The House Brazeryen: 21JUN2022 🐉
Brazen Summit was lit af 🔥
Gm Brazeryens. Who’s aping out tonight? [no, really we need a +1 invite to apefest] 🦍
[Welcome to Issue 08 of The House Brazeryen, where we break down the latest Brazen Bio, Brazen Capital, and bio-startup-related news for you fortnightly, in roughly 5 minutes.]
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Brazen Summit Recap
Wow.
Still pinching ourselves from our first major event production. First of all, we want to thank the nearly 20 volunteers who helped to make the Summit run smoothly especially—the Chief Volunteer Officer, scientist-CEO, and our friend—Gail Chan, PhD.
Highlights of the day included four amazing panels with nearly 20 panelists, the Chest of Death (a medical grade fridge full of Liquid Death… sponsored by B Medical Systems and Liquid Death), the keynote everyone is STILL talking about (Bryan Johnson, with moderator Keerthi Vedantam), the raffle for $1,000 in Amazon gift cards (thanks, BioLabs LA!), the Vermillion Wine Party which rocked (and began with tray-passed Doritos), and the killer gourmet pizza from Gjelina. Stay tuned on social media for recaps and photo dumps.
BRAZEN BREAKDOWN
If the metric for success was providing value for founders and aspiring founders, the first annual Brazen Summit was a SMASH success.
Just wait until 2023. af.
Brazen Capital Announces First Close and First General Partner
Last week, Brazen Capital—our partner venture capital fund—held the first close (of several) from its first cohort of limited partners (LPs). This means we are ready to deploy some capital to support rising scientist-CEOs (especially women and underrepresented folk)!
We also were thrilled to announce for the first time at Brazen Summit that our friend, Monica Berrondo, PhD, is joining Brazen Capital as its first General Partner (GP). Monica is a scientist-CEO who trained at Johns Hopkins and bootstrapped her startup, Macromoltek, for several years as a consultant before being accepted by Y Combinator in 2018. Monica resides in beautiful Austin, TX which gives us a great excuse to drop by (especially for SXSW!).
BRAZEN BREAKDOWN
If you want to help support the rise of scientist-CEOs, we are still raising from accredited investors for Fund I (inquire here). We are especially interested in investments from biotech entrepreneurs, early career venture capitalists, and anyone who may be able to provide added value to our founders.
ALSO: WE ARE LOOKING FOR VENTURE SCOUTS (inquire here) . In the micro, scouts will help find and diligence deals and—in the macro—they will keep their finger on the pulse of the market, early-stage biotech startups, technologies, and founders. These roles are fully remote, part-time, and no experience is necessary. This is our first rodeo as well so it’s a great opportunity for us to all learn together as a team.
VC Corner: Giving me the spin(out)s
Contributed by Scott Alpizar, PhD — It’s recently been said (tweeted by Ashton C Trotman-Grant) that the process of “spinning out” science from universities is broken. I agree.
It’s not that universities aren’t interested in innovation commercialization—they will all surely say that they are. But when push comes to shove, spinning out a company and spinning out a company that has the best chance at success are two different things.
A decent portion of my job involves directly interfacing with university tech transfer offices (TTOs) to spin out companies. There are definitely problems with the process, but it doesn’t have to be as bad as it may seem.
Let’s look at the points raised—and I’ll share what I’ve seen in my experiences.
BRAZEN BREAKDOWN
Universities take months to sign agreements. They do! The bureaucracy at universities can not only hold back company progress but can stall it completely if the license is required to get funding. Losing time in this competitive startup environment can lead to losing your upper hand as well.
Universities make startups unfundable by taking too much equity. Unfundable may be a stretch. You can still usually attract VCs since they’ll get their desired equity regardless. But this will likely impact the founder most - they’ll have less for themselves or for future hires down the line. And don’t even get me started on universities having non-dilution…
The final licensing agreement may include counter-productive clauses that prevent the company from succeeding. A LOT goes into licensing agreements, but the financial terms can most easily hurt a young startup. There can be issue fees, annual fees, milestones fees, and more. Paying too much early on can drain cash needed to advance the technology. I understand TTOs need to generate license revenue, but successful companies can generate more long-term.
University tech transfer offices (TTOs) refuse to negotiate directly with grad students & postdocs because ‘it’s a conflict of interest’. This is true and can be extremely frustrating. Universities want their founders to start companies, so why shut them out of the process? Academic founders wear two hats, the university employee hat and the startup founder hat, both of which should have a voice in this process. This should be a collaborative process so that what’s best for the company (not just the university) can be decided.
First, we make the process TRANSPARENT and give scientists the tools and information they need.
How do we fix this? Well, as is mentioned later in the thread, playbooks would be a good start. There isn’t a database or handbook of key spinout deal terms that founders should strive for. Academic founders that have never spun a company out before are going in totally blind, giving the advantage to the universities.
The good news is that tech transfer is changing, albeit slowly. As an example, there has also been an adoption of express licenses to help streamline the process (Google “university express license” to see tons of examples).
All of this makes founder education so important. They can be more empowered to get better deals with knowledge about the process, the specific terms, and how each of those terms can impact their startup in the future. As a starting point, I often point our founders to Yale’s Startup Guide and Columbia’s Term Sheet Recommendations. Get reading!
[PS: Amazing breakdown, Scott! Also, no spinout conversation is complete without Jared Friedman’s synopsis from Y Combinator—ed.]
😋 Brazen Snax (NFT Edition)
Since we are at NFT.NYC we thought we’d provide you with a few snax to get you started on your NFT journey. You didn’t ask, you say? WDGAF. You’ll thank us later.
📸 NFTs 101 (a FAQ from The Verge)
💵 Setting up your first NFT wallet (Gary Vee)
🦍 Buy your first NFT on OpenSea, the “Etsy of NFTs” (primer by one37pm)
This is not investment advice, duh
🔪 Carveout
SO GOOD WE ARE FEATURING IT TWICE: ATTENTION FOUNDERS!!! “From Start-Up to Grown-Up: Grow Your Leadership to Grow Your Business” by Alisa Cohn is required reading. QED.
🙏🏽 A Dose of Gratitude
We are grateful for all of our fantastic Brazen Summit partners and sponsors for making our conference dreams come true, especially: Qualio, LatchBio, Benchling, ALine Inc, Breakout Ventures, Pliancy, and BC-LA!
[PS: taking nominations! If there is someone you would like us to shout out let us know! If you are the first to nominate someone we feature, you’ll get Brazen Bio swag!]
🙃 Brazen Meme
✍️ Feedback
Please tweet all thoughts, questions, and insults to us @brazenbio. Bring it. No, really. COME👏🏽AT👏🏽US👏🏽BRO👏🏽