The 7 Lessons That Proptech Startups Can Learn From Biotech

By: Angelica Krystle Donati

Happy New Year, Forbes readers! For this first column of 2019, I decided to do something a bit different to the articles that I typically write.

Last night, I attended a presentation in Rome (which is where I'm based half of the time), hosted by LUISS university and Confindustria Young Entrepreneurs , by esteemed MIT professor Robert Langer. For those of you who, like myself until a short while ago, had never heard of Professor Langer, he runs the largest biomedical engineering lab in the world, holds the world record for number of patents (over 1350 between those granted and pending) and is the among the 7 most cited individuals in history.

You may be wondering why I'm writing about a chemical engineer in a PropTech column. The reason is this. In the course of his career spanning over four decades, Professor Langer has founded over 40 startups in his field, only one of which is no longer operational. Of the majority that survived, several have been very successful, with record breaking IPOs and multi billion dollar industry exits. The title of his presentation was "what I've learned from founding more than 40 startups", so I decided to see how (if!) these lessons from biotech can translate to PropTech.

Professor Langer gave us  several "science lessons" for a nascent biotech startup. I'm going to try to formulate the PropTech equivalent for the ones I think our sector's startups can learn from.

Build a platform technology you can use for many things. The professor meant this in reference, for example, to the areosol drug delivery system he developed with his company AIR which can be used for a host of drugs, including recent experiments with anti-Parkinsons drugs. This translates quite obviously into PropTech. Though you may, and probably should, start by focusing on a single problem, the scalability of your solution goes hand in hand with the scalability of your buisiness. Several examples come to mind, one being Google's recent investment into AI maintenance chatbot AskPorter, on the premise that their tech can be scaled for use across all steps of the lettings life cycle and is not limited by its current maintenance functionality.

Make sure your results are published with a paper in one of the top journals. In other words… GET MARKET VALIDATION. I was just on a call with a startup and the investor leading the round it just closed (watch this space!), and one of the top drivers for the investment taking place was that the investor was able to get validation on the product's value add by the startup's initial clients who are well respected in the industry. I know getting big-name anchor clients is easy to say and hard to do, but it is crucial in establishing B2B market success. You are probably better off focusing on the big fish and letting the smaller fish swim away for now. In the B2C space, this translates into getting your marketing in early. You should aim to have a user base ready, thanks to intelligent marketing campaigns (and I don't mean Tube ads) before you launch, so that at launch you can jump straight into testing and scaling the product.

Read more >> https://www.forbes.com/sites/angelicakrystledonati/2019/01/10/the-7-lessons-that-proptech-startups-can-learn-from-biotech/#467d909d68fb