Red Flags and Green Lights: How Leen Kawas Evaluates Biotech Teams as Both Founder and Investor

Most venture capitalists have never walked in an entrepreneur’s shoes. They’ve built careers evaluating companies from the outside, armed with spreadsheets and pattern recognition, but they’ve never experienced the gut-wrenching uncertainty of building something from scratch.

Leen Kawas brings a different perspective to biotech investing. As Managing General Partner at Propel Bio Partners, she’s the one writing checks to start-up and early-stage biotechnology companies. But before that, she was the one pitching for those checks—co-founding and leading a biotechnology company through its initial public offering, raising over $400 million in the process.

This dual experience has given Leen Kawas an unusually sharp eye for what separates promising biotech teams from those destined to struggle. She’s seen the patterns from both sides of the table, and her evaluation criteria reflect hard-won insights about what actually drives success in life sciences.

Read the Full Article Here