With its stock up 1,190% in the decade ending June 2006, Genentech, once a legendary startup whose leadership under its founder the late Robert Swanson has been well chronicled, today leads the biomedical industry as an established company. Here are just a few examples of how a strong entrepreneurial culture at Genentech over the last ten years has kept innovation and effective commercialization humming at even a large company¹:

The lessons of Genentech are also appropriate to today's biotechnology startups. Indeed a track record of entrepreneurial culture, disciplined resource allocation, and careful technology market-matching² is an attraction for venture capitalists funding the expansion of small bio-medical companies. For example, Dan Summa, Venture Partner at Genesys Partners in New York City, emphasizes that he looks for companies that have successfully endured periods of scarce resources. These are entrepreneurial management teams that learned key skills during the post-Internet bubble 'nuclear winter' of biotech funding in the early 2000s; skills such as bootstrapping and surviving with leaner infrastructure rather than large organizations, motivating talented people with means other than high salaries and stock options, using in-licensing and partnering to obtain technology from others and to stretch resources, and focusing on well defined revenue-generating projects and business arrangements that demonstrated and advanced their innovative technologies.