A smattering of fundraising announcements involving Boston-area companies and investors, along with a student entrepreneurship program in this collection of local news tidbits:

—Skyword, a Boston-based marketing company that links freelance copywriters with advertisers and other clients, has raised $6.7 million. The investment was led by Cox Media Group, which Skyword says will help hire more people and generally grow the company. Cox’s holdings include 15 TV stations, 85 radio stations, and eight daily newspapers.

—SimpleTuition, an online company that helps college students save money on school and manage their money, has raised another $4 million. The Series D financing round was led by Atlas Venture, Flybridge Capital Partners, and North Hill Ventures, all previous investors. The company started as a loan comparison service, but has also added textbook shopping, savings accounts, and student discounts to its roster of offerings.

—Boston-based Spark Capital has led the first venture investment in Jelly, a new startup headed by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. Stone has not said what Jelly is working on, other than hinting that it has a lot to do with mobile devices—he called it “the natural next step for our connected society” in a blog post. Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet, who led the firm’s investment in Twitter, will sit on the Jelly board. The amount of investment wasn’t disclosed, but angel investors including former Vice President Al Gore, U2 singer Bono, and Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey also were involved.

—Boston’s Charles River Ventures has invested $15 million in Pebble, makers of the smartwatch of the same name. It’s the first venture funding for Pebble, which was actually spurned by investors after its run through the Y Combinator startup program, forcing the company to turn to Kickstarter to crowdfund production of its gadget. That worked out fine—Pebble raised $10 million from customers in short order. The new VC investment was led by George Zachary, a CRV partner based in Menlo Park, CA. It’s one of several Boston connections to Pebble, including manufacturing help from Dragon Innovation and developer support from RunKeeper, one of the first two official Pebble apps.

—MIT has named the 14 student teams selected for its Global Founders’ Skills Accelerator program, which helps aspiring entrepreneurs learn business skills. The program runs from June to September, concluding with a demo day. MIT says each team gets up to $20,000 in grants if it meets “customized milestones,” along with stipends and workspace. There are eight MIT-affiliated teams in the program and six groups representing international schools, including students from Canada, China, Russia, and Turkey.

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I was pretty slow about getting around to reading Thinking, Fast and Slow. The career-capping book by Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman, one of the founders of behavioral economics, spent months on all the bestseller lists back in 2011. I finally picked up a paperback copy a couple of weeks ago.

The book is mainly about the limits of intuition and the biases—seemingly built into the way the human mind has evolved—that keep us from acting in accord with logic, rationality, and statistics. For example, the “anchoring effect” means we’re highly suggestible when it comes to numbers and prices. No matter how much soup they really want, grocery-store customers buy more when there’s a sign saying “Limit 12 cans per customer.”

It was Kahneman’s studies of such impulses that won him a Nobel Prize in economics in 2002. Together with Amos Tversky, Richard Thaler, and many others, Kahneman overturned economists’ old picture of society as a mathematical utopia in which individuals act rationally to maximize their own utility. Thinking, Fast and Slow is a lengthy, detailed, yet approachable summary of that revolution. You’ve probably seen or read popular behavioral-economics boks like Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics or Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational; those are like sugary desserts next to Kahneman’s protein-packed tome.

As I absorbed Kahneman’s points about all the ways human judgment breaks down under various stresses and distractions, I couldn’t help looking for lessons that might apply to the high-tech circus we insiders sometimes call, in a self-congratulatory way, the “innovation ecosystem.” By which I mean the researchers and developers who incubate new technologies inside universities, corporate labs, and garages; the entrepreneurs who turn these new ideas into products; the angel and venture investors who place bets on the entrepreneurs; and the eager customers who fuel the whole process.

And such lessons abound. Indeed, entrepreneurs, executives, and investors are prone to so many kinds of errors that they almost seem to be Kahneman’s favorite subspecies of homo economicus. In the end, I think Kahneman’s observations about bias lead to a big puzzle about the nature of entrepreneurship and technological progress. But before I get into that, I’ll relate a few examples from the book—each one richly supported by the psychological experiments and surveys conducted by Kahneman and his colleagues over the last three decades:

1. The illusion of understanding: If we can fit past events into a satisfying story, we think we understand what really happened, and we can’t imagine things turning out any other way. Here Kahneman cites the example of Google, which was started by two Stanford graduate students who lucked into one of the biggest untapped markets in the history of business (i.e, search-based advertising) and came out looking like invincible geniuses. In fact, there were numerous points at which Google’s story could have taken a drastically different turn—such as 1999, when Page and Brin were willing to sell the company for $1 million but the buyer thought the price was too high. But luck took them in a different direction. “A compelling narrative fosters an illusion of inevitability,” Kahneman observes.

2. Outcome bias: Closely related to the illusion of understanding, this is the tendency to reward or blame decision makers for the performance of their organizations, even though the correlation between leadership quality and corporate performance is generally low. “We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact,” Kahneman writes. “Leaders who have been lucky are never punished for having taken too much risk. Instead, they are believed to have had the flair and foresight to anticipate success, and the sensible people who doubted them are seen in hindsight as mediocre, timid, and weak.”

3. The illusion of pattern: Kahneman thinks we’re far too willing to ascribe meaning to events that are the product of pure chance. A basketball player who sinks three or four baskets in a row is seen as having a “hot hand,” and a CEO who oversees several successful product launches or acquisitions acquires a reputation for extraordinary insight or skill when in fact, like Page and Brin, he was probably just fortunate. “We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random,” Kahneman warns.

4. Nonregressive explanations: An outstanding performance is likely to be followed by a mediocre performance. This isn’t backsliding: it’s usually just regression to the mean, the tendency of variables to gravitate around a historical average. The concept is well established, but because we’re hard-wired to seek causal rather than statistical explanations, we have a hard time accepting it. One corollary is that we shouldn’t punish a company that fails to follow up a stellar product with an even more stellar one (the iPad and its regrettable sequel, the iPad mini, come to mind). Another is that all extreme predictions are unreliable; we shouldn’t believe any entrepreneur who says his company is the next Google.

5. The illusion of validity, also known as the illusion of skill: We’re strongly influenced by the world in front of our eyes, and unwilling to admit that there’s much we don’t know—a phenomenon that Kahneman calls WYSIATI, for What You See Is All There Is. As a result, we come to believe—sometimes fiercely—that our own predictions are accurate, even when it wouldn’t take much digging to show that they’re little better than … Next Page »

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All eyes in the biotech world will soon turn to the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting in Chicago, but for now, the industry keeps humming along. This week’s news was highlighted by partnerships, product launches and big name hirings—and lowlighted by the closure of the long time anchor of Long Island’s biotech scene.

—Former Genzyme CEO Henri Termeer offered a glimpse into what he’s doing in this next chapter of his career, in a two-part interview with Xconomy’s national biotech editor, Luke Timmerman. The man who turned Genzyme into a multi-billion dollar success went into great detail about what fuels him to stay active in biotech, drug prices, and the lessons he learned during his last days at the company.

—Just weeks after raising $265 million for its latest fund, Cambridge, MA-based Atlas Venture has formed what it calls “corporate strategic partnership” agreements with Amgen (NASDAQ: AMGN) and Novartis (NYSE: NVS). Through those agreements, Atlas, Amgen, and Novartis will essentially work together to build new biotech startups. The alliance is the latest example of Big Pharma and venture capital firms teaming up to foster the development of life sciences startups. Merck/Flagship Ventures and Polaris Partners/Johnson & Johnson are some other recent examples.

—Three years after paying $4 billion for OSI Pharmaceuticals, Japan’s Astellas Pharma shuttered its Long Island, NY-based subsidiary’s lab as part of a global R&D shakeup that affects 200 jobs across the U.S. OSI became a success on the back of lung cancer drug erlotinib (Tarceva) and is the anchor tenant for the Broad Hollow Bioscience Park, a not-for-profit partnership between Farmingdale State College, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and the Research Foundation of the State University of New York, that offers research space to early-stage life sciences startups.

—Cambridge, MA-based Tokai Pharmaceuticals raised $35.5 million from Apple Tree Partners, Novartis Venture Funds, and other undisclosed investors to help bankroll the ongoing mid-stage clinical trial of its prostate cancer drug, galeterone. Tokai has been shaken up recently. Martin Williams, its previous CEO, left the company in March “to pursue other career opportunities” and has been replaced by Jodie Williams, its former COO and vice president of clinical affairs.

— Cambridge, MA-based Radius Health’s most advanced drug program may be its injectable osteoporosis drug, BA058, but CEO Michael Wyzga told me that its biggest value driver is a follow-up version of the drug administered through a skin patch. Radius will unveil the results from a mid-stage clinical trial for the patch in September, after which time it will likely evaluate its deal options. Radius pulled a potential IPO in November.

—It’s been a big few weeks for Boston-based Third Rock Ventures. In March, Third Rock raised $516 million for its third fund, bringing its total assets under management to about $1.3 billion. And it built on that momentum on Tuesday, adding two well-known life sciences veterans to its ranks. Alnlyam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ALNY) CEO John Maraganore joined Third Rock as a venture partner, aiding the firm with advice for its portfolio companies. Maraganore—who is keeping his day job at Alnylam—used to work at Millennium Pharmaceuticals along with Third Rock’s founders Robert Tepper, Kevin Starr, and Mark Levin. Third Rock also named James Geraghty, a Genzyme executive for two decades, an “entrepreneur-in-residence” that will help Third Rock create companies targeting rare diseases.

—Speaking of Third Rock, Cambridge, MA-based Ninepoint Medical—the only medical technology startup Third Rock has formed to date—began selling its first product, the NvisionVLE Imaging System, this week. Ninepoint CEO Charles Carignan told me that the company is in the midst of raising $35 million for a Series B round that will help it roll the system out across the U.S. and Europe, among other things. The NvisionVLE’s selling point is that it can look deep into tissue and see large areas very quickly, creating a more efficient way for doctors to identify a disease.

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The Boston area’s best-known startup hub is taking another big step in its national expansion plans.

The Cambridge Innovation Center, an all-in-one office space and services provider that houses some 500 companies near the MIT campus, is opening a branch in St. Louis.

CIC officials announced the expansion Thursday along with Wexford Science & Technology, a real estate development company. Wexford is renovating the building that will house the new CIC branch—the St. Louis Post-Dispatch describes the property as “a former telephone factory undergoing a $73 million conversion into labs and research space.”

The CIC operates as a kind of landlord on steroids for startups and growing companies, offering month-to-month rent for its flexible office spaces that range from “co-working” bullpens to full-fledged corner offices.

Rent prices can be higher than some other addresses, but all of the common office services are included—IT, phones, printers, snacks, and even networking events. The lack of long-term commitments also means that fledgling companies can grow or shrink their rent and footprint as their company changes.

Rowe

The CIC is headed by Tim Rowe, a longtime presence in the Boston-area startup scene who also serves as a venture partner at venture capital firm New Atlantic Ventures, among other appointments.

No financial terms were disclosed for the St. Louis deal, which is the first expansion for the CIC outside of the Boston area. The CIC has previously discussed its plans to grow in other parts of the country, including in Baltimore, as I reported in February. The company also previously told The Boston Globe that St. Louis was among its targets for expansion.

A news release from the two companies says the CIC branch will occupy most of one floor of the building, enough room for up to 100 tenants. And it sounds like they will mostly be biotech companies—the building is part of a project called Cortex, which has raised millions of dollars from private, university, and government sources to establish a life sciences research and startup campus in the city.

“We were struck by the breadth and energy of the startup community in St. Louis,” said Ranch Kimball, president and CEO of CIC Partners and a former economic development official under Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

The CIC offered no hints about its plans to move into Baltimore, but the partnership with Wexford could help there, too—the private real estate company is based in Baltimore. Earlier this year, Wexford merged with San Diego-based BioMed Realty Trust.

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Ninepoint Medical earned the distinction of becoming the first—and to date, the only—medical device maker seeded by startup creation specialist Third Rock Ventures when it set up shop in 2009. Some four years and $33 million later, Ninepoint’s vision, a product that can make cancer diagnosis more efficient, is becoming a reality.

“It’s a pretty exciting week,” Ninepoint CEO Charles Carignan says.

Today, the Cambridge, MA-based company began selling its first product, the NvisionVLE Imaging System, to academic and large community hospitals around the country—specifically, those treating patients with advanced esophageal disease. That event will fuel a new $35 million round of financing that Ninepoint is in the midst of putting together, Carignan says.

“We’ve been living off of our [$33 million] Series A, and now it’s time for some more capital,” he says.

That’s a big step from where Ninepoint first started.

According to Carignan, Third Rock’s idea in creating Ninepoint was to put together a company that could use a specific technology or platform that could help shorten the time between a person having symptoms, coming in for an examination, getting a diagnosis, and then getting treated.

Carignan, previously the chief medical officer of Boston Scientific (NYSE: BSX) and later Novasys Medical, met with Third Rock several times before coming onboard as CEO in the summer of 2009, before that technology was even in place.

Ninepoint found its product idea at a meeting with Dr. Gary Tearney of Massachusetts General Hospital, during which he described a method of medical imaging called optical frequency domain imaging, or OFDI. That technology can look deep into tissue and see large areas very quickly, creating a more efficient way for doctors to identify a disease.

That’s a big change from the current practice, which typically uses “random biopsies” to find disease, Carignan says.

“With our technology, you’d be able to target biopsies and improve the diagnostic yield of those biopsies,” he says.

Ninepoint licensed the technology from Massachusetts General Hospital in 2010, and turned it into the NvisionVLE system with the goal of using the device to make things like traditional biopsies more efficient.

The FDA approved the NvisionVLE system as an imaging tool in December 2011, and expanded its reach in April to allow Ninepoint to sell the device to clinicians as a diagnostic device for esophageal diseases such as cancer.

Ninepoint has big plans for the system’s applications from there, however. First, it wants to use the product in other gastroenterology settings, such as detailed looks at the pancreas, colon, and bile duct. Then, it hopes to use the system as a diagnostic tool for lung and bladder cancers, and eventually for benign diseases of the ear, nose, and throat, such as asthma.

Ninepoint is selling its imaging console for $149,000, and the individual catheters used along with it for $1,095 apiece.

The company’s follow-up product is its tethered capsule, a pill version of the system. Rather than undergoing a typical endoscopy, which requires anesthesia, patients would take a sip of water and swallow a pill in a doctor’s office and give the clinician the “same imaging depth” as the NvisionVLE.

That pill wouldn’t work if a doctor needs to actually grab a piece of tissue to examine, but it would help a patient avoid going through an endoscopy if in-office imaging is all that’s needed. Ninepoint hopes to begin selling that by the end of 2014, Carignan says.

Ninepoint’s $33 million Series A brought the company where it is today, with 59 employees and the capability to manufacture its devices on its own. Once it puts its Series B together, Ninepoint will use the money to roll out the NvisionVLE system in the U.S. this year and Europe in 2014, expand its use into other potential disease areas, bring its tethered capsule to market, and add people in sales, manufacturing, marketing, and reimbursement.

From there, Carignan concedes that the way Third Rock and co-investor Prospect Ventures Partners will likely get their returns is through an acquisition, given the lukewarm state of the IPO market for med-tech companies. But Carignan is bullish on Ninepoint’s prospects.

“I think that once we show the value of this in depth imaging, a number of companies out there are going to be interested in acquiring the technology,” he says.

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First of all, the company is no longer called the Daily Grommet. Now it’s just The Grommet.

“We still execute daily,” says CEO Jules Pieri, “but we dropped the word because it seemed to be superfluous.” She adds, “We love what ‘grommet’ represents, a humble piece of hardware that makes things better.”

The company’s mission? To feature interesting, undiscovered products on its website, tell the stories behind their makers, and help get them out into the world.

The news this week is that Lexington, MA-based Grommet has a new majority owner—Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten—thanks to an unspecified new investment. Rakuten led the startup’s Series B round last September, and Grommet also has raised about $6 million in angel investment ($4.4 million paid in capital).

And next month, the startup—which has grown from 10 to 43 employees in the past year or so—will move into new digs right on the Cambridge-Somerville border, near Davis Square. Its new mailing address will be in Somerville to reflect “more of a hacker/maker community,” Pieri says.

All of which is to say, this is a good time to step back and think about Grommet’s greater journey—and, in particular, its significance to a world of online commerce traditionally dominated by big players.

Pieri co-founded the startup, her third, in 2008 along with Joanne Domeniconi. An industrial designer by training, Pieri wanted to build a business around helping small products and companies compete for distribution in a world of big-box retailers and Amazon.com (hold that thought). She calls the approach “citizen commerce,” and it’s a mix of online marketing, curating, storytelling, and video, all centered around changing the culture of how and why people buy stuff.

“We reveal the people behind the company and what they care about,” she says. “On our site, you can search by values. You’re not necessarily shopping by price or requirements, you’re shopping by what kind of world you want to live in.”

That might sound idealistic, but Grommet has built up some scale now. In addition to the typical hot-startup growth chart—roughly 400 percent growth in revenues and customers in the past year—Pieri (pictured) says the firm has “more vendor relationships than Walmart and more suppliers than Ford Motor,” to use the parlance of the big guys. (Grommet calls its suppliers “partners.”)

On the new ownership front, what Rakuten brings is a large, established online marketplace, logistical expertise, international product sourcing, and key relationships with companies like Pinterest (in which Rakuten is an investor).

The Japanese firm also shares an important bit of culture with Grommet. “They’ve been working away at the same mission for 15 years,” Pieri says. “The humanizing experience of commerce, connecting you to merchants.” She relays an experience in Tokyo a few weeks ago: she was shopping at an open market and met a stand owner peddling nuts; she found out that the owner does more than $300,000 a month in sales on Rakuten.

And while Grommet’s mission hasn’t changed, it does need to serve its new master. “Our role in life is to discover and curate the best ideas and products out there, and help them scale,” Pieri says. “We de-risk them to help them move forward to Rakuten’s store” and other large retailers.

Rakuten is sometimes referred to as the “Amazon of Japan.” But it sells itself culturally as the opposite of Amazon. “Rakuten doesn’t undermine its partners,” Pieri says. “A lot of our vendors have a problem with Amazon.”

She’s talking about the Seattle e-commerce giant’s tendency to “watch what sells on their platform and then undercut them.” There’s nothing wrong with competing on price, of course, but Amazon does seem to rub a lot of smaller retailers the wrong way.

For Grommet and others, it boils down to a … Next Page »

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[Corrected on 5/16/13, 9:11 a.m., see below] Fresh off raising $265 million to bankroll its ninth fund, Atlas Venture has forged strategic partnerships with Amgen and Novartis to help supply the bigger companies with innovative new drug candidates. The deals represent the latest in a string of alliances that is bringing venture firms and Big Pharma closer together than ever before.

Cambridge, MA-based Atlas announced today that it has struck what it calls “corporate strategic partnership” agreements with Amgen (NASDAQ: AMGN) (through its VC fund, Amgen Ventures), and Novartis (NYSE: NVS). According to Atlas partner Bruce Booth, both pharma giants are “significant” limited partners in Atlas’s latest fund, Atlas IX, which is expected to create at least 15 biotech companies.

Through those agreements, Atlas, Amgen, and Novartis will essentially work together to build biotech startups without locking them into transactions that cap their value.

Here’s how a partnership for a theoretical company would work, according to Atlas’s Booth. Atlas would scout out an interesting drug development platform or therapeutic from academia and seed finance it with around $500,000—or more, with the financial help of Amgen and Novartis—to validate the academic findings. If Atlas is convinced after a six to 12-month period that the technology works, it would put together a $10 million to $15 million Series A round to turn the idea into a company and pursue the next set of experiments needed to gather convincing evidence to support the platform, or various new drug candidates. Amgen or Novartis could be part of that financing round if they choose, but have no contractual obligation to do so.

Amgen and Novartis, in fact, won’t get any specific transactional rights or equity stakes in the companies that get created. Instead, they will give advice and feedback during the creation process and get the closest seat to watch those companies grow. Amgen and Novartis can then decide, as the startups mature, to eventually license a product if there’s a piece they like, or bid to acquire the entity altogether down the road.

“During that whole time Novartis and Amgen would really have a close proximal view of the scientific progress of those companies and at some point may say, ‘You know what? We like that enough that we’d like to integrate that into our R&D portfolio,’” Booth says. “That would certainly be a successful outcome for us and for [them].”

Atlas has between six and 10 seed-stage companies in Atlas IX already, all of which the firm has been actively communicating with both Amgen and Novartis about. The idea from here is to “cherry pick the ones” that are worth progressing into fully-invested companies, according to Booth.

The partnership is the latest in an … Next Page »

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In the beginning of Kendall Square’s biotech scene, everyone knew that partially built-out lab space was rare and precious, and its availability usually spread through word of mouth.

For Cambridge commercial real estate brokers, that phenomenon added to the mystery of trying to keep track of the growing biotech scene: there were very few choices on which to build a lab space practice.

Though new developments like One Kendall Square added more space, Kendall Square has continued to have a general lack of office and lab availability, particularly for smaller companies that cannot lease full buildings.

The times, however, have changed. As you see in the graphic below, we are now in a period with a glut of lab space and practically no office space.

Here are four reasons why:

1. Developers have been encouraged to build. For more than a decade, we have had a very small, focused group of lab developers who knew the biopharma space metrics well enough to realize that if they could build lab space in Cambridge, the lab users would come. Come they did, at rates much higher than office space. Even when some tenants went outside of Cambridge to save money there were still so few existing lab units available at any one time that there was plenty of incentive to build out lab space in any building that could physically accommodate it. Lab space as a percentage of total inventory in Cambridge has ratcheted up to about 45 percent in the last decade.

2. Big office users are competing for space. In the last few years, big office users, such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Nokia, have joined the big pharma and biotechs in East Cambridge, creating a serious competition to get Kendall Square branding and to hire the best and brightest. The result: the office buildings that can’t adapt to lab uses have more and bigger credit tenants while the small and medium office users are left to fill in between or escape to other affordable, plentiful submarkets.

3. The CIC phenomenon. The Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC), a hugely successful incubator/accelerator/satellite office center now occupies around 200,000 square feet of space right on Kendall Square. The CIC is so good at what it does that most of the time it’s full (no doubt its recent expansion from One Broadway to 101 Main Street will fill up soon). As the mostly tech companies in the CIC grow, the CIC keeps the rest of the office market really tight by launching companies into the rest of Cambridge as well as adjacent submarkets.

4. Vertex moves to Boston’s Seaport. Who knew that Vertex Pharmaceuticals, with its many ups and downs over two decades, would become a household name? That’s what happens when you build the largest construction project in the U.S., a million square feet in the most visible section of Boston with a mayor who loves to promote it! What also happens is you leave behind nearly 500,000 square feet of existing (gulp) lab and office space next year in a Cambridge market that already is out of balance on the lab/office equation.

So what’s going to happen now? Here are a few predictions:

—Lab absorption will happen as nascent companies grow: There are still a lot of growing Cambridge lab companies that may surprise us with how much space they need.

—Developers may convert lab space to other uses: Some owners who have lab space will consider returning it to office use, especially if it’s outmoded or can easily adapt to the trend toward cool office or unorthodox residences.

—The office development incentive: For now, anyone who can provide office space will provide office space in Cambridge.

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Just a little over a month to go before our fifth annual flagship conference, XSITE 2013 (Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, & Entrepreneurship) at Babson College. The date is June 19, the theme is “Boston’s Tech Revival,” and the agenda is here.

You can still register for the event (be sure to note our student and startup rates, if they apply).

I’m pleased to tell you about a few more high-profile speakers who will be joining us.

—Jeremy Hitchcock, the CEO and co-founder of Dyn, is speaking on the “Founders’ Stories” breakout panel that also features Diane Hessan of Communispace and Mike Baker of DataXu. I’m sure Jeremy has some pretty good stories about bootstrapping Dyn to profitability with the rise of the Internet.

—Jason Jacobs, the CEO and co-founder of FitnessKeeper (RunKeeper), will also join the “Founders’ Stories” panel. Jason brings a consumer/mobile and healthtech perspective to the discussion. This session is always popular, as it features founders of top companies being brutally honest about the challenges they’ve faced in building their businesses.

—Meredith Flynn-Ripley, the CEO of HeyWire, will speak on a plenary panel moderated by Olin College President Rick Miller. Called “Serial Entrepreneurs Club,” the discussion will touch on the need to innovate across sectors such as mobile tech, big data, social marketing, and sustainability. The other panelists are Ash Ashutosh from Actifio, Roy Rodenstein from TrueLens, and David Berry from Flagship Ventures.

—Bob Frankston, a member of CommonAngels and co-creator of VisiCalc, will talk about the interplay between opportunity and innovation. Let’s just say Bob has some provocative views on existing models of tech and business innovation, and how things can be done very differently for the betterment of society.

—Sarah Hodges, co-founder and managing director of Intelligent.ly, will talk about the state of talent and training in the Boston-area innovation community. Sarah has her finger on the pulse of education for students, young entrepreneurs, and transitioning executives, and she has some important suggestions for how New England companies can develop their talent base.

—Naomi Fried, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital, will join the healthtech breakout entitled “Clinics, Corporations, and the Cloud.” The rest of the health IT panel includes Jeremy Delinsky from Athenahealth, Chris Boyce from Virgin HealthMiles, and John Walsh from CareCloud. Naomi will bring a much-needed perspective from the hospital side to the discussion of emerging technologies and business models aimed at improving healthcare.

—Our “startup Xpo” will feature about 10 seed-stage (or earlier) companies that we are hand-picking for their diversity of approaches and sectors. Emceeing the session will be Meredith McPherron, director of the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School. Meredith helped change the face of the HBS business plan competition this year, and she brings a fresh perspective to startup strategy in the Boston area (and beyond).

The full agenda is still evolving, and we’ll have more speakers to add, but I wanted our readers to see what’s in store for XSITE on June 19. It should be a fantastic rallying point for people who want to shape the future of Boston-area technology and business. We’re looking forward to seeing you all there.

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Updated 10 a.m. with new item
Some news on VC fundraising, startup investment, corporate layoffs, and student entrepreneurship in this midweek rundown of items to catch up on:

—Matrix Partners, based in Waltham, MA, has confirmed that it’s raised $450 million for its 10th venture fund. The news first surfaced in mid-April, courtesy of Fortune’s Dan Primack. Matrix did have one bone to pick with that earlier report: although its ninth fund was $600 million, as Primack noted, Matrix says that included a $150 million “special opportunity fund” that didn’t actually wind up drawing any capital from Matrix’s investors.

—E-commerce startup The Grommet (no longer Daily Grommet) has added more investment from Japanese e-commerce site Rakuten. As Kara Swisher at AllThingsD reports, neither company is saying how much money was put into Grommet again (Rakuten led an unspecified Series B investment in the startup last fall). But the larger company is now Lexington, MA-based Grommet’s “majority stakeholder,” Swisher says.

—More cleantech blues: Newton, MA-based Ambient Corp. is charging $350,000 in costs to a restructuring plan, most of that in employee severance. The Boston Business Journal cites unnamed sources pegging the number of laid-off Ambient workers at more than 25, roughly a quarter of the company’s overall workforce. Ambient (NASDAQ: AMBT), which makes smart grid connectivity and communications equipment, also announced its CFO was resigning earlier this month.

—Highland Capital has picked the newest class of student entrepreneurs to participate in its Summer@Highland program, which offers free office space and a no-strings-attached stipend of $18,000 to work on a startup idea over the summer. The full list of participants includes some good hometown representation, with teams from Harvard, MIT, Boston College, and Olin College. Cambridge, MA-based Highland recently filed paperwork outlining plans to raise a $400 million ninth fund.

Update:
—Acacia Communications, an equipment supplier for telecommunications companies, has raised a new $20 million round of financing. Summit Partners led the round, joined by existing investors Matrix Partners, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, and Egan Managed Capital. Acacia is based in Maynard, MA.

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A prominent leader in the tech-startup community is moving on.

Walt Doyle, the longtime CEO of Where, which was acquired by PayPal in April 2011, has left the company as of today. Doyle served as general manager of PayPal Media Network after the acquisition. It has been two years since the deal, so Doyle’s departure is not surprising.

I’ve reached out to Doyle and the local PayPal office for comments and an update on the company’s local progress and strategy.

There are two real stories here, and this isn’t one of them—they have yet to be written.

One is what Doyle (pictured below) will do next. He has been very active in the entrepreneurial community, serving on the boards of Celtra, EverTrue, and other companies, and serving as an advisor to other firms like Leaf and Auction Holdings. He is one of the Boston area’s leading experts in mobile technologies and payments, but more broadly he has strong business instincts in areas such as consumer products, media, and publishing.

The other story is about the future of PayPal in Boston. From what I’ve heard, a lot of PayPal’s mobile strategy is being driven locally. With Doyle’s departure, the local office is led by David Chang, the chief operating officer of PayPal Media Network. Chang originally joined Where as vice president of product back in 2009. Like Doyle, he is steeped in Boston’s entrepreneurial ecosystem (his previous experience includes TripAdvisor, m-Qube, and Mobicious) and is involved with a bunch of startups.

Another Where alum, Mok Oh (who served as PayPal’s chief scientist after the acquisition), left PayPal in October and is now working on a consumer-focused photo organizer startup called Moju Labs.

Where (originally called uLocate) was started in 2003 and relaunched in 2007 as a location-based mobile services platform. The company built its software business around local search and discovery, deals, and an advertising network, and became nicely profitable. The price tag for PayPal’s acquisition was about $135 million.

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The online world can be a dangerous place for the unprepared. And it’s just going to get worse. It’s time to teach cyber security as integral part of the high school and college curriculum and to all corporate employees.

I grew up in New York City and for a few years heaven on earth for me was going to Boy Scout camp in the summer near the Delaware River. The camp had all the summer adventures a city kid could imagine, hiking, fishing, canoeing, etc. But for me the best part was the rifle range. For a 12-year old kid from the city shooting target practice and skeet with a .22 rifle meant being entrusted by adults with something you knew was dangerous—because they were beating gun safety into our brains every step of the way.

From the minute we walked onto the shooting range to even before we got to touch a gun, we learned basic rules of handling weapons I still haven’t forgotten. You screwed up and you got yelled at and if you did it again you got escorted out of the rifle range.

While target practice and skeet shooting were fun, safety was serious.

Over the years I would learn how to shoot an M-16 in basic training in the military, go through a basic combat course to go to Southeast Asia (when we acted like this was a lark, our instructor stopped our drill and said, “For your sake I hope the guys shooting at you were screwing around in their combat course.” It got our attention). When I bought my ranch, herds of wild boar still roamed the fields. While we were putting in the miles of fencing to keep them out, I bought much heavier weapons to deal with a charging 400-pound boar and hired an instructor to teach me how to safely use them. Each time gun safety was an integral part of training with new weapons. For me, guns and gun safety became one and the same.

Hacking and Cyber Security

For consumers, online surfing, shopping, banking and entertaining ourselves have become an integral part of our lives. And with that has come identify theft, hacking, phishing, online scams, bullying, and predators online. As well as a loss of privacy.

But for businesses, the threats are even more real. Go ask RSA, Northrop, Lockheed, Google, Amazon and almost every other company with an online presence. Intellectual property stolen, customer data hacked, funds illegally transferred, goods stolen, can damage a company and put them out of business.

I think we’re missing something.

In the last 20 years three billion people have gained access to the Web. Yet for most of them safety online remains a problem for other people. It pretty clear that for a company going online today is equivalent to playing with a loaded gun. The analogy of comparing the net with guns might seem stretched, but I think it’s an apt one. Guns have been around for hundreds of years, to provide food as well as wage war, but it wasn’t until the 20th century that gun safety rules were codified and taught.

I think we need the equivalent of gun safety training for online access.

We now know the basic tools online hackers use. We know enough to harden sites to stop the simple hacks and to educate employees about basic social engineering and phishing attempts. It’s time to teach cyber security as integral part of the high school and/or college curriculum—not as an elective.Companies need to make cyber security education an integral part of their on-boarding process.

The Air Force Academy basic Cyber Security course is a good place to start (Stanford and other schools have a similar syllabi). The class consists of basic networking and administration, network mapping, remote exploits, denial of service, Web vulnerabilities, social engineering, password vulnerabilities, wireless network exploitation, persistence, digital media analysis, and cyber mission operations.

Lessons Learned

• The web is not a benign environment
• Companies, high schools and colleges ought to make a basic cyber security course a requirement of getting online access.

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There’s some more fuel for the online database arms race today: Boston-based Cloudant has secured a new $12 million investment round.

The money will bankroll Cloudant’s general growth, which includes a new office in San Francisco, complementing Cloudant’s previous footprint in Boston, Seattle, and Bristol, England.

New investors in the new Series B round are Devonshire Investors, Rackspace Hosting, and Toba Capital. Previous investors Avalon Ventures, In-Q-Tel, and Samsung’s venture arm also re-upped for the new round.

Cloudant’s three founders were MIT particle physicists, and have been working on “big data” since way before it was cool—think Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Large Hadron Collider. The company was part of the summer 2008 group at Y Combinator, when the startup accelerator still had an outpost in Boston.

Cloudant’s service helps Web and mobile developers handle big, complex, ever-changing sets of data without having to constantly manage the software behind it all. That frees up developers to work on their actual applications, rather than tinkering with the guts that keep them running.

Like most things cloud-related, the competition in this field is spread out from big to small. Amazon Web Services has its own database products, and big computing companies are getting into the game, alongside a crop of startups hoping to rise to prominence.

With this latest bet of confidence from investors, it looks like Cloudant will be one of the upstarts continuing to the next round.

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A couple of years back, business software company LogMeIn bought a little startup called Pachube. This happens all the time, of course—a public company snapping up a small fry, hoping to bring some scrappier DNA or a promising product into the fold.

But this acquisition, more than many others, seemed to hint at an intriguing future.

Pachube, an early leader in the burgeoning “Internet of things” field, had developed online software that let tinkerers and hackers connect their electronic creations to the Internet.

LogMeIn, best known for its cloud-based remote access software, re-branded the service as Cosm last year, but it was still a “beta” test version. The future remained a little unclear.

Now, we can finally answer the nagging question of just what LogMeIn (NASDAQ: LOGM) wanted with that connected-devices startup. Today, the Boston-based company is unveiling Xively (rhymes with “lively”), another new name for the software service formerly known as Pachube.

And with it, LogMeIn hopes to build out its software business far beyond its current competition with companies like Box, Citrix, and Google for the inboxes and desktops of office workers around the world.

As a subsidiary of LogMeIn, Xively is using its parent company’s underlying cloud infrastructure to offer a connectivity hub for developers who want to build that “Internet of things” by connecting physical objects—temperature sensors, light switches, and much more—to the Internet.

If that sounds like a page out of the much-admired (and constantly cited) playbook for Amazon Web Services, then LogMeIn is starting to get its message across. “We’re going to do the same thing for the Internet of things,” says Chad Jones, a Xively vice president of strategy.

Time will tell if the new effort has the juice to make that lofty vision come into focus. But LogMeIn thinks it has some natural advantages.

It’s all part of a major trend that seems like it’s been on the cusp of happening for many years now. As Clive Thompson wrote in Wired, “Back in the ’90s, big companies built systems to do tricks like this, but they were expensive, hard to use, and vendor-specific. The hype eventually boiled away. The Internet of things turned out to be vaporware.”

That has changed, quite noticeably with some high-profile products aimed at the everyday home. A major one is the Nest thermostat, a slick-looking digital heating and cooling controller produced by some of the folks who cranked out the first iPods. It’s connected to the Web and spits out reports of how much energy is being used in a home, while using machine-learning software to adjust to the patterns of its owners.

Another example is the WeMo system, made by connectivity company Belkin, which allows consumers to link relatively cheap power outlets and motion sensors to Web applications, allowing users to turn on their appliances or lights from a smartphone, for instance.

Both of these items are widely available—Nest thermostats are sold at Lowe’s hardware stores, and WeMo setups are prominently displayed at Best Buy locations. So it’s pretty clear this stuff is moving out of the realm of nerdy hobbyists.

“The possibilities are endless for how the community can design new sensors and the meta apps that connect them in innovative and useful ways,” says Scott Miller, CEO of hardware manufacturing consultancy Dragon Innovation, which counts the the Pebble connected smartwatch among its clients.

That means there’s going to be some intense competition, especially on the typically lucrative software side of the equation. There are bigger players trying to get some communication standards in place, Cisco and IBM among them.

Meanwhile, a group of smaller companies jockeys for position as an online “platform” that handles the Internet-connection layer of programming, making it easier for product developers to bring their creations to life. … Next Page »

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Yesterday, we ran the first part of a wide-ranging interview with Henri Termeer, the legendary biotech entrepreneur and former CEO of Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme. He spoke about what kinds of startups he likes to get involved in, the trend toward drug companies working on rare diseases, and efforts to repair pharma’s damaged reputation.

Today, he speaks in more depth about specific lessons from his final days at Genzyme.

Xconomy: I’d like to switch gears here for a second. Now that you’ve had some time to reflect, a couple of years have gone by since you left Genzyme, have you spent time reflecting on what happened to the manufacturing at Allston? Were there any lessons learned there, which you are taking forward?

Henri Termeer: Yes. The lessons learned, when this happened, we were short on manufacturing capacity because we were having very early success with a product called Myozyme for Pompe disease. A deadly disease, and it got approved very broadly, very early. In Europe, we utilized excess capacity we had in one plant while we were building new plants. While we were putting more through that one plant, we created a condition that reduced the provision of inventories for other products, and also quality concerns. We had too many things happening at one time. There was too much stress on the plant. In the middle of that, as inventories were low, we were hit by a virus. It was difficult.

You’re probably familiar with the Black Swan concept. It was our Black Swan. We had never had a virus in our plants. We hadn’t calculated that in, in terms of the need for inventories we’d need to recover from such a condition. When it hit, and we had to close down the plant, it was extremely painful. The second part was just as painful. Not only did we have to close down the plant, we had to take it apart. When we took it apart, we, of course, had to put it back together. And the productivity at the plant was very slow in coming up to the productivity we had before we closed it down.

Henri Termeer

When we recovered, we recovered very slowly. The plant just didn’t come up the way we had hoped. The new plants, meanwhile, were being completed. A new plant in Framingham, MA was completed shortly after Sanofi took over. Currently, we see Genzyme recovering in a very important way. It’s very interesting. Genzyme had that interruption, in a marketplace that was connected very closely, passionately, to Genzyme. But we couldn’t support all patients with the appropriate dose.

Competition came in during that period of time. The competition was in the process of coming for decades before this happened. You would have thought that Genzyme would have lost all its market share. It certainly would have been the case with some broad-based products. Generic products tend to take over very fast when they come in, on price. But Genzyme didn’t lose its market share. Last week when Sanofi announced its results for Genzyme, they were up 25 percent. They are regaining, continuously, in the market.

X: Are you still upset about what happened? Would you still be the CEO of Genzyme if this virus hadn’t hit Allston?

HT: I don’t speculate. Sanofi’s interest was of a strategic nature. That interest would have been there, independent of this. I can’t predict what would have happened without it. But the lesson here is if you get a condition of this kind, where you have products coming to market very early, manufacturing is something that has to keep up. Things can happen that may never have happened before. It happened to us. It was a setback.

X: How has that experience influenced you, and how might it affect the advice you provide to other entrepreneurs going forward?

HT: I know of many risks out there. This is part of what you do, you manage risk. The unexpected risk makes me very aware that amazing things can happen. You can think ahead to build in some protection. In this case, it would have been inventories.

X: Any chance you’ll take an operating role again in a biotech company?

HT: I kind of doubt it, because … Next Page »

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Because it’s often so difficult for entrepreneurs to obtain seed funding for their startups, bootstrapping is one of the best methods to self-fund their projects. And offering a service is one of the best ways to go. This, by the way, remains a controversial point of view, and most industry observers will take the position that companies get distracted if they try to bootstrap a product with a service. At 1M/1M, we take a pragmatic and contrarian position, and back it up with numerous case studies. From where we sit, bootstrapping products with services is a tried and true method.

RailsFactory, a consulting and app development company that provides solutions for the web application framework Ruby on Rails, was co-founded by Senthil Nayagam and Dinesh Kumar in 2006. RailsFactory provides numerous services—primarily focusing on app development for the Ruby on Rails platform, but also including Rails version migration, e-commerce solutions, e-mail campaign system implementation, and iPhone and Android app development.

Senthil and Dinesh bootstrapped RailsFactory themselves, starting with about $1,250 in seed money. When they needed to, they each utilized other personal resources: Senthil reached into his savings, and Dinesh turned to his parents. But they started generating revenues fast—thanks to the services they offered, they were generating revenue by their second month, and they’ve been growing since. To date, RailsFactory has executed over 100 projects and has worked with clients in the US, Canada, India, Australia, Singapore, and the UK. Their services revenues have crossed a couple of million dollars, and the company has recently built a product that they have started validating with those 100 services customers. The productized offering enables them to offer a support package to the small- to medium-sized enterprise segment based on packs of trouble tickets.

Similarly, Mansa Systems is a SaaS-based IT company, founded by Siva Devaki in San Francisco in 2006. Siva founded Mansa Systems to focus specifically on cloud computing. Currently, Mansa publishes a number of apps to be used in conjunction with Salesforce.com through Salesforce’s AppExchange app marketplace.

AppExchange allows partners to create apps to enhance Salesforce for business, and Mansa Systems currently offers eight different apps for Salesforce. Each of the apps is designed to address a limitation with Salesforce; for example, cloud storage app Cloud Drop gives users additional cloud storage space, MassMailer allows users to circumvent Salesforce’s bulk e-mail limitations, and EaglEye provides Salesforce users with secure, trackable document filesharing. Mansa Systems remains entirely self-funded via the company’s service business, and there are currently no plans to use outside funding. The company already has achieved $2 million in annual revenue, and enough profitability to be able to develop and launch its apps at a steady clip.

AgilOne, a company that provides cloud-based predictive customer analytics, was founded by Omer Artun in 2006. Initially, the company relied entirely on services to get close to customers, understand and address their problems, and in the process generate revenues. Today, AgilOne’s product is a software-as-a-service platform. Much of what the company learnt about its customers in the services mode has been productized, although a percentage of revenues still comes from services.

AgilOne’s platform is designed to make it easier for companies to see how their customers are interacting with their products. For example, a company’s online retail customers can be broken into different “clusters” based on their search and shopping preferences. These clusters then enable the company’s marketing department to more accurately target those users with specific promotions.

Omer bootstrapped his company from no revenue or employees in 2005 to about 45 employees and over $15 million in revenue by the time AgilOne partnered with Sequoia Capital in 2011. Silicon Valley’s top venture firm made a sizable investment at a high valuation in a company that was bootstrapped using services.

I have often heard that capital intensive businesses are difficult to bootstrap. There is some truth to this observation. However, Finisar offers the counterpoint.

Finisar produces optical communications components and subsystems and was founded 25 years ago by Jerry Rawls and Frank Levinson. Jerry and Frank bootstrapped Finisar by first providing consulting services while doing product development in high-speed fiber optics for computer networks. They searched for a need in the computer industry that wasn’t filled, and discovered that need in the early 1990s when they … Next Page »

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For Radius Health, it’s all about September.

That’s when the Cambridge, MA-based biotech will unveil the mid-stage data on a version of its experimental osteoporosis drug, BAO58, which is administered through a patch affixed to the skin.

CEO Michael Wyzga makes no bones about it: the moment is huge for Radius, despite the fact that the patch isn’t the company’s most advanced drug program (an injectable version is currently in late-stage clinical trials). The way Wyzga sees it, good news could swing Radius’ value high enough to make its big move.

“It’ll be a killer drug when we get it out there,” says Wyzga, who was Genzyme’s CFO before joining Radius in December 2011. “As we go past that, we’ll see. But we’ll do it on the back of a good valuation and good results.”

Radius has raised $240 million in total funding through four separate financing rounds from investors such as MPM Capital, Brookside Capital, BB Biotech Ventures, and F2 Biociences III. F2 led its latest round last month, a $43 million haul just five months after Radius yanked a potential IPO.

Radius believes it can change the market for osteoporosis treatments by adding a skin patch armed with an effective anabolic drug to the mix.

Osteoperosis, a degenerative bone condition that the International Osteoperosis Foundation says affects roughly 200 million women worldwide, is typically treated with bisphosphonates such as risedronate (Actonel, Warner Chilcott) and ibandronate (Boniva, GlaxoSmithKline) that work by preventing the bones from decaying. Some patients who take bisphosphonates still suffer from bone fractures—about 2 million osteoporosis-related bone breaks occur in the U.S. alone every year, according to Radius.

This has left an opening for a new crop of drugs, such as Eli Lilly’s (NYSE: LLY)  teriparatide (Forteo) and Amgen’s (NASDAQ: AMGN) AMG-785 (still in clinical trials), that work by building up the bones rather than preventing them from weakening. Teriparatide posted $1.2 billion in sales in 2012.

Both of those drugs are administered through injections, however. While Radius has developed an injectable version of BA058 that is currently undergoing a 2,400-patient, 18-month late-stage clinical trial that will wrap up in late 2014, Wyzga believes Radius can unlock its real value after the data on the patch comes out later this year.

Michael Wyzga, CEO of Radius Health

“If we could find a way to keep it private at least until that point and maybe until a little time after that, we surmise that we’re going to have pretty good results,” he says. “[And] we surmise that can be a pretty good value driver.”

Radius is a little fortunate that it will even be able to consider such a thing, because it would’ve been a publicly traded company by now if Mother Nature hadn’t stepped in.

Radius, which already reports its results publicly after merging with an unlisted shell company in early 2011, has toyed with the idea of an IPO for almost two years now without pulling the trigger. Radius announced plans to go public and raise $86 million in February 2012, and it set a range of $8.50 to $10.50 apiece for 6.5 million shares in October.

Wyzga says the company was all set to price at the end of October, but Hurricane Sandy barreled through New York City and shut down the financial markets for days. Radius thought of pushing the offering back a week, but that would’ve put its IPO right in the middle of the pre- and post-election market turmoil. So Radius passed, and ultimately yanked the IPO altogether in November.

Instead, the company raised $43 million privately in April, and now hopes that bit of luck will help it create more value in September.

“[We] would have ended up inevitably giving away … Next Page »

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It’s time to catch up with Dyn. You know, the once-bootstrapped tech dynamo from Manchester, NH, which raised a big venture round last fall and has been making some acquisitions as of late.

Today the Web infrastructure company said it has acquired fellow New Hampshire firm Trendslide, a business-analytics startup focused on mobile apps. No terms were given, but this is Dyn’s fourth acquisition since September.

Dyn says Trendslide co-founder Benjamin Petrin has joined the company as a lead developer in mobile tools. (Trendslide’s other co-founder, Jeffrey Vocell, spoke at last year’s XSITE conference; apparently he is not joining Dyn.)

It sounds like Trendslide’s mobile dashboard technology will be repurposed from a sales and marketing tool to an IT/development tool for Dyn’s core customers. But the common theme is mobility: data and analytics being pushed to business and enterprise users’ smartphones and tablets to help them keep tabs on their companies’ performance.

Dyn’s chief technology officer, Cory von Wallenstein, was an early investor in Trendslide. As is often the case, timing-wise, Dyn chose to buy the startup as it was about to raise more money.

Dyn was started in 2001 and became a leader in managed DNS (Domain Name System) and e-mail delivery services for big customers like Salesforce.com, Twitter, and Zappos. Back in October, the company announced its first venture funding round, $38 million from North Bridge Venture Partners.

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Henri Termeer could have easily faded away into obscurity a couple years ago. The biotech pioneer could have relaxed at his oceanside home in Maine, played a little golf. Or, if he wanted, he could have made loads of money at a private equity firm.

Certainly, he didn’t need to mess around with hungry little biotech startups nobody has ever heard of.

At 65, Termeer had more money than anyone could reasonably spend, thanks to the more than $100 million fortune he amassed at Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme. His place as one of the key mover/shakers in biotech history was secure. He will always be known as the guy who figured out how to build a great business by making drugs for rare diseases. Legions of his protégés had moved on to lead other companies, greatly extending his influence. Genzyme grew to 10,000 employees under Termeer’s watch.

While he could have stopped there, Termeer also had reason to write a different closing act to his career. The final days at Genzyme had taken a toll. The company he built and loved was caught flat-footed in a manufacturing crisis in Allston, MA, that erupted in June 2009. That disaster created shortages of Genzyme drugs that people depended on, sparking an angry backlash among patients and shareholders who saw irresponsible, or arrogant, corporate behavior. The crisis prompted the FDA to levy a $175 million fine for the manufacturing deficiencies it saw at Genzyme. Competitors exploited the opening. Genzyme’s sagging stock price made it vulnerable to an unsolicited takeover, which ended in a $20 billion sale to Sanofi in February 2011.

Two years later, Termeer sounds like a man who’s come to terms with the Allston disaster, and is mapping out a second career. He’s landed on a bunch of boards, allowing him to provide advice and insight, without having to shoulder all the day-to-day operating burdens of a CEO. He’s on the boards of MIT, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard Medical School, and gets his biotech fix on the boards of Verastem (NASDAQ: VSTM), Abiomed (NASDAQ: ABMD), and Aveo Oncology (NASDAQ: AVEO). More recently, he joined the board of privately held Moderna Therapeutics, shortly after it inked a $240 million upfront cash partnership with AstraZeneca. He’s advised a few startups, and gave away $10 million to Massachusetts General Hospital to start a personalized medicine initiative.

Henri Termeer

The guy clearly still has a lot of energy, and isn’t ready to walk away from biotech.

Last week, I spoke with Termeer by phone for a wide-ranging interview about his latest startup pursuits, and thoughts on some of the biggest issues facing the industry. Here’s the first part of the conversation. Look for the second half here tomorrow, as Termeer reflects more specifically on the turmoil at the end of his run at Genzyme.

Xconomy: You joined the board of Cambridge, MA-based Moderna Therapeutics a couple weeks ago, right after it got a huge deal done with AstraZeneca for its messenger RNA drug technology with $240 million in upfront cash. What attracted you to this company?

Henri Termeer: I was familiar with the company because I have worked with Stephane [Bancel, the CEO of Moderna] before. From the beginning, a year and half or two years ago when I got introduced to it, it was a very fascinating possibility. It kept on proving itself. It’s a different way to introduce proteins into the body through synthetic RNA. For me, it was about the people involved, the possibilities, the early-stage nature of it, the significant financial muscle behind it, and the local part. I do a lot of things in Cambridge. I can really be involved without having to sit on planes.

X: I saw you spoke to the Boston Globe a couple months ago, and you said something about how you’re free now and can get a lot more done. What do you mean by that?

HT: When you run a company, and build a company, you have many balls in the air. It’s similar to what I have going on currently. But you have the structure and discipline of a company when you’re responsible for it. It ties you down. You just have to do the work. You have to do the quarterly things. You are very intimately involved with any transactions. It’s an enormous, 24/7 kind of activity. Genzyme was continuously in motion. It was intense for 30 years.

I always had interest in the outside world. I was part of the Federal Reserve, and MGH and MIT and other places. But I did much less. I’d go to board meetings and would run some meetings, but it was different. I didn’t have any time then. Now, I have all the time, and I don’t need … Next Page »

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In the rush to revolutionize taxicabs, the hot new property isn’t a fancy black sedan or a network of hustling cabbies. Instead, digital entrepreneurs are suddenly racing toward the 21st century version of hitchhiking.

So-called “ridesharing” services, which enlist everyday people to make some money by picking up other folks, have been spreading from the San Francisco area thanks to high-profile startups like Sidecar and Lyft.

Uber, a heavily financed startup that is taking on the “black car” and taxi industries, recently jumped into the ridesharing game too, unwilling to let other upstarts expand on its possible turf.

But some startups haven’t bothered to change lanes—and that could be an advantage.

One of the most notable examples is Hailo, a London-based company that makes smartphone apps to connect consumers and cabbies.

“Simplicity is a beautiful thing,” Hailo CEO Jay Bregman says. “We believe that there is more than enough room to build a spectacular business just focused there. So we are laser-focused on doing yellow cabs and doing them perfectly, and nothing else.”

Considering the way taxi services are regulated around the country, that should be plenty of work.

In many cities around the U.S., local governments have strict laws and rules limiting the number of players in the car-for-hire industry. The regulations are meant to help protect consumers from unsafe drivers and wildly varying fares. But predictably, the highly regulated industry has become relatively closed-off, and hasn’t leapt ahead with the latest advances in technology.

There are also plenty of bad actors. An amazingly detailed Boston Globe investigation, for example, recently revealed the seedier sides of the taxi industry, replete with tales of bribes, driver gouging, and straw-man license owners cashing in on lucrative taxi leases.

The highly regulated, insular nature of the taxi industry has led to plenty of clashes around the country as entrepreneurs have attempted to shake up the old-school taxi and black-car system. And by far, the most pugnacious has been San Francisco-based Uber.

Uber’s early approach was to start hooking up drivers and passengers with more expensive sedan rides without getting officially blessed as a regulated black-car booking service, leading to some skirmishes with local authorities.

In some cities, including Washington, DC, and Boston, government officials conceded to well-organized pressure from the app’s fans.

There’s a good reason why those people are so vocal—the Uber app, and others like it, can make a formerly frustrating task seamless. Whip out your smartphone, and up pops a little icon on the map where you’re standing. Push a button to call a car, and it arrives. When you leave, pay through the app with the credit card you have on file.

The established taxi industry, however, isn’t quite so sanguine. In Boston, for example, taxi interests have sued Uber in a case that has federal implications (Uber has asked that the civil lawsuit be dismissed).

Hailo, however, has mostly escaped that ire.

While Bregman says there have been some conflicts, he thinks his startup avoids spooking the entrenched taxi systems too badly because of its focus on getting more people into cabs when they’re empty, rather than trying to crowd out the cab companies or own the relationship with drivers.

For instance, Bregman says, taxi drivers spend 40 to 50 percent of their time “desperately seeking fares.” Hailo’s goal is to put riders in those empty cabs, but make it incremental business rather than cutting out a radio dispatch company or other entity that makes money by getting payments from cabbies.

Hailo can make that approach work when it has large numbers of cabbies signed up, Bregman says.

Hailo says it has about 1,400 drivers registered for its service in Boston, a significant number when compared to the 1,825 licensed taxis in the city. Hailo claims 32,000 drivers registered across all of its cities, and says it is on pace for $100 million in … Next Page »

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