Beyond Funding: Establishing Ophthalmological Ventures

So, Dr. Rahal, Excite Ventures invests, Excite Catalyst advises.

What gap were you trying to fill that a fund alone couldn't fill?

It's a good question.

And we've given that question a lot of thought in formulating this company.

First, scientifically speaking, there is a gap and it's a numerical gap that I can speak to.

We've at Exide Ventures entertained or heard pitches from now on.

I lost track, over 1,200 companies in the 10 or 12 years we've been investing.

And we've only invested in about 14 or 16 companies, which tells you there's another 900, 1,200 something that we didn't invest in.

So the physical gap is there's a lot of investable companies within that other thousand that for whatever reason we were not able to invest in for a million and one reasons.

But those companies have merit.

And we have found during those years that they often have questions and guidance challenges that we've helped them with, even had we not invested.

So essentially, the answer is to provide some of the services we've been providing as investor colleagues to companies that we aren't invested in and formalize that because we still get those questions and quite routinely.

Sky, your background is compliance, risk, and operations at global financial institutions.

How does that experience translate to advising early-stage ophthalmic innovators?

Well, I'd say first and most importantly, it has to translate to building the firm itself.

So in those two decades, I've spent a good amount of time doing program building across legal and operations.

And in the financial industry, obviously, it's heavily regulated.

And you have to make sure that you have discipline and structure when you build things.

But you don't build things just for regulators.

You build things for clients, customers, the bank, right? So you need to be thinking how to optimize things to be efficient and ultimately to deliver the services that your clients and customers need.

And so that's the mindset

that I

intend to bring to Exide Catalyst.

And then, of course, as it relates to customers, and clients of the firm.

That same idea of having strict discipline, of having professional presentation, of having a critical eye to diligence, that runs through all the things that these smaller firms need as they build and grow, right? To set their governance, to set their team correctly, to have their data due diligence room, data room, you know, due diligence ready uh and so i think uh i think it'll it'll translate pretty nicely