The healthcare industry is notoriously complex, and moving the needle is a challenge for both entrepreneurs and investors. Often there is a disconnect between the people who have brilliant ideas, or invest in those ideas, and the people who do the work. Will X make a difference? Would a hospital buy Y? Can a primary care practice reasonably implement Z? Is this application of AI a solution looking for a problem? How can I efficiently identify promising early stage companies that have biological plausibility and address real, unmet needs?
For investors, we serve as a “force amplifier” that can enhance your current approach to investing. Because we are geographically distributed and subspecialty agnostic, we can find early stage companies you might have missed. Because our daily lives are spent in the trenches – providing patient care, making scientific discoveries, leading large and complicated teams – we can help you execute due diligence on your most challenging targets.
For entrepreneurs, time is money, and both are scarce. You want reliable answers and you want them quickly, without an expensive, lengthy engagement, and without rolling the dice on a matching platform. You definitely do not want your project farmed out to someone with no practical experience in your area(s) of interest. You want connections to key opinion leaders at top tier health systems. Our Hoplites work directly in the areas you seek to understand, have extensive professional networks, and are enthusiastic about creating positive change in healthcare.
Click on our menu to learn how we can help investors and entrepreneurs, or scroll below.
for Investors
Venture Scouting
Our network of physician-scientists has established relationships with major universities (covering > 60% of all NIH dollars, a surrogate marker for healthcare innovation in the U.S.), technology transfer offices, angel investment groups and biohubs at most major cities and public research universities in the United States. Additionally, we attend MedTech, Digital Health, and Healthcare Investor conferences. We research, track, filter, and aggregate a list of promising, early-stage healthcare companies. This list of companies, packaged with our analysis of the technical + scientific merit, market size, and pathway to payment, can supplement your deal flow.
Portfolio Company Support
When you invest in one of the companies we find, we can help connect your portfolio company to the health systems (both academic and community) where we work. Hospitals are notoriously impenetrable, and having a trusted physician advocate for you through meaningful introductions can make an enormous difference.
Advisory Boards
Whether you are seeking to add some trusted physician-scientists or healthcare leaders to your Advisory Board, or helping one of the companies in your portfolio add some key opinion leaders, we can help. Our network includes nationally-renowned clinicians, NIH-funded basic science researchers, Department Chairs, hospital CEOs, and everything in between.
Consulting
You want reliable answers and you want them quickly, without an expensive, lengthy engagement, and without rolling the dice on a matching platform. You can certainly hire an enormous company who may farm out your project to someone who’s never taken care of a patient in his or her life. Our consultants work directly in the areas you seek to understand. We can find you someone who can answer your question(s) from the vantage point of years of patient care, scientific discovery, and leadership experience, in most cases coupled with formal business training.
for Entreprenuers
Introductions
Part of our work is to really understand what healthcare investors are seeking – we study their portfolio and investment thesis, learn about their filters. For early stage companies we learn about and find compelling, we can introduce you to active healthcare venture capitalists, giving them an unbiased opinion on your business concept that means something because, ultimately, we are in the business of helping investors make smarter decisions based on insight from practitioners.
Feedback
There are a myriad of reasons we might not feel comfortable recommending your business to venture capital firms we know – do not take it personally! While we don’t want to engage in a non-productive debate about the strength of your intellectual property assets (just one example), if you took the trouble to introduce yourself to us, you deserve some honest, unbiased feedback. And even though it hurts, in the end we hope it can help you sharpen your message when you meet with the people who will be writing you checks.
Advisory Boards
If you are new company looking to build a Scientific Advisory Board, we can help. Our network includes nationally-renowned clinicians, NIH-funded basic science researchers, Department Chairs, hospital CEOs, and everything in between.
What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of “I’m not sure.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets
