MIT somehow managed to make this happen in New York recently (warning: contains disturbingly graphic images of a ‘banker guy’ talking candidly about pharma deals)

If you’re new to this, you could utterly lose your bearings in a tsunami of venture capital concepts and pharma language, but I just let it all wash over me and absorbed the general ambience. If I learned nothing else, I could at least easily contrast this with the experience of listening to quite different challenges in the social media and consumer technology investment space.

Is this video worth watching?

“Back in the good old days, Mark raised forty five percent of all the capital in biotech

Ed Saltzman, introducing panelist Mark J. Simon “the banker guy”

A deep and philosophical debate can ensue on whether watching this will be instructive at all, because the event was held on the 28th of January (2010) but I think the argument in favour of (at least the uninitiated) watching it is overwhelmingly reinforced by the timescales (in many cases well over a decade) of many of the biotech projects referred to, although of course, for those on the inside of the industry who are watching developments on a minute by minute basis, this may be ancient history, but that isn’t the point: biotech dealmaking affects us all, yet few, if any of us outside these exclusive circles will have had a chance to hear anyone talk about their experiences.

The people in the panel are:

The event was:

The Changing Landscape of the Biotech Pharma Deal

was presented by the MIT Enterprise Forum of New York

The event was sponsored by IBM, Holland & Knight, and the New York City Bioscience Initiative

It was hosted at the premises of Kenyon & Kenyon

There was also a moderator who introduced the session (Dr. Mark DeWyngaert – MD Huron Consulting Group)