Main competitive advantages:
1. The three founding partners of our healthcare venture fund include myself with large health system executive experience, a physician with deep clinical, managed care and policy experience, and a third partner with start-up, finance and venture experience.This diversity of backgrounds is unique and has served us well. Most firms of our type have partners limited to the finance/venture backgrounds.
2. We have built our systems to be scalable anticipating that Fund II and Fund III will reap the advantages of investing for the future during Fund I. This is most evident in our deal flow network, research and IT infrastructure.
3. Hiring extraordinary talent and settling for nothing less than the best. This requires a great deal of discipline to use extensive assessment tools, interviewing techniques, background and reference checks and to match talent and chemistry with the founding partners.
Main Threats:
1. Inadequate deal flow could cause us to settle for investments that we otherwise would take a pass on.
2. The financial markets tighten impacting credit facilities and a less favorable environment for IPOs depress our long term opportunity for exits in the portforlio.
3. Too much available venture capital chasing too few investments causes artificial inflation in the value of investments forcing us to have to overpay to enter an investment.
1-2 PROBLEMS THAT ARISE DURING ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT
It has been my experience that most organizations stay focused on gathering data within their own industry. This is a flaw particularly found in healthcare where we tend to view ourselves as unique and different from other industries. The truth is there is much to learn from other sectors and our environmental scans and assessments should not be limited to just the healthcare space. If we look at new models of service delivery, quality, safety, supply chain, customer service, business processing, business development, marketing (just to name a few) there are immense learnings from other industries. We tend to focus too much on local direct competitiors during the assessment phase of strategic planning.