Colleen Cuffaro (’14) completed her PhD in Cellular and Molecular Physiology under the advisement of Dr. Barbara Ehrlich. Her research focused on identifying a role for aberrant intracellular calcium signals in the development of metabolic syndrome. While attending Yale, Colleen served as Co-President of the Yale Healthcare and Life Sciences Club and Chairman of the Yale Business of Biotech Seminar. After earning her PhD, she accepted an analyst position at Canaan Partners, a global venture capital firm focused on technology and healthcare sectors. In less than a year she was promoted to her current position as an Associate on Canaan’s Healthcare Team.
Q. When you entered graduate school, did you expect to pursue a career in academia or were you always interested in pursuing a non-academic career?
A. I actually never thought about academia seriously. I was a chemistry major as an undergrad and then worked for three years at a contract pharmaceutical manufacturing firm. We were working with a range of clients from Big Pharma that I had heard of my whole life (Pfizer, Merck, etc.), but then I was also working with these early-stage biotech companies. I became really interested in what our clients were doing and thought, I kind of want to work at one of these companies. This is really exciting stuff. I wanted to learn some biology because I didn’t necessarily want to be a medicinal chemist, but wanted to do something scientifically based at one of these kinds of companies. So, I came into grad school with the hopes of eventually joining a company.
Q. How did this shape your graduate experience? What did you do during graduate school to position yourself for this type of career?
A. From the second I got on campus I was asking, what else can I do outside of the lab, because I knew I didn’t want to be an academic. I joined the Healthcare and Life Sciences Club (YHLC), went to their Business of Biotech Seminar, and did their pharmaceutical case competition. At one point I did a pro bono consulting gig. I found a lot of ways to get a little bit of exposure to different things, but still wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to do. I felt like I had a good ten-year, twenty-year goal, but didn’t know what the next step would be after graduating.
Q. How did you end up in venture capital, and at Canaan Partners?
A. I wasn’t thinking about venture capital, but I really didn’t know what early-stage venture capital was. While I was at Yale, Tim Shannon, a general partner in the Westport, CT office of Canaan came to give a talk at an event run by the YHLC. I went to Tim’s talk and at the dinner afterwards I was completely fascinated by the story he told: he started his career as an M.D., then went into industry, and now is a venture capitalist who also starts companies. I reached out to Tim about six months after we met to ask for career advice and he was willing to meet with me. Six months later—several days after I submitted my thesis—Tim invited me to come to the Canaan office to meet his colleagues because they were looking to hire an analyst.
Q. So you accepted a position at Canaan after graduating and have been with the firm for about a year—first as an analyst and now as an associate. What are your main responsibilities?
A. The majority of my time is spent looking at new deals and doing due diligence— evaluating opportunities and deciding whether they’re good investments or not. There are also opportunities to work with the companies on some level after they’re funded. I’ve been able to observe board meetings, participate in some scientific advisory meetings, and participate in strategy sessions for some portfolio companies, which is really cool.
Q. In what ways did your graduate training prepare you for your current position?
Investing is kind of an individual sport. Even though we work together as a team, each investor has their own investments that they make and they’re responsible for the success of them. That’s not different from graduate school. You have your own project, and yes, you get input from your P.I. and maybe a postdoc in the lab but at the end of the day you’re the one driving it. The other part is that fundamentally what you do in graduate school is take a big question for your thesis project and learn how to break that down into smaller pieces that you can answer over time. That’s kind of what we do with due diligence. We take this big question—Do we want to invest?—and break it down into smaller chunks and go after those pieces. Once we make the investment that’s also really what we’re helping the companies to do: break things down into smaller goals, match it up with a timeline and a budget, and execute on it.
Q. Are there any skills you need in your field that you didn’t acquire in graduate school?
A. I’d say there are two things you need to be able to do that we’re not really trained to do: read financial statements for companies and make capitalization tables. That means looking at the ownership of a company and a list of the shareholders, how many shares they have, and what percentage of the company they own. Those are Excel spreadsheets and they’re not incredibly complex, but they’re a basic part of the job and would be a part of the analyst or associate role at any venture capital firm.
Q. What are the most rewarding aspects of your job?
A. I think what I like most about it is that it gives me incredible breadth in my knowledge base. Any given day at Canaan you might interact with average of four companies, so those are opportunities to learn about completely new areas. In graduate school, I spent five years studying one channel. Now I will spend an hour talking to a company about doing bundle payments for health insurance, and then the next hour I’m talking to a company who has new oncolytic virus for ovarian cancer, and the next hour it’s someone with a new kind of nanoparticle delivery for RNAi.
Q. What are the greatest challenges associated with your role?
A. If there is a negative about the job, it’s that sometimes you feel like you’re learning so many things and you’re kind of an inch deep and a mile wide. Something I always prided myself on in grad school was that I was an expert in my area. But you kind of get the best of both worlds in VC because you get this breadth by looking at so many new companies and so many different areas, but then once you make an investment you get to dive deep with these companies.
Q. Many PhD students in the sciences are unable to take advantage of internship opportunities during their graduate training. What other activities would you recommend to those who want to gain exposure to your industry?
A. One thing I highly recommend is to subscribe to Fierce Biotech and Fierce Pharma daily newsletters. Even if you just read headlines and occasionally click on an article, you’ll start to absorb something from it, which is a sense of the macro-environment in the industry. I think that is very important, and it’s something that can be gained pretty easily without too much additional effort.
Q. Do you have any last words of advice for PhD students interested in VC?
A. Find a way to really understand what the job is, because I think it’s really easy to get frustrated with what you’re doing and think that the grass is greener on the other side. I think educating yourself is critical. Explore options for starting your own company or get involved in Yale Entrepreneurial Institute. Try to understand a little bit about the process of starting and operating a company and pay attention to what’s going on in the industry—where the innovations are, what the companies are doing.