#134 | Global Fundraising in Life Sciences

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Wendy: Hello friends, and welcome back to another episode of The Global Marketing Show. Very excited for today's guest because he brings a wealth of experience on fundraising and medical device and working globally. But before we get into that, just a reminder that we are sponsored by Rapport International, a company that provides high-quality written translation and spoken interpretation in over 200 languages. 

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And so today's tidbit from them is about your head. Did you know that in a lot of countries your head is very sacred, particularly in Asian countries, and it shouldn't be touched by somebody else? So I certainly learned that when I lived in Taiwan, that you just didn't touch anybody else's head. So I thought that was appropriate because we're going to get into some very intellectual smart stuff today. So we've got Dennis Ford coming on today. He's an entrepreneur, an author, and thought leader who's an expert in sales, marketing, and business development. He spent most of his career launching new companies and developing a market for nascent game-changing technologies. 

He has a distinct value in understanding the world of global alternative investors and how that relates to high-growth early-stage technologies. Dennis, I'm so [00:02:00] excited to talk to you and hear about your journey and your advice. So welcome. 

Dennis Ford: Thank you very much. 

Wendy: Yeah. So tell me what you're doing these days. 

Dennis Ford: Well, I think, when you're talking about life science, you've really got to divide it into the four silos. And so we call it the four Ds: Drugs, Devices, Diagnostics, and Digital Health. Each one of those silos pretty much has its own perspective and own profile. So, if you're developing a drug, you're in it for the long haul, 15-20 years of work. 

And if you're doing a medical device or a diagnostic, it can be a lot shorter, three to five or five to seven years. And then if you're doing digital health, it's software, so it can be fairly flexible in the length of time that it takes. [00:03:00] Part of understanding what's going on in life science these days is really understanding each of the distinct silos—drugs, devices, diagnostics, and digital health—and then also how they're kind of blending. 

Which is a whole other category of what's going on with things that generate data. So we can touch on some of those things as we go, but for myself, I'm the founder of a company called Life Science Nation. Life Science Nation spends a lot of our time working with the people that are leaving research and taking some technology assets that they've discovered and trying to figure out how to commercialize them. 

[00:04:00] So, we call those folks the sellers. And the buyers are the capital investors and licensing partners and collaboration and project partners that are looking for these assets. Typically, if you're leaving an academic environment with a tech transfer license, you typically want to affiliate with either an incubator, accelerator, tech hub, bio cluster—somewhere that you can land and continue your work. Then you try and get your first iteration of funding, which a lot of people try and get non-diluted funding, either from the federal government or from regional government agencies, states, or patient groups or endowments or foundations. 

That aren't taking equity, but eventually when you start to get your product up and running, you need to look for your first round of money, which typically is seed. And we look at the seed world up to 2 million. [00:05:00] Some people are getting small amounts in the tens or the fifties or the hundred thousands, but other people are getting a million or 2 million in seed. 

And then from there you go to Series A and Series B. Series A can be 2 million to 10 million and Series B can be 10 million to 50 million. And then from there, you're going to your C and D rounds. But my company, Life Science Nation, we have the capability through an investor network that we've grown over the last decade. 

There's 10 categories of investors and we have about 4,000 investors in our network. Each of the categories, like each of the silos we were talking about, they really have their own profile and they really have their own kind of ecosystem that they live in. So, it starts with your angels and your angel syndicates, and then it [00:06:00] goes to your family offices, be it a single family office or a multifamily office. 

And then it goes into, as we said, patient groups, endowments, foundations, and then venture capital, which really is divided into three categories: the early-stage VCs who are putting small amounts of money in many companies; the mid-stage VCs who are typically looking for a de-risked asset, maybe a phase two B company that's looking to move into phase three and eventually get commercialized; and then your late-stage folks are the folks who are really standing on the sidelines looking for a de-risked asset, but they're willing to give you growth dollars and scaling dollars to bring your product to market and go global with it. 

And so that's the same for [00:07:00] private equity, and then there's all the corporate players like Google and Microsoft and Oracle. Everybody's really into the life science space these days because we're in the golden age of life science. All of the new drugs and all of the new devices and all of the new test diagnostics in the software are just going to be changing the whole way that we view healthcare and the way that we deal with patients and just all the methodologies that are going to be transformed. It's a really exciting time to be in life science and we've seen the advent of all the new tools and processes and things like CRISPR and other things coming to the market that are just going to really have a significant change for everybody in the world. 

Wendy: [00:08:00] Okay, so that's a good segue to everybody in the world. I remember when I was in business school a number of years ago, all the VC and the investment was all very American-based. And I have certainly seen a change in that since I left business school and followed the life sciences industry—it's gone more international. 

So when you look at your community of investors across the 10 categories, and then you look at the people who are looking for funding, tell me what you're seeing in the international marketplace. 

Dennis Ford: A lot of the technology that's out there comes from research and academia. Every state, every country, every region in the world has universities and colleges. [00:09:00] Those universities and colleges have programs where they give PhDs in the life science arena, chemistry, biology, et cetera. 

All of the technology assets that are out there are coming from the thousands of colleges that are creating these PhDs that are doing the research in the different facets of life science. Eventually, some of the research is great and fun to know, but some of it has value when it wants to get commercialized. 

So, I think if you look at any region, and I tend to divide the world into threes: Asia Pacific, with China and Japan and Taiwan and Korea and Singapore and Australia; then there's Europe and the UK; and then there's North America, Canada, and the US. And of course, there's stuff going on in Africa and South America, but the three real markets that we traverse are [00:10:00] APAC, Europe, and North America. 

And so when you look at what we talked a little bit earlier, it's the golden age of life science. Because of all of the new forms of technological development and the new tools that are in place to take advantage of that, we're just seeing an incredible amount of products come from everywhere in the world. Thinking that it's just coming from the U.S.—a majority of the stuff is coming from the U.S., but there's really great technology happening everywhere. 

I don't think that when somebody discovers something new in a particular silo, a new drug or a new device or a new diagnostic or some new software, that it's going to be in a particular location. It's going to be very centric to [00:11:00] the founder and the inventor and the team that's inventing it. I don't think anybody has the ability to say it's just gonna be in one part of the world or the other. 

Wendy: And how are you seeing, the founder expanding from where they are? So they've got a good idea. 

Dennis Ford: So you know, the first thing is there's these ecosystems, and how many, life science ecosystems are there in the world right now? I mean, we can look. On what's going on in the U. S. and we can say, there's the Boston area and the New York area, and then we can go down to, D. C. and North Carolina and keep on going down to the southern region and wind up in in Florida. And then we can, jump over to Texas and the Texas Medical Center and all of the things that are going on there and we can traverse up to Minneapolis and all the med tech device things that are going on in that whole region. 

And in the, in the Chicago area that we can [00:12:00] jump over to Seattle and San Francisco and San Diego. And so. There's all these technology centers in the U. S. and then there's all these technology centers. I call them innovation economies, really, and they're all across Canada as well. And then that's the same for the UK and in Europe. 

And that's the same for Asia Pacific. And so what happens is. The university environment is spawning this research and development that comes out of the institutions of each region, the academic institutions of each region, and then each region kind of has their little, you know. Ecosystem of Angels and Venture Capital and PE and other people that play in that region and, they'll typically be involved, but what we have seen [00:13:00] is that if you're a startup company, and you're trying to do a fundraising campaign. 

It's not just learning how to do a 30 minute pitch and then, the myth is go get your tech transfer license, go wind up someplace at an accelerator, an incubator, go get your 30 minute pitch, get funded by a VC, get your data to your phase to be and get bought by a pharma. It's really not that simple. 

And, what we have found in our. 10 years in the marketplace is that a lot of the entrepreneurs and residents, mentors and coaches that are associated with all of these innovation economies, they're teaching these scientists how to pay for a 30 minute PowerPoint pitch,  

but nobody really alerts them to the hardcore facts that [00:14:00] raising money is a numbers game and that it takes 9 to 18 months. And that you have to get out of your region and you have to go global and, that's been a little bit of a bone of contention because my company, Life Science Nation, we have a database of investors that we sell on a subscription service. 

We have an entrepreneurial education. Group inside my company that will help, cohorts of entrepreneurs get ready to leave their region and go global. And then we have soft landing programs that we also offer for people that are trying to get into the U. S. So there's this whole idea that we have that it's. 

A numbers game to go find the right amount of investors to just start. And when I say investors, that's licensing partners, [00:15:00] capital investors, collaboration partners, and licensing partners. And if you do not have. The correct amount to start with. It's very difficult to make it to the end and get funded or find your partners. 

We basically found that it takes 600 to 800 targets that are a fit for your stage of development in your product set to really, be in a position to do a 9 to 18 month fundraising. Campaign and, you know, 800 turns into 400 turns into 200 turns into 100. And before you know it, you're out of leads and you're out of targets to go after. 

And that's if you're a fundraising CEO. Trying to go out into the market. And when I look at the funds that I know, the fund managers that are, raising funds, and I look at their PowerPoint and I say, how many companies [00:16:00] do you vet, before you invest? And I looked at one health tech company recently, and in 2023, they vetted 800 companies to do 3 investments. 

And then I went through another one. A pediatric fund, and in 2023, they went through 600 companies to do 2 investments. So I was a little bit shocked when I realized that. The sell side, the fund raising CEOs, they need 6 to 800 leads to go find the fund managers and then the buy side. They've got to go find six or 800, candidates to give their money to and vet and out of them, they pick, one or two or three and so both of the sides of the table have this really large problem in that they've got to go find large quantity of people that are a fit for their investment theme. 

or for their product stage of [00:17:00] development, and we think that's where a lot of people really fall off the table.  

Wendy: Yeah, I mean, that's certainly intimidating. You're a scientist, you're trying to get the business off and going, and you've got to have that, and you've got to become a salesperson all of a sudden. 

 But I want to take you back into, you've got to go global. We had a conversation that was really interesting about why people should make that list of 600 - 800 targets. And. Go global rather than just looking in the United States. That's where they're based.  

Dennis Ford: So, you know, we could go to any territory. 

We can say, okay, how many investors are there in Massachusetts? And I have 4, 000 investors in my database and I can go how many are in Mass and how many are in New York and how many are Connecticut and I can hit a button and I can tell you exactly how many we know, which are probably, a decent portion of them and it's just not enough. 

For any company that's in any region, [00:18:00] including a really rich one like Boston, Cambridge, or Silicon Valley or San Diego, there just isn't enough investors in a particular region to allow them to play that numbers game. And the numbers game is. If you ask a fundraising CEO, so how many targets do you have to go start your fundraising campaign? 

They might say a dozen, a couple of dozen, 50, 60, 100, but none of them are saying I have 600 or 800. And so, Right there is a major problem because if you have 12 targets, you can send 12 emails in a day and those 12 targets can all of a sudden go to one reply back and you're out of schlitz, then you're basically going out there and trying to find targets that are fit for your stage of development and product that you can engage in a [00:19:00] dialogue. 

And so. What has become painfully, aware is that you've got to get out of your region and so people go, okay, well, I'll go from Boston and I'll go to the West Coast and I'll go travel to some of these regional shows. But that really isn't enough either because it's a numbers game and you've got to start with 600 to 800 targets. 

You've got to include Europe. You've got to include Asia and a lot of the times by including Europe and including Asia. You're really enhancing. Your, ability to get a dialogue with people with the right people, because there's a lot of technology assets in Asia, that are getting, evaluated, but the people that are the investors and licensing partners, they want a big pool to go with. 

So they want to go to Europe and they want to [00:20:00] go. To the North America and make sure that they're getting their 800 companies to vet. So the people that understand this, they don't have a problem figuring out that it's going to take 9 to 18 months. They've got to knock on doors. They've got to make the phone calls. 

They've got to get the meetings and because they've learned it. But right. So many of these  

Wendy: yeah, the tech transfer. I'm here in Boston and I'm developing my list of six to 800 and I go, okay, I'm going to start with all of Boston. Then I'm going to work my way across the United States. 

It's easier in English. So you say you would work throughout the U. S. and then go international?  

Dennis Ford: Yeah, you've got to do everything. I mean, everybody's got their own strategy and tactics of how you do it personally. For me, I want to get a list of everybody that's a [00:21:00] fit for my stage of development of my product. 

And then I want to send them a really cogent message about who I am and what I'm doing and what I'm trying to do. And then I want to see how many raise their hand and say, yeah. Let's have an entry level conversation. So my approach is to find people that are fit for you globally and then go after them and then see how many raise their hand and want to talk to you. 

So that's, the shotgun approach, and I'm a big fan of that, because if you send it out to people are a fit. And you get 40 or 60 people say, yeah, let's have a meeting. That's great. So you can start to dialogue, but the other way is, yeah, let's just, let's do the rifle shot. Let's get everybody in Massachusetts done. 

Let's get everybody in Rhode Island and let's get everybody in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York and let's get everybody in DC. You can do it that way too. I personally like to canvas [00:22:00] through many mailings, many newsletters, many pieces of information that I send to people that I know are a fit for me and getting them to engage with me once they realize that. 

Their mandate for investment. I'm a fit for so you can have different tactics and you know, you can go regional and you can broaden to the southeast and then you can go to the rest of the U. S. It's all good, but it's a numbers game. You've got to get out of your region and you got to start getting in front of as many people as you possibly can. 

Wendy: Okay. So people are reaching out and, and I know there's a lot of English speakers here in the United States that will listen to this and they'll say, well, I don't speak the European languages. I don't speak the Asian languages. How are people handling that?  

Dennis Ford: I mean, English is pretty much the universal language in life science. 

I'm not an expert in any language, but I speak [00:23:00] a little bit of a lot of languages, so I travel around the world. I've never run into a problem. The fact that I speak English and, the other person doesn't. Most people that come from academics and are in academic global networks and research institutions. 

Everybody's pretty much speaking English, and I haven't really seen that. And then when you're talking about, 10 categories of investors. and licensing partners. They're all in the international world. And I have not seen in my conferences or any of my trips that, me not speaking the native language is a deal killer. 

Wendy: Oh, okay. Say they get a funder in a different country, say it's in, China and, so they get their funder there. What happens then?  

Dennis Ford: Well, it doesn't really work like that. I mean, there's going to be a lead investor and typically the lead investor [00:24:00] is the person that's going to really be babysitting the company and making sure that they're having the weekly meetings or the monthly meetings. 

And there's going to be people that are part of that. And so typically, if somebody's doing, a later round, an A, B, C round, there's going to be a syndicate of investors, and if you have a Chinese investor, and a European investor, and a couple of American investors, and one's the lead, and your company's in the U. S., it makes sense for, the lead investors managing and doing the day to day, month to month quarter. And then when, the milestones are met in the calls for cash are coming in, then the other people will get more involved in and send their checks along. So it's not. That typical for a foreign venture fund to just be [00:25:00] managing a remote, U. S. fund. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but typically there's a group of investors that have an international reach and an international footprint, and they've done this, for many funds, and they pretty much know how to manage, uh, where the company is, the people will decide based on geography or based on other criteria, who's going to be the front guy that's going to be managing and babysitting that particular investment. 

Wendy: Oh, okay. So the investors then partner up. So once you get a hit of somebody that's interested, they're actually going to help you bring in the other investors that are going to.  

Dennis Ford: Yeah. And that's a really big part of what happens at the RESI conferences. My company has 5 annual partnering events that we do every couple of months because, that's what's needed. 

You can't leave your region once or twice a year and hope to get [00:26:00] funded. You really got to get out of your region on a regular basis. So we've created a Redefining Early Stage Investment (RESI) conference, and we start at the JPM in January Which is a big gathering of around 30, 000 life science players from all over the world. 

 And then in March, we just did, RESI South, which took care of all the, the southern states. And then we went to Barcelona in June. We came back to Boston in September, and then we're going to London in, December. And so if somebody follows my partnering events, they will be able to get out of their region and they will also be able to go meet investors from all around the North America, Europe and Asia as well, because my investor network comes to my events so that they can find technology assets to source and vet. 

Wendy: Okay. And [00:27:00] you had also mentioned once you get an international, investor, there's a lot of advantages to having somebody. in another country to help you launch. Can you talk about that?  

Dennis Ford: Yeah. I mean, if I was a fundraising CEO and I was looking to get a bunch of investors for a B or a C round, I would want to get, somebody in Asia and somebody in Europe and a couple of people in the U S as part of an investment syndicate, So, by getting to know them and them getting to know me, as my company starts to go forward and my product starts to head towards commercialization, they really understand, like, They have footprints in the region. 

They know all the service providers. They know all the distributors and OEMs and value added resellers and they can really help guide you in their particular territory that they're an expert in and [00:28:00] who the right players are for distribution and who the right players are if it's a pharma and you're looking for licensing situation. 

They will know personally the people to go to and having a diversified group of investors that are, investing in your company, guiding you through the process and also as the company starts to mature, they know other people in their regions that can really help. You make a joint decisions and be more effective than just kind of going at it alone. 

So the personal makeup of your venture capital group is super important.  

Wendy: What are some of the biggest challenges you see people with, communication or culture or working across countries?.  

Dennis Ford: Yeah, I mean, the thing that we've been talking [00:29:00] about is they don't understand that, they've got to get a simple story straight. 

And the simple story that they have to be able to tell in, 5 seconds, 30 seconds, 3 minutes, 3 hours. They don't really understand that it's got to be a simple narrative. That's compelling. That really encapsulates who the founder is, how the team got established and how they went about discovering the technology and what the magic was there. 

And so, a lot of the times we see scientists come into the environment that we live in and they're convinced the only thing that matters is the science. And so, when you tell them that it's not the science, it's, The investor is about to marry you for X amount of years, and they want to know who you are. 

Are you a good person? What's your passion? How did you [00:30:00] get involved in this? How do you act when things don't work out? How do you act when things work out? Great. How does your team pivot? What happens when you miss milestones? And so there's a general disconnect of scientists, entrepreneurs, Coming at it as if the science is the only thing that matters and the people who are trying to give them money and evaluating are the science matters. 

Don't get me wrong. And the data is important. And you got to be able to have verifiable validated data. And you've hit milestones along the way. But they really want to know about who am I giving my money to? What kind of person is it? How's the teamwork? How's the teamwork together? 

And so that is really completely misunderstood and, once again, it's, other things that are understood, like, if you got a list of 600 investors, global investors that are a fit for you, what would you do with it? And [00:31:00] nobody really knows, like most of them would say, Oh, I'll just stick it in an Excel spreadsheet and I'll color code it. 

And when I reach out, I'll just kind of keep track of it like that. And it doesn't work that way. You really need to get a CRM, look salesforce. com that allows you to take those 800 profiles and put them in a place that you can organize and get reports and update and see what's going on and nurture each account. 

 Personally, and have a record of each interaction that you've been involved with, and these interactions are going to not be months, they're going to be years. And so, just the fundamental understanding of, at the bottom of sales, and at the bottom of marketing, and at the bottom of business development, Is this thing called a list? 

You know, all of those silos of business start with a list of targets that are a fit for what the heck you're trying [00:32:00] to do. And so nobody teaches that you've got to get a list of people that are fit for you. And nobody teaches that you've got to put that list inside of a CRM. 

And then nobody teaches that. How do I canvas that list? How do I do an email? Or how do I. Do a phone canvas and how do I develop a compelling, simple, easy to understand narrative that I can turn into a compelling story that if I see somebody for 30 seconds, I can just tell them who I am and what I've done. 

And they'll go. Oh, we need to talk. That's not really. Part of what we see, coming out of the mentors, coaches and EIRs, you know, not to be down on them at all because they are teaching how to do the PowerPoint and how to go in and, get this thing started. But we take it further we have cohorts from [00:33:00] Australia and Korea and Brazil that are elite technology assets that have come from these really great, innovation economies. And we talked to these folks. they do have their PowerPoint down, but they're just missing a whole bunch of ingredients that they need to do as far as telling their story and understanding what the investors are looking for. 

And a lot of that we teach.  

Wendy: Oh, that's excellent. How is it different preparing for a global road show than it would be for just a standard U. S. one? I mean, I hear that they have to develop a simple story and they've got to get their list and they have to take it out. 

It is the global marketing show, so I want to pull those differences for people that they might have to think about, if they're going global. 

Dennis Ford: Well, then it comes back to the, you know, if you're going to a rich place like the Golden Triangle in the UK of Oxford, London and Cambridge, [00:34:00] there's lots of investors, there's lots of angels, there's family offices, and if you're doing some kind of interesting drug development, that by going to a You know, Kendall Square and meeting all the investors around Boston and Cambridge and things. 

That's great. And going to San Francisco, but it's also great to go to London and to some of these other places Spain and France and Germany. These are big players with really big investors and those investors. are looking for stuff in their region, but they're looking for first in class, best in breed, and they're not going to be looking, for anything other than the best. 

And so they don't care. If they're going in France or England or the US, they want a team that they can work with. They want a technology that's compelling. They want to see milestones that are [00:35:00] achievable. And when all of those things are in the right spot, they'll give you money and they're not really worried that much about where you're located. 

Wendy: Okay. Interesting. Now I have heard of people that will go over to like Spain, France or Germany and make a presentation. And even though the investors, English is very good, if they're from those countries, if they bring their presentation translated, even if they're speaking English in the meeting that translation gives them a leg up because people can hear it, but then they can also read it in their native language and get it more. 

Dennis Ford: Yeah, we just don't see anything like that. I've been doing this for, let me see, we had 350 investors at our RESI conference two weeks ago in Boston and we had 300 startups. So I would say 20 or 30 percent of those people were international [00:36:00] from Asia and Europe. And South America, and, we just don't see that elementary, misunderstanding of, you know, I'm an American, PhD guru in RNA, and I'm going to talk to a bunch of investors that are RNA based investors for oncology. 

They're not down to this elemental level where I mean, everybody's talking the same language. They're all super educated. They all speak English. They all read English. We just don't see it. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but the people that I play with , that was my 48th RESI conference over 12 years. So we see, thousands of investors and we see thousands of startup companies every single year. 

Yeah. And it's not a language issue. [00:37:00] Now, I'll tell you where it's an issue culturally, but it's not the English, language issue that you're, discussing what we see is the cultural protocol where we tell somebody, you have to keep on going after an account. 

And if you sent them 1 or 2 messages, you can't stop and they will say, well, in our culture, we don't spam. In our culture, we give them one or two or maybe three phone calls, but we're not making 20 phone calls. That's just not what we do. And so that is really common, and we explain to them that you might not do it, and if you don't want to do it, then you're not going to play the game that everybody else is playing. 

So I kind of give an example of like a wave going by. That's the potential for somebody to get funded and you're sitting there and you're competing with the Israelis and you're [00:38:00] competing with The Americans and you're competing with the folks in different countries and nobody's saying, I'm only going to do 2 or 3 emails or make 2 or 3 phone calls. 

And if they don't call me back, then I'm just going to quit. That'll kill you. That'll ruin your company. You won't make it. What we say, you keep on calling until somebody tells you, no, it's not a fit or stop bothering me. And so in the world of you're a startup company, and you're hustling around the planet, and you're trying to talk to and kiss as many frogs as you can. It doesn't scale when you say, well, they didn't call me back. So they're off my list. That's the kiss of death. And the worst thing that you could possibly do and, we have so many examples where. On the 20th phone call, the investor answers the phone and says, I'm so busy. 

I'm so [00:39:00] sorry. My schedule's open. I've been wanting to talk to you for months. Tell me when we can do it. It's just so many examples of that and, people just don't believe it. And, we have the same thing when we're talking to CEOs and you're going, you know, I just want to pitch to science and you're going, but they're not interested in the science. 

They're interested in your story, your team, your technology, the pedigree, the lineage. And so, one time we had. Somebody say, you know, I've got my slides. I've got a half hour. I'll have five minutes for questions at the end. I'm going to take over with my techie slide show. Thinking that the science is just going to win everybody over. 

And so I advised this one person. I said, why don't you do half your meetings with you taking over the slideshow and doing a purely science thing? And then the other half of the meetings just have 1 slide in your back pocket and just start by explaining who you are as a person where you're [00:40:00] coming from find out who they are. 

And the person came back to me and said, oh, my gosh. I learned so much about the other person on the other side of the table. We're both fathers. We both like to ski and we both like to bicycle and we have kids the same age and all of this stuff that all of a sudden they realized that that was really, something that just had never dawned on them before. 

So a lot of times when we're working with government agencies and bio clusters that send us cohorts and we're educating them, a lot of people say, A lot of the things you seem to be doing with your curriculum is just teaching people how to be people, how to talk human to human, how to tell a story about, when they were a kid, they saw a sheep dolly that got cloned, and that just got them on a path. 

 So 25 years later with a PhD, a young, Girl that was living on a [00:41:00] ranch in Texas now has a hormone that stops, childhood growth. Problems. And so it's those stories that really ignite the interest and allow people to start a dialogue based on commonality and then really exchange about who each other is. 

And, really what goes on. So those are some of the key items. We had a really, super experienced farmer executive in one of our Australia cohorts. And they said, I know what I'm doing. I just want to tell them about my product. I'm not wasting time with this story. 

I'm not going to do it. And, I said, if they want to know, and they said, here's 10 million, tell me where your passion, tell me how you got into this product. And you tell them it doesn't matter. It's not going to scale. And so, she said, okay, I'll tell you. And she basically said she had a teenage son that [00:42:00] was on an IV in hospital for three months. 

And as she was taking care of him, she basically said, made a promise to herself that if he got out of the hospital, she was going to cure, a virus, I don't know if it was malaria or what. And I told her, I said, do me a favor. Okay. Every time you meet somebody, take 30 seconds and tell them that story of why you're here, and she just didn't believe me. 

She goes, I would never do that. And I said, just try it. And so she came back and she said, Oh, my God, I couldn't believe it. Turns out that other people had kids my age, other mothers I talked to they had problems with their kids being sick and everybody really related to every single thing I said and the people were really. 

 Enamored with my story because it's a personal story of a mother, trying to cure, other children of a disease, and it's got a lot of, really important parts to [00:43:00] it. And so she then went on to be chosen to be in a. Contest of entrepreneurs, a pitching contest for all of Australia. 

I think they picked 100 of the best technology CEO startups, and she actually won it., she actually won the competition and sent me an email saying, man, I'm really so happy that you advised me to, tell a personal story. And I said, yeah, I just dragged it out of you, but it was your story. And, you know, congratulations on winning the entrepreneur of Australia pitch competition. 

But those are the things that, when you get a CEO from a foreign country, or even from a region in the US, and you're trying to explain to him, like, tell me your story. Like, why are you doing this? And they really just look at you like, what the heck does that matter? I found this new technology in the science. 

They want to go down [00:44:00] the rabbit hole. And you've got to go, no, no, no, we've got to bring it up and we've got to create a narrative around this that really explains you, your team, your technology, and really puts it in a nice story so that they can quickly decide that they want to move forward with you. 

And so those are the things that people just don't get because they're coming out of the science world and they just never been in this whole other world of business.  

Wendy: Right, and how much the story is important. I mean, I think that's such an interesting way of looking at it because so often we have to tell American business people who are going international that you have to build the relationships because the U. S. we can be very transactional, but here you are in a foreign country. Culture that is very transactional. I, you know, I do science. I understand this. And it's still about building the relationship because that's ultimately what makes the company successful. I hate to say it, but we're out of time because this [00:45:00] has been fascinating. 

I mean, you have shared such good, valuable advice on, uh, raising money international and how to build the team and how to tell the story. So we have to end here, but, you know, I'm going to ask this. Question at the end about your favorite foreign word and foreign, just to be clear, can be defined as any language. 

 Would you like to share with us your favorite foreign word?  

Dennis Ford: Oh, I mean, I learn all sorts of foreign words all the time. My most recent one was in-yeon, which is Korean. And, we happen, my wife and I happen to be watching this movie about past lives, people knowing each other in the past. 

And, going through generations of reincarnation and then they meet again like 100 years later and just all of that, that whole thing that goes around that. So. One of my, staff is Korean. And so I saw the movie and I said, Claire, you have to go [00:46:00] watch this movie. It's about in-yeon. 

And she goes, what are you? How did you even know? And I told her and I said, could you explain it to me? And he said, yeah, it's people, who might have lived generations ago and interactive and now they meet again. So I thought that was kind of a cool story in a nice new word.  

Wendy: Oh, that is great. 

I like that. So phonetically it would be like, il yong, I-L-Y-O-N-G?  

Dennis Ford: I wrote it, on the board because I'm not good at this. I think it was IL and then WAYN for my phonetics. But I don't know. I don't know exactly how the word goes in English.  

Wendy: Right, right. I mean, exactly. Korean's a character language, so there might not be an exact spelling. 

 So thank you so much, Dennis. Where can people reach out to you or find you if they'd like to know more?  

Dennis Ford: You can reach me at dford@lifesciencenation.com. And you can look us [00:47:00] up on lifesciencenation.com or you can look at our RESI conferences. resiconference.com. And you can find out a whole bunch of stuff. 

We've written a book on fundraising called The Life Science Executive's Fundraising Manifesto. And if anybody needs that, we can send them an e copy of the book and we're happy to help anybody.  

Wendy: Great. I didn't know about your book yet. So, that's fantastic. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. 

Great.  

Dennis Ford: Awesome. Thank you so much. Really appreciate everything, Wendy.  

Wendy: Okay, thank you, Dennis. The information that you're bringing to scientists is absolutely fantastic, and I love to hear how everything is going so global, from the start, from the fundraising. So, thank you, and, we'll Talk to you soon. 

 Thank you listeners for tuning in. If you know a scientist that is trying to raise money, this would be a great episode to share with them. I run into people, like that all the time [00:48:00] because it is a very big challenge. And, I have heard, and I think this was from Dennis himself, that many times great technologies don't get to the market, in the life sciences area because people don't know how to do this fundraising. So, certainly share this and, encourage people to reach out. If you've enjoyed this episode, please remember to give us a five, and, subscribe to it so you can get the series of interviews that we're doing with the medical devices and new technologies that are coming out that we actually recorded at the RESI conference this year in Boston. 

 So thank you for tuning in, and we'll talk to you next time. [00:49:00]