Day one of the psychedelic portion of Plant Medicine Week saw a solid lineup of panels. One of the standouts was the Psychedelic Capital panel, a collection of industry experts and investors discussing the state of the industry and investment landscape.
The panel included:
Richard Skaife: Co-founder of the Conscious Fund and Chair of Microdose.
Jan Hardorp: Co-Founder of re.Mind Capital, one the industry’s biggest mental health VC funds. He’s also a life coach and self-proclaimed psychedelics evangelist.
Daniel Koppelkamm: Managing Partner at Convergence Partners, Swiss HealthTech venture capital firm that actively supports the internationalization and business development of its portfolio companies in the world’s largest healthcare markets.
Ken Belotsky: Partner at Negev Capital. Negev Capital (www.negevcap.com) invests in companies developing novel psychedelic medications for various mental health issues.
Bek Muslimov: Bek is a co-founding Partner at Leafy Tunnel. For the past 7 years, he has been investing in European technology and life science companies. Prior to Leafy Tunnel, Bek was the Investment Director at Blue Wire where he led early-stage investments in European tech companies such as Monzo, Superawesome, Homehero, Ocean Harvest, and Ihateironing.
Catherine Dockery. Founder of Vice Ventures, an early stage venture capital fund conquering stigmas and striving towards superior returns by investing in good companies operating in superficially “bad” industries.
The panel started with a disarming talk about personal favorite compounds, for both personal and professional reasons (psilocybin and 5-MeO-DMT seemed to be the winners).
Many interesting topics were discussed, from the realities of discovery stage industries, if we can have the therapy without the trip, moving past old models of treatment and business, and that there could be more investment opportunities than just drug development (neutropics, data, diagnostics, VR, therapy optimization, clinics)
Jan Hardorp: “The United States has a very specific legal framework, and there’s always an competition between federal laws and state law. I think in this case it’s an opportunity, because the States are very different in their policymaking and there are few states that are open to this and exploring the space and making legal frameworks that allow things to advance. And if that’s successful then other states will follow. We’re in the very very lucky position that today also the Conservatives in the US are in favor, driven by MAPS and the whole issue around veterans.”
Daniel Koppelkamm: “Let’s look at clinics. Unfortunately, there is a trend of some of these players really cutting the therapist element, purely for a profit reason, because actually having to work with the patient, preparing a patient for a trip, or spending time on integration, it costs time and money right? So now we’re unfortunately seeing that some players are starting to cut corners — and I think this means that accidents can happen. That you might miss schizophrenic patients and someone goes into some kind of psychosis. This can actually throw the whole development back a few years. I think we have to be very careful here.”
Ken Belotsky: “I think that 90% of the companies that we have right now will disappear from this market. And this is really good. It’s normal because it’s a function of venture industry to make a lot of new startups and a lot of new initiatives. And many of these companies will die and this will help us to find the right solutions because you cannot find the optimal solution if you have just a few companies in a market. When you have hundreds of companies in the market, we all have much more chances to achieve the result. And from the view of venture fund, we believe that just a few companies from our portfolio will generate most of the returns.”
