PharmaJet, Inc. (http://www.pharmajet.com) offers jet injection technology to deliver vaccines and drugs through skin. The company offers PharmaJet, a needle-free system that delivers liquid medications at high speed creating a ‘liquid jet’ that penetrates the skin and delivers the medicine through the skin in less than 1/3 of a second. It serves individual patients, as well as public health needs internationally. The company is based in Golden, Colorado with operations in

With approximately 23 employees currently,  PharmaJet was founded in 2007 and is currently headquartered in Golden, Colorado with other offices in San Francisco and  Baltimore.

As a privately held medical device design company, PharmaJet has developed an FDA 510 (k) cleared needle free jet injection technology.  It can be used to inject any liquid medicine into the body (human and animal), for fixed dosages ranging from 0.1cc to 0.5cc, into intra-dermal, subcutaneous, and intra-muscular tissue depths.  It is most appropriate for vaccine delivery, which is a standard 0.5 cc dose for nearly all human vaccines.  Since starting its first scientific collaboration 22 months ago, active pre-clinical and clinical testing of PharmaJet’s device is underway in 9 countries, with 18 partners for more than 25 vaccines and therapeutic medicines.

Market Opportunity

History & Genesis

PharmaJet’s technology was developed to address a need for safe and clean delivery of liquid vaccines, without a needle, in view of the massive infection rates caused from within the healthcare system of hepatitis B, hepatitis C, and HIV (and an additional 17 other blood borne diseases) due to syringe needle reuse and needle stick injury during vaccination (estimated at 22 million injuries per year world-wide).   With the World Health Organization’s (WHO) guidelines in mind, the Founders created a needle-free injection technology that is simple, robust, and inexpensive.  Besides getting rid of needles, however, there are a host of other sustainable competitive advantages and attractive features making it a value added device that can improve the lives of people, reduce the cost of healthcare, all the while generating profitability for PharmaJet and its partners.

Product  Potential

PharmaJet’s features help address the developing world problem of re-use (as much as 40-70% in some countries) which contributes to growth in disease and epidemic.  Further, the intra-dermal application (0.1 – 0.2cc volume) may contribute to stretching vaccine supply (reduced dosage, but similar immune response to standard 0.5cc dosage) where there is shortage so that the health net can be spread among a larger population, ultimately benefiting their group welfare and economy.  At the same time, it is perfectly appropriate for the sophisticated healthcare market, and eliminates needle-stick injury which is prevalent everywhere.  As a technology platform, there are a variety of additional product extensions that allow it to be useful in other injection segments, user groups, and processes.

Initial Markets

• Human vaccine market: >1.75 billion needle-syringes being used annually for injection of vaccines, for children and adult populations.
• Animal vaccine market: Even larger by volume than the human vaccine market, PharmaJet’s device has been used successfully in a range of species (mice, rabbits, guinea pigs, dogs, cats, goats, sheep, horses, cattle), making it suitable for:
  • For pre-clinical research and antibody production
  • To keep companion animals from spreading disease to their owners (i.e. rabies), and;
  • To keep animals productive, so that populations do not starve (developing world), industries are not financially devastated (i.e. culling for foot & mouth disease), and producers maintain efficiency (i.e. dairy).

The Position

As PharmaJet, Inc. seeks to substantially expand it’s product user base, exposure and revenues in 2010, the PharmaJet Regional Business Development position plays a vital role in product introduction, demonstration and sales within several key market segments.  Leveraging their industry experience, this sales and business development leader will systematically identify and develop key new market opportunities and represent product sales to all public and private healthcare providers currently utilizing needle injection delivery of vaccines and select drugs to patients and the general public. Based upon a pre-defined region, such product introduction will use a team approach for product adoption and use support, in conjunction with PharmaJet Certified Trainers and Technical Support. This position will thus serve as the overall regional business manager of these services.  The role will be focused on integrating PharmaJet’s product capabilities into all relevant regional public health networks, private clinics, and hospitals, thereby participating in all key mass vaccination events at the city, county and regional levels.  Such efforts shall include attendance and representation at all relevant user’s groups and regional conferences of professional healthcare providers

Financial Backing

PharmaJet has raised a Series A and B equity financing from angels and strategic investors, and is well capitalized to enter their next phase of commercialization.

Compensation

Compensation is competitive with the position’s requirements.  In a performance-based environment, this will include base salary, incentive bonus structure based on both quantitative revenue goals and qualitative MBOs, and a potential stakeholder position in the company.

Periodically, we make an effort to pull together executive compensation trends and analysis focusing on venture capital backed companies in the United States.  The last executive compensation report we put out was in September 2009 (see prior blog post http://www.bostonsearchgroup.com/blog/ceo-compensation-analysis-west-east-founder/), and focused on C-level compensation, with a further contrasting of founder versus non-founder CEO compensation, both West Coast and East Coast.

This report is similarly focuses on West Coast and East Coast differences in executive compensation, however this time looking at the VP level across the functional organizational structure.  For purposes of this report, only companies who broadly fit the definition of “information technology” were used in the analysis, not including biotech, medical device/medical technology, or cleantech.

The titles looked at include the following–

Vice President Business Development

Vice President Engineering

Vice President  Marketing

Vice President Sales

Vice President Sales & Marketing

VP Software Development

VP Product Management

Note that below we’ve only included the analysis of the executive compensation data, in other words the deltas. If you’d like more detail and the information on which we based the analysis, please email damador@bsgtv.com with your name, title, company and business email address, and we can provide you with the baseline full report.

Do keep in mind that this is only one set of data. To draw the best comparables, it’s important to do all three data-grabs listed above. Also, this is a “blended” sample set of multiple venture-backed industry sub-sectors in the information technology category. Some industry sub-segments may pay more or less than others with further parsing.

West Coast Early vs. Later-stage Venture Capital-backed Companies

Cash compensation is almost always higher in later stage companies, and this is reflected in all 3 quartiles of data analyzed.  For West Coast venture-backed companies, the differences are $15,000 to $50,000 in most roles, with an average different of about $25,000.  The only exception is for the VP Sales/Sales Marketing role, where cash was significantly higher in later stage companies for these roles, ranging between $75,000 to more than $125,000 in the top quartile companies.

Conversely, equity is almost always higher in early-stage companies to offset the lower salaries referred to above.  For these West Coast companies, regardless of quartile, earlier-stage companies received on average ¼% to ½% more equity, with the biggest jump in VP Sales/Marketing, and lowest in the VP Engineering function.

East Coast, Early vs. Later-stage

East Coast compensation tells a different story from their West Coast counterparts.  Although cash compensation was similarly lower in early versus later-stage companies, East Coast executives of venture-backed companies didn’t see the “make-up” effect in equity.  In fact, equity appears lower in many of the quartiles compared, by as much as ½% comparing East Coast early versus East Coast later-stage.

East Coast vs. West Coast, Early-stage

Cash compensation, East versus West, shows that West Coast executives of early-stage companies more often than not earn more in base .  West Coast Engineering is $10,000-20,000 more in base, VP Marketing is up West over East by $10,000 to $50,000. VP Sales/Sales & Marketing is actually the one notably lower cash category where East Coasters are better off than West in the higher quartiles (but not the lowest).  As noted above, West Coast early-stage executives are compensated more favorably when it comes to equity than their East Coast brethren virtually across the board.

East Coast vs. West Coast, later-stage Venture Capital-backed Companies

As for cash compensation for later-stage companies East vs. West, a similar pattern existed being mostly lower than their West Coast counterparts, than its West Coast peers.  However, when looking at equity stakes in later stage companies East vs. West, the East Coast did better, often by ¼% to as much as ½%.

Every few months we survey the innovation-stage community of CEOs with the goal of leveraging our C-level relationships as executive recruiters to generate collective wisdom to share back.    We hope below you find insights that help to run your companies more strategically.

In August, we surveyed our CEO community and had more than 60 CEOs participate.  Thanks to all who contributed.   The theme of this survey was centered around whether a different strategy is required to succeed post-recovery than that which was in place pre-recession.  These CEOs came from those practice areas in which we focus, and included broad based technology companies in the media, software, mobile and telecom sectors, Biotechnology, medical devices, and cleantech / renewable energy.

The 60-plus participating companies were spread across the growth-stage spectrum, ranging from pre-revenue through profitable/shipping product, most being seed-funded through post-Series C, as well as private equity-backed–

To set the stage for the survey questions, when asked when CEOs were expecting the recovery to materially reach their companies, the results were still quite bearish, with more than 50% responding Q2 2010 or later–

Although entrepreneurs are supposed to be eternal optimists, when asked what sort of recovery CEOS expected, again, the majority picked the worst of the alternatives, with more than half opting for a “W” recovery (in graphical terms, a double dip, with the last year starting September 2008 to now equalling the first “u” of the “W,” and another anticipated dip between now and Q2 2010 or later.  Almost as bearish, 28% of CEOs chose an “L” recovery, indicating that they felt “recovery” was really better defined as a flatting out of the downward trendline, but no corresponding upward rebound–

The next several survey questions focused on business strategy.  58% of CEOs indicated that they were not planning on pursuing the same strategy after the recession than before–

In executing on their strategies, CEOs responded somewhat intuitively that sales & business development functions would be two of the most important executive level functions that would help them in executing successfully post-recovery.  Somewhat less intuitively, the third most important functional area ranked was product development–

The last strategy question posed to CEOs was whether - if a majority of the CEOs were executing on a different strategy in post-recovery than pre-recession – did CEOs feel that the same executive team they had could execute effectively on both.  More than a third of CEOs surveyed indicated, no, their current executive teams were not the right teams for their new post-recovery strategies.

As for their companies’ financial condition, 60% CEOs responding indicated they were still burning cash, 15% were cash flow break-even, and 25% were running their companies in cash positive position–

And answering the perennial question as to whether CEOs were planning on raising equity capital in the near future, slightly more than half responded in the affirmative–

In conclusion, the survey pointed up the fact that innovation-stage companies are still very cautious around the economic forecast, have recast their strategies as different from pre-recession in preparation for the recovery, but still have some retooling to do within their executive teams to optimize the chances of outstripping their competitors in 2010.

Thanks again to the CEOs who participated.  Knowledge is power.  Collective knowledge is actionable.

I’ve had the opportunity to be in Asia (Hong Kong and Singapore), Silicon Valley, Boston, New York, and Europe in the last 2 months of this year.  Most of the community I’ve been with has either been technology or science-based entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and other institutional investors banking those start-ups, or professional services providers helping fast-growth companies hit their various milestones.  It struck me that I’d had the opportunity to sample how each community, country, culture, or continent was responding.

Asian perspective: “We’ve had tsunamis, bird flu, SARS, and financial crises like the Asian flu (1997 financial crisis), and this recession that’s hitting us now is likely worse than all those combined.”  U.S. and European entrepreneurs who were offshoring their manufacturing were saying that getting products prototyped in mainland China– something that used to be a problem because start-up run lengths were too short– was no problem at all.  Vast numbers of factories were laying off workers, and these same factories were more than willing to start with shorter runs and low/no guarantees to help offset the freefall in the manufacturing sector there.

Silicon Valley: Suffice it to say, out at dinner on a Monday night at a restaurant called A16 in the Marina District in San Francisco, there was no sign of recession.  We had a 7pm reservation, and almost got waved off for being 15 minutes fashionably late,  getting the last table squeezed in amongst the revelers.  Consumers were showing no spending fatigue.  Out near Sand Hill Road, it was a bit of a different story.  A few investors were shorting the stock market with their personal money, but still emphasizing that this was the time to do seed and Series A investments.  All in all, as is typical for Northern California, optimism abounded.

Boston:  Here, it sounds much more like Asia:  pull in all investing.  Only add follow-on investment to your own portfolio.  If you do invest, the going rate in some VC circles was rumored to be, “new valuation pre-money is equal to the amount of last money in.”  In other words, if the last round was $15 million, that would be the valuation, no matter how much had preceded it.  CEOs in Boston are talking about the return of “vulture capital.”  In the parking lot of a commuter rail train station, one late-night rider yelled back to another who was also getting off at the same stop, “What you doing getting home so late?” The response– “Went out with some of the people from work who got laid off today.  Cut 15 or 20.”  The first commuter answered back, “Yeah, layoff at our work today as well, but no one went out.  Stayed and worked late.”

New York: Quiet.  For the city that never sleeps, there was a really good imitation of somnambulism.  Everyone seemed to have had a prolonged Ambien moment.   The epicenter of the financial crisis seems to have brought down virtually every other sector along with it.

Europe: Or, more specifically, the UK.  With the Sterling down, and the second biggest stock market suffering similar downdrafts as that of the U.S., it’s also really quiet.  Unlike the last recession brought on by the dot-com bubble burst where Europe lagged a full 6 to 12 months behind in its slowdown, the UK in particular has suffered almost simultaneous with the U.S.

Ultimately, this was the take-away for me– no matter whether I traveled 3 thousand miles west, or 15 thousand miles east, the speed at which this downturn has traveled was faster than any plane I could catch.  It had beat me to each continent I landed on, each city I was doing business in.

As we cruise into the New Year, my wish is a hope that the recovery is also as globally instantaneous.