Lobby of 1776’s Washington, D.C. offices.
Donna Harris, a cofounder of 1776, said she is stepping down from her post at the end of January, in a blog post last week. The incubator, based in Washington D.C., with other locations in Crystal City, Virgina, San Francisco, New York, and Dubai, has made a global push to find startups across healthcare, transportation, energy, education and “smart cities”. Fellow cofounder Evan Burfield will continue to head up the business.
Harris launched the incubator four years ago with Burfield. Each year, the company has hosted a Challenge Cup, an international competition in which startups representing each of the incubator’s five areas of interest are whittled down in regional pitching events culminating in a week-long event at the incubator’s DC headquarters. The idea behind the annual competition is to search for meaningful technology that’s also scalable.
In her blog post, she explained that the foundation for 1776 was born from her previous role as managing director of the Startup America Partnership:
Find serial successful entrepreneurs to join together to a) knock down the barriers to startup success in their home communities and b) band together into a national network to help every community and every startup reach their full potential.
Among the accomplishments Harris highlights from her time at 1776 in the blog are the more than 700 companies that went through its incubator program. She noted that these companies collectively raised more than $350 million and created more than 2,500 jobs.
Last year, 1776 closed its first seed fund at $12.5 million. Among the startups the incubator has backed through that fund are these digital health companies: Babyscripts, CancerIQ, Cognotion, Dorsata, and Orchestra One.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Rock Health, Healthbox and Blueprint Health have each had senior level departures this year. In the case of Rock Health and Healthbox, the moves by Halle Tacco and Nina Nashif, respectively, coincided with business model shifts. Jean Luc Neptune quit his post as accelerator director but continues to be a partner in Blueprint Health and the accelerator’s investment fund. Rock Health subsequently hired Genentech veteran Bill Evans as managing director and Neil Patel became president and COO of Healthbox.
Harris herself was vague about what her next challenge would be as the closing paragraphs on her blog entry suggest:
Today, perhaps unbelievably, we are facing far greater economic, political, and technological change than in 1776. We watch it play out in the news and social media every day. We hear the predictions of the millions of potential job losses coming. And we saw our collective global worry play out in Brexit and the US Presidential election. Everyone recognizes that the world has changed but real solutions for the future seem to elude us.
Well said by Thomas Friedman a few days ago: “These accelerations in technology, globalization and Mother Nature are like a hurricane in which we’re all being asked to dance. Mr. Trump and the Brexiters sensed the anxiety of millions and promised to build a wall against the howling winds of change. I disagree with them. I think the challenge is to find the eye.”
The next chapter in my career will be about finding that eye.
