How to Build Your Startup—and Grow It into an Empire | Chris Loose | Big Think

How to Build Your Startup—and Grow It into an Empire

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Hertz Foundation Fellow Dr. Christopher Loose sold his first startup for $80 million in 2012, and co-founded his second startup, Frequency Therapeutics Inc., in 2015, which is developing methods to restore hearing loss, with greater applications in human regenerative medicine. Even if you aren't in the field of medicine, innovators of any kind looking to found their first startup will benefit from his experience and advice on mentorship, building a balanced team, consulting experts, and how to develop the right first product—one that the rest of your career might be valued on. The Hertz Foundation mission is to provide unique financial and fellowship support to the nation's most remarkable PhD students in the hard sciences. Hertz Fellowships are among the most prestigious in the world, and the foundation has invested over $200 million in Hertz Fellows since 1963 (present value) and supported over 1,100 brilliant and creative young scientists, who have gone on to become Nobel laureates, high-ranking military personnel, astronauts, inventors, Silicon Valley leaders, and tenured university professors. For more information, visit hertzfoundation.org.

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CHRISTOPHER LOOSE:

Christopher Loose, PhD, serves as executive director of Yale University’s Center for Biomedical and Interventional Technology (CBIT). He holds an appointment as assistant professor adjunct of urology in the Yale School of Medicine. He is also a lecturer in entrepreneurship in the School of Management and lecturer in Biomedical Engineering. Additionally, Dr. Loose is an accelerator executive at the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT).

Previously, Dr. Loose co-founded Semprus BioSciences with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Professors Robert Langer and David Lucchino, and served as chief technology officer until the company was acquired by Teleflex Incorporated in 2012 (TFX: $80M). Semprus Technology was published in Science Translational Medicine and received a Frost and Sullivan Breakthrough Technology Award in 2010. Semprus’s first product, a vascular catheter with a surface modification designed to have reduced thrombus (clot) formation, was FDA-cleared in 2012.

Dr. Loose received the prestigious Hertz Foundation Fellowship and was selected by MIT’s Technology Review as a member of the “TR35,” naming the world’s top 35 innovators under the age of 35. He was awarded the inaugural Peter Strauss Entrepreneurial Award from the Hertz Foundation in 2011 and was also named to Boston Business Journal’s 40 emerging business leaders under 40.

While earning his PhD in chemical engineering at MIT, with his Hertz Fellowship, Dr. Loose co-authored the Semprus Biosciences business plan, which won entrepreneurial competitions at MIT, Harvard University and Oxford University. Prior to his graduate work, Dr. Loose was a chemical engineer at Merck Research Labs after graduating, summa cum laude, with a BSE in chemical engineering from Princeton University.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Chris Loose: As an entrepreneur, focus is critical, especially with a platform technology.

One often knows that you can go after many different product applications, but you ultimately get valued most importantly on the first application you bring forward, and as an entrepreneur you have limited time and limited resources, so you need to choose well and drive deep into clinical and regulatory validation for that first product.

Now, in order to make that often really painful decision about what to invest in and what to leave on the side—at least for a while—there are many aspects of a certain product you need to think through. Obviously market size plays a role. Technical fit to need plays a role.

As I’m looking at new ideas, I often try to follow some of the advice I once got from Bob Langer, who has been very prolific—he has started roughly 50 companies out of his lab, I think, at this point, and I have had the honor of starting two companies with him. Among the other kind of rules of the road he shares, is first: look for a platform company. If you're going to build a company make sure that if you’re successful in one area it can create value in a number of adjacent areas, because that really justifies bringing in the investment, building the whole infrastructure not just for one product but potentially for many.

But within that it's crucially impo...

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