SoCal's New Playbook for Funding and Growing Startups, From "Burn Rate" to Billions | LSI USA '25

Bill Carpou  0:03  
So welcome everyone. We're going to let people, we're going to let the panel here introduce themselves as we, as we go around and share the commentary and all. And you know, really, this is about raising capital, and part of the equation that Octane has used. You know, we're an organization. For those of you that don't know us, we're an organization here in Southern California. And while I talk about a lot of things that we do, there's a lot of organizations in other cities, in other parts of the country that we work with and you know, I think as you as you look at some of the pathways that we provide, you know, part of it should be, what are the organizations in the areas that you that you reside, if you're not in Southern California, but you know, we've, we've got a bit of an interesting organization. We do, we do a variety of conferences through the course of the year, nothing to this magnitude. We work very strategically and cooperatively with LSI. We're a little bit more focused on specific therapeutic areas. So we have four different conferences throughout the course of the year that focus on medical esthetics, ophthalmology, cardiovascular and neuro and we do have a general med tech, but ours are a little bit more focused to that standpoint. We have, we have a $200 million fund, which is, which is almost, you know, completely invested at this point, so we're going to go on and raise an additional fund, and that, that fund historically has been invested specifically in eye care companies, and the new fund will include those other therapeutic areas and be opportunistic even beyond that. From that standpoint, we also, and you know, part of our team here will talk about their journey through our accelerator. We have an accelerator called Launchpad. It's offered pro bono for companies that are here in Southern California, and basically that's intended to provide and get companies investor ready for what I'd say is an institutional or a more sophisticated investor. And so, you know, we have the events that we bring people together, we have this accelerator, and we work with about 65 companies a year. And then from there, we have a platform that we can help companies raise capital with the relationships that we have with venture capital firms, both institutional and strategic and family offices. So with that, I think we wanted to open up and Marinela and Sabing Maybe with you guys.

Marinela Gombosev  2:27  
Yeah, hello, everybody. I'm Marinela. I'm a startup operator. I usually get brought in by founders to help them bring to market, to commercialize and scale their innovation. And this is my now third startup. I am Chief Operating Officer and President at Spark neuro, and we are focused on dementia diagnosis. And my journey with octane actually started many years ago. I think over 12 years ago now, I have been a part of the octane ecosystem. I've had a front row seat watching them evolve, and now also watching the ecosystem evolve. So I'm really excited to have this conversation, and I'm now on the board of octane as well. So just to start us off with I want to take a quick sense of the room. How many of the folks here are innovators, entrepreneurs? Okay, great. And how many are investors? All right, thank you. And I'm curious also, how many folks are outside of Orange County currently, okay for about half the room. That's really helpful, just to help us kind of tailor the conversation, I've had the pleasure to take my prior last company through the octane accelerator, Launchpad accelerator, and really it was an experience for me at the time that helped elevate my company and be ready to pitch on larger and larger stages in front of more and more sophisticated investors. And so that's one thing that, as an innovator, I really always advocate for. And Jon, you've done a great job with your team to kind of add even more structure and process. And I've also seen other accelerators around the country as well. And so I think we have something here that is really world class in terms of preparing, particularly first time CEOs and founders, and with that, maybe I'll pass it to Sabing.

Sabing Lee  4:25  
Hi everybody. I'm Sabing Lee. I'm a partner at Kennedy Martens. Kenobi Martens is an IP firm, but we've also been a long standing supporter of octane, pretty much, since the very beginning. So Bill, your predecessors, predecessors, lady's predecessor, Gary Augusta, I think, was one of the first, or he was the first CEO. He was of octane. And so our firm, 2002 Yeah, our firm's had a relationship with octane. So our firm is based in Orange County. We were founded in 1962 so we've really seen the county grow, and it's been incredible growth. Octane has been an instrumental part of, I think, coalescing a lot. Of the communities within Orange County that makes it a bit easier to network and centralize things that I think is really helpful to building connections. Our firm has been a supporter of the launch pad program. I'm sure Mike and others will talk more about this, but Launch Pad is the program that accelerates companies, where the companies will go through panels that people like myself participate on. So I'm an IP attorney, so I don't need to work with any of you, but if you come into the panel, I'm happy to just look at your IP slides and give you my honest criticism as to what's good what's bad. And the panels are made up of experts, subject matter experts in the area, hopefully and oftentimes, relevant to your industry as well. And I think that's really, really important. So I've gone through a number of these. I've seen my clients go through these. They're really, really helpful. I'm not going to steal your thunder mic, but there's all kinds of metrics that are used where you can compare and see how you compare to other companies. There's all kinds of data here that's really, really useful, so you can see how do I measure up, and where do I have strengths, and where do I have things that I need to improve upon? And honestly, that honest feedback is really important. I mean, it might be hard to hear sometimes, but I think a young or a new CEO, or even an experienced CEO can benefit from learning these things. So our firm's really been proud to be a part of this. I'm also on the octane board of directors. I've been a part of all of the programs that bill is talking about here. And I think it's a really it's think it's a really important

Bill Carpou  6:24  
part of the community. And Sabing maybe expand on on a company or two that you've helped through that journey, you know, with IP, if you could for sure.

Sabing Lee  6:31  
So I know one of the presenting companies, I'm not sure if he's here in the room, is relief cardio. They were a presenting company at one or many of the different panels in the cardiovascular forum. So the cardiovascular tech forum is one of the vertical conferences that many of us participate in. And so that's an organization, and that's a that's an event that focuses on cardiovascular where you bring cardiovascular companies together, and so having companies come there and build the connections. The main investor for relief is, or has been, the moderator, the MC for the program. And so just building those connections has been really important. And so I think again, the connectivity provided by these conferences with people who are like minded, like yourself, in a particular industry, is really critical,

Bill Carpou  7:21  
great. And you know, before you move to Mike and far as Aaron Ellen, maybe we could talk a little bit about the evolution of the ecosystem. And I'd love to get some input from the audience, wherever they are, how do they see their their ecosystems evolving? Because two weeks ago, we did a trip to New York, basically a road show with companies that were that were helping raise capital and opening up that aperture to Boston investors who actually have a very high appetite for companies that are here in Southern California. One of the dynamics is that they've the Boston marketplace has about four times the amount of capital than is investable in in the Boston, the greater Boston area, on an annual basis. So they they by definition, need to come outside. On the other hand, if we look at Southern California, Southern California only has about 13% of the capital required that's headquartered here. So if you think about that, as an entrepreneur, here, you have to go outside the area for the most part. So whether it's Silicon Valley, whether it's Boston, whether it's New York, or one or two other money centers, but as that's, as that's evolved, you know, I'd love to get your your take on that. And then again, you know, anybody who wants to add to that, that's, that's someplace different, a country. Yeah,

Marinela Gombosev  8:37  
my last company, I commuted from Orange County to New York. The company happened to be headquartered in New York, and I kind of got to watch these two ecosystems, and what I can say about Orange County's med tech ecosystem, and particularly in its evolution, it's not only matured, but it's become a place for me and my peers where you feel like you can you have a broad set of resources you can go to among friends and that are easily accessible, that all care about each other. You know, this is a long, hard road, and as CEOs and founders, you need access to a lot of resources at different times and quickly and over time. You know, Orange County, through, in part, through the connectivity that octane provides, has really created a place where CEOs founders can come together and say, Hey, I need a reimbursement person, or I need, you know, clinical research capabilities in this particular, very specific, very narrow area. And oftentimes my network comes around and says, Hey, you know, this is, this is available, or even grant funding, you know. And Octane has been a wonderful resource for that as well. So I think the evolution is kind of in the maturity of the network the people that are here that they have many, many years of expertise, and they can go deep and narrow. And I think that's really helpful in Medtech in particular.

Bill Carpou  9:52  
Yeah, Anybody care to comment on what's going on in your respective ecosystems as you're outside the area? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so with that, Mike, why don't, why don't we talk a little bit about the cap and growth platform, and you know, once somebody comes out of the launch pad, will we, you know, what we could do and what we look for? Yeah, I'll kind of

Mike Hill  10:16  
walk you through the trajectory. And I think, you know, question like that, what's going on in your ecosystem? It's kind of broad. Maybe, maybe I can give some context. What some context where it can narrow, because we do want to understand how we can facilitate a partnership and collaborate with other ecosystems as well, on behalf of the innovators in the room. So Marina was talking about, and Sabian was talking about going through our accelerator. So it's a nonprofit accelerator. It's funded by a couple of grants, but companies in this region can access that accelerator. And what makes that accelerator unique is that it's entirely focused on getting you investor ready. So when we're when we're doing panels, for example, the panels at Sabing and others volunteer to sit on and provide that feedback to the innovators you're hearing from experts, where you are being perceived to have issues with your story that are either strong or are vulnerable. And so we take that data, we quantify that data to give you some scoring. Once you come out of that accelerator, you are, by the definition of our panels investor ready, and so Octane has created a part of our organization that is specifically focused on advocacy, helping the innovators who are coming out of the accelerator get the introductions to the commercial partners and the investors in This ecosystem and beyond, for the purpose of accelerating your pathway to commercialization and capital. And I think we do a pretty good job. If you haven't seen our impact report, it just came out, and I think $10 billion over the last 13 years, something like that, 1111, years, 11 billion, or 11 years billion, 11 billion. Over about 13 years, companies that have come through our accelerator, graduated and gone on and continue to have subsequent rounds of funding. And I think the biggest, the biggest stat that I think gets underplayed a lot when we talk about metrics in an ecosystem is the survivability of the startup and our accelerator. We're really proud. This is a Deloitte finding for us, 90% of the companies that have come through our accelerator over the last 13 years remain operational today. That's not, we're not we're not quantifying the condition of those companies. Some are not necessarily doing well. Others are doing extremely well. We've had some IPOs, but 90% and the reason that that works is because of an ecosystem that is fully engaged and those resources are available. So I work on the cap and growth team, and our job, that is what we are here to do, is to bring advocacy and voice to your innovation so that you have access to this larger ecosystem that we're really honored to be a part of. And so that's a little bit about. OCG,

Bill Carpou  13:00  
yeah, and you know, maybe specifically what some of the services are in young capital and growth, yeah. Mike could basically, prior to his role now in capital and growth, our platform, Mike had run the accelerator for what, about a year, year and

Mike Hill  13:15  
a half, about 18 months, yeah. And then prior to that, I was an entrepreneur for 24 years, and so fought all those battles, made all those mistakes, three startups, two exits, one didn't make it. Learned way more from that. But octane cap and growth is designed to sort of navigate those pitfalls. So we call OCG capital and growth. So capital is what I was talking about, helping to make those introductions, helping to make sure that you're aligned with capital, not just who's who will sit and listen to me pitch, but who's got capital to invest, who's active in my space and has expertise in the space. So we try to align that capital, and then we showcase you through our events, but then the growth side is and this is a phrase you may have heard me say before, if you if you've met me before, I say it all the time. Investment capital should never be tuition. You should already know when you get funded, where you're going and how you're going to execute your business. Well, entrepreneurs don't always have that luxury. If you haven't done that before, they may be new to you. So what we do is we've provided growth resources a network of people who know how to navigate regulatory pathways. And so we have vetted those, and we have resources available to help you. If you need IP work or your portfolio, a lot of founders will get that core IP, but they don't understand portfolio strategy. How do you build IP strategy? And that's where we bring in our partners to help with that as well. And so there's about 13, maybe, maybe more, so 20 or something like there's a lot, 29 different categories of growth partners who have the expertise. And I'll leave with this so that far you can jump in here. No one ever loses an investment opportunity when they're pitching their deal. You. Or they lose it in the Q and A when somebody asks a question you have no idea how to answer, and so rather than say, I have no idea, or I've got a guy on my board who did this, like, 10 years ago, and I think he's gonna be really great for us. A better answer would be, hey, what's your regulatory pathway before I answer that, let me tell you about the CRO that we worked with to build that roadmap out, because they've been here 45 times, and so I think that's a really powerful story. So bringing in the experts and octane tries to facilitate as an ecosystem, again, helping in that area, facilitate the right introductions and bring that expertise where you may have a gap and a deficiency, all that is required on the part of the entrepreneur is Coach ability to say, You know what? I don't know everything. Let me go find the right experts who can help make that happen and and that's what octane really has tried to do. And I think we're, we're all pretty excited to be a part of it as, again, as a nonprofit, we're just here to support support innovation.

Bill Carpou  15:53  
And I heard the prior panel, they were talking about KOLs and the importance of KOLs in the whole equation. And before I pass it to farzac, we believe in that too. We have a lot of, you know, in those four therapeutic areas that I talked about, we are very deep relationships with physicians, with the KOLs, and they serve, in many instances, as a medical advisor, you know, on their boards, you know, help with clinical but it's we've even actually built our fund around that. And as I was explaining to a couple of people earlier today, I wish I could say this was a well thought out strategy from the beginning, but we we kind of backed into it that when we did our first fund, the first 50 LPS were actually physicians, were ophthalmologists, and what we found was they were doing clinical trials. There was no shortage thus of of deal flow that they provided the fund. We ran it through an abbreviated version of the accelerator to make sure there's a there, there. And then, you know, what I think's really worked for us is that, given the relationships that we have with some of the bigger al pharma companies, I use in this example, before I turn it over to a cardio company that you know, whether it's whether it's AbbVie or al Khan or Bosch and loam, we would basically sit down with them and say, We're considering an investment. What would we need to execute on? What would the company need to execute for you to be interested in taking a significant position or even buying it at some point? And so we end up getting the roadmap and then execute against that. So, you know, Kol involvement and involvement of the strategics is really, really important in terms of what we've seen and the exits that we've had. Well, as Mike says, there have been some IPOs out of the fund. In particular, there's been more that have been acquired by strategic organizations where they they kind of had that road map before. So with that, I want to turn it over to our esteemed colleague here from Edwards life sciences, Farzad. So,

Farzad Azimpour  17:51  
so, yeah, great to see everybody here. So I'm a cardiologist by background, and I wear two hats. One is at Edwards. That's my 100% job on paper, at least running the incubator, which is all the internally kind of brewed things that we're working on in the Advanced Technology unit, and it in wearing that hat, I get a lot of kind of erroneous inbound calls from from folks, which I actually love to take. But startup founders, individuals with an idea will will come my direction and say, Hey, I'd love to share my idea with you guys. And thankfully, I have colleagues who I can direct them to, who can have a more kind of appropriate and protected conversation with them about how to move things forward. But I will say that in those erroneous conversations, I meet a lot of people on accident, and so our network happens to grow just by accident, also by intention, right? So I'm also fortunate to wear my other hat in academia, and that puts me in direct contact with Biodesign programs. In particular, I'm on faculty at Stanford Biodesign, so maybe I can zoom back to all of California for a moment, but zooming into Southern California, we have UCLA Biodesign, and these are collections of early career folks, or people who are just at the end of their training, whether it's in engineering, business or medicine, and they're these bright, shining stars who are the next generation of entrepreneurs. They may be people who you partner with in some capacity, or if you're an investor. You may be taking a look at some of these companies that are coming out of there, but the point is that through academia, through through strategic industry, folks like me, through organizations like this, our network tends to kind of get bigger and bigger and more substantial and meaningful in many ways. So if I, if I come across any sort of kind of weird sounding question. It's no longer that weird to me. It's great.

Bill Carpou  19:49  
And the you know, the pathway, when you say incubator, do you? Do you actually you're incubating the idea internally, you're not bringing an external company in? Or are

Farzad Azimpour  19:57  
you? That's right. So in our case. Yes, what we do is we apply a version of the Biodesign process to essentially take a blank starting point and articulate what we classify as an unmet clinical need. Now that term gets used by many people. You'll hear people say unmet need. We have a very strict definition of what that means, and it's written or articulated in a way that once we do that, we can take a step back and say, Okay, I can actually write the outline of what a clinical trial might look like. I can imagine how I would have to study that. And I would say that if you can't imagine how you would ultimately study something, it's not worth pursuing, or maybe you de prioritize it and and move something ahead that you can imagine studying, particularly in cardiovascular, there may be some fields I imagine that aren't that don't require the rigor to move something forward. I don't want to underplay them, but cardiovascular just tends to be one of the one of those kind of high rigor, high intensity spaces where the expectations are high. So we have to articulate that need with that intensity.

Bill Carpou  21:04  
Okay? Marinela.

Marinela Gombosev  21:06  
yeah. And, I mean, maybe just that's a great way to think about, you know, from burn rate to billions, right? Like, how do you start with that initial idea, and what does it take in terms of the rigor of testing and identifying that market need and validating that there truly is a market need. And how do you surround yourself with people, ideally, through your ecosystem, who can help you kind of soberly look at the evidence that you have the path to get there, the reimbursement strategy, the go to market strategy, the investor profiles, etc. So I'd love to hear, like anybody here on the panel, talk about that, from your perspective, is, you know, how do you see your way through from initial start to what does it take, and how do you surround companies with that kind of set of resources over time?

Mike Hill  21:53  
Yeah, I'll jump in just for a second. I'll try to be brief. But you don't have to be well, he literally pulled me aside and said, Be brief. So, so at the beginning, right, ideation, coming up with great ideas. The contrast for for private entrepreneurs who are trying to figure that out, you know, you look at it and you're so deep in that space, understanding those unmet needs, you have a different perspective. For for entrepreneurs, we have a lot of great ideas, but we haven't validated anything you know, like, how do you really know that you have an unmet need there? It's great on paper to write out, I got this great idea, we're going to build this incredible company. And so Bill talked about, and we're really this is kind of a big opportunity for innovators to work with octane. We go to the strategics, and we talk to them ahead of time, very, very early. We're looking at a company. He talks about investment, but we don't necessarily even have to do this for investment. Working with a company and they're in this space, does this align with you strategically, anywhere on your roadmap? And if they say yes, our next question is, when would you like to see them, when they achieve these things, EFS or Pivotal, or whatever it might be. And that grid gives us a roadmap. And so now you have an entrepreneur who's laser focused on, okay, I've got a pathway to some validation if I stay focused on this path. And when you are a first time entrepreneur, the folks who said they were entrepreneurs, how many are first time entrepreneurs? Yeah, well, what is the saying? Carol, the first pickle out of the jar is the hardest, right? So the next pickles are easier, but the first one is always the hardest. But activate an ecosystem around you and get some help validating that what you're working on actually align strategically with people who are interested in bringing your innovation forward. I don't know how you view that, but that's how we sort of see that. Yeah.

Farzad Azimpour  23:47  
And I think one of the great things about Southern California ecosystem, particularly in cardiovascular is that we have different types of strategic investors too. So like Edwards, we tend to go early, not always, but generally, we tend to go earlier. That way. We can bring it in, put our fingerprints on it, and spend more of our efforts internally developing that and going as deep as we can. There are other companies that will go a little bit later for business reasons that they've that make sense for them, right? And it's just a different strategy. But you as then, as as an entrepreneur, have some options in terms of where you are with your technology, and what's your personal appetite for taking this thing as far as you

Bill Carpou  24:33  
need to do? Do you incorporate build to buy? I mean, is that a strategy of Edwards? It?

Sabing Lee  24:39  
I'll say we're currently exploring that as an option. It tends to be a hot topic right now, I wonder if you guys can talk about mentorship, because what I see in my experience is I have a lot of clients that are early stage, sometimes physicians that start up companies, they have full time jobs, and they don't have the time to really develop a company as well as they should. And often. Of times they don't have the experience. Now, it's not to say that I haven't dealt with early stage CEOs that are first time CEOs, and I've known quite a few that have been successful, but I've also seen others who actually need the help and probably need to realize when it's time to hand the reins over to somebody else, they can remain a founder, they can remain whatever other title, but then they need to bring in an executive who has experience raising money and then bringing something commercial. But what do you guys feel is your experience there?

Mike Hill  25:27  
I mean, again, from my perspective, almost every entrepreneur will hit that stage gate where your experience and capabilities are not necessarily aligned with what needs to happen for that successful exit. Hubris can get in the way of that. And I don't mean to be I'm not trying to insult anybody, but I'm just saying that also your board, your board of advisors. When you're a startup, you bring on a lot of great people to help you get started. That is not the team, I promise you. That is not the team that's gonna take you to the promised land and finish it, they're going to be great clinical advisors to help you figure out how to build that how to build that innovation and bring it forward. But you need go to market commercialization strategy. You need smart people who can raise capital and talk about your business very differently, oftentimes, than somebody who maybe is just a inspired clinician and so thinking about your team, thinking about yourself, and constantly having that openness to self, audit and understand you've got some experience gaps. It doesn't mean you're out of the company. It means you get to support and build an incredible innovation that the world needs with world class with a world class team that you built. And so it happens constantly that you're going to reshuffle your board and your management team, and being open to that, I think, is really important, and that's where, again, ecosystems can help. I mean, if you reach out to Sabing, he'd be able to tell you about companies that have exited in your domain, or probably there's some CEOs or some really smart people that have a lot of domain experience who are looking for their next opportunity. Let's face it, entrepreneurship, it's a sickness. You guys aren't going to get away from it once you're in, you're in, and you'll just do it over and over and over again, which makes you incredibly valuable to any ecosystem that you

Sabing Lee  27:12  
work at. Yeah, I've seen exactly that, where the founder realized that he didn't have necessarily the experience from having brought companies to successful acquisition before. And so he brought his company to Orange County, found a former CEO that had done a massive acquisition by Medtronic. He was looking for another gig, and so hired Eman as the new CEO and took that company to success as well. That was one of your acquisitions. Farzad, all right, but it's a key point, I think, just to find people in the community that you're in, because oftentimes you bring your company to a location where you can find the talent that you need to, you know, technically support your business, but also provide the business advice that you need. And I think you can find that a lot in the area that you're in, if you're in the right industry in that area.

Farzad Azimpour  27:57  
So this might be unpopular, I don't know, but anecdotally, when I get cardiology fellows or people who are in the middle of their training call me and say, Hey, I've got this idea, and I'm in the middle of my training right now. What do I do with it? I tend to steer them towards their office of technology commercialization, or whatever their tech transfer office is, because they're and you know, the quality and the the interest of those offices is going to vary depending on where you are, but you can actually pull out a lot of resources, particularly at a stage where they're going to be taking the risk, not you as the entrepreneur. So like, I remember, I was in that very position myself. I was a cardiology fellow. I had never patented anything before. I needed to learn how to file a provisional. I needed to learn all this language, and I did it on the university's dime. And so that was kind of a nice benefit to having that around you. So either if you yourself are affiliated with a university or some place with the tech transfer office, or if you want to partner up with somebody who's affiliated with that and then leverage those resources internally that can help maybe get you to a reasonable state to then bump up

Sabing Lee  29:12  
your capability. I will caution people a little bit on dealing with tech transfer offices, because if the tech transfer office appreciates the value of the technology, they will assign appropriate budget to it. But we deal with various universities where, if it's not considered to be an important technology, they'll give it a very, very small budget, and they may not staff the best caliber attorney to the project. So if you are at an institution, you have a say, and so you should be thinking about who you select, you know, for any sort of advisor, but you can have a say in terms of, no, I want to have this person because I think they have the right background for my technology. Great

Bill Carpou  29:49  
point. You know, I think on this point to the the the impressive thing is, when you see and meet an entrepreneur that has a self awareness that they're not in, that they're not the one. To take the company to the next level, and that's a hard discussion to have. We end up having to have that several times, and it's better if somebody comes to that conclusion themselves, but in most instances, the founder isn't really the right person to take it to the maximization of the level. You've got to find someone else. That doesn't mean you leave you leave the company, you take a different role, different responsibility, the chair role or something. But what we're finding more and more, I think, today in tough capital markets, is investors are looking for somebody that's running a company that has had operational experience, more so than just technical experience. You want to have the technical ability inside the company, but they want to really feel comfortable that somebody understands, you know, the levers that you drive, the revenue, the the margins, the cost, and all the functionality, you know, in building a great team. So, you know, I think, I think having the awareness to begin to backfill yourself as the founder at some point in time, because it becomes abort. So with that, we have a little bit of time left. You know, I guess we're standing between cocktails, but we'd like to open it up. If anybody has questions and anything that we could help with, we could certainly meet with everybody afterwards. But anything that comes up, room's not that big. You could yell it, or you could use the microphone here.

Marinela Gombosev  31:24  
And Farzad, we'll wait for questions. Farzad, I'm curious about, you know, how you think about obviously, Edwards is has huge reach outside of this ecosystem. When you look at innovation, how useful important is it to be part of this community, or is innovation coming to you from all over the country, within Edwards, and, you know, outside of Edwards.

Farzad Azimpour  31:44  
So yeah, people with an idea come from all over the world, and again, I will direct them to my colleagues on our exploration team. And we actually have folks who are strategically located in different parts of the world to be that inbound kind of receiver of those conversations. And when it comes to what we do, we love being down here for so many reasons, from a talent standpoint. And by the way, this goes in many directions. People come to us. We send people elsewhere. People go leave, you know, and go and go start a startup on their own. They learn interesting things within a big company, and then go take that into their own kind of endeavors. Having academic facility, clinical facilities nearby. We've got UC Irvine. We've got UCLA cedars nearby, is great for us. So we can go perform clinical immersion San Diego. We can perform clinical immersion, kind of embed with with clinicians in their clinical environment, so that we can better understand how a disease is currently managed today. So we can then kind of unpack and articulate what we what we think are the gaps we have. So many pieces of all, all the requirements that you need, whether it's legal, whether it's global health, economics and reimbursement regulatory like, there's so much expertise down here that we don't have to go very far. It's great. I used to like getting on planes because it's so fun to travel. You know, that kind of gets a little old. Now it does.

Sabing Lee  33:19  
Let me ask Mike for the companies here who are looking to work with octane. Let's talk about Launchpad and then capital and growth, but I know there's a selection process, and so maybe you can speak to what kinds of companies are ready to go through Launchpad or for ready, ready for capital and growth, and which ones do you think are maybe too early or need to do a little bit more before they're ready for the services that can be provided.

Mike Hill  33:43  
Yeah. Well, first of all, I will just point out in our audience, we have John Wyatt, the director of Launchpad. And so if you are someone who is looking for that kind of help, he is happily ready to engage, as many of our team members are. There are some selection criteria. So first is to go through our non profit and by the way, there's no cost to an entrepreneur ever, no advisor. They have a great team of incredibly talented advisors who can help with the building of your business, but they cannot invest in your company. They cannot be advisors of your company. You cannot hire them to be involved in your company. There's a very, very strict conflict of interest, because it's the federal government has funded these in the state of California as well. So we have this perception of neutrality. We treat every company the same. These advisors wake up every single day and all they do is ask, How can I help this company move forward? That's it. That's it. That's the entire motivation. How can I help them move forward? So, but there was a selection process. So first is Orange County, Inland Empire is kind of the network that we work within. So the companies have to be domiciled here, or have an office here. That's the first thing. The second thing is, there has to be some traction with the business. So. Not just an idea. You've actually done some work on that, and so an MVP or some fundraising has occurred so that you're ready to sort of move forward. But beyond that, and John can maybe go into a little more detail privately with you, there's not a whole lot more other than Are you building an innovation that is aligned with our ability to support and help you. So that's where Launchpad starts, and then you go through this process. Then your crescendo of that event is a panel presentation to volunteers from the industry that includes legal it includes commercial partners. It includes CROs. Regulatory people are going to help you understand what you're thinking about from a regulatory perspective, is is reasonable financial folks are gonna look at your financial model and tell you if it's delusional. Investors who are going to tell you if it's fundable on what you need to do. And most of the time, really interesting conversations happen as a result of that, but they'll score you once you graduate from that, you are then introduced to the for profit side of octane, which is the advocacy side of octane. So whereas they cannot advocate for you without sort of maybe getting in a little trouble with the grants. And then I'll let you explain that later, but, but the the for profit side is all about advocacy. It's about you've got something that is really important. We want to get behind it and support it. And we want to activate a whole bunch of resources to make sure that you are being well supported on your journey. And so that's what our team does. It starts with Carol, who Carol can raise your hand, Carol. Carol works with a whole bunch of growth service per bar providers who can help you bring that expertise forward. On the capital side, Jono capital's capital is there. Our capital team is there to help make introductions to capital resources and and then we have another fund Bill mentioned our visionary Fund, which is our roughly $200 million fund fully deployed. We're getting ready for fund three. But we actually have three funds. We have a clean tech fund, and we have a new startup fund called Boost, where we help physicians and scientists led startups stand their companies up correctly. We don't write checks really to the entrepreneur. We write checks to guys like sabings team, Kenobi Martin, to build the IP roadmap for you. So it's not the execution or it's not the filing of your of your IP, but it is the road maps we work with CROs. We write them a check on your behalf to get the regulatory path, the re the insurance reimbursement path. So when you talk about what's, what's the trajectory, go through the accelerator, get connected OCG, and then go on our stages and get in front of 500 to 800 people who come from your niche industry, who are also there to support innovation and get you connected.

Sabing Lee  37:40  
But be clear, the OCG part does not require the Orange County. No. Good point.

Mike Hill  37:45  
Yeah, accelerator is Inland Empire, Orange County, but you can work with OCG globally. We work with companies all over the all over the world. So with

Bill Carpou  37:52  
that, we're going to wrap up. I want to thank everybody for your attention today, and any way we could help, please let us know. Okay, thank you. 

Sabing Lee  37:59  
Well said.