Devices & Diagnostics, Health IT, Startups

Leading Edge Ventures partner talks about entrepreneurs, investment priorities

Leading Edge Ventures, a $10 million venture investment fund in Delaware is relatively new on […]

Leading Edge Ventures, a $10 million venture investment fund in Delaware is relatively new on the venture scene since its launch last year. Among its targets are early stage and seed stage medical device and IT companies. In a recent interview with Keystone Edge e-newsletter, General Partner Doug Petillo talked about his background as a serial entrepreneur and its work with Pennsylvania’s economic development arm Ben Franklin Technology Partners at the Northeast Pennsylvania division.

The venture fund is a welcome addition to the Pennsylvania-Delaware-New Jersey region, where startups frequently have to look elsewhere for funding such as New York or Boston if they want to stay on the East Coast. In addition to Petillo, some other partners include Rick Birkmeyer, who heads up CD Diagnostics, and Mike Bowman, associate director of the University of Delaware’s Office of Economic Innovation and Partnerships.

Prior to Leading Edge, Petillo previously founded and was managing partner for Navigant Ventures.

Here are some highlights from the interview.

On working in venture capital “…You’d be hard-pressed to find another industry that is such a meritocracy, where you interact exclusively with smart, motivated people committing their lives to ideas that can change their industries. It’s really pretty incredible.”

What it takes to be a successful entrepreneur “The best entrepreneurs I’ve worked with have three things in common: They can sell, they don’t settle for conventional wisdom and they take advice. The rest is hard work and luck.”

On what Leading Edge Ventures is looking for “Leading Edge Ventures is set up as a general, early-stage fund intending to deliver a superior financial return for our limited partners…Our preference is to invest in companies that are just pre- or post-launch, where there is some tangible sense of demand, a team that has experience with the market they’re addressing, and a product or technology-enabled service with good financial and competitive characteristics.”

Experience as co-founder of healthcare startup “On-Site [Specialty Care] is a company my wife and I founded with another couple back in 2000.  She had been with a large nursing home chain that jettisoned their provider group when reimbursement changed. So we grabbed a bunch of those folks, formed a company around it, and went back to the chain and other homes like it with a nurse practitioner service that would be free for their facilities and improve the quality of care. The ‘big breakthrough’ was managing patient care using a utilization model, not a staffing model, and it worked pretty well.

 

 

 

 

 

Shares0
Shares0