Things I Wish I Knew – Building a Platform Company
In ADDC’s “Things I Wish I Knew” webinar series, we’ve been learning from prominent scientists, entrepreneurs, and investors about their successes, struggles, and the things they wished they knew before starting their journey. Today’s topic is on building a platform company.
Life science startups come in two flavors – asset driven and platform companies. Asset-based companies develop specific drug candidates, while platform companies advance technologies with broad applicability.
Building a platform company in the life sciences isn’t easy. The breadth of potential applications makes it challenging to find the right product-market fit. With a luxury of options but shortage of time and resources, many platform start-ups fail to bridge the funding gap.
As a former founder, I know how hard platform companies are to build. If I were to do it again, I would surely talk to Dino DiCarlo, a UCLA professor of Bioengineering with five successful start-ups under his belt.
Recently Dino sat down with his former student, Ivan Pushkarksy, now CEO of Forcyte Biotechnologies, for a conversation on “Things I Wish I Knew” as part of a monthly webinar series on bioentrepreneurship organized by the Academic Drug Discovery Consortium.
Dino and Ivan shared a few suggestions – food for thought.
Platforms need a tractable path to “bridge the gap”.
For DiCarlo this has meant co-founding start-up companies with an initial team, often led by former lab members or collaborators, who can attract grant funding to move the technologies forward. SBIR grants and seed funding support the companies through the early phases of platform development. Fee-for-service projects help expand platform applications and provide commercial validation for later stage investors.
Always be thinking about the “product”.
Often academics lean on their academic colleagues for advice on technology applications. Dino advised reaching out to industry contacts, clinicians and even the FDA for input. You have to talk to a lot of people to understand the right market fit. The right people are those who are closest to the market need. For Ivan, thinking about the commercial landscape earlier was one of the things he wished he had known.
Understand different investor types.
Not all life science investors have an appetite for platforms. In fact, most life science investors are focused on product assets and getting them into clinical development. Teams for these companies are experienced drug developers. Technology-focused investors are looking to build out the technology infrastructure and gaining commercial traction with partnerships to validate the platform. These investors are more comfortable with founder/scientist CEOs.
For more information about the ADDC’s Entrepreneurship webinar series, check it out on EventBrite here.
Photo by Cheng Qi Huang on Unsplash.
