The lifeblood of a young biotech company is cash.

Without capital, the greatest of ideas get nowhere.  The biotech entrepreneur must successfully identify and access consistent sources of capital over the life of their organization in order to transform their ideas in to products.  During early development stages the entrepreneur should make use of Angel capital and Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) and other federal (NIH) and state grants.  But at some point this budding company will need to secure venture capital or what is known as Institutional Funds.  How does one go about doing this?

Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield &  Byers (KPCB) is one of the stalwart biotech venture capital groups and one of the early backers of Genentech in 1977.  Since then, the firm and its Partners have backed entrepreneurs in over 100 life science companies working in every area of medicine, including cardiology, cancer, neurology, immune system diseases, ophthalmology, and molecular diagnostics.

Stanford University’s Entrepreneurship Corner interviewed Brook Byers, an early partner in the firm discusses the best way an entrepreneur should find and reach venture capitalists.

In this second video clip he shares his thoughts on selecting and working with venture capital firms. (more…)

A recent report from Ernst and Young acclaimed that the biotechnology industry finally reached profitability for the first time in history with a net income of $3.9 billion in 2009 (Beyond Borders: Global Biotechnology Report 2010). This is a significant milestone and welcome news!  However, to put this in perspective, Wal-Mart, General Electric and AT&T individually had net incomes of about 3-4 times the total biotech industry ($13.4 billion, $17.4 billion and $12.9 billion respectively).

The biotech industry is only about 35 years young.  However, in spite of reaching profitability, some still say the biotechnology business model is broken.  (more…)