YouSaid · the spoken record

Jan Garfinkle

lines on the record: 78
first: 2021-09-02
most recent: 2021-09-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“We got the money from high net worth individuals that were at $50,100,000 kind of investments in us. They liked our story and then the bigger ones were we had three foundations in Michigan where the chief investment officers just loved the fact that we were focused more on the Midwest at the time. Now we're more national and international but at the time we were much more focused on Michigan and the Midwest and they love the idea that someone”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Consulting, and then we were trying to raise $5 million so that we could get this 250. So the first close on Arboretum 1 was $6 million.”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was started through a gift from Sam Zelf. And Tim had been the executive director. He had founded it. He had started. He'd run it for four or five years. He'd probably made 10 different investments over that time. It wasn't a lot, but it was a lot more than I had done. And so Tim joined me very early. And luckily, this life science corridor was still underway. And so the Michigan Economic Development Corporation wanted a couple more venture funds. And so they ran a little RFP process. There were 17 applicants and two winners, and we were one of the winners. And so the state of Michigan helped us. They basically said, go raise $5 million. And once you raise that $5 million, we'll give you $250,000 to cover your legal and your travel. So Tim was still working at University of Michigan at the Wolverine Venture Fund. I was still doing.”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A partner because no one is going to invest in a single person who has to know about your experience. Yeah, I have a lot of success as an operator, but not as a venture person. And so I put an ad in what was called VentureWire at the time saying I was looking for a venture partner to join me in Ann Arbor to help me invest in healthcare companies. And I got all these smart biochemist PhDs from the Bay Area, but none of them had run a venture fund either. They were just sort of interested. Luckily, the person who ended up joining me is Tim Peterson. And Tim had worked at Wolverine Venture Fund, which was a venture fund contained within the business school at Michigan.”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely true. I often say naivety is blessed. But what I did know was I really wanted to change healthcare. And my big aha for me was at this point the cost of healthcare was starting to climb. It was about 12% of GDP. This is now 2002. And I just had this fundamental belief that through innovation we should be able to drive cost out of our healthcare system, but still provide great clinical care. So I thought a venture fund was the way to do this. And so I thought I'll find companies that can drive costs out of the health care system and still provide great clinical care and I'll invest in those. And so luckily one thing that happened was another mentor, one of the gentlemen from one of these two funds said that he would mentor me when he heard I was starting the venture fund, was starting arboretum. And so he said the very first thing you got to do is get.”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And governor of our state for two terms. And then the other was a group of folks that kind of didn't know what they wanted their legacy to be. And so when they both said no to me, I was leaving one of them and we live a couple miles from downtown Ann Arbor. And I love to walk. So I walked home and I just like, this is ridiculous. I'm going to just start my own venture fund. I literally walked home, went on the computer, went to irs.gov, filed for a tax ID number and started arboretum. I was like, I'm just going to do this myself. I'm like, it can't be that hard.”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To a whole bunch of healthcare startups. I love helping early stage healthcare companies. That's really my favorite thing. And so I helped probably 12 or 13 of the Michigan-based healthcare companies get started. And then there were two venture funds in Michigan that were focused on healthcare. And so I was doing diligence for them. Through all of that, I thought I would love to work for a venture fund. The two companies I had been at had both been backed by venture. And I just thought that would be a great way to have sort of a broader impact. And so I tried to get a job at both of them. One of them, the senior gentleman, wanted to become governor of our state, and he did. So he shut his fund down, and that was Rick Snyder.”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some other companies in the cardiovascular space. So I would say ACS and DVI were on the plumbing side of cardiovascular devices because they're in the plumbing. And so he said, okay, great. Anyway, I ended up doing consulting for eight years. And it started in marketing, but what happened was guidance started a venture group. It was called Compass. And I ended up doing a lot of diligence for Compass, writing white papers for them. They were probably half of my consulting practice. And then the other half was the state of Michigan was trying to get on the map with healthcare. Michigan's super automotive focused all the big, except for Tesla, all the big automotive companies are there. And at this time, and so this is the late 90s, each state was getting tobacco dollars because there was a huge class action suit in every state got some money. So Michigan got $70 million. And they said, let's see if we can create a whole other industry here. So they started what was called the life science corridor and they were giving grants and loans.”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So after ACS and DVI, I ended up getting married. He had moved from Chicago to, we dated long distance for two years. He then moved to San Francisco when I got this job at DVI and went back to, he's a physician and went back to where he had done his fellowship, which was out here in the Bay Area, which was when we met. And after a couple of years, Mike said, you know, Jan, I moved here for you from Chicago, and I'm really unhappy in this position I'm in since he went back to where he had done his fellowship. They still sort of treated him like a super fellow, but not an equal. And so he said, you know, it's my turn to look for something. And I said, okay, you know, anywhere in the Bay Area or Seattle. And he found beautiful Ann Arbor, Michigan. So I was a very reluctant trailing spouse moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan. And what had ended up happening was ACS and DVI were bought by Eli Lilly, but Eli Lilly bought.”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Patients from that standpoint. So, anyway, I wrote the business plan for John, and then I joined DVI as head of marketing and clinical research for that particular device, led the PMA trial, got PMA, the big clinical trial approval, and then launched that product worldwide. My group terrained all the physicians worldwide on how to do it. And Eli Lilly also bought that company. And so I was six years at that company too. So 12 years total.”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The physician that had founded ACS, John Simpson, came up with another idea. So he asked me to write the business plan for his second company. And so I did that. And that was called DVI Devices for Vascular Intervention, all these very sort of generic names that we then abbreviate into an acronym. So DVI, instead of ballooning, opened the coronary arteries, it was shaving out the plaque, sort of like a little rotor router kind of device. And then you could remove that plaque that would accumulate in the coronaries. And you could send it off to pathology and see what was in it. It had results that allowed for longer-term success. The problem with angioplasty is that it would come back pretty quickly. It's called restenosis. It reblocks with atherctomy, which was what this technology was called. It would shave it out and it wouldn't rebound so quickly. So it was better for.”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, to be able to see a product from concept to FDA approval and actual launch is a terrific experience. And if you really want to learn how a business is made, I think that's what you've got to do. You've got to see the whole process, including the manufacturing, just all of it. And so I was lucky enough to get into a company that was a rocket ship and ended up being able to see a lot of those different aspects.”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“hard question for me to answer because when your employee 19 you are involved in everything one of my favorite things about startups and i often tell young people this is if you really want to learn how a company works go to a startup because you get access to all the different departments so i started in marketing but i ended up doing clinical research and i ended up doing sales you know i was there for six years and so i launched probably 20 different medical products while i was there for those six years and that was because i was involved in so many different aspects of the business and so i learned how to get from a product from concept to market sell it both domestically and internationally how to get reimbursement how to get fda approval i learned all of those things because i was in such a small it grew a lot obviously when it got boughtly put a lot of resources into it”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think, but I really wanted to go back to the Bay Area, and that's where this startup was. So I reached out to the founder of that and I joined. It was called Advanced Cardiovascular Systems. I was employee number 19 at this little angioplasty company out in California. It was terrific, led by a wonderful guy named John Simpson, who was the physician who founded it. So I worked there for six years. And Eli Lilly did buy it about a year after I was there.”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back, this is now early 80s, they wanted to acquire some medical device companies. They thought that they could potentially be a broader healthcare company. They were very progressive in that idea. So I worked in this little tiny group of five people that was looking for acquisitions in the medical device space. And it was like the summer intern that basically made my career because I ended up identifying this little company out in California that made angioplasty equipment and angioplasty is equipment. There are these little balloons that you can put into the coronary arteries to stop a heart attack. This was one of the very first companies to develop this product. And so I identified the company I started doing diligence on it, but then I had to leave to go back for my second year. So when I graduated, I had an offer from Eli Lilly to go back to that acquisition group, which would have been terrific.”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so Wharton has great companies that come to recruit, and Eli Lilly came to look for summer interns. So I actually did a summer internship at Eli Lilly. And it was at this point, Lily was a very successful pharmaceutical company.”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I went to Wharton. Wharton is a finance school primarily, so you have to do finance, and that's what I did a lot of. But I really majored in strategy and marketing. Those were sort of the sweet spots for me that I really enjoyed trying to figure out how to help a company be successful in the marketing side. It was really more strategic marketing, I would say, really understanding the customer, figuring out how you talk to them, figuring out what products they really want, all of those kinds of things. And I really enjoyed learning all of that.”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was Can only do that in your 20s. And I just became a great aunt. I don't think I will ever change a diaper again without thinking about you as I put the tape on the disposable diaper. That part I did not know about you. So you did that for two years and then decided grad school had to be easier than working three different ships, three different weeks. So where did you go and what did you major in in business school?”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“50s that were both men. I was 21, I was female, and they reported to me and we had to install these huge taper machines on these very fast assembly lines. And we”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I really wanted to work in medical devices, but we're talking late 70s at this point, and there were not a lot of medical device companies like Medtronic was just starting. And I had two job offers when I graduated from Berkeley, neither of them in medical devices. One of them was going to work for a big oil company down in Houston. And all these big cowboys with the hats and the cowboy boots were coming in, you know, and trying to recruit me. And I grew up in San Francisco. I just didn't feel like I was a cultural fit there. And then the other opportunity was to work for Procter& Gamble manufacturing pampers. And so my first job was as a process engineer. This is when pampers did not yet have tape on them. So my first job was installing these humongous, they're called taper machines on these very fast paper manufacturing lines. And I had two technicians that were in their”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and thank you, Ros. Again, I really appreciate being here with you today. I majored in biomedical engineering, and this was a very long time ago, almost during the dinosaur. Was actually a brand new major at UC Berkeley, which is where I went, and I really loved pre-med and I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do. I was thinking about being a physician. And I was actually accepted in the College of Engineering. And so I picked bioengineering since it was the closest thing to pre-med. And it's sort of half pre-med and half engineering. It was 50% women because there were two of us in the major. And now it really is. It's more like 55% women, which is terrific when incoming college students now, a lot of them go into bioengineering and many of them are women, which is fantastic.”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And ask for allocations that we genuinely want in hopes that we'll get them. So it's as much an art as it is a science, but we don't have very many managers. Our portfolio is pretty concentrated. We tend to have fewer managers. We tend to have bigger positions with them, and to try to do more things with them. So we're an important client to arboretum and they're an important client to us. We don't have very many healthcare venture capital firms based in the Midwest. There are only ones, and we're sticking with them.”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd like to say that there's a precise science to it, but there isn't, and the way that we size our positions is we start out with how much is the GP raising. We want to be at least five percent of the fund. Sometimes that's not possible with a firm like Sequoia, but we want to be at least five percent of the fund. We want it to have significance to us. Otherwise, it's just a benefit to the manager, not to us. So there has to be something that fits from that standpoint. Second, healthcare longevity and everything associated with it is one of our themes. So we're looking to emphasize investments in that area. We're pretty picky about the managers we select.”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the firm in the sense that we've introduced them to our grantees in order to create that virtuous circle. And they've been more than willing to do that with us, talk to our grantees, provide investment advice to them as they're beginning to commercialize, and then follow them all the way through. That has been something that's been helpful all the way around.”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all she made some great additions to her team along the way, and Tom Shahib is one of them and he's brought a tremendous technical capability to the firm and we saw that some of the deals that they were doing had changed as a result of his addition to the team. Second, they actually accessed deals in areas that were significant for Helmsley. For example, one of the big challenges in rural healthcare is actually access to healthcare. So technological solutions to provide access with something in which arboretum invested and that was one of the things that kept us very interested. They've also done some work in type 1 diabetes which is one of our disease areas so that was important to us.”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You first back Jan, it was really early on. She's now had a number of funds at Arboretum and some great success along the way. And I'm curious what you saw as success factors that led you not just to back her initially, but then to continue to re-up in subsequent funds.”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A woman in these fields, and the same for me, I think that's what led to our success. And then the rest of it as we worked hard, we were diligent about everything that we did, all that other happy stuff that leads to success.”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably the most important part. Neither of us thought about our genders as a particularly differentiating factor. I wanted to go into finance, she wanted to go into biomedical engineering. We didn't think of ourselves as women going into these fields. We thought of ourselves as people going into these fields. And the significance of that is that it did not allow us to victimize ourselves. So many times when things happened in our careers it would have been easy to say, oh, that's happening to me because I'm a woman. No, it's happening to you because it probably would have happened to anybody in your position. But if you look at everything through the lens of some immutable characteristic, then you'll victimize yourself faster than anybody else will. By thinking of herself as an engineer and then a venture capitalist first, and secondarily as a”
2021-09-02 · Capital Allocators · Jan Garfinkle – Arboretum Ventures (Manager Meetings, EP.09) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source