Week in Review: August 22-29

In slightly different context, this Thursday was termed “An August Miracle” by Highland Scheduler Alison Howard. While this comment wasn’t referring to our stellar turnout, I think it can be related. August has been a quiet month in terms of the breadth of events put on by the Venture Cafe, but by no means in the amount of people who have attended.  Despite NEVCA’s hiatus and the lazy nature of this last month of summer, people continue to come and connect within our temporary kitchen space.

To that end, the events that we did hold this week were quite a success, supplemented by the strong turnout of first-time cafe-goers that came to connect. Senior Vice-President of Highland Capital, Michael Gaiss, was kind enough to hold ad-hoc office hours and met with hopeful entrepreneurs like Michelle Salamone and Jason Feldman of SOsponsored.com, a custom-clothing company that pairs 3D design technology with the ability to lower costs by tagging corporate sponsorship right onto the product.

Michael’s office hours were paired with the third #IDTechUp, brought to you by Seeding Labs (@SeedingLabs), a non-profit on the forefront of using scientific breakthroughs to help developing nations. This event marked the send-off of the four Kenyan fellows, working with Seeding Labs for the summer on behalf of Kenyatta University in Nairobi. Seeding Labs has been garnering quite a bit of publicity in the past couple weeks, as CEO Nina Dudnik has been showing the biotech community how their innovative achievements may make biotechnology more available abroad. In a recent article in Mass High Tech, entitled, “Life Sciences Firms Explore Ways to Help Developing Nations,” Dudnik talks with writer Mark Songini about how traditionally, using biotech innovation for the public good has not been a goal for firms due to the already difficult process of getting funding, even for for-profit ventures. There is also a notable lack of intermediaries and infrastructure between invention and distribution in developing countries. Dudnik provides some ideas for biotech companies to skirt these problems, including looking for funding on other avenues like grant foundations or giving rights to your drug to the World Health Organization so that they are responsible for distribution and your company is only responsible for production. Measures such as this that make biotech more accessible and geared towards societal benefit could show a new trend in the role biotechnology plays in international development efforts.

Seeding Lab’s International Development event,  as well as my chat with Usman Hassan, a management consultant at Oliver Wyman, inspired me to end this post with one last note. In the talks I have heard by VC’s this summer, there has been a prevalent idea of making sure there is a market opening for whatever your start-up may cover, because once the window closes, you may have missed your chance. I’d like to relate this idea to the current state of disaster in Pakistan. It has been nearly four weeks since the devastating floods first began to decimate whole villages and infrastructure. As time lapses between the start of the disaster and the present, press coverage may begin to lag as miserable conditions become a norm instead of an irregular state.Usman and his partner Daniyaal, both Pakistani-American, came to Venture Cafe this week, not to promote their start-up, but rather to speak about the floods, in line with the “International Development and Technology” gathering. I was reminded that now, while media coverage is still generous, people are most likely to use their tremendous brain power to attempt to help with this issue. Our dependence on media coverage often means that once things fall off of the homepage of your news source of choice, they fall out of concern as well.  If you’re interested in joining the conversation about how best to address the disastrous conditions in Pakistan, post a comment or tweet @VentureCafe and we’ll put you in touch with Usman and others.

Let us know your comments on our Belgian Beer tasting! Shoot us a comment or tweet @VentureCafe with your thoughts and suggestions.

-Liz Peyton