I Love You, IndieBio
Dear IndieBio founders, family and friends,
I am excited to share with you that today I am joining Mayfield, a top-tier venture capital firm with a fifty year history of people-first investing, as a Partner to co-lead the Engineering Biology practice alongside Ursheet Parikh. I am also transitioning to the new role of Venture Advisor at IndieBio. I will keep my IndieBio board appointments for the foreseeable future. And I will continue helping with pitch decks, milestone setting, business model construction and introductions for all the IndieBio companies because you are all still, and always will be, my portfolio.
There is more to this transition than Mayfield and IndieBio.
This is a moment not for two firms, but for the entire class of venture capital. Biology is a maturing technology that can change our world for the better. The fact remains we are running out of time to invest in the changes required. For some perspective, across all venture capital, only 3.3% of the money is deployed into planetary health companies. We need to deploy ten times that amount, yearly, to meaningfully impact climate change, pandemics, food security, fertility and sustainability before it is too late.
In the beginning, IndieBio was a simple idea for independence. Freedom for a new breed of entrepreneurs — scientists around the world. IndieBio began as an experiment. But in order to succeed, IndieBio would need to become an institution, enabling scientists to consistently build world changing companies. In the process, it also became something unexpected. A movement.
For this budding movement to reach its true potential, it would have to exist at every stage of capital, at every venture capital firm and into the public markets. And I always knew, that might mean I’d need to move to the later stages to help make that vision a reality.
Five and a half years ago, Sean O’ Sullivan and I founded IndieBio as a way of using biology as technology to solve the world’s biggest problems. We would fund overlooked scientists with ideas others thought too crazy to work. We’d give them cash, give them a lab, business mentorship and a venue to showcase their progress.
I believed in these outsiders because I was one as well. I had left a great career as a designer at IDEO to start from scratch to build IndieBio — with no prior experience in biotech, much less venture capital. It all seems so obvious all these years later, but back then I figured the chance of me destroying my career was the flip of a coin.
Since then IndieBio has produced many stars. Most you know. They are the founders reinventing our world. They’ve been written about in so many industry publications and featured in the mainstream news.
But the IndieBio staff in the basement are not as well known. They work as hard as the startups to get every company as far as they can possibly go in four and a half months. And in doing so they also became stars to the founders.
At IndieBio, it truly feels like time goes faster. We learn so much, and grow so fast. The same way our startups grow in just a few months, the IndieBio team — to a person — has matured remarkably in just a few years. Ryan Bethencourt and Ron Shigeta grew in the entrepreneurial direction, taking what they had learned and founding their own, Wild Earth. Alex Kopelyan, who I met as a young PharmD, has wisened into a great operator and leader of our planetary health initiatives. Jun Axup brought her eminent expertise in genetics, but has grown into a community leader and connector. Maya Lockwood came on to do Communications at first, but she did far more, creating our Female Founders series and, with Alex, our leadership track for entrepreneurs; now she’s recruiting new investors and doing investor relations. Parikshit Sharma was still in school when I first met him; now he’s analyzing industries as they emerge, helping us understand what creates successful startups and how to invest in them. In the process of accelerated growth, we became more than a team, we became a family with a common purpose.
Our evening salons and events became hot tickets for which we always found more chairs. Next, I set to work to create an adjunct partner board that could help advise us and our companies. George Church, Jim Collins, David Eagleman, and four others, all legends of their fields, agreed to join the movement and lend us their experience and networks. We were on fire. Then I met Po.
Po Bronson might seem an unlikely person to become a central figure at IndieBio. But he has seen so much, and has such a deep understanding of so many facets of our world, that he is a fountain of unique insight — into industries, into consumer behavior, and into science. Further, his experience on boards, in corporate innovation, and angel investing would serve him well as a venture capitalist. I could see that the very traits that made him so good at IndieBio also fueled his success as a writer and hitmaker, penning seven national bestsellers. His deep and personal commitment to the mission of human and planetary health is what made everyone turn to him as a leader at IndieBio.
In the meantime, our returns were accelerating. We were getting better every batch. Two academic institutions did a study on our process. In 2018 we got our first exit, a 20x return. Our companies were getting funded faster and with more money.
Our alumni needed help with scaling up business models, hiring and raising series A’s and B’s. I joined many boards. The team became stretched. So we added Pae Wu from DARPA and Telofonica as our CTO and Westley Dang as our analyst to help. Pae is a PhD in electrical engineering and expands our scope of investing into biological and electromechanical systems while Westley is a PhD in neuroscience and helps us invest in the future of neurotechnology.
The diversity of synthetic biology was astounding. The whole world was getting rebuilt, one molecule at a time. IndieBio was at the forefront.
The movement needed expansion. There were still more founders with great ideas than we had slots for. We were speaking to a choir that already believed. We needed a way to scale beyond the valley.
The answer came with a call from NY. They wanted IndieBio to spark the movement we helped start in Silicon Valley — in the Big Apple. Partnering with the Partnership Fund New York City and Empire State Development Corp made a lot of sense. With big pharma across the river in New Jersey, it represented a chance for us to expand but also to learn new skills in therapeutic drug development. Adding seven amazing people to the New York team, being led by Stephen Chambers, we were ready to go. We also structured a $2 million dollar seed program for therapeutics companies, knowing they just need more capital to get the data they need for good partnerships and series A financing. IndieBio launched the NY inaugural cohort mid COVID-19 on June 1st 2020.
Today, with over 15 employees, 6 investment partners and a portfolio of $3.2 billion dollars, IndieBio is now finally an institution.
Yet something gnawed at me. With IndieBio doing better than I can ever have imagined, I was waking up at night.
There was a growing suspicion in my mind that these scientists needed more, and I needed to be there to help them.
On the boards of many later-stage companies, I began to see how consistent and strong support in the growth phases of human and planetary health companies can help create success. There is no playbook everyone can follow. We are charting a new course and drawing the map as we go. It began to dawn on me that I needed to be on more boards, with the focus and time to see them through. But the basement always called me away. I was so torn.
I first met Tim Chang over a decade ago and was blown away by his thoughtfulness and knowledge. He and Ursheet Parikh visited the first IndieBio lab in the Dogpatch over five years ago. Since then, Tim, Ursheet and Navin Chaddha who leads Mayfield, have come to IndieBio batches as mentors and participants in panels. The founders were consistently impressed with their feedback and approach to leadership. Mayfield consistently had a culture that placed the founders first. Meanwhile, Ursheet had built the Engineering Biology practice for the past five years at Mayfield, paralleling my own efforts at IndieBio. In the past eighteen months they invested in two IndieBio companies. I had gotten to experience working with their partners and their commitment to conscious capitalism. They are also a top five returning fund in the world — with over $2.5 billion under management and a track record of guiding over 117 IPOs and over 200 acquisitions. They know what they are doing and they are great at building global scale companies.
I wanted something that’s very unusual in venture. Which was a bridge between the firms, where I could still help at IndieBio but also invest Series A at Mayfield. Working this out took a huge amount of trust, from Sean, Navin and Ursheet. Before Covid hit, I asked them all to meet and see if there was a way to work together. We sat down to talk. By the end of dinner, an alliance was forged.
Not only would I join Mayfield as a partner and continue at IndieBio as Venture Advisor, we felt the need to put momentum behind growing the movement of human and planetary evolution. To do so, Mayfield and SOSV are the inaugural members of the Genesis Consortium that will invest in IndieBio companies and promote engineering biology. I am excited to see the Genesis Consortium grow with multiple VCs and corporate members in time. More details on this to come.
I have converted a lot of luck into skill over the past years which gives me confidence that I can handle what comes next. But I cannot say I have no butterflies.
It is at once surreal and empowering to hand over the day to day operations and control of IndieBio to Po Bronson and the team. IndieBio is more than an accelerator to me, it is the most meaningful thing I have ever created. It also has become a beacon of hope that any scientist can forge their own path to create change.
My mission, our mission, has not changed. It is simply growing.
Thank you all for your continued hard work in the basement. I am honored to roll up my sleeves with you.
I love you all,
Arvind Gupta
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FAQ
What is a Venture Advisor?
A role that is defined by the IndieBio team and what it needs to succeed. The advising will be for batch intake, current batch companies and existing IndieBio portfolio
Can I still ask you for an introduction to someone?
Yes of course. Any IndieBio company remains my portfolio of investments. I want you to do well!
Will you remain on my board?
Yes. I will work with the company and boards as a SOSV representative to transition off over the next couple years as my board roles increase at Mayfield.
I’m an IndieBio company, can you join my board in the future?
Unfortunately no. Without a direct investment from Mayfield, joining a board without significant financial interest is a conflict of interest for LPs.
I am a future IndieBio company, will you advise us?
Yes. As Venture Advisor to IndieBio, my duties include all current and future portfolio companies as directed by the IndieBio management team.
What is the best way to contact you?
Email and text. My email at SOSV, arvind@sosv.com, will remain active alongside my Mayfield email address, arvind@mayfield.com
What kind of deals are you doing at Mayfield?
Series A. This means check sizes from $3m up to $10m (in some cases).
Can I ask you to lead our next round?
Yes! I believe IndieBio companies are the best in the world :)
Is there a specific focus for you at Mayfield?
The mission is the same. Companies using biology to solve the world’s biggest human and planetary health problems.
Is there a right of first refusal with Mayfield and IndieBio?
No. Mayfield is supporting SOSV and IndieBio as an investor but there is no preferential treatment of Mayfield by IndieBio or SOSV’s management teams. For the mission to succeed we need all of venture capital investing in the engineering biology asset class.
