It took some time, but we’ve put together a list of what we assume are the most relevant events and conferences for the Biotech Entrepreneur. We say relevant for the entrepreneur because we have left out conferences on clinical / drug development, medical conferences, etc… and if you think we missed anything let us know.
9th Annual BIO Investor Forum October 6-7, 2010 San Francisco, CA, USA
AdvaMed 2010 October 18-20, 2010 Washington D.C., USA
BIO-Europe International Partnering Conference November 15-17, 2010 Munich, Germany
If you know of any other and worthwhile conferences or talks for the startup Biotech entrepreneur, let us know, and we will add to this list. Additionally, in terms of pure biotech-medical-pharma research. Head over to BioSpace – a really deeply designed database for the Life sciences community.
How do you start a Biotech Company? Good question, for the most part it’s like anything else, you have a good idea, you write a business plan using a well defined guide, and then proceed to get things off the ground.
But we’ll let someone explain it better than we could, this podcast comes from Absolute Science and Welltopia.com where Mignon Fogarty interviews her husband Patrick Fogarty a post-doc at Stanford who in the 90’s started his own Biotech Firm with next to no knowledge of business. However you’ll notice a lot of the same trends we’ve been discussing here, engaging executive summary, a hook for the VC, scalability, market size and identification, thus further pinning the belief that a majority of entrepreneurial concepts are transferable between industries.
The Wall Street Journal claimed in 2009 that it was a dire time for the biotech industry. New firms had little cash, and the outlook was grim indeed, then come January 2010 and we see a report indicating that the industry raised a record breaking $55.8 bn, yes billion, despite unfriendly capital markets. Why, we’ll cover that later on today but for now, we’d like to introduce you to the Invisible Revolution of Biotechnology.
It’s no big surprise that what you tend to see on a daily basis in the realm of startup blogs, sites and otherwise material focuses on the mobile / the web / and new tech, this is simply due to the fact that these types of products are the most readily accessible by the consumer and therefore have the most mass media appeal.
Notwithstanding this invisible technological revolution is taking place at the same time as the ordinary tech one we see, hear about feel and touch on a daily basis; yet we deal with the invisible as well, where it affects us in ways unseen, it makes our lives better, makes us live longer, and helps not only us, but the environment.
This is Biotechnology. It’s unlike most anything else, not only because it’s “under the hood” of the media spotlight, nor because it can be anything from a geno-engineered microbe to a new form of high ethanol producing crops. It’s in its business model. You see, the web startup, or the software company can get a product to the shelf fairly quickly, with the web, if you have a good idea and some chips time to market can be as little as a few months if that, with biotech however, product development can take years, and oftentimes it will be a decade or more before the firm sees its first customer.
The biotech startup model is a complexly woven web which more than deserves its own analysis, and at the same time, and from the point of view of startup aficionados as ourselves it’s something breathtakingly beautiful.
So in the event you’re familiar with the industry, have a watch and enjoy, and if not, then welcome to the world which is Biotechnology. And a big thanks to the people at Europa Bio for putting this video together.
