Sean George, a biotech entrepreneur, argues that founders should prioritize their company's mission over maintaining control. He shares how this mindset shapes decisions about funding and partnerships, drawing from his experience building in the biotech industry.
You, I'm running this shop, I hand built, hand selected the team. We are making progress. And then at some point, right again, the market starts shifting, everything moves. We knock off the technology risk, we prove it can be done. Externalities seem to be going in our favor. FDA basically goes away for a while at the change of the administrations. The gene patent fail that was pretty much assumed to be something that would block our kind of model forever showed signs of cracking. The first case started popping up through the federal court, through the district courts that was challenging patents, you know, subject matter, patentability for gene sequences itself. And in that period of time, a lot of people started getting interested in the space, a lot of people started getting interested in us. It became clear to us it was turning into an execution play. And at that point then you've got these industry veterans around the table. You're looking at, in our kind of business model, what matters when it starts turning into an execution play? Essentially it turns into a foot race and you start coming to the realization that you need a lot more capital than you thought you did. Again, if you really want to go for what it is we wanted to do, if we really wanted to go after all of the families that are currently not able to get this information for their kids, for themselves, we were going to have to spend a lot more money. And so that started going into decision making mode where there were a couple companies that we had been kind of partnering with that then all of a sudden threw over acquisition offers. In that you're kind of making the decision, well, gosh, we could probably raise another, maybe another $10 million round on our own, but really if we want this to happen, we want to have it at scale, maybe we should tuck into a larger company and just see this through. That's trying. As in you've spent the last, you've basically sacrificed the last two and a half years of your life getting to that point and now the best options in front of you seem to be the ones that remove your control. It's not why you started the company, but again for us it was very much one of like, look, what matters most is that what we're doing sees a lot of day and has impact in the market. And so we seriously entertained a lot of that for a while. We entertained those bids, did the diligence, had the conversations, soul searching times to be sure. And then what happened? Then Randy, who was on our board again, I think got so excited about it all. He kind of said, ok, yes, we could raise a small round and kind of go it alone, but we're just not going to make it. He amongst most knows you need a lot of capital to make changes in these spaces. The acquisition offers, well, yes, that's probably barring our internal round, the best way is to go ahead and be acquired, make it happen. But even then, then you run the risk that you just get subsumed by a big company and everything that you've tried to build doesn't actually get out there. And so he suggested, hey, how about this instead? I'll lead the C round, I'll bring in a bunch of investors and we'll fund this thing and we'll do it right. We'll go, we'll go for the long shot, we'll go for the big win, we'll go all the way. And this is going to take $300 million. And so let's do that. And turns out that's the way we went. That was certainly the right call for his pains. Of course he was going to be CEO instead of me. That's where it all came in. It's like, okay, which door do you go through? What are your personal incentives? It all came back to again, if I wanted to get this done, this team who had joined me wanted to get this done. This was definitely the best way to do meant taking a smaller piece of a bigger pie. It meant giving up control of the company. It meant a lot of things that you at the time were tough. But honestly, looking back, there was no other way to do this. There was no other way to do this. That was the right way to go. And I think that's where I want to on that point in particular today, I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs that are in that tweener phase of the company. They got some funding, they're getting going and they're making these decisions and they know they need the money, but it means losing control. They know they need a partner, but it means partnering. I would say that is a key point if you're going to start a company. That is going to be a key challenge as you start to succeed again. If you want my advice, the best thing to do is do what's right for the mission. Remove yourself from the equation. That's the best way to succeed. I've seen people get all tied up in what their percent ownership. It is. It's my vision, my company. We're going to do it my way. That's a tough path to continue. For everything that we read about in the public media, how that's the obviously the one or two of those, the unicorns that make it out, and that's the case. That's all we ever read about. But I can assure you, the thousands of other companies, most of which die on the vine, that is not the way it works. You've got to be willing to sacrifice your own personal ambitions and desires for the mission at hand.
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