Angel Invest Boston

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Check Out Our Syndicates A professor of entrepreneurship in Paris who discovered a way to use art to help business people think more creatively, Sylvain Bureau met his unlikely collaborator at a wedding. The product of this chance encounter, Art Thinking, has gained acceptance in boardrooms around the world. My sound engineer Raul Rosa really liked this episode. I did too. ESCP Europe, where Sylvain Bureau teaches, is the first business school. It was founded two centuries ago. The founder was Jean Baptiste Say of the eponymous economic law. B. Say really believed in entrepreneurship. The foundation named after him now employs twenty academics in the field of entrepreneurship in several European cities. Sylvain Burau was trying to get out of the “Velvet-Lined Rut” of tenured academia in much the same way that Howard Stevenson was when he left a tenured position at Harvard Business School to go into business. At a wedding celebration Sylvain Bureau met an artist named Pierre Tectin. Since French wedding festivities are famously long, Pierre and Sylvain had a long conversation from which ensued the idea of Art Thinking. They apply a technique created by Guy Debord whereby small groups of people wander or drift, (the method is actually called “drift”) through an unfamiliar landscape, usually urban, allowing themselves to be drawn by the terrain and the chance encounters they make there. Art Thinking is a method to create the improbable with certainty. The goal is not to find a solution, the goal is to question our questions. Sylvain see the need for this approach arising from the need to find new solutions to the constraints we face both in terms of the environment and in terms of the encroachment into human work by machines. Creating the improbable allows humans to enhance the value of what machines can do. Sal speculates about the connections between drift and the neuroscience of human vision, whereby low-resolution images of the world around us are created and stored in our brains. Art Thinking is more about unlearning certain patterns of thought that locks the business person in certain unproductive modes. The Art Thinking workshops are very demanding and challenging but invariably result in the creation of something valuable. This strong experience that produces an unexpected object opens participants up to possibilities they had not previously considered. The e-commerce site LaRedoute.com implemented Art Thinking in its personnel department and found that their new practices had resulted in more openness to new providers. Another instance is the creation of an event that highlighted the work of street food vendors and led to the creation of a new catering company called Mamie Foodie. Sylvain wrote a book called “Free Your Pitch” to help people improve their pitch decks. The aim is to free you from the habits that lead to boring pitch decks. It won’t make you into Steve Jobs but it will make your deck at least good. The methods in the book have been used by EY and Canon for internal presentations. Sylvain compares the entrepreneurial environment in Europe and the US. He sees huge shifts. Japan is using France as an example to follow in boosting entrepreneurship quickly. Sylvain emphasizes the need for increasing people’s ability to be creative so that they may contribute more productively in a work environment being increasingly automated. Startup Parade Glowee is a startup that grew out of Sylvain’s work. It makes lighting based on biological lighting sources. Dashlane Password Manager is another company founded by a former student. It has been well received in America. They made a successful jump from Europe to the US. Stonly is a tool for creating highly effective user guides. Anti-Café is co-working space where you pay by the hour. “Where Everything Is Free Except Time”. In conclusion Sylvain advises founders to take into account the human element in their work. “The Fuzzy and The Techie”.

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels:  Click Here to Learn About Our Syndicates Still in his thirties and still working full-time, Phillip Lachman is a leader at Walnut Ventures. How this startup exec finds time to invest as an angel is a remarkable story. Clever, articulate and full of good cheer, Phillip is always a delightful interlocutor. Fun episode! Highlights: How Phillip leverages his angel network and modern means of communication to work full-time and still be an active angel. Phillip’s first angel investment was in a company called CoolChip, in which Sal also invested. The company went under but Phillip and Sal still greatly respect the founder. Will Sanchez, PhD and his co-founders provided an example of how to wind up a failed venture. Phillip and Sal would gladly invest in a future venture of Will Sanchez. He showed a sterling character in difficult circumstances. Will is actually friends with Shakeel Avadhany, CEO & co-founder of ClearMotion where Phillip works. Phillip explains his approach to early-stage investing. He looks for founders with whom he has a rapport, a sense of shared values. Phillip looks for grit and perseverance in the character of the founders, considering the enormous obstacles founders have to overcome. Phillip relies on emotional intelligence to gauge the commitment of founders. He looks for the ability to be good stewards of investor money, for the ability to listen and the determination to solve problems. Sal tells the story of his investment in PIKA Energy, recently acquired by Generac. Two MIT frat brothers eager to democratize the wind turbine business. PIKA discovered that the real business was creating circuits to manage the load from the various alternative energy sources in an efficient way. Their partnership with Panasonic batteries gave Powerwall from Tesla a good run for its money. Sal invites you to consider his syndicates. Phillip talks about one of this podcast’s favorite founders “Action Jack” Huntress of HomeBinder as an example of someone who has his act together as an entrepreneur. Fundraising tip from Phillip Lachman: no does not mean no forever; it means no right now. If an angel turns you down, continue to keep that angel in the loop on your raise. That’s how Jack Huntress got Phillip to invest in HomeBinder. Sal talks about how hard it is to resist the temptation to play business analyst when deciding to invest in a startup. The angel should focus on the team, provided the market is large enough. If the team is really great, let them figure out the business. On pitch decks, Phillip Lachman emphasizes having a simple explanation of the business the startup is in. Fearless Angel Joe Caruso also made the same point in his interview. Keep in mind that angel investors are usually intelligent generalists. Don’t assume deep familiarity with industry jargon. Phillip Lachman is also a fan of Kendall Tucker of Polis, a startup with sophisticated software to inform door-knocking campaigns. Polis, a Techstar alum, has raised $2.5 MM in seed funding from Haystack VC whose portfolio also includes DoorDash and Instacart. Kendall Tucker, like Jack Huntress, is a founder who stays engaged with her investors. Reaching out for help and keeping investors informed with regular reports. Regular reporting has many virtues that founders may not appreciate. Encapsulate the key take-aways in the subject line. Remember that you’re fighting for mind share with your investors. Phillip makes a point about building credibility by saying what you’re going to do and then doing what you said you were going to do. Seems obvious but too many founders fall into the trap of over-promising. ClearMotion, where Phillip works, started out in 2009 trying to harness energy being dissipated by shock absorbers with the goal of increasing fuel efficiency of military vehicles by 1 or 2 percent. Given how hard it was to build business with the government, ClearMotion (formerly Levant Power) pivoted in 2012 to building active suspensions to improve the ride of automobiles. The goal is to “erase the road” so as to improve the quality of the time when a rider is in motion ClearMotion has grown a lot. It’s raised $290 million in funding and now employs about 210 people. They expect to get their first order later this year. New England’s bumpy roads are the ideal lab for ClearMotion. Think how valuable the company’s tech will be when autonomous vehicles start transiting our bumpy roads. ClearMotion aims to make the time riding autonomous vehicles as usable as possible. What if they could eliminate motion sickness? ClearMotion’s technology creates maps on a cloud that track where there are road bumps, thus enabling vehicles to react appropriately. These maps are constantly updated by sensors on vehicles. Insurance companies may appreciate the reduction of wear and tear on vehicles. Municipalities will have very precise information about the condition of roads in their jurisdiction. Shakeel Avadhany of ClearMotion is a truly exceptional founder. He has the talent of bending reality to make seemingly impossible things happen. Shakeel is also great at motivating the organization to keep making constant improvements. NextGen Partners, in which Phillip participates, employs a network-driven venture investing model. NexGen’s community of more than a thousand partners helps originate interesting deal flow and provides needed expertise for due diligence. Founders appreciate the significant funding and support that NextGen can mobilize. Phillip and Sal invite listeners to consider angel investing wherever they live. They describe the rewards of being angel investors. Sal invites listeners to follow the splendid example of Phillip Lachman and leave a review on iTunes.

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Our Syndicates Seasoned entrepreneur Nancy Briefs on her startup’s daring swing at Type 2 diabetes. AltrixBio is creating a pill that simulates the benefit of the best gastric bypass surgery: remission of diabetes in 80 percent of cases. With co-founders Jeff Karp and Ali Tavakoli, she is re-purposing an existing treatment with a great safety profile to address this daunting problem. Highlights include: Nancy Briefs, co-founded 7 companies and managed, or been on the board of, several others. Together with Dr. Karp and Dr. Tavakoli of Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Nancy co-founded AltrixBio to emulate the results of gastric bypass in a pill. Sal saw Nancy pitch at MIT Angels and Walnut Ventures and was impressed. Ali Tavakoli, M.D. performs the Roux-en-Y procedure which is the gastric bypass operation with the best record of success. Tavakoli and others observed that diabetic patients who experienced the procedure had their Type 2 diabetes go into remission about 80 percent of the time. Seven and a half years ago, upon observing this phenomenon, Dr. Tavakoli approached Jeff Karp, PhD, who trained at MIT’s renowned Langer Lab and works on new ways to deliver treatments to the body, wondering if the results could not be duplicated using a pill. The Roux-en-Y is irreversible and has considerable side effects. Drs. Karp and Tavakoli set to finding a reversible and benign way of mimicking the results of the procedure. Needless to say: Type 2 diabetes is a huge problem that currently eats up one in four dollars spent on healthcare. It a global problem. The team zeroed in on Sucralfate, a drug presently used to treat peptic ulcers that could be modified to produce the desired outcome. Sucralfate is designed to stick only to the ulcers. The modified Sucralfate can be made to adhere to the healthy lining of the digestive tract. The re-engineered drug, called LuCITM, thus, in theory, could be used to coat strategic parts of the intestine to control the uptake of sugar by the patient’s body. LuCITM was tested on mice with encouraging results. There is at present no drug that can cause diabetes to go into remission reliably. The treatment is expected to make part of the digestive system unavailable to nutrients only part of the day. The dosage would permit absorption of critical nutrients the rest of the time. An interesting quality of LuCITM is that it is easy to tune how long it stays in the gut. It is a platform that could be adapted, due to its versatility, to treating other diseases such as NASH or for the targeted delivery of biologics which are highly perishable in the body. Sal loves platforms. SQZ Biotech, Savran tech etc. Nancy says: it gives you more shots on goal. Plus: Sucralfate has a 30-year safety record, which could simplify the approval process. It has an expedited FDA approval path, given the history. It’s possible there could be a signal that it works in humans with the investment of five to seven million dollars. Sal talks about portfolio company SQZ Biotech. Nancy explains how an angel can make money investing in an early stage company. Hint: value creation needs to outpace fundraising by a lot. Nancy Briefs mentions the acquisition of Tilos Therapeutics by Meck for $773 million as an example of the type of exit possible. Silicon Valley Bank study reveals that 80% of companies are acquired at Phase II trials. She believes AltrixBio could be through Phase II trials in four years. Repurposing a drug such as Sucralfate that has a 30-year record of safety with the FDA can greatly shorten and the time to approval and reduce the cost from hundreds of millions to tens of millions The FDA has the files from the five generic suppliers of Sucralfate that show no heart risk, no cancer risk etc. The near-term inflection points for AltrixBio is (1) moving the compounding of the drug from the lab to an outside supplier, Catalant, and (2) once there is usable formulation of the drug AltrixBio will have a “pre-IND” meeting with the FDA to get initial guidelines for the approval process such as how many subjects will be required and what they acceptable endpoints might be in the first clinical trials. This information is expected to de-risk the investment substantially and to allow a sharper focus on how much money will be needed to fund clinical trials through Phase II. At the end of 2020, AltrixBio will already be at first-in-human trials and to have enrolled 15 to 20 patients. Nancy recalls pivotal times in her career. As a young sales rep for Pfizer she was impressed by a heart valve surgery she witnessed and realized at that moment that she wanted to spend her life in healthcare. Nancy’s decision to work in healthcare was reinforced by getting her MBA. Nancy recollects the various positions she had and what she got out of it. Nancy’s father ran a Pillsbury plant. Her mother was a small banker. Nancy discovered leadership early. She was student body president at her high school. Innovation = Invention X Commercialization, Ed Roberts from MIT/ Sloan Nancy says that in order to have a business in biotech you need a platform technology. Nancy talks about the work patent attorney Peter Fasse of Fish & Richardson is doing for AltrixBio. Nancy’s decision to found her first company came from the conviction that all the work she had done as an executive and board member had prepared her to take the leap. Taking a company through an IPO with Goldman Sachs back in the 1990s taught Nancy the importance of being able to convey a compelling narrative about the company. Speaking of the daring required to start a company, Sal recalls his business partner Bob Smith’s audacious but well-founded belief that he could build his business in competition with big Wall Street names. Nancy’s views on de-risking startups is consonant with Jeff Arnold’s. Being an entrepreneur is wonderfully fun. Nancy finds Massachusetts a great place to build a biotech company. Sal notes that Boston is a big exporter of ideas and a big importer of capital. Two third of Series A funding of Boston companies is from outside Massachusetts.

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Link to Our Syndicates Barely two years out of Harvard, founder Ben Pleat of Cobu has owners of premier apartment buildings excited by the community-creating activities that make their properties more desirable places to live. Owners spend heavily on making the physical spaces attractive but are frequently frustrated by tenant turnover that averages 50 per cent per annum.  Cobu helps develop a sense of belonging that increases tenant satisfaction and lowers turnover. Ben’s not doing this alone, he’s recruited an impressive team of colleagues and advisors who share his vision. He tells us the Cobu story in an accessible and engaging manner. Topics include: Introduction Sal intros the show and mentions portfolio company Vedanta Biosciences. Ben Pleat bio. Sal sees the problem Cobu is solving first-hand in his multi-family properties. Ben pitched at Walnut Ventures and Sal found his pitch compelling. Cobu Connecting residents in communities of 300 to 400 hundred residents through shared interests. Using technology for community management with the goal of creating a sense of home. Cobu is starting with large, new buildings that are usually owned by institutions. Cobu is addressing the global problem of isolation, UK just appointed a Minister for Loneliness. Cobu is using technology to create genuine human connections. Creating opportunities for people to meet in authentic, face-to-face, offline ways. Founding Story Ben’s inspiration for founding the company came from professional and personal experiences. Working for institutional owners he saw how putting in granite counter tops, climbing walls and roof decks did not move the needle on high tenant turnover. People move across the street because they lack a sense of belonging. In his personal life, Ben saw how isolated his mother, a highly social person, became when she realized her dream to move to an upscale building in Manhattan’s trendy Greenwich Village. Eventually she found another place to live which was more conducive to her avid need to engage with her neighbors. That someone as outgoing as his mother could become isolated by her choice of housing made Ben realize the massive implications of the problem of creating community in large residential settings. It’s an issue not just for retiring Baby Boomers but also for Gen Z and Millennials. Cobu stands for community building. His mom found community, ironically in a mid-Town building with few common spaces. Team Co-founder Steve McLaughlin has twenty-five years in digital marketing, building online communities for large brands. Melissa Manning, Director of Community has a natural talent for connecting people. Kim Votruba-Matook leads content and brand. Jeff Beir, successful entrepreneur and venture capitalist is an early advisor. Sal’ Portfolio Company Vedanta Biosciences Sal talks about of his favorite portfolio companies, Vedanta Biosciences, a leader in the micro-biome space. The company is in Phase III trials with a treatment for C. difficile as well as in Phase Ib/II trials for a therapy for peanut allergies. This illustrates the kind of company Sal runs into in his investing. He invites accredited investors to consider his syndicates as a way to invest alongside Boston’s leading angels. Cobu’s Go to Market Strategy Cobu is working with major players such National Development and Boston Properties to power communities in their buildings. Go to market is to continue to partner with leading developers in properties with 100+ units which are near a critical mass of retail areas and thus amenable to community building. Also getting inbound leads. Metrics Measuring the results with a Community Index. Four main elements: (1) sense of membership, mutual influence, needs fulfilled by community and shared connection in person. Software does not build community; it helps people build community. LinkedIn as an Example Addressing the value of software in building community, Sal mentions the example of Gillian Isabelle of Enlivity (https://www.angelinvestboston.com/ep-76-gillian-isabelle-enlivity) finding her co-founder on LinkedIn. Podcasts Ben Listens to Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman How I Built This with Guy Raz Likes the highly produced narrative of How I Built This Sal really values the repeated exposure to different models Business Model Charge building owners a per unit fee, also get revenue from national brands. Avoid one or two turnovers and the owner pays for Cobu for the whole year. Future-proofing buildings Projections Cobu is now in 3,000 units. Expect to be in twenty to twenty-five units by the end of 2020. Finding Your Calling Ben was always fascinated by the energy of cities. His other interest was entrepreneurship inherited from his immigrant mother. Ben and Sal enthuse on Edward Glaeser’s book Triumph of the City. Ed Glaeser is an advisor to Cobu. Ben grew up just outside Queens in New York. Ben’s Parting Thoughts Ben finds Boston a highly supportive place to build a startup. Ben talks about Harvard’s iLab as a great place to build an early-stage company. Ben finds that Boston founders are remarkably ambitious.

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Our Syndicates Scientist and intrapreneur Gillian Isabelle, PhD, founded Enlivity (https://enlivity.com/) to make chemotherapy more bearable for cancer patients. The first product is a supplement invented by an oncologist that helps prevent sores from forming in the mouths and digestive tracts of patients receiving chemotherapy, a problem that can delay life-saving treatment. A fun interview with an infectiously affable guest. Gillian Isabelle studied material science at UC Berkeley and received her PhD from MIT. Worked at Corning and then at PureTech Health, the remarkable promising new pharma company started in Boston. At the Broad Institute she set up and ran the business development office to bring is licensing revenue from the Broad’s research. Gillian Isabelle is the founder of Enlivity, a startup dedicated to improving the lives of patients receiving chemotherapy. Radiation and chemotherapy have serious side effects that include sores in the mouth and the digestive tract. Such sores can cause treatment to be reduced or suspended, lowering the chances of the patient surviving the cancer. Patients with mouth sores may need to be administered opioids to help them endure treatment. These side effects also have economic consequences. Patients with sores may need to be admitted to a hospital in order to continue receiving therapy. Providers have an economic incentive to help to prevent hospitalization due to side effects from therapy. Value-based reimbursement for treatments, which is now the rule among payors, increases the incentive of managing side effects from treatment. Supporting the health of the oral and digestive mucosa allows patients to eat and drink normally and to maintain a healthy weight. Gillian observed a gap in cancer care. Great work is being done in developing new therapies but those can take decades before they help patients. Little is being done to help patients endure current therapies. If we can help patients better tolerate existing therapies, we can achieve better treatment outcomes and lower cost of care in the short run. She sees dealing with side effects as relatively low-hanging fruit. Gillian’s research, including talking to a lot of doctors, nurses and patients, showed that the most likely path to improving outcomes was to work on making nutrients that are known to support the health of tissues more bio-available. She speculated that using technology for targeted released of compounds in the body could help make these nutrients more available. The first product, Healios, is a compound of glutamine. Glutamine has been known to provide amino acids, the building blocks of protein, that support tissue health and immune function. Unfortunately, glutamine by itself is not bio-available. A pediatric oncologist at MD Anderson, a leading cancer clinic in Houston, invented a compound of glutamine with sugars which is readily absorbed by the body. This patented formulation is licensed exclusively to Enlivity. Gillian intends Healios to be the first of a whole stable of products that support patients receiving treatment. Gillian met her co-founder Jill Tobacco via LinkedIn. Jill brings marketing experience and to complement Gillian’s technical background. Gillian was looking for a nutritionist who was good at marketing. Jill bought into the vision. Looking for a co-founder displays self-awareness on the part of Gillian Isabelle for knowing what she needed help with. Before asking Gillian how she plans to go to market, Sal talks a bit about his portfolio company Akili Interactive which expects to be the first company to get approval from the FDA to market a video game to treat ADHD or attention deficit. Akili’s approach is to actually train the young person’s brain to make it easier to pay attention. It’s meant to be a therapy for the underlying cause of the problem, not just a treatment for the symptoms. This is a link to an article in the Financial Times about the founder Eddie Martucci, PhD and the company: https://www.ft.com/content/1f2bc488-8c5a-11e9-a1c1-51bf8f989972 Sal mentions Akili to highlight the type of opportunity he sees in Boston’s startup ecosystem. Accredited investors should contact AngelInvestBoston.com to learn more. Chemotherapy targets the fastest growing cells in the body because cancer cells are fast-growing. Cells in the lining of the mouth and throat are also fast-growing so they are susceptible to chemotherapy which is what leads to sores. Radiation releases free radicals which also attack the lining of the mouth and throat. Enlivity plans to market its products directly to the care providers who are the most familiar with the problems of cancer therapy. There is also growing inbound interest from care providers. Conversion is high when patients try samples. Sold via their own website. By the end of 2020 Gillian hopes Enlivity will have a strategic partnership for distribution and to be launching their second product, a treatment for people who lose the ability to make saliva due to radiation therapy. Gillian describes working at PureTech Health when it was a startup starting startups. The company partnered with faculty members seeking to commercialize technologies. Gillian told us how exciting it was to work with Daphne Zohar, the founder of PureTech. PureTech has shown a remarkable ability to define important problems to address and to bring capable resources to bear on their area of focus. When Gillian went to the Broad Institute it was still managed as a department within MIT. As the Broad spun out from MIT, it needed to have its own technology transfer office which handled licenses and collaboration with strategic players such as the large pharmaceutical companies. Big pharma is reducing in-house research and contracting it out to universities. Watching a friend die from cancer at age 42 changed Gillian’s focus from long-term cures to what could be done in the short run to improve the lives of cancer patients. Gillian did not see anyone else addressing the gap she noticed so she decided she was the person to do it. Gillian’s mother was a nurse practitioner who was an early social entrepreneur creating a program for disabled children which was copied all over Jamaica. She is a model for Gillian. Gillian’s husband is very supportive of her venture. Gillian emphasized the importance of finding allies to support you early on because the journey is very lonely. Advice to entrepreneurs: don’t go it alone. Important allies: MIT Venture Mentoring Services (VMS), co-founder, and other mentors and friends. Gillian reveals that she’s a listener to the Angel Invest Boston podcast and that she has left a review on iTunes. I’m honored!

Invest Alongside Boston's Leading Angels: Learn More About Our Syndicates Two young founders on a mission to get valuable data about complex illnesses which are not now easily captured. Nell Meosky Luo and Dan Toffling of Folia Health tell the story of how their startup came together and where it’s headed. Highlights include: Nell Meosky Luo bio. Dan Toffling bio. What Folia Health does. Patients dealing with complex or chronic illnesses possess a wealth of data that is not now transmitted via the five to ten annual interactions a patient has with a physician. Both Nell and Dan have seen the problem in their immediate families. Built an online platform that patients can use to record important information. This information can be used to guide the patient’s clinical care and, in anonymized form, can be valuable research data. Sal notes that the user experience of their platform looks very accessible. Folia has spent a lot of time on getting the right interactions with patients. How Folia Health came about. Nell notice that researchers did not have access to this kind of data that her mom collected on her brother’s condition. This gave her the idea of finding a way to capture that type of data. Existing data on long-term impact of therapies is usually indirect such as insurance claims statistics. Nell worked on the idea for a year then advertised for a co-founder on BostonStartupsGuide.com and connected with Dan Toffling. Sal asks for you to leave a review of the podcast on iTunes. How Folia Health plans to go to market. Company is emerging from exclusive product focus to focusing on going to market as well. Referral by people in the disease communities is one channel, another is working with clinics. Folia is initially concentrating on Cystic Fibrosis which has highly motivated and organized patients and families. Dan uses Folia with his daughter who has Down’s Syndrome. Dan’s daughter is eager to cash in the certificates for Starbuck’s Cake Pops that Folia Health provides to users to increase engagement. As a user, Dan values the “appointment guides” the platform provides to summarize the information recorded and make it usable at a doctor visit. Makes patients the stewards of their own information and provides continuity when a patient changes doctor. Folia is very transparent about use of data collected and gives patients control over their data. Sal talks about startup Healthjump which works with Electronic Health Records. Link to interview of Healthjump founder, Martin Aboitiz: Interview with Healthjump Founder Martin Aboitiz Nell makes the point that EHRs are really about helping providers get paid by insurers and only tangentially about recording information that can be used to treat patients. Folia plans to make money by selling the anonymized data their system collects to stakeholders who need more data about how their products or services perform with patients. These include providers, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and academic researchers. Sal brings up his interview with Keith Elliston, founder of Axiomedix in which they discussed the startup combining patient records with their genomic data in an anonymized data base for research (Link to Keith Elliston Episode and Page). Dan Toffling credits users for their help in making Folia Health’s platform user-friendly. Dan got into computer technology because his father was an engineer. He emphasizes the need to acquire technical expertise before trying to do things on your own. The example is given of Bill Gates dropping out of college to start Microsoft kind of obscures the fact that he had been coding since an early age at a time and was a highly-skilled software engineer when he dropped out of Harvard. Another turning point of Dan’s career was dealing with the numerous medical procedures his daughter needed. This shifted his focus to wanting not just to make money but to contribute to making the care his daughter and others like her receive. Nell grew up observing her mother’s care of her brother who has an immune deficiency. Because of this she has been thinking about the problem of gathering data from patient experience for a long time. It intrigued Nell that medical decision making in her brother’s case was not really data-driven because of the paucity of usable data. Nell got advice that being a medical doctor was not the best way to pursue her interest. A project at MIT showed her the possibility of dealing with people’s health at the population level. This led her to transfer to Yale University. Dan speaks to the importance of working with people who are invested in the goal you are trying to achieve. Nells advice to founder in digital health: (1) avoid the temptation to be too conservative by recreating in digital form the processes as they exist in the non-digital world, and (2) avoid the opposite temptation of “swinging for the fences” in creating digital processes which are unmoored from the reality of the problems being addressed. Nell also spoke of “following the river” rather than trying to “climb the mountain”, ie follow the easiest path. Dan emphasized the importance of respecting patient ownership of data and also understanding the monetary value that it can have. The choice of Cystic Fibrosis as the first disease on which to focus was entirely serendipitous; it came from meeting a CF father at a Mass Challenge event. It has proven to be an excellent choice since the CF foundation is well organized and funded. Things moved so fast that they got a pilot started in three weeks, an unusually short time in the medical space. An example of following the river rather than trying to climb the mountain. Folia is now getting pulled in by foundations for other conditions. An important milestone for Folia: a patient recently brought in a full year of Folia-recorded data to her annual visit with her doctor.

Repeat founder Adam Martel went to work for Babson College as a major gifts fundraiser in order to get his MBA for free. While at Babson he identified the problem Gravyty is addressing and met his co-founder Rich Palmer. Gravyty attracted early support from Christopher Mirabile’s LaunchPad Venture Group. The company just completed a $2 million plus raise to ramp up its growth. A really sparkling interview with two outstanding leaders. Adam Martel, former coach, and full-time fundraiser at a college, tried to start a couple of businesses but realized he needed a co-founder to improve his odds of success. Adam decided to quit his job and go to work at Babson College where he could get his MBA for free. Adam’s motivation was to find a co-founder at Babson. Rich Palmer, a fellow MBA student, had worked on Wall Street building quantitative models. They hit it off and have made a great founding team. From Adam’s work at Babson it was obvious that each fundraiser needed help in identifying which of their more than a hundred assigned potential donors to prioritize. Rich Palmer was confident he could build software that would provide that intelligence. Rich used to build systems to predict which stocks were likely to pop. He and Adam found that predicting donations had a lot in common with that. It was easy to sell management on the platform; the problem was that fundraisers were no logging in; which is the real measure of success for this type of platform. Adam and Rich discovered the “three screens” principle, i.e. people have three screens they’ll look at: their calendar, their email and their database. It’s hard to get them to look at a fourth screen. The solution to the login problem was to incorporate all the insights from the platform in emails addressed to the fundraisers. This approach was a big game changer. The product is called “First Draft” and provides, in addition to predictions of who is most likely to give, content which is intelligently adapted to the individual fundraiser’s writing style. Christopher Mirabile and Ham Lord were initially not convinced that there was a big market for the company but they were so impressed by Adam and Rich that they scheduled a series of meetings. After each meeting Ham and Christopher got more and more impressed with the team from Gravyty and decided to invest. LaunchPad early on impressed on Gravyty the need to have a board. Adam and Rich signed on eagerly, much to their credit. Too many founders perceive boards as “grumpy dogs” that have to be “managed. Christopher and Ham were provided great help. Christopher thinks Gravyty has the perfect set up for the board, two members representing the common shareholders (founders), two members representing preferred shareholders (investors) and one independent member with industry experience; perfect for the early years. Gravyty is 100% SaaS. Gravyty Live provides support for fundraisers, a profession plagued by high turnover, who frequently need to be brought up to speed on their new accounts. Gravyty has achieved great SEO and leads their category for search terms. Adam’s experience as a sports coach has served him well in his work of team building in his companies. Of particular value is the ability of getting people to do the things that need to get done. Working as a college fundraiser taught Adam to listen and to build relationships. These skills translated to raising money for Gravyty. Adam and Christopher fifteen-minute call every two weeks and this has been highly fruitful. Christopher sees three functions for early=stage companies: (1) support in execution, (2) different perspectives, and (3) mentorship. A really meaty podcast!

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Our Syndicates To super angel Jeff Arnold the way to make money in biotech is to make few but highly researched bets and then back them to the hilt. His remarkable record is hard to argue with. The interview takes us from his student days at MIT through his various startups and investments; a tour de force. His approach has much to teach angels and founders. Sal opens by talking about how he delights in the promising companies that come from Boston’s unrivalled concentrations of universities. He mentions his investment in Gelesis which recently got FDA approval to market a new weight loss treatment. Sal introduces engineer, founder and super angel Jeff Arnold who studied electrical engineering at MIT and then spent the next seven years building and marketing medical devices at Becton Dickinson. Jeff Arnold describes his experience at Cambridge Heart which he headed through an IPO. The most salient lesson is that technologies that work in the lab do not necessarily translate to the real world. Incentives differ greatly from business to the academy. In business, the goal is to fail fast so that you can find the ultimate solution. In academia, the goal is to discover new things so that reliability of the technology is not such a big issue. To Jeff Arnold, the CEO’s job is to raise the money needed to execute the plan, not to execute the plan that can be afforded by the money available. Jeff gives a vivid example of trying to do without an expensive study and permanently limiting the value of the company’s technology. It was profound and painful experience. Jeff advises to raise as much money as you can when the money is available. Another vivid example is given. Led to Jeff being Entrepreneur of the Year at Goldman Sachs. Entrepreneurs are optimistic and tend to raise just enough to get them to the next round. This leaves no room for miscalculations, which are common with new technologies. Miscalculating the raise could be company-ending. Companies fail because the CEO allowed a bad thing to happen when the company was out of money. Common sense advice: don’t schedule outcomes that can make or break the company during raises. You can get very far with a compelling pitch. Hear the pitch that got Goldman Sachs to take Cambridge Heart public. Being CEO is all about selling; selling to your investors, selling to your hires, selling your vision to your employees and selling to customers. If a founder can’t sell, she/he needs to get a CEO who can. For a CEO, an IPO is merely a funding event. When a CEO sells some of his shares a lot of alarms go off. They have to stay all in. Jeff started angel investing after his last job as a CEO. He hired his replacement and became chairman. That gave him time to be a mentor at MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service (VMS). He discovered that the companies in which he invested and advised did better than the companies in which he was only an investor. He decided to invest only in companies he could advise. He invested in 17 life science companies, advised 15 of them, about half of which had exits, two failed and the rest are doing well. A very impressive record. Jeff’s style of investing resembles that of Elon Musk and Walnut colleague Frank Ferguson. Take few bets but work with them intensively and invest in every round that looks promising. Jeff Arnold looks for companies that are addressing problems big enough for a nice exit to be possible and yet will not take too much money to get off the ground. In deciding whether or not to get involved with a company, Jeff does not place so much emphasis on the team because he helps build the team. He looks for a CEO or founder who is coachable. Jeff looks at all the risks to the success of the startup and expects all to have 90 percent chance o success except one, that might be fifty-fifty. If there are two 50 % risks, that’s too much risk for him. Sal asks for you to leave a review on iTunes. Super angel Jeff Arnold gracefully offers to leave a review himself. Some of Jeff’s favorite startups: JB Therapeutics, now public as Corbus Pharmaceuticals. JB/Corbus was developing a treatment for fibrosis based on a non-psychotropic derivative of THC (the active ingredient in marijuana) which is a powerful anti-fibrotic; i.e. prevents the growth of fibrous tissue that shows up in scars after injury. Targeted systemic scleroderma which affects mostly women in middle age and has a 50 percent ten-year mortality. Corbus is now valued at half a billion dollars. Jeff thinks it’s undervalued because he thinks it’s going to get FDA approval for its systemic scleroderma therapy. What made Corbus a great investment was that the drug was already in use in humans so it was not so expensive to re-purpose it to this orphan disease. Xeno Biosciences founded by Hasan Celiker, Ph.D. aims to achieve the weight loss of Roux-en-Y Gastric Bypass surgery by introducing oxygen into the small intestine via specially designed capsules that the patient ingests thus altering the biome of the gut. The significant benefits in terms of weight loss and control of Type 2 diabetes caused by gastric bypass surgery is not replicated by any other treatment. It was originally believed that bypass surgery worked by reducing the absorption of food due to a reduction of the size of the digestive tract. There is now growing evidence that bypass surgery works by altering the biome in the intestine to include aerobic bacteria made possible by the presence of air that bypass surgery lets in. Xeno Biosciences seeks to make a similar change to the micro-biome by introducing oxygen via a pill, thus avoiding the need for surgery. It is believed that oxygen in the gut changes brain signaling to produce weight loss. Xeno is going to start patient trials in Australia soon. The recurring mistake Jeff sees in startups is over confidence by CEOs and founders. Bob Langer companies succeed in part because they attract a lot of money and a lot of smart people. This allows them to succeed when things don’t go well. They have money in the bank which allows them to pivot. I saw this in the case of SQZ Biotech. Life science companies usually have nothing to sell but shares in the first few years. This leads to a conflict with the boards desire for transparency. Too much truth can dry up funding. Jeff sees value in a strong advisor who is not on the board and can support the CEO. Jeff’s value to companies is in helping them avoid company-ending mistakes. Never apply to angel groups via the website, go to LinkedIn and look for someone you know to introduce you. Then apply. You are ready to pitch to angel group when you can provide validation that most of the risks to your startup are low. There are a lot of competitors from well-funded labs who have a lot of data to backup their likelihood of success. There should be at most one area in which the angels have to do due diligence; beyond that is too much friction and your raise will go nowhere. Jeff was inspired to build a product from watching the heart monitor at his mother’s bedside in the hospital and wondering if the data could be captured digitally. This led to eventually creating such a device at Becton Dickinson. In summation, Jeff advises company founders to be honest and straightforward with their boards and investors. He provides a cogent example. Being willing to help people pays off eventually, and in surprising ways. That’s the approach of Keith Ferrazzi of “Never Eat Alone” fame.

Sal's Investment Syndicates: Learn More About Our Syndicates Engineer and consultant Susan Conover’s struggle with skin cancer inspires her to apply AI to help us understand what’s going on with our skin. This determined founder has made considerable headway in building the most valuable asset an AI startup can have: a strong, proprietary data set. A fun interview with a dynamic founder. Highlights include: Sal crows about his investment in Gelesis, a company that just got FDA approval for a new weight loss treatment with broad application and good safety profile. Consider our investment syndicates if you are an accredited investor (https://www.angelinvestboston.com/our-syndicates/) Susan Conover bio. Honors grad in mechanical engineering from UT Austin, a top program, got a master’s degree in engineering management at MIT. Susan has studied or worked in France, Australia and Singapore. Susan Conover became a melanoma survivor at age 22. This made a big impression on her. Susan sees a need to “close the loop” on patient care so that the needs of the patient are uppermost in medicine. LuminDX moves in that direction, allowing people more control over their healthcare. Met her current co-founder Josh Joseph, a machine learning specialist, at Improv. MIT Sloan’s Catalyst program allowed Susan to connect with technologists working on skin cancer who have helped start her company. Eventually pivoted away from skin cancer to focus on helping people deal with everyday skin ailments. LuminDX has been accepted to the highly competitive accelerator Techstars in Boston. Kudos! Next, how LuminDX plans to make money, but first Sal asks you to leave a review on iTunes. Business model is to build data base of images to train its AI by helping consumers connect with health providers and getting paid a small fee. The real monetization is expected to come when LuminDX’s AI become better than primary care physicians in diagnosing skin conditions. Many options become attractive at that stage. The model is Google or 23 and Me. The algorithms are open sourced but the core asset of LuminDX is diagnosed images from physicians. LuminDX uses the fact that there are a billion searches for skin issues in the US alone to get found by consumers. First paid search to build its search engine optimization. The field is so large and undeveloped that competitors are also partners. Has rolled out for one indication. By the end of 2020 expect to have twelve indications in which the AI is capable. Susan was really good at science and math but not great in history. Mechanical engineering was a good way to satisfy Susan’s innate curiosity about how things work. Susan gradually talked herself into entrepreneurship. She actually dreamed of studying psychology as undergrad because of her intense curiosity about what drives people. Being a founder is connected to that aspect of her personality. Don’t go into entrepreneurship just for being your own boss, Susan says. You need to be deeply motivated to solve a problem in order for it to make sense. Susan advises founders to do intense preparation of their pitches before reaching out to investors. Techstars has taught her that fundraising is a known science. You need to reach out to people who might eventually invest to map out the milestones they would require before funding you. The fact that LuminDX’s business model encompasses three different domains: dermatology, AI and marketing, creates a problem. Finding investors comfortable in all three has been a challenge but she’s making headway. People say they invest in the team but Susan finds that people frequently get caught up in challenging the business model. Sal concurs & emphasizes the fact that it’s really hard for angels to truly focus just on the team and resist the temptation to be the “business analyst” who knows better than the founders. Quotes Michael Mark on this. Susan Conover thinks founders should just focus on building the business according to the milestones set by VCs and let the progress win over the early stage investors. On building product, Susan urges founders to build little but test a lot. Only when you really understand what people want do you start to build. Susan, inspired by angel Diane Hessan, is working to be more daring in setting down explicit goals, stakes in the ground. She sees value in having clear metrics even if they are not met. Vanity metrics can kill your business. The question for LuminDX is how much data is needed to go into a clinical setting in primary care. The number they came up with is 370,000 images, that’s a stake in the ground. Susan Conover believes in the methodology of Alex Iskold for analyzing a startup’s sales funnel. Techstars has pushed LuminDX to sharpen their focus on acquiring patient images and data. Want to be able to announce 100,000 images acquired on demo day. Sal salutes Susan Conover for her focus and energy. Susan asks Sal why he puts so much into the podcast. Sal’s answer: insatiable curiosity about what drives people. Susan asks Sal what his pet pain point that could be solved by a startup, Sal answers bookkeeping for his multi-family properties. Sal hopes Pilot.com will eventually get to this space. Shout out to founders Waseem Daher and Jeff Arnold.

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Link to Our Investment Syndicates Two of Boston’s most active angels, Marlene Boyaner of Golden Seeds and Doug Bates of Walnut Venture, talk to Sal Daher about angel investing, fundraising, building a startup and various other topics. The panel takes challenging questions from an audience of startup founders. Highlights include: Marlene Boyaner bio. Doug Bates bio How Marlene went from intrapreneuring at CIBC & Capital One to angel investing. Golden Seeds is on the organized end of the spectrum among angel groups; Marlene likes the way it operates. Entrepreneurship was a natural for Doug Bates due to several examples of in his family. Founded a successful business with the woman to whom he was married at the time. Put his wife’s idea through a thorough MBA-type scrutiny and became convinced it would work. Golden Seeds seeks to ensure that women get their share of startup funding and invest in businesses where they can see the possibility of an exit. They are generalists, no industry focus. When Golden Seeds started women got only 3% of startup funding, now women get 27% of such funding. Women now start 50% of all businesses so it seems that Golden Seeds has room to grow. Startup Parade: Fortified Bike from which was spun off Save My Sales. Doug admires founder Tivan Amour who has been interviewed on the Angel Invest Podcast (Link to Tivan Amour's Podcast). Sal is also an investor. Fortified Bike was a theft-proof bike business which proved to be a hard ride. While trying to get the bike business up the hill, Tivan built a highly effective texting tool that drove sales very powerfully. That’s the business that became Save My Sales. Tivan demonstrated integrity in the way he migrated to Save My Sales by giving investors in Fortified Bike stakes in the new company. Startup Parade: Clean Fiber has a prosaic business but an extremely sound one. The team is impressively high-performing in building out a new production process for producing insulation with recycled materials. Doug likes the boring but lucrative niche they occupy. Startup Parade: Marlene Boyaner brought up Day Zero which has technology to determine at the outset of treatment what is the best antibiotic to use on an infection. Currently, patients with severe infections are started on broad spectrum antibiotics until the result of cultures allows the determination of the ideal treatment. Startup Parade: Marlene Boyaner also mentioned Acivilate helps people involved with the justice system get better results in terms of lower recidivism. Although this is not an industry Marlene would have anticipated investing in, the ability of the team was so compelling that Golden Seeds has backed Acivilate. Startup Parade: Sal GainLife which has been building software to help disability insurers get better outcomes with workers who are out of work due to an injury. Founder Sean Eldridge and his team have gotten impressive traction with insurers. Here is Sean’s interview on this podcast, an episode called “Transforming Lives”: Interview with Sean Eldridge Startup Parade: Meenta founded by Gabor Bethlendy and Stephan Smith is building Stripe for science, a workflow platform to make the notoriously inefficient process of scientific experimentation more efficient. Gabor was also on the podcast, here’s the interview with him: Interview with Gabor Bethlendy of Meenta Doug Bates believes that angel investing requires a high level of understanding of the industry in which the startup is being built. Powerball vs. Moneyball; Doug is a moneyball investor, i.e. he likes to take small, highly-analyzed bets that are likely to pay off consistently. Marlene talked about Golden Seeds’ focus on portfolio companies having defensible businesses, i.e. businesses that cannot be easily copied by competitors. Golden Seeds also needs validation from pilot programs or repeat sales. Golden Seeds looks for teams that are coachable and resilient. They liked big markets. Each big Golden Seeds chapter sees three pitches per month. Office Hours is a great way to connect with Golden Seeds if you don’t have connections. Sal asks for your review on iTunes to help the Angel Invest Boston podcast found by listeners. Doug and Marlene tell us the best ways founders can connect with angel investors. Sal on the proper way to use LinkedIn to connect with angel investors. Hint: it does not involve sending mass emails to people you don’t know. Resources for founders raising money; start with The Capital Network, a non-profit dedicated to supporting founders. Marlene says keep pitch decks crisp and to the point. Less is more. Doug says pitch decks should address greed or fear. Don’t go into the weeds. Marlene adds that they have to explain how the product works in layman’s terms. Sal recalls Joe Caruso urging founders to make sure angels listening to their pitches understand what the company does. Here’s Sal’s interview with Joes Caruso, the CEO Whisperer: Interview with Super Angel Joe Caruso Doug: the most important subtext of due diligence is that it’s all about evaluating the founding team. Doug: the golden mean between dogmatism and lack of conviction. Founders should understand that Golden Seeds has a process; no on-the-spot answers. Doug urges frequent communications with investors. Monthly is good. Sal urges founders to occupy investor mindshare with monthly reports. Audience Questions: Jake Kayser of YourAgora asks questions about how angels invest directly or through entities. Paul Livingston, Ph.D. of EdTech Advisory Group ask questions about how investors view educational tech companies. Caleb, a senior at Babson, had a question about how to engage angels. Davin, a Babson student asks for advice on having an entrepreneurial career.