Eigencluster: Potential Advisors

Eigencluster Home Andy was my partner from the biotech seed we founded (LaunchCyte)... both he and Jon are great guys, very smart and willing to give us time. (Andy less so, as he is a neurological surgeon) - David L

Andrew Firlik joined Sprout Group as a venture partner in January 2004. Prior to Sprout, he was a principal at Canaan Partners where he concentrated on life science investments. While at Canaan, Andrew invested in and served on the board of directors of several companies, including Viacor, Transoma Medical, Omnisonics, IntelliCare, and SpineWave. Prior to his involvement with Canaan Partners, he was a co-founder and principal of Cortex Consulting, where he served as a consultant to Mayfield Fund and several early stage healthcare companies. He is a co-founder and scientific advisory board member of Northstar Neuroscience, a medical device company in Seattle. Andrew has been in the health care profession for 12 years during his training and practice as a neurological surgeon. He has published more than 40 articles in the medical literature, written chapters for several medical textbooks, filed patents on several inventions, and is the co-editor of a book about cerebrovascular surgery. He also co-founded LaunchCyte, a healthcare seed stage investor and business accelerator and serves on the board of directors of NovaVision. Andrew studied biology at Cornell University and Oxford University, received his MBA from the University of Pittsburgh, and his MD from Cornell University Medical College. He is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at New York University School of Medicine and is an attending neurosurgeon at the Manhattan VA Harbor Healthcare System affiliated with the New York University Medical Center.

Jonathan Kaufman, Ph.D., MBA Jon’s entry into entrepreneurship began in 1989 as a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, when he funded his master’s thesis in Measurement and Control by becoming employee number two at MicroMed Systems Inc., a start-up company that developed advanced technology for diagnosing heart valve disorders. Jon subsequently entered the pharma-ceutical industry at Merck & Co., where he began writing sequence code for automating the manufacture of several of Merck’s high profile drugs. By the time Jon returned to academia three years later, he had the responsibility of managing a $3 million budget for automating the purification of Mevacor. While at Merck, Jon earned a spot on the New Technology Committee, his introduction to formal technology assessment. While pursuing a his Ph.D. in biophysics at The University of Pennsylvania, Jon was in-vited to help screen physical science invention disclosures at the university’s Center for Technology Transfer. In addition to helping evaluate technologies, Jon out-licensed sev-eral medical imaging technologies. In the process, he learned the basics of contract law, intellectual property law, how to successfully interact with faculty and industry partners and ultimately, how to close deals. Upon completion of his dissertation in 2000, Jon joined LaunchCyte, a seed stage in-vestment company. At LaunchCyte, Jon was promoted to Vice President and Chief Sci-ence Officer, and was the point person in the start-up of all of LaunchCyte’s new compa-nies. Jon served as the founding president of Crystalplex Corp. In addition, Jon was the project leader on all of LaunchCyte’s technology search contracts with industrial part-ners. In his most recent year at LaunchCyte, after earning an MBA in Finance at The Wharton School, Jon managed LaunchCyte’s financial reporting and audits. This responsibility involved accounting for a wide variety of options, convertible debt instruments, preferred stock issuances, bridge financings, and partnership taxation. Jon currently serves on the boards of the following privately held companies: Reaction Biology Corp., Crystalplex Corp. and Immunetrics, Inc.

I have other advisors though at our "developmental stage" they would not be appropriate.

Dr. Ira Joseph Haimowitz, I would be happy to help. I am a lead user and purchaser of commercial data mining software incluidng clustering to apply to the business world; including finance and pharmaceuticals. You may contact me at my office: Pfizer; 212 733 6375; haimoi@pfizer.com.