Mentors, Networks & IP: Power Moves for Biotech Startup Success | Darren Cooke (Part 2/4)

Intro - 00:00:06

Welcome to the Biotech Startups Podcast by Xida. Join us as we speak with first-time founders, serial entrepreneurs, and experienced investors about the challenges and triumphs of running a biotech startup from pre-seed to IPO with your host, Jon Chee.

In our last episode, Darren shared stories from his early years in the East Bay, growing up with a single mom, discovering a love for cars and engineering, and realizing through trial and error that medicine wasn't the right path. If you missed it, check out part one. In part two, we'll hear about Darren's time in San Francisco, where he worked at Covington and saw what elite practice really demands. His pivot to Bio-Rad, where he gained a front-row seat to inventors and IP strategy, and how a major acquisition sparked his passion for startups, leading him to launch a solo practice and take his first steps into the Bay Area angel scene.

Jon Chee - 00:01:15

Before we move on to your next role, were there any key lessons that you take away from that firm experience that perhaps you carry with you to this day?

Darren Cooke - 00:01:27

Yeah. I think it's actually in the very next firm that there's something that's more interesting and something that I think about a lot. So what happened with the very next firm is everyone knew from the beginning I wasn't staying in Phoenix. I came in saying, "Hey, we're here just for while Julie's in a clerkship, and then we're leaving."

Jon Chee - 00:01:48

It's a temporary gig. Yeah.

Darren Cooke - 00:01:49

Her job was definitely temporary because that's by design. But everyone I was working with at the firm in Phoenix knew the same thing. And they knew I was not staying. Because she's from Seattle, I'm from the Bay Area. We're going to move back. Our families are there. So when she came back from Cambridge, I told everyone, "I'm going to be here for another month." No surprise, I'm leaving. And because her thought was—my wife, she said, "Because you made me go to Phoenix, I get to pick the next place to go." That's fair. Right? So where are we gonna go? San Francisco. So I grew up here in the East Bay, but that's where I wanna go. She worked at UCSF.

So I went to the partner that I worked with most closely in Phoenix, Alan Blankenheimer, and asked him, "If you had to go to another firm in San Francisco, where would you go?" Because he was the real deal. And he said, "Covington." I said, "The DC firm?"

Unknown - 00:02:55

Yeah. Yeah.

Darren Cooke - 00:02:57

Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like, Covington is a well-known law firm in Washington, DC. And he said Covington without a doubt. And I didn't even know they had a San Francisco office. At the time, I was kinda bummed because I was thinking I was gonna go to Wilson Sonsini or Morrison & Foerster or Heller, or one of the big top-tier San Francisco firms. Like, that's the one everyone's heard of. He said, "Trust me. Check it out."

Jon Chee - 00:03:28

Did he give any rationale, or was he like, "No. Just trust me. Just do it"?

Darren Cooke - 00:03:31

He said, "If you're looking for a similar experience, that's the closest." Okay? And indeed, I reached out to Covington, and I got an interview there and met people there, and they hired me. At this point, I'm a fourth-year associate. So after three years in Phoenix, and it was just as good. And he was right. It was just as good. Talk about operating at a high level. And, you know, my wife worked at different firms in San Francisco, so I have a point of comparison.

Jon Chee - 00:04:01

You made the right choice.

Darren Cooke - 00:04:03

It was also excellent. This is the thing I think about a lot. On my first day, I'm in this junior partner's office. The very first day I'm in the office, and he's welcoming me. And I still keep in touch with this guy. We're friends now, but at the time, I had just met him. This partner comes in, Sonya Winner. And I'm saying this on a public podcast on purpose because it was a really interesting experience. I ended up working with her a lot, but this is the first time I'd seen her. She comes in with this piece of paper that, apparently, this partner had written, like a motion or a brief. And she said—I won't even say the name. I'll just say Bob or something. Right? "Bob." She said, "This was terrible." And there's red all over the page. This is one law firm partner talking to another law firm partner, and she's saying this in front of me on my first day on the job.

Jon Chee - 00:05:03

Like, what am I getting myself into right now?

Darren Cooke - 00:05:06

A world of pain. And, you know, she gave him the markup with all the red ink on the page, and he went back and he edited it and all this sort of thing. The thing that struck me is at first, I was shocked. I'm like, I can't believe it. It seems rude or something. But now working with Sonya—and this, coincidentally, was similar to working with Sonya Sotomayor—is that she was super harsh. There was a joke that when it came time for your performance review and they said, "And this next paragraph is from Sonya Winner," put on your seatbelt.

But what I discovered is that her heart was so in the right place. The reason she was being so harsh was because she really wanted you to get better. It was wild. Like, she wasn't being mean. She was actually being really nice in a weird way. Because it kinda stings. Right?

Jon Chee - 00:06:04

Yep. Absolutely.

Darren Cooke - 00:06:05

And so I've thought about this a lot. This happened just the other day. I gave a presentation upstairs. I'm in tech transfer right now, but that's at Berkeley Skydeck. I gave a presentation to some visiting executive MBAs. And this older colleague of mine, this guy that's been around the campus forever, he took me aside. He's like, "Hey, can I give you some constructive pointers?" I'm like, oh my gosh. This happens so rarely. And what he's gonna tell me, I could tell it's coming. It's gonna be something that where I'm probably gonna be defensive or wish he didn't tell me that or something. And this is just general advice. First of all, seek out people like that, who are willing to give you advice like this and then welcome it however you can. So my former boss, Rich Lyons—more about him in a minute—used to say, "What do you say when you get constructive, perhaps even pointed feedback?" What do you say? "Thank you." Because it's such a gift. You know what I mean?

Jon Chee - 00:07:11

Yep. Yep.

Darren Cooke - 00:07:12

Anyway, yeah. So Sonya Winner, that's what she did.

Jon Chee - 00:07:16

Yeah. And I think about that a lot too because I think about how I played lacrosse and the coaches that had a big impact on me were the ones exactly like that. It comes from a good place. Sometimes it doesn't feel good to hear it.

Darren Cooke - 00:07:33

Oh, yeah. It usually doesn't, right?

Jon Chee - 00:07:35

Yeah. It doesn't feel great, but if they didn't care, they wouldn't even say anything.

Darren Cooke - 00:07:42

Yeah, exactly.

Jon Chee - 00:07:43

And I think, too, that whether it's athletics or your professional career or even a teacher who can be super intense, you gotta internalize it. It's kind of like that ego-swallowing moment. You're just like, "This is a moment for me to level up." And that was kind of like what my co-founder did; he nudged me. It was a little bit more than a nudge. It was like, "Step your shit up." So I love that. And at that firm, it sounds like it's a very kind thing to do. It's kind of like a mentor experience. Can you talk a little bit about what were some other pivotal moments at that firm that stood out to you, now that you're back in San Francisco?

Darren Cooke - 00:08:25

Yeah. So what stood out to me is that it was a lot of work. It was probably even more. It was more than Phoenix. So now, I get into a firm where, again, it's the top level of practice and everything is going to trial. Everything requires 26 motions in limine, and you're staying late every night. I mean, it was just a lot. So my wife was working at a firm literally across the street. This is just Downtown San Francisco. We'd recently moved to the suburbs from our apartment in San Francisco. And guess what? Now a baby on the way. And we're both working crazy hours at law firms. And so we both at the same time were like, "This is not going to work."

Jon Chee - 00:09:15

Yeah.

Darren Cooke - 00:09:16

We can't both be super busy law firm associates. So I started looking—so there's two paths when you're at a big firm like this. You either make partner and then your life continues like that, and you understand that, or you go in-house. That's what they call it. You go in-house. It's a dream for a lot of law firm associates. Anyway, I was looking because I'm like, shoot, one or both of us can't be working at a law firm when we have a baby. So I started looking to go in-house. It was a shock to the law firm, to Covington. I was definitely on a path where it was perceived that I was on a partner track. Like, that was the idea. In fact, when I announced I was going to Bio-Rad—a company you know—people were really surprised.

Jon Chee - 00:10:08

And I think too, also, it's kind of like having that recognition that this is not mapping. There are only so many hours in the day. Something's gotta give. Because sometimes you can ignore that, and then the ramifications of that, you can put it together. But I think you and your wife, having that kind of just like, "Alright, one of us needs to go in-house, at least," is very astute in terms of observing what you needed to do. And so how did this Bio-Rad opportunity come about?

Darren Cooke - 00:10:38

Oh, it was just advertised. I saw it. I think back in the day, there's like a newspaper. I still remember seeing it. There was a newspaper called The Recorder. This is still the early 2000s, so it wasn't uncommon just to be in the literal library of your law firm, and there's the legal newspaper there, and there are ads in the back. It seems super old-fashioned now. But Bio-Rad was advertising for someone to run the IP department—and IP is my thing, except as a litigator—the IP department for the tools business. Okay. So Bio-Rad, you know, has two different sides, tools and diagnostics. So they were actually hiring two IP people. One to run the tools business and one to run the diagnostics business—or at least the IP side, patenting, licensing agreements of that business.

I have a bit of a life science background because I took all those classes for when I thought I was gonna go to medical school. And then a number of the litigations that I had, especially at Covington, were related to life science companies. So it comes full circle. I was kinda familiar with the life sciences space. I just remember—I forgot about this—we had a lawsuit, Caliper versus Molecular Devices. Two companies which are now gone or acquired. MDC is now Danaher, I think.

Jon Chee - 00:12:01

Yep. Danaher. Caliper went away. Yep. Yep.

Darren Cooke - 00:12:05

Ciphergen, the low-cost mass spec—these are all cases we had at Covington. Oh, wow. Yeah. So I was familiar with the tool space because of the litigation that I was in. Ironically, this is the wildest thing. Bio-Rad bought Ciphergen later. I went to Bio-Rad, and then we bought the company. Wow.

Jon Chee - 00:12:28

I love how that happens. That's very cool. And I guess so you're no longer living in San Francisco. You're now in the East Bay. And, shout out to the East Bay as well as working at Bio-Rad, did you go to Kinder's a lot? Sorry. Okay.

Darren Cooke - 00:12:42

Yeah. There's the Kinder's in Hercules? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:12:46

Sorry. So, again, this is the foodie in me coming out.

Darren Cooke - 00:12:51

We go to Kinder's.

Jon Chee - 00:12:52

The barbecue is great. Growing up in Berkeley, you eat for In-N-Out too. The In-N-Out is not in Hercules. It's in Pinole, but you're either going to Oakland or you're going to the In-N-Out in Pinole. So I spent a lot of—let's just say I was commuting for the food. That's awesome. But, um, anyway, so you're now at Bio-Rad, and you went from just law firm go, go, go, go, go, nonstop, nonstop, nonstop. What was that experience going in-house? One for you, personally and professionally? Like, was there a culture shock, or how was that for you?

Darren Cooke - 00:13:29

Yeah. It was great. Super easy landing. The attorneys that were at Bio-Rad were also from big firms, so we all had similar backgrounds. So they were all really good. But, yeah, suddenly, it became like a literal nine-to-five job. I'd get there at 9 a.m., work there all day, and leave. That was just the culture of it. And at Bio-Rad, most people don't know—so first of all, Bio-Rad was UC Berkeley's first spin-out startup. Dave and Alice Schwartz, graduates in the fifties, started Bio-Rad in a Quonset hut on Fourth Street.

So cool. Yeah. So Bio-Rad. Real Berkeley connection, just coincidentally. But yeah. And then, of course, they moved to Richmond, and then they moved to Hercules. And if people have never seen the Bio-Rad campus, it's wild. It's gorgeous. Super nice. So beautiful environment, rolling lawns, some cool architecture. And the people are fantastic because even though it's a public company, it's family-owned. The Schwartz family still owns it. And it is that sort of place where it's a little bit quirky because of that, but also it's just ridiculously comfortable to be in. Somehow, they attract people who want to be there and love to be there, and they stay there forever. From what I've come to learn, it's a very different corporate culture.

Jon Chee - 00:15:01

Yep. And a couple of things that really stood out to me is that one, shout out Go Bears, fellow spin-out of Berkeley. But as you mentioned, it's still family-owned. And I don't think there's one way to build a company. But, you know, I think being in the Bay Area, sometimes you can maybe get the impression that venture capital is the only way. But Bio-Rad was virtually bootstrapped.

Darren Cooke - 00:15:27

It's just bootstrapped. Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:15:28

It's a—and Bio-Rad is massive now for anyone who's unfamiliar with Bio-Rad. You can bootstrap to something massive. I mean, they went public.

Darren Cooke - 00:15:37

They went public in the seventies. That's funny to think about. But yeah. So it was founded in the fifties, and they just bootstrapped, like you said. And now it's a $12 billion market cap company. So it's possible. It intentionally is very careful. It grows steadily compared to other benchmarks, maybe slowly, but it's great.

Jon Chee - 00:16:02

Yeah. And that's something that I consider for anyone out there who's contemplating company creation: the way you capitalize your business. There are tons of ways to do it creatively and there are creative ways to do it. And Bio-Rad is an example of exactly what you said. You can grow—yes, you may have to grow slower, but if it works for you, your business model, and your personal growth trajectory, then maybe that path is right for you. So, okay. Now you've found more balance at Bio-Rad.

Darren Cooke - 00:16:37

I did. For sure.

Jon Chee - 00:16:38

Talk about the early days working at Bio-Rad and how you're continuing to progress at Bio-Rad and what your growing set of responsibilities were.

Darren Cooke - 00:16:48

Yeah. That's an interesting question because I went from being a litigator, which is a very different skill set. This is taking depositions and writing briefs and arguing before the court occasionally. I was an associate, so it didn't happen much. But still, stuff like that. Depositions.

Jon Chee - 00:17:04

By the way, I was helping with some depositions, and my role—you talked about all the paper. We got all the boxes out with all these academic papers. And our expert witness was on deposition, and he would call out a specific paper, and then we would be grabbing the paper and just handing it to him. So, yeah, I have experience with depositions. It was like the kind of paper element, but sorry.

Darren Cooke - 00:17:34

Yeah. So I suspect a lot of people don't know what a senior litigation associate does. They take a lot of depositions. That's what I was doing. Depositions are part of discovery where it's, for the benefit of your audience, there's different discovery. There's document requests. There's interrogatories. There's requests for admissions, and then there's depositions. So four different types of discovery. This is the live version where you go into a room. There's a court reporter there. You ask somebody live questions. And like you said, you can hand them documents, but it's sort of like the most advanced part of discovery. But it's what senior associates do. Totally. Had a lot of experience with depositions.

So, anyway, that's what I was doing when I left Covington to go to Bio-Rad. And so not a culture shock in terms of people, but a little bit different in terms of, you know, now I'm going to an office in Hercules. Okay. I live nearby, so it's really easy. It's just straight up the road and had regular hours. And the people I worked with, I came to like a lot, but I had to learn all this new stuff. I was never a patent prosecutor. I had to convince them. And so now I'm managing a patent department, which is mostly managing patent prosecution, which I'd never done.

Jon Chee - 00:18:52

Figure it out.

Darren Cooke - 00:18:54

I did. I mean, I had to make the argument. I'm like, "Well, I've seen a lot of prosecution through litigation." In litigation, you look at prosecution records, so I've seen what they look like. I'm sure it's not hard to—I wouldn't be prosecuting myself because we had too many cases. It was all farmed out to outside counsel. So that was the process.

I got up to speed pretty quickly. But here's the thing. I had a bunch of new experiences, and it was really fun. Really fun. Liked the people. Liked the tech. The tech was neat. The engineers were cool to work with. Now I'm working with inventors closely. I would run a process where if an engineer thought that he or she invented something, they'd bring it to me, and then we'd evaluate it. And we had a committee that would decide whether to file a patent application on it. And, yeah, it's interesting. That was fun. But after five years—I was there for 10 years. After five years, I'd pretty much seen it all, and then I stayed for another five years, doing exactly the same thing.

That was probably a mistake. So what I discovered is that it was such a nice place to work, and the pay was good, the people were great, the work was interesting, that I stopped doing anything new after five years and just kept rinsing and repeating every day, like Groundhog Day for five years. I realized after 10 years, I gotta do something else. It got busy and boring at the same time. And so this is actually advice I give to undergrads for their embarking on their careers and things. I'm like, yeah, if you ever find yourself in a situation where you're busy and bored, you really should be doing something else.

Jon Chee - 00:20:38

Yeah. I was gonna say, it can kinda lull you. And when that happens, it's just like you almost feel like you stop growing, and that's a bad feeling. And that's a really important perspective because it's almost like the golden handcuffs. This is so comfortable. This is great. But the one thing I will say that sounds like it was a great part of the experience is that going in-house gives you exposure to so many different things. Getting that exposure and being able to work with the engineers and all functions of a business is, for anyone out there who's looking to really level up, find those opportunities that get you that exposure because there are just more tools in your tool belt. And, you know, you might start off with litigation, but then, on the fly, you're learning patent prosecution. And I'm going to imagine that probably as people were providing potential technology that you want to patent, this lended itself to IP strategy a little bit.

Darren Cooke - 00:21:51

It did, a lot of that.

Jon Chee - 00:21:52

And, like, investing almost. You might have to correct me on the time period, but is this when you started investing with Life Science Angels, maybe right after Bio-Rad?

Darren Cooke - 00:22:03

Yeah. So there was a breakpoint there. And, actually, it was a startup. This is what inspired me to leave and to do something different, was that we acquired a company that you've heard of. We acquired a company at Bio-Rad called QuantaLife, the maker of Droplet Digital PCR. We bought them in 2013. And then I was suddenly working with this top-flight team. The QuantaLife team was really good for a tools startup. They were really good. The technology came from all over. But that's actually really where I caught the startup bug, the QuantaLife team, which was in Pleasanton.

So I started spending a lot of time in Pleasanton because I had to incorporate their vast patent portfolio. I'm the IP guy. It's my priority to work with the QuantaLife people. I'm like, man, you guys are good. And I sorta got the history of how QuantaLife started and how they grew, and then they grew to 50 people and they went through a Series B and all this stuff, and then Bio-Rad bought them. And then we built out the Digital Biology Center down in Pleasanton based on the QuantaLife technology. It's now the ddPCR lineup.

But in 2013, I really started working closely with that startup and thought, "I need to do more of this. This is cool." And then, I sort of began to understand how they were funded, how QuantaLife was funded. Like, how did they grow? And so in 2015, I got this notion. I'm like, "You know what? Clean break." Because I'm an attorney, I can legally hang out a shingle even if the shingle is in my basement. I could just start my own law firm, and I did, called Torrents IP. I started my own law firm, with the idea of catering to startups because they need somebody who's low-cost, like literally a guy in his basement. Literally a guy in his basement who does stuff cheaper. And so patent strategy, freedom to operate, background checks on the IP, diligence, that kind of thing. And so I started this firm. I'll tell you what. I left in 2015. All of 2016, zero clients. I had nobody. I was literally an unemployed solo practitioner.

Unknown - 00:24:27

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:24:29

That is the entrepreneurial experience. Every entrepreneur, when you start a company, there will be a time when you have zero clients, a goose egg.

Darren Cooke - 00:24:37

I know, that's exactly right. That was it. But then I just started going places. And this is a point that I make a lot. A lot of people consult with me. I made some big career moves, and they're like, "How did I do it, and how should they do it?" That's the basic question. And my general advice is, yeah, if you think you wanna do something else, just start going to every event that seems remotely relevant. That's it. Don't overthink it. Look at the event. Most of them are free, probably, unless it's a big conference. Just go to it. Probably 19 out of 20 will be total duds, and you'd be like, "I can't believe I did that." But then one out of 20, you're gonna meet somebody who leads to another introduction that something else happens. Whatever it is, you're gonna be glad you did, but you just have to do it. There's no way to get around going to the 20 events to find the one person because you don't know where that person is.

Anyway, that's all I did. That's what I did in 2016. I started going to every event. So I'm in Orinda, which is right over the hill from Berkeley, and I was a student at Berkeley at some point, so I have a close connection to the campus. I just started going to everything I could find. Everything on the internet, go down to Palo Alto, go to places around Stanford. And, frankly, most of them were duds. You know? I think back at some of them I went to, I'm like, what the heck was I thinking? But I didn't know what it was about.

And then at one event at Berkeley, UC LAUNCH—the Haas School of Business MBA students run a startup accelerator, if you will, but it's MBA-run. They do their own version of an accelerator, which is actually really well done. They had a demo day, and I decided to go to it. I'll go to the LAUNCH demo day. And I'm sitting in the back of the room, and I look over, and there's this guy there who I recognize, and he's my neighbor. Like, oh, that's cool. Wow. And he's like, "Oh, hey. You're into this stuff?" I'm like, "I am now."

Unknown - 00:26:42

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Darren Cooke - 00:26:44

And so he invited me—he's running Berkeley Angel Network. It's a club on campus, but not really on campus, of Berkeley alums. And I was technically a Berkeley alum because when I left my graduate program, I have a master's degree. So he's like, "I should start coming to Berkeley Angel Network meetings." And I did. I went to a couple. Then I met another guy at Berkeley Angel Network who's like, "Oh, you're totally into life sciences? You need to come with me," he said, "down to this meeting that very next day at LSA, Life Science Angels, the biggest angel group in the country that's just focused on life sciences." I was like, "That sounds like fun too." And I did. The meeting was a dinner meeting in Palo Alto, a big event. And I met a bunch of people there. I'm like, this seems great. These are the people I was looking to meet. And so I joined the group. It was as simple as that.

LSA, Berkeley Angel Network is just free. It's just a club. But LSA is organized and structured and there's management and there's a board and all this. So I joined the group and just really started digging in with that. These are really smart, mostly retired, all successful former entrepreneurs. And they're looking to stay involved with startups in the life sciences space. They're looking to invest themselves. They're great. Suddenly, I'm in this environment of successful entrepreneurs. And we're thinking about investing in companies. That was a learning experience.

Jon Chee - 00:28:17

The first thing that really stood out to me is just the advice to just get out there. I'm a naturally introverted person, so the thought of going cold to an event like that just makes my palms sweat. But there's nothing that replaces that. You've got to put yourself out there and manufacture that serendipity. It seems like your neighbor being right there—you couldn't plan that.

Darren Cooke - 00:28:42

I never would have known.

Jon Chee - 00:28:44

You just have to get out there.

Darren Cooke - 00:28:46

Yeah. You have to do it. There's a real magic. I call it the magic of showing up. That's it. Most people don't.

Jon Chee - 00:28:54

Yeah. That's the thing that is again, it's not really a glamorous secret or anything like that. It's just, show up. More often than not, exactly as you said, it's gonna be a dud. But when it isn't, it kind of creates these connections. And it only gets easier from there too because eventually, you do this long enough and you go to an event, you already know a lot of the people there. So it's less of a palm-sweating kind of experience. It's like, "Oh, friends." Exactly. It's more of just catching up now. And so this experience of getting into these angel networks, and you're now in Life Science Angels—were you, in addition to your own law firm, like, "I'm gonna actively invest as well"?

Darren Cooke - 00:29:43

Yep. Very cool. So yeah. I started doing that. I've invested in a couple of companies. Frankly, the payoff has not been substantial. It's fair to say. But the fact is I didn't really expect it to be. This was more to get the connections, learn how it works. I didn't know anything.

Jon Chee - 00:30:00

Learn by doing. Exactly.

Darren Cooke - 00:30:02

I really didn't know anything about it. But I started going to every—LSA used to have one screening meeting every week. So the bio group, which is therapeutics, and then the device and digital group, which was device and digital, would have meetings every other week. So one would be on Monday of one week, one would be on the Tuesday of the next week. But you could go to a meeting, an evening meeting every week, like 50 a year. So I just started doing that. I just went to every meeting.

And then pretty soon, if you go to every meeting, you meet everybody in the room. This used to be always in person. This is back in 2016. So always in person. You get to know the people and just see what they're asking and how they're working and what they're thinking about in evaluating a company. Because these are people who have built companies before, so they know what to ask. Anyway, huge learning experience. I got the opportunity to then run the device group in 2017, and so I ran it for two years. This was then I ran the meeting that happened every other Monday night for two years. So I ran 50 investment meetings. Talk about trial by fire.

But I was responsible for figuring out which companies to invite to the investment meetings. We'd have two or three companies pitch every night. So 50 meetings over the course of two years, 150 pitches or probably 125 pitches. And mostly, there were a lot of people in these meetings. Between twenty and thirty people would show up. So I learned a lot. I learned a lot, not just about investing, but also just kind of how to run a meeting. Which seems like if you do it 50 times, you're gonna get fairly practiced and understand how to keep things running on time, how to manage the questions. I just sort of have a process for a meeting, which I still use today, and it drives me nuts that people don't do it the way I do it.

Jon Chee - 00:32:01

How do you do it?

Darren Cooke - 00:32:02

The agenda's important. Timing is important. Timing is very strict with a timer.

Jon Chee - 00:32:07

Yeah. Yeah.

Darren Cooke - 00:32:07

Time's up, you're out. That's it. And there's also—you bake in time for personal connection. It's weird to say this. So I run an I&E council. I can tell you more about this later. At UC Berkeley, we have an organization on campus with 65 organizations represented on the I&E council. So I run this meeting now once a month. We didn't do this before I took over, but I instituted this. It's just a Zoom meeting where in the middle of the meeting, I call it the "surprise online event" just because I called it that from the beginning because I didn't wanna scare people off. I wanted it to sound intriguing.

Unknown - 00:32:44

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Darren Cooke - 00:32:45

An online event was gonna happen. And what I was doing behind the scenes is while we're running the meeting is I'm setting up the Zoom rooms. And then I'm about to dump people, like 50 people, into a random Zoom room with somebody else. That's it. Love that. And so the first time this happened, they didn't know what it was. I'm like, "Okay, folks. Guess what? It's time for the surprise online event. I'm about to click a button, and you're about to be in a Zoom room with somebody who you may or may not already know. It doesn't matter. You could be meeting someone new. You could be talking to an old friend. It's just gonna be a fun five minutes. So we'll see you back here." And people love it. They love it. I think a lot of people are hesitant and be like, "Ah, it's kinda scary." But when they come back from that part of the Zoom meeting, they're just buzzing. And I'll go around like, "Hey. Who met somebody new?" And half the people do. And, yeah, it's really fun. Anyway, techniques like that, I learned from these 50 meetings at LSA. I'm moving it back to the LSA story.

Jon Chee - 00:33:50

Right? Yeah. No worries. And in addition to honing the craft of investing, what were some patterns or strategies when it comes to successful life science angel investing, at least, that you can glean from those past experiences?

Darren Cooke - 00:34:11

So I quickly started the Bio Track here at Skydeck upstairs where it's very similar. So companies may be at one step earlier, but we're, again, thinking the same thing. So I'm running the selection committee for the companies that are being accepted into the UC Berkeley startup accelerator, Berkeley Skydeck, but in the bio space. Kind of the same companies we're looking at at LSA. You know how it works, is that, basically, a company has to run the gamut. And at some point, it's likely they're gonna get knocked out, but it could be for anything. It could be for a weird founder. It could be the tech seems unlikely to work. You know? There are a lot of things, but you never know what it is. The companies that we invested in at LSA, the companies that we accepted and invested in at Berkeley Skydeck through investing $200k in the companies that we accepted into the program, they ran the gamut. They got to the end without being knocked out. So the answer is what we're looking for is everything. You want everything. You want great tech. You want a big market. You want a strong IP position. You want people who know how to navigate the regulatory landscape. You need everything. And, you know, because we had enough deal flow at LSA—we got hundreds of applications a year for just a handful of investments—and enough deal flow at Skydeck. We were getting 300 applications for four spots. So the companies that didn't make it into the four spots, they fell out for some reason, but there's no common theme.

Jon Chee - 00:35:44

Well, I think what I just gleaned from that is the theme is that you can't just ride on one thing, which I think sometimes it's kind of like if the only tool that you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And especially in life sciences, I think it takes expertise in tons of domains. And when I say tons of domains, I'm not just talking about, "Oh, we have a medicinal chemistry person, and then we have someone who's in molecular biology." I'm talking about you gotta have someone on the operations side who's a wizard. You gotta have someone who's a strong finance function because I think sometimes in scientific ventures, you can get tricked into believing that if the science is super sound, everything else will fall into place. And even you said, you can get disqualified due to founder dynamics. People forget that these are all people. You've got to be able to work together for a long time and not be at each other's throats. You know? And I think that can be neglected sometimes or at least it's a secondary priority, but it all matters.

Darren Cooke - 00:36:56

No, it does.

Jon Chee - 00:36:57

It all matters. So I guess for anyone who's thinking about company creation, think about that from every single vector.

Outro - 00:37:07

That's all for this episode of the Biotech Startups Podcast featuring Darren Cooke. Join us next time for part three of our four-part series, where Darren goes deeper into the angel and startup chapter, from running device investment meetings and sharpening selection frameworks to helping shape Berkeley's ecosystem through Skydeck and campus tech transfer. He'll also unpack the university IP basics founders often overlook, why Bayh-Dole and letter agreements matter, and how mentoring led to teaching programs like NSF I-Corps and to MBA courses at Haas. If you're enjoying the podcast, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a friend.

Thanks for listening. The Biotech Startups Podcast is produced by Excedr. Don't want to miss an episode? Search for the Biotech Startups Podcast wherever you get your podcasts and click subscribe. Excedr provides research labs with equipment leases on founder-friendly terms to support paths to exceptional outcomes. To learn more, visit our website, www.excedr.com. On behalf of the team here at Excedr, thanks for listening. The Biotech Startups Podcast provides general insights into the life science sector through the experiences of its guests. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from the podcast is at the user's own risk. The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not the views of Excedr or its sponsors. No reference to any product, service, or company in the podcast is an endorsement by Excedr or its guests.