Civilization Ventures: Lessons learned from operating, founding, exiting, investing in startups and applying them to support founders

Shahram Seyedin-Noor is the founder and managing partner at Civilization Ventures. Shahram received a JD from Harvard and worked at Wilson Solsinis and Cooley before going into investment banking at firms like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. He then entered the startup world co-founding several startups. He eventually ended up Angel investing and in 2017, launched Civilization Ventures, focused on supporting cutting-edge innovations in health tech and biology.

Shahram has over a dozen exits under his belt, which is a phenomenal achievement. Here are some of his investments: Rewrite (acq. by Intellia), Replace (acq. by Tome), Lemonaid (acq. by 23andme), Singular Bio (acq. by Invitae), Rocket Pharma (listed on Nasdaq), Palamedrix (acq. by SomaLogic), Foresight Diagnostics, BillionToOne, Omada and others. Shahram takes an active role in company building. Prior to founding CV, Shahram was the founding CEO/Chairman of Inspirna, an oncology therapeutics company currently in Phase 2 human trials, and the CFO and VP of Corporate Development at NextBio, a genomics software pioneer acquired by Illumina.

Shownotes:

• https://www.civilizationventures.com/
• Success has a thousand fathers but failure is an orphan
• Accountability: Few people blame themselves for failure and give credit for success to others
• Evolution of mindset: Don’t let others dictate what you can or supposed to do in life
• EQ is more/equally important than IQ
• Transition from law school to startups
• Advice for recruiting a non-scientific co-founder
• Rewrite therapeutics acquired by Intellia
• Investment thesis at Civilization Ventures: Drive to do things differently
• Lessons learned from exits
• Contact email: shahram@civilizationventures.com