2 million bucks is all it takes

Another way to scrape together 2 million dollars
Credit: WVLT

In this week's C&EN, a really fun article by Lisa Jarvis about Forge Therapeutics' hunt for investors
at 2016's JP Morgan Healthcare Conference. The company's founder is Seth Cohen of UCSD, with Zak Zimmerman as CEO and David Puerta as head of chemistry. Here's a fun little detail about their current funding situation:

Launched in early 2015, the firm secured “seed” funding—a small influx of cash from private individuals—to set up labs and start generating data. Zimmerman and Puerta are hoping in 2016 to attract a first round of funding from venture capitalists or secure a partnership with a big pharma company—maybe even both... 

The two chemists knew the science, but they needed help on the business side. One day in December 2014, Puerta took his kids out to play soccer and ran into another family. “Zak was out there with his kids, and it turns out we had worked across the street from each other in Cambridge,” Puerta recalls. 

It was a fortuitous meeting. Zimmerman had led business development at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals and was lured to San Diego when the firm spun off the microRNA business Regulus Therapeutics. In other words, he had years’ worth of industry, venture, and banking contacts that could be exceedingly helpful to a young business. 

It turned out that Zimmerman, Puerta, and Cohen lived within a mile of each other. And they discovered that in addition to the usual commonalities—kids, soccer, science—they had an easy rapport. Conversations about a potential company quickly turned into the launch of an actual one. Zimmerman put his network to work to come up with a list of metalloprotein targets that were of interest to big pharma companies. If Forge’s novel chemistry yielded inhibitors, partners might be interested. 

Meanwhile, the team scraped together about $2 million from family, high-net-worth individuals, and the San Diego-based private investor network, Tech Coast Angels. Last spring, the three hired several researchers and set up shop in JLABS, a sought-after Johnson & Johnson incubator in San Diego where tenants share lab and office equipment. A pilot agreement with J&J soon followed.

The rest of the article is just as interesting - I think I had as much fun reading it as Lisa had in writing it.

(Isn't vorinostat a good example of a hydroxamic acid drug?)

The small company experience seems to be just as much about about "let's ask people for some money" in addition to "let's come up with some new science ideas." I should grow up about that, and acknowledge that getting money from people is a skill, and one that I should get better at.

Starting a small chemistry-related business, by Luke

Credit: Alameda Labs

Today, I'm letting Luke tell his story of starting a small chemistry-based business. I think you'll enjoy it:

Hi Chemjobber readers! Several months ago I quit my bench chemistry position without a new role lined up (a bit of free career advice: probably don’t do this) and decided I wanted apply my chemistry skills outside of the lab. So, in January, I started a small business designing and manufacturing custom, stainless steel-based Schlenk lines as Alameda Labs. I haven’t quite replaced my income from working full time, but I’ve done managed to sell a couple of lines. Total revenue: a not shabby $20k. 

I’ve learned a lot in the short time I’ve been doing this and CJ has graciously given me the space to talk about my experience and give advice to people interested in going down a similar route. 

My Story 

Being unemployed sucks. I quit a bachelor’s level research position at a material science startup and instead of looking for a similar position, I decided to start interviewing for data science roles based on the software and math skills I’d developed at work. After a couple of months of interviews but no offers, I started to worry that I had made a horrible mistake by quitting and trying to change industries. 

Apart from anxiety, being unemployed also gives you a lot of downtime. After doing my daily due diligence on the job search, I still had 4 - 6 hours of free time. I obviously had the time to try new things, so on New Years I pulled the trigger on an idea I’d been noodling on for a couple of months. 

At the material science startup, I’d partnered with a chemical engineer colleague to develop a couple of stainless Schlenk lines to develop some pilot scale process chemistries. I realized that the stainless concept could be valuable to others when we noticed one of the staff research scientists had shifted all of his synthesis over to the stainless lines from a traditional glass line. The chemistry our scientist was doing required an hour-long dissociation/distillation step and he realized that on the stainless line he was able to cut that step down to minutes because of the more reliable and stronger vacuum it could achieve. 

I made a single page website describing what I intended to sell and started emailing people that I knew. Two weeks later, no nobody’s greater surprise than mine, I got a call from a postdoc at a R1 University who wanted to a quote for a line. 

All in all, I think the skills that make me good at entrepreneurship are the same things that made me successful at chemistry. Chiefly, I like to try new things and I’m resourceful. Starting out, I didn’t know how to make landing pages or set up Adwords campaigns, nor create Purchase Orders or engineering drawings. But between asking people in my network for help (to whom I am indebted and incredibly grateful for) and Google, I’ve managed to make it work. I’ve also found that if you can manage the highs and lows of doing research, you’ll find sales is really similar (I celebrated my first sale with an f-bomb and a couple of Tiger Woods fist pumps).  

Thanks again to CJ for allowing me the space to write about my project. If you have any questions about what I’m doing or want feedback on any ideas of yours, feel free to email me directly at luke at alamedalabs.net. I’ll also try to show up in the comments.

Thanks to Luke for his great story! Readers, any questions?

What is the minimum amount of equipment needed to run a chemistry business?

In the entrepreneurship thread, the discussion turned to how to set up a small business performing chemistry:

Anon060720110900a: The idea that anyone other than tenured professors with a LOT of clout can just go off and found a science/chemistry based startup is TOTAL bunk. Of course, you can find the one or two cases in which it happened (google Halcyon Molecular). But seriously, the Zuckerberg model of "start the company from your dorm room" works great for software, but once you realize that you need fume hoods, AFMs, TEM's, compliance with federal/state/municipal hazard laws, etc, the model falls apart real quick. 

Anon060820111000a: I hear such space exists in the Silicon Valley with all the permits to do chemistry, and landlord offers proper waste disposal in the rent which is about $5000 per month. They don’t provide chemicals, glassware or Scifinder access. Better have a client list with orders or a big bankroll.

What's the smallest amount of glassware, etc that you need to set up a lab? My list would consist of:

• A hood
• A small set of glassware
• A heating mantle
• Temperature probe (or thermometer)
• Flash column
• TLC plates
• Rotovap
• Access to an HPLC and/or an NMR
• SciFinder access (or a nearby university)
• A laptop (combination lab notebook and lab radio)

I think that's about all I would need, but I'm going to guess that I've just listed off about $10,000 worth of equipment. 

The operating overhead for chemistry is just really high -- that hurts small business formation and I'm not sure what to do with it. Readers, what say you? What's the smallest amount of equipment you need?