Transcription
Nick Ross 0:05
All right, good morning. Welcome. So first of the stage, Raul Martin-Ruiz, Ysios Capital. We have Samuel levy from Luxera Capital, Owen Willis, founder and general partner of Opal Ventures, and Lu Zhang, of Founder and Managing Partner of fusion fund. So thank you for for joining us. And I think for the panel here, I'll probably ask you all to introduce yourselves properly. Lu, would you like to start?
Lu Zhang 0:39
Oh, yeah, happy to Good morning, everyone. So very glad to get together here in Barcelona, very beautiful city for the panel and also conference. I'm Lu I'm the Founder and Managing Partner of fusion fund. We're a VC firm based in Silicon Valley, Palo Alto mainly focused on early stage healthcare, enterprise AI and industrial automation investment. So I started the firm back in 2015. To now we have a three flagship fund under management for the stage two Opportunity Fund, and then invest across United States and with 82 portfolio companies. And also myself, I was entrepreneur turned investor, I build and sell my own medical device company to Boston Scientific before I sell carbon to the dark side to start my VC firm. So looking forward to the panel discussion today.
Owen Willis 1:29
Amazing. Hey, everyone, I'm Owen Willis. I'm the founder and general partner of Opal ventures. It's great to see everyone here this morning. And looks like some people didn't go to the beach party last night. So that's great. So my fund is pre-seed Health Tech fund. We're based in New York. And we're backing founders that are building out of lived experience in healthtech, medtech and medical devices. You know, in terms of the the kind of the fundraise and raising the fund itself, I actually raised the fund, during what I think someone described as this down cycle. And so I'm happy to share some some insights and lessons learned from that. My background is as an operator, so I built a medical education startup called Osmosis, which was acquired by Elsevier and my kind of big contribution there was driving our b2b go to market, which ended up being something that has been really helpful for the founders that I've worked with. I also built and ran a health tech community called OnDeck Health for earliest stage health tech founders. And a long, long, long time ago, I started my career as a special education teacher in Washington, DC.
Samuel Levy 2:40
Hi, everyone, my name is Samuel Levy. I think there's a sort of recurring trend here that I'm also a med tech entrepreneur turned investor. So I guess I started off as a physician, with a classmate in medical school, I invented a medical device which I built a company around called Allurion Technologies, which we just took public on the New York Stock Exchange about two months ago. Four years ago, I founded an investment firm called Luxera Capital Partners, and we raised a $300 million first time team first time fund focused on health technology. We are not sure whether we raised it during a good time or a bad time. Our first closing was during a lockdown or second closing was during a COVID lockdown. At the time, it felt hard, but I'm not sure whether the environment was better or worse than than it is now. But delighted to be here and be on this panel.
Raul Martin-Ruiz 3:27
Good morning everybody. My name is Raul Martin-Ruiz, and I'm a partner with Ysios Capital joined the firm in 2008. That was the year when the deferment started. We are now managing plus 400 million euros across three funds. We are the largest life sciences, venture capital firm in Spain, but we are investing globally primarily in Europe and the US. Before joining the firm, I work in business development and commercial operations in pharma. So I'm originally a pharma guy. And before that, I was an academic researcher.
Nick Ross 4:00
Thank you, I think clear the panaway who all have significant experience fundraising in a mixture of different environments. And I'd like to ask the panel, and Raul, perhaps you could start looking back at fundraising that you've gone through what was the greatest contributing factor for your success in raising a fund?
Raul Martin-Ruiz 4:19
Yeah, I mean, I think that there were several reasons, right. If we look at the first fund, that was in 2008, it was not a great year, I would say for for fundraising, as it happens now as well. But probably at that time, we have a completely new value proposition. So we were a first time fund, first time team. That's true. But but we were planning to raise we're at the time was going to be the largest venture capital, funding Life Sciences in Spain, and also with the idea of not investing only in Spain, but investing but investing globally, right, that was there from the very beginning. So at that time, that was a completely different approach to what our other peers We're doing. And I thought that that that's what what helped us to raise the fund. Also the fact that the team was coming from different origins, but all of all of them with relevant background, in terms of, you know, bringing value to a venture capital firm.
Samuel Levy 5:18
Well, I think, I would like to say that it was like the, you know, fantastic nature of our team and strategy, I think, you know, we are like a mix of operators and investors. And we, we do do a lot of thematic sourcing and are open to doing both minority and majority deals. So, you know, I think we had a positioning that that's a little bit different than some of our pure funds. But I think the reality of that being, you know, basically a free money environment, especially compared to where interest rates are today certainly helped everyone in the in the asset class, you know, attracting interest. So I think it was a mix of of macro, which, which felt scary when we all went into lockdown in our vacation homes. But then I think what ended up being a tailwind as people realized how broken the healthcare system is in the context of the COVID. And then, you know, and I think, again, it's raising a first time team first time fund is like raising money for an early stage med tech company, it's an uphill battle. You know, I think we did something like 800 meetings, to be able to raise our fund over two years. So it wasn't like, you know, Rome wasn't built in a day, it was just a long bloody slugfest.
Owen Willis 6:26
Yeah, I mean, I think there have been a couple of factors. So for me, number one, this fund wouldn't have been possible. from an outside perspective, without the generosity of my network. I mean, I think a big part of fundraising is about the relationships that you have, and the warm introductions, because that is the thing that enables you to build those relationships with LPs a little bit more quickly. And so I'm incredibly grateful for, you know, obviously my friends but but also the the founders and operators and other LPs that I've gotten to work with, I think the other kind of small factors, were number one, I chose to raise at a time when actually not a lot of other people were raising. And you know, it, I think, on the outside, it might have looked a little bit foolish to be raising and in such a bad environment. But at the same time, you know, LPs have to put capital into funds, right, and I was the person who was there who was raising who was showing up with the confidence to say, even in this market, I want to be building a fund. And so I think that was a contributing factor. And then the other thing, building on what Tim was saying, resilience, right, you just take you take a ton of meetings, you get a lot of noes. And as long as you are learning from those noes and making adjustments and iterating on your pitch, those notes can be incredibly beneficial. It's just about being able to push your way through all of those to find the people that you want to partner with. Yeah, that's
Lu Zhang 7:53
all very good, very good opinion, which I also agree. And I want to add on to that, for another kind of angle for most emerging managers are how to institutionalize the LP base, I also started a Fund I, II is majority of the LP family offices in funds through are able to convert 40% of the new LP as institutional LP and institutional LP essential are critical for a firm be sustainable, and also great to certain size. But on the other side, they will are watching and the follow was the fund manager probably for three or five years before they make the first commitment. And during this process was in critical is show that we deliver what we promise have a very consistent methodology. And also based on the methodology define the sector, we're focusing on how we allocate capital, how we build up community, and then wound up every three, five years. There are so many buzzwords out there, why we choose now to follow the buzzword and show that our methodology actually helped us allocate capital in the right place. I think all of this consistency, also give confidence to the institutional people who are looking for long term partner be able to come to our Fund III and start a partnership with us. I think another thing we have to talk about, especially in the past two years, you know, things are changing dramatically because of the performance of public market. And the setback to the expectation of the performance of the private sector. So I think LP cares more about DPI now compared with a couple years ago, especially for early stage VC, sometimes a little bit challenging because early stage means we invest in a company seed/pre-seed that we're looking for 17 years later, and they have generated amazing billion dollar IPO. But on the other side, you know, if they saw some early dpi, no matter for merger acquisition or from other acts, it doesn't mean they will push you to exit early but they just want to have some confidence in the process knowing there's liquidity go along together with the found and also prepare the founder for the potential for return of return work. Apple, your top performing company with billion dollar capital. So there are so many things are rapidly changing based on market momentum. And even today, we're we're expecting the performance of Instacart IPO and ARM did very well last year. So I think all this performance or the IPO market gonna also impact on the the expectation from the LP come back to the private sector investor.
Nick Ross 10:23
When you were fundraising through your process, how targeted was your selection of LPs and the reality of taking money where you can get it versus actually really pinpointing the people that you wanted? And perhaps maybe that's changed also with the different funds you've taken on.
Owen Willis 10:39
So I think for me, the qualification of LPs has been incredibly important. So I brought in kind of some of the methodologies I used when doing enterprise sales. And that actually was incredibly helpful just from, you know, looking at my funnel of potential LPs and understanding, who are the people who are really going to be excited about what I'm building? Because at the end of the day, you know, there are so many reasons why an LP would choose to put your money with you versus another fund. But it boils down to, you know, do they like the space that you're building in? Do they think that there's a lot of money to be made? And do they trust you to make good decisions with their capital? Right, and I think the, as much as I possibly tried, within the raise, you know, I wanted to make sure that they understood healthcare, right, and really were excited about health care that they understood there was money to be made in healthcare, they knew what the, what it took to build a company from zero to one in healthcare, right, they they understood the power of network in that early stage of building. And then, you know, at the end of the day, I also wanted them to be people that I wanted to work with, right, this is a 10 year plus relationship. And so there was a little bit of qualification on my end of is this somebody I can see myself working with over the next 10 15 20 years. And then, you know, there's, what that's meant, though, is that my LP base for the fund is almost all healthcare people, which has ended up being a huge value add to the founders that I work with, right, because these are people who are, you know, later on in their career, they have access, and building and selling and healthcare is really all about who you know, and understanding the incentives that drive decision making within the space. And it just so happens that my LP base is made up of people who know those things and know the right people. I would like to say that that was intentional. But it was just kind of, it's kind of how it sorted itself out as I was going through the process.
Nick Ross 12:46
Have you had similar experiences, or particularly around the selection of the LP
Raul Martin-Ruiz 12:49
In our case, it was, it was a little bit different. I mean, back in 2008, when we raised our first fund, the reality is that we didn't have access to many LPs that were familiar with a sector. So we're going to invest with that family and life sciences in general, or focusing on on biotech, medtech, and diagnostics. And, unfortunately, then the number of LPs that have the knowledge on on that space was negligible, right. So we, we obviously had to sell the, you know, the merits of investing in life sciences to people that were not familiar with it. But but as I said, at the beginning, I mean, we put on the table a value proposition that was completely new for them, right. And they they learn with us. So the investors have the Fund I. We were of course, in close contact with them quite often. And they learn a lot about the sector from from us. So it was us educating them. And several of them they decided to repeat in subsequent funds. Right. So it was probably a different situation, because most of our piece, well, in the case of the first one, I think all the lps were Spanish, right? So we were not targeting at the time being a first time team first and fund didn't make any sense to target international LPs that could invest in in other other firms in their countries. Right. And they had been doing that in the past. So we decided to focus on the Spanish ones, educate them and, and then and that was that was successful in our in our case.
Samuel Levy 14:25
So we have an LP, who is a private equity investor who has a long history raising funds, and he told me, you know, in raising funds, I have one rule, if the champagne is being passed, take a glass and I that sort of stuck with me. We had a bit of an entrepreneurial journey, raising our first fund. You know, I left we left our operating roles to start our investment firm on January 1 of 2020. And we thought that we had about 70 80 million euros soft circled. And then on March 16, when Emmanuel McCall announced we were going to be locked down. In the weeks following that, you know, basically all the money we had soft circle disappeared, with the exception of two parties, a family office, that one of the largest family offices in France that, you know, continued to be there and supportive. And then, you know, thankfully for us the French sovereign wealth fund, which saw, you know, the real interest in having more health technology investors, you know, in France and in Europe, and I think, you know, a lot of my American friends, I'm from the States originally think that it's crazy doing entrepreneurship in France, I think that you know, there are a lot of strengths in Europe and one of them is the presence of, of investors, like the BPI and the European Investment Fund, that are that are really supportive of emerging managers and you know, structurally want our organizations and our firms to exist. So we, you know, we, I think fundraising, in private equity, venture capital, there are different kind of categories of investors and like, like in like in a fundraise for an early stage med tech, people are curious who else is investing who else is there, and as soon as you've been able to convert one investor in a particular category, so when you have your first fund to funds, then the other fund of funds will come and listen, when you have your first insurance company than the other insurance companies are interested when you've your first endowment, the other endowments are interested in being able to kind of talk about names by category health, and we were very lucky. You know, through persistence and hard work, you know, we were able to build a pretty institutional set of investors in our fund one, but really, you kind of have to win each category one at a time. That's your that's also been your experiences.
Nick Ross 16:35
Good. And you will have very different geographic locations for your LPs. Are you starting to see a shift in mindsets and mentalities? Considering the last six months have been a challenging, it's probably the nicest way of describing it.
Lu Zhang 16:52
Yeah, so yeah, last half year. So we're not on the market this year. So we'll plan our next one next year. But this year, I definitely talk with also my GP friends who are raising capital was tough because loss of the LPs, especially institution LP in United States, they have to perform, they have lots of capital stock in the public sector. And there's a percentage issue in terms of which vertical to sell capital. So they basically couldn't deploy any capital in the private sector to the new fund manager. So that also push lots of the GP start looking at, you know, international LP, international capital potentially joining on board. But on the other side, there ourselves a process of education needs to be done to really as our other panelists dimension, right. Firstly, they need to understand the nature of a VC second need to understand the nature of investing healthcare is very different from investing consumer company, our business model innovation company, so the expectation has to align before any capital jump on board. So I think it takes time times but the good thing is it was the whole trend of generative AI was in healthcare this afternoon, I have another panel talk about large language model for healthcare, people started looking at it healthcare industry as a very attractive industry, maybe one of the industry have the largest opportunity, leveraging AI to push for digital transformation. So I think more capital are looking at healthcare in a different perspective. And also bring opportunity for file manager, like us to start conversation with wisdom. So I started lots of conversation was a newer institutionality this year, just to prepare for my next fundraise. During the conversation, I think a good thing is that they're super eager to learn new things super eager to learn about new fund manager, emergency manager. And they also agree there's lots of momentum going on in the early stage investment, early stage startup, which is the opposite of the growth stage investment. It just got limited by the current allocation strategy. And they're looking for potentially free up capital next year, once IPO market opened up in order to support more from a fund manager in the emerging side. So I do hope and I believe there will be more program focus on emerging manager especially from institution LP side, and they should be much better and environment for fund manager like us to work with them.
Owen Willis 19:10
Yeah, I mean, I think from like today, compared to January compared to summer of last year, it's gotten a lot better. I think a lot of the uncertainty that was in the market is now baked in. I think LPs are have reshuffled their portfolios and are looking at new managers in a way that maybe they weren't a year ago. I know in the US, most of my fundraising has been with family offices. And in the US, a lot of them in the kind of the top of the market had shifted their focus a little bit more into direct investing. And as the market has turned, a lot of them are starting to back away from direct investing and are looking to redeploy some of those assets into fund managers instead. Just because of you know how difficult it is It is to to actually deploy capital and and generate returns for early stage companies. The other thing that I The other thing that I think I mean, I raised this whole funds during this cycle. And, you know, it's it's been a incredibly difficult process. But I would say that like, as a first time fund manager, it should be difficult, right? It should be really, really, really hard to raise a first time fund, because it is a tremendous position of privilege in the market. Right, and you are a steward for other people's capital. And I do think when money was cheaper, I think there was a little bit of this change in perception of people feeling like they earned or deserved a fund. And now we're kind of back in that cycle of No, you really have to demonstrate that you are building something unique and differentiated and special in order to be able to raise capital. And it's much harder, but I think it is better long term, both for those LPs, but also for the founders that are being supported.
Raul Martin-Ruiz 21:03
I would say perhaps that, I mean, I fully agree with what you said. And I think it's clear that you have to look for a differentiating factor. This is becoming more and more complicated these days. So easily, because it's many of us, you know, looking for money, not us at this moment, but but we will have to do it at some point. So that's obviously one way of trying to, you know, to be different and to find for something niche, something different with a particular focus that have not been explored, explored, or whatever. And then, of course, the other deal, the way to have the success in fundraising is to show a strong track record, right. So there are some firms that they have managed to raise funds very quickly. And it was fun, number five, six, whatever. What I think is that this was because first of all, the track record. And and also because they they manage during all the previous years in the previous funds to establish a solid relationship with with the LPs, right. And as you said, before Lu, you have to identify them. They are it was you, I don't remember who said it, but you have to identify the some investors in every inequity basket, and you have to establish a relationship with them that will will last for many years. It's not only the life of the fund, but it's what you think that you will be doing later on. Right. So I think that those are the the two suggestions that if I had to give a suggestion to somebody, that's what I would what I would say,
Nick Ross 22:33
okay, good. Somebody was something we discussed before this panel was around. Perhaps a good question for many of the CEOs here is the dry powder left in the market, and why we're not seeing it at being allocated. I'm sure there's plenty of frustrated faces in in here looking for capital, what's been the driving thoughts within your fund and the way you're allocating whether you're thinking about putting money out into the market?
Samuel Levy 23:02
So I feel like there's two parts of that there's sort of the the dry powder in the industry, and then what we're doing at Luxera. So I think this is kind of a confusing time to be in the market as an entrepreneur raising capital. Because on the one hand, I think there's never been more dry powder in, you know, in venture world to to to, you know, to in theory be deployed, but there's obviously been a major slowdown in terms of deal volume. And, you know, I think the there are a number of drivers for that. I think, you know, what are the main drivers in the last 24 months has been a bit of a bid ask spread difference between valuation expectations for for companies, and, you know, valuations in the public markets and valuation expectations for investment committees in in venture capital and private equity funds. But I think enough time has passed that that that bid ask spread has narrowed quite a bit, especially last six months. I think one of the challenges that exists is I don't think it's obvious to people outside how bad the fundraising environment has been for venture and private equity in the last 24 months. So the equivalent of like, the medtech investment bankers that, you know, we're used to talk to as med tech entrepreneurs in our world, our placement agents, these are people that raise raise capital for private equity funds. I had one in my office about six months ago who told me, I've been doing this for I've been raising money for private equity funds for 30 years, this is worse than 2001. This is worse than 2009. This is the worst I've ever seen in my career. And so the impact that has is that no one is terribly motivated to go back to the market and raise the next fund in difficult market conditions. So you slow your deployment down. Because instead of being back in the market in 12 months, if I do fewer deals, I'm back in the market and 24 months where maybe things will be better. And so bizarrely the sort of private equity fundraising environment has an impact on deployment, which then impacts the you know, the the ecosystem of entrepreneurs raising capital. I do think that things are improving, I think, you know, as always, it's driven by public markets. So you know, the the s&p 500 is like done pretty well, this year. I didn't check it last night. But last time I read, it was like up 16% this year. And I think that's helped relieve some of the pressure for institutional peace that had the so called denominator effect, which, you know, the private assets still are small for most asset managers compared to liquid assets. And as liquid asset prices decrease, and as the net asset value of the private assets sort of stays safe, steady, at least temporarily. There's this issue of these, these LPS being overexposed to private assets. And when public asset prices do well, that relieves the so called denominator effect, making it possible for them to reconsider investments in private assets. So public market, valuations going up, helps relieve fundraising pressure for private asset managers, which then, you know, basically makes people more willing to deploy capital and Luxera, we've been, you've been very active. So, you know, we've, we've done now, in the last two years, we've done 10 deals, two and a half, two and a half years. And we are going to go back to the market this fall to go raise Fund II.
Nick Ross 26:18
Similar experiences for the others, or do you see other contributing factors to the, to the reasons of the slowdown in investment?
Owen Willis 26:28
I think one thing, especially at the early stages, is, you know, you look ahead to those future rounds, and whether or not they're happening, right. And I think the, you know, Series B+ slowed to almost nothing. For a period of time, I'm starting to see more series A's happen, which is an indication that things are going to be picking up downstream. And, you know, one of the, one of the big risks, especially in healthcare in health tech, as an early stage investor, is that there's a trough, right, like almost like a funding trough, where a founder gets that initial capital, they have to go build out their data set, and it is exceptionally difficult to raise capital inside that trough. In a good market. It's even harder when the market is like this. And so I think one of the things that has, I've seen people talk about is, you know, do we believe that this founder has the ability and has access to capital raised through that trough, because founders just have fewer opportunities to get extensions, they have fewer opportunities to have a redo on their go to market. And so what that means that the earliest stages for founders is that everything just needs to be a little bit tighter, you have to have a much better sense of what you're building, you have to have a lot more validation and traction than you maybe had before. And, you know, one of the big things that I talk to founders that I work with is not all traction is created equal. It has to the traction has to be in line with the business that you say you're going to build. And that's something that I think before you're able to get away with a little bit. And now it's it's it's tightened up a lot more on the diligence side.
Nick Ross 28:15
But one final question for the panel, open up to the audience. ESG has been a topic that gets talked about a lot. What's the reality when it comes to your LPs? And is it something they are looking at? And are there particular areas of impacts that they find pressure points on?
Lu Zhang 28:34
Yeah, so for ESG has been a super popular topic among LP community for the past couple of years. But I think in general, I think it's not only LP, most LP GP, still figuring out what is the most practical way to integrate that concept was the really financial driven venture investment because all of us I think I can speak for other panelists, were worth proud high financial return value investment, that's number one. And meanwhile, of course, we want to encourage a company and support a founder be able to provide a solution also for few years she targeting certain way. So we're trying to find the best way to balance both of that. And also meanwhile, to really help fund to understand how to be smart in terms of doing a rising SmartWay. Going back to the LP side, I think they're also trying to figure out whether just a purely allocate capital to yours you focus as a impact investment and only looking at other different metrics, like how many people got jobs and uncovering credit etc. Versus coming back for the existing financial driven VC firm, how to have another layer on top of that or to implement ESG so we have lots of discussion with our LP I think things are definitely getting better and more clear. And for example, I was talking with one LP recently about digital biology. Digital biology is supposed to be you know, healthcare investment, but the one sub sector is a systemic biology, synthetic biology could also apply to chemical industry, help them, you know, in terms of innovative the process of chemical processing and the eventually benefit for the environment. So that's a perfect example that essentially, this is creating a huge market opportunity. And also applying a new technology but also is complying was the ESJ guidance. So I think this type of vertical is become more and more popular. Of course, there's also other sector probably we have to sacrifice. Like I mean, investor had to sacrifice financial return a little bit in order to achieve the ESG goal. But also, there's more and more vertical that we don't need to do at this sacrifice, we could achieve the goal at the same time, and also especially leveraging a new digital tool to help our effectively achieve that goal. So at least that's what my understanding about ESG still going back, essentially World Financial driven investor financial return, DPI is the first priority for me in order to responsible for LPs I'm working with, but meanwhile, having a CLG mindset on the, as one of the criteria really helped us get back to the best of founder and big potential startups.
Owen Willis 31:11
Yeah, I mean, the reason why LPs invest their money with put their money with us is to drive returns, right? Fundamentally, most of my LPS also have other philanthropic endeavors that they're interested in. But the mindset is that the money that goes into my fund is something that's going to be able to help fund those endeavors in 10 15 20 years down the road, right, like that's, that's the, the way that they're thinking about how to use how to use their capital. And so, you know, a lot of those folks have just different pots of money for things that are tied to the causes that they are most interested in. You know, that being said, one of the things that I really like about healthcare as a space is that there is a way to overlap doing well with doing good in in a really interesting way. So for example, with our fund, one of our big focus areas, are companies that are addressing some of the root causes of lack of access to care for underserved populations. And the belief is that, you know, about 70% of Americans actually have pretty crappy access to health care in the US, right. So being able to solve the problem for those large segments of the population is something that can drive returns, just because of how large that market opportunity is, but there's no mandate on the fund that just happens to be where I think there's opportunity for us to deploy capital.
Raul Martin-Ruiz 32:41
I think that the ESG. And impact is something that I mean, it's here to stay, that's for sure. We're not fundraising now. So we have not tested the waters with a potential piece on which is their perception of that, but I'm pretty sure because I know from other colleagues, that it's, it's very important for them, of course, it's not going to be more important than making a financial return, that's for sure, as well. But the good thing that we have investing in, in life sciences is that, you know, we have an impact per se, right, we don't none of our funds are an Impact Fund, none of them. By but we have started monitoring some time ago, all the impact that our our, our portfolio companies are doing and what our fund is helping to do in terms of impact. And we were really positively surprised, right, and we have developed our own methodology. And we have realized that, you know, in investing in in the sector, per se has an impact independently of being an Impact Fund or not. And I think that that's something we have to clearly transmit to do LPs because I know that many are asking, Okay, are you going to be an Impact Fund? And then we can say, I mean, no, it's not our our intention, but but here is the impact that we are having in our portfolio companies are having right. So I think that that's something that we have to convey to LPs. And in my case, I might be biased, of course, but I really think that putting private money in into VC firms that are focused on on, on, you know, improving the life of patients and these type of things is much better than doing in other sectors. Right. That's my, my humble opinion.
Nick Ross 34:27
Good. Thank you. Thank you very much for your time. Appreciate everyone listening. Thank you to the panelists, and enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you.
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