Hacker News Reader

Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiousity - why YC?

My general understanding in health startup world ("real" health startup - not just a new mobile app that measures vitals) is that if you have a truly compelling product that is clinically proven (sounds like this is?) then the venture/acquisition/funding landscape is pretty straight forward and has high returns - something that doesn't generally characterize the path of the AirBnB's, Heroku's, Homejoy's, etc. of the world.

View on HN

I'm glad you asked! I would encourage you to look at this article where YC recently announced how it will be backing bitechs: http://www.nature.com/news/start-up-investor-bets-on-biotech.... We are excited to see this shift in attitude towards biotech investing and wanted to jump on board early. What makes us a a fit for this is our business strategy that is a closer fit to the "style" of companies that come through YC. For a typical biotech with clinical targets in mind, to bring those to market after FDA approval and clinical trials is a long process with returns being 7-12 years down the line. In our case, there is an identified research tools market that we can tap into first that would make us profitable by next year. By establishing an early source of revenue, we mitigate risk for our investors. Through YC we have a platform and the opportunity to reach wider umbrella of investors to share our story and strategy with.

Any particular reason why you didnt fundraise first?

I think anyone could answer this question -- fundraising is extremely time consuming, which means less time for actual product development. YC is the fundraising strategy since the demo day blasts lots of investors with the same chunk of information which is more efficient than individually pitching to each investor through typical fundraising processes. Investors are typically picky on who can pitch them, so unless you have an intro, it's hard to do a cold-call pitch. YC is a fast way to get an intro to everyone in the valley.

Howdy! I definitely understand your comment and the reason why I ask is bc typically biotech firms don't fit the early stage model, so I was just trying to get more info on why he chose the early stage model (past his stated reasons of not having a long time to market)

My thoughts exactly. Also, depending on the location, there are typically a large amount of public funds earmarked as grants for commercialization in this field. It's not the typical tech-company fundraising situation either. The marketing needs are also vastly different from the companies you mentioned.

We are planning to pursue the SBIR grant route, but there is a lag time in the grant application process and we are eager to supplement our current developmental traction in the meantime with funds from other sources as well.

SBIR grants can also be quite defocusing.

In a long-ago materials startup, we had 30+ Phase I, 6 Phase II and 3 Phase III SBIRs. The money was helpful (VC funding on topic was thin at the time).

Very few of our SBIRs were exactly on point with our product development goals. This created resource allocation tensions around pushing product development vs. performing on the SBIR contracts. Something to consider when thinking about SBIR funding.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com