Jackie Schooleman is CEO of Virtual Proteins, a life science high growth startup based in the High Tech Campus of Eindhoven, that went through multiple rounds of funding, including an -out of the box- crowdsourced funding model. The NextWomen met Jackie in the UK, time for an interview:

Q: What is the mission and product of your company? My company Virtual Proteins wants to change the world of Life Sciences! Our VP MicroLab, a desktop virtual reality system, is helping out researchers to find new medicines and physicians to be able to review patient scan data in a much better and efficient way.

Our latest development, an augmented reality trainer based on VP MicroLab technology will also allow doctors to learn and practice medical interventions on virtual patients before performing the real intervention.

Q: How did you form your team? In 2004 I  started with my Chief Science Officer Trudi Sonderkamp who was connected to me by some of my dear old friends who I used to live with when I studied at the Design Academy in the early eighties. They told me she would be a perfect fit to my product/market ideas, because she is a smart biochemist, very ambitious, and also very eager to find new ways in drug discovery.

My CTO, Gino van den Bergen, was connected to me by a person that knew my company and  my ambition who thought we would be a perfect match. He’s top in his field !

My Vice presidents Frits Cornelisse and Jan Hoefnagels joined later, they brought in a nice mixture of B2B sales experience, business economics and very friendly, honest and open characters.

Q: How did you fund it, why the crowd funding model? with how much money, and what is the business model? Any info on turnover? The company was initially funded by myself. I wanted to immediately have VC money on board, and try to get it in 2006, but found out it was too early.

A smart VC company in Boston USA advised me to start with a combination of grants and bank loans, and to first finalize product development and start initial sales.

In 2006 we got an initial loan of 200K Euro from the Dutch government and Rabobank, which was increased by another 800K in 2007-2009.

I also started some kind of foundation, called “friends of Virtual Proteins” were people could buy small amounts of certificates in the company. It’s a kind of crowd funding.It’s very easy to join, in the early days you did not need a whole lot of money. Because we sell certificates rather than shares, I still have 100% control in the company,  and our commercial strategy cannot be influenced by shareholders. By joining they commit money in the trust of the company.

Q: What makes you different from other players in your sector? being a Dutch company in an international field, what can you say about that? In technology, we have access to the international state of the art HW and SW technology, and even beyond. We have a small team of top-performers, and also have a very flexible organization that can easily adapt to changes in the market. In product/marketing we started to listen to our future prospects even before we had a product ready for sales.

As a Dutch company, we are lucky to be surrounded by some of the world best doctors/professors in the medical field working in the Academic hospitals in the Netherlands with a large history. The Dutch are well known to be open to partnerships and innovations, and understand as a “ small”  player, we need to connect to the “ big” players if we want to solve global problems.

Q: There is a lot of discussion on women in tech & funding, what is your experience? Which women? :  ) I think women that are able to survive and expand their businesses in fields historically dominated by men, perform better than men, but that is just statistics.

So I would always put my money on them !  Our investors today are 60% women, 40 % men. In the company, a healthy mixture of men and women gives the best overall performance.

Smart people understand this, and are willing to take the risk and invest in our company. Bank people sometimes forget that women are much more down to earth than men, when it comes to financial projections.

What was your biggest challenge during the development process and how can others learn from that? The biggest challenge is to remain the highly innovative and flexible atmosphere of the small development team with top-experts in their fields we have right now. Thanks to that we have great performance, the challenge is to keep it as efficient as it is right now while we start to grow into a much larger business.

Do you envision an exit, how and when? Business wise, I see spin-offs in companies that use IP (new drugs) discovered with our drug development tools. And also part of our business could be acquired by other companies, since we already have separate business units for different market segments. Virtual Proteins BV is a company build for long term performance, in a global market.

In time, we might go for an IPO, but I don’t expect that to happen within 5 years from now.

Personally, I would love to keep investing in product development and R&D, and be the connection between development and end users in the exciting field of Life Sciences .

Whether or not as CEO of the company will depend on how the rest of our MT will evolve in time.

Any role models or mentors? Role models? Yes, in the Netherlands, Edgar Wintzen who founded BSOrigin, in the USA Bill & Melinda Gates, for using the money they made with Microsoft to make the world a better place in healthcare.

I don’t think I will ever make that kind of money, but do my best to go for “the better place” with Virtual Proteins in the field of global drug discovery and patient safety in healthcare.