Each year OTT helps launch high-quality start-up companies based on discoveries made by Emory faculty or staff. Over the past few months, OTT set out to interview a selection of the entrepreneurs and VCs we have worked with and pick their brains about what it takes to make a successful startup venture.
What got you thinking about becoming an entrepreneur and starting/joining a start-up?
Terence Walts (President & CEO of two Emory startups, Transfusion & Transplantation Technologies (“3Ti”) and Cambium Medical Technologies): I headed the department of New Business Development at CIBA Vision until 1998. During that time, I did due diligence on a very early stage start-up concerning refractive surgery in which CIBA ultimately invested $6 million. I got so excited about this start-up, its potential, and the opportunity to help create and build something new that for my last three years at CIBA, I got an agreement to vacate my business development responsibilities and work full-time with the management team of this start-up with plans to join them full-time after 1998. I took this risk because I believed in the technology, the founders, and the opportunity–and believed that my personal business development and market focus skills had uncovered a “winner.” We ultimately took this start-up public and then it was acquired. It was a great experience, a thrilling ride, and financially rewarding…so I concluded somewhat naively “this stuff is easy (boy, did I later learn the opposite), why don’t I double down and do another one!”
Daniel White (President & CEO of the joint Emory/Georgia Tech start-up Clearside Biomedical): Becoming an entrepreneur is a frame of mind as much as it is a desire. As I recall my beginning, I was starting my career in biotechnology and ended up working with a small California biotechnology company in collaboration with a multi-national consumer goods conglomerate. The mind-set of this biotech company was build and, one day, sell the company, and they had this mind-set from the beginning. It was not about employment or security. It was as though the goal in life was build and sell as many companies as possible during your career as a measure of accomplishment – and I guess the attitude rubbed off. I often wanted to move to California as a part of that mind-set, but I grew up in the southeast and the only place I call home.
Ed Cannon (President & CEO of the Emory start-up NovAb): I first began thinking about starting a biotechnology company in 1978. At that time my laboratory at Brandeis University was focused on the genetics of antibody production and diversity. We were among the first labs to adopt hybridoma technology. Our capability with hybridoma technology led to many collaborations and an invitation to present the technology to a large multinational diagnostics company. At the conclusion of my presentation the only individual in the audience dressed in a suit commented that he did not see any advantages of monoclonal antibodies versus the polyclonal antibody preparations currently used in their products. I apologized for not presenting the technology clearly, but realized on my flight back to Boston that large diagnostic and pharmaceutical companies would be very slow to adopt monoclonal antibody technology and other biological transforming technologies, e.g., recombinant DNA. The next day I contacted a colleague at MIT and we began the process of forming what became Hygeia Sciences, developer of the first monoclonal antibody-based home diagnostic products, the First Response Home Pregnancy and Home Ovulation Prediction products. Hygeia became the leading producer of antibody-based home diagnostic products worldwide, executed a successful IPO, and was acquired at substantial shareholder return within a year of its IPO.
Michael Lee (Chairman & CEO of the Emory start-up Syntermed): I always admired my father for starting and maintaining his own architectural firm and consequently I always felt I wanted to own my own business. In graduate school at Georgia Tech I was exposed to a software development lab whose director was very entrepreneurial. We were one of the first university-based commercialization activities at Georgia Tech and in fact the country. After this experience, I joined the Office of Technology Licensing at Georgia Tech where I was charged with identifying similar technology commercialization opportunities and interacted with local venture capital groups and entrepreneurs. It was the convergence of all these experiences that led me to be part of three startup companies, two of which were venture backed.