Matt and Kara on All Things D

After confessing a “man crush” on Matt (whatever that means??), Kara Swisher has a good interview with WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg.

A Short Walk on the Biotech Side

As an Internet/Digital Media investor, virtually all of my blogging has been about stuff in these sectors.

However, one of the really fun things about my partnership is that we invest in an incredibly diverse range of opportunities, spanning consumer, retail, business services, tech, and life sciences.

In fact, my partners on the Life Science and Biotech side have had some phenomenal successes over the past few years, so much so that I am going to have to start mentioning them now and again. Forgive my shameless bragging about my partners here, I can’t resist.

Earlier this week, it was announced that GlaxoSmithKline was acquiring Sirtris Pharmaceutical for a whopping $720M.  Four years ago — which really is a blink of the eye in biopharma time — my partners helped start Sirtris, and we made a tiny seed investment.  Just a couple years after that Sirtris emerged from the academic laboratory to the Nasdaq, and just a couple years after that, this sale to one of the major pharma companies.

What’s especially neat, though, is that this meteoric rise from an academic research project to IPO and/or sale, is not an isolated lucky strike.  In fact, just last week The Wall Street Journal described the track record my partner Terry McGuire has had backing one particularly prolific scientist, MIT’s Bob Langer, to launch 13 diferent companies. Here is the article in full:

Scientist Gives VC an Edge
MIT’s Robert Langer,
Investor Terry McGuire
Start 13 Firms in 15 Years

By REBECCA BUCKMAN
April 14, 2008; Page B5

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — When the idea for a new drug-delivery company called BIND Biosciences Inc. started percolating in a lab here four years ago, venture capitalists quickly offered to invest.

Robert Langer, who runs the lab, and partner Terry McGuire, have launched 13 companies.

One moneyman, though, had an inside track: Terry McGuire, a partner with nearby Polaris Venture Partners. Mr. McGuire was familiar with BIND’s nanoparticle technology to treat tumors and heart disease. He’s also a friend, and frequent business partner, of Robert Langer, the decorated scientist who runs the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lab. That relationship often gives Polaris first dibs on cutting-edge medical technology developed there.

Together, Messrs. McGuire and Langer have launched 13 companies over the past 15 years and become a model for other venture capitalists scrambling to commercialize new drug and medical-device research. Dr. Langer, 59 years old, holds more than 600 patents and supplies the science; Mr. McGuire, 52, fine-tunes the business. Some of Mr. McGuire’s work with Mr. Langer was described in a 2005 Harvard Business School case study called, “The Langer Lab: Commercializing Science.”

“I don’t think either one of them would have been as successful without the other,” says Andrey Zarur, a bioscience investor with Kodiak Venture Partners who is familiar with Dr. Langer’s lab.

Other serial “academic entrepreneurs” have teamed up with VCs to launch bioscience companies. They include Harvard professor George Whitesides, who helped start biotech giant Genzyme Corp. and drug company Theravance Inc., and Stanford ophthalmologist Mark Blumenkranz, whose research helped launch OptiMedica Corp., which is developing new technology to treat eye disease. Dr. Blumenkranz joined with venture capitalist Brook Byers on OptiMedica, and “we’re working on another project together,” says Mr. Byers, a partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. But few venture capitalists have been as successful as Mr. McGuire in cultivating one scientist as a source of deals.

Hooking up with a prolific university inventor is important in bioscience investing because most health-related start-ups, unlike information-technology companies, are born in academia. The technology is complex, and investors say they prefer to work with a longtime partner they can trust.

Mr. McGuire first sought out Dr. Langer, a wiry chemical engineer, in the early 1990s after hearing about his research into drug delivery and “regenerative medicine,” or techniques to rebuild human tissue and organs. One early big hit came in 1997, when they co-founded, with another Langer protege, Advanced Inhalation Research Inc. The company, which devised a novel way to deliver large-molecule drugs via the lungs, was sold for $113 million in stock 18 months later; Polaris made nearly 10 times its money, and Dr. Langer profited as a significant shareholder of AIR.

Since then, the two have teamed up on other drug-related start-ups like Pulmatrix Inc., which is developing inhalable aerosols for respiratory disease, and Tempo Pharmaceuticals Inc., which uses nanotechnology to create new drugs. Of the 13 investments, two companies went public and three were acquired.

Dr. Langer has a knack for understanding which lab projects can be commercialized and which are better left to scientific journals, Mr. McGuire says. Researchers who have worked for Dr. Langer say he is a talented manager who hires smart graduate students and gives them leeway to pursue their interests, whether they lie in stem-cell research, tissue generation or drug delivery.

Mr. McGuire, meanwhile, helps the scientist-entrepreneurs in Dr. Langer’s lab develop business plans, target potential markets and recruit managers. He also helps them negotiate partnerships with bigger companies and sometimes lends them spare offices at Polaris’s headquarters.

Polaris is often the first place Dr. Langer and his researchers turn when they’re considering starting a company. Sometimes, “when we end up doing deals, it’s a 20-second phone call,” Dr. Langer says.

Protégés of the men now collaborate as well. BIND began with research by Omid Farokhzad, a researcher in Dr. Langer’s lab who was trying to engineer nanoparticles to deliver drugs to specific sites in the body. He sought advice from Amir Nashat, a Polaris partner who had also worked in Dr. Langer’s lab. Mr. Nashat met Polaris’s Mr. McGuire through Dr. Langer.

Then Mr. McGuire stepped in, helping Mr. Farokhzad negotiate a license for his technology from MIT. Mr. McGuire also helped the company find a lawyer and recruited BIND’s chief executive, Glenn Batchelder. “Before there was even a company, we tried to be helpful,” Mr. McGuire says.

BIND spurned an investment offer from another venture-capital firm and, last year, took $2.5 million in funding from Polaris and Flagship Ventures, of Cambridge. In November, it raised another $16 million. BIND now has 21 employees, and a partnership with a big pharmaceutical company, which it declined to name.

Startup Metrics

One of the great things about building an online business these days is that you can actually get a product built and out in the wild fairly quickly and inexpensively, and then get down to figuring out what works and doesn’t work with real live users. To make the most of this, though, you really need to focus on measuring what is happening with the users of your site or service.  In my experience, entrepreneurs often don’t apply the rigor and discipline that they should to this stage of the process.

Dave McClure has a good presentation on this topic.

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Most Bloggers Don’t Deserve Ad Revenue

Louis Gray has a good and provocative post by this title. I don’t think he is wrong.

WordPress vs. Facebook

Fred Wilson got a great discussion going on WordPress vs. Facebook, or, more specifically, how and why blogging is going to become the social network for adults.

It’s a good provocative post but even better is the conversation in the comments.

Mine is here.

WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg’s is here.

Other interesting comments from less notorious bloggers (haha!) are here and here and here

Boston Startup Events

Don Dodge has pulled together a good list of what’s going on in and around startups in the Boston area. Check it out here.

Meet the Boston Bruiser

Fred Wilson has “the Gotham Gal” (his wife), and I’ve got “the Boston Bruiser.”

The Bruiser, born and raised in California, picked up ice hockey a few years after we moved to Boston, and has taken to it with a vengeance. She now captains a team known as Women on Edge (I preferred their old name, “Chicks with Sticks” but that got voted down last year).

Last weekend we watched the WOE team play in a season finale tournament, which included an opening game against a team from Concord, MA.  My brother lives in Concord, and one of his friends’ wife played on the opposing team.  My brother, this friend, and I watched the game together, and all had a good laugh when our wives had a collision against the boards. I laughed a little harder than he, since his wife went down to the ice while the Boston Bruiser scooped up the puck and zipped down the ice.

I just learned that he is no longer so amused, since his wife actually broke her finger in the fall, leaving him to do the dinner dishes.

Hence the name “Boston Bruiser.”

Is Geography a VC cliche?

Chris Wand of The Foundry Group has a thoughtful post on why he and his partners are happy to follow the best entrepreneurs and best deals to invest across the U.S.

As a geographically challenged VC with as many investments in California and New York as in my backyard, I am happy to see others making the case.

Maybe I am not crazy after all.

Power Day in Silicon Valley

Amidst what otherwise is a San Francisco week for me, I spent yesterday down in the Valley.

Without really trying to, it worked out that I ended up hitting all the power schmooze spots around Palo Alto: coffee at Coupa Cafe, breakfast at Buck’s, lunch at Il Fornaio, coffee at University Cafe, yada yada yada…

The highlight, though, was when I — literally — bumped into my former boss, Justice Kennedy (I was a law clerk to Justice Kennedy back in 1994). I ended up spending about an hour having a glass of wine and catching up with the Justice, and his wife.  Pretty random, but it was alot of fun to catch up with my old boss, who in addition to being a relatively important guy is also very nice and fun to talk with.

Back from FaceCamp

Last weekend I corralled about 15 entrepreneurs in and around the Facebook ecosystem for a couple days of back country cat skiing and discussion of where all this social networking stuff is going.  A tad of good food and drink were consumed too (if you happen to be a Facebook friend of Seth Goldstein you may have noticed a video of the Slide vs. RockYou beer chug-off).

The skiing, conversation, and crowd were all phenomenal! Only bummer was that we had to return to the real world.