BiF-4 Insights – David Berry – Flagship Ventures

Sequoia Capital is asking CEOs (Partners) to take 20% pay cuts and people earning over $100,000 to take 10% pay cuts:

• This is a really bad time to raise VC funds
• Sequoia sees this slowdown lasting up to 8 yrs

Flagship ventures does traditional VC work, but also does building of companies from scratch or building of companies around a professor or innovation:

• One example is LS9 – 60 people in South San Francisco
• Sugar goes in and petroleum comes out
• Uses e-coli bacteria that have been modified

What if you could turn CO2 into oil?

• Joule Biotechnologies
• Using organism created from scratch

Don’t want to sell out to or take investment from big oil:

• Other countries are interested in these technologies but also states in the USA because the inputs are otherwise waste products in states like Tennessee

We are also investing in genome sequencing and understanding genome mutations:

• 60 year old male has hundreds of thousands of mutations at the cell level in the heart by this time of his life, and these are non-dividing cells…

94% of cancer deaths come from metastacies and yet we typically only treat the primary cause.

For more information on the talk, go here.