Kristen Overly - Life Science Financing

Angel Invest Boston

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Kristen Overly works as management consultant and is a leader at MIT Life Science Angels. Kristen and I discussed various aspects of the funding of life science startups. She, like me, is intrigued by the opportunities in what Jeff Behrens called the scrappy biotechs in his doctoral thesis. Highlights include:

• Sal Daher Introduces Kristen Overly of MIT Life Science Angels & Back Bay Advisors
• “…MITLifeSciAngels.com. And we look for companies that have some sort of affiliation with MIT, whether that's a founder or a board member or maybe a scientific founder or maybe the technology came out of MIT.”
• “Who's invited to the [MIT Life Science Angels] meetings as potential investors?”
• “…. I remember it was kind of in the beginning times of Rubius Therapeutics because that was a similar-ish platform play to Remora.”
• “I suspect he had a hard time raising money, not having had a Ph.D. He's a brilliant guy, he could have done it but in the life sciences, it's almost like joining a holy priesthood or something. You have to have your Ph.D.”
• “… the increase in the number of SPACs recently. I think it just shows how different the life sciences industry is from the tech.”
• “…you just have to believe in the people, sign a blank cheque and hope that they can do their jobs right.”
• “But still the [SPAC] model is untested…. Acquisitions are hard. Most acquisitions fail…”
• “So basically 97% of the funding go to either life science companies that are created by the venture capital firms themselves or companies that have some kind of a star player, right?”
• “…when I was at MIT, I found myself frustrated because there were so many amazing technologies just kind of stuck in a lab.”
• “The number of scrappy biotechs is about to skyrocket.”
• “And there's a lot of not great AI technologies. People are just taking the open-source code and applying it and calling it a product and starting a company and getting money.”
• An Intro to Radio Pharmaceuticals
• “…my senior year, I got a really bad concussion, freak accident.”
• “Yeah, it was the hardest decision I had ever had to make in my life to take the year off at school. I mean, I was on this set path since I was born.”
• I'm passionate about is that only about two percent of all VC funds overall go to female founded companies.