Casey Chan is a tech entrepreneur, angel investor, inventor and an adjunct professor at the  Orthopedic Surgery department at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He also has a degree in aerospace engineering and holds 35 US patents in surgical devices to boot. The man is the definition of a polymath.

Casey never dreamt he would one day go down the path of entrepreneurship. He got into entrepreneurship by accident. As Director of Orthopedic Research at McGill University, his first research project was to find a way to make bone cement stronger. He devised a way to remove the air bubbles that get trapped in the cement during the mixing process, and set out to commercialise this technology and successfully established it as a clinical application worldwide.

“At that time, the technology transfer was very easy. I was very lucky to be able to monetise that technology, and because of the royalty I received, I was financially well equipped to explore different areas,” he said.

So for the last 15 to 20 years, Casey has been developing his own technologies and monetising them while contributing to medical advancement. We asked him some questions about his background as an inventor, investor and professor.

Tell us about the failures you have experienced in both starting up and investing in companies.
I have started many companies that failed, and invested in many companies that failed. I am fortunate in the sense that I am able to sort of absorb those losses because I already had an income from my technology that I had previously commercialised and monetized. That is part of doing business to me. Its not an endgame failure, its just one of the things that happen when you commercialise technology.

For somebody who is just starting out, I think that you want to take a certain amount of risk, but not to the extent that it will be an endgame failure. I suggest that when people start new companies, they try to get paid as they do the work. Maybe they won’t get paid as much. There is this myth that you have to suffer, eat few meals and spend all your money in the company you start. I think that not very wise path to follow, because the chances of failure are extremely high in any startup. You want to be able to recover from that and so it is certainly not worth betting all your assets on a startup. So thats why angel investing is very, very important to young startups, so you can have someone who can back you up financially, at least partially.

You’re an investor, entrepreneur, inventor and you also teach. What is your focus right now?
There are only 24 hours in a day, so the important thing is to find people that you can work with. I work with responsible people I can trust who help me in my day to day duties. I would say my focus is in three different areas, teaching and research, angel investing and developing new technologies, the last of which I enjoy doing the most. If I look back in my 20 years of career, and think about where I reaped the most benefit, it was in developing and commercializing new technologies so if I had to give up any one of my duties, this would be the last thing I would give up.

Which of your roles have been, financially, the most successful?
It is not easy to make money in angel investing, it is almost a zero-sum game, though I did ok. In terms of the amount of effort you put in and the kind of returns you get, its probably in developing technologies and commercialising them, that has been financially the most successful endeavour personally. Once you develop a technology, you can patent it, license it and sell it as an asset.

What is your investment philosophy?
Mostly in biotech companies and those that make medical devices. From my own personal experience, although the technology is a major component, what is more important is the people in a startup. If you have a very good technology, but the wrong people to run it, it can go very, very wrong. From my personal experiences, more than 50% of the companies failed because of personality, not technology.

Also, I have seen people who work for the company, on whom the technology is highly dependent on the person. Especially in biotech companies, if the technology is dependent entirely on one person, and this person is not very entrepreneurial and very risk averse, then when something doesn’t go right, they bail out and find another job. So to me, this person needs to have to stake in it, so that there is pain if they bail out. If they get a salary and no pain in bailing out then its unlikely that the company will succeed. A successful company is one that insulates itself from the departure of key people while having the ability to retain its knowledge base.

Otherwise for me investing is like taking a shot at the lottery. I have a group of friends in the Bay Area who recommend new technologies to me which I will proceed to invest in after doing very little due diligence. Its more out of interest than actually making money sometimes because I get to meet people, talk to them and I enjoy looking at new technology.

I understand most of your investment is overseas, not in Singapore. Is that because of a better quality of ideas overseas compared to Singapore?
It is a matter of statistics. There is only 4 million people in Singapore, compared to 250 million in the US. I don’t think Singapore is any less smarter than the US. It boils down to the quantity of deal flows which depends on the population size. What Singapore can try to do is to attempt to create the environment that exists in the US. Notice all enterprise in the US gravitates towards San Francisco, so even if Singapore has that environment, she still needs to attract that quantity of ideas, and that is not under the direct control of our policy makers. So a possible next stage is to create a ‘funnel’, that attracts more ideas into Singapore. But attracting ideas from the region into Singapore brings up issues of ownership of technology, whereas in the US, you don’t have the same problem, everyone is from the same country.

What is the difference between investing in biotech companies vs. software companies?
One big difference between the two is that in biotech, the risk is lower and the people who invest in the medical device company, are usally people who are industry insiders: they know what the problem is, they know the solutions that exist. One example is VentureMD, a fund me and a few friends started. We have a system of accessing technology, and the way we do that is to look at the technology itself, look at the people, look at the IP coverage in terms of reimbursement, how much we have to invest to get it into the market place and so on. All that allwos us to quantify the risk. This is completely different from in software. Oftentimes when one person sees success, everyone tries to do the same thing, and most of them fail. So the risk in a software startup is very very high.

Could you tell us more about Venture MD?
VentureMD is a business technology accelerator fund mostly dealing in the medical device area that me and some friends involved in the successful exit of a previous company got involved in. We look for early stage technology either within ourselves or we look at other inventive surgeons or independent inventors who have started, have an idea, and maybe have an early prototpye, and we think that they will work. We invest in such companies and run the project in terms of spinning off the company such that one of us take charge as CEO. We feel that we are much more preapred to take the tehcnology to commercialiseation than anybody esle, since we had done that many many times.

The fund was closed in march this year. It was oversubscribed, we had a list of almost a 100 potential investors, and although we only looked at the top 20, even then we were oversubscribed. Since then we have almost looked at 20 deals already. We have a process where we actually get things done very very quickly. We can get our term sheet out in a week. We have due diligence done in a very systematic way.

Backgrounder

-Founder of WizFolio and co-founder and former CEO of e-learning company WizLearn.

-Adjunct professor at the department of orthopedic surgery and the division of bioengineering at NUS, teaching third year engineering students a course in Bioengineering Design.

-Fifteen years’ experience in product development and in patent filing, with 35 US patents in the area of surgical devices and 10 other patents pending.

-Was the director of orthopedic research at Montreal General Hospital, McGill University, where he designed a bone cement mixing system, now widely used in joint replacement surgery in the United States.

-Has a degree in aerospace engineering and was an engineering consultant for the Institute for Aerospace Studies, University of Toronto.