Florida’s Startup Surge: Insights From UF Innovate Ventures With Dr. Jackson Streeter, Part 1

 

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Welcome to another episode of The 7 in 7 Show with Zack Ellison, which features full-length interviews with the world’s leading investors in innovation.

Episode #12A of Season 2 features Dr. Jackson Streeter, Director of UF Innovate Ventures at the University of Florida, where he manages a venture fund for the Research Foundation.

After assuming this role in late 2019, he recruited a luminary Investment Advisory Committee and began investing in 2020. In addition, he manages life science investments for the Florida Opportunity Fund and DeepWork Capital, where he is a limited partner. Dr. Streeter is the inventor of over twenty patents, the author of multiple scientific publications, and has served on over a dozen boards and executive committees.

Previously, he served as an Officer in the U.S. Navy, completing a general surgery internship at Naval Regional Medical Center Portsmouth, Virginia and then primary Flight School at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida. During his military service, he was the first Naval Flight Surgeon selected as a TOPGUN staff instructor. He served on several overseas deployments, including Operation Desert Storm. Dr. Streeter initiated the Basic Combat Medicine Course to train Naval Aircrew on the essential life-saving skills necessary to stabilize combat-related injuries in the field.

As the Senior Flight Surgeon at Naval Air Station Fallon, NV he was part of the helicopter aircrew with the Search and Rescue (SAR) team and pilot rescue program where he participated in over 40 real-world SAR missions and was awarded the Navy Commendation Medal for that service, as well as, two Naval Achievement Medals and other awards. After eight years of active duty, Dr. Streeter left active Naval service at the rank of Lieutenant Commander.

In this episode, Zack Ellison and Jackson Streeter discuss:

1. Florida’s Potential as an Innovation Hub: Exploring the state’s growing talent pool, favorable business environment, and increasing investment, positioning it as an emerging leader in innovation.
2. Early-Stage Funding for Startups: The importance of securing early-stage funding, particularly for underserved communities like veterans, and how it can significantly impact a startup’s trajectory.
3. Strategies for Founders: Key strategies for startup success including starting with a solid product-market fit, choosing the right investors, and prioritizing intellectual property protection.
4. Gainesville’s Startup Ecosystem: A look into Gainesville’s vibrant startup community, its internationally recognized incubator system, and how it attracts talent and companies from around the globe.
5. Valuation and Cap Table Management: The consequences of raising money at high valuations and the importance of managing the cap table to avoid pitfalls like down rounds and talent loss.
6. Venture Debt and Dilution: How venture debt can help startups save on dilution, and the strategic benefits of this financing option for growth-stage companies.
7. Innovation in Healthcare AI: Discussions on the potential of AI in healthcare, including predictive analytics, medical imaging, and smart ICU technology, and their implications for the industry.

Florida’s Startup Surge: Insights From UF Innovate Ventures With Dr. Jackson Streeter, Part 1

UF Innovate Ventures

Welcome to another episode of the 7in7 Show with Zack Ellison. I have with me Jackson Streeter, who’s the director of UF Innovate Ventures. Jackson, thanks for joining.

Zack, thanks for having me.

It’s a pleasure to have you. We both have UF ties. I’m finishing up the doctorate and business administration program there. I am impressed with what UF is doing generally in innovation. Talk to me a little bit about what you’re doing now, what UF Innovate is, and what UF Innovate Ventures is.

I run a venture capital fund for the University of Florida. I got brought into UF at the end of 2019 to put the fund together. This is not a grant program. This is an equity investing program like any other venture fund. It is a little different in that it is part of the University of Florida. I came at the end of 2019 and put together an investment advisory committee. The way we set this fund up is that we have an outside group of independent people from the university who are primarily venture capitalists scattered around the country who look at deals before we finalize writing a check.

We put that together at the end of 2019 and then began investing in the early part of 2020. When we launched the fund was right when COVID took off. It didn’t slow us down all that much, as much as it may have in other states. I think Florida, we got back to the office early, started doing stuff, and started investing. In this fund, we can only invest in companies that have licensed technology from UF. That’s a criterion for us to invest. They can be located anywhere in the world.

 

 

I’m currently sitting in Bilbao, Spain, which is where one of our portfolio companies, SatLantis, which is a satellite company, is headquartered. They do their AI and advanced computing research still at UF, which is where the company was formed. Our check size is relatively modest. It’s up to half a million dollars and we don’t lead deals. We co-invest with syndicated institutional investors and other venture capitalists.

It can be in any industry. We’ve got investments like I’ve mentioned in the satellite company. About half of our portfolio, twelve companies now, is in healthcare. Our upcoming newest investment will be in a material science company in San Diego. The cool thing about my job is that I get to see a lot of cutting-edge research in a lot of different industries and fields. It’s a pretty interesting job.

How did you get to this position? I know you’ve got a medical doctorate. What did you study in med school and how did you go from med school to where you are now?

I have a very circuitous route to where I’m at today. I started as a US Navy doctor. I went to medical school on a Navy scholarship and then spent eight years as a Navy flight surgeon. My last job there was probably the best job I’ll ever have, in which I was the first flight surgeon who got accepted to be on the TOPGUN staff. I ended up with about 400 hours in the F-18. It was fantastic and got to be with some of the greatest pilots in the world, which is awesome. In the mid-’90s, I was looking at a couple of different career options. One of them was to start a company.

I founded a med-tech company in San Diego and decided to do that full time and went ahead and got out of the military at that point. I did a couple of medical technology companies in San Diego, which is where I was when I got out of the Navy. They were venture capital-backed companies. I learned the process of venture capital and starting a company with no formal training. I just went out there and did it. I remember going to Barnes & Noble and buying a book on how to write a business plan.

I learned everything the hard way about this. The last company out there ended up getting rolled up by a private equity firm. Along the way, I discovered some interesting science and literature about some researchers at the McKnight Brain Institute at UF who discovered some proteins that could be detected in the blood after brain injury. My field of research and what I had worked on a lot was in stroke.

I was interested to learn if these blood-based biomarkers that they had developed for a concussion and traumatic brain injury could be relevant to stroke. I came out to UF to look at this technology because I thought it was interesting. One thing led to another, and they wanted me to come on board and be CEO of a startup company at UF. I went back to San Diego and convinced my wife it was a good idea to leave San Diego and move to Gainesville. That’s how I ended up there.

How does she like it?

 

That’s also how I got to know the University of Florida. That company was called Banyan Biomarkers and we had a great partnership with the Department of Defense. We did develop a blood test for concussion and got that approved by the FDA. Ultimately, we did a commercialization deal with Abbott and then that company was acquired by a large French diagnostic company called bioMérieux. My family and I enjoyed raising our kids in Gainesville. That whole process with being in several years, we didn’t want to leave. Jim O’Connell runs UF Innovate, asked me to come on board at the end of 2019 and get this thing going. That’s how I ended up doing what I’m doing.

That’s very cool. I watched a movie recently about the Blue Angels. They’re amazing pilots. Did you ever interact with them?

I had a few guys that I flew with a TOPGUN and ended up going into the Blue Angels. A couple of them became the boss, which is the commanding officer of the Blues. It’s a pretty awesome thing that they do routinely. They would never let the doctor fly that close to another jet ever. They did some pretty awesome stuff. We did some awesome stuff at TOPGUN that was different. It wasn’t demonstration flying, it was tactical. I enjoyed it. It was cool.

That’s very cool. I feel like that would be probably the most exciting job to have, being a fighter pilot.

You’d think it’s dangerous, but then you get out and start raising money and starting biotech companies, and you realize what real thrills and danger are all about dealing with investors and all that stuff.

Thoughts On Gainesville

Before we move on, I wanted to ask you a little bit about Gainesville. I think Gainesville is very underrated and one of the best places that people can live nowadays. I wanted to get your thoughts on it for those who think of Gainesville as a swamp but don’t realize what a great community it is.

Gainesville punches above its weight in a major way. You go back to Gatorade, which is the thing that everybody knows about. We have 100,000 square feet of incubator space. We’ve got 60-plus companies that are inside the UF incubator system. There’s a vibrant startup mentality around the town. There are a few different coworking accelerator-type things. Culturally, Gainesville is friendly to innovation and starting things.

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It’s pretty good. One thing that in our incubator system, we’ve been recognized internationally as having several times the number one biotech incubator up in Alachua in the world. Not all the companies that are inside the incubator system have to come from UF. We’ve had several different countries, including Brazil. Several European companies come to the United States and they land in Gainesville to get the company started. It’s a good place.

One of the things I love about Gainesville, first of all, you’ve got the University of Florida there, which is a tremendous asset, with tons and tons of talent that you alluded to on all levels. There are students, there are professors, and there are a lot of innovative companies that are choosing to make Gainesville home. Also, the cost of living is very reasonable. The state of Florida has a lot going for it in general. Gainesville is also pretty close to other major cities. It’s two hours from Tampa, an hour and a half from Jacksonville, hour and a half from Orlando. The University of Florida also is a good time in terms of all the activities that surround it. Where else can you go to a football game with 90,000 people for the cost of less than you’d spend going to a movie?

The same weekend, see something very cultural, like a world-class opera singer or ballet or whatever. It’s not just athletics, which I love, but there are a lot of cultural things that come with you up there in Gainesville too. When we came from San Diego and we saw the price of housing, we were like, “Can we get two?”

You can probably get four for the price of one. Probably more or almost more. If you look at it on a price-per-square-foot basis, it’s so much cheaper. For those tuning in and for you, Jackson, I’ve moved to Florida full-time. I’m in the St. Petersburg area. That’s mainly for lifestyle reasons, but also business reasons as well. I like Gainesville quite a bit.

I want to open an office there for ARI because I think there’s so much talent. There are so many good students too that are coming out of UF and so many good companies to connect with. We were talking about this offline, but I think Florida as a state is going to be the next big thing when it comes to innovation. I think we’ve reached peak Silicon Valley and Boston and New York and and other larger cities that were historically venture hubs have peaked in my view.

Not that they won’t still be the largest, but in terms of growth rates, it’s going to be Florida and it’s going to be the Southeast US in my view because there’s so much talent flowing down here. The lifestyle is better. The business environment is much more friendly. There’s a ton of talent coming out of places like UF. I’m very bullish in this area, which is one of the main reasons I moved down here. That’s also why I wanted to go to the University of Florida to get my doctorate because I feel like this is the next big thing. I always want to be associated with the cutting edge of growth and innovation. It’s happening here. It’s not happening in some of the larger cities in my view.

You made a good choice. You look at there’s $2.5 billion of publicly funded research going on inside the state. About half of that occurs at UF. If you look at what drives innovation, Silicon Valley, obviously got Stanford and UC schools there. It’s the fuel underneath the fuel innovation that comes often from research universities, and we have that in Florida. The University of Florida has also expanded out of Gainesville and we’ve acquired the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter. It is now part of UF. Some of the world’s leading biomedical scientists are there at Scripps. We’ve already started three companies there.

A lot is going on in Florida. Typically, Florida has been underserved and still is from a capital perspective, but that’s changing. Maybe since COVID, it drove a lot of the private equity, some of the investors, a lot of Ken Griffin down in Miami, but a lot of wealth has moved down. They probably always had homes down here, but now they’re moving their companies down here.

 

This is a good place to be and it’s a good place to do company formation. It’s tax-friendly. You mentioned that real estate is relative to New York, California, and Massachusetts. This place that’s moving in the right direction for sure. I get to interact every so often with some of the undergrads and a lot of them don’t want to leave, but if the jobs aren’t there, then they end up getting educated in Florida than doing their careers outside of it. That’s one of the things that is moving in the right direction too. There are a lot more companies being formed in Florida and staying in Florida.

One of the keys to that, at least in the world that I’m in, is whether those companies can get early-stage capital or not. If they get that seed and series A funding and they build a team in a certain location, it’s hard to move a company at that point. If they get their seed and series A funding in Boston or Silicon Valley, they’ll never come back. There’s still a need for more of that early-stage funding in Florida, but it has increased over the last few years. The state is putting money to work through the full opportunity fund. That’s an early-stage venture capital program that the state is committed to funding Florida-based companies through.

Getting On UF Innovate Ventures’ Radar

If there’s a startup in Florida that is seeking funding what’s the best way for them to get on your radar and potentially get UF Innovate Ventures to invest?

For me to invest out of UF Innovate Ventures, they’d have to have a licensed technology from UF. That said, I spend probably at least half my day interacting with entrepreneurs that will never happen or it’s not relevant to what they do. I’m very open to pointing people in the right direction as long as they have a Florida-based entity. I also look at the life science investing opportunities for Florida’s Opportunity Fund which is managed by DeepWork Capital in Orlando. I could point them there. There are several active Angel groups. It depends on what the startup does. Many of them don’t look at biopharmaceutical opportunities, for instance. They’re more tech-focused. I’m more than happy to point them to the funding sources that we have connections with for sure.

Generally speaking, for founders that are early stage, let’s say seed stage or series A, what advice do you give them in terms of the big picture and potentially capital raising and building their business in general?

One of the important things is if you look at the reason most startups fail, and it’s been analyzed and we’ve done this analysis ourselves and it reflects what happens nationally, is there isn’t a market for the product. Any VC will tell you that you’ll see very excited entrepreneurs about a product, but it’s not clear who’s going to buy it and how big the market is.

I would say have a deep understanding of who is the customer ultimately going to be, and do they care. We’ve seen some things that get built and it’s not a technology that fails. It’s that there was no market for it. Having a deep understanding of who’s going to buy it, how much are they going to pay, and what’s the competitive landscape going to look like. That’s fundamental.

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If you go through that exercise, you are convinced that there is a market for this. You need to get investors that can be helpful to you. Investors that have experience in the industry that you’re going into can be important and valuable in putting together advisors, if you’re a first-time CEO who has experience in the area that you’re working in, that can prevent you from making costly dumb mistakes.

In addition to the product, which is important, what else do you look for in terms of the team, the business model, or other key factors?

The longer I’ve been on the investment side of the equation, for me anyway, maybe 50% of an investment decision is who the people are. At an early stage, no one is going to have the full team built out. Of course, they’re not going to have all the money, but at least being able to show that they’re coachable and can receive input and act on it. That becomes important because any startup is going to have a lot of ups and downs. It’s a roller coaster. It can go from the highest highs and the lowest lows all in an eight-hour day. You have to look at people who are adaptable, receptive, humble, and confident. It’s a lot of little things that are a little hard to quantify, but the more that you do this, you realize that a lot of those qualities are super important.

Just to go back to your first point on the product, I always think, what problem are they solving? Are customers willing to pay for this problem that’s being solved? It’s looking a little bit further at its competitors and saying, “Are there other people that are already solving this problem or that are trying to solve it? How do they fit into the mix?” I start with the product and make sure that they’re supplying customers with a product that they need and want and will pay for.

On the leadership side, everything you said makes total sense. I would add to your point about coachability. Working with people who are aligned with you and who are easy to work with, because if everything’s difficult, you can find other people to work with. I always give people the advice to just be somebody that others want to work with, and a lot of good opportunities that you may have not even known were there will appear before you. If you get that reputation, you keep living that way.

That’s great advice. There are plenty of deals at the end of the day. You will see a hundred deals to do 1 or 2. Getting with a professional, with a venture capital investor and an entrepreneur, it’s a bit like a marriage. You’re going to probably spend a lot of time with these people. It has to fit both ways too. From the entrepreneur’s side, if the chemistry is bad, that often doesn’t work. It’s got to be a good fit for all parties for it to flow because there’s going to be tough times for sure.

Choosing The Right Investors

That brings me to my next point, which is choosing investors is critical to long-term success. A lot of people early on will take any money that’s offered to them. Sometimes you have to because it’s hard to raise money, especially when you don’t have a track record. A lot of folks realize later on that maybe they shouldn’t have taken money from certain types of investors because there wasn’t that fairness, that alignment, and that transparency that they need to be successful. I wanted to get your thoughts on what founders should be looking for when they consider who they’re partnering with on the investment side. Maybe any red flags that you’ve seen over the years in terms of what might make the fit difficult.

This is important. You’ll see often, you’ve probably seen this too, where you get some friends or family or some maybe Angels involved in a deal and they have completely unrealistic expectations because they don’t know what they’re investing in. I’ve seen this happen in life science startups several times. People are concerned about Alzheimer’s disease. They know nothing about drug development or whatever the technology is. They know about the disease because maybe they have some personal connection to it.

 

They invest in things that they don’t understand. From the entrepreneur side, I understand there’s a reality that you need money at the end of the day but if you can get people that understand what you do and what you’re trying to accomplish in the industry that you’re in, that can be important. Another thing that will happen is formation. If the company isn’t formed right, that can lead to a whole slew of problems. If it’s not formed right, you raise early-stage Angel or friends and family money at some unrealistic high valuation, then it has to be recapped.

Now when you go to professional investors, let’s say they’re looking at three deals and one of them has to be completely restructured. All of them have maybe equivalent values or potential returns, but in one of them, you have to spend all this time fixing it because it wasn’t formed correctly in the beginning. They’re going to pass because it’s hard. They’ll go do the deals that don’t have to be fixed. I would say at formation, if possible, get the lawyers, the law firms that know how to form early-stage tech-based companies. They’ll form them right and they won’t have to be fixed. With your investors, as we mentioned, trying to find people who have experience in what you’re doing can be important.

Don’t raise money at the highest valuation necessarily you can from Angels. What you want to do is whatever your financing strategy is, typically like pre-seed, seed, and series A should be step-ups all along the way. You don’t want to have to reset the valuation on the early-stage Angels. You have to go back and have difficult conversations. It’s better not to do it like that. Getting lawyers involved. We all complain about lawyers like we were doing before we started. They do have a role and it can be important, especially in the early stage.

This point that you made about valuation is important and getting the cap table right early. I always go back to this principle beginning with the end in mind and thinking, “What does this venture need to look like in 5, 10, 15 years? How do I put in the foundation now so that I’m able to achieve those 5, 10, 15-year goals?” A lot of people rush through the foundational stage. They build a house on a shaky foundation and it ultimately collapses.

One of the things that people get wrong that you alluded to and that I want to dig into is raising money at a valuation that’s too high. It sounds counterintuitive. This is why I want to get your thoughts on it because a lot of folks would say, “Of course, I want to raise money at the highest valuation.” If the valuation is unrealistically high and cannot be justified, it can lead to many negative repercussions. I’m curious if you could dig into that for people who don’t understand what can go wrong in that scenario.

Maybe it’d be helpful to talk a little bit about what’s called venture math and how venture capitalists will look at an investment. Typically, they have to look at an investment where they’re going to say, “We’re going to need to see 5 to 10 times return on our money.” Even the smartest funds in the world are going to have 6 out of 10 investments that don’t go anywhere. The other four have got to carry the fund and return all the capital, plus more.

They’re going to be looking at, “How am I going to get a big return on my investment? How long will it take? How much money is the company going to have to raise to get to that exit for my fund?” That becomes important. What are the comps in your field that have been acquired or have gone public and what do those exits look like for those investors? You can then start to understand how the professional investor will start looking at valuation at the early stage because they’ll factor in, that this company is going to need $5 million now. It’s going to need another twenty before it gets to exit. I’ve got to hold back so I can continue to participate. What will their position look like on the cap table?

Never lasts forever. The business cycle will always cycle again. Share on X

We’re not going to get into all the real details on this in this show. This is where an experienced lawyer can be valuable in walking the entrepreneur through what this cap table means and what is the position of ownership going to look like on a go-forward basis. Any investor will roll their eyes if they hear, “This is a $10 billion market. If I can just get 1% of it, I was going to.” That’s not the right way to think about it. A lot of people will say that and nobody takes it seriously.

One thing that a lot of people need to hear is that once you take money, you’re on the clock. If you take money at a high valuation, the clock is ticking faster. That’s what a lot of people underestimated over the last couple of years when they took money at high valuations in 2020, 2021, and the first half of 2022. They realized, “I’m not going to be able to raise money in the future at my previous valuation.” They’re forced to do what’s called a down round, meaning they’re raising money at a lower valuation.

That makes nobody happy generally because you’ve got the existing investors who realize that their investment value has plummeted in some cases and new investors are seeing this as a negative signal. I’ve been talking to a lot of founders recently who are full of regret from taking a lot of money at high valuations. They realized, “We’ll never be able to reach that valuation.” This means they start flirting with what I call the startup death spiral, where their employees now have options that are probably not going to be worth anything.

They start to look elsewhere and maybe leave, which means that operationally, the company’s growth is going to slow because their most talented employees are going to go elsewhere. When growth starts to slow, that scares away future investors. It also causes current investors a lot of angst and it spirals on itself. You lose more and more talent. Your revenue starts to slow, your valuation drops further and before you know it, you’re out of business. A lot of companies right now are caught up in that death spiral. They either don’t know it. Most of the time they should know it at this stage but they don’t want to admit it.

We’re going to see a lot of companies failing and closing their doors over the next couple of years because when you think about startup funding cycles, it’s every 2 to 3 years you’re raising another round of capital. In the last two years, roughly, the market has been shut for the majority of companies. Now they’re running low. They are in burn rate and weren’t sustainable. They never figured out how to reach profitability. They didn’t have sustainable business models, absent external funding.

A lot of founders are coming to me now looking for venture debt because they don’t have as many options as they would like on the equity side. Of course, venture lenders aren’t looking to finance companies that are dying. We’re looking to bet on the winners that have done well. A lot of these companies are out of options. A lot of folks are now saying, “I should bootstrap my company longer. I should have sold less equity at a lower valuation.”

A lot of founders were being pressured by VCs to grow at all costs. Their burn rates were not sustainable, but the VCs would keep pushing them saying, “Don’t worry, you can raise more money. Keep raising money and keep spending and you’ll be fine.” That faucet of liquidity got turned off. Now the VCs are nowhere to be found with a lot of these companies and have abandoned them and the companies are saying, “I shouldn’t have taken the advice from my investors. I should have thought about other options in advance.”

In biotech, there’s been a massive reset in valuations. It’s interesting when you look at how all that’s evolved over the last few years. The public markets opened up. A ton of money went into a lot of things that probably shouldn’t have gotten funded. A lot of companies ended up going public and are now withering on the vine or going out of business. There is a herd as you’re talking a little bit about when things get frothy and money is everywhere. You’re raising an important point that it never lasts forever. The business cycle will always cycle again.

This goes back to having people around the table who have lived through some cycles and can give you the right advice, rather than go out and raise the money that you’re going to spend it. That does happen in these frothy times and you do need to be careful of that. When the cycle comes back the other way, there’s a pain because you didn’t raise the money you needed to get to break even. I work in life sciences a lot to get some meaningful clinical trial endpoint, let’s say. You still need more and now the money isn’t around to get it. That’s where companies go out of business often.

 

It’s sad because we of course want to see people be successful. One of my many goals is to help founders understand all the potential pitfalls while they’re still very early and try to avoid those. A lot of them are foreseeable if you have experience and if you’ve done the research. You know there is going to be a risk. There are ways to plan around that. One of them on the capital raising side and cap structure side is to be a little bit more conservative and maybe bootstrap a little bit longer.

Figure out if there are ways to take the minimum amount of external capital in each round instead of the maximum. Do it at valuations that are fair, but not too frothy because what you can do then is continue to show momentum. It’s like the public stock market, for instance. When you beat expectations consistently, investors like it. You’re doing well, but if you miss expectations, your stock is going to get punished. It’s the same for smaller companies as well. It’s all about managing expectations.

Another thing I’d mentioned is not giving up too much equity early because a lot of folks are like, “It’s okay, I got to get off the ground. I’m going to give my co-founder 25% or 50%. I’m going to give my anchor investor a big chunk.” They realize later that there’s not enough meat on the bone to continue to raise external capital. To your point, they haven’t gotten to profitability yet and sustainability. They’re at risk because they don’t have anything more they can sell, but they’re not there yet. That’s where a lot of companies are right now in their life cycle. They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.

I’ve seen this with founders and this is where there’s no vesting over time because things change people don’t get along, they get sick, whatever. They got all this equity and then they’re not even involved with the company anymore if it’s giving away in the beginning. This goes back to having experienced a company formation from a legal perspective and how you set up giving out equity that often it’s better if invested over time. That’s not all given away and then it’s irretrievable. That can lead to a lot of issues for sure.

Advice For Founders

Are there any other pieces of advice you’d give to founders?

This doesn’t necessarily apply to pure SaaS or tech companies, but if you’re in the field of engineering or certainly in all the life science companies, your intellectual property is key. That’s the analogy of the foundation of a house. In those companies, that foundation is the IP. Ultimately, most things get acquired. That’s how exits typically occur. The strategic companies are coming around to pick up those assets.

They’re buying the IP almost at the end of the day. It’s making sure that you’ve done everything you can afford to do to protect that. I think that’s important. On the investor side again, first early-stage entrepreneur, you’re not going to have everything in place, but I always look at money as raising money as like dominoes, where you need the money to tick over the next tunnel. You know the pathway of all the things you’re going to need to do, who you’re going to need to hire, what things you’re going to have to in-license or whatever. All the events you’re going to do with that money.

Whatever money you raise, you want to make sure you’re raising to get to some significant milestone, whether that’s MVP, a minimal viable product, or getting to some clinical study that is going to drive value. Raise the amount of money you need to get to a milestone. Don’t leave yourself stranded by not raising enough money to get to something meaningful.

 

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About Dr. Jackson Streeter

Experienced Senior Executive with a demonstrated history of working in the biotechnology industry. Skilled in Medical Devices, Biotechnology, Healthcare, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Research and Development (R&D).

Strong business development professional and extensive experience working with Department of Defense, former Naval Officer and graduated from University of Nevada School of Medicine.