Larry Bock is one of the most insightful innovators you've never heard of. The 42-year-old venture capitalist rarely speaks at biotechnology conferences. He does not court the media and he does not hype his startups--even though he had founded or cofounded 13 at last count: 12 biotechnology firms and 1, his most recent, a nanotech outfit.Any early-stage venture capitalist can spot emerging technologies. The ever-insightful Mr. Bock, however, has figured out a way to build successful companies around emerging science. "Larry has proven time and again that he knows how to get novel science out of the lab and find a useful place for it in the commercial world," says Harvard University chemist Charles Lieber, who is one of the top-notch scientists collaborating with Mr. Bock on his nanotech startup, Nanosys.

Eight of Mr. Bock's startups now trade on the Nasdaq. All of them have revenue but, this being biotech, none are profitable. Vertex Pharmaceuticals, which he cofounded, generated $167 million in sales last year and has four drugs in Phase II clinical trials and one in Phase III. One of his private firms was bought for $700 million and another for $100 million. Mr. Bock's startups have a way of landing on the pages of Red Herring: Neurocrine Biosciences made the 2002 Red Herring 100 list; Pharmacopeia almost made this year's list; and Illumina Technologies was the subject of a Red Herring feature two years ago on proteomics, which was then just starting to take shape.

Mr. Bock has always been ambitious, but he hasn't always been this successful. He did not attend a prestigious Ivy League school: he studied biochemistry at little Bowdoin College in Maine. He wanted to attend medical school, but didn't make the cut. He decided instead to try his luck as a bench scientist in the emerging field of biotechnology.

Back then in the '80s, the hottest company going was Genentech. After being rejected twice, he was finally hired by Genentech's infectious diseases department. "I quickly figured out that I was a lousy scientist," he says, "but Genentech was such a great training ground for me to learn the business side of biotech." It also gave him the notion that he could make a go of it as a venture capitalist.

He left Genentech in 1983 to get his MBA at the University of California, Los Angeles. He got his big break when he landed a summer fellowship working with biotech VC veteran Jean Deleage after his first year. Mr. Deleage, who helped create Genentech, was the perfect mentor for Mr. Bock: steady, experienced, independent, unorthodox. After UCLA, Mr. Bock did tours of duty with Fairfield Ventures and Avalon Ventures before hooking up with CW Group where he remains today.

After so many years in biotechnology, it may seem a bit of a stretch for Mr. Bock to make the switch to nanotech. But, he says, "Scientists are making transistors 1,000 times smaller than the ones currently being put on microchips--in a lab, not a billion-dollar fab. Whenever you find a field where your success is based not on scale, but on your cleverness, that's a venture opportunity."

Working to Nanosys's advantage is its right to acquire intellectual property from top nanotech laboratories like Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California, Berkeley, and UCLA in the fields of medicine and computing. In addition to Dr. Lieber, Mr. Bock has lined up impressive collaborators like UCLA's James Heath, and UC Berkeley's Paul Alivisatos. All this plays into the company's mission, which is to aggregate and commercialize promising nanoscience.

And if all of this sounds impressive, consider that Mr. Bock is nearly blind. He has a progressive genetic disorder known as Stargardts disease, which is a form of macular degeneration. To Mr. Bock, the world is a maze of pixels. He can function with corrective lenses, but he can only read words in 48-point type, so he needs a magnifying machine to help him "keep up on the literature."

Honing a technique used by astronomers (who spend their careers peering through telescopes trying to make sense of trillions of tiny illuminated dots), Mr. Bock has learned to override his central vision with his peripheral vision. "The world is still a blur of dots, it's just that, like an astronomer, I've figured out a way to make sense of those dots," he says.

Sources From:RED HERRING 2002