Valitor- Engineering better medicines by leveraging its multi-valent biopolymer technology

Lab to Startup

Wesley Jackson, Ph..D., is the co-founder, President and Chief Scientific Officer of Valitor. Wes was the founding CEO and led the startup through its Series B financing where they raised over$30M to date. Valitor is a biotech startup that uses a novel protein-biopolymer conjugation technology that was licensed from the University of California, Berkeley. Professors Kevin Healy and Dave Schaffer were the inventors of the technology and ended up co-founding the startup. We talk about Wesley’s decision making process to launch the startup, the conjugation technology and the problems it is capable of solving; customer discovery process; lessons learnt from working with partners; finding product market fit; fund raising; importance of work-life balance while building a deeptech startup, a very important topic that is generally frowned upon at startups; and programs that helped Wes grow his startup, leadership transition and many other lessons. Shownotes: - https://www.valitorbio.com - Decision making process to launch Valiant Bio - Working with faculty at UC Berkeley to spin out a technology - Multivalent Polymer conjugation for tissue localization to develop therapeutics - Customer discovery process - Speaking with physicians, feedback from grant submissions - Noise vs signal - Dissecting "No" from potential customers/investors - Speaking with potential partners: Timing and alignment - Questions to ask potential partners - Product market fit - Funding journey - Lessons learnt from grant proposal writing - Too much data: Mistakes in the pitch deck - Focus on markets - Building a biotech startup is mostly a marathon with a few sprints - Balancing life and family: Raising twins while building the startup - Doesn't make sense to burn employees as they carry. lot of institutional/intellectual memory - Role of the board and insights into independent board members - Leadership transition - Programs that helped- https://skydeck.berkeley.edu, California FAST Advisory program