From bread baker to start-up maker

From bread baker to start-up maker

Landon Merrill has long had an interest in living organisms. He recalls spending summers during high school and college baking bread for a French artisanal bakery in the middle of the night.

Landon Merrill, Genoa Ventures

“I just loved that you were making something that was alive and interacting with yeast, and just the slightest things could steer them off into interesting places,” he tells Venture Capital Journal. “So it was a fascination with working with yeast and life and building something.”

That fascination with growing is still strong for Merrill, who was recently promoted to partner at Genoa Ventures, an investor in companies operating at the intersection of biology and technology. “When I’m working with these companies, it’s often coming from a place of education and cultivation and stewardship,” he says.

Merrill joined Genoa in 2021 as an entrepreneur in residence, then transitioned to principal in 2022 before being elevated to partner two years later. The San Francisco-based firm, which has about $150 million in assets under management, started raising its third fund in June, according to a regulatory filing. Genoa has not disclosed a target for Fund III, but Fund II closed on $84 million in July 2022 with commitments from the Rochester Area Community Foundation and the University of Minnesota Foundation, among others, according to fundraising data from affiliate title Buyouts.

Everyone at Genoa, which was founded in 2018, has a scientific background and experience as an operator. Merrill’s operating specialty is bridging the gap between technical and commercial teams, which “tends to be an uncomfortable exercise for early-stage life sciences start-ups where most of the hires are technical people practically until the company is ready to commercialize,” he notes.

Because so many of the team members at biotech start-ups are immersed in the effort to productize technology and few interact with people on the commercial side, “trying to transition companies from a technical, product-oriented mindset to a commercial one can sometimes be really painful,” he notes.

A career pivot

Merrill’s commercial acumen has evolved in stages. At the start of his career, he was a scientist. After more than five years as a senior microbiologist at Selective Micro Technologies, he joined GlaxoSmithKline as a senior scientist in late 2009. His work as part of a team that was using a next-generation sequencing platform to decode screening assays for drug discovery indirectly led to his first entrepreneurial experience.

He left Glaxo in 2012 to join New England Biolabs as an application development scientist, where he resumed his focus on how customers could use next-gen sequencing and genomics to translate to clinical use and other healthcare applications. At Biolabs, he was exposed more to product development and release cycles. While he was there, the company released three or four products that Merrill’s team developed from scratch which became foundational in RNA sequencing and that others would subsequently build on.

But he credits his time at Glaxo for helping to drive his move to California to co-found 10x Genomics (NASDAQ: TXG) in 2013. Both companies’ platforms were rooted in the ability to sequence and decode millions, if not billions, of different barcodes at a time, when most in the genomics market were using just a handful of barcodes simultaneously.

10x Genomics became known for its sequencers, which enable scientists to view gene expression in single cells, yielding a much more detailed picture of biological processes than was available before. By the time the company went public in September 2019, its lab equipment had been used in about 500 drug and other science-based discoveries.

Merrill’s decisive turn to the business side of scientific development occurred at Purigen Biosystems. One of Purigen’s investors, 5AM Ventures, had a thesis about the importance of scientific companies having product management practices early on and helped recruit Merrill to Purigen in 2016. His role as director of product management was created to test this thesis, he says.

While at Purigen, Merrill also worked with 5AM and Roche Ventures, another investor in Purigen, to explore other scientific tools and bring product management practices to some of their portfolio companies.

He gives credit to the teams of both venture firms for recognizing that product management functions should be present when a company is as small as 10 employees. He likens it to the idea that “if you don’t know exactly what the market needs by the time you start building it, your chances of hitting something that they’re going to be satisfied with and pleased to purchase [are] pretty low.”

Deciding not to go back to the technical side and drawing on his experience as an instructor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, he began to explore how to help technical workers foresee the commercial challenges ahead.

Much of that comes down to “helping them empathize with customers because a lot of them have been customers in the past and they’ve experienced what it’s like to have a product that’s just kind of off the mark,” he says. “Helping them understand how to avoid that with their own products that they’re developing was a very salient decision to focus on,” especially in Silicon Valley.

Becoming an investor

Jenny Rooke, Genoa’s managing director and founder, helped recruit Merrill to Synthomics, which Genoa helped to seed in 2018. As head of commercial operations at the synthesizer developer, Merrill tried to understand what was and wasn’t working.

After moving to Acorn Product Development as business development manager, he and Rooke kept in touch, mostly to assess companies focused on oligonucleotide synthesis, which helps create short fragments of nucleic acids with a specific chemical sequence used to analyze and manipulate DNA and RNA molecules.

When they didn’t find what they were looking for, Rooke asked Merrill to join Genoa in 2021 as a part-time entrepreneur-in-residence “to articulate what a new venture in the [synthetics] space should look like.” Although he was still planning to launch a new company of his own, he ended up working with portfolio companies, as well as on new deal diligence, and he eventually realized that was all he was doing. “I organically suddenly became an investor.”

“Having lived that full lifecycle from napkin drawing to commercial launch and beyond multiple times, I’ve been able to see the decisions you make early on impact things that aren’t going to happen for two or three years,” he says. When those decisions aren’t made early, embedded features of the product become intractable and can hurt the company’s chances of success, he adds.

Making start-ups more investable

Genoa tries to help companies it considers promising become stronger bets before investing in them and then de-risk them after deploying capital. Some of the companies it sources have a market or technology advantage but have a gap that prevents them from realizing their potential, Merrill notes.

BrightSpec is one of the more extreme examples in Genoa’s portfolio. The company’s molecular rotational resonance spectroscopy platform provides detailed insights into molecular structure. While BrightSpec had been in the market for a couple of years, its product wasn’t gaining traction. Genoa first invested in the company’s $18.4 million Series C round, which was completed in late 2022.

“We had a deep belief in the technology they had and the market space they were going after, but they had the product configuration wrong essentially,” says Merrill. “Our term sheet quite literally called out, ‘We’re going to do this work with you and lead you through it. We don’t have the answers for what it should be, but we can guide you on how to get to those answers.’”

For three and a half months he spent half his time helping BrightSpec’s founders map out a product development and commercial plan to bring the right product to market. “Since then, they’ve hit every milestone in the last two years that were outlined in that financing on time and under budget and are about to go to market with products that have exceptional feedback from the community so far in their beta testing and early access testing.”

Merrill wishes there was as much innovation and creativity on the business model side as there is on the technical side. He sees much more to be gained to that end through the use of analytics, including more thorough inquiry into creative ways to interact with customers. He says he’s actively doing that with multiple portfolio companies and seeing a lot more opportunities to do so in Genoa’s pipeline.

“It’s not like there’s a business model that I preferentially go for. But I am attracted specifically to companies that are reinventing the way that products can interact with customers and companies can interact with customers,” he notes.

He thinks the market is still getting comfortable with how to interact with new computational and analytics tools. It’s critical that not only investors but founders understand how much potential there is to create “unique types of product solutions that customers are delighted to engage with,” he says. Grasping how a new generation of customers wants to engage with companies and how they prefer to pay for things is all on the table, he adds.

“There’s a whole new wave of how things can be productized in a way that benefits the marketplace because there’s new tools available. It’s not just hard assets, reagents and software packages that can be licensed,” he explains. It’s become harder to justify licensing software any more because if it has any machine-learning capability, it’s getting better at what it does every time it’s used, which requires a different way to engage with it. Numerous companies are thinking through the implications of that for their business models.

This profile is part of an occasional series about new partners at venture firms. Read other new partners profiles here. If you know of a new partner who should be profiled, please contact David Bogoslaw here.

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