Dana Mead: Venture Capitalists Mitigate Risks

So as I mentioned earlier, that we're willing to accept risk. There's a certain level of risk that we're willing to accept. And really what our job is, as Tina mentioned, is to really try to mitigate the risk the best we possibly can. And many people describe it the white hot risk. Whether that's a clinical risk or technical risk. What we try to do, as I mentioned earlier, is put those risks up front and, and solve for those risks before we get five, six, seven years and $100 million of capital down the road. So yes, and so that's what we're continually doing. And we try to look at it. Unfortunately, sometimes it's hard because over a six, eight year period, things can change dramatically in the market. Another technology can come out of somewhere. And that's really why there's a high mortality rate in early stage venture capital. Not all the companies I showed you a lot of logos are very successful companies. We probably have another 100, 150 companies that were not successful. Okay. Now they could have been great ideas and for different reasons, they didn't happen. So what we try to do is we try to look in those three big buckets of risk and within each of those we try to do that and we do a lot of pattern matching. So we over looking at a lot of companies over many years and working with many companies, we have some patterns of things that worked and patterns of things that didn't work. And we try to pattern match those the best we can to minimize risk. But all of these ventures are risky. That's why they call them ventures, right? Some will fail. We probably aren't doing our job right if some of them don't fail. Because if you shoot really high and you do what we call in our firm, you do the black swans or the grand challenges, some of those are going to fail. In life sciences, the failure rate's probably not as high in it, but in it the home runs are bigger home runs than they are in life sciences. So we have to have a lower failure rate. If you think about venture capital, it's really about slugging percentage, right? How many home runs you hit versus batting average, how many singles you hit. Because a home run or two can make up for many companies that don't do well. And so we have to balance that.