Pharma Deals for TechBio: Part III

What to do after the ink has dried

Congratulations, you've signed a pharma deal and now you're asking yourself, what's next? How do we hit the ground running, do some great science, and set ourselves up for future growth of the partnership? This final post in the series discusses 3 lessons PostEra has learned along the way.

Before that, if you're interested in why you should want to sign pharma deals, or how to go about signing pharma deals, check out Part I and Part II.

The key to becoming a valuable partner to pharma, achieving milestones, and signing bigger and better deals, is ensuring your platform actually works. Obvious, I know right? All the lessons I outline below are useful and should help you avoid sabotage, but ultimately, your technology needs to produce some great science and advance pharma's internal programs. There's not much more I can add to that point except to say, "Best of luck." However, as a Founder, it's important to stay focused on what truly matters. With that said, here are three actionable lessons to keep in mind once the ink has dried.

Lesson #1: Team Allocation

Who from your company will join the collaboration team is a crucial early decision. For context, pharma typically has 3 sources of touch-points in these collaborations:

• The Scientists: Self-explanatory, but these are the folks on the ground who know the projects you'll be involved with and are responsible for onboarding your team.
• Alliance Managers: These individuals act as the grease in the wheels of the collaboration. They'll pull the right people into the room, make sure action points from meetings are followed through, and are particularly critical in the early days when you're trying to figure out "how pharma does things."
• Committee Members: Typically, on a quarterly basis, the core team members from both sides meet at a Joint Committee. Several individuals from both sides will have the power to make binding decisions about the collaboration such as adding or terminating programs, declaring milestones, or changing the objectives.

Two comments here regarding the team you should put on the field:

• Leanness: My advice is to have a lean collaboration team. At PostEra, our scientists also act in some capacity as alliance or relationship managers. They make sure meetings happen, slides are put together, and action points are actually actioned. Additionally, giving your Scientists some of the non-science responsibility widens their purview to see the contours of the broader collaboration, something they're likely to appreciate.

At a startup, your advantage is speed so don't slow your collaboration efforts down by having too many cooks in the kitchen.

• Learning: As mentioned in the prior post: pharma wants to learn about novel technologies like yours, beyond just letting them loose on their internal programs. Effectively presenting the Story of your work and how your platform has enabled it is key to pharma being convinced they are getting a good ROI. Ensure your collaboration teams can present well and consistently provide insights on how your platform does what it does while admitting its blind spots. This is the soft stuff that constitutes being a good partner which the scientists will value, even if the lawyers do not.

Lesson #2: Operations and Logistics

Every startup has a hill or two they are willing to die on. Sometimes, it's a pet peeve that turns into an obsession, something they double and triple down on. Efficient Operations and Logistics is one of those things at PostEra. It doesn't matter how groundbreaking your technology is if your cycle times are slow and unpredictable, or if your assay cascade is decoupled from your CRO geographies, or if your science gets quite literally stuck in Indian customs.

Think deeply about these things as you're embarking on your collaboration with pharma. Not just the scientific operations, but also the collaborative operations. Do you really need another weekly alignment meeting? Can you make the data transfer from pharma faster and easier for them? These things in and of themselves are unlikely to generate a scientific breakthrough, but they will prevent your great science from being upended by the faff of doing drug discovery.

Lesson #3: Keep Dreaming Big

If you're doing a good job, hitting milestones, and generally making pharma want more, begin to plan ahead. A single pharma collaboration is rarely transformative for your company, but a single pharma relationship can be transformative. What does the ideal deal expansion look like? You'll be in a much better place if you share your big dreams with your Internal Champion and gauge what may or may not be possible well ahead of the contract expiry.

Pharma companies plan on longer timelines than you, often constrained by annual budgets, so help yourself by helping them.

A single pharma collaboration is rarely transformative for your company but a single pharma relationship can be transformative.

Circling all the way back to Part I: As you're thinking of what the next deal might look like, make sure to again ask yourself the million-dollar question of "What is our business model?" This will inform if you want to pursue more ownership of the back-end economics, or concern yourself only with the upfront non-dilutive funding.

Maybe you want to be more intentional about a therapeutic area this time or try to have contribution rights in the Clinic? Either way, don't just blindly copy and paste your last deal with bigger money unless you're confident the new deal reinforces your company's story. Don't let it become just a side-show.

Wrapping Up

As I conclude this set of posts, I can honesty say the 4 deals we've done with Pfizer and Amgen have generated a huge ROI for us as a company. However, this has only been because we've tried to be incredibly thoughtful about what we want from these deals, how best to execute them, and how to plan for the future effectively.

I wish you the absolute best if you're a founder pursuing pharma deals. Yes, breaking in is tough, staying in is tougher, but as a TechBio, these deals are a unique opportunity to amplify the impact of your Tech in Bio. To that end, I hope this set of posts have been somewhat useful, though if you all start stealing pharma deals from PostEra, I'll be deleting this series.

As always, if I can be helpful, please feel free to reach out.