YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Parker

lines on the record: 32
first: 2018-06-11
most recent: 2018-06-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So, this is an interesting one. It's even a bit orthogonal for us, but the company is called GraphWare. It's two very cool entrepreneurs out of University of Pennsylvania. They actually moved into our lab in San Francisco in order to get a little more attention from the investment community. And they're developing a wearable made from graphene, which is a very high-tech material, which is also a very esoteric sensor. And they can sense many things in your sweat, which recapitulate what's in blood. The most important one they're working on is blood glucose. So for all the type 2 diabetics in the world who are pricking their finger to get a drop of blood to figure out what their glucose level is, these folks hope they will change all that to make it look like a Fitbit. And I was just so taken with this team that we had to do it.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually do come back to my earlier discussion of process at board meetings. I think getting everyone aligned on the objectives which the investors, the company, the employees will all have getting that done as early as possible. I just didn't really understand that for the first six or seven years. And, you know, this is a hard business. I mean, I think it takes 10 years to even begin to do it well. And that was a lesson I wish I had been even just told earlier on.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. I'd like to see us all be a little more vocal. I think the industry, obviously it's made up of individuals, and so this may be a little too optimistic, but we all have a point of view on gun control. We all have a point of view on tariffs. We all have a point of view on human decency generally. And I feel like as an industry, we don't speak up enough.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know about frequently, but one that's kicking around in my head recently is back in September, Fred Wilson in his blog, he quoted Brad Feld, who said that you make money in winners, but you make friends and losers. And it's absolutely so true, and it's been very true of my career. And it gives you a perspective on every experience you have in venture investing. I mean, not all companies go well and you're working with a team, you're working with boards. What do you take away from that? And actually all the people I'm working with now, we coalesce around a couple of things that probably didn't go well, but it really caused us to bond to each other.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this one won't sound too good, but I did go to meet a pretty famous guy who will remain nameless in the most recent fundraising effort we had underway. And I arrived at the meeting, it's a lunch meeting in a pretty nice restaurant right near where he normally works. He was about four glasses of chardonnay into the meeting, and I sat down with my fundraising agent, and he said, yeah, welcome. And where's Peter Parker? And so we kind of looked at each other and my agents said, he's sitting right here. Oh, okay, okay. And he had my deck out and he was fumbling with it, had a couple of more chardonnays, and about two-thirds of the way into it. Is Peter Parker going to come? I just thought, okay, this meeting probably hasn't gone too well.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, here's one you probably haven't heard of, but it's called Barbarian Days. It's subtitled A Surfing Life. It's by the New Yorker staff writer named William Finnegan. You know, he was kicking around Hawaii in the 70s and took up surfing as a kid, and it just captured his imagination in such a way as that he did it for his whole life. He became a war correspondent and then a very, very accomplished writer for the New Yorker, and he never really gave up his first love, which is surfing. So it's an autobiography, but it's really a coming of age story and a road trip. He actually travels around the entire world surfing in every possible location that you can imagine. And I just couldn't put the book down when I read it.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that is a difference between us and tech investors. I'd like to see a portfolio with two thirds of my companies being gains for us. And so not relying on the 50 to 1 winner to drive the whole portfolio. I think that's just too hard to do.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that is absolutely true. And it is a big problem with life sciences companies that can't get to a demonstrable place on reasonable millions of dollars of venture investment. So we like to say the companies have to be able to exit by the time $50 million of venture money has gone in. So you sort of work backwards and you say, okay, so where do you have to get to on your A round? Where do you have to get to on your B round and so forth? If you're in a company that's taken down a lot of money, they're in the clinic, there's no real good signal from the clinical trial that this is working. I'm afraid your prospects are difficult. I think you can sell those assets generally always if you have a clinical stage asset. There's often a buyer for that, but you'll lose money in that transaction. So we try to go into things that have very, very early signals, and we're not unwilling to sell a company for very nice return, but way before its potential is.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's why I'm here. It's because the field has changed so dramatically that I just can't stay away. I just love being able to play in this new environment in life sciences.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the teams went out and created two new companies, which ended up in our lab, one called Potenza and one called Surface Oncology. And now those two companies have very large pharma investors and are likely to be sold quite early out of A or B rounds. So that's, I think, what's happening. This is all very new, Harry. I mean, I couldn't have told you this story in 2006. This is all within the last 10 years.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's not aqua hires, but it is early acquisition of technology. So Big Pharma has a pipeline and they need to get more drugs into their pipeline so they can have commercial products when their current ones go off patent. They used to have a reliance on their own research people to fill that pipeline. If you look at the last 10 years, the research headcount in pharma has gone down by five or six percentage points per annum. So they're half as big internal research, but now what they've done is created external R&D groups. So they're out shopping. And we have really created our fund around that concept. In the last three or four years, there have been really eye-popping exits of pharma companies out of Series A rounds. I mean, there's a company called Coast Him Pharmaceuticals, which was sold to Novartis in 2014. They immediately let the whole team go and just kept the asset. It was a big return for the venture backer.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, all about creating companies that can exit to these people. The good news is there are 25 of them or more that are readily”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the overarching one is almost trivial. I think in tech you're basically trying to take a technology to market and see if you have a market for it. In biotech, there's a market. There are people with disease. And so if you have a technology that can make an impact on any disease, you will have pretty ready path to either an exit or a much larger company. So that's a very different proposition. It means we're in the business of enabling entrepreneurs to create breakthrough science. And I think in tech, VCs are in the business of enabling entrepreneurs to get really interesting market uptake. If you think about it in those terms, there are very different elements that come into the picture. I mean, we have a lot of strategic investors in our companies. Why? Because they're the folks who will eventually market these drugs to the world. There are very few. There won't be any new major pharmaceutical companies created out of biotech VC money.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And unfair measure. I mean, everybody kind of looked at it and said, yeah, I didn't hit my goals for a couple years. That's pretty obvious. Yeah, I mean, you have to do it in person. It's all empathy, right? I mean, we all don't want to be in that situation. I think the more clear-cut data you're bringing to the table, the easier it can be. That's why these very objective measures that you set out for the company, those are the CEO's goals, right? There's no difference between the CEO's goals and the company goals. And if they really are just lagging behind dramatically, then it's just not something you can sustain. I don't ever have a CEO say to me, wow, that's really unfair. I should get another year, sort of no room for that kind of argument. I have not had the situation where CEOs are just killing it, really hitting their goals, and we just think they're the wrong person. That could be. But then it's my fault. We didn't set the goals high enough.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They always get very focused on the goals when I introduce this for the first time. And goals they've talked about and put forward previously are all of a sudden. Wait, we really have to do that? Oh, okay. Let's really write that in a different way. And there's a bit of negotiation over the goals at the beginning of the year, which is good. It's very healthy. So the board and the team get together and talk about the 20 possible goals and then narrow that down to five. Yeah, if companies aren't hitting their top two or three objectives and if they're reasonable objectives, yeah, something's wrong. And this is when you really then look at your whole card and decide what happens on subsequent funding rounds, what happens to that team. I haven't been shy. I mean, I've changed probably 15 CEOs in my life. It's never fun. Sometimes it has to happen. Often you probably don't do it soon enough. I mean, I think signs are there. And I've never had anyone feel like it was a draconian.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quantifiable. So you're going to do X by that date, and these people are in charge. Just tell us five things. Don't tell us about the market. Don't tell us about the competition. We kind of know a lot of that already. But that actually changed a lot of the board dynamic because the board meeting is now very simple. Objective number one, what have we done in the last couple of months? Objective number two, and so on down that list. And we limit them to 10. So beyond 10 objectives, we don't feel they can really be focusing on things that we think will change the outcome of the company. That also affects bonuses or just judging people. So if it's quantifiable, you know at the end of the year. Did they actually file an IND? Did they actually come up with three development candidates for that particular cancer target? We can measure. That was another light bulb going off for me. I'm a sort of a bit manic about that, and my partners will probably tell you privately that I talk about it too much.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would say the biggest thing I can point to is a realization that my partners and I came to in the mid 90s. And that is how to ask companies what their goals are and then how to sort of follow up on that. I'll really give you an example. So when I started into the business, a company would produce a plan at the end of every year for the following year. Generally, they would come to the board meeting and say, all right, here's our goals in marketing, here are our goals in technology, here are goals in fundraising, here are our goals in partnering, and they'd have some sort of set which would look like a McKinsey two by two set of boxes and a lot of strategic plans look this way. We actually decided we couldn't judge a company based on that at the end of the year. And we finally moved to a metric where we say, just tell us the five things you're going to do for this year. Put them in prioritized order. Make them”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like meeting these people. I think we have a great product to sell. And it's made me calm. Can I ask what makes a great pitch meeting, so to speak? Is it kind of incredible communication in terms of conversation? Is it your partner's and you being very in line with each other and cohesive? What do you makes you leave going, yeah, that was a great pitch beating? It's always more than one of us. I've noticed, so there are meetings you have to sometimes take alone. They're never the best meetings. Generally, if you could...”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years. Great question. Wow. So I don't know how to describe this. I have probably a normal level of self-confidence, meaning when I was first out fundraising, I was scared to death. Yeah, I feel you there. And so basically would go into these meetings with the AT&T pension fund or the, I mean, just huge players in the LP world. And I didn't do a good job. I was not crisp. I was probably too nervous. Now go in with fewer slides each time. I mean, we generally will go into a fundraising meeting with nine or ten slides. And I feel like if you can't tell the story in four slides, you know, you just haven't really got your pitch down well. And so that has made it really easy because five partners can learn to talk about four slides on a pretty consistent basis so that all of us are saying the same thing. I'm much calmer. In fact, I love going into fundraising meetings today. I couldn't have said that back in 1989. But I just”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly why I love chatting to you so much, but you said there about your new experience. You recently raised a 130 million seed fund at the ripe age of 65. Experience for you in the latest fundraise. You know, it was good. We love the platform that we're working off of, so we show that to people. They get it right away. You know, I think my age was probably a bit of a concern to some of the people we pitch, but actually a very small minority of people mentioned it. You know, they had the good taste not to mention it to my partners or my fundraising agent. But I would hear certain comments. The thing is, I've been able to keep my enthusiasm for this business. I think that comes across. And when they see that I've had a great track record over 30 investments, they understand that it's not just five people trying out a new fund idea. And so I think this fundraising went pretty smoothly, largely because they believed that I could build a team and then impart some of that background to this new team. I always think kind of pitching LPs really is an art. How have you seen your style of pitching your delivery, your communication flows with LPs change over time and over the”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or no, and I'd much rather have a quick no than being stretched out for a long time. So we show them the warts right away. We say, hey, we're new. We're trying something that's never been done before. But we think it's incredibly exciting. Come see us. That generally is the way to do it. I find they respond really well. And once they've given you a commitment, think about it. They're giving you a 10-year no-cut contract. I mean, it's pretty hard to get cut. And you know it's astonishing, the longevity. And it's a black box. You haven't shown them the investments you're going to make. You just have given them a concept, really. I don't think there's a better job in the world. And I know you share their point of view, but that's what keeps me going. I mean, as you can tell, I'm excited by my new experience, and I've certainly had this experience before.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you're not passionate about them when you're fundraising and they don't call you back. But, you know, I'm a fairly low key person. I mean, I also try to be pretty low profile. So if you think about it, my view of the world is we're middlemen. It's their capital and we're finding great places to put it. That sounds pretty pedestrian. I really don't like the cult of personality that sometimes accrues to very, very big names in the venture business. I'm not sure it's warranted. I think we're investors primarily. I mean, we certainly have all been operators as well, so we have a lot of empathy for the entrepreneur. But I think you need to have empathy for the LP. I mean, the LP has got a job to do. They've got to put money out into places where they can get better returns than they'll get in the stock market or a bond portfolio. And telling them exactly what your strategy is and being really open and clear with them, making the decision pretty easy for them.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're also tolerant. We're a new fund pioneering a new platform. We're very much a startup too. And so we've kicked around lots of ideas for investment concepts. For instance, our cash flow model would suggest that over the life of a deal we'll put roughly $7 to $8 million in the company. But does that mean we shouldn't give an entrepreneur a chance to get started for six months on $250,000? Initially, I thought no, but a couple of cases where people have made that argument and it's been very persuasive and we've done it. So no, I think as long as your partnership really likes working together, you can get through almost any decision like that, even in Outlier's case. No, absolutely. And speaking of partners there, we've spoken. And you've stated your love or liking of LP”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had the good fortune of coming into the business with a fabulous managing partner, a guy named Rick Sharpy at Ampersand Capital. He'd come out of Payne Weber and really just wanted to leave the whole investment banking legacy behind. And he was very much a believer in unanimous decisions. So it's hard. You've got five partners and they have very different points of view often on investments. It's a lot easier down the road because it's not a question of whether these companies are going to get into trouble. It's just a question of when and when they get into trouble, you have to be all pulling in the same direction and not having somebody say, hey, I told you that was a pretty dumb idea. So, you know, we've passed on deals where one partner had just serious reservations and four would have voted for it. And that was true at Ampersand. It's true at Bioinnovation Capital as well.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not so much, it's actually interesting we have exactly the same number of partners, five that we had at the time we formed Fund One. For me, this is now Fund Six, really. And it's a whole new group of partners. So the first time fund is a moniker that we sometimes get labeled with. I remind people that it's really my sixth fund, but that's okay. I think I'm just calmer now. I think the idea of both mentoring these younger partners as well as providing some structure for them and some process is a lot easier for me now and it's something I did learn from the first time around by the way. I think process is almost everything in good venture firms. If you get under the hood of any firm that you really respect, I think you'll find a very, very detailed process, even though it looks chaotic. They have a pretty set system. They have a set of values. They're investing based on common shared vision of what the firm should be. And that was a lot easier to bring to this firm.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Country where companies can get started in a week. They can actually just come in month to month. There's not even a lease. And it's become such a powerful model that I felt it was just a lot easier to form this firm, go out and fundraise for it.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to cut down on the years that maybe I've been doing this, I actually took almost a leave from this business in 2006 to go run a company that I had invested in and then did some angel investing in 2010 through 2013. The reason I came back to it because I saw an opportunity to do something in life sciences that has never been done before, which is to do what, you know, the tech world got this right in 2003 and 2004. Venture firms were searching for new models and all of a sudden the lean startup model became very, very effective. It was a confluence of things that you know more about than I do. Cloud computing was available and storage and all of a sudden you didn't need as much money. In biotech, that wasn't true. You still needed labs. You still needed equipment. You still needed permits and expensive chemicals. And what we've now done is taken away all that. We've actually created a set of lab platforms around the world.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's a great question because fund one, I'm in my 30s, it was so much fun. We just had really good concept for a fund. We had no institutional LP base. It was a first-time team, first-time concept, and frankly, we were pretty naive. Took us a year and a half to raise about $37 million. And you've been out on the fundraising trail. You can understand how painful that is”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In specialty materials and chemicals. And our early investors, meaning LPs, included some corporate investors who wanted to learn more about that field. So in some ways, that was a very groundbreaking fund. And I think it just was part of an early wave of specialization that's now taken over.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. I mean, you know, when I got into the business, so a few of us co founded a firm called Amper Sandures back in the late 80s. There were probably, we thought, maybe 200 venture firms in the world. And in those days, the US was the predominant player in venture capital. Now, this is early stage venture capital. A lot of these were efforts that had spun out of investment banks or other even high net worth individuals just doing it as a sideline. There were maybe 2,000 professionals in the industry, but really only about 500 partners. You could almost know everyone in the industry. So, you know, you fast forward to today. I mean, there's just so much money, so many more firms. And what I think has changed a lot is specialization. So back in the late 80s, there were very few specialized firms at all, none that I knew of that would call themselves, for instance, life sciences firms. We became specialized in the sense that we formed a firm around my background.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me and ever since then, I've been very, very focused on entrepreneurs in any way I could be. So in my research job, I actually created a bunch of internal ventures, about 20 ventures in this very large firm. I became somewhat notorious for this and ended up joining a venture capital firm that was just getting started out of MIT.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're right, it hasn't been long. I was working in a big corporate RD unit in the 70s right out of graduate school. And in those days, there was no cult of the entrepreneur. In fact, we didn't even know what one was. And I ended up running laboratories in several locations around the United States, all heavy-duty chemistry. And I realized that all the research had been done on innovation by teams. Teams would produce the latest computer or teams would produce the latest grade catalyst chemicals, but it was people. And that just struck me so hard when I realized that in the early 80s. And then there was a lot of research that came out about intrapreneuring and people within corporations who suddenly were renegades and making a difference. And 3M is a great example of this where the post-it note was famously invented by someone who just needed a way to communicate with the CEO on a piece of sticky paper. That really energizes.”
2018-06-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source