Company Spinout vs Traditional Startup 🧫 w/ Vik Bajaj - Managing Director @ Foresite Capital | BIOS

0:00 let's discuss the first one verily is a unique kind of experiment in our field and andy conrad really understood what he was doing in setting this up in the way that he did and i've just learned so much from him but it's a it's an overused analogy but verily is a little bit like a t bell labs in that it was early i would say some of the concepts that we were exploring even in 2013 were years ahead of where the field is

0:32 and it really served as a systematic incubator of sorts in which at a time when the future was so far away that private industry wouldn't summon the money for say a grail scale project verily was a way that we could try in multiple multiple different verticals the union of data science and the life sciences to understand where that space as a whole is going so not only was it intrinsically successful as a business

1:03 and remains so but i think it was catalytic in the way that at t bell labs will be that's how it will be remembered in spawning these new ideas so if i can list a few those ideas range from things like how artificial intelligence and new imaging methods can be used to shape robotic surgery to actually move robotic surgery from a field in which few outcomes have been demonstrated few beneficial outcomes as

1:33 composed to convention as compared to minimally invasive surgery to one in which systematically a combination of machine augmentation allows surgeons to do things at a lower error rate and higher skill level than they were ever before so that's a concept that we launched with a subsidiary of j and j in the form of verb surgical that jnj has reacquired that really explored transformational concepts which you'll see 10 years from now are the basis of new ways of conducting

2:03 invasive surgical procedures so that's an example other examples you know include verily strengths in in immunology and understanding the immune response that's a project led by my colleague charlie kim at verily that you know really was ahead of its time as is many of verily's clinical projects including the baseline study the idea that we could produce a deeply phenotype cohort of individuals who would serve as

2:33 participants in clinical trials that benefit them but also which would provide a molecular longitudinal atlas of disease evolution that was far ahead of its time considering the maturity of the analytical platforms in 2013 2014 when we launched that product and you see now seven eight years later that that's turning into a framework that pharma companies are collaborating with verily to use in a variety of innovative settings and clinical trials verily's care delivery

3:05 operations also are similarly early but growing now and blossoming into things that are along the lines of the hypothesis that i was talking to you about before to do with really personalizing care delivery in the interests and preferences of the patients so to answer your questions we learn a great deal collectively from these large-scale efforts that only the tech industry has been able to do because of the ability to launch many many things in parallel

3:36 and to see what blooms effectively and then to invest in those whether those investments come from google or verily or they come from people who leave and set up small companies which then attract investments i think you trace a lot of the lineage back to the ideas that were developed in that group so that's the role that i think they they play i think one thing that's that's interesting is i believe very strongly as you might

4:04 imagine in the power of harnessing the entrepreneurial ecosystem and that's where spin-outs from large tech companies or in the grail example that you cited from a large platform company illumina are very successful in reorienting a company towards the ingredients of its own success ultimately the forces that govern entrepreneurial companies the discipline the crucible of the entrepreneurial experience is a success factor i believe and so the ability to spin these things

4:36 out when they still need a lot of innovation before they grow too large into a independent company i think is catalytic we learned that at grail but we also learned that in many of verily's joint ventures that spinning them out under independent management where they can take a life of their own is really transformative and that's the lesson that we've tried to adopt at forsyth labs we help start these companies we create them

5:07 but very soon we turn them over to independent managers and ceos to whom we hope we're effective partners in the long term but they have their independent incentives to make the company successful and i think that's a very balanced and very flexible model