Innovation in the City
By Brad & Menée Hill
Let’s consider January 9th our official kick-off date reentering the public arena of biotech. A quick 50 minute trip into the city from the Silicon Valley, and we found ourselves at back-to-back evening events, both highlighting the 37th Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, both in art galleries, both events laden with innovative start-ups looking for collaborators to help provide the extra boost needed to get them to their next milestone.
The UC Davis Venture Cataylst cocktail and pitch event was an intimate, and well attended event at the Weinstein Gallery, bringing biotech entrepreneurs and investors together. The event was at capacity with people standing outside hoping to get in. Pitches were made by 10 biotech start-ups, all varying in fields in medicine, all worthy of funding. We left amazed, invigorated, and inspired.
From there, we headed over to MOMA (The Museum of Modern Art), where Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (WSGR), a powerhouse high-tech legal firm, brought biotech entrepreneurs and venture capitalist together en mass in the setting of a reception.
First, “reception” draws an inaccurate picture of the event. It was a basically “the” melting pot where heightened intellect meets deep pockets and together they create breakthroughs in medicine. It was an incredible scene of over (at our estimation) 2,000 movers and shakers, all who are or, in our case, have worked with WSGR.
But, can we just tell you, despite the enormity of the event, once you had a drink in your hand and grabbed some tasty food from the servers as they passed by, striking up conversations with other attendees was quite easy. People were there to talk, meet people, and share what they were doing.
We spoke with other entrepreneurs, and funders alike. All looking to grow in the realm of biotech. While the majority of people were from the San Francisco Bay Area/Silicon Valley, many had traveled from afar to attend the event.
By evenings end, we had learned about new funding opportunities to promote women led biotech companies, new heart rhythm monitoring technology for home use, cutting-edge customizable and adjustable prosthetic limbs for amputees, and a camera-based augmented reality system for precise dental implant placement – all from participants who happened to be standing next to us.
On a gorgeous, starlit evening in San Francisco, in the midst of the dazzling Union Square and Yerba Buena Gardens, UC Davis Venture Catalyst and WSGR demonstrated their biotech culinary magic, each creating their own biotech soup du jour, both sprinkling in the vital ingredient – the desire to come together and collaborate to create the future of healthcare. We left San Francisco satisfied, energized and filled with creative imagination, excited for what lies ahead from here in our innovative, biotech adventure.