So You Want To Do A Start Up?

What It Takes to Commercialize a New Technology

Flagship Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on creating, financing and building innovative companies. Founded in 2000, Flagship manages over $600 million in early-stage funds and operates from its offices at Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA. With an active portfolio of over 40 companies, the firm’s strategy is to balance its investments across three principal business sectors: Therapeutics, Life Science Tools & Diagnostics, and BioEnergy/Cleantech.

Jim Matheson, General Partner, Flagship Ventures Jim focuses on creating and funding new ventures in the sustainability, clean technology and special technologies (e.g. nano-technology, materials and technology systems) arenas.
Jim has over 20 years of technology and leadership experience across a variety of organizations and roles designing, engineering and deploying sophisticated technology platforms. Jim serves on the boards of Flagship portfolio companies Advanced Electron Beams, Black Duck Software, Frontier Energy, Mascoma Energy Corporation, Novomer and Oasys Water and is Chairman of the Board of Genstruct and Ze-gen. Jim earned an MBA from The Harvard Business School, a Bachelor of Science (with honors) from the United States Naval Academy and retired as a Commander in the US Naval Reserves.

Brian M. Baynes, PhD, Partner, Flagship Ventures Brian Baynes focuses on creating and managing new, internally generated ventures. He is working on leveraging a new model for distributed innovation across the globe to allow our new ventures to develop significantly more value with limited capital. Previously, Brian co-founded Codon Devices in 2004, and then joined Codon full time in 2005. Initially, as CSO, he led development of partnerships and several novel synthetic biology platforms, and ultimately was appointed President in late 2007.

Before joining Flagship, Brian was an engineer in process automation and composition modeling at Mobil Oil and a Director in the MIT School of Chemical Engineering Practice at Mitsubishi Chemicals and General Mills. He has also worked closely with several startup companies in the biotech space. Brian did his PhD research in protein stabilization with Bernhardt Trout and Danny Wang at MIT.