Tag Archives: Biotech

Covid-19 Startups : BioNTech and Moderna

Yesterday I posted about Airbnb IPO filing here and in a few weeks or months I will update my 600-startup cap. tables to 700. A major upgrade. In the mean time, even if I am not a specialist at all of biotechnology I study some startups of the field from time to time. You can check the tag #biotech for example or a post about Crispr startups. It would have been difficult not to notice recently two other startups which went public recently, Moderna in 2018 and BioNTech in 2019, because of Covid19. Look at their recent stock history when they annouced a vaccine against the virus:

Maybe have a quick look at their cap. table below but first some comments: Moderna had been founded in the Boston area in 2009 and BioNTech in Germany in 2008. Their revenues (and losses) were large at time of filing. A lot of venture capital (which owns 60% of both startups), many employees. Not young founders (46 and 60 at Moderna, 41, 43 and 64 at BioNTech). You can add any comment you want, if any…

In reality, these figures are not that different from those of the giants of the digital world in yesterday’s post, except one maybe, the founders’ age.

Two new British startup cap. tables: Autonomy and Bicycle

I recently published an updated version of a database of capitalization tables of 600 (former) startups. I obtain the data most of the time from the IPO prospectus of the company (that is the document the company publishes when it is listed on a public stock exchange, and in general Nasdaq.

These documents are an amazing source of information of all the business components of the companies even if I focus only on the shareholding and funding history. They are sometimes a little frustrating though as they do not cover the full history of the company, but only 3 to 5 years in the past so it is not simple to get the founders’ data for example.
Some countries do however provide access to the full company data, often for a fee like in France. A few cantons in Switzerland (Basel, Zurich) and the United Kingdom provide it for free and this is just great.

I have done some research for Revolut and Graphcore recently. Today, I revisited the data I had built for two British companies: Autonomy founded in 1996 and had gone public on Easdaq in 1998 and Bicycle Therapeutics, a biotech company with links to EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland) founded in 2009 and public since July 2019.

The IPO documents did not provide enough for me about the founders and early rounds. So here are my new tables:

Autonomy

Bicycle from the IPO data

Bicycle from the UK register data, the updated cap. table, the funding rounds and its growth over time:

The funding rounds


The growth of revenues and jobs

The largest technology companies in the last 10 years in China and in Biotech (Part 2)

Following my recent post, The largest technology companies in Europe and the USA in the last 10 years, I needed to add a quick follow-on which comes from the fact that many people asked me two additional questions:
– but what about China?
– but what about biotech?
I am not a specialist of either dimension but I tried to do a similar exercice in the past and yesterday. Here are the results:

Top China 2020

Top China 2016

Top Biotech 2020

Top Biotech 2016

Top Biotech 2007

I have a small doubt about the year of that last table (best effort only…) and all the data in a single pdf here: Top China and Biotech

Also a short synthesis to be compared with the previous post:

The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee – a Symphony of Research

Progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in that order – Sydney Brenner
All science is either physics or stamp collecting – Ernest Rutherford

I did not know much about genetics, except my data here and there about biotechnology startups. But thanks to his book The Gene, Siddhartha Mukherjee makes me feel I know much more. His brilliant storytelling is like a symphony, describing the early days of genetics, with Darwin and Mendel and the latest developments of this fascinating science. There are brilliant quotes like the two above, respectively page 202 and 221. And there are marvelous portraits.

I will only give a few of them, the pictures I mean, as a quiz…

But before letting you discover the names below, here is a short extract from The Gene, a famous anecdote about how Genentech was born…

And a great analysis of what science, technology and biology are:
“Do not be lulled by that description. Do not, gentle reader, be tempted to think – “My goodness, what a complicated recipe!” – and then rest assured that someone will not learn to understand or hack or manipulate that recipe in some deliberate manner.

“When scientists underestimate complexity, they fall prey to the perils of unintended consequences. The parables of such scientific overreach are well-known: foreign animals, introduced to control pests, become pests in their own right; the raising of smokestacks, meant to alleviate urban pollution, releases particulate effluents higher in the air and exacerbates pollution; stimulating blood formation, meant to prevent heart attacks, thickens the blood and results in an increased risk of blood clots to the heart.

“But when non-scientists overestimate complexity – “No one can possibly crack this code” – they fall into the trap of unanticipated consequences. In the early 1950s, a common trope among some biologists was that the genetic code would be so context dependent – so utterly determined by a particular cell in a particular organism and so horribly convoluted – that deciphering it would prove impossible. The truth turned out to be quite the opposite: just one molecule carries the code, and just one code pervades the biological world. If we know the code, we can intentionally alter it in organisms, and ultimately in humans. Similarly, in the 1960s, many doubted that gene-cloning technologies could so easily shuttle genes between species. By 1980, making a mammalian protein in a bacterial cell, or a bacterial protein in a mammalian cell, was not just feasible; it was, in berg’s words, rather “ridiculously simple”. Species were specious. “Being natural” was “often just a pose”. [Page 408] […]

“Technology, I said before, is most powerful when it enables transitions – between linear and circular motion (the wheel), or between real and virtual space (the Internet). Science, in contrast, is most powerful when it elucidates rules of organization – laws – that act as lenses through which to view and organize the world. Technologies seek to liberate us from the constraints of our current realities through those transitions. Science defines those constraints, drawing the outer limits of the boundaries of possibility. Our greatest technological innovations thus carry names that claim our prowess over the world: the engine (from ingenium, or “ingenuity”) or the computer (from computare, or “reckoning together”). Our deepest scientific laws, in contrast, are often named after the limits of human knowledge: uncertainty, relativity, incompleteness, impossibility.

“Of all the sciences, biology is the most lawless; there are few rules to begin with, and even fewer rules that are universal. Living beings must, of course, obey the fundamental rules of physics and chemistry, but life often exists on the margins and interstices of these laws, bending them to their near-breaking limits. The universe seeks equilibriums; it prefers to disperse energy, disrupt organization, and maximize chaos. Life is designed to combat these forces. We slow down reactions, concentrate matter, and organize chemicals into compartments, “It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe,” James Gleick wrote.” [Page 409]

And now the answer the the picture quiz:

Charles Darwin Gregor Mendel William Bateson Thomas Morgan Alfred Sturtevant
Calvin Bridges Hermann Muller Hugo de Vries Ronald Fisher Theodosius Dobjansky
Frederick Griffith Oswald Avery Max Perutz George Beadle Edward Tatum
Linus Pauling James Watson Francis Crick Rosalind Franklin Maurice Wilkins
Arthur Pardee François Jacob Jacques Monod Edward Lewis Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard
Eric Wieschaus Sydney Brenner Robert Horvitz John Sulston Paul Berg
Arthur Kornberg Janet Merz Herbert Boyer Stanley Cohen Frederick Sanger
Walter Gilbert Craig Venter Allan Wilson Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza Shinya Yamanaka
Jennifer Doudna Emmanuelle Charpentier

Are Biotechnology Startups Different?

This is a research work I did recently and after trying very shortly to publish it in academic papers, I stopped trying. Maybe it is not good enough. Maybe the research world and I do not fit! It is the result of two series of research I have done for years, one about Stanford-related spin-offs and another about equity in start-ups.

I encourage you to read it if the field is of interest for you or just have a look at the tables below which I extracted from this 5-page short document.

Crispr Therapeutics Ag, the Swiss start-up also files for Nasdaq

Last April, I published a short post about the hot Crispr Start-ups. At the time only Editas and Intellia had filed to go public. I could build Crispr Therapeutics cap. table thanks to Swiss registers data. Now Crispr Therapeutics Ag has also filed on Nasdaq (see its S-1). I was not so far from the truth as you may check the new and old cap. tables. Interesting data points…

– Crispr Therapeutics from Nasdaq filing
crispr_therapeutics_cap_table_sep16

– Crispr Therapeutics from Swiss register data
Crisper-Crispr

CRISPR Start-ups

There are not many weeks, not to say days when you cannot read something new about CRISPR. I have to admit I do not know much about it given my total incompetence in health related matters. But when I heard there was a battle around intellectual property between universities (see Bitter fight over CRISPR patent heats up for example) and that start-ups were already entering the field, to the point that one was already public and another one filing to be, my interest was aroused… So I had a look at 3 of the more visible companies, and you know what… I could build their cap. tables… here they are:

– Editas Medicine
Crisper-Editas

– Intellia Therapeutics
Crisper-Intellia

– Crispr Therapeutics
Crisper-Crispr

What is worth noticing, at least for me? They are young companies (less than 3 years old. they have raised a lot of money, at least $50M. They have very reputable investors: Polaris, Third Rock & Flagship for Editas; Atlas & Orbimed for Intellia; and Versant, NEA, Abingworth & SROne for Crispr Therapeutics. the founders are alreday quite diluted as they all less own than 15% as a group in each. Additional comments welcome!

The business of Biotech – Part 4: Licensing

The business of biotech is very unique as my previous posts illustrated. Companies go public without any revenue or product; they are often times very small firms in part because they are science-based mostly with a lot of collaborations with universities. Finally, an interesting feature is the biotech is a licensing business. Start-ups seldom produce and sell drugs but license their intellectual property (IP) to large pharmaceuticals companies. They also themselves license IP from universities, where the early inventions are made and protected through patent applications.

One of the best-guarded secrets is the terms of such licenses. I have already published articles about the licensing conditions by universities to start-ups. See for example:
– June 2010: University licensing to start-ups – https://www.startup-book.com/2010/06/15/university-licensing-to-start-ups-part-2/
– November 2013: How much Equity Universities take in Start-ups from IP Licensing? – https://www.startup-book.com/2013/11/05/how-much-equity-universities-take-in-start-ups-from-ip-licensing/
– June 2015: Should universities get rich with their spin-offs? – https://www.startup-book.com/2015/06/09/should-universities-get-rich-with-their-spin-offs/

So I’d like to revisit the topic for biotech companies. In terms of equity, there is not much difference; you can read again the table below. But there is an additional term that I’ve seen less often in other fields. Royalties on sale are very much accepted because Genentech (part 3) and Amgen (part 1) defined the industry rules.

Uni-licenses-startups-2015

Again let me quote my previous articles:“[…] negotiated an agreement between Genentech and City of Hope that gave Genentech exclusive ownership of any and all patents based on the work and paid the medical center a 2 percent royalty on sales of products arising from the research.” [Page 57]

“For an upfront licensing fee of $500,000, Lilly got what it wanted: exclusive worldwide rights to manufacture and market human insulin using Genentech’s technology. Genentech was to receive 6 percent royalties and City of Hope 2 percent royalties on product sales.” [Page 94] Perkins believed that the 8 percent royalty rate was unusually high, at a time when royalties on pharmaceutical products were along the lines of 3 or 4 percent. “It was kind of exorbitant royalty, but we agreed anyway – Lilly was anxious to be first (with human insulin). […]The big company – small company template that Genentech and Lilly promulgated in molecular biology would become a prominent organizational form in a coming biotechnology industry.[Page 97]

“Memorial Sloan-Kettering had filed a weak patent, not knowing what it actually had. Therefore, said my general counsel, Amgen was legally free to process on its own, without paying a royalty to MSKCC. That didn’t seem ethical to me; without Sloan-Kettering, we wouldn’t have stumbled across filgrastim (Neupogen’s generic name). We negotiated a license with a modest royalty.” [Pages 143-44]

Another interesting source of information is KUL (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) in Belgium and its spin-offs Thormbogenetics and Tibotec. KUL has a long history of licensing with its R&D arm (LRD) founded in 1972. Here are examples of licenses.

KUL-LRD-Licensing

One particular example is the Genentech-Thromobogenetics-KUL relationships with license terms as follows:
Genentech-LRD-Thrombogenetics

as well as royalties
Genentech-LRD-Thrombogenetics-payments

All this comes from http://www.seii.org/seii/documents_seii/archives/colloques/2012-10-12_5_TG%20NV%20from%20lab%20to%20company-COLLEN.pdf

So what is a fair deal? I do not know. If you check the footnotes in the table above, you can see again a 2-4 % royalty range. So let me finish with a text I found many years ago:
– A raw idea is worth virtually nothing, due to an astronomical risk factor
– A patent pending with a strong business plan may be worth 1 %
– An issued patent may be worth 2 %
– A patent with a prototype, such as a pharmaceutical with pre-clinical testing may be worth 2-3 %
– A pharmaceutical with clinical trials may be worth 3-4 %
– A proven drug with FDA approval may be worth 5-7 %
– A drug with market share, such as one pharma. distributing through another, may be worth 8-10%
Ref: Royalty Rates for Licensing Intellectual Property by Russell Parr

The business of biotech – Part 3: Genentech

I should have begun with Genentech this series of posts about Biotech (see part 1: Amgen or part 2 about more general stats). Genentech was not the first biotech start-up, it was Cetus, but Genentech was really the one which launched and defined this industry. All this really began with the Cohen Boyer collaboration. Genentech would have loved to get an exclusive license on their patent about recombinant DNA, but the universities could not agree for business as well as political reasons. Genentech was an unknown little start-up and genetic engineering a very sensitive topic at the time. Swanson had tried even to offer shares to Stanford and UCSF (the equivalent of 5% of the existing shares at the time).

Please note I already wrote about Genentech here in Bob Swanson & Herbert Boyer: Genentech. But this new post follows my reading of Genentech – The Beginnings of Biotech by Sally Smith Hughes.

Genentech-the_beginnings_of_biotech

Chronology
– November 1972 – Meeting of Cohen and Boyer at aconference in Hawaii
– March 1973: First joint lab. experiments
– November 1973: Scientific publication
– November 4, 1974: Patent filing
– May 1975: Cohen becomes an advisor for Cetus
– January 1976: Meeting between Swanson and Boyer
– April 7, 1976: Genentech foundation
– August 1878: first insulin produced
– Q2 1979: 4 research projects with Hoffmann – La Roche (interferon), Monsanto (animal growth hormone), Institut Mérieux (hepatitis B vaccine) and an internal one (thymosin).
– July 1979: first human growth hormone
– October 1982: FDA approval of Genentech insulin produced
– October 1985: FDA approval of human growth hormone

I have to admit I had never heard of the Bancroft Library’s website (http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/projects/biosci) for the Program in Bioscience and Biotechnology Studies, “which centerpiece is a continually expanding oral history collection on bioscience and biotechnology [with ] in-depth, fully searchable interviews with basic biological scientists from numerous disciplines; with scientists, executives, attorneys, and others from the biotechnology industry.”

The invention of new research and business practices over a very short period

Swanson was captivated: “This idea [of genetic engineering] is absolutely fantastic; it is revolutionary; it will change the world; it’s the most important thing I have ever heard.” [… But Swanson was nearly alone.] “Cetus was not alone in its hesitation regarding the industrial application of recombinant DNA technology. Pharmaceutical and chemical corporations, conservative institutions at heart, also had reservations.” [Page 32] “Whatever practical applications I could see for recombinant DNA… were five to ten years away, and, therefore, there was no rush to get started, from a scientific point of view.” [Page 32] “I always maintain” Boyer reminisced, “that the best attribute we had was our naïveté… I think if we had known about all the problems we were going to encounter, we would have thought twice about starting… Naïveté was the extra added ingredient in biotechnology.” [Page 36]

The book shows the importance of scientific collaborations. Not just Boyer at UCSF but for example with a hospital in Los Angeles. A license was signed with City of Hope Hospital with a 2% royalty on sales on products based on the licensed technology. “[…] negotiated an agreement between Genentech and City of Hope that gave Genentech exclusive ownership of any and all patents based on the work and paid the medical center a 2 percent royalty on sales of products arising from the research.” [Page 57]

Even if in 2000, City of Hope had received $285M in royalties, it was not happy with the outcome. After many trials, the California Supreme Court in 2008 awarded another $300M to City of Hope. So the book shows that these collaborations gave also much legal litigation. [Page 58]

In a few years, Genentech could synthesize somatostatin, insulin, human growth hormone and interferon. It is fascinating to read how intense, uncertain, stressful these years were for Swanson, Perkins, Boyer and the small group of Genentech employees and academic partners (Goeddel, Kleid, Heyneker, Seeburg, Riggs, Itakura, Crea), in part because of the emerging competition from other start-ups (Biogen, Chiron) and academic labs (Harvard, UCSF).

“On August 25, 1978 – four days after Goeddel’s insulin chain-joining feat – the two parties signed a multimillion-dollar, twenty-year research and development agreement. For an upfront licensing fee of $500,000, Lilly got what it wanted: exclusive worldwide rights to manufacture and market human insulin using Genentech’s technology. Genentech was to receive 6 percent royalties and City of Hope 2 percent royalties on product sales.” [Page 94] They managed to negotiate a contractual condition limiting Lilly’s use of Genentech’s engineered bacteria to the manufacture of recombinant insulin alone. The technology would remain Genentech’s property, or so they expected. As it turned out, the contract, and that clause in particular, became a basis for a prolonged litigation. In 1990, the courts awarded Genentech over $150 million in a decision determining that Lilly had violated the 1978 contract by using a component of Genentech’s insulin technology in making its own human growth hormone product. [Page 95] Perkins believed that the 8 percent royalty rate was unusually high, at a time when royalties on pharmaceutical products were along the lines of 3 or 4 percent. “It was kind of exorbitant royalty, but we agreed anyway – Lilly was anxious to be first (with human insulin)” […]The big company – small company template that Genentech and Lilly promulgated in molecular biology would become a prominent organizational form in a coming biotechnology industry. [Page 97]

The invention of a new culture

Young as Swanson was, he kept everyone focused on product-oriented research. He continued to have scant tolerance for spending time, effort, and money on research not tied directly to producing marketable products. “We were interested in making something usable that you could turn into a drug, inject in humans, take to clinical trials.” A few year before his premature death, Swanson remarked, “I think one of the things I did best in those days was to keep us very focused on making a product.“ His goal-directed management style differed markedly from that of Genentech’s close competitors. [Page 129]

But at the same time Boyer would guarantee a high quality research level by encouraging employees to write the best possible scientific articles. This guaranteed the reputation of Genentech in the academic world.

A culture was taking shape at Genentech that had no exact counterpart in industry or academia. The high-tech firms in Silicon Valley and along Route 128 in Massachusetts shared its emphasis on innovation, fast-moving research, and intellectual property creation and protection. But the electronics and computer industries, and every other industrial sector for that matter, lacked the close, significant, and sustained ties with university research that Genentech drew upon from the start and that continue to define the biotechnology industry of today. Virtually every element in the company’s research endeavor – from its scientists to its intellectual and technological foundations – had originated in decade upon decade of accumulated basic-science knowledge generated in academic labs. […] At Boyer’s insistence, the scientists were encouraged to publish and engage in the wide community of science. [Page 131]

But academic values had to accommodate corporate realities: at Swanson’s insistence, research was to lead to strong patents, marketable products, and profit. Genentech’s culture was in short a hybrid of academic values brought in line with commercial objectives and practices. [Page 132]

Swanson was the supportive but insistent slave driver, urging on employees beyond their perceived limits: “Bob wanted everything. He would say, If you don’t have more things on your plate than you can accomplish, then you’re not trying hard enough. He wanted you to have a large enough list that you couldn’t possibly get everything done, and yet he wanted you to try.” […] Fledging start-ups pitted against pharmaceutical giants could compete mainly by being more innovative, aggressive, and fleet of foot. Early Genentech had those attributes in spades. Swanson expected – demanded – a lot of everyone. His attitude was as Roberto Crea recalled: “Go get it; be there first; we have to beat everybody else… We were small, undercapitalized, and relatively unknown to the world. We had to perform better than anybody else to gain legitimacy in the new industry. Once we did, we wanted to maintain leadership.” […] As Perkins said “Bob would never be accused of lacking a sense of urgency. “ […] Even Ullrich, despite European discomfort with raucous American behavior, admitted to being seduced by Genentech’s unswervingly committed, can-do culture. [Page 133]

New exit strategies

Initially Kleiner thought Genentech would be acquired by a major pharma company. It was just a question of when. He approached Johnson and Johnson and “floated the idea of a purchase price of $80 million. The offer fell flat. Fred Middleton [Genentech’s VP of finance], present at the negotiations, speculated that J&J didn’t have “a clue about what to do with this [recombinant DNA] technology – certainly didn’t know what it was worth. They couldn’t fit it in a Band-Aid mold”. J&J executives were unsure how to value Genentech, there being no standard for comparison or history of earnings.” [Page 140]

Perkins and Swanson made one more attempt to sell Genentech. Late in 1979, Perkins, Swanson, Kiley and Middleton boarded a plane for Indianapolis to meet with Eli Lilly’s CEO and others in top management. Perkins suggested a selling price of $100 million. Middleton’s view is that Lilly was hamstrung by a conservative “not invented here” mentality, an opinion supported by the drug firm’s reputation for relying primarily on internal research and only reluctantly on outside contracts. The company’s technology was too novel, too experimental, too unconventional for a conservative pharmaceutical industry to adopt whole-heartedly. [Page 141]

When Genentech successfully developed interferon, a new opportunity happened. Interferon had been discovered in 1957 and thought to prevent virus infection. In November 1978, Swanson signed a confidential letter of intent with Hoffmann – La Roche and a formal agreement in January 1980. They were also lucky: “Heyneker and a colleague attended a scientific meeting in which the speaker – to everyone’s astonishment given the field’s intense competitiveness – projected a slide of a partial sequence of fibroblast interferon. They telephoned the information to Goeddel, who instantly relay the sequence order to Crea. […] Crea started to construct the required probes. […] Goeddel constructed a “library” of thousands upon thousands of bacterial cells, seeking ones with interferon gene. Using the partial sequence Pestka retrieved, Goeddel cloned full-length DNA sequences for both fibroblast and leukocyte interferon. […] In June 1980, after filing patent protection, Genentech announced the production in collaboration with Roche.” [Page 145] Genentech could consider going public and after another fight between Perkins and Swanson, Genentech decided to do so. Perkins had seen that the year 1980 was perfect for financing biotech companies through a public offering but Swanson saw the challenges this would mean for a young company with nearly no revenue or product.

New role models

The 1980-81 period would see the creation of a fleet of entrepreneurial biology-based companies – Amgen, Chiron, Calgene, Molecular Genetics, Integrated Genetics, and firms of a lesser note – all inspired by Genentech’s example of a new organizational model for biological and pharmaceutical research. Before the IPO window closed in 1983, eleven biotech companies in addition to Genentech and Cetus, had gone public*. […] But not only institutions were transformed. Genentech’s IPO transformed Herb Boyer, the small-town guy of blue-collar origins, into molecular biology’s first industrial multimillionaire. For admiring scientists laboring at meager academic salaries in relative obscurity, he became a conspicuous inspiration for their own research might be reoriented and their reputation enhanced. If unassuming Herb – just a guy from Pittsburgh, as a colleague observed – could found a successful company with all the rewards and renown that entailed, why couldn’t they? [Page 161]

*: According to one source, the companies staging IPO were Genetic Systems, Ribi Immunochem, Genome Therapeutics, Centocor, Bio-Technology General, California Biotechnology, Immunex, Amgen, Biogen, Chiron, and Immunomedics. (Robbins-Roth, From Alchemy To Ipo: The Business Of Biotechnology)

Following these three posts, I might write a fourth one about academic licenses in the biotechnology if and when I find some time…

The business of biotech – Part 2

After a short analysis of Amgen through the book by Gordon Binder – Science Lessons – here’s a more statistical description of the world of biotech. I am considering a third part about Genentech as a conclusion of this group. For several years, I have been manually building the capitalization tables of start-ups in general thanks to their IPO documents. They probably contain errors as the exercise requires attention and accuracy, but I imagine that these errors are averaged. I have today more than 350 cases, which are published on Slideshare.

At the end of this document, I have added some synthetic data from which I extract the following. Remember that my sampling is done as I find new companies, so it is not totally random or statistically neutral …

Biotechnology represents a significant part of my data, I will return to this later. VC fundraising is not more important than in other areas, which may seem surprising but it is because a biotech start-up goes public in term of maturity well before the start-ups of other fields. Besides their sales level ($11M on average) is much lower than the others ($114M for the average of all). Also they count 71 employees against 521 for the full set. The Amgen example illustrated that an IPO in fact more a complementary VC round than a market validation. However the first round is much bigger, probably because of the resources required for the initial proof of concept. The (profits and) losses are similar to other areas (excluding software and internet).

BiotechDataFeatures

Now a small digression about the founders and the sharing of equity. They are much older (45 years) than average (38 years) and only come close the founders of medtech start-up. Probably because of the specific domain (length of academic curriculum and difficulties in inventing without a long experience). Another consequence of the dynamics of the field (including the uncertainties), the founders retain less equity at the IPO and investors get a larger share.

BiotechDataFeatures2

I now return to the biotech industry through its geography first and its timeline later. One known fact – the importance of the Boston area and the East Coast of the USA in general – and perhaps a surprise – the just as great importance of Silicon Valley and California more generally. It is often believed that the Boston area is the site of biotechnology, which is true with respect to other areas, but the West Coast is just as creative and entrepreneurial.

Cap_Tables_Fields_vs_Georaphy

Finally it would be wrong to believe that the Internet has removed biotech. The periods here represent the years of creation of the startups. Biotech is the main field (over one third) since the 2000’s whereas they accounted for less than a quarter before. Again remember that my sample is not statistically validated …

Cap_Tables_Fields_vs_Period

Cap_Tables_Fields_vs_Period_percent