In the heart of one of the biggest Life Sciences hubs - tales from a Swiss entrepreneur in Boston

Venture Leaders Life Sciences team member Mathieu Horras, from Aspivix and winner of the Startup Champions Seed Night pitch competition prize, shares with us his experience of the intensive investors roadshow, the pitches and local life, including the famous lobsters!

It's THE day! The day of our departure to Boston for the Venture Leaders Life Sciences trip 2018. It is 5:25 pm on Sunday, Jordi is already on his phone posting photos on all the accounts that GAFA can offer. In the airport, the temperature exceeds 30 degrees - surely to match our level of excitement, which is at the maximum not only for the 10 entrepreneurs but also for all those who surround and guide us. We all look forward to Monday and the true start of our adventure, pitching our companies to some of the most respected venture capital investors in the world.



Day 1 is finally there. Full of energy, or maybe jetlag, we all wake up rather early – 5am. Starting on time at swissnex is not a challenge; after all, we’re Swiss companies!
We have a quick brush-up from Philipe Labouchère of swissnex Boston and some key figures from the universities, researchers, startups and investors in the region. There's no doubt, Boston is a hot hub for startups and we are in the right place!
Jordi Montserrat already has advice for us: “Adapt to the American market!” One could say a pitch is a cupcake that you need to customize with icing sugar to get a bite from the investors. This tip turned to be very useful for the rest of the trip.
We finish the day with a panel of experts sharing their experience on strategic partnerships. These high-profile people, with thousands of deals worth billions of dollars behind them, all share one takeaway: early partnership with a large corporation brings credibility. The more you have, the better shape you're in.

It is already Day 2! In a building fronting the river, we start with a crazy 90-min session with 10 fast pitches and a very good drilling at Gurnet Point Capital. Chris Viehbacher, former CEO of Sanofi and Chairman of Genzyme, and his team share their insights. They also praise the crisp, clear quality of the presentations.




No time to breathe – we are already in downtown Boston for a hectic afternoon. Stuart Paap starts leading the pitch and video workshop session, with a very convincing model to crack the 1 min pitch, breaking it down it into three pieces: past, present and future. In a few minutes we all rewrite our 1-min pitch script and we have only a few minutes to swallow this entire new script for a video shoot. There's a funny moment when Venture Leaders are wandering the corridor talking to themselves, like characters from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We were obviously all out of our comfort zones. What a great learning moment!
The shoot is just finished when we enter the room for a new 5-min pitch. MedScience Ventures, a very professional VC, came with 10 partners, some of them having flown in from the West Coast just for this session. Questions fly from all the sides of the table, with wide open feedback. 
Then it’s time for a well-deserved lobster dinner after a second excellent, yet intense day. One could have thought that dinner would be a time to relax. No way! It is a crash course on how to eat a lobster in the oldest restaurant in America, the Union Oyster Bar. I feel ready to do that again and again.




Already middle of the week, the next day opens with an expert feedback session. Comments are explicit. All the Venture Leaders have the impression we are facing true experts who challenged us on all aspects of our business, from market sizing, pricing, technology and patentability right up to go-to-market, with good arguments. It's an amazing opportunity to validate many hypothesis, assumptions and decisions. Cherry on the cake 

 many of us had also to test our adaptability skills, as after a fire alarm, we ended up pitching in the middle of the courtyard or on a sidewalk.



A few minutes later we are in a luxurious building, joining Heinrich Christen, a seasoned partner of Ernst & Young. Heinrich's wise advice and broad knowledge give the impression of opening a book packed with knowledge 

 developed by the incredible scientists of RACapital and TechAtlas to support their evidence-based investing strategy. This probably explains the success of RACapital, an ever-green fund with $2 billion under management and more than 30 IPO and 70 unique private deals.
Leaving Boston, we head back to Cambridge for an informal meeting in the buildings of the prestigious Harvard Business School. We learn more about the back stories of the famous business cases that underlie the HBS teaching method, with their writers. It's an appealing perspective for us, to see how our challenges might be turned into lessons for future students and entrepreneurs.



The sun is now setting and we can feel the tension and excitement growing. The Pitch Fest is indeed coming soon. In the brand-new building of the Novartis Research Institute, the Swiss Startup National Team is welcomed. Ten startups from Switzerland and ten from the US have one minute each to convince the 300-person audience, ready to vote on their smartphones. And beware the Swiss bell if you overshoot the 1 minute mark!
The Venture Leaders did a great job in winning the first seats of each session and reaching the final. It was a great success, but also great fun for all of us.

We end the day with a fun evening together, but ssh 

what happens in Boston stays in Boston!




It's already the last day. We all have the impression we know by heart each and every pitch from the team. The rest of the day will give us an opportunity to demonstrate it. First at 29 Newburry Street, a very fancy address, Dr. Frank Gentile listens to each of us for 10 minutes. In a very interactive session afterwards he demonstrates incredible command of nearly every single market, be it Medtech or Biotech related.
The same format and challenges follow a few hours later at Novartis Venture Funds. We learn a great deal, with Markus Goebel, about IPO trends, but also about the question, “What is in it for me as an investor?” Markus also turns out to be tremendously helpful in creating connections, to provide more insight on the broad range of topics we all presented.
For the last session of this unforgettable trip, we meet the team at Foley & Lardner, and are briefed on incorporation and taxes. The visit  ends with our last pitch of the week. In a relaxed atmosphere, the Venture Leaders all decide to talk about Emma 

 a character from one of the pitches who has become famous over the week, and who made it into all the pitches in this memorable final session. Good fun, yet you could already see the teams getting steadily better, and sharper. 

While the fruits of these meetings will only be evidenced later on, everyone could see the progress and valuable networks that we each came out of this program with.
Jordi Montserrat and Caroline Graf from Venturelab, and Philippe Labouchere from swissnex, with subtle and smart support from the program sponsors, put together an amazing learning program for every one of us. We made our way home with deep gratitude towards this team, which steered us during the entire week, and some emotion on leaving our new friends, the Venture Leaders of this memorable 13^th Edition.