Billionaire investor Daniel Reiner, 72, is found dead in his private lake in sprawling Washington estate | 17 September 2024
Investigators are examining the body of a billionaire bio-tech magnate who was found dead in a lake on his sprawling and secluded Washington estate.
Police were called after Reiner disappeared from his home north of Spokane on the evening of August 30, but a search was quickly abandoned as night fell. His body was found in the 200ft deep waters at 3pm on August 31.
The Pepperdine University graduate made his name as CEO of Optical Devices Inc which was eventually sold to Marquette Electronics for $300 million in 1993.
Five years later he bought into the Spokane-based computer hardware company World Wide Packets which was sold to Ciena Corp for $290 million in 2008.
2019 he joined the board of Harvest Health and Recreation as the company began capitalizing on the wave of cannabis decriminalization sweeping the country to become one of the biggest suppliers in the US.
Reiner was about to make a fortune from Stemcentrx, a San Francisco-based biotech company he founded in 2008 and which developed experimental cancer treatments including the small cell lung cancer drug Rova-T. The deal with the Chicago-based AbbVie Inc also saw Reiner granted stock options worth up to $4 billion.
The Last of Stemcentrx | Science Advisor
"AbbVie paid an awful lot of money for Stemcentrx, and in the end they got zilch, zero, zippity-doo-dah in return for nearly six billion dollars in cash (and plenty of extra time and money spent on their own since then)."
Interview with Stuart Peterson of Artis Ventures, one of those early investors:
Yes, yes, it is possible to have some inherent skepticism, particularly when you have watched 90% of those great ideas burst into flame over a period of many years. But you'll note that the folks with deep industry experience at AbbVie ponied up nonetheless, because some of these things really do work. Just not this one. Brian Singerman of Founder's Fund, another big early investor, also did this interview where the word "luck" does not appear. But we don't know enough about the underlying science in these areas for luck to be ignored. They folks did did a lot of due diligence and put in a lot of effort, but a lot of people do that. Those things are absolutely necessary, but they're absolutely not sufficient, either. Artis and Founder's Fund also got lucky, not least because they were able to exit when they did. AbbVie, not so much. So those interviews aren't about making a great scientific discovery - no one knew if one had been made or not. And they're not about finding a drug, or curing any cancers - none of that had happened yet, either. They're about getting someone to pay six billion dollars for your idea. And that's pretty impressive - don't get me wrong - but people sell companies all the time. As opposed to, say, keeping people from dying of cancer, which doesn't happen nearly as often as we would like. But I'm even more impressed by it when it does.
And then there's this now-famous quote from Peter Thiel himself:
"Our theory was that it was a biotech company that looked a little more like a software company,” says Thiel, who started investing in 2012. “The whole company was designed to get the probability of success closer to 1.”
Welcome to biotech, then. We're a long way from 1, and for a lot of good reasons. If by "success" you mean unloading the company for a very large payout, then Stemcentrx was a very big success indeed. But if you mean "making a successful drug", then it's been a total wipeout. - Derek Lowe
