Sept. 25, 2006 — Small Times NanoCon International in Las Vegas came to a close on Friday with a keynote address by a veteran of the biotech industry and a second keynote on how the Sarbanes-Oxley act affects nanotech, as well as a trio of panels that covered the life sciences, what it takes to go public, and how to get early stage funding for a nanotech startup.
The first keynote featured Steven Burrill, president and chief executive of Burrill and Co. His talk addressed a wide range of issues, spanning everything from technology trends to globalization.
Burrill, who has been active in biotech for more than three decades, immediately drew the comparison between what the biotech industry was like in the early years and what nanotech is like today. “In those first years I talked a lot about how we are going to take this technology and turn it into a business.”
While that sounded familiar to those in the audience who have been engaged in pushing nanotechnology innovations forward to become products, there has also been undeniable change over the last decades — especially when it comes to globalization.
“Lesson number one,” said Burrill, “is you have to live at 30,000 feet all over the world.” The moment you launch a nanotech business, he told the audience, you are a global player.
On the technology side, Burrill said he was particularly motivated by the 3 P’s: personalized, predictive and preventative medicine. These technology trends will drive new product development and innovation in the coming years, he said, and one can expect nanotech to be as affected by the trend as biotech.
Burrill’s address was followed by a nano bio panel that he moderated. He was joined by Andreas Jordan, chief executive of MagForce Nanotechnologies; David Macdonald, president and chief executive of Nanomix, David Dykeman of Greenberg Traurig, and Balu Karandikar, senior scientist at AcryMed. The panel reinforced Burrill’s statements with real-world examples from the nanotech sector.
The sessions on biotechnology were followed by a keynote address by Doug Jamison, president, chief operating officer and chief financial officer of Harris & Harris Group, a publicly-traded venture capital company that makes new investments exclusively in nanotechnology, MEMS and microsystems companies.
Jamison’s talk reviewed the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 and the pressures it places upon small technology companies. While the Act has certainly helped curb the corporate malfeasance that characterized the 1990s, Jamison said it will need to be revised if U.S. capital markets are going to be the place where the nanotech companies of the future go public. Instead, he said, in some instances companies are looking abroad to do their public financing rounds.
That sentiment was echoed in a panel titled “Going Public?” that followed Jamison’s talk. On the panel, Jamison joined a group composed of entrepreneurs and analysts. One of the companies on the panel — Polyfuel — had actually gone public on the London Alternative Investment Market. The company’s chief financial officer, Mark Campion, said it did so explicitly in order to avoid the rigorous U.S. regulatory situation.
A final panel on early stage funding was moderated by Charles Gause of Luna Innovations. It provided attendees with advice about how to attract the attention of venture capitalists for the purposes of raising private equity rounds.