Current thoughts - July 2007

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Fund raising for CytoTrack Since July 1rst I have been working part time with CytoTrack to assist them in their fund raising process. I have followed the company for quite a while and have been keen to get involved in the project.

CytoTrack has developed a system that can find incredibly rare cells in your blood. The system can locate one cell in 10 billion cells.

Their first application is in detection of circulating tumor cells. Cancer spreads in the body by releasing metastatic cancer cells into the blood stream from the original tumor. CytoTrack can find these cells and count them.

The number of cells turns out to be predictive for how long a cancer patient will live and can also be used to monitor cancer patients while they are undergoing chemotherapy treatment.

One cell in 10 billion - That is like finding a needle in a forest of haystacks!
July 23, 2007 11:51 PM

VentureCup 2007 I had the pleasure of being a jury member in the recent finals of the Danish competition for small innovative companies, VentureCup. VentureCup is mostly targeted towards companies run by graduate students or researchers at Danish universities.

This year had a strong showing with several high quality business plans on the table. The winning team was CSP.NET, a software company that has developed tools to enable programmers to take advantage of a new generation of CPUs which contain multiple cores (in lay-mans language, multiple computers inside the CPU). Runners-up were InMold Biosystems, and Mooncean.

VentureCup is fantastic initiative. It is growing every year and deserves a lot of credit for fostering entrepreneurship among the students.

But it concerned me to see how almost none of the teams in the final had seasoned business people on the team. It was striking, in particular because the students had previously been strongly advised to include people in the teams with previous experience. Several of the business plans therefore had team sections stating things like "Peter will be the COO with responsibility for global sourcing. He has a strong international experience, having backpacked across Australia recently". Not something that will convince typical venture capital funds.

I can only hope that they will use the attention created from the VentureCup process to attract some more seasoned partners to the teams. With the right team, I could see at least a couple of the companies being ready for serious venture capital.
July 04, 2007 09:26 AM