Transcript
Speaker: Hi, everyone, and welcome to Spark Time. I'm Dani Stoltzfus. And I'm Will Riddle. Of Mighty Spark Communications. Our mission is to use scientific innovation to drive transformative change. We believe that compelling storytelling is the most effective tool we have in our arsenal to motivate and inspire audiences to invest themselves in audacious goals. We are scientists by training, storytellers by experience, and entrepreneurs by nature. Let's get started.
Speaker: Today we're exploring the art of storytelling in biotech as we delve into the power of a well -delivered pitch. Our guest, Dietrich Steffen, a seasoned biotech executive, entrepreneur and genomic scientist, shares his experiences in driving investor audiences to make bets on innovative technology.
Speaker: Well, in today's episode, the podcast's very first episode, we're discussing one of the most exciting and stressful times in a company's growth, and that is getting early investment. So what does a company look like when they're going out to raise for the first time? Well, typically they have an idea, which they have some data to support that it works, and they're super excited to get that next piece of data and the next confirmation that they're on track to bring a big idea to fruition.
Speaker: The challenge is, how do you get investors to feel as excited and invested in your big idea as you are? That's the crux of what we're going to be discussing today. Let's have a quick history lesson on VC investment. We all know that 2021 was a boom year for biotech, and we all knew that the bubble was going to burst at some point in time.
Speaker: We saw this play out with a number of VC deals across both early and late stage, declining from 21 to 22, and that continued on into 2023. Interestingly though, all of the term sheets signed in 23, over half were for Series A rounds, indicating that investors are hungry for new ideas, innovation, and are willing to invest when a company has an idea that truly represents transformative change.
Speaker: Right, so someone who is very well -versed in powering transformative change is our guest today, Dr. Dietrich Steffen. Dietrich is a biotech executive and an entrepreneur with a background in genomics. He's played a significant role in the founding and the leadership of more than 30 companies, including several that have reached valuations exceeding a billion dollars. In those companies, Dietrich has frequently served as the founding CEO, where he's raised an incredible amount of money exceeding a billion dollars.
Speaker: Clearly, for many reasons, Dietrich is an expert at obtaining early investment in an idea, and we are delighted to be interviewing him today. So Dietrich, thank you so much for being here. We'd love to hear some more about your journey as an entrepreneur, so help us understand the magic that allows you to raise so much money. Well, Danny and Will, thank you very much for having me. It's a real pleasure and honor. Maybe by way of
Speaker: background, my interest is in trying to make sure people don't suffer and die needlessly from getting a bad shake related to a disease or disorder. And there are many people that have this passion. It's in fact an entire industry and it's, in my opinion, a noble endeavor to
Speaker: try and make a difference in the lives of those people who have no hope moving forward. Now, it's not easy. The body is the most complex machine we're probably ever going to encounter in the universe. And we probably know only about 1 % of its inner workings. So the idea that we can
Speaker: refabricate parts and figure out how to install those correctly to make the human machine function properly again is audacious. And in fact, the statistics reflect the audacity of that endeavor where any one, for example, therapeutic in its earliest stages has less than a 5 % chance of ever making its way
Speaker: into the marketplace to benefit humanity. And yet each of those often costs tens, hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars to move forward through the pipeline. And so you get a sense for not only how difficult it is to do this, but how expensive and inefficient the process is.
Speaker: That complexity and inefficiency is a complex
Speaker: equation to solve when you're trying to communicate to an investor or a partner that you've got the goods and it's going to work. And so what you guys are doing is of the utmost importance in terms of telling the story in a limited amount of time with its infinite complexity with all of the expertise behind it that needs to
Speaker: boil right up to the top and be viscerally understood and with the reality associated with it so that there's never a chink in the armor of credibility. So hats off to what you're doing and happy to have a discussion about how I've done it in the past.
Speaker: It's such a delicate dance that a founder has to do to get that funding and really, as you said, not show any chink in the armor. You've had so many experiences in doing so. I can't wait to dive into that. I would say with your background in terms of
Speaker: talking about realizing a vision and bringing forward transformative change, which is what Danny and I talk about every single day. And this is the first time you can do this in a company is after that early raise, then really, there's no one better to talk to you than you, Dietrich. So thanks again for joining us.
Speaker: Yeah, so I have to ask you, DJ, did you roll out of bed in a three -piece suit ready to raise money? Were you born this way? Were you always this amazing? And clearly, you've demonstrated your ability to do fantastic things in this really difficult space. And so what is your secret? What are some of the most valuable things that you've learned to incorporate when you're pitching a company and an idea so that it really does resonate with the audience that you're speaking to?
Speaker: Well, you're very kind, Danny. I view this as a constant learning endeavor and constant improvement over many reps is, I think, how you move forward. And so I began my journey by out of frustration, quite frankly. You know, initially as a academic researcher, we would
Speaker: try and understand the underpinnings of a disease. In my chosen field, human genetics, you know, we'd find a broken gene and then
Speaker: at the top of every paper and every grant, we'd say, and we're going to cure this disease. And so we'd publish the paper and write another grant and publish another paper and write another grant. And no cure magically appeared in the marketplace. And so over time, perhaps too long of a time, it dawned on me that these solutions weren't going to passively or magically appear in the marketplace as a result of my work. There had to be a direct and active connection.
Speaker: between myself as literally the world's expert. No one else knew this information before I figured it out. So given that I was the world's expert, the only way it was going to manifest itself was if I jumped in and played an active role.
Speaker: What did that look like? It looked really sloppy and really messy. And it was a whole bunch of mistakes over and over and over again across dozens of different companies. And I'm still learning. And so there is no magic here. What I would say is it all begins with a deep understanding of the fundamental science and innovation
Speaker: And then a conviction that that can be productized over a period of time with steps that do not include black boxes. The path, while it will have things that need to be solved, should
Speaker: should exist within the entrepreneur with deep conviction. And that expertise plus a thoughtful conviction will ultimately allow you to
Speaker: talk about it in that way. And that's the fundamental of any pitch. Everything else is important, but I'd say is window dressing. And that's the first form that my pitches took. I can remember the very first company I
Speaker: I ever founded, I was actually still running a genome institute, running research at a genome institute. And I was in my office and we happened to have some VCs from Silicon Valley touring the building. And my colleague said, hey, you should talk to Dietrich about this science paper he just published. And so they popped into my office and I pulled up just a bunch of science slides on my computer and they were standing next to my computer. And I said, we did this and we did this.
Speaker: Here's the animal pharmacology data, and the stuff works. And the next thing you know, in the background, we had gotten sort of a seed round put in place. And that's the fundamentals of everything. Now, over time, you learn
Speaker: that there is window dressing around that, that makes it easier for investors to engage in the story and to fund you. Really, well articulating the unmet need and the market sizing and the competitive landscape and your IP position.
Speaker: You know your exit strategy and comparables for that exit strategy and time to exit and liquidity and an accurate use of proceeds many people underestimate what it's going to take to To build and so so over time you dial those in But that's really only I'd say part one and and that's an evolution so Part two
Speaker: crucially is understanding your audience. At first, you don't really have the capacity to understand your audience and where they come from and what their interests are because it's a different beast, an investor, capital allocator with a fund life and a thesis and a portfolio of investments that
Speaker: you know, may or may not need to be redundant and so forth. And so imagine sort of shouting your aha idea into a crowd of people randomly without knowing, you know, how to dial it in. And so that sort of part two is in every pitch, every single pitch needs to be dialed in to that particular investor and their interests.
Speaker: and resonate with them. So yeah, so I'll stop there.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a really interesting point, Dietrich. And the clients that we work with often need this message kind of reinforced is that every audience is slightly different, and your pitch deck will vary from audience to audience. And that's OK. It's about understanding who you're talking to and talking to them in the language that they're used to hearing and that they want to hear. And we often get asked, what is it that investors are looking for?
Speaker: How is a seed and angel investor different from a VC and things like that so it definitely seems like there's a lot of mystery around the audience for early founders and i think that. No one thing we try to strive to achieve is to demystify that process and bring our experience to the table i think will you probably agree with that comment.
Speaker: I do and I'm also struck by what Dietrich said around conviction is that is coming from the science, we're all scientists here. And when you're in the position of translating science into a more general audience, for example, an investor audience, unless they're also scientists.
Speaker: Something that may not come across is how convinced you are of your ideas. And what we've seen with a number of our clients is that when they go through conversations with investors and they show the same deck over and over again, they start to get the same questions. And then they start to hedge everything that they put into their deck with qualifying statements. And they sort of get lost in a rabbit hole of providing far too much information.
Speaker: And what we hear from them is that that leads to really pointed questions from investors that they latch onto and they lose sight of the overall picture that has convinced them, the founder, in the first place and they start to doubt themselves.
Speaker: Yeah, really interesting, Will. I don't know, Dietrich. Perhaps, I don't know if you've ever felt yourself in that position, but I think we'd love to hear about a time where you found yourself in an investor rabbit hole and trying to dig your way out because you've taken something in the wrong direction. Those learnings are so valuable and learning how to listen to what people are looking for and speak to that. I'd love to hear about one of your terrible failures, if you're willing to give us
Speaker: Dirty details. Yeah, so every company is a new adventure and most of the activities along that adventure will be new activities by definition. No one has ever brought that particular product to market before in the history of humanity.
Speaker: you will get questions as an entrepreneur or a CEO as to, well, what about this? And what about that? And many times the answer is I don't know, which is absolutely okay. Because that's, that's part of the build. The, the,
Speaker: The important thing is that we've number one got the best team out there. So you, you've heard me say this before. Team is everything. Great teams can do great things. Terrible teams can't period. So 100 % true. So if you've got a great team.
Speaker: Chances are you can solve your way through it if you need to compliment your team with other experts Go get them and help them get them to help you solve your way through it So I would say just I Think one of one of the Achilles heels of many teams that go out is pretending to know everything about everything And that is an instant loss of credibility in my in my opinion, right? Yeah
Speaker: So don't be afraid to say, I don't know, but hopefully you as the investor can actually help us solve some of these problems we're going to hit.
Speaker: I really like how you took that to the place of let's partner together in solving this problem because we believe so deeply that together we're stronger and we can solve more challenges where we work as a team. I really like that that resonates in how you think of communicating with the investors as well because it's such an unusual way to hear it spoken about, but I really believe in the power of that.
Speaker: Yeah. And by the way, many investors want to add value and want to be your partner and can add value to what you're doing. And I would say select your investors in that manner. So you're in charge of your company and your destiny, and you should bring the right investors around it that can actually add value.
Speaker: A lot of people think I'm just going to go get any investor that will fund me. And I think that's the wrong strategy. I would be very selective. Yeah. And I think.
Speaker: I want to take this in a slightly tangential direction now because you just made me think of something that I really wanted to get your opinion on was, we hear often that one really compelling way to introduce a concept to someone is, say the state of problem and demonstrate that you have a solution to it.
Speaker: When you're a scientist, you often already know what the solution is, but it's quite hard to place your solution within the greater picture of what's going on around you. How do you navigate doing that aspect of, well, I know how to do this, and this is the big picture that it solves? Because I feel like as a scientist, and when we talk to other scientists, we often focus so much on the detail, but really struggle to zoom out and see the big picture.
Speaker: Is that something that you faced and so how do you kind of navigate that? Yeah, in the early days, I absolutely did. I had no macro context within which I was operating and had no idea of competitive programs and timing of those and how my proposed solution would layer on top of or beat them to market or otherwise. And so that I think is a common fumble.
Speaker: when going out. And I think more recently, it's embedded within the concept of become the expert before you go out. We had talked about the core narrative or the fundamentals and then the window dressing around it. And so that set of features that I would characterize as window dressing, it's the wrong word.
Speaker: Yeah. Those are important to become an expert in as well. And look, when you take the story out after you become the expert, you're still probably only at 80%. And investors are pros. The best ones are incredibly smart. I mean, think about what their job is. It's to take in. It's amazing. Hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars.
Speaker: and multiply that and that requires the best of the best. And so if you get a question that you don't know,
Speaker: I think it's fair to turn it back around and say, hey, we hadn't thought about that. What's your view on that? And then you integrate that immediately back into the story. You learn it and you integrate it back into the story. And after your first 10 pitches, you've moved from 80 to 95%. And now you're really singing.
Speaker: And we can get into pitching strategy, but that's the way I always tranche the conversations is do around with friendlies, dial in the story and then take it out more broadly. Yeah, that's great advice. That's amazing. Yeah, just how adaptive you have to be to get what you need out of those relationships and those conversations.
Speaker: It's really all about how you're communicating what you're doing to the folks who want to know about it and empower you to do so. So with that perspective, Dietrich, you've been on the receiving end of a lot of pitches, I'm sure, given that you sit on a lot of different boards. I'm sure you've heard a lot of different pitches from people you're friendly with or people you've been connected with.
Speaker: Some of the ideas that we've been talking about are conviction that you build over time and you bake into your pitch deck and you're showing resilience in solving those issues. How do you think some of those things come through when you're on the receiving end of the pitch? How do you interpret them when you're viewing someone either make those mistakes or power through them?
Speaker: Yeah. Well, can I just take a half step back for a second? I think it's important to mention that even after everything we've just said, raising a financing round on the private side generally takes between three and six months and entails 50 conversations with VCs. And at the end of that, you'll
Speaker: You'll get someone that will lead the round and you'll have to fill in with follow -ons. So even after all of that expertise and conviction and dialing in, you're having
Speaker: 50 plus one hour conversations, and then people who get interested will go deeper. And so this is a lot of work. But it's really, I think, the success metrics that are important to call out and the expectations that someone should have if they're going to go do a private VC round, particularly in this macro environment where things have tightened up more recently. I think that's going to loosen up next calendar year.
Speaker: But it's important to set those expectations. So what does that mean? That means everyone has a different palette and a different investment thesis and sees risk in a different way. Otherwise, everyone would invest in everything that I thought made sense, which is just not reality. And it's just not me. I mean, this is the way it works.
Speaker: Okay, so with that now clear that everyone has a different lens on every different story, if you flip it around, I have particular things that are very important to me when I'm evaluating getting involved in a company. First and foremost are two things. One is the entrepreneur of the team.
Speaker: And I like to think I have good EQ, but I really take the time to get to know the team. And what does that look like? It's going out to dinner. It's talking for a couple of hour sessions, really sort of pressing into
Speaker: some of the core cultural beliefs I have about how companies should be built and watching people's micro reactions to those. And so taking that very seriously is number one. And number two is obviously the fundamentals. And so before I get involved in anything, I'll actually go read the papers. I'll sort of becoming a mini expert in the way that I just described to you so that I can get conviction because
Speaker: Look, our most limited resource in life is time. And the last thing I want to do is get involved in a company that's going to take seven years and hours a week of my time and have nothing make sense or not work. So the fundamentals are important.
Speaker: My personal belief is that there will always be problems to be solved. There will be issues with technologies and markets and so forth. And so you shouldn't expect none of that. You should expect all of that, but it's a matter of getting comfortable with those and comfortable that you can solve your way through them. And so I would just say those are my two main criteria that I look at before I get involved in anything.
Speaker: Yeah, that's, that's really helpful. I think I really resonate with getting to know the team. I think that's such an important part of it because it's almost like you're entering a relationship with these people and you want to know that you're entering a good one. And like you say that if you, if time is limited, that you maximize the value that you can create with that time and not only so much innovation really has the potential to be transformative and we have to be
Speaker: Why is it about where we spend our time if we want to maximize the potential there? So it really makes sense to me. Yeah, I'll give you an example of that. It's so important. Great. If you just think about the prototypical founder entrepreneur, this is an academic that has shouted eureka over some innovation and maybe published a paper on it. If you think about the other main stakeholder we're describing, it's an investor that may have an MBA, probably also has a PhD or MBA.
Speaker: and is in charge of deploying capital, those two people speak very different languages. And when you can't communicate seamlessly, there's a level of potential mistrust that might emerge or confusion. I can remember when I started my first company,
Speaker: And I got a term sheet for the seed investment that I described. It was like reading Greek. I had no idea what all this stuff meant. So the first thing I did was go hire my own lawyer and give them the term sheet and
Speaker: I'm paying for all of this out of my pocket as an academic and they're marking it up and I'm sending that turn sheet back to the investors. The investors are looking at it saying, this guy has no idea what he's doing. And so you get into this cycle. And so how do you break that? It's by being able to, in a trusted way,
Speaker: translate between all of these stakeholders to build the trust. And trust is built over very long periods of time so that when something really serious happens, you can grab someone, say, hey, we got to talk. And it's not an ad hominem issue. It's actually grappling with a substance of something where everyone knows you're working in the best interest of the company. And that kind of glue is
Speaker: missing in many companies. And so what happens is you get these toxic dynamics that emerge where you've got investors on a board who are pounding the table and saying, why isn't this going faster? We need an exit. Our fund life is ending. But really have no expertise or no visibility into the workings of the company. And you've got management sitting there saying, everything's on track. What's going on?
Speaker: And so those are the types of things that can actually be death nails to morale and to the companies themselves if they're not treated very carefully. And so that's where all of this sort of softer interpersonal stuff becomes of existential importance. Yeah, so true. So true. I guess, you know,
Speaker: Having said all of that, what we've discussed today has been so informative. What is your next challenge and what is your next passion and what are you going to do in 2024 and beyond? Because you've clearly been so successful in raising all this money and starting so many companies. Are you continuing that trajectory or looking for a bigger, harder challenge to solve now that you're so skilled at solving problems?
Speaker: Yeah, well, before we go there, we haven't even actually talked about the pitch. Oh, yes. I don't know if you want to talk about that or not, but I have a couple of thoughts on that. And so first, there has to be a narrative arc, and everything needs to be tied to and come back to that narrative arc. And of course, collaterals are of crucial importance
Speaker: In highlighting important elements of the story you know i think that. A lot of the stuff we've already touched on for example know your audience know their level of.
Speaker: scientific competency versus business competency help inform kind of the elevation of where you come in on the actual pitch and the narrative. But beyond that, you know, I've gotten great, you know, great comfort in a couple of things I'd love to refer your audience to that I actually go back to on a routine basis. One is a,
Speaker: is a lecture by a professor named Patrick Winston at MIT. The lecture is available on YouTube. It's entitled How to Speak. And it is a masterclass in how to communicate with your audience and how to use collaterals at the same time. And so I can't recommend that highly enough.
Speaker: Again, without going into details of structuring the narrative, the second resource that I find has stood out over the last decades for me is a book called Resonate by Nancy Duarte, which I just love. And so to sort of short circuit this section of our conversation, I would just refer folks to those two resources.
Speaker: Yes, totally agree. Thank you. And I have a copy of Residate on my table that I'm looking at right now. Such a valuable resource, so thanks for sharing those. Any other tips for crafting a good pitch, Dietrich?
Speaker: Yeah, I would listen, listen when when listen and look when you're in a pitch. A lot of people can't read the room. And if you've got investors tuning out, you're going in the wrong direction. You've got to bring them back. And if people ask questions,
Speaker: Think about the question before you answer it. A lot of people don't listen just generally in life. If you want to build conviction in an investor that you're going to listen to them over the course of their deployment of capital, start in the first interaction.
Speaker: and be thoughtful in answering it. And if you don't know, say you don't know. I think that those are obvious, but they're secret weapons when you're in a pitch. I've seen management teams just go in there, roll over it with their practice slick pitch and walk out, and it just totally didn't land. Yeah, it's not very compelling. Yeah. So do you want to move on to your question, Danny?
Speaker: Yeah, please. I'd love to hear what's next for you, Dietrich. Yeah. Well, I'm not sure I would say what's next. I would say it's how
Speaker: how does one scale this type of work? And if you think about the amount of innovation that's happening on the global stage outside of epicenters like Boston, San Francisco, San Diego, you get a sense of how much innovation
Speaker: incredible science is dying on the vine and not making its way into the world to benefit those who are sick and dying. And so my, um, my sites are set on how do you drive efficiency into that process at scale? Um, actually wrote a Harvard business review article on this a few years ago. And, um, you know, I'm beginning to
Speaker: work to put the infrastructure in place to manifest this. It's non -trivial, but there have been some big structural changes in the world that I think make this possible at this point in time. One is the fluidity of capital. And so it was a decade ago.
Speaker: that VCs would not invest outside of their backyard. It was common rhetoric to say, if I can't drive to a board meeting, I'm not investing in it. That's absolutely changed. There are no geographic limitations anymore on capital.
Speaker: The second is virtual teams. And this is perhaps the only benefit from COVID, but we all use Zoom every day for almost every meeting these days. It's just commonplace. And the notion that teams can be distributed across the world and still be highly effective is brand new as of just a few years ago. I think those are two crucial elements to getting things moving at scale. I still buck against the inefficiencies.
Speaker: in drug development that have arisen
Speaker: off the back of support organizations that are used to living off of Big Pharma. And so a small biotech that's just raised 10, 20, $30 million cannot afford to go hire a CRO for this and a CRO for that, a consultant for this and a consultant for that that all charged through the nose because they're used to working with Big Pharma. So there needs to be significant reform in that area of
Speaker: of biotech pharma, and I think the other area that I'm keenly interested in is think about where the cost of drug development are. A huge slug of that is in clinical trials, and think about the perpatient costs for enrolling and prosecuting a trial. It's through the roof, and so how do you
Speaker: use modern distributed or virtual clinical trials that might be more technology driven to supplant what I'll just call the stagnant bureaucracy of how clinical trials are run today. I think those are two pressure points I'm interested in, in unlocking so we can really accelerate this movement. So yeah, so that's what's been on my mind recently.
Speaker: Well, that's ambitious and audacious and completely in keeping with your style. So it's really, really exciting to hear about what's coming. And I really can't wait to hear how that plays out for you. And, you know, we'd love to keep in touch and have you back and hear you talk about that in the future.
Speaker: Absolutely. Well, any time and hats off to both of you for what you're doing. It's so crucially needed. It's of the highest importance in terms of being able to effectively tell the story to unlock transformational solutions. So I'm always around. Thank you, Dietrich. Amazing. Thank you so much, Dietrich. It's been great having you.
Speaker: Wow, what a great interview. Titric's been on such an amazing journey in his career. I can't even imagine today showing an investor some science slides and that catalyzing a seed round. That just seems so unbelievable to me. Well, what do you think the most valuable thing was from the conversation today?
Speaker: Yeah, I agree. That was pretty amazing. I think Dietrich gave us a lot of practical advice. And although it can be generalized to most things in life, I do think that constant improvement over a number of repetitions will yield positive results over time. That's an especially powerful tool in forging relationships with investors. It's like flexing your funding muscle.
Speaker: Oh my God, that's a mental image I don't need. Yeah, sorry for that image. Something else I took away, and we hear about issues with this pretty often. Expertise with thoughtful conviction is the core of a successful pitch. People who hear your story for the first time might have a lot of questions, some of which are outside your area of expertise, but when it's in your wheelhouse, be thoughtful and show conviction. People really respond to that.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a really good point. Honestly, I can't imagine working that hard to drive success if you didn't have deep conviction for the idea that you were pushing forward. It would be like constantly banging your head against the wall. I'm sure there's many aspects of being a biotech entrepreneur that feel that way, even if you do have deep conviction about the idea. Sure.
Speaker: My favorite part of the interview was when Dietrich talked about partnering with investors to solve problems together. It's such a unique way of thinking about that and also the concept of bringing in people to support you when you lack some key experience or some key skills like you would as an early founder. I think that's such a powerful way to lead a team and really, really impressive.
Speaker: Absolutely. Well, I hope our listeners enjoyed the gems of wisdom that Dietrich has shared with us and perhaps even incorporate some of his learnings into their own entrepreneur journeys. Join us next time as we continue to power scientific innovation with storytelling to drive transformative change and solve our most demanding challenges.
