Leave it to a hairloss forum to decide that 15 million in early stage funding from massive biotech and VC firms can possibly be seen as a negative simply because the CEO admitted in a press release that what they are trying to accomplish is incredibly difficult.
People were willing to bet all their cope/hope on things like Tsuji (begging for dollars on twitter and wanting to charge you 700k USD to be in his trial), Replicel (entire firm valued less then this Series A alone), Histogen (entire firm valued under 10 million after raising tens of millions over a decade from no name investors) and dozens of other shitty products and companies over the years that had no where near the legitimacy or backing that this company does.
Keep in mind here that the private valuation of his firm is likely anywhere between 50 to 100 million now. The only other thing that's come around in the last 2~ decades that has the same legitimacy of this company/process is the recent HopeMed series B that put that company well into the hundreds of millions valuation wise. Recognize that this type of money doesn't flow into something like hairloss without serious potential and hype behind the science.
of course Stemson have credits and I'm not questioning its potential for the hair loss market or comparing them with these other ""scams""..
But I'm criticizing the purpose of the letter from the CEO. What is the reason of it?
Basically, he said (and everything are true) that baldness is a considerable problem, the solutions provided to it until now are disheartening, they are rising money to invest in the solution, but it is difficult to get it and they are just starting.
Neutral points:
- bla bla bla about problems of hair loss, emotional history and bad products at market until now.
Negative points:
1) They are just starting the pipeline
2) He didn't guarantee anything
3) Is hard to obtain the solution
Positive points:
1) They are rising money and are serious to try to provide a product to "cure" baldness (but I think we can compare this positive points with the "others". Every big player in this market are seriuous to bring hair loss cure, so, this point is not very useful)
For me, this letter was not a good choice, even for businesses logic. It would been better/interesting to just announced the partnership and written down advances of their current research.
Instead of publish this bad letter, which looks like a candlelight close to a darkness that itself brings