Navigating Frontier Technologies with Ben Hemani of Bison Ventures

Today I got to speak with Ben Homani. He is the co founder of Bison Ventures, which is a newish VC firm. And they are really broadly focused. They are in the deep tech space, they are in biology, they are in agriculture and also climate change. So kind of spanning the spectrum. They're really interested in companies that leverage AI or deep tech in order to solve big problems. So we talked about a lot of things including what makes someone successful in getting into their portfolio and how they support those individuals after the fact that I think this is a really actionable episode and I think you'll learn a lot, especially if you are on the funding trail. So enjoy. Welcome to building biotechs by Recredomics Consulting. We've helped over 90 biotech, life sciences and venture capital firms strategize and hire thousands of employees to scale companies that impact human health. We speak with those at the forefront of growing biotechs to learn their tactics on building these companies from the ground up. I'm Karina Klingman, founder and principal at recredomics Consulting. Enjoy the show. Ben, thanks so much. This is great. I'm excited to chat with you. So we always like to start out by asking a little bit about your background. What did you want to be when you were 7? What are you now and how did you get there?

Growing up, my dad was a physician, my mom worked in a hospital as a chaplain. I think going into medicine was always sort of the obvious path. But I got to school and in high school and college turned out to be much better at physics and engineering than biology and found myself as an engineer. This was also a point in time where there was increasing awareness around climate sustainability and the impact of greenhouse gas emissions. And so I ended up focusing in environmental engineering and started my career in the energy space. I found myself into my first role in venture in Boston at a clean tech fund a little over 10 years ago. And then as my career grew and I moved to a new firm and a family office, I had the opportunity to open up the aperture more widely and really look at the full breadth of what we now have branded as frontier technology companies. And so getting the chance to circle back to working on applications of biotechnology, whether they're in industrial use cases that are relevant for climate sustainability, or working more directly on therapeutic development and the tools that we all depend on in the biotech world, but also spending time in robotics and high performance compute and long duration energy storage and a wide variety of fields has been a real treat. And I think ultimately is emerging where I probably Saw myself going when I was 7 and then where I found myself when I got to school and indigestible.

I love that. And it's all really interconnected, aren't they? It also makes sense because we have to live in such a connected environment and we're talking about climate, we're talking about technology and biotech. It all goes together totally.

And I think it's a huge privilege that I was afforded to get to work on that breadth. But now that's become how we think about the opportunity set for venture. We see so much interconnectedness and the opportunity for cross pollination, whether it's of our own ideas or entrepreneurs moving from one domain to the other and taking with them what they've learned and translating it. That's where I think we often find the most compelling businesses. And intellectually it's a huge privilege to get to spend time on all of it.

Yeah, I bet. So you made a transition into the VC world. That is not something everybody does. Was there a specific moment you knew you wanted to be on the funding side and really driving this change?

I really think that I was interested in venture from early on in school. It's not typically a career path that you can go straight into out of undergrad or even grad school. It tends to be something that people who have more substantial professional experience than work their way into. I'm a huge believer in the opportunity for the sort of power of free markets to drive the growth and and deployment at scale of technology and for technology to make the world a better place to help solve hard problems. And that intersection of engineering and science and economics I think is really interesting. I think there are sort of two sides of the entrepreneurial ecosystem between the company builder, founder and the investor where I don't get to go as deep and to take as much ownership on any one company, but I get to have a portfolio of interesting things where I'm working on any given time. I get to have the opportunity to always be learning from new entrepreneurs about different problems and opportunities that they're seeing. And so I really value that breadth and diversity. I understand implicitly that the motivations of the founder to really want to have ownership and to build something. But I think I the eclectic schedule and instead of things we work on is I think part of the appeal for me.

I really resonate with that. I obviously work with a lot of different companies and that's my favorite part is getting to know these different companies, what they're excited about and learn. I think learning every single Day is very important to me. So part of work satisfaction, right? We have to know what we want.

Absolutely.

Okay, tell me a little bit about Bison Ventures specifically. What are you building there?

We are an investor in the full breadth of what we call frontier technology companies. So we're looking at applications of novel science and technology to solve big problems in large markets. And this sort of convergence of digital biotechnologies, either directly in human health or in again kind of more industrial or agricultural use cases is a big pillar of what we do. I think at this sort of moment in time, as we look at macro trends in technology and the maturation of different solutions to really start to be commercialized and deployed, that's a broad intersection where we are seeing, I think some of the most interesting innovations, but it isn't everything we do. I think we're also, as I said, spending time in, in other fields like high performance compute and applications of AI for the physical world. Although again that might overlap with drug discovery in some ways or. And then again climate sustainability tends to be during the big focus area for us and we're early stage investors for us that means probably a seed round to as late as a B. In companies that have ambitious science and technology, there tends to be some meaningful variation in what the businesses look like depending on the letter. I think in enterprise SaaS you get a little bit more regimented scale maturity, cost structure as you move through that progression. And so, you know, we're adaptive to different companies and where we can be most helpful.

Yeah, I was going to say the difference between tech and biotech, you really see it at the funding level because of the burn and how we approach science and even the de risking and the milestones. So how do you actually assess that when you're looking at these different investments?

The way that we think about technology risk and maturity is we try and draw a line as much as we can between novel science and the deployment and engineering and optimization of something that's already been proven and feasible. I think with true scientific discovery it is really hard to put any sort of a meaningful timeline or budget together. And there's just a lot of serendipity uncertainty that comes with that type of work. It's extremely important, but ultimately the driver of what we do downstream. But it's in our view better left to research laboratories, government funding, where you can have those sort of open ended explorations. And then there comes a point when technology is ready to be commercialized, whether it's again a novel discovery platform or experimentation engine or, or Something in a totally different field. I think that's where venture can come in and help drive the formation of a team into a business and get those technologies in the world to solve hard problems, whether it's a patient or an enterprise. And so that's where we try and look to enter is after the phase where there's meaningful scientific uncertainty and discovery, but where you still have the hard work to do. And in translating what's been proven viable into something that can become commercial.

This is a really interesting time that we're seeing. Right. With the funding situation. Last couple of years have been crazy. When did you start Bison? How old is it?

We announced the firm last fall, so in the late summer, early fall of 23. But we were working behind the scenes for over a year before that. Getting the fundraise, the team built, et cetera.

Yeah. So fairly new. And you've come in at an interesting market. How has that been?

BioSent is a brand new platform. My, my partners and I are not new investors. And there's a little bit of a duality there between being having the experience of evancing across multiple cycles and then what's it like managing this firm in this moment? It's a really interesting time to be deploying capital. I would say in general, this is ultimately a game of supply and demand and there is less supply of capital willing to take on early stage technology development risk than ever. The interesting thing though is I don't think that there' any meaningful correlation between business cycles and innovation cycles. And so, you know, we see a steady stream of great companies founded by awesome entrepreneurs and there's just a harder time finding capital. And so to be an investor in this moment is a real privilege because we get to a. We get to catalyze these businesses in a way that is a little bit different when every company is getting funded to 150% of the dollars they were seeking. And b, it's an attractive time, I think, to be company building. The other dynam dynamic. I think it's easy to focus on what's going on with capital flows and venture dollars pulling back. But labor markets have also shifted. If everyone's stock is growing up by 30% a year, you're in a real golden handcuff situation. And as companies have gone through large reductions in forces, as public stocks have trade off, I think you've seen a lot of talent willing to leave those seats and start again on something new. And that's a really important driver as well for creating successful companies. And so we See more reasonable burn rates and valuations. We see as high quality of technology as we ever have and we see more great talent willing to jump into a startup. So it's a really compelling moment in time acknowledging that's the case because there are challenges and it was a challenging time to be raising our fund. It is a challenging time for entrepreneurs to be raising capital for their companies. With. With that stress, I think comes some of the magic of venture.

Yeah, we're going to see some really strong companies coming out of this because to your point, we're vetting them fairly aggressively. And it's about the founder too, right. I imagine that a lot of the decision making you, especially at these early stage companies that you take on is around the founder and that team. Am I accurate in that?

For sure. And this is I think one of the differences of the type of investing, especially within biotech that Bison does versus the company formation driven work that like a flagship engineering might do, where we are investing in founder led businesses. And ultimately I think as early stage venture investors we invest in about 1% of the companies we look at. It's a very selective process and that's because we have to see a compelling opportunity across so many different orthogonal dimensions is the market opportunity. There is the technology, there is the team, there is the valuation reasonable. And that's just a really high bar. And it can be really frustrating as an investor when you see a company that checks four out of five boxes or nine out of ten boxes and there's just one thing keeping you from getting across the line because sometimes you really build a connection with those teams and those opportunities. But above all, especially at the early stage, it is a bet on team. Because building a company is never a linear journey. There will be significant challenges, whether commercial or technical or financial in the company's path. And you need to have a team at the helm that can navigate those and be creative in addressing challenges to ultimately find a successful outcome.

Can I ask how you assess that? How do you get that feeling for the winning team during this process?

That's a great question. And the cliche answer is it's a pattern matching game. That's really not. I don't think the case for Bison though. You know, in. In some segments of venture and traditional tech there are pretty narrow profiles for the the typical founder. There are often expectations for elementary, certain a couple of schools, you are a couple of different departments. Often they're young white males and across frontier tech because there is this element of do you also have great science and Technology. You know, we see a much more diverse set of successful founders, people who are just coming out of their PhDs, people who have been in industry for, for 30 years and have really built a masterful understanding of the nuance and want to take that into a new venture to solve a problem. And so I don't think for us it is a pattern matching theme. In the same way I think that it's about, honestly, it's about often the sort of meta signals because I'm not an expert in all of the fields we invest in. And so I don't claim to know more about computational drug discovery than the founders that we're talking to. In that space, we have to assess do they really understand the problem? Do they know where the pitfalls lie? Are they cognizant of their own strengths or weaknesses? And have they built a team around them that complements them and will make them more likely to be successful? So these second order questions and assessments for me, I think tend to be the most influential in our decision of is this going to be a successful team and is this a team that we think is someone we want to put our weight behind in what will be a very long journey? You don't get to throw up your hands and decide that a venture partnership in between a company and a fund isn't working. You are shareholders until that company either exits or shuts down. And so you need to be willing to work together and to trust each other for a long time.

It's a bit like a marriage, huh?

Very much so, yeah.

So we don't have a silver bullet for what is going to make the right type of founder team. There's a lot of nuance there.

I think that we are very cognizant of understanding the individuals we're investing in and building a more substantive assessment of who they are, what they're like. Again, what are their strengths and weaknesses, are they blind to them or aware of them? Everyone in our investment team is technical. We have four engineers and we have four investors. And we try to bring a technology development kind of minded partnership to working with our companies where we really can be constructive in understanding what are the challenges and opportunities, resources that are required in bringing something novel to market. I think it's really important to have partners who can be shoulder to shoulder with your management teams in that journey. And not that we are going to jump in and help solve novel technical challenges. I think that it's an important perspective to bring as an investor to companies that really do have real science and Technology development at their core to that point.

What other support do you give to these founding teams as they're starting to grow this business? You mentioned you work sometimes with fresh founders right out of school and then some seasoned folks. So I imagine there's a big difference in what they need in terms of support.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I think that. So different teams have different needs and the same team will have different needs over the course of his life cycle in the context of therapeutic development. Right. The challenge of getting to your drug candidate is very different than the challenge of getting through FDA for your first inhuman. Very different than closing that big pharma partnership. And so I think that as life cycle investors we are, we're coming in early, but we're at the table till the end. We need to be able to bring different contributions to companies at different times and be cognizant of. One team might have a really strong CFO and they just don't really need us to get in the way there. Another team might have world class scientists who don't understand the mechanics of capital markets as well and would really benefit from us being constructive partners and helping them define the budget for the year, the milestones for the round, negotiate that next round or partnership, et cetera. And it's again, I think we started the conversation. It's a challenging job because the needs of our portfolio companies can vary widely and we want to be a jack of all trades for them. But it's also an exciting and engaging opportunity to be partner to these companies because you get to work on so many different challenges over time, making sure they have access to the right recruiter at one point in the company versus the banker to work on their IPO at a certain point.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So something I talk with my clients about a lot and we do long term planning around is the talent piece because as you do go through various rounds of funding, the funding partners and potential funding partners want to know who's going to do the work and how much is it going to cost and how do we achieve these milestones? What are you looking for there when you're looking at that portion of the deck?

Yeah, I think it's really important for management teams and founders to have good clarity over the alignment of what is the technical progression of this company, how does that line up with the commercial progression? What are the resources in particular team that I need to make those happen. And then lastly, where do the funding events occur that makes sense relative to those de risking moments and Those cycles of maturation and coming into a new financing, a new Series A. It's really important, I think, to be able to clearly articulate, okay, here's what we're going to do in the next 18 months, here are the people that we need to, here's what this will cost both in terms of cash and equity. Budgeting both and having a use of funds on both is important. And I find that teams that have really gone through systematically and identified how that progression of the company lines up across these different axes are, have much better clarity in what it takes to then go execute after you've invested in them. And that will set them up for success in the future round. Right. Because the next financing will have all of the same requirements in terms of the structure and organization for how you planned it. And you don't want to be in the process of having very reactive and ad hoc decisions around when are we making these investments? When are we raising capital? You want to have a long term plan and then adapt it as circumstances change over time.

Yeah, a hundred percent. We were definitely seeing that companies were able to be a little bit more fast and loose with the cash during, you know, the 2020, 2021 era. And the talent landscape didn't need to be quite as well defined to in order to achieve funding. And now it's really tight. We really do have to nail down exactly who we're going to hire, when we're going to hire them, what they're going to cost. It's very technical now, which is probably better for everybody, frankly.

Yeah, this is one of the great things about the sort of typical structure of the venture ecosystem. So there should be great alignment between sort of economic incentives of a founder and an early stage investor. And I think that for both parties, prudent, disciplined investment, because of the constraints the capital markets have placed on us, drives better outcomes. Again, this is the difference between building something in a small company versus inside of a large corporation where, you know, we do have more limited resources and we make more with less. And the results are compelling.

I love the scrappiness. Hey there, just a quick break. I wanted to let you know that if you're listening to this podcast because you are exploring careers in biotech, which it turns out quite a few of our listeners actually are, you might be interested in the Biotech Career Coach podcast. It is brought to you by our sister company, the Collaboratory Career Hub, which is our career development community. If you would like actionable tips on job seeking and career development, that is the place for you it is a companion podcast to our Career Coach column that we write monthly in Biospace, but we go a little more in depth and sometimes we have special workshops and all of that good stuff. So if that sounds interesting, click the link in the show notes or search for Biotech Career Coach on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts back to the show. I'm curious about the life cycle of one of your portfolio companies. Can you walk me through that?

One of the things that's maybe a little bit different about our typical investment and portfolio company is we often know the companies for a long time before we invest. We are never going to be the firm racing to write a term sheet in two weeks and jumping into a new team and a new opportunity we've never thought of before. Whether it's because we've worked with some of the team in the past or we got to know the company well before we invested or there was an opportunity to invest, I think we've already started building that relationship and understanding what we can do to be helpful. As with different founder backgrounds and different team strengths and weaknesses, I think syndicates of investors have different roles to play. We are an interesting investor in that. We sit at this intersection between biotechnology and more traditional technology, deep tech and that cross pollination role I think gives us a very different perspective, especially in their previous companies for example, about what we think is important where we want to prioritize investment and in long term R and D. And it also I think gives us meaningful blind spots where I don't necessarily have as deep of a nuanced understanding of the various efforts going into treating a single condition. And so we try and again I think be reactive to the individuals and the organizations around the table and find the role where we can be most constructive partners and also lean on the strengths of our co investors or our management teams where there is depth. I think we are often very focused on applications of high performance compute and artificial intelligence and where can you do more with less and take advantage of these tools in a way that just wasn't possible five to ten years ago in drug discovery. We tend to be very emphatic on the value of platforms in a way that is very out of out of vogue today. But I think in the long term will be really important for success of licensed portfolio companies and I think we tend to be really helpful around planning out the life cycle of different funding rounds and capital needs and making sure fundraisers are successful and ultimately setting companies up for strong public offerings or exit.

Star burners So I love that you touched on the platform companies being in vogue or out of vogue. It's so polarizing. I've had guests on that are very bullish on platform or very bullish on single therapeutics. So I like the platform companies. I'm with you. I really like the idea that something can be built that has legs. Personally, I agree.

And it's hard to prioritize dollars towards those right now when. And you're consistently being told that other investors aren't going to assign any value to the platform. But we've seen great companies be built that have produced successes off of a common platform. And I think first of all, it creates a lot more upside. Second of all, it creates an opportunity to reuse the amazing infrastructure and resources that go into building an organization, whether it's the human capital or the technology development for that to all be one shot. And if you have a bad card flip on a clinical trial, it's gone. Just feels insane to me.

I also love the partnership aspect that platform companies can, can have. I love the idea that if you build a great platform and then you can partner with so many different companies to impact different populations of patients. I just. Something in, in the scientist in me loves that.

There's the other measure of impact, right? There's the human impact and societal impact. And if you can deliver multiple programs, if you can solve something that is translatable across different companies, you can move them ultimately benefit more patients, right? That's the figure of merit in, in therapeutic development. And it's necessarily true that a second program means more patients than just the one.

So as you grow, are there any specific sectors or technologies you'd like to expand into? Are you pretty happy where you are right now?

We have a pretty broad mandate, you know, across the spectrum of frontier technologies. And what's interesting is that I think often from the limited partner perspective, we are viewed as a specialist or a niche strategy. From our perspective, the applications of these kinds of innovations can touch at least 50% of global GDP. Certainly it's more than all of information technology. And so I feel like we've got a lot under a lot of wood to chop at this point. What I am excited about is continuing to find new areas within that broad charter that we should be focusing on. And ultimately those views on where those market opportunities are really informed by the entrepreneurs that we're meeting and where they are seeing this convergence of technology, getting ready to solve a commercial problem.

Anything you want to let us in on what's really hot, right Now, I.

Think within the biotech space, I am increasingly confident in our ability to find the proverbial key for a lock. I think especially in small molecule drug design, the tools have gotten so much more powerful, led by early leaders like Schrodinger. But there have been many others, of course. I think the next frontier is really unlocking our understanding then of the biology downstream, that we can better predict what is going to happen when we get to clinical trials in humans. And there are some really interesting innovations happening in that space. We've made at least one bet in that category, but you can get this really virtuous flywheel, whereas you enhance our understanding of biology. Whether it's through novel experimentation or through artificial intelligence, or ideally a combination thereof, you can identify targets better, you can better predict what's going to work, you can shorten the timelines to getting patients drugs, and you can hopefully really bend the curve on the failure rates. I think if you look at the cost of delivering novel drugs to market, so much of it is driven by the lack of understanding of the complexity of human biology and the associated failures that we see in the clinic. And so that I think is really the sort of grand challenge for the next era of cutting edge technology development in biotechnology.

I'm really excited about where this intersection of basic research and technology, deep tech AI ML is going. That's really exciting to me too. So thank you for funding that. All right. What does a day in the life of Ben Hemoni look like?

Every day is a little different. I often talk to half a dozen different companies a day. Whether it's a first conversation, meeting a founder and hearing what they're working on, or it's a deeper dive into the particular nuance of a business. One of the privileges of starting a new firm and building Bison from the ground up is that we don't have a big board load today. Venture capitalists over time tend to be on a lot of boards, and so a huge amount of your time goes into that work. And we are at a moment right now where I've got to pretty light boardload, just a couple of companies. And so I do spend more of my time talking to founders and entrepreneurs and learning from them. In the earliest days of Bison, it was exclusively fundraising, just as entrepreneurs and companies need to raise capital to get off the ground. Being a VC is surprisingly close analog. And so we're fortunate to have gotten through that phase, raised our first fund from a really incredible group of partners, and now we really are focused on the support of our portfolio and Identifying new companies to back.

I think people forget that funds have to fundraise too. That's definitely not. So you think VCs just have money? It comes from someplace, right?

Well, One of my CEOs described it to me as if you're successful in building a company, you will raise a couple of rounds. Eventually you take the company public, it's profitable, you never have to do that again. If you're successful at being a vc, you get the privilege of going out, raising a fund.

Makes sense. Good luck to you on that. It's been a market. Our guests are really intelligent people. We like to know what you're reading because selfishly, it helps us build our book list. So what would you recommend to folks right now?

My wife and I are expecting our second baby in about a month. So I'm deep in Emily Oster at this point. If you're not familiar with Emily, she's a economist actually from Brown who goes in and looks at the quality of research that supports a lot of the recommendations or preconceived notions we have around human, human health in particular around pregnancy and children. Something like what does the evidence actually say about drinking coffee while pregnant? And I, I always really appreciate that perspective. I feel as again someone who's not an expert in all of the fields I'm investing in, but it is technical. The perspective of quality of research and what Emily's doing there I think is always really interesting. So that's what's next to my bed right now.

Yeah, that's excellent. Thank you for the recommendation. I think people will, I don't know us scientists, we have to know all the actual facts about everything, which can be wonderful and also really daunting at times, especially during pregnancy and things like that. Some of my friends, I am not a mom, but some of my friends have gone pretty deep down the research rabbit hole there and said they wish they hadn't because there's just too much. So hopefully she distills a little bit of that for you too.

I think it's very digestible and it's for an inquisitive audience, but it is digestible.

For people who want to learn more about you, where can they connect with you?

Our website, Bison VC has the details of the firm, has our portfolio, has our backgrounds and it's got our email addresses. We are accessible partners and we'd love to hear what your audience is working on. My personal email is Benison bc.

Great. We'll link that all in the show notes so people can click right through this was really fun. I think people will learn a lot from this. And thank you so much. I really appreciate your time.

Thank you for having me. This was really enjoyable.

Building Biotechs is brought to you by Recruitomics Consulting. You can find Building Biotechs in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or anywhere else podcasts are found. Make sure to click subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes, and join our mailing list for a weekly dose of biotech news and a podcast overview. And if you need to install a recruitment engine that saves time and money for your growing company, reach out for a free strategy session. I'm always happy to share my expertise and show you techniques to simplify your hiring process and maximize returns. On behalf of the team here at Recruitomics Consulting, thanks for listening.