Interview with Dennis Ford, Founder and CEO of Life Science Nation (LSN) By Caitlin Dolegowski, Marketing Manager, LSN

Dennis Ford

Caitlin Dolegowski

Life Science Nation (LSN) is elevating RESI JPM 2025 by moving to the San Francisco Marriott Marquis on January 14, 2025. This super-central venue, just minutes from Union Square, offers a spacious area with all activities on one floor. The new location allows for significantly expanded capacity, enhancing networking opportunities for attendees.

As the 50th RESI conference, this milestone event during JP Morgan Healthcare Week promises enhanced networking opportunities, great food, and the unique RESI format of equal representation between early-stage companies and investors/partners. RESI JPM continues its tradition of fostering crucial connections in the life science industry, building on its legacy of helping companies secure substantial funding and partnerships.

In an interview with Dennis Ford, CEO of Life Science Nation, he shared insights about this exciting location update for RESI JPM and its implications for the event’s future.

Caitlin Dolegowski (CD): What motivated the decision to move RESI JPM 2025 to the San Francisco Marriott Marquis?

Dennis Ford (DF): Forgive me, but let’s dial in the time machine and go back a decade to the third RESI event LSN had in 2014 at the iconic Baseball venue of Fenway Park, Kenmore Square, Boston. We had just launched Life Science Nation (LSN) and the Redefining Early Stage Investments (RESI) conference series and were two years in. My son Patrick worked at Fenway as a chef and introduced LSN to the catering folks who agreed to let RESI take over two of their big restaurant venues and stage an investor event complete with beer, hot dogs, and Boston clam chowder. At the RESI Fenway Park event, I met Ray Briscuso of AdvaMed, and we immediately hit it off. Ray is a well-known change agent in the life science arena and has created one of the world’s most dynamic MedTech partnering events. Ray loved what we were doing, connecting investors with startups, and he suggested bringing RESI to the JP Morgan event in San Francisco in January 2015.

With Ray’s encouragement, off I went to San Franciso, and I found one venue, the Marine Memorial Hotel, a few blocks away from Union Square. This is a small hotel, but it did have enough space to scatter a RESI event around the different floors with all the various nooks and crannies that this venerable older hotel offered us. RESI took over two floors connected by a stairway and launched the first RESI JPM, which we promptly sold out. At the inaugural RESI JPM event in that crowded hotel, the “collision factor” at RESI was born.

Our first RESI JPM was a packed house. The tight quarters had an exciting effect in that half the attendees were startups, and the other half were investors, and licensing partners kept literally bumping into each other as they traversed the hallways and staircases from scheduled meetings to panels and workshops. As the day went on, this collision prompted on-the-spot ad hoc meetings, which many reported were the best meetings of the day.

Typically, a partnering event has scheduled one-on-one meetings throughout the day. Still, at this event, the ad hoc meetings were equal to the number of scheduled meetings, which created a very different vibe because of the crowded facility. People were more open, friendly, and willing to chat and, if not a direct fit, make some referrals, and that aspect has carried over to every RESI event to this day.

Anyway, to make a long story short, we continued at the Marine Memorial for ten years, unable to find anything with more capacity, and stuck with our friends at the Marine Memorial, eventually taking over the entire hotel for the RESI event year after year. RESI JPM was limited in capacity to 1200 attendees, and most years, we were sold out because of a lack of capacity. RESI JPM developed a reputation as the place to find a capital investor and licensing partners; investors bump into other investors and find syndicate partners, and the relaxed community atmosphere came to define the community that supports our RESI events to this day. Fast forward a few weeks ago, and the Marriott Marquis had an opening this year with a 20,000 sq ft venue, and LSN felt we had to make a move and expand the RESI JPM partnering event. As it turns out, this RESI JPM will mark our 50th RESI event, and I still vividly recall an animated conversation with Ray overlooking the Fenway Park ball field telling me to get my ass to SF, CA, and find a hotel!

CD: How do you think the new Marriott Marquis location will enhance networking opportunities for attendees?

DF: JP Morgan Healthcare week has morphed into the most significant global partnering event in the world. The main reason many people travel to San Francisco in January is to participate in the numerous meetings and parallel events across the city’s downtown. These meetings start before the main JPM events and run throughout the week, offering diverse discussions and presentations from various organizations. LSN’s RESI JPM is one of the parallel events and is considered one of the go-to events of the week. The JPM gathering is still one of the premier global industry events and still fosters collaboration and innovation.

CD: Can you discuss the advantages of hosting the conference during JP Morgan Healthcare Week?

DF: Everyone who is anyone is at the JP Morgan week, and if you want to play in the life science arena, it is an opportunity to meet and network with the -players you need to be connected with.

CD: How do you anticipate the new venue will impact attendance numbers, particularly in terms of early-stage investors?

DF: LSN is about helping early-stage seed, 250k-2M, series A, 2M to 10M, and Series B 10-50M. RESI events cater to the buyers and sellers in this part of the life science landscape and is the place to be if you are an early-stage company seeking capital or licensing opportunities. At RESI JPM, attendees are equally divided between buyers and sellers. So we expect around 1500-2000 participants, equally divided between early-stage companies and investors and licensing partners seeking technology assets for their portfolios and product lines.

RESI conferences are unique because they are equally divided between early-stage life science companies across drugs, devices, diagnostics, and digital health and the investors and licensing partner entities.

CD: As RESI JPM 2025 marks the 50th RESI conference, how do you see this milestone event reflecting the growth and evolution of RESI over the years?

DF: RESI has helped over 400 companies raise over 5 billion dollars over the years. If any of these company’s technologies make it to a patient’s bedside and improve a patient’s outcome, then we will have done what we set out to do—make a difference.