylle Hauser: WIB has done a pitch session at events before and on a chapter level, as Lisa already mentioned. The Boston Chapter and Washington, D.C. chapters have pitching events there, but we wanted to do something on a national level. We also wanted this to be in an environment where there are many investors and big exposure. RESI is a great conference and platform to do that. I am really excited about doing the session with RESI. Through our outreach for this partnership, we even unearthed women entrepreneurs we never met before, so we were able increase our Women Founders Forum.

Lisa Iadicicco: Sibylle actually introduced us to RESI. We have done this as a chapter only effort in the past. Chicago is another chapter that consistently has a pitch or startup competition. But we want to create an event that we can speak to a national audience and RESI and LSN offered a platform for us to do just that.

Erich White: What part of RESI did you like the most so far?

Sibylle Hauser: We had the chance to witness the Featured Company Pitch Session during RESI San Francisco this past January. I really liked the value of the feedback. A lot of these women entrepreneurs don’t get feedback on their approach or pitch from an investor’s point of view. So, the pitch session is helping them hone in more and target their pitch to investors.

Lisa Iadicicco: That was the thing, to hear that feedback. I’ve been on panels and several pitch competitions here in the Pittsburgh area and the feedback is really critical. You don’t usually get this like you do at RESI. We want everyone to walk away from this experience having learned something, even if they are not one of the five finalists to pitch.

Sibylle Hauser: One other point about RESI that made a difference for the companies that participated in the April 2-Day Partnering event. Five of twenty-eight WIB member companies had never pitched to an institutional investor before. They are very good at getting grants from the NIH. But this was their first time getting in front of an institutional investor. It was a totally new audience for them. Obviously, it was a learning curve for them, but it was a really good opportunity for them to start relationships with some of these investors. Some of these companies may be early but, nevertheless, it is never too early to start relationships with a potential top target investor.

Erich White: Anything else you would like to say about RESI?

Sibylle Hauser: What I really liked was that LSN helped me push these women entrepreneurs to the limit. They were, in parallel, in NIH grant submissions last month. But LSN gave them a unique opportunity and a really great methodology for booking meetings with investors. LSN gave each company a list of targeted investors that were a fit for the companies and their assets as well as an introductory message template for requesting a meetings, suggestions for follow-up messages, a tear sheet template, and recommendations for their messaging and branding. And, if the company adhered to it, they would really have great success. The highest challenge was actually the pre-recorded pitch for the Featured Company Forum. But, in my view, this is the future. I work with some San Francisco investors and we now only do evaluations with pre-recorded video pitches.

Women In Bio

Women In Bio is an organization of professionals committed to promoting careers, leadership, and entrepreneurship of women in the life sciences.

We aim to help women achieve the highest levels of leadership, influence and decision-making that they desire. Our primary focus is to provide women-to-women mentorship and leadership support through all stages of career development

• from bench to boardroom
• from academia to industry
• from first job to last
• from idea to entrepreneur

Our members reflect the increasing spread of the life sciences. We belong to biotech and pharma companies, universities and institutes, law and accounting firms, marketing and PR firms, CROs and CMOs. Many of our members are entrepreneurs, and a focus on entrepreneurship has remained core to the mission of WIB since its foundation in 2002.

By Gregory Mannix, Chief Conference Officer, Vice President International Business Development, LSN

Partnering for Digital RESI June is about to open, and after 29 successful RESI partnering events, we can see what strategies lead companies to successfully book many productive meetings using the RESI Partnering Platform. Follow these tips and you will see the results:

 

1. Start Early: Be sure to register before partnering opens to get on the platform from the beginning.
2. Company Profile: create a compelling profile for both your company and yourself
3. Choose Your Meetings: us the Partnering Platform to filter for the investors and strategics who are a fit for your technology and stage of development.
4. Meeting Request Message: put a lot of thought into developing a concise but compelling message to request meetings.
5. Request Many Meetings: request meetings with all of the investors/strategics who you think might be a fit for you. The 72-hour non-stop partnering format at Digital RESI June allows all attendees to book more meetings than ever before at a RESI conference!
6. Follow Up: don’t forget to send follow-up messages to the people you are hoping to meet with until you hear back. Craft several messages with additional information about your company you can use to follow up.

Check out these partnering success stories:

• Terran Biosciences Creates A New Record With 45 Investment Partnering Meetings at Digital RESI – Congratulations
• Reglagene Nails RESI Partnering with 25 Investor Meetings

If you haven’t registered yet, you can REGISTER HERE

Confirmed investors for Digital RESI June:

 

By Dennis Ford, Founder & CEO, Life Science Nation; Creator of RESI Conference Series

Global early stage investment will be manifesting in unique partnerships and alliances as new business models proliferate.  Though nascent, a new paradigm is evolving around sourcing, vetting, developing, operating, testing, prepping for licensing and exiting of technology assets.  There are 100s of Biotech and Pharma incubators sprouting up, not to mention the proliferation of university, regional, state and national incubator programs worldwide, because technologies are reaching a breakthrough threshold to change the state of patient care and how we treat and cure disease. Big Pharma plus hundreds in the U.S. alone are all in the hunt to find solutions that will impact the healthcare market.

The incubator strategies are all over the map, depending on corporate mandates. I have stated, in the past, that finding seed money (under 2mm) for 1000s of companies is a lot different than finding series A and B capital (10-50mm). The simple math dictates that a funding bottleneck is on the horizon. This is not a scientific survey, but an estimate based on our knowledge of the market. Using the LSN Company Platform, the NIH SBIR/STTR database and the list of RESI attendees over the last 8 years, our ballpark estimate is that there are around 10-15K early stage companies in the life science arena, with the following distribution.

LSN called and Googled around, and estimated that there was around $60B in investor capital in 2019 for early stage healthcare companies. Assuming there will be 10,000 fundraising startups, with 75% raising a Series A at a ballpark $10M+ and 25% raising a Series B at a ballpark $30M+, our back of the envelope, very conservative, calculation is that at least $150B in capital is needed, with only $60B available.

The point here is that there will be a very large bottleneck in cash due to a lot of need and not a lot of available dollars.

The game changer here is that ALL these incubators have to prepare their early stage companies for the up and coming bottleneck.  The incubators have to better manage their assets, and train their early stage firms on how to raise money and secure strategic partnerships, while their portfolio companies need to actively achieve milestones and get compelling data. All RESIs have a 1:1 ratio of companies to investors, giving companies a great platform to make themselves noticed. Even still, many investors say they invest in only about .5% of the companies they see each year. These incubators with 1000s of early stage companies need to worry about how to get their companies to rise above the noise in the marketplace, as too many early stage companies compete for too few dollars!