Angel Scale Biotech: Learn More

Leen Kawas PhD, managing general partner at Propel Bio Partners, invests in life science companies such as Persephone Biosciences and Inherent Bio that promise immediate benefits for humanity. An uplifting chat with a dynamic VC and founder.

Sponsored by Purdue University entrepreneurship and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish and Richardson.

Highlights:

• Sal Daher Introduces Leen Kawas
• What Propel Bio Partners Does
• Persephone Biosciences
• "... It's a pipeline for probiotics. They're starting with infant probiotics..."
• "... is anybody else working in the space of microbiome for babies? I haven't seen this..."
• Inherent Bio
• "... That's what Inherent is working on. They have identified an epigenetic signature that has the ability to better predict pregnancy outcome with men..."
• "...What is the profile of the kind of company that you find attractive in public markets now...?"
• Advice to the Audience
• Leen Kawas' Immigrant Story
• "... I want to tell entrepreneurs that are out there, no is typically not no. Just keep that in mind..."
• "... I just want to tell the entrepreneurs out there, you tell your own story, you work on your mission, you define your why. Keep going and you'll be successful..."

Topics: building wealth, management, raising money

Artist K. Woodman-Maynard discusses her gorgeous graphic novel interpretation of The Great Gatsby, the business of being a graphic artist and other engrossing matters. A delightfully different interview with a charming guest.

Highlights include:

• Sal Introduces K. Woodman-Maynard, Creator of The Great Gatsby Graphic Novel
• “Color is gorgeous. The drawings are extremely expressive and interesting… the style of the period is displayed.”
• “…I think it's a good way to get people who might not otherwise read The Great Gatsby, the prose book, interested.”
• Cashflow from a Graphic Novel Is Inconsistent – Good to Have Steady Income from Graphic Design
• “…it was very painful for me to cut out specific lines, because I love those lines.”
• “I'm in complete agreement that you shouldn't dismiss somebody's whole life's work just based on certain philosophies. It's a balance.”
• “…it started by a very intense deep reading of the text…”
• “The whole book took about 1500 hours. That's actively time tracked hours.”
• “…the first thing for a beginner that they need to know is that they can do it. You can make a living as a graphic artist.”
• “I was encouraged to go into architecture because that was considered to be more stable for artists. I'm so glad I didn't, because I graduated college in 2008.”
• “One thing that's been key for me has been diversifying my income. I have income from graphic novels. I have income from graphic design work, from illustration.”
• “I think it's an important thing for yourself as a graphic artist to be able to pivot and to be able to work in different ways.”
• “…finding good mentors. That's something that I would encourage your niece to do.”
• “Going to Harvard has really helped me with asking stupid questions.”
• “You can be a good business person and also be good at your craft.”
• “The Great Gatsby was a commercial flop at the time that it was published.”
• “He was making a huge amount. He would just spend it before he even got it, which is the direct opposite of me.”
• “…a captive audience of troops who read The Great Gatsby and then returned and spread the word about it.”
• “I'm wondering what's going to happen once the vaccine is out. Will we experience another Roaring Twenties in a different way?”
• “I do the Pomodoro method. …You work for 25 minutes; you take 5 minutes off. Then every two hours, you take a half an hour break.”
• “In high school, we had to take career placement tests. I had equal likelihood artist and military officer.”
• The Importance of Story Telling
• Addressing Mental Health Issues with Kids via Comics: TKAMI.org
• “I decided not to go into architecture because it wasn't my calling. Also, because I could see that it wouldn't be good for my mental health.”
• “It's just gorgeous. I highly recommend this work.”

Angel Scale Biotech: Learn More

Paul Hartung returns to talk about how to fund promising biotech and life science companies. He continues his conversation from his previous episode discussing his past experience with angel investing.

Sponsored by Purdue University entrepreneurship and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish and Richardson.

Highlights:

• Sal Daher Introduces Paul Hartung
• "... Tell me the story of the first syndicated angel funding here in New England..."
• "'... there's a bunch of guys like you and me who've been successful in business, who are starting to get together.' He said, 'I just joined a group called Launchpad...'"
• "... I was CEO from the start and chairman, the president and secretary and [laughter] and all the offices..."
• "... The story here is that technologies are coming out of labs that are amazing, that are just astonishing, that could do things that couldn't be done 10 years ago by any stretch of the imagination. It's not one-off, they're multiplying. The cost of developing this technology is a coming down..."
• "... how do I support angels? Due diligence I think is part of it, creating due diligence, and I think part of it is also syndication..."
• "... What is the end game? Who would be the strategic partners that might end up acquirers or might license the technology...?"
• Pros and Cons of Grant Funding
• ".. the timing of strategics is not the timing of startups..."
• "... I think there's a lot of room for Angel-friendly venture funds that will work with Angels and will help bring Angels over from software investing into the life sciences, perhaps initially for digital health, but eventually, in wet lab..."
• Advice to the Audience
• "...Don't just have a purely science team. You need to have someone who's going to be your business representative if you will..."

Topics: angel investing strategies, biotech, building wealth

Sascha Deri and Lindsay Becker were interviewed by co-host Ben Littauer and me about the equity crowdfunding campaign this fascinating rocket company based in Brunswick, Maine is doing on WeFunder. They are targeting the a growing niche of sending small non-human payload into space. They are doing this with a non-toxic rocket fuel that is friendly to the envidonment. As of this writing they had already passed the million dollar mark at WeFunder. Check them out here: https://wefunder.com/blushiftaerospace

Angel Scale Biotech: Learn More

What if automation could help patients better follow their prescriptions? Natalie Park and Saumya Rawat met at MIT and are co-founders of Pharmesol which seeks to do this.

Sponsored by Purdue University entrepreneurship and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish and Richardson.

Highlights:

• Martin Aboitiz Introduces Natalie Park and Saumya Rawat
• What Problem Pharmesol is Solving
• Pharmesol's Product and What it Does
• Pharmesol's Business Model
• Fee-For-Service vs. Value-Based Payments
• What Makes Pharmesol Marketable?
• "... I think ideal profile of a customer would be an integrated delivery network. What that means is that they have both a health system as well as a health plan..."
• Why Not AI?
• "... Pharmesol is a clinical automation company, and we're solving the problem of lack of clinical capacity and challenges with workforces at provider organizations..."
• "... These people, they know what they're talking about. They're trained. Graduate degree, they're a doctor of pharmacy. Underutilized resource..."

Topics: co-founders, discovering entrepreneurship, founding story

Angel Scale Biotech: Learn More

Finding a less noxious way to sterilize medical devices is the goal of CL Tian, winner as MedTech Innovator ’22. She founded Phiex to commercialize a sterilant that allows devices to sterilize themselves in the presence of light. Industry is listening to this compelling founder.

Sponsored by Purdue University entrepreneurship and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish and Richardson.

Highlights:

• Sal Daher Introduces CL Tian
• What Problem Phiex is Solving
• "... The moat is how do you deliver it without using capital equipment, with plastic packaging material as the delivery system, and how do you deliver it when it's activated by light? Our materials, once they see ambient light, start to release a sterilant..."
• “... I don't think I mentioned, but the amount of devices that are sterilized with this cancer-causing technology's half of the industry. That's 20 billion devices in the US a year. There's no alternative for most of those devices…”
• CL Tian's Background
• How CL Tian Came to the Issue of Sterilization
• Message to the Audience

Topics: biotech, discovering entrepreneurship, founding story, product

Angel Scale Biotech: Learn More

Paul Hartung is an angel investor involved in the life sciences field. Here, he discusses how he helps build companies such as Leuko, Clairways, Verisense, and others in the MedTech space.

Sponsored by Purdue University entrepreneurship and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish and Richardson.

Highlights:

• Sal Daher Introduces Paul Hartung
• Leuko Labs
• "... Something dark goes through, that's a red blood. Something light goes through, that's a white blood cell. Then they count that, and then it can come up with immunocompromised, or low leukocyte count, or normal leukocyte count..."
• Upcoming Milestones for Leuko
• Clairways
• "... That's an area of great interest for me is academic founders in the life sciences, taking their technology from the lab into the clinic, or into the market. It requires understanding the technology, and it also requires understanding the market..."
• Verisense
• Xander
• "... Well, he's basically creating a software that interprets the voice of the person who's speaking to the wearer of the glasses, and creates a caption, which projected on the lens. You can caption what people are saying to you..."
• Paul's Backstory
• How Paul Got Into Life Sciences
• 3Com
• "... The whole premise of the technology was that you could take people who were suspect of the disease, and rather than immediately going in for really expensive brain imaging tests, which actually involve exposure to radiation and you can only do them very infrequently, this is something that could be done in a general practitioner's office, doesn't even have to be done in a hospital...:
• Sonivance
• Advice to the Audience

Topics: angel investing strategies, product, venture capital

Angel Scale Biotech: Learn More

Founder, entrepreneur, and angel, Richard Lane, explains his experience investing in companies such as Alice’s Table and The Jitterbug phone.

Sponsored by Purdue University entrepreneurship and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish and Richardson.

Highlights:

• Sal Daher Introduces Richard Lane
• "... The founder is in the business of discovering new territory, terra incognita. The angels and the board members are in the business of making sure that she doesn't run aground on well-known shoals..."
• Alice's Table
• "... She was helping women who were very much into floral arrangements to teach in-person classes in floral arrangement, and how to make a really beautiful floral arrangement. What her business did-- basically, she helped these women to run events. The women would use those tools in their network..."
• "... As an angel investor board member, I go in and I say, "Are you on schedule? Great. Everything's good? I don't care about that. I'll look at that later. Tell me what is keeping you up at night. What is the first stumbling block?"
• Richard's Entrepreneurial Career
• "... One of the driving things I had since my childhood was, what happens when you die?"
• Telephone Companies
• "... It's a business that didn't exist. Before that, landlines were everything. It was everything, that was telephony was a landline..."
• Pacific Telephone Company
• The Jitterbug
• "... A couple of things worth noting, a device around older people, needs to be looking at their user’s expectations. We're hardwired by the time we're 65 to think certain ways, to do certain traits..."
• LifePod
• Parting Thoughts to the Audience

Topics: angel investing strategies, founding story, product

MIT Media Lab alum Alex Westner has glasses that show captions to hearing-impaired people during real-time conversations. His approach is to refine existing technologies to deliver an excellent experience in one use case. Loved the focus and his dedication to detail.

Highlights:

• Sal Introduces Alex Westner, Sound Technologist & Founder of Xander – Glasses with Captions for the Hearing-Impaired
• Xander Seeks to Assemble Existing Technology into a Great User Experience
• XanderGlasses Are Great on Privacy Because Nothing Is Recorded
• Xander’s Speech Recognition Is Built on Kaldi, the same Opensource Platform Alexa Uses
• Xander Trims Features of Augmented Reality Devices to Focus on It Use Case
• Maybe There’s an Annual $200 Million Market for XanderGlasses
• XanderGlasses Are Certainly Cooler than Hearing Aids (Faint Praise!)
• Xander’s Go to Market Approach
• What If Google Gets into the Business?
• Alex Westner’s Entrepreneurial Journey
• An Easter Egg for Raul
• Alex Westner’s Parting Thoughts

Topics: software, product

Title: Augmented Reality for Hearing Loss

Which Founding Teams Succeed? Are Founders Born or Made? Can Innovation Be Crowdsourced? How Many Jobs Do MIT & Stanford Add to the Economy? Blockchain for the Supply Chain? Chuck Eesley, Stanford's Startup Prof Addresses These Questions and More.

This timeless interview is being relaunched to make available the wise and affable words of Professor Chuck Eesley.

• Introduction

• Professor Charles Eesley Bio

• The Traumatic Founding Experience

• Shivang Dave, PlenOptika & Entrepreneurs in Poor Countries

• How Chuck Eesley Ended Up at MIT Studying with Ed Roberts

• The Economic Impact of MIT & Stanford: Millions of Jobs Created & Trillions in Economic Activity

• “And the other big takeaway is that we had been looking at the impact of these universities in too narrow of a way previously.”

• Robust Finding: Larger Teams Do Better; Startups Tend to Have Teams that Are Too Small

• Chuck Gets a Great Idea for Research While Hiking with a Friend

• Cooperative vs. Competitive Commercialization

• “…, if the industry is high in the effectiveness of patent protection, and high in the importance of complementary assets ... you're motivated to go and talk to the big guys, because you need their complementary assets…”

• “…low effectiveness of patent protection, low importance of complementary assets, that's where you tend to get competitive commercialization…”

• “Are You Experienced, or Are You Talented?”

• Sal Talks About the Impact of Portfolio Company Concrete Sensors

• Evidence-based Entrepreneurship

• Blockchain to Make it Easier to Finance Supply Chains

• “And with that additional data, then we can also start to optimize more and more of the startup process, and do a better job of picking which ventures to invest in, and to devote resources towards.”

• The Value of Thrift in Life and in Entrepreneurship

• Chuck & Family Plan to Give Their Money to the Universities that Made Their Success Possible

• “So, I think it [thrift] is an underappreciated value. And definitely in Silicon Valley…”

• Early Google Investor David Cheriton Is a Role Model for Chuck

• Chuck’s Parting Thoughts: (1) Entrepreneurs Can Change Their Luck, (2) If Chuck’s Projects Interest You, Reach Out, and (3) Be Frugal in Life and in Entrepreneurship.