Index Ventures

More and more biotech entrepreneurs and investors, alike, are realizing the considerable risks associated with simultaneous development of multiple assets and instead opting for a more streamlined approach that has come to be known as “asset-centricity.”

IT’S been described as “the $4.2 trillion (£2.7 trillion) opportunity”. According to the Boston Consulting Group, there will be 3bn internet users globally by 2016. If it were a nation, the internet-based economy would rank in the world’s top five. And the UK sits at the forefront, with 8.3 per cent of GDP now online – the highest proportion in the G20.

Yesterday, over 130 people, largely drawn from Cambridge, London and Oxford, attended the first ever ‘Playground’ event, aimed squarely at young academics thinking about biotech start-ups. We figured the best way to shine a spotlight on this world was to have five experienced entrepreneurs talk about how they got into the business and how they’ve dealt with the ups and downs along the way. This turned out to be a good call!

He turned 46 years old last week and at the end of 2011 he chose to leave a coveted academic position as Principal Investigator in the Department of Medicine at Cambridge University (UK). Really? Has he done that? Is this guy crazy? Even his beloved mum told him before prematurely passing away last year: "How can you be possibly do that, dear? What is more exciting than being faculty at Cambridge University?" True. It was tough, but he wanted to go. David Grainger had to go because he needed to follow his logic.

Together we can get the Tech IPO market going in London

From our vantage point at Index, the centrality of the Tech sector to economic growth -- particularly during the economic slowdown of the last few years -- is all too clear.

A recent piece in the FT reiterated this point. Ed Hammond, the paper's property correspondent reviewed the shifting make-up of the City and the steady transformation of the tenant mix in the Square Mile.

In his blogpost David Grainger, calls it “chocolate flavored-poison”: creating biotech companies with multiple drugs to diversify risk makes us feel more comfortable about the endeavor ahead, but in the end it does more much more harm than good. Here’s why.

Any biotech entrepreneur who’s ever spent time with their IT counterparts notices one thing in particular; how young these guys are. It’s a feature of the IT world that business tend to succeed or fail quickly, which means that a technology entrepreneur has several attempts at building a successful company over the course of their careers. This contrasts with the life science business, especially in Europe, where individuals typically join companies for the long haul. It’s by no means unusual to spend >10 years in one company, I did it myself, but the odds are against any one of these companies being successful. If you consider your professional career lasting 20-30 years, this doesn’t give you many attempts at ‘the one’.