How I Help Venture

This transcript has been slightly modified from the original recording.

I’ve been connecting with so many people during the coronavirus quarantine.  So many of them in venture capital and the same question keeps coming up.  How can I help them out?   I thought that I would pull this together and give a comprehensive accounting of how I work with venture.

If you don’t know me well, I encourage you to visit my med tech-strategy.com site, and hear about my story and journey.   Top level, I’ve been in executive leadership positions and P&L ownership positions at Mylan (EpiPen), Baxter Healthcare (Surgical Devices), and Highmark Health (Vital Program) and as well have owned a consulting business for a number of years and a medical device distributorship. 

So, how do I help?  Generally speaking with the venture community:

• I help you make better decisions
• I help company leaders make progress faster and better
• And I help with founding

So, what’s it really mean when I say I help you make better decisions? Well, specifically I can do three things:

• I can provide insight into the business of healthcare.  One recent example is when a venture fund called me and was interested in digital therapeutics.  They were having trouble understanding how payers were going to reimburse with these technologies, so I walked them through the current perspectives.
• I can help with the validation of solutions or understand the level of clinical interest that exists out there.  I did all these things at Baxter and Mylan when I was bringing in new acquisition targets that we could use to expand our P&L or portfolio.
• Lastly, I can help you validate the business model that companies propose and help you understand how the company plans on making money and whether that lines up with the healthcare system of today.

Next, I can help company leaders make progress faster and better.

• I can operate as a strategic advisor or fractional chief strategy or marketing officer to a CEO of a company you’ve invested in.  Today, I do this with a digital therapeutics company called Nightware, where I am the Chief Marketing Officer.
• I can help companies by leveraging my proven frameworks that I’ve developed over 25 different brands and businesses to help companies accelerate faster and develop a commercial foundation.
• I can also help people navigate through the complexities of the healthcare ecosystem.  Healthcare is complex and there’s a reason why so many companies fail and only the best survive. I would make sure that the companies you are investing in are using the best in class processes to make sure that they are going to be successful.
• I can participate as a member of the company board.  Today, I’m on the board of a large non-profit fighting homelessness in Chicago.

The last way that I can help companies is through founding.  

• I can either help you migrate past an early stage tactical founder
• or we could target a space together and solve the problem

The first one is pretty simple. I think we’ve all seen companies that have a great product. They have a great idea but I hate to say it….a technical founder may be standing in their way.  This is easily solvable. There’s usually a pathway for migration to someone who understands at a deep level that this is a business and how to take a great idea and turn it into dollars.

Lastly, let’s pick a space where there is a problem and fix it.  This is something that I was exposed to at Highmark.  There are huge healthcare problems that are costing the system hundreds of millions of dollars.  There is a way to double down on spaces that have the greatest amount of spend and start searching for problems that need to be solved.  We can then source the technical solution for the problem and create a company.

Well, thank you very much for your time.  I’m sure this helps you understand where I can help.  Feel free to give me a ring, or contact me via email.  I look forward to speaking with you soon!