Author: Brendan Pease, BRV Fund Manager
Could you start by sharing your background and what motivated you to get into venture capital?
I started my career at L.E.K. Consulting where I focused on healthcare and life sciences. Our typical cases were private equity due diligence and growth strategy, but at a later stage than most venture capital investing.
I then transitioned to Flatiron Health, where I was on the life sciences partnerships team, so I gained experience forging strategic partnerships with life science companies.
I joined Morgan Health 2 years ago. I was really excited by the prospect of a strategic venture fund focused on the employer sponsored insurance world. A lot of healthcare is fraught with misaligned incentives which we can see in pretty obvious and painful ways in the commercial market.
What kinds of experience from your career prior to VC were the most helpful as you transitioned into a VC role?
The private equity due diligence experience was definitely transferable. My work on partnerships for Flatiron Health was transferable, too.
For L.E.K., your casework focuses a lot on digging deep into a market, trying to understand the dynamics of that market, and what gives companies the right to win in that space. Performing those analyses really gives you a sense of what the most attractive opportunities are in the U.S healthcare industry, and it gives you the analytical rigor to understand businesses really well and know what might make them successful.
I know your firm focuses on healthcare – what types of companies do you typically invest in in terms of maturity or specific verticals?
We typically invest at the series B plus stage where a company has demonstrated product market fit and has at least a million dollars in revenue.
In healthcare, later stage investing allows for more strategic relationships – we can advance pilots within the JP Morgan ecosystem when a company is slightly more mature, which is why we focus on series B plus.
I’ve worked in a lot of different areas – women’s health, oncology, primary care, care navigation. And all high priority issues that impact employers due to costs and impaired work performance, such as musculoskeletal disorders.
It’s a broad mandate, but the main buckets are accountable care, primary care, care navigation, and high priority conditions.
How do you see AI changing the healthcare startup ecosystem?
I think everyone wants to know what that will look like 5 years from now. At this point, I see some of the biggest opportunities in the administration of healthcare – there are still a lot of manual activities that could be improved by AI solutions. The first set of use cases I think should be focused on healthcare administration, and I think a downstream use case could be in clinical decision making and care delivery. I think that will take more time and AI in general is not native to physicians’ workflows right now, so it will take some adjusting as more of this technology rolls out.
Do you anticipate that the outcome of the U.S. election will have an impact on healthcare VC?
It depends on where in healthcare you’re thinking of. The industry encompasses so many different things that it’s hard to come up with any broad strokes that apply to everything, plus the election is still so recent.
Any final thoughts?
One of my favorite things about working at Morgan Health and in VC is being able to meet and work with so many talented and excited entrepreneurs who are innovating in spaces that historically haven’t received a lot of attention. I’m really excited to see where the industry is headed.