Pete has over 30 years of health care operating and venture capital experience. In addition to co-founding Thomas, McNerney & Partners, Pete co-founded Coral Ventures in 1992, where he was responsible for health care investing. Pete has served on the board of a number of the Coral Ventures' and Thomas, McNerney and Partners' portfolio companies. Prior to joining Coral in 1992, Pete was a co-founder and Managing Partner of The Kensington Group, a firm specializing in providing management services to early stage companies in the health care field. In 1986, he founded and was Chief Executive Officer of Memtec North America, a company established to commercialize cross flow membrane microfiltration technology in North America. Previously, Pete spent 11 years with Baxter Healthcare Corporation, where he held various general management positions in the U.S., Europe, Middle East and Southeast Asia. He has served as President of the Minnesota Venture Capital Association and is on the Board of Trustees of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota. A Certified Public Accountant, Pete received a B.A. from Yale and an M.B.A. from Stanford University. Pete was a 2014 fellow at Harvard's Advanced Leadership Initiative program.
The Healthcare Entrepreneurship Lab offers a unique opportunity for students to be part of a local early-stage healthcare company. Students apply the foundational learnings from Kellogg's strategic training to address real and complex entrepreneurial challenges in healthcare. Students are guided by the Kellogg instructors and the company's executive. Instructors bring extensive experience as investors and entrepreneurs in the medical device, health IT, and pharma/biotech areas.
Students work with a startup (medical devices, digital health, biotech/pharma, services) on a mutually agreed project and work plan. The project will be strategically important to the company and will benefit from the students' knowledge and broad perspective gained from their studies at Kellogg.
All projects are selected and uniquely designed to expose students to the challenges of an early-stage health care company and at the same time provide a unique learning experience not fully available in other courses at Kellogg. It is geared towards students with a serious interest in entering the world of early-stage health care companies either as an entrepreneur or early-stage investor and who are seeking real life experiences and industry contacts.
The first five weeks will be focused on forging and each team will be paired with a company that has successfully navigated the early-stage challenges facing health care companies. The teams will be asked to investigate the actions taken by the company to place them in a successful position and asked to present their findings to the remainder of the class. The second five weeks will be focused on funding during which the course will explore the key drivers and trends in early-stage financing and venture capital. Guest speakers will include experienced venture investors and CEOs of early-stage companies raising capital. Teams will be asked to evaluate early-stage investment opportunities and make an investment recommendation.
Field Studies include those opportunities outside of the regular curriculum in which a student is working with an outside company or non-profit organization to address a real-world business challenge for course credit under the oversight of a faculty member. This course is for 1 credit unit.
