2025년 11월 15일 (토요일)
안녕하세요 보스턴 임박사입니다.
지난번에 Adimab LLC에 대해서 글을 쓴 적이 있습니다.
BIOTECH (191) Adimab LLC: One-stop antibody shop with discovery and non-exclusive partnership
Adimab은 항체개발의 One-stop shop으로 임상시험 없이 오로지 연구와 파트너쉽을 통해서 성장한 모델이었는데요 이 회사에 대해 글을 쓰던 중 잠깐 언급했던 인물이 한명 있는데요. 그 이름은 Errik Anderson입니다.
“여기에서 두분의 교수 – Tillman Gerngross 교수와 Dane Wittrup 교수 – 가 가진 입증된 연구성과를 바탕으로 계약 주체들과의 신뢰를 형성한 것이 중요했고 또 하나 Errik Anderson이라는 분의 치밀한 특허분석과 전략 수립 그리고 사업계발 전략이 큰 공을 차지한 것으로 보입니다. 나중에 Errik Anderson의 다른 벤처에 대해 얘기할 기회가 있으리라 생각합니다.”
Errik Anderson이 Adimab에 참여할 당시는 Tillman Gerngross 교수의 학생이었는데 그는 빅파마, 바이오텍이 항체개발을 외주를 주려면 어떤 특허적인 문제들을 넘어야 할지를 면밀히 분석하고 이렇게 분석한 Patent map에 근거해서 전략을 수립해서 필요한 특허들을 매입하고 그 이후에 사업개발을 통해서 회사를 성장시키는데 큰 역할을 한 주역으로 함께 성장을 했습니다. 이렇게 10여년간 경험을 쌓은 Errik Anderson은 자산을 많이 축적하게 되었고 이렇게 축적한 자산을 바탕으로 Ulysses Diversified Holdings 라는 Single-family office를 2013년에 창업해서 자신의 자산을 바탕으로 한 VC를 시작했습니다. 이 회사가 Private company이고 특별한 정보를 제공하지 않기 때문에 자세히 알 수는 없지만 7년 전에 VC analyst를 모집하는 공고가 있는데 이 공고에 보면 어떤 일을 하는 회사인지 살짝 들여다 볼 수 있습니다.
VC Analyst @ Ulysses Diversified Holdings in Boston, MA – VC Jobs & Newsletter
이 잡공고가 너무 재미있고 까탈스러워서 이 곳에 그대로 올립니다. 그리고 공고문 중간중간에 제 생각을 좀 남깁니다.
Ulysses Diversified Holdings is looking for Analysts to help us change the world.
This is likely going to be the hardest job you’ve ever had in your life. We’ll ask you to take responsibility for yourself, our companies and the impact we all have in the world. This is an apprenticeship model, where you’re expected to be independent and do the work alongside our team and our companies.
여기에서 말하는 Apprenticeship model이라는 것은 소위 견습생이라는 개념입니다. 즉, 가르쳐서 키우겠다는 의미를 담고 있죠. 그러니까 현재를 보지 말고 미래를 보고 합류하라는 행간의 의미를 담고 있습니다. 이미 여기서부터 심상치 않습니다.
The hours are as long as necessary to change the world – you do the math. Please recognize that our Analyst position is coming in at the ground level and we try very hard to stay lean and close to the action. We don’t have assistants. We don’t have “people” who do things. We do things. All of us here at Ulysses. That’s life. Doing the small things is what connects us to the reality of startup life.
Everyone takes a pay cut to come to Ulysses. This world needs missionaries, not mercenaries. When we create value, we share that value, pure and simple.
자, 여기에 그 의미를 담았죠? Finance, accounting 학부를 나오고 1-2년간 VC, PE, consulting 업계에서 일을 한 사람이어야 자격조건에 들어갑니다. 이런 사람은 이미 고액연봉자일 가능성이 크죠. 그러니까 연봉은 줄어든다는 것입니다. (pay cut) 그런데 선교사 (missionaries)래요. 선교사가 누구입니까? 현재 아무것도 없는 곳에 들어가서 복음의 씨앗을 뿌리지만 그 열매가 언제 거두어질지 알 수 없는 일을 하는 사람입니다. 투자 선교사라…가치를 창출하고 그 창출된 가치를 공유하겠다고 합니다. (create value…share that value)
You will learn the ins and outs of new company creation, venture capital and private equity while starting up and scaling our own companies and analyzing other investment opportunities. In 3 years, we expect all our Analysts to be working actively inside a company in a leadership position, starting their own company or continuing to grow their career in venture capital or private equity. As long as you continue to support and project our values in the world, you’ll always be a member of the Ulysses team, even after you move on to another company or start your own company.
뽑으려는 견습공에게 3년 후를 설명합니다. 이 투자심사역은 3년 후에 어떤 회사의 중역으로 혹은 자기 회사를 설립해서 혹은 VC나 PE로 성장하게 될 것이라고 말이죠. 그러니까 이 포지션은 결국 VC인데 PE 즉 M&A를 포괄하는 업무를 하게 된다는 것이고 3년후에 회사를 경영하든지 투자자로 나아가든지 당신 스스로 결정할 수 있다. 뭐 이런 느낌을 줍니다.
Ulysses Diversified Holdings is a private, diversified holding company founding, incubating, growing and funding cutting-edge biotech, high-tech and consumer-focused companies. Ulysses supports entrepreneurially-minded individuals, their companies and other startups with the world’s best executive talent and resources in finance, legal, strategy, leadership development, recruiting, HR, and business development.
While we have access to hundreds of millions of dollars in permanent, evergreen capital, we are not a typical venture capital shop. We evaluate our projects using three simple criteria: 1) it must be a problem worth solving, 2) we must be working with good people, and 3) we must be able to add value beyond the check we write. Problem worth solving, people worth helping and time worth spending. Simple. We choose our projects for maximum impact in the world and our communities. We do the work. Right alongside entrepreneurs and their families.
이제 회사를 소개합니다. Ulysses Diversified Holdings는 첨단 바이오텍 (cutting-edge biotech), 첨단기술/소비자 중심 회사 (high-tech and consumer-focused co)를 설립, 인큐베이팅, 성장하고 투자하는 회사입니다. 일반적인 family office가 아니죠. 결국 VC firm의 성격이 아주 강한 회사인데 소비자 중심회사 이것 때문에 PE가 결부되는 것입니다. 창업자 마인드를 가진 개인 (entrepreneurially-minded)과 그들의 회사들 혹은 스타트업을 돕는데 여기에 재무, 법률, 전략, 리더쉽 개발, 채용, 인사, 사업개발 분야의 세계 최고 경영진 풀을 제공하겠다는 것입니다. 수억불의 펀드가 있지만 전형적인 VC는 아니고 (1) 해결할만한 가치 있는 문제에 대하여 (2) 좋은 사람들과 일해야 하고 (3) 투자금을 훨씬 상회하는 가치를 창출할 수 있어야 한다. 는 것입니다. 굉장하죠?
Ulysses’ mission to “Make People Better at Making the World a Better Place” is a recognition that the greatest impact on the world will be made with and through people who share its core values, work ethic and commitment to excellence.
While we are a biotech and healthcare heavy shop, we have a strategy to reach millions of people through our more consumer-focused efforts. As an example, Ulysses is the owner and manager of New England Rugby Club (aka the Free Jacks), which is a part of Major League Rugby. Ulysses is intimately involved in every aspect of day-to-day operations of the professional rugby team and the league. As a member of the Ulysses team, be prepared to love rugby.
There is no “typical” day at Ulysses, nor is there a “typical” person. We need insanely hard-working, motivated leaders who understand that no job is too small in a startup while no ambition is too large over the long run.
투자부문은 바이오텍, 의료 분야인데 소비자-중심 전략으로 수백만의 사람들에게 다가가고자 한다고 해요. 이미 New England Rugby Club을 소유, 경영하고 있고요. 럭비를 좋아해야 한다는군요. 미식축구말고 럭비요. 미국에서 누가 럭비를 하나요? 축구도 그리 많이 안 좋아하는데…여하튼 마지막으로 촌철살인을 날립니다.
우리는 일에 미쳐서 스스로 일하는 그런 사람을 찾는다. 이 사람은 어떠한 스타트업도 작다고 여기지 않고 어떤 야망도 결국 그다지 크지 않을 수 있다고 믿는 사람이다. 라고요. 스타트업을 오랜 기간 해 온 경험과 에릭 앤더슨의 철학이 들어가 있습니다. 스타트업을 시작할 때 생각했던 것과 달리 실제로 경영을 하다보면 전혀 다른 방향으로 크게 성장하는 경우를 너무 많이 봤다는 것이죠. 에릭 앤드슨이 대학 졸업 후 Adimab과 그에서 파생된 스타트업을 경영하면서요.
Principal Responsibilities
- Make People Better at Making the World a Better Place.
- Act with integrity.
- Be present, do the work.
Required Qualifications
- Be an entrepreneurially-minded, self-starter constantly looking for ways to add value without being told what to do every minute of the day
- A strong technical or financial background and general curiosity about the way the world works
- Superior written and verbal communication skills. The ability to articulate thoughts in a clear and concise manner through written correspondence, presentations and in meetings
- Strong skills in at least a few of: PowerPoint, Excel, Benchling, antibody engineering, functional genomics, Quickbooks, Filemaker Pro, Adobe Create Suite, CRM platforms, Matlab, R, Python, Java, SQL, Scratch
- Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent Thiel Fellowship
Helpful Qualifications
- Minimum 1 – 2 years of work experience in private equity, investment banking, or management consulting as an Analyst or 3-4 years of work experience in another field.
- Bachelor’s Degree with a concentration in Finance, Economics, Accounting or a related field
If interested, please apply here.
이 공고에 보면 연구자료를 보관하는 benchiling과 항체공학 그리고 Functional genomics에 대한 기술적 재능이 있어야 한다고 합니다. 즉, 에릭 앤더슨이 항체와 유전자 분야에 진출하고자 한다는 의미가 되겠죠. 그리고 AI/ML도 이미 생각을 하고 있습니다. 이 공고가 7년전 그러니까 2017-2018년 즈음이 됩니다.
이 공고가 날 즈음 에릭 앤더슨은 새로운 바이오텍을 설립합니다. 그 바이오텍이 오늘 얘기할 Alloy Therapeutics입니다. Alloy Therapeutics는 2017년에 설립되고 시리즈 A, B를 지나서 2021년에 시리즈 C를 했습니다. 이 당시 3가지 비즈니스 모델로 펀딩을 했는데요 (1) Humanized mouse platform licensing revenue (2) CRO revenue (3) 스타트업 지분을 통한 미래수익을 제공한다는 것이었습니다. 그리고 에릭 앤더슨은 3세대 바이오 벤처캐피탈 모델이라고 Alloy Therapeutics의 사업모델을 설명했습니다.
The Series C round valued Alloy at $563 million…Anderson’s pitch was focused on the startup’s humanized mouse platform...Around 70 organizations have licensed Alloy’s mouse technology.
Another branch of the business conducts contract research work and tech support for drug companies and academic laboratories.
It’s the third arm of the business that offers the most upside for investors: Alloy’s in-house company creation studio dubbed 82VS.
Alloy and its entrepreneurs-in-residence will create new startups by working with other drug companies, or funnel some ideas into Alloy’s own wholly owned subsidiary, New Frontier Bio.
It’s already started doing this, launching eye-disorder drugmaker Broadwing Bio in December with Maze Therapeutics, a San Francisco-based biotech developing treatments for genetically driven diseases.
Alloy’s investors will automatically get a stake in those ventures and could make money if they’re acquired or go public.
Alloy is part of what he calls the third generation of biotech venture capital. Investors have moved from simply handing over a check, to creating biotechs themselves, to now developing companies with the infrastructure to support multiple ventures.
그리고 1년반 후 시리즈 D를 추가로 했습니다. 1년반동안 Keyway TCR Discovery라는 TCR 개발서비스를 신설했고 gapmer를 발명한 Sudhir Agrawal 박사와 Genetic medicine 서비스를 만들었으며 스위스 바젤, 미국 조지아와 샌프란시스코에 연구소를 개소했습니다. 그리고 공동연구에 필요한 CRO, CDMO 및 특성적 기술기반 서비스 회사와 연계한 서비스를 제공하게 했습니다.
Alloy has expanded from its foundational antibody discovery technologies and discovery services into T-cell receptors (TCRs), with the launch of its Keyway TCR Discovery division, and genetic medicines through its collaboration with Dr. Sudhir Agrawal, the inventor of gapmer technology. Alloy has further expanded with three new research sites, in Basel, CH; Athens, GA; and San Francisco, CA.
Alloy also supports complementary CROs, CDMOs and other discovery and development service providers as a critical part of the collaborative ecosystem to empower pharma in its mission to cure disease.
Alloy Therapeutics에 대한 기사가 GEN Edge에서 3년전에 나온 적이 있습니다.
What would it look like to build a company that you scale this up in a different way?…Alloy Therapeutics. Anderson wanted to help the scientist-entrepreneur who has a great idea about how to make a drug but then is faced with the problem of how to get access to the tools, technologies, protocols, scientific team, and capital—all the things that have to come together to build a biotech company.
Errik Anderson은 Alloy Therapeutics의 철학에 대해서 말하고 있습니다. “과학자 창업자를 도와줄 도구, 기술, 프로토콜, 과학자 팀과 자본을 제공하는 회사를 만들고 싶었다”
Founded in 2017 in Boston and privately funded by visionary investors, Alloy also has labs in Athens, GA, San Francisco, and European labs in Cambridge, U.K., and Basel, Switzerland...Five-and-a-half years ago, Alloy started with antibodies and eventually moved into adjacent fields. Alloy’s second and third modalities are T-cell receptors (TCRs) and genetic medicines. In 2022, it launched Keyway TCR Discovery as a fully integrated TCR-mimic and engineered TCR discovery platform and service offering. Now, it’s developing new novel formats in antisense oligonucleotides as pre-competitive technology that it will share with interested groups through its Genetic Medicines group. Alloy Therapeutics also works in peptides, cell therapy, and drug delivery. More than 130 companies are already working with one or more of Alloy’s platform technologies.
Anderson doesn’t shy away from the word service provider or CRO. “In science, everything we do is providing services,” he said. “We embrace a bit of that service mentality that is trying to collect cash, while using that capacity to also do something more strategic by improving our technologies.
Alloy’s venture studio 82VS…provides venture partners and entrepreneurs access to all platforms and services at a low cost to enable quick initial experimentation, paired with company creation expertise to empower newer entrepreneurs.
“We’re trying to cut out those first 1.5–2 years and be able to run those initial experiments,” said Anderson. “Maybe it’s a few hundred thousand dollars in experiments.– in cases where the partner is a venture partner or an executive in residence (EIR) in the venture studio, the common stock is split between Alloy and the founding team.
“Our typical model is we open a multimillion-dollar master services agreement (MSA) that allows that company to access our services, and so they don’t pay any cash,” said Anderson. “It’s like a loan to the company. It’s also non-dilutive. The idea is how quickly can we start designing experiments and doing drug discovery.”
If that works out and an 82VS company can make it to seed financing, Alloy Therapeutics writes the first million-dollar check to get some cash into the company. “When you have a lead or maybe two drugs in hand and some enabling data, and now you’re out doing your Series A or seed financing with new external venture capitalists with a lot of data in hand, it shifts the power dynamic a bit in this field where you can go to an investor with data in hand and maybe a drug lead,” said Anderson. “This is why we talk about innovation and access to innovation. When we think about 82VS with a venture studio, it’s not just access to innovation but also capital and expertise.”
We get excited about bringing access to technology, capital, and expertise and allowing people to start up these companies and then leave the venture studio. At that point, it’s external financing. We support them along the way and want to be really good permanent friends. We’ll always be there.
“The deals Flagship, Atlas, and Third Rock Ventures will do just don’t fit our model,” said Anderson. “Ours is pretty lean. It’s a different sort of project that we’re doing. Once we step in and do that seed or Series A financing with an external party, that’s exactly the folks that we want investing in our companies. Maybe we’re taking away the company creation pieces for a year or two and bringing them a fully formed idea with our scientist-entrepreneurs we’re working with. We see this as doing a slightly different part of the value chain of how you do venture creation behind drug assets.”
For now, not a single company that has licensed Alloy’s technology has gone out of business, according to Anderson.
The controlling class of stock is held in an entity that cannot be sold. “Alloy cannot be sold,” said Anderson. “Theoretically, Alloy could go public, but it will continue to exist so long as we don’t run out of money. It’ll just continue to be around in 100 years, innovating and sharing that innovation with others.”
Alloy reinvests 100% of revenue into innovation and access to innovation. “When we’re collaborating with big pharma and emerging biotech companies, we’re making this promise and commitment that if you give us $5 million to do something, we will use that to develop new technology and share it with the world,” said Anderson. “We are going to reinvest all of this.”
Those two aspects of Alloy’s business model allow the ecosystem to build technologies and companies across slightly longer time horizons than a traditional venture model. “When you can start playing with time as one of your variables, like great technology and great people, you can do things that look extraordinarily different,” said Anderson. “Most of the ideas we have had are those others have had. We’ve just executed this with a slightly different business model and different constraints.”
In October 2022, Alloy closed $42 million in Series D financing led by its existing investors 8VC and Mubadala Capital and joined by return investors Thiel Capital, Presight Capital, Founders Fund, and other unnamed family offices and sovereign wealth funds. Alloy will use proceeds from the Series D financing to further support the drug discovery community with new pre-competitive drug discovery technologies in biologic modalities and new partnership models designed to further fuel innovation.
Q&A with Errik Anderson, Alloy Therapeutics Founder and CEO – PharmExec.com 27-Jul-2022
We believe the best scientific insights should dictate which drugs advance to the clinic, rather than whether someone can afford access to the right enabling technologies. Since Alloy’s founding in 2017, we have been a company focused on democratizing access to tools, technologies, services, and company creation capabilities for the global scientific community. Having launched our first commercial platform in 2019, we’ve grown our ecosystem to 130+ partners across academia, biotech, and pharma, and have achieved our first IND filing from a licensee of our first platform, the ATX-Gx for human antibody discovery, and continue to see more partners advancing to the clinic. We have rapidly expanded ATX-Gx with new strains designed to solve different problems in antibody discovery, all of which are accessible to our partners under their original license. We have expanded this model of democratizing access from antibodies into five adjacent biologic modalities: TCRs, genetic medicines, cell therapies, peptides, and drug delivery technology.
With the help of our venture studios, 82VS, we’re also able to continuously support the launch of new asset-focused startups that in turn leverage our platforms and services. These new startups also serve as early adopters of our innovations and help expand our technology and service offering for our entire ecosystem.
Alloy’s novel business model has been embraced by 16 established pharmaceutical companies, all of whom understand and share our commitment to developing and supporting long-sustaining research and development.
This allows our team to become experts in using our proprietary in vivo, in vitro, and in silico technology, as well as incorporate other top industry standard protocols to discover the best therapeutic drug candidates for our partners. To further support the industry as an innovation partner, earlier this year we launched an Innovation Subscription program, which offers access to all current and future Alloy discovery technologies at one fixed annual fee. This offering has a multiplier effect given our commitment to reinvesting 100% of our revenues into innovation: each Innovation Subscription fee is invested into acquiring and inventing new technology that can benefit the entire consortium.
3년전에 Errik Anderson이 인터뷰한 1시간 30분 짜리 동영상이 있습니다. 신약개발은 100년 이상 사람들이 사용하게 되는 의미있는 일이라는 에릭 앤더슨의 말씀이 인상적입니다.
그리고 1년전에 PE Firm인 10X Capital과 인터뷰한 최근 동영상도 있습니다. 제목이 재미있습니다. 20개 이상의 스타트업을 창업해서 $10 Billion 이상의 가치를 만들어 내겠다는 야심이 대단합니다.
BOSTON DR LIM 