Animating for Your Audience: The Right Visual for Your Dev Stage

The life of a company is marked by a beginning, a middle and hopefully not an end. To reach its goals, there’s a fair amount of blue skying (forward-looking statements aside), but it’s crucial to know exactly where it sits on its timeline, and by association, precisely who its audience is at that moment. Because that’ll keep changing.

Freshly minted biotechs and their CEOs arrive incredibly enthusiastic, itching to set the science world on fire, and they want to tell everyone every last detail about it. These are typically researchers coming out of universities (person #1), and they are thrown into the maelstrom of commercial life with little background knowledge on how to survive.

Entry – Stability Island #1

So, who is their audience at that point? Likely angels, who’re going to pick through the rationale of why this approach might work. Two things will spell funding – a novel approach, and the possibility of success, but that second point is a long way off. The angels will want to see the nuts and bolts of what this fledgling IP the company is creating, along with a vision of its proposed applicability in the marketplace later.

Funding arrives, maybe up to two million. The company has come to its first island of stability, but it will have to set out again soon for the next island – burn rates will climb as more people, equipment and space are added. The next injection date looms…

I often see companies at this stage of development completely inundate angels with so much technical information that it blinds them to the potential value of the underlying science. Yes, they will want to look through the particulars, but descriptions can become a tangled ball of ancillary information that is not necessary.

The best approach might be to give the information in three levels –

• First, an overview of the problem this research is working to alleviate.
• Second, a cursory view of the science involved, both in words and effective imagery to give context and to see relationships. Also, as a comparison to other approaches currently either in practice or in the funding stage.
• Third, a very in-depth view (should the angel ask to see it) of the underlying science, either in papers or other data. Presenting it in these three levels lets anyone dive in at the depth they want. Giving them a taste in the beginning, if they’re interested, will pull them into the science and reveal your vision.

To do good research, scientists have to be extremophiles, turning over every tiny pebble in search of the truth about any biological process. Frankly, I admire these people – to push that relentlessly in pursuit of answers is a difficult state to occupy and even harder to maintain, year after year. But those same people often find it very hard to step back and see the larger picture. That often requires person #2.

YEAR 2-4: Stability Island #2

If a company is lucky enough to make it to this stage, it sometimes becomes painfully apparent that while the original founder of the company is truly gifted in having discovered/invented this drug/treatment/device, they are not equipped, either via training, or by personality, to go after more funding. And this is where the second CEO (person #2) comes into the mix.

At this point, the focus shifts to early-stage investors, identifying the right ones to court, and the best ways to describe that company’s budding IP. Having good visual content to get those points across effectively will make that job much easier.

Thirty years ago, investors mostly came from other industries, because biotech was a nascent commercial field. There were MD’s and PhD’s, but often they were unfamiliar with the IP most biotechs were pitching. That has radically changed. Many biotech investors are double, even triple-degreed if you add MBAs, so the conversation can go to a greater depth.

But they are mainly interested in one thing – will this make money? I have watched pitches to investors where the complexity level rose to flood stage, and investors were inundated. Knowing just how much tech to inject into a presentation is critical.

The science has by now been fleshed out to the point where it’s clear what’s going on. But it’s still difficult to put into words, especially if the listener isn’t in that field. This is where a concise, not overly complicated animation would be useful. Investors see multiple presentations each day and because they’re human, they may tend to glaze over occasionally. The best way to implant your idea in someone else’s head is to give them a standout visual that encapsulates your tech. It will set itself apart from all the other presentations that day, and it will likely spark questions.

Credit: Arkitek Scientific

Success! The company has landed on the second, slightly larger island of stability, and it feels tantalizingly good. Again, it will only last a short while, because research is ridiculously expensive. As soon as the money arrives, the heat is on to find the NEXT round of funding. This may require person #3 and a new audience.

YEAR 4-?: Stability Continent (and building a launchpad)

CEO/person #3 enters the scene, who is a seasoned veteran, probably having taken more than one company on the ride of its life. He or she is focused on second stage investors, but by now, with research yielding more secrets that hopefully have turned into actionable IP, that third CEO now splits their attention between those investors, and potentially, pharma. The gauntlet biotechs must run to stay alive is one of the most knuckle-biting journeys anyone can undertake, and if a company has made it this far, it should feel pretty good about itself.

At this stage, these companies are appealing to investors for a third, much larger round of funding, which carries with it both the gravitas of being at this point in its evolution and is also the uncomfortable act of balancing on the head of a pin. Research, personnel and space costs have soared, and it’ll require large sums to keep this enterprise afloat.

So, the view is bifurcated. There are two pitches possible, and some companies do both simultaneously. Pitch to investors to get more cash, and keep building a more attractive portfolio, but to what end? And that’s the question all at this juncture must grapple with.

LIFTOFF: Should I stay or should I go?

It’s unclear whether most biotechs dream of becoming pharma themselves, but I think many secretly do, though few get there. So, the alternate play becomes: who can we sell the company/IP to? And pharma is always hungry. These two approaches require two very different pitches.

Pitch #1 - Retain the company’s identity and go for the gold because the feeling is this IP will get to the marketplace under their banner. This approach will mean selling investors on the idea that the company can take this to market itself. The onus is on the company to explain to investors who the likely population is (what is the unmet need), what the level of the product’s effectiveness is, and how that product might be pitched to them.

Credit: still from Unifarco Biomedical’s Ceramage animation – Arkitek Scientific

Pitches at this stage might show investors just the hard data. But there’s something to be said for encapsulating the IP as a digestible animation that quickly defines the problem as well as the solution, effectively differentiating that company from all the rest. People have become extremely sophisticated consumers of top-level visuals, (thank you, Hollywood), and are primed to watch animations that are highly engaging.

Pitch #2 - Aimed squarely at pharma. People in pharma are also human, and making the case for acquisition using strong visual assets will never hurt the cause. Pharma, just like investors at every stage, are interested in four things: is the trial data strong, how many people suffer from whatever affliction this drug/treatment might mitigate, what competition will the drug have, and what the actual benefit to patients will be if they use it. But they will still be interested in seeing the story visualized. Anything that makes your company memorable (for the right reasons!) is worth the effort.

Credit: still from Unifarco Biomedical’s Ceramage animation – Arkitek Scientific

If all goes well, the company will be acquired by pharma and will be folded into its suite of offerings to the public. The company’s identity will evaporate, but the drug/treatment will move forward.

And then you live to fight another day, start another company, sail off into the deep blue sea, pick your own adventure. At every step along the timeline of a company, it comes down to how you effectively tell your company’s story. You’re working on groundbreaking, lifesaving or life-enhancing drugs, treatments and devices. Not everyone in the world gets the chance to make a difference - you do. So, give your company the best possible chance for funding.

Make them see what you’re doing.

Beth Anderson is the CEO and co-founder of Arkitek Scientific