“Invest ahead of the crowd, believe in your intuition, sense early, respond immediately, be resilient, and pivot to accelerate when others are fearful“
Dr. Martin Alexander Gershon
Managing Partner and CIO, Endeavor Life Sciences Venture Funds and Venture Studio
Email: endeavor@gershoncapital.com
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/martingershon
Dr. Martin Alexander Gershon, MD, JD, MPH is the Managing Partner and CIO of Endeavor Venture Funds and Endeavor Venture Studio. He is a Leading Healthcare and Life Sciences Innovation Strategist, Futurist and Advisor for emerging Unicorns and Fortune 500 companies, and prominent Venture Capital Investor and entrepreneur featured on CNBC and in Fast Company.
Endeavor Life Sciences was founded in 1999. As the Managing Partner and CIO Dr. Gershon is the architect driving a team of 22 professionals to leverage Endeavor’s ecosystem of collaboration partnerships to provide CEO/Entrepreneurs Founders with bespoke revenue generating Go-to-Market strategies, FDA regulatory services, clinical trial design and reimbursement and coding guidance, and the development of strategic and corporate partnerships to grow, scale, and commercialize disruptive new healthcare and life sciences products and services stemming from technologies like AI and ML.
Over the past 23 years Endeavor has expanded and developed an ecosystem of collaboration partners within Big Tech Companies, Digital Healthcare, Pharma, Biotech, Medtech and Healthtech, leveraging the core competencies of the partnerships and providing transformative innovation and technology solutions to emerging healthcare companies. With this ecosystem Endeavor designs strategies for CEO/Founders to improve their business performance, use big data more intelligently, and accelerate revenue generating implications of new technologies such as AI and Machine Learning. Endeavor particularly targets emerging Digital Unicorns in Healthcare and Life Sciences to design strategies to expand AI Healthcare use cases in collaboration with Big Tech and Cloud Providers, providing companies with bespoke growth strategies that accelerate commercialization and generate new stand alone revenue streams. This hyper growth often leads to the development of financial partnerships and syndicated venture investment opportunities within our network of 200 venture partners and corporate venture accelerators and our venture arm, Endeavor Venture Funds.
Dr. Gershon and Endeavor have served as Senior Advisors for Commercialization and Go-to-Market Strategies and FDA and CMS regulatory affairs for McKinsey & Co., Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital, Fidelity Investments, TPG, BlackRock, Tiger Global, GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Pfizer, Novartis, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Dr. Gershon is also a prominent Healthcare and Life Sciences Venture Investor, and CIO of Endeavor Venture Funds and Venture Studio, the Chief Innovation and Investment Officer McGill University, and Advisory Board Member McGill Innovation Fund. Endeavor Venture Funds is an evergreen Swiss Healthcare and Life Sciences Fund, established in 2009, and has invested in groundbreaking companies like Moderna and 94 life science companies with 140 investments, reshaping the healthcare system. Endeavor’s companies all possess disruptive technologies with strong scalable commercial potential, driven by great entrepreneur/founders who look for coaching and partnerships within our ecosystem to enhance and build their companies into the next great unicorns.
Dr. Gershon is the Managing Partner and CIO of Endeavor Life Sciences Venture Studio – The Alternative to Accelerators. Unlike an accelerator, a venture studio doesn’t fund existing startups. Instead it provides very “hands on” guidance and operational and strategic guidance with seasoned entrepreneurs, subject matter experts and business leaders to help grow, scale and commercialize the company’s products or services.
Venture studios create startups by incubating their own ideas or ideas from their partners. The studio’s internal team builds the minimum viable product, then validates the idea by finding product/market fit and early customers. Examples of companies that have emerged from venture studios include Overture, Twilio, and the most famous alum, Moderna.
90% of startups fail in the first 3 years. Not because they run out of money as most CEOs believe, but because they don’t know how to put the right team, partnerships, and strategies together and don’t have the team to implement revenue accelerating go-to-market strategies (which are often flawed).
They lack key partnership and collaborators, and are often fearful of sharing their ideas because they believe their product is so unique and so valuable that everyone wants to steal it.
This is just poor judgment and leads to a death spiral of isolation, going it on your own, and ultimately then running out of money and failing. It’s the lack of leadership and vision that leads to running out of money. Not as most CEOs believe, running out of money as the great driver of failure.
Endeavor Venture Studio addresses these problems with proven solutions for success. Once you know how to be successful, you can template it. And that’s what separates Endeavor Venture Fund. We have over 25 years of experience in building and exiting great healthcare and life science businesses, all supported by our ecosystem of Big Tech, Big Pharma, MedTech, Biotech, HealthTech, and Prominent Academic Institutions like Harvard, MIT, Boston University, McGill University, NYU, and Columbia University. We partner with the largest Fortune 500 Companies and greatest institutions to help provide a problem solved ecosystem at the hands of great CEO/Entrepreneurs who are committed to growing, commercializing and scaling the next great healthcare and life science Unicorns.
Dr. Gershon is a Mentor-Advisor to many healthcare and life science start-ups. He is a Techstars Mentor, MassChallenge Expert Investor and Mentor, Executive-in-Residence Matter Health Accelerator, Series A Venture Fellow Newchip Accelerator, Harvard Innovation Labs Mentor, NYU Stern Business School Entrepreneurship Mentor, Ben Franklin Technology Partners Investment Committee Member, Harvard Technology Alumni Association Life Sciences Division Lead, and active member of the Angel Capital Association, Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of London and Northern California, Harvard Business School Private Equity and Venture Capital Alumni Association, Harvard Alumni in Global Finance, Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs, and Harvard Business School Healthcare Alumni Association.
Dr. Gershon is a designated Standard and Poor’s Healthcare Industry Leader, Google Healthcare Scholar, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Mayday Fellow neuroscientist, oncologist/immunologist, and FDA regulatory attorney specializing in clinical study design.
Dr. Gershon has been an entrepreneur and healthcare investor since 1996, founding a series of outpatient emergency clinics. Patients coming to the hospital emergency room are often admitted to avoid liability risk, yet most patients don’t need admission and end up with hospital acquired infections, needless tests and the hospital gets burdened with unreimbursed bills. Dr. Gershon trained ER physicians in the hospital to triage patients to avoid unnecessary hospital admissions, transferred patient liability to his clinics, built ERs outside hospitals and grew a start-up to a company generating $25M of annualized free cash flow within 3 years. Dr. Gershon’s background in healthcare insurance, reimbursement, and regulatory affairs provided a unique competitive driver that provided higher reimbursement for outpatient clinics and better care for patients. The company was successfully exited in 2003.
In 1999 Dr. Gershon founded a Clinical Research Organization (CRO) and within 2 years grew it to become the largest CRO investigating pain treatment therapies in the Northeast, with over 3000 patients enrolled in clinical studies. The company was successfully exited in 2004.
Dr. Gershon is a former Pictet Asset Management Advisory Board Member, Chair Aspen Institute Business of Health Program, Senior Fellow Aspen Institute, CEO of Comprehensive Care one of the largest CROs in pain management, Senior Advisor to the Dean of McGill School of Medicine for life science licensing and commercialization, Professor of Healthcare Economics and Policy Johns Hopkins, Lecturer of Healthcare Finance and Drug Development Harvard and MIT Sloan Business School, Guest Lecturer at Oxford University Said Business School, The Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, and Professor of Healthcare Economics and Finance Columbia University, and the recipient of the Ceiba-Geigy Outstanding Researcher Award in Oncology and Immunology.
