INTERVIEW: CINDY MESAROS
How Biotech Startups Should Think About Storytelling and PR
Insights on marketing from a VC perspective.
Welcome to another installment of M*A*S*H* (Marketing Advice for Startups in Healthcare), VSC’s ongoing series of conversations with executives, investors, and entrepreneurs sharing their wisdom and experience. Recently we caught up with Cindy Mesaros, Head of Marketing and Communications at Foresite Capital Management. Cindy has had a varied and successful career in marketing and communications, leading teams and building brands. In addition to her role as Head of M&C, Cindy also serves as Head of Brand & People for Foresite Labs.Cindy shared her insights with us on marketing for healthcare startups, common misconceptions companies have about public relations, and more. We’ve known each other for years, and you've been in so many roles in technology prior to this. Tell me about your position at Foresite Capital today, and what from your past experience in Silicon Valley has prepared you for it. I run marketing and communications for Foresite Capital, a life sciences venture firm with about $3 billion in assets under management that invests across all stages of a company's lifecycle. I also head the brand and people (HR) function for Foresite Labs, an incubator for companies at the intersection of healthcare and data science.I have a typical startup background, where I’ve worked in some very small companies, including two that I've co-founded. I joined Foresite Capital as a newcomer to the world of healthcare and life sciences marketing. The industry is evolving quickly - healthcare and technology are merging, and that’s resulted in my past background in tech marketing being relevant in a way that it may not have been even a couple of years ago. What are the moments in a company’s life cycle where you engage with them? Is there a particular key set of insights that you try to provide? In general, the best advice we can give is to set aside the short term tactics and focus on the long term goal. Teams need to be mapping out a plan for what milestones are going to be reached over the next year or two and then thinking strategically about how to bundle those achievements to tell a compelling story.Sometimes a company will come to us the night before a release is going out, and I’ll ask them, “what are you trying to accomplish with this? What's the objective?” and the response will be, “my objective is to put this press release on the wire.” In those cases, we work with our partners to think through timing and goals to create a much more strategic plan around announcements. That’s hard to do on their own, so I am often advising companies to get an agency partner that can help think these through from a big picture level - a team that can really plan it out through the end of next year, see around the corner and maximize impact. In some cases, companies just want to have a release that indexes well online so that when new hires Google the company, there'll be some news out there. That's fine if that's the objective, but let's be clear about that, and let's then look at doing some local coverage in a market where their headquarters are instead of just going to national distribution on the wire.But a lot of my coaching is even more upstream than that. It's about the importance of having a brand in the first place. Thinking through how your brand looks and feels, how you speak to your audience. So brand building from the very, very beginning is a big part of what I do.
In general, the best advice we can give is to set aside the short term tactics and focus on the long term goal. Teams need to be mapping out a plan for what milestones are going to be reached over the next year or two and then thinking strategically about how to bundle those achievements to tell a compelling story.
We’re seeing a greater demand for marketing and storytelling in life sciences than ever before. Today, that's probably due in part to global interest in COVID, but how else are you seeing this need evolve?Today, patients are becoming really comfortable with virtual healthcare because they have no choice. COVID has forced this conversation around healthcare being more of a consumer play in some ways, and it's no longer purely about hardcore scientific B2B marketing.Classic consumer marketing skills are going to become increasingly important as consumers start to take the reins, become more savvy, make their own decisions, and explore other options for themselves. That shift has been happening for years, but it's only really recently that knowing how to talk to consumers is becoming valued.Are there unique challenges that these companies face compared to other Silicon Valley startups when they go out to market?The amount of capital and timelines required are really significant in this industry. In traditional tech marketing, you can have a product that just barely works, throw it out there and see what happens, test it in real-time on an audience. You can say, “let's go break things and see what happens, why not?” Nine times out of 10 it doesn’t work, but that 10th time it was great. It works, right?That is not on the table in life sciences. Everything has a longer cycle that is very highly regulated because the stakes are so much higher. If you’re marketing an entertainment service, whatever tactic you try might bomb, but no one's gonna die. In healthcare, that’s not necessarily true.
CCOVID has forced this conversation around healthcare being more of a consumer play in some ways, and it's no longer purely about hardcore scientific B2B marketing.
Do you find there are common misconceptions around what PR can do and cannot do that you have to coach these teams on?A lot of teams want a huge story, but don't necessarily understand the steps that it takes to get there. Generally, it requires going beyond putting a press release on the wire.It’s important to take your time, and sometimes that means a release date needs to be moved out. Start by seeing if you can get some interest early from writers that you have relationships with. Be a good resource to the media even when you don't have any news. That's something a lot of teams have a hard time with. It's not anybody's priority to be helping journalists out with industry information or providing introductions. Oftentimes a reporter will ask, “who else should I be talking to in this space?” and it’s important to follow through on that. You can't just reach out only when you have news of your own - you need to be a resource and a partner. If you don't have an agency, that can be a hard thing to prioritize.In tech, marketing is understood as either B2B, doing PowerPoints for the sales force and managing the trade show booth - or it’s B2C, and 100% focused on customer user acquisition. In healthcare, often we’re still on the trade show, sales support side of things, which is very tactical and doesn't generally involve storytelling. I hope that this consumer shift will help every company in the industry get away from the idea that marketing is tactical and equals sales support. Also, a lot of healthcare companies want their press release to coincide with a trade show. That's something we got away from in tech pretty early on because the news just gets lost in the noise.
Oftentimes a reporter will ask, “who else should I be talking to in this space?” and it’s important to follow through on that. You can't just reach out only when you have news of your own - you need to be a resource and a partner.
So PR is still pretty greenfield for a lot of these companies, but how about social media? How do you advise these companies to approach social channels?It's pretty untapped for the most part. LinkedIn and Twitter are the only platforms I see almost any activity on. Unless an executive already has a Twitter presence and is pretty confident with it, then encouraging them to put their time and effort there is probably not the best use of their time. You need to reach your audience where they already are. I don’t see much value being tapped from Facebook today. Although, as we talk about healthcare becoming more consumer-focused, we may see a big shift there, particularly with older audiences. I’ve not seen any companies successfully leveraging other social platforms.Do you see any patterns in terms of how much these companies invest in marketing at what stage? For example, do they typically have in-house marketing or PR teams at Series B, or do they have agencies?It varies, but I generally don't see marketing or PR in-house at the earlier stages. Some of the more progressive companies understand that the time to build your brand and your story is early, and will invest in a PR agency very early on when they have taken on a sizable round. It’s really hard to rebrand a company and reshape those perceptions that are already out there if you've neglected to pay attention to it from the beginning.My bias would be to think about what kind of brand you want to build from the very start, and then it becomes a question of when is the right time to build capacity in-house vs. externally. At a seed stage, you're not likely to have an agency on retainer, so that is when you do a lot of your planning in terms of your brand strategy. By series A, depending on the size, you should be thinking about bringing an agency on board. If the CEO makes it a strategic priority, you may be able to manage it without needing an additional in-house marketing person. At a series B, you may start to think about bringing somebody in-house who is managing marketing and PR efforts.When do these companies start caring about Google AdWords and SEO? Is that even on the radar?They need to, for sure. I’m starting to hear ‘consumer DNA’ coming up in recruiting conversations, which two years ago absolutely did not happen. Those skill sets are going to be wildly in demand, just the way they are in the tech world - figuring out how to get your message in front of the right audience, programmatic ad buying, all that stuff. When I co-founded a mobile company back in 2001, the cellphone industry was in its early stages, and then suddenly, we were at the forefront of this whole new shift in content strategy being delivered to phones. Then everything became about ‘social’ after that. And now, suddenly, the whole world's eyes are on healthcare, and it’s just on the precipice of merging with consumer marketing and technology.Tell us about Foresite Labs.Foresite Labs is an incubator headquartered in San Francisco and Boston led by Dr. Vik Bajaj, who was formerly heading up Verily at Google. We've been in operation as an independent entity since October of last year, and are looking at companies in particular that utilize data science in healthcare and life sciences. There's a general package that we put together to support incubated companies, which we’ll customize depending on the business idea and the capital needed. Then we bring on all sorts of resources in terms of infrastructure, marketing and finance operations, etc. It's a chance for us to explore areas we want to invest in where there aren’t yet investable opportunities. Now have the ability to launch those companies ourselves or partner with really great entrepreneurs to launch them.What we really have to offer is the strength of our people. We have extraordinarily sophisticated data scientists and engineers who can spend their time working with our entrepreneurs to help move their product ideas along a lot faster than they would be able to do on their own. We're currently hiring lab staff as Entrepreneurs in Residences (EIRs), and are partnering with entrepreneurs who have their own business ideas to bring to the table and want to launch them with the strength of an incubator behind them. So I encourage anyone to drop Foresite Labs a line through our website.A big thank you to Cindy for so generously sharing her expertise and knowledge. If you enjoyed this edition of M*A*S*H*, be sure to check out our interview with Julie Grant, a General Partner at Canaan who shares her insights on the firm's unique approach to building brands.