Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co

celinehh.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 251 posts

Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co

#81

Post by BurningFrog »

crackercrews wrote: post #21

Interesting that she had a much easier time raising from men than women. She mentions having a CRM with 150+ investors, so presumably this isn't just random chance based on a small number of interactions. One possible reason is that men may have been actively looking to invest in female founders for diversity reasons. Female investors wouldn't feel the same pressure for gender diversity among their portfolio companie…

In general it's good for men to be aware that women don't actually like each other, on average.

Certainly not as much as men like women, on average.

I keep "rediscovering" this, so maybe others need to be told/reminded.

Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co

#83

Post by pseudolus »

I've read elsewhere that their approach involves using rapamycin - a drug used by transplant patients. Apparently, it has been reviewed positively as a potential anti-aging agent for humans [0]. The unique approach here is to treat animals, rather than humans, and thus avoid the extensive and expensive trials that human testing would require.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6814615/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11357-020-00274-1

Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co

#84

Post by tptacek »

a_bonobo wrote: post #78

>It’s a VC’s job to keep the door open. Many were ‘blown away’, then passed before the second meeting. This is normal. I'm sometimes working with US-Americans and not being US-American myself, I feel like this is also a US-cultural thing? In important meetings with US stakeholders I struggle to read the room because everything is always 'awesome' and 'amazing', there's rarely upfront criticism. Honest feedback has to…

No, it's famously a VC thing, and it causes problems for ordinary US people as well.

Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co

#85

Post by topherpalmtree »

b20000 wrote: post #16

Congrats, also for being honest and mentioning you previously worked in VC and had ivy-league connections. Myself and my co-founder never had time to go network or sell to investors, building a product just took 200% of our time. Having a moonshot idea and big market didn't matter. We just didn't have the connections or the time to build them. Looking back that is all that mattered. They didn't care we had customers…

Yeah, much less a working product. Tech vc is sprinkling money around hoping to grow magic. If you have revenue it probably isn’t speculative magic revenue.

Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co

#86

Post by muzani »

a_bonobo wrote: post #78

>It’s a VC’s job to keep the door open. Many were ‘blown away’, then passed before the second meeting. This is normal. I'm sometimes working with US-Americans and not being US-American myself, I feel like this is also a US-cultural thing? In important meetings with US stakeholders I struggle to read the room because everything is always 'awesome' and 'amazing', there's rarely upfront criticism. Honest feedback has to…

I think in this situation, it's more that an investor could be impressed, but think it's too risky. She also brought up that she had a lot of angles on how to solve the problem, which made investors nervous.

Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co

#87

Post by woeirua »

Kudos to her for landing investors for this idea, but her plan was actually to optimize her pitch for potential investors, and given enough pitches she eventually found a few who pulled the trigger. To me, this is not really a sign of a strong idea for a company, but rather a sign of a good saleswoman. I would expect companies with much better, stronger concepts to land funding much faster.

Also, I think most people vastly overestimate the level of competence of VCs and especially the degree of due diligence that they do. They are just as easily wooed by great presentations and the typical sales tricks. Cases in point: WeWork, Theranos, etc.

Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co

#89

Post by fuzzfactor »

dang wrote: post #40

This article got a lot of user flags. That's bad—it's obviously a substantive article, squarely on topic for HN and not sensational, ideological, or predictable. Even a quick skim is enough to see that it doesn't break down along any of the obvious faultlines for this general topic. That not only means it shouldn't have been flagged, it makes it HN gold. If you've been wielding the flag club that indiscriminately...p…

Absolute gold.

Especially for those of us where top software can be very critical, but who are not in the software business and are committed to efforts in other areas of technology.

I can only imagine the challenges you have been facing are on the increase.

Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co

#90

Post by DistressedDrone »

woeirua wrote: post #87

Kudos to her for landing investors for this idea, but her plan was actually to optimize her pitch for potential investors, and given enough pitches she eventually found a few who pulled the trigger. To me, this is not really a sign of a strong idea for a company, but rather a sign of a good saleswoman . I would expect companies with much better, stronger concepts to land funding much faster. Also, I think most people…

> Also, I think most people vastly overestimate the level of competence of VCs and especially the degree of due diligence that they do. They are just as easily wooed by great presentations and the typical sales tricks. Cases in point: WeWork, Theranos, etc.

Remember when more than one millionaire funded Juicero? I remember.

Post reply on HN