Venture Capital in Reverse: The Business Idea First, Then the Entrepreneur A Kansas City firm turns the traditional VC funding model on its head and captures new opportunities.

For the dogs: David Rosen and Linda Rhodes of Aratana.

Photo© David Lang

The typical venture capital story goes something like this: An entrepreneur gets an idea and plots out how to turn it into a business. Then he or she goes searching for venture capitalists to fork over dough to fund it.

But Steven St. Peter, managing director of Boston-based venture capital firm MPM Capital, prefers to flip that story around. He uses MPM's funding and resources to locate ideas in the marketplace, then goes out and finds the best people to build the company.

"It's not a formal "they work for us and they pursue ideas,'" St. Peter says. "It's a collaboration." And it's working. MPM's model has catalyzed three Boston-area pharmaceutical companies: Idenix Pharmaceuticals, Rhythm Pharmaceuticals and Verastem.

Now MPM has turned its attention to animal health with Kansas City, Kan.-based Aratana Therapeutics, which launched in December 2010. St. Peter recruited Dr. Linda Rhodes, a veterinarian who founded and built animal health research company AlcheraBio and sold it to Argenta, a New Zealand-based pharmaceutical research company; and Dr. David Rosen, also a veterinarian, who was previously an entrepreneur-in-residence at MPM and executive at Pfizer.