Open Coffee Cambridge

On 31 July, our co-founder and COO Daniel Rooke joined Jeremy Leong of CAMentrepreneurs for a fireside chat at Open Coffee Cambridge. The morning was run by CAMentrepreneurs and Innovate Cambridge, and more than 130 founders, researchers, investors and curious people signed up to join us over coffee.

Dan has built companies as a lawyer, an operator, an investor and now a founder again

Dan started his career as a senior lawyer before moving into industry. He then co-founded Start Codon, Cambridge’s early-stage life sciences fund and venture builder, with Jason Mellad, and mentors founders at Cambridge Judge Business School. With OtoImmune, he has stepped back into founder mode to build something for people living with immune conditions.

Dan shared three lessons from going from step 0 to step 1

• Starting again means being a beginner again. Advising founders from the investor side is very different from doing the work yourself with a small team and limited resources. Asking for help early is part of the job.
• Start with the people who have the problem. Before building anything, spend time with the people you want to help. For OtoImmune, that meant listening to people living with autoimmune conditions about what their care is really like.
• Hold the mission steady and let the evidence shape the route. Watch what people actually do as well as what they say, and be willing to change how you get there when the evidence points somewhere new.

The questions from the room were thoughtful and generous, and the conversation carried on well into the networking afterwards.

Open Coffee brings the Cambridge start-up community together

Open Coffee Cambridge is an informal networking morning for entrepreneurs, students and anyone in the start-up community, bringing together the CAMentrepreneurs network and members of Innovate Cambridge’s Glasshouse. CAMentrepreneurs is a University of Cambridge alumni group that supports business and social entrepreneurship, with more than 25 chapters around the world. Innovate Cambridge leads a shared innovation roadmap for the city, backed by more than 200 partner organisations.

Thank you to our hosts and to everyone who came

Thank you to Jeremy Leong for such a warm and honest conversation, to Tasneem Khatib and the CAMentrepreneurs Cambridge team, to Innovate Cambridge, and to everyone who got up early to join us. If you would like to follow what we are building for people with immune conditions, join mOI.

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