Review of Mahendra Ramsinghani's "The Business of Venture Capital: Insights from Leading Practitioners on the Art of Raising a Fund, Deal Structuring, Value Creation, and Exit Strategies

21 Aug 2012

Review Posted on Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/review/R2Q6WI836ZOCJT/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0470874449&linkCode=&nodeID=&tag=

A 'must' for all those who fancy the bucket & probably the ocean too!, August 21, 2012 By Vishrasayan As someone aiming to venture into VC, and moving quite laterally at that, I was on lookout for a book that not only strengthens my basics but would also help me develop my own perspective of how the ecosystem behaves & how I could synergize and coexist with the same - `The Business of Venture Capital..' by Mahendra Ramsinghani fit the bill perfectly. While essentially structured as a comprehensive guide to the VC process, the author took pains not to make the style pedagogic & peppered it liberally with quotes, case-studies and his own witty one-liners that helped the overall learning process while not getting your goat. Even as I persisted through all chapters, I did realize that the composition of each chapter allows one to skip a chapter or two & still make sense of the flow. The book ends with a quote by David Ogilvy "Don't bunt. Aim out of the ballpark. Aim for the company of immortals". Interestingly (for me at least...), the epilogue starts with the sentence, "At its core, VC is truly an apprenticeship business" - This seeming contradiction/ irony is what defines the approach taken by the author Mahendra Ramsinghani in establishing that a true venture professional is essentially a lifelong apprentice who nonetheless perpetually aims to challenge the boundaries of a conventional success. Highly recommended for aspiring & established VCs and anyone else who fancies the `bucket' in whichever way!

The clinical attrition of INX-189 post a 2.5 billion acquisition - are investors into life sciences really looking at where the buck is headed?

October 2012
Discussion initiated onGlobal Private Equity & Venture Capital group on Linkedin

http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=48513&type=member&item=156370875&qid=b8ecfd7b-c40b-491c-9e3d-f3f42e0780e4&trk=group_search_item_list-0-b-ttl&goback=%2Egmr_48513

Agreed BMS is no VC & acquisition of Inhibitex at 2.5 billion was more a survival tactic, but probably the outcome could be such for many investments into the life science (drug discovery). I believe the investor due-diligence of the investee should go beyond market projections of the pipeline candidates & a rational assessment of the druggability & clinical longevity of the pipeline candidates is what should interest the investor the most – not sure if this happens to the extent required?

Would love to hear what the investor community feels about this.

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PS: My love went totally unrequitted :-)... zero response

Is the LP bias against investment into life-sciences contra-logical?

17 January 2013

Early Stage Biotech Showing Positive Signs of Scaling Its Wall of Worry by Bruce Booth on Forbes

http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucebooth/2013/01/15/early-stage-biotech-showing-positive-signs-of-scaling-its-wall-of-worry/ goback=%2Egmr_38263%2Eamf_38263_16107339%2Egde_38263_member_205146678

Despite the apparent consensus opinion at JPM that innovative new start-ups are continuing to attract capital, I wonder if in reality the venture funding, particularly from big-pharma CVCs, is mostly channeled into development/ acquisition of potential clinical candidates - THIS anomaly of an 'uncharacteristic aversion of domain biggies themselves towards investing into early innovation that'd feed their own pipelines' is WHAT I feel is the primary reason for a strong bias in the LP universe against investment into Life Sciences......