Neil Littman — Investing in the Future of Health

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done. I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have talent. Talk to Doxatant and you won't be disappointed. Go to doxatant.com Bill G. Again, that's doxatant.com Bill g. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G Check it out. Today. We're talking about biotech innovations in healthcare and the future of health. Something near and dear to all of us. Eventually, whether for you now or later, a family member, but then also as a business person, as an investor, what are the opportunities to really see rapid transformation in this field? That's what we're talking about today with our guest coming up in just a minute. Hey everybody, I'm Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of this very fine Scaling up business podcast. Our show comes to you a couple times a week with something to do with the world of growing your business, scaling up, getting the team right, dialing in the strategy, executing better, optimizing the cash model so you don't have to seek funding all the time and then of course the leadership required to take you there. You'll find hundreds and hundreds of shows now@scalingcoach.com or wherever you're getting this right now. YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook for like the video version or Many of our listeners are on the Apple platform, Apple podcasts, but it could be somewhere else, Spotify, like whatever stitcher soever you're getting it like subscribe right there. You know what to do and if you want to do us a favor, give us a review. Reviews help those platforms to know who's got the more engagement. So that is always a lovely thing to do for us. All right, I'm going to get into it right now with our guest Neil Littman. Neil is founder and CEO of bioverge Ventures. It's an investment platform that's bringing more investment to early stage biotech innovation, healthcare innovations. And he's also got a podcast under the same name, bioverge Podcast, talking about all things to do with this. He's got a background in a mix of healthcare and venture capital. So biotech sciences, biology Work mixed with finance and perfect thing to bring you into this stage. Right. So welcome to the show, Neil.

Thank you, Bill. It's great to be here with you today.

Neil, where are you based?

I am based in the Bay Area just outside of San Francisco.

So you're also enjoying beautiful weather today?

I am indeed. We finally have what feels like spring.

Yeah. I hope to get out to Crisy Field later today and get some water. Water time in.

I love Crissy Field. As a quick aside, I used to live right around that area. I go running down to Chrissy Field almost every morning. Great way to start the day.

It's one of the most beautiful places. Whether you're doing one of our famous races like marathon down there, the Alcatraz Triathlon or that kind of thing. It's. It's just a breathtaking place and so fun to go.

Yeah, I would run to Hopper's Hands right at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge and literally every morning I was like, wow, I am just so fortunate to be able to call this my home and come to this beautiful spot and just, you know, enjoy the view.

Even when the weather's not great. It's a great, It's a just a scenic, beautiful, picturesque place to be. If only the homes were a little less expensive right there along the.

That's for sure.

They're the sort of eye watering prices that can make anyone feel poor no matter what you've accomplished.

You're not kidding. One of the, one of the downsides of the Bay Area is the, the prices around here, but otherwise it's a beautiful place.

Yeah. Yeah. And today it looks like sunshine and good wind. If you're sailor, kiter, foiler, that kind of thing, it's a good day to get out on the water and finish the day. So aside from the fun sides of things, let's talk a little bit about your background, this combination of bio and finance and kind of what leads you to this world.

Yeah, absolutely. So Bill, why don't I start with my personal story because I think it will help set the stage for what Bioverge is, what we do and how I got involved in it in the first place. So I grew up on the east coast, actually in Baltimore. Grew up as an athlete. Played football in lacrosse in high school. Decided to do something different for college, so went out to the University of Colorado in Boulder where I majored in molecular biology. Did a lot of snowboarding on the side. Still one of my passions today. Worked in a virology lab for a couple Years as well. And so was deep into the sciences and really loved it and sort of fell in love with biology and everything from studying it to the application of biology in the lab. But Bill, I had two experiences in college that really changed the trajectory of my life that I'd like to share today. At that time I was pre med, was intent on going to medical school. And the first experience I had was I was in a plane crash literally in the middle of Las Vegas, of all places in Vegas it was like Con Air. If you've seen the movie Con Air, like literally dropping out of the sky. Won't get into all the details, but my buddy was a pilot. We rented a plane from Boulder, flew to, flew to Vegas. Engine failure, you know. Long story short, I was incredibly fortunate to walk away from that experience relatively unscathed. My buddy who was a pilot, broke his back in the crash, wasn't as fortunate. He's okay now, luckily. But as you can imagine, that whole experience really shifted my perspective on what I value, what I enjoy spending my time doing. And you know, I carry that with me today because that sort of near death experience at such a young age, I think really profoundly impacted me and my outlook on life. The other thing that happened to me right around that time was when my grandmother fell ill and was diagnosed with cancer. I experienced her struggles and my family's struggles as she went through that whole process. And ultimately she died of complications from cancer. And that whole experience was really frustrating to me and actually served to really push me away from wanting to practice medicine. Because what I was frustrated about was while her doctors were amazing people and they were doing everything they possibly could, they were really limited by the tools at their disposal. And that was a really frustrating part. And it was at that time I decided that I wouldn't feel like I could have a much bigger impact than I thought I could as an individual doctor treating individual patients. And given that I was studying molecular biology and all these things at Colorado at that time, I really sort of fell into this idea of biotechnology as a way to create more tools for more doctors to use to help more patients. And so I thought that was a way that I could have a bigger impact in the future. And so I ended up not going to medical school against my parents wishes at that time. I went to get a master's degree in biotechnology from Johns Hopkins, went into finance from there, started my career doing investment banking on Wall street to learn some practical business and finance skills. And then I'll just sort of fast forward to about Eight years ago, when I saw science fiction come to life, I, at that time was working at a place called the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which is a mouthful, so we call it CIRM for short. It was a $3 billion fund that invested in early stage stem cell and regenerative medicine related research. And I had the opportunity to meet a little girl by the name of Evie who was cured of a previously incurable genetic disease. And while I realized that everything that we were doing at CIRM was so incredible, we were translating novel therapies from the laboratory bench to the bedside of patients. We had a $3 billion fund that we were deploying. This was really focused on the state of California. I realized that there were still far too many innovations that weren't receiving the proper funding. And we had a number of big wins at CIRM at that time as well. Financially, we had one company that went public for over $1 billion. We had another company that was acquired for about $300 million. We had another company that was Acquired for $4.9 billion. So as an individual, I really wanted to invest and participate in this really cool, novel, cutting edge technologies, plus invest, because you could make financial, outsized financial returns by investing in these types of innovations in companies. And so fast forward to about six years ago. I decided to take a leap of faith and, and start Bioverge with this idea to democratize access, to enable more individuals to invest in early stage healthcare companies. Technologies like the type of technology that everyone's cured of, which was a gene therapy, by the way, and to diversify their portfolio with all alternative assets, really for the purposes of helping to generate long term wealth. And really this whole idea that Ben Franklin first coined that we can all do well by doing good. Happy to tell you a little more about what we're doing at Bioverds and some other stories, but I'll stop there because I know that was a mouthful.

You're on a roll. I didn't want to cut you up. Well, there's a lot of things to ask about there, but let's stay with the story for a second before we talk about investing. Evie, what sort of thing? How did that go? Tell us some more about that.

Yeah, so Evie was. She was born with a genetic disease called, called severe combined immunodeficiency, or scid, more commonly known as bubble baby disease. Very many Seinfeld fans in your audience, Seinfeld had an episode where they're a boy in the bubble. That's basically scid. So these children are born with a compromised immune system because they have a defective copy of a single gene. And so at cirm, we were funding a program that was using a technically a lentiviral gene therapy that can replace and provide a functional copy of the gene in the children where they have that defective copy. And so the work was originally done at ucla, and we funded a lot of the work that was done in the academic environment. The technology was spun out into a biotech company called Orchard Therapeutics. And so every was treated when she was about 1 years old with this gene therapy. Fast forward to when I met her. She was about 6 or 7, and she was cured. And she went to school, she had a dog, she was living a normal life. She now has a normal life expectancy. And I was like, wow, this is incredible. I mean, not only a huge impact, obviously on Evie and her family, but there were 29 other children in that trial as well that were also functionally cured of a previously incurable genetic disease. And that was just one of many programs that we funded at cirm. But it was this. It got me thinking. This whole idea of what sounds like science fiction is more routinely becoming science fact in the world of medicine and biology. And, you know, part of what I like to do is evangelize about these really novel technologies that are here today. It's not, you know, necessarily 30 years in the future. These things are happening today. People are investing in these types of technologies, and investors can get involved and invest in these meaningful technologies and also generate returns.

So as a great segue, I think, to thinking about investing in this category and growth in biotech, I think as an outsider, right, I'm like, oh, just endless and difficult and maybe totally appropriately, but regulatory issues to be concerned with, or whether it's a device or a medicine or some other kind of therapy, I just think, oh my God, who knows how that's going to go and how long is it going to be? And we saw the recent things with the Myrna vaccines, but then also the potential for huge MRNA therapies of other kinds. But that got fast tracked because of the global pandemic and moved very quickly. But what are the issues there? What do investors need to think about as companies go in there in terms of. Is that different than anything else? I mean, I don't think about anything like that if I'm going to invest in a SaaS business.

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right, Bill. There are a lot of regulatory barriers and complexities when it comes to investing in biotech, in healthcare companies. For sure. But actually that's something that we lean into and embrace because that creates significant moats and competitive advantages in a lot of cases for companies right around novel ip. And maybe it's the regulatory strategy and one point, Bill, that you mentioned that I just want to highlight is the development of the MRNA vaccines, which I don't think most people know, and obviously we all know now that these were developed in really sort of warp speed time. Right. Like, like the program. I mean, they were developed in, in less than a year. What isn't widely known though is that the company that was developing one of the MRNA MRNA vaccines, Moderna, didn't have or even need a physical copy of the virus. All they needed was a digital copy of the genome to print the vaccine. Yeah, that's incredible. That couldn't have happened even five years ago, let alone 10 years ago. So that's the type of innovation that we're talking about today.

Well, I also think, to clarify for people, my limited knowledge, but the MRNA technologies, the approach had been in development for years, for decades. Right. And then the underlying understand, like the abilities of CRISPR technologies to decode things and replicate and all of that has been building for a very long time. It's just the specific application that happened very quickly and moved forward because there was such a pressing need on a global scale. Right?

That's right. That's right. Most of these technologies, just about all these technologies that we see as sort of breakthroughs have been in development for literally decades. And so there's tons of evidence behind them. People have spent their careers researching different variations of some of this stuff. And so as you think about it from the investor perspective, I understand a lot of the regulatory challenges, reimbursement, those things are intimidating in a sense. But I also think they are. They're obviously there for a reason. And I think if you know what you're looking for and you have people that are sort of experts in the field and have sort of been through the process, they do create significant competitive advantages and competitive moats for companies that are in the space. The question is, well, how do you navigate that without the background? And so the key is leveraging a network of other folks and experts who do have that expertise that you can sort of lean into, that you can talk to. And so we've built. Our strategy has been, because I don't know all these things myself, neither does my partner, but we've built what we call the BioVerch network, which is a network of subject matter experts or key opinion leaders that have expertise in things like regulatory or reimbursement or manufacturing is always a big one. And so we can, we call on those people, we lean into those people to help us assess from a diligence perspective the, maybe it's the regulatory strategy or maybe it's the manufacturing process or, you know, whatever it may be. And so I think that that's really key as you're thinking about diligence, right? You're doing diligence on a, on a SaaS based company and it's a lot easier because you're looking for month over month user growth rates and blah, blah, blah. But at the same time, I will also say that software companies and tech companies in general have actually a much higher failure rate than biotech companies do. Biotech companies oftentimes have a binary outcome where their drug works or doesn't work. But oftentimes there's a lot of valuable IP and science that these companies are generating. And so even the ones that necessarily aren't a home run, there is some residual value. So, you know, that's just sort of another, another thing to think about is the loss ratios in biotech aren't, aren't as high as they are with, you know, pure software companies.

Yeah, well, you know, there is of course, such need and such opportunity and we are drawn especially as outsiders. We see certain things, we hear about things and then, and then we apply that, like broadly to all of it. So in the world of blockchain and crypto, we see an awful lot of scammers and foolish money and things going on like that. In the world of biotech though, we also know Elizabeth Holmes who's in the news again recently. Right? So we think about that like, and, and then we're like, okay, how do I understand something? How do I know if the science is legit here? How do I understand what's going on so that I can invest wisely in that platform? And so talk about how, how do you address that.

Um, yeah, so, so Bill, for us, that comes back to this idea that the BuyVerge network that we've built, and so it's not only us internally at Bioverge, and you know, we have domain expertise, but we leverage other folks. So let's, let's say we're looking at a company that's developing a novel oncology therapeutic, right? We'll actually, we'll go out, we'll talk to clinicians, we'll talk to people in the field who are working with patients, or talk to folks that have experience developing drugs. In the cancer space. And so we'll try to get kind of a 360 degree view of what the company is doing that we're looking to invest in. What are the key risks, what are the key milestones, what's the preclinical data set that they need to move into IND enabling studies, which is the phase right before going into human clinical studies. What do they need to prove out in human clinical studies to show that the technology of the drug actually works? Right, so you call that, what are the clinical endpoints? So those are all things that we look at and we, we invest at very early stages. So we're, we're pretty, for the most part, seed stage investors. So yeah, we have the highest risk, but we also have the highest return profile at the seed stage. And so often when we're diligent something, it's not even in human clinical trials. So we're looking at in vitro experiments, we're looking at animal model data, so a lot of mouse models and things like that. And we're trying to ascertain, well, does the data that the company have support the scientific rationale of what they're trying to do. And so, you know, as long as those things line up, we get some feedback that says, okay, yeah, you know, there we have these questions that this company needs to address. You know, from the use of proceeds with this next round, if they hit those, then it looks good, they'll be able to raise the next round at a much higher valuation. So there's all sorts of the things that we're assessing at a very early stage. But you know, Bill, as you know, and probably a lot of our listeners, we all sort of operate in a realm of uncertainty. When you're building businesses, right.

When you're scaling, nothing but uncertainty, right?

Nothing. Right. I actually listened to an interesting. There's a Netflix documentary, it's Struts. It was a new Jonah Hill documentary where he's talking to a psychiatrist. Anyway, one of the things that they talk about is there are sort of only. There are three constants in life. One is, one is pain, one is uncertainty, and the other one is. Now I'm drawing a blank on the other ones. Pain, uncertainty. It'll come to me in a minute. But the more that you embrace those and realize that that is reality, the quicker you'll be able to move through those and sort of be successful. And so I think for a lot of the sciences is biology, it's not engineering, it's really hard to predict. And things are going to Go weird and go wrong. But, you know, you got to place your bets, right?

Yeah. Well, nothing captivates more than good stories. So talk to us a little bit about Volumetric printing. Like, how do we grow organs?

Yeah. So this is a really cool story, Bill. So Volumetric Biotechnologies is a company that we invested in. It's a really cool story. So we first invested in July of 2020. The founder and CEO was a professor of biomedical engineering at Rice University. We met through one of our advisors at Bioverge. So Volumetric is developing technology for 3D bioprinting of human tissue and organs. This is another one of those things that sounds like science fiction, but guess what? They have already produced the world's most complex 3D printed object ever, the human lung scaffold, which has demonstrated gas exchange in animal models. The technology made the COVID of Science magazine when it was first published, which was, I think, May of 2019. I won't get into some of the technical details there, but fast forward to today. The company was acquired for up to $400 million by 3D Systems, which is a publicly traded 3D printing company, the largest in the world. And they have a partnership with another company called United Therapeutics. Scientists at United Therapeutics are cellularizing or placing cells on the 3D scaffolds that volumetric has printed to grow a patient's own stem cells to create tolerable, implantable human lungs. And so that's incredible. So if you think about all the need for immunosuppression, the lack of available organs. Right. I mean, that. That's incredible. That's not here today. Right. That's going to be pretty far off in the future, but we're making progress towards that goal. And the really, I think, interesting.

You know, though, like, so one of my dear friends had a double lung transplant a few years ago, and otherwise a pretty healthy guy. He's still with us today and successful. But he came very close to not finding a donor and was very, very sick. And fortunately he did. But, like, you know, there is a valuable, great human being who goes right to the edge of death before he got lucky. But not everybody does get lucky with that. So what you have are cells coaxed into becoming the right type of cell and then printed or laid onto a scaffolding, a structure that helps them to mimic the structure and form and therefore the function of a lung. Right. And a lung is a fairly complex structure with a lot of intricate, you know, spaces. That's fascinating. And it's not a small Thing. Right. This is a pretty big STR that would be put into a human being and then it's their own cells that we would potentially be using.

That's right, yeah. So it would be all, it's called autologous. So the cells would come from the patient.

Yeah.

You basically then see those on the scaffold printed by volumetric. And so you're eliminating this idea of needing a transplant from another patient, which gets into the idea of immune rejection.

Right.

So that's obviously one of the major problems today with organ transplantation.

A lifetime of immunosuppressive drugs. That's right, yeah, that's right, yeah. So keep going with what's happening there with that.

Oh, I was just going to comment the really interesting. I mean this is all super fascinating to me, but it's amazing how breakthroughs happen. So one of the key breakthroughs that happened was when Jordan, who's the CEO, was looking for bio inks to use in the bio printer. The rate limiting factor historically has been all the inks that were used in 3D printing in non medical realms were all carcinogenic. So that's why this idea of 3D maybe not good organs could, it wasn't working because the ink was carcinogenic. Yeah. So Jordan realized that he could actually use food dye as the substrate to absorb the right wavelengths of light to make the 3D printing process work for their technology. So he literally went to like the local grocery store and got food dye off the shelf that used for like baking and, and use that as the first iteration for what they're doing. And that, that like solved this key bottleneck to unblock them to allow them to advance this technology. It's like, wow, it's just really sort of orthogonal thinking and you just never know where these ideas are going to come from that allow you to go from really zero to one. And that was, that was the big point that allowed him to scale, go from zero to one was going to like Safeway to get food dye off the shelf to solve this previous problem that hadn't been solved for I don't know how many years.

Well, it's, it's somewhat ironic because as a kid we had a carcinogenic food dye. In particular, red dye number two was like the thing that I, you know, it was all the news and I'm, I'm, I think, you know, they obviously, they found some substitute for that and, and found ones that were not, that were, that were biosafe neutral kind of.

Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. So you know Bill, happy to share some other companies with you or let me know what, what you think would be interesting to jump into.

Well, I, so let's, we'll talk for a second about, about investing in the platform and that kind of thing. Reminder, we're not pitching any particular companies here, that kind of thing. We always want to be careful of doing that. We're just talking about some of the successes, some of the examples of that kind of thing. And investing in this stage of companies is for qualified investors only. Right. So there are certain qualifications. If you know what they are and you are, then you probably aren't. If you don't know, then you need to go research that before you could do this stage of investment. Any of the early stage vc, angel seed, being in lots of funds like this requires certain kinds of qualifications to keep. People who shouldn't be putting their money into high risk things, who don't have that kind of reserve shouldn't be doing that. So.

Yeah, and, and so Bill, that's a good point. So we work at this point in time only with accredited investors. And so that's an SEC definition and we don't have to get into the details there. But what, but what I will say, Bill, is because I know your podcast is really focused around scaling businesses and some of the challenges there. You know, one of the major challenges that we've faced over the years is how do we scale Bioverts? Because our mission is to engage with more accredited investors and give access to these investments to more people throughout the country and throughout the world. And so There are roughly 13 million accredited investors in the United States. And so as I've thought about building Bioverge, our biggest challenge has been how do we get in front of more credit investors? How do we let people know that Biverge exists? I sort of view what we're doing as analogous to what Charles Schwab did when he started his company. I think it was in the late 70s or 80s. His initial idea was to provide low cost stock trading services to individual retail investors. Before Schwab came around, stocks and bonds were really the exclusive domain of ultra high net worth individuals in this country. They weren't in everyone's portfolio until Schwab really came around. And so that's kind of analogous to what I'm trying to do with Bioverge is trying to make sure that healthcare venture capital, these investments are more Americans portfolios for a whole variety of reasons. But scaling is the big challenge. Right. So we started life with, you know, I really Started buyer to solve my own problem and my co founder Rick's problem, where we were looking to diversify our portfolio into alternative assets. So we literally started writing our own checks. And then we recruited some friends and some family members and then we expanded to personal networks. And then we quickly got tapped out of our personal networks. And so then it was a little bit of word of mouth. And so investors who invested with us told their friends or colleagues and we had some founders tell some people that they knew. And so it's sort of spread by word of mouth initially, but of course that only goes so far. Right. And so then how do you really spread the word? So then we experimented with some digital advertising and marketing and none of that really worked at all. That was, I don't view anything that we've done as a waste of money because I view all these things are little experiments that you're learning something from. And so it's kind of like the Thomas Edison saying, right? He learned 9,000 ways not to screw in a light bulb until we finally figured out that one way to do it. So for us, we had some early successes. And so leaning into some of the existing performance, some of our exits, we had a number of companies that raised some follow on rounds from very well known investors. So leaning into that like track record, that performance, word of mouth, some of those case studies really helped us to scale our investor base. And then it just sort of, it grew a lot from there, but it's really challenging. And that sort of understanding how your business scales is an ongoing challenge, I think. And just because you figured out one day doesn't mean it's not going to change the next day for us. We figured out probably not surprisingly, but it took us a while to figure out how to go about this. Was people in the medical community like investing in what we're doing because they happen to sort of get it, it resonates with them. So going after physicians or biotech execs tends to resonate for what we're doing specifically. But it's been a lot of experimentation and it's been a lot of failed strategies along the way until we figured out stuff that does work. And so I'll just make one more comment on the scaling notion for folks in your audience. Our approach has always been to first do things that don't scale. We do them manually pretty much until they become too painful to keep doing manually. And then we figure out how to scale that. And the scaling usually comes in the form of automation or software solution where myself or Rick, my co founder, aren't then manually having to do everything, but we get to that breaking point where we can literally no longer do it ourselves until we feel comfortable investing in. Maybe it's another team member or software or an automation solution to really scale that. Yeah, that's.

Well, that's actually a useful lesson for everyone. Right. Like, if you're thinking about scaling, you're trying to decide where to put your energy first you want to go find the demand. You want to go like, put, go sell something, go find some customers, get something for like, so your minimum product and, and then find some people who want to do it and then start to figure out how to elevate it, how to automate it, how to get more profit out of it. That line that's often quoted or misquoted really from the field of dreams movie. Build it and they will come. It was build it, he will come. But is a really bad business lesson. Right. Focus instead on finding that customer and. And then go figure out how to, how to fulfill and keep your promise to them. To deliver the product is almost always the best business advice. Right. The. The barest minimum, like sell it and then. And then go build it.

Yeah. And Bill, that's 100% true. And we fell into that trap a little bit. So as I mentioned, we started Buy Vert to solve our own problem.

Yeah.

And then I was like, well, we can't be the only ones with this problem. So I figured there's probably more demand out there. But the mistake that I made was that we figured the hardest part for us was going to be getting into really high quality deals. And that actually proved to be the easier part given our connections. And so we sort of, to use your analogy as an example. Well, I sort of felt like if we got into the best deals, then investors would come to our platform. Yeah. And that's just. It doesn't work that way. Like, yeah, we got into good deals, but then you got to go find the investors too. So it's like build it and he will come. No, not at all. Go out and proactively recruit people. Talk about what you're doing. Go.

Yeah, build and evangelize for us.

Yeah, evangelize. And. And to your point, Bill, you know, you talk about like an mvp, right? Minimal viable product. Like, absolutely. Like, that's, that's critical.

And you.

And, and we built a lot of our. We don't really do a lot of marketing per se, but we built a lot of any sort of marketing we do around the customer experience. And the problem that we're solving for the customer. So it's, it's not, we found that works the best when you have like an event, almost like a case study for an investor on our platform who's using it. Why do, why do they come to Buybirds? What gets them excited and build some marketing and case studies around that. That's what we found is a good way to do any sort of marketing or lead generation or things of that nature.

Well, so let's just break it down a little bit. So in the earliest stage, right, you identify a problem and you assemble a couple of people to develop a demo or some reasonable proposal for something that could be even before the MVP stage. Right. It's not really a product yet, but it's a kind of a proof of concept or something that you've got. And that's where you're getting the earliest money to help to cover some bills and basic expenses. And at that stage, a lot of times your founders and co developers are, are working for practically nothing or very little or nothing at all at that point. And you're just getting that first little bit of money. And now I've got something like, okay, this is something that could work, it's not ready for production or whatever. That next little bit of money helps you to get a demonstrable product ready. That's kind of at the MVP stage. And then in certain cases you've got to prove it, you've got to demonstrate efficacy, you've got to get regulatory approval before you could start doing much of it. And that's probably your next bit of money. And then there's money around marketing and scale that's going to get it out to more people and get more adoption. And then there's branching off and. Right. Those are lots and lots of stages of money and people are only funding you to sort of get to the next stage and prove out and then at some point those people want out. So with that kind of recap, talk to us a little bit about your typical investor and the typical kind of companies that you look at with the Bioverge platform.

Yeah, so our, let me start with our typical investor. Our typical investor really varies. Like I said, we have a lot of folks in the healthcare medical community. So physicians who have all kinds of various specialties are a big component of our base. We have a lot of entrepreneurs, technology entrepreneurs who have made their money building technology, software startups that are interested in biotech or healthcare for any number of reasons. We have a lot of folks that are Simply interested in diversifying their portfolios and allocating a portion of their portfolio to the private markets and almost could care less about healthcare. They just come to us for financial returns and diversification. But I would say a majority have at least an interest in biotech and healthcare as part of what they want to do with their capital. We work with some registered investment advisors on behalf of their clients and family offices as well as. But the large majority are individual investors, which is true to our mission. And they're both, I would say domestic and international. Probably 85% of our investors are US based and probably about 15% are international investors. In terms of companies, as I mentioned earlier, we invest at very early stages. So pre seed seed to a lesser extent. Series A as well. We invest across various sub verticals within healthcare. So that's biotech, that's digital health and digital therapeutics. Diagnostics Medtech to a slightly lesser extent. The commonality is this idea of interlacing technology with solving a fundamental problem in healthcare. So a company could be using a tool like artificial intelligence or machine learning or something else to.

Yeah, yeah.

Try to solve a fundamental problem. Right. So to try to speed up the drug discovery or drug development process for us, we don't really care what the tool is or what the technology is. I think a lot of people get super excited about that. What we care about is how is it going to impact patients at the end of the day? How is it maybe going to speed up the process of getting something into the clinic and how, how are you going to use that to better predict how someone is going to respond to a therapeutic once it's in the clinic? Yeah, right. As I think a lot of people know drugs, you know, there's like a 9% success rate for developing a new drug. So if you can move that 9% success rate up to 10 or 11%, that's huge. That's a, that creates a ton of value for investors and that's helps patients tremendously.

Yeah. Bioverge.com is the website. It's. If you didn't guess already, there it is on screen and it'll be in the show notes and that kind of thing. But easy to find and remember. Bio Verge G E V E-R-G-E.com is the website if you want to check out a little bit more of Neil's company and what they do and that kind of thing. Some shout outs to some other folks. Wanda Mitchell getting our show ready, produced each week and out the door, the folks at Podfly Productions My friend and mentor, Vern Harnish, who I'll be leading a boot camp with next week. We have a group of companies coming to a Lake Tahoe resort that we do a couple of these at a year, a deep dive. We'll also have in a few weeks a Scaling up intro workshop in San Francisco that you can find out all that and more@scalingcoach.com if you want to give us a little feedback, send email to infosalingcoach.com, find us all that more, all our programs, workshops, things like that, our our gatherings@scalingcoach.com thanks so much for coming on the show today, Neil and talking with us about Bioverge, what you're doing. This world, there's a lot of cool things happening there. Like so many, the intersection of health and tech and the opportunity also to invest to be part of that, to help make that happen is pretty cool.

My pleasure, Bill. Thanks for having me on.

All right, thanks again everyone for watching, for listening. Give us a review that helps us. If you want to do something nice for us to grow our show and find more audience, that is super helpful. We'll talk to you again next time. Keep scaling up till then.

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