A 21-Year-Old Healthcare Startup Accelerator Founder From Stanford Shares Her Four Big Lessons Learned
This is a guest post by Deanna Logorelc, a staff writer at MedCity News, where this article first appeared. Reprinted with permission.
Last summer, when regenerative medicine company Stem Cell Theranostics went through the StartX accelerator program at Stanford University along with one other biotech company, the team members realized that many aspects of their experience were much different than those of the other companies. For example, they weren’t moving as quickly as the other companies, and they faced regulatory hurdles that the others didn’t have to deal with.
Several months later, one of Stem Cell Theranostic’s student founders, Divya Nag, became the founder and CEO of the healthcare-focused accelerator track StartX Med, which launched its first class this summer comprising 11 health IT, medical device and biotech companies. The six-month track provides select students and faculty with education, community and mentorship for their startups.
It’s been a great experience for the 21-year-old entrepreneur, who’s on leave from school for now. “We’ve been learning from (other companies’) mistakes and seeing how their decisions play out,” she said. “It almost feels like I’m CEO of 11 different companies – people are so open.”
So she’s paying the openness forward and sharing a few early lessons she’s learned so far about the business of healthcare.
Universities, tech transfer offices, and intellectual property
“Stanford owns all of our technology, so we’ve been going for the past nine months or so to license our technology back,” she said. Convincing the technology transfer office that the technology is better off in the hands of its developers than in the hands of a big-name company is harder than she expected.
That’s why researchers shouldn’t be over-confident or exaggerate the potential of their discovery, she suggested. “If you go into the licensing office and say you have this incredible technology and want to patent it and start this company, the office gets really excited about it and makes more of an effort to market it to other big companies, so there’s a higher chance that you might not actually get your technology or get a non-exclusive license.”
But still, researchers should approach the technology transfer office as soon as possible, because as part of the process the staff there must do a lot of research into patents and markets that can help the founders, too. “They’ll let you know who else has patents in the space and who your competitors are, even before you have an idea of what you’re looking to do because the process they go through is a two-month market search where they shop your IP around to big companies,” she said.
Conflict of interest between research faculty and their companies
If faculty members are co-founders, the university wants to make sure that they don’t have financial stake in the research they’re publishing. “That conflict of interest process is extremely long, so it’s good to know if you’re going to have go through that so you can budget your time,” Nag said.
Non-dilutive funding from government sources
Nag has seen many startups in medicine receive non-dilutive funding from the government, including her own company, which received a $20 million grant earlier this year to further its technology and run a clinical trial. “I see a lot of my peers taking investor meetings and hear all of these horror stories,” she said. “I would tell others that it is totally possible to get a company off the ground without raising any VC money, even now when investors aren’t funding biotech companies.”
Acquisition by a larger strategic partner
Utilizing strategic partners is the best way to finding an eventual acquirer, Nag said.
“The approach companies are taking now is, if I put $500,000 into each of these startups, I can form relationships early and have a first look.” They don’t take any equity, but that kind of relationship gets a big company invested in the success of the technology at a very early stage, which could also put the founders at ease. “Our biggest fear has always been we don’t want to give it to a big company because we’re afraid they won’t care about it as much as we do and it will just sit on a shelf somewhere,” Nag said.