生物科技公司初期投资实战宝典

    • 有时我们会为了表面上的好理由而贻误时机（比如：“我们就要达成业务开发协议，不想在这一过程中改变现状”），而实际情况往往证明这些都不是什么好理由（比如：“这项协议一直都没有付诸实施”）。迅速摆脱束缚几乎也总是正确的选择。

    • 招聘时别只看履历，要聘用真正的人才。生物科技行业中许多人的履历都很不错，要么是参与制造了了不起的药物，要么是参与过漂亮的投资退出行动，但这些实际上都不能决定他们到底是怎样的人物（至少和他们自诩的人物相比相去甚远）。当然，在我们聘用的履历非凡的CEO中，有相当一部分并没有在我们的初创型企业中成为优秀的领导者和经营者。仔细核实以往他们做过的实际贡献是背景调查和聘用的一个重要组成部分。有时，书面文字和实际工作出现落差是因为尽管过去作用重大，但从大公司转到小公司是个艰难的过程；另一个原因是他们以往的成功更多的是靠运气，而不是技能，而重复好运的难度很大。

    2. 你不能选择自己的出身，但能选择自己的投资伙伴。最终实现退出的生物科技投资中，绝大多数都需要1,500万美元（9348.75万元人民币）以上的风投资金，而平均投资额则接近6,000万美元（3.7395亿元人民币）。这就是说大多数投资都需要至少三方组成的风投财团，而且投资方往往超过三个。这为出现混乱局面埋下了很大的伏笔。我们观察到的情况是：

    • 大型财团往往运转不良，我们会设法避开这样的财团。财团越大，参与议事的人就越多，对孰轻孰重的不同理解就越发分散注意力。投资人的退出倾向不同（长期投资，还是尽早转让），资本偏好不同（节约资金，还是倾囊投入），对管理团队的看法不同（换还是不换），同一领域中利益不同（同一项投资让有些人赚钱，让有些人赔钱）。

    • 投资者目标不一的害处可能和管理不善一样大。这一点毫无疑问，而且基于上述原因，大型财团中投资者目标不一的可能性较大。最优秀的管理团队会努力让投资财团中各位成员的目标保持一致，并且会为了在战略、愿景、财务和退出等问题上保持一致而与董事会进行开放性的探讨。

    • 风投技能之外的经验能在初期真正提升董事会的实际价值。我们深信，起步时引进独立董事会给初创型企业带来极大帮助。比如，让制药公司Vertex前总裁兼研发业务主管维基•萨托进入计算机辅助药物探索公司Nimbus，尽管当时董事会的规模超过公司本身，但这是一项正确选择并大大提升了Nimbus的实力。

    3. 较为务实的预期有利于尽职调查。避免在生物科技行业蒙受损失的最佳途径就是别向生物科技公司投资。这个行业比较复杂，针对科技、项目、团队、计划、专利等方面的尽职调查至关重要。

    • Sometimes we've delayed for apparently good reasons (e.g., "we were close to a BD deal and didn't want to rock the boat during the process"), which more often than not turns out to be poor reasons (e.g., "the deal never got done"). Ripping the bandage off quickly is almost always the right answer.

    • Don't hire for the resume, hire for real talent. Lots of folks in biotech have good resumes, were part of stories with great drugs or great exits but didn't actually shape them (or at least no where near as much as they think they shaped them). We've certainly hired our fair share of great paper-resume CEOs that didn't translate into excellent leaders and operators in our startups. Diligencing the specifics of their actual contributions in the past is an important part of reference checking and recruiting. Some of the disconnect between paper and practice is that the transition from large to small companies is hard despite great past roles; others is that their past success was more luck than skill and repeating luck is a challenge.

    2. You can't pick your family, but you can pick your co-investors. The vast majority of biotech deals require >$15M in venture capital to get to an exit, and the average is close to $60 million. This means that most deals require syndicates of at least three VCs and often more. This creates a lot of potential for entropy. Our observations:

    • Big syndicates are often dysfunctional, and we try to avoid them. The bigger the syndicate, the more cooks in the kitchen, the more distracting the differing priorities become: Different exit preferences ("go long" vs "sell early"), different capital appetites (capital-sparing vs pushing money into a deal), different views of a management team (change vs no change) and different disease area interests (one made money on eye-deals, another lost money on eye-deals).

    • Misaligned investors can cause as much harm as weak management. This is undoubtedly true and, for the reasons stated above, big syndicates increase the odds of misalignment. The best management teams work hard to keep their investor syndicates aligned and maintain a continual open Board dialogue about that alignment on strategy, vision, financing, exit, etc…

    • Experience beyond the venture skill set can add real value on early stage boards. We are big believers that bringing great independent directors into deals early can be a huge help for startups. For example, getting former Vertex president and head of R&D Vicki Sato involved at Nimbus, even when the board was larger than the company, was the right thing to do and a great addition.

    3. Diligence would benefit from more realistic crystal balls. The best way to not lose money in biotech is to not invest in biotech. It's not a simple business, and deep due diligence around the science, programs, team, plan, patents, etc. is critically important.