Join us for a Virtual Lunch & Learn presented by Dr. Yoanne Clovis as she explores how PhD and MD founders can adapt their communication approach as their companies grow.

As the scientist who discovered and developed your product, you are the best person in the company to explain the science to other experts in your field. You can close the first round and convince the first hires, usually also scientists. But scientists often fall into the expert trap, when your deep expertise prevents them from connecting with non-experts, like angel investors and non-scientist executives who could become your next hire or your next partner. What made you credible in the lab becomes a liability as the team grows.

This session looks at the specific pattern PhD and MD founders fall into somewhere between fifteen people and sixty: the founder keeps leaning on the science and insists on leading the communications alone, long after the company has outgrown that approach. Dr. Clovis will walk through when things tend to change structurally, why “I’ll handle it myself” stops working, and what early-stage and pre-Phase II leaders can put in place now to maintain scientific integrity while growing the company.

Have you ever wondered if your product truly has the upside you believe—or have sold to your investors? Given the remarkable failure rate of new products, it’s worth understanding what separates the winners from the losers, and how you can see more clearly which of those paths you’re on.

“From Half-Baked to Fully-Baked: Getting Your Product Right for Faster Market Uptake” is for entrepreneurs who run lean and can’t afford a new product failure. The talk is based on case studies with local Inc.-5000 companies that, while smart, made product blunders costing millions of dollars because of overconfidence and hubris.

Join us for a Virtual Lunch & Learn presented by Oliver Richards and Madelyn McCormick as they explore the common patent mistakes that early-stage companies make and how to avoid costly issues down the road. Most patent mistakes are cheap to avoid and expensive to fix. The trouble is that the fixing usually happens years later, in a licensing dispute, a due-diligence review, or a courtroom, long after the startup that made the mistake has moved on. This session looks at the most common patent errors early-stage companies make, from public disclosures that quietly forfeit foreign rights, to ownership and inventorship gaps, to provisional applications that don’t actually protect what the founders think they do.

Rather than a checklist of best practices, the talk works backward from how these mistakes surface once a patent is challenged or enforced, from the vantage point of a patent litigator who spends his days on the consequences. Attendees will leave with a practical sense of which early decisions actually matter, which ones are recoverable, and where a modest investment of attention up front saves a great deal of money and heartburn later.