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by Ted Driscoll on May 3rd, 2013 
Congratulations to Claremont Creek portfolio company Natera on closing a $54.6 million financing round. Given Claremont Creek Venture’s involvement since the company’s earliest round of financing, we know Natera is on its way to dominating the market for noninvasive, prenatal genetic testing. The financing is just the latest recent milestone for the company. In February it announced a major agreement with Quest Diagnostics, the world’s leading diagnostic information . . .
→ Read full post: Congratulations to Natera on Completing $54.6 Million Financing to Support Expansion
by Ted Driscoll on March 11th, 2013
The human genome evolved for us as Paleolithic cavemen, arming us to cope with leopards, communicable diseases, infections, parasites and starvation. But modern society has succeeded in taming most of those risks, and now, ironically, our biggest health challenges are largely a byproduct of our success. As we extend our lifespan, cancer and cardiac disease increase in incidence. We confront an epidemic of diabetes and obesity related diseases largely caused by overconsumption and inactivity. Our genome never evolved to benefit obese 70 year olds. Cavemen didn’t typically live past 40 and didn’t drink high-fructose corn syrup in Big Gulps. . . .
→ Read full post: The Golden Age of Healthcare Investing is Now
by Ted Driscoll on February 23rd, 2013
Congratulations to Natera—our portfolio company who is the leading innovator in prenatal genetic testing! Yesterday they announced a major deal with Quest Diagnostics (NYSE: DGX), the world’s leading diagnostic information services company. Quest Diagnostics will offer physicians access to Panorama™, the new non-invasive prenatal test developed by Natera. (Read the Quest Press Release)
Panorama uses free-floating fetal DNA in circulating maternal blood to screen for chromosomal abnormalities associated with . . .
→ Read full post: Congratulations: Quest Diagnostics to offer access to Natera’s Panorama, non-invasive prenatal test
by Ted Driscoll on February 22nd, 2011 A version of this article was originally published February 21, 2011 in The Health Care Blog Follow comments on the original blog post
mHealth – otherwise known as mobile healthcare – sounds like just what the doctor ordered to help make healthcare delivery cheaper and more effective. And since the Internet today essentially resides in everybody’s pocket, we have what amounts to a last-three-feet problem. So I’m not sure mHealth is ready for primetime, . . .
→ Read full post: mHealth – Potentially Valuable, But Not Ready For Primetime
by Ted Driscoll on February 6th, 2011 When I was in high school back in the 70′s, I remember my favorite physics teacher telling me about the difference between data and information. Data was raw, unprocessed and unlinked to any meaning. Information was what data became when it was linked to meaning. This was an important distinction that has even greater meaning today in 2011.
I also remember that data was precious, hard to find and gather, and often even hard to . . .
→ Read full post: Creating Value In A World of Big Data
by Ted Driscoll on December 7th, 2010 I was at an event with a group of MBA students a couple of weeks ago, chatting with two of them. One asked me how the venture deal flow was different in the past. I made the off-hand comment that the World of Could seemed to have grown much bigger, but the World of Should hadn’t kept pace. That passing comment has stimulated a lot of thought on my part in the past couple of weeks. . . .
→ Read full post: Musing on the “World of Could” and the “World of Should”
by Ted Driscoll on October 12th, 2010 Last year, Claremont Creek Ventures was exposed to over 500 startup ideas and entrepreneurs. As is probably typical in most early stage technology Venture Capitalists, we ultimately invest in less than 1% of the deals we see. That means we are saying “no” at least 99 times for every time we ultimately say “yes”. It is therefore understandable that VCs can seem negative, arbitrary and arrogant to the entrepreneurial community.
Why would we say “No”?
In . . .
→ Read full post: A VC’s “No”, What is it good for?
by Ted Driscoll on July 29th, 2010 Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot about how the VC model is dead, and the venture capital industry is drying up. This is justified by the lack of conventional exits and liquidity events, meaning the venture capital funds can’t return cash to their investors. While we have clearly been going through a flat spot in IPOs, and the world of acquirers is reduced, I’m not sure that implies the industry is dead. I think its just . . .
→ Read full post: Idea Flow
by Ted Driscoll on June 16th, 2010 The classical view of venture capital is that a VC invests in a company, grows it into revenue and breakeven, and then sells equity in it to the public in an IPO. The exit part is the VC’s can then sell their ownership interest in the startup to that public market of buyers as the company grows in value, or distribute their now-liquid shares to their limited partner investors to sell . . .
→ Read full post: What makes a good VC? — Exits
by Ted Driscoll on June 15th, 2010 After making a venture investment and building value in the startup, in preparation for an exit. This is the operational part of the job — how do you help a startup succeed? . . .
→ Read full post: What makes a good VC? — Managing and Growing the Deal After Investment
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