A 29-year-old exec who worked on 2019's biggest biotech IPO told us the 2 key lessons that made it a success
- Cameron Turtle is the 29-year-old chief business officer of rare-disease biotech Eidos Therapeutics.
- Turtle helped lead Eidos's IPO last year, which was his first-ever IPO.
- The lessons he learned from the process helped pave the way for the success of another public offering: that of biotech BridgeBio this summer, which was 2019's biggest biotech IPO.
- Read on for more about what Turtle learned.
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Last year, Cameron Turtle helped lead his first IPO.
At the time, he was just 28 and the stakes were high. Turtle was working for the rare-disease biotech Eidos Therapeutics, a subsidiary of genetic-disease-focused biotech BridgeBio, and the IPO was seen as crucial for BridgeBio, too.
Eidos would raise $106 million in its June IPO, according to Crunchbase, and shares have surged about 100% in the year since. Turtle would go on to work on BridgeBio's IPO this summer, which raised $348.5 million, making it the biggest biotech IPO of the year.
"The fact that Eidos has been successful over the last year has kind of paved the way for the BridgeBio IPO in terms of investors either having made money on Eidos, or having wished they did," he said. "And so, we really needed this IPO to go well to validate the model."
After studying bioengineering as an undergraduate and earning a doctorate in cardiovascular medicine at Oxford, Turtle's longtime interest in diseases of the heart took him from McKinsey to BridgeBio and Eidos roughly three years ago. Today, he's 29 years old and the chief business officer of Eidos, a promotion he got after the Eidos IPO in 2018. He's also SVP of portfolio management and corporate development at BridgeBio.
The Eidos IPO was a crucial learning experience, he said, and it wasn't always mistake-free. Those lessons helped pave the path for BridgeBio's successful IPO this year, Turtle said. BridgeBio priced its shares at $17 in the IPO, and they've since climbed about 75%.
Here's what he learned.
IPO 101
Turtle started working on the Eidos IPO back in 2017, when he realized how "hugely important" it would be for BridgeBio.
As part of that, Turtle wrote "big chunks" of the company's S-1 filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and worked with banks, lawyers and research analysts.
"IPOs are kind of incredible that, as long as there's the investor support there, you say the word and the bankers, the lawyers, everyone kind of jumps out to help you do it. For a fee, obviously. But it really is a just a big process to manage," he said. "If you have something of value that investors appreciate, you can absolutely get it done."
'Deciding who the real supporters were'
Privately-held companies go public in an IPO to raise fresh capital from investors, and investment banks play a huge role in shepherding companies through the process. Banks also employ sell-side analysts, who follow certain industries or companies closely and make recommendations about those stocks to investors like mutual funds.
But with Eidos, it was an uphill battle drumming up interest on Wall Street and among investors broadly. Eventually, three banks signed on to the IPO.
But after the company went public, an analyst from one of those banks started covering Eidos and gave it a "neutral rating," meaning the analyst doesn't expect the stock to either outperform or underperform the market.
That "sounds [like] not that big a deal, but it's surprising to have a research analyst who's on your IPO to initiate neutral on the stock. And that was really almost a mistake on our part, or just that we didn't have the broad set of 15 banks calling us to try and participate in the IPO like we did for [BridgeBio]," Turtle said. "It was a very different dynamic, where we had to go out and sell it."
So with the BridgeBio IPO, "we made sure to kind of be out in front and make sure we were selecting the banks where people who we knew were really supporters," he said, noting that seven research analysts who started covering BridgeBio were "strongly supportive" of the stock.
Investment banks have long had to separate their research analysts and banking businesses, as part of a firewall intended to avoid conflicts of interest and set up after the dot-com bubble burst in the 1990s.
Allocating shares to deep-pocketed funds
With the Eidos IPO, the team wanted to get broad support from deep-pocketed mutual funds at places like Fidelity, T. Rowe Price and Wellington Management.
But initially, they didn't get it, Turtle said.
"And those are the folks that we love to include in an IPO just to make sure that they're there to support us in the long-term," he said. With BridgeBio's IPO, that changed, "in that more folks knew us, that we weren't walking into the room and introducing ourselves in most of the meetings, which made it a lot better."
Having Eidos, and its success on the public market, helped with that, he said.
Turtle and his teams may have successfully navigated two IPOs, but they're now busy learning something new: how to lead a public company, he said.
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