I. What changes - news to watch this week

Kano Therapeutics raised $7.15 million in seed funding and secured an early-stage partnership with Novo Nordisk

Cambridge, MA—Kano Therapeutics, a new MIT spinout, is tackling a major challenge in gene therapy: efficiently packaging DNA into lipid nanoparticles for delivery. 

Kano’s seed funding round was co-led by The Engine Ventures, a tech-focused investor with MIT affiliations, and Vsquared Ventures, a European Union-backed investor based in Germany 🇩🇪.

How did Kano get here?

Search the company’s or the founders’ X or LinkedIn posts for the backstory of such fundraising news. I did this for you, and you can see that almost exactly nine months ago, Kano brought together four experts in the field as their scientific advisory board (SAB). So, a note to future biotech founders: in addition to working on the patents or company name, load your SAB with experts, and even then, it still will take more than half a year to raise a seed round with a meaningful amount of capital.

Co-led by Vsquared Ventures

Vsquared Ventures is a prominent VC firm located in Munich, Germany 🇩🇪. The firm is part of the broader umbrella of Unternehmertum Venture Capital Partners, and I know a few people working there as I’ve been based in Munich for two years now.

You may wonder why an EU-backed VC will invest in overseas projects, and if they invest in the US, will they also invest in biotech startups in China?

The U.S. market remains the most dynamic and attractive capital market globally, so investing in U.S. biotech firms affirms the status quo that, for robust returns, the U.S. market is still the go-to destination.

Will they invest in China too then? No. Why? No trust. The US partners the EU investors have are the results of 40+ years of collaboration and partnerships — so there is still a lot to catch up for the Chinese market to catch up on, even if they offer some shortcuts to capital like the special listing rules for biotechs in the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEX).

Read more about the exit strategy of biotech companies here.

II. What never changes - timeless wisdom

⚛️ What is the molar mass of LinkedIn?

And, why don’t we have a Nobel Prize in Marketing?

With the progress and achievement we have made in education as a whole, it is safe to assume that even the dropouts of a science class know the concept of atoms, a concept that is mentioned in Chapter 1 of over 90% of high school science textbooks. But then, what about LinkedIn? Is LinkedIn made of atoms? Of course not. Okay then, when we say, “I just posted on LinkedIn,” what do we exactly mean?

Language is fun (or at least English), as it does not have a specific rule to distinguish virtual and physical objects. Otherwise, it would be more annoying than the fact that in certain languages, objects have genders (like German). Language not only allows us to communicate, but it actually lets us blur the line between the physical world and the abstract world. We say we watch a good show on Apple TV, but in fact, we are just staring at an illuminated physical screen with electric current and diodes that shine precisely down to the nanosecond. Even LinkedIn is a platform; you cannot lie on it, just like on your bed. So yes, I refute my first sentence - indeed, only physical matters are made of atoms and obey physical laws. And, of course, not all matters are physical matters. Psychological matters or LinkedIn matters are not made of atoms.

This is the gap that most scientists cannot leap over, as they are so consumed by what they say in the lab every day that they forget the physical world is not all. This is also why science or technology people commonly undervalue marketing and the significance of finding the correct blue color for your logo.

As a scientist by training and an entrepreneur by practice, I used to argue with my marketing team days and nights about their work by challenging them with my scientific framework. Having written a handful of unpublished arguments on whether marketing is science, I no longer find this argument intellectually interesting, right after I found out that I mistakenly embraced reductionism a bit too much and overlooked that the world is not just the physical world. Clearly, yearning for a Nobel Prize in Medicine is no less shallow than a marketing guru saying building a huge marketing funnel is everything.

Continue reading here…

III. Book Quotes

Here are some book quotes for you to ponder over the weekend.

Thanks for reading,

— Anthony