A new venture-in-residence program will help address one of America's most pressing issues: health care.
Google investor and former product manager Mary Mino on Wednesday announced the launch of an early-stage startup accelerator program called Treehub and an early-stage venture firm called AI Health Fund, aimed at supporting startups operating at the intersection of healthcare and AI. The AI Health Fund is the venture arm of the Treehub Residency, where founders apply to incubate their ideas.
The training program will last six months, with the first 12 weeks dedicated to helping founders find product-market fit and the final 12 weeks focused on the company's direction, Mino said. “We could consider raising a large round, joining a traditional accelerator, or even expanding across the entire hospital system.”
She said she got the idea to start the residency and program late last year, six weeks after giving birth to her second child, when a family member was diagnosed with acute leukemia and “went from very healthy to critically ill almost overnight.” She didn't like how difficult it was to find a specialist for this family, how long she had to wait after diagnosis before treatment was available, and how policies and outdated technology often slowed the treatment process.
“Things can only happen when people step outside the system and break the rules,” she says. “I realized we need more startups here that challenge the status quo.”
So she turned to her longtime friend Esther Wojcicki, an educator and mother of the late former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and 23andMe founder Ann Wojcicki. Esther was once Minno's high school journalism teacher, and the two have remained close ever since. The two talked about how to foster innovation in the medical field and how academics (often those who do a lot of research) struggle to get startup ideas off the ground.
The problem, Mino says, is that they don't really know how to tell a good story, at least in a way that venture investors want to hear, and they don't know how to successfully commercialize their research. She and Esther wanted to build a program that would team founders and business owners with an emphasis on academics, “in the same way that a venture firm teaches the techniques of building a business.”
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In addition to launching the Treehub Residency, which founders must apply for, Minno and Esther are collaborating with members of Stanford University's Biomedical Data Science Department to launch the AI Health Fund, which will pay out early checks (ranging from $50,000 to $150,000) to participating companies from academia. The fund plans to raise $10 million, and its first close last year was $1.5 million, Mino said. They raised $500,000 from family and friends and received a $1 million check from billionaire VC Tim Draper.
Anne Wojcicki joins as operating partner and Esther serves as founding advisor. The Stanford team includes Roxana Daneshjou, assistant professor of biomedical data science and dermatology at Stanford University School of Medicine; Minho's husband Derek is the president of VC firm Point Capital. Alexander Ioannidis, assistant professor of biomedical data science and genetics at Stanford University;
AI Health Fund hopes to support at least 60 companies in the first phase of the program. This fund was created as an alternative because Minno wanted to support founders who may not take advantage of the program, or who may not need the Treehub program and are second- or third-time founders, but still have a good idea.
That said, the AI Fund has already backed 12 companies from the Treehub program, including female hormone tracker Clair Health (which also passed the A16Z speedrun) and researcher Dennis Walls' new company focused on childhood autism.
Mino said the residency is still in an experimental stage as the team explores the best way to make the accelerator and fund approach work. He said the real value of the training program is that he wants to work with founders early on, before the company is established.
“In more than half of the cases, we introduce the founders to the lawyers who helped them set up the company, so they almost act as co-founders,” she said.
“The difference between us and other accelerators is that we actually help them strategize and do well. When they have a problem, we help them with problem-solving skills,” Esther said.
Mino said he wanted to build the Treehub residency program to support the needs of founders, such as arranging meetings they need and arranging everything they need to scale their business. “There are no demo days because these companies mature at different rates,” she said.
The overall goal is to see how the first iteration of the training program goes and “understand which aspects can be expanded and which aspects need to remain small,” Mino continued.
“It is very important to us that every company we work with is successful,” she continued. “Our vision is to multiply that tenfold, so we're planning to start very small and run this cycle a few times before hopefully running this across the country.”
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