HIGH-FIVERS: SYNERGY AND A SEASONED TEAM HELP HATTERAS VENTURE PARTNERS FOSTER STARTUP SUCCESS.

• Author: Ranii, David
• Position: NCTREND: Money talk: North Carolina's financial set

East Carolina University chemistry graduate Robin Smith has founded or led three life-sciences companies that relied on venture-capital funding. Each startup obtained money from Durham's Hatteras Venture Partners, which has invested in 61 companies since its founding in 2000, including G1 Therapeutics, a cancer drug developer that went public in May. Smith keeps returning to Hatteras not only for much-needed cash--his latest venture is Boston DNA-testing company Orig3n--but also for advice provided by Hatteras co-founders Clay Thorp and John Crumpler. "They are great mentors," he says. "They help make our businesses a success."

Smith's Durham-based Synthematix was the first startup funded by Hatteras in 2000; it was sold for $13 million five years later. Smith is especially impressed by the partners that Thorp and Crumpler have attracted. The latest addition, former GlaxoSmithKline Chief Executive Officer Andrew Witty, joined as a part-time venture partner in September. In an email, Witty praises Hatteras for its "quality of science and people that they have chosen to invest behind."

Witty supplements a leadership group that includes General Partner Bob Ingram, a former CEO of GSK predecessor Glaxo Wellcome, where he was Witty's boss and mentor; Ken Lee, who previously co-led the international life-sciences practice at Ernst & Young; and Christy Shaffer, former CEO of publicly traded Inspire Pharmaceuticals. (It was acquired by Merck in 2011.)

Hatteras invests in drug and medical-device makers and health care information-technology companies. "We are entrepreneurs at heart and operators at heart," says Crumpler, who started a computer-systems integration company that was sold in 1996. "It takes a certain breed of human being that loves the opportunity to work with all that uncertainty."

Before Shaffer joined Hatteras, she got an inside look while serving on the board of directors of a startup funded by Hatteras. "I saw when there were issues, they very quickly rolled up their sleeves and wanted to help," she says.

Hatteras' strategy requires its general partners to unanimously agree on an investment, or the firm walks away. Fortunately, it's apparent that the team members "genuinely like each other and play well together," says Joan Siefert Rose, former CEO of the Durham-based Council for Entrepreneurial Development who is now a senior partner at a consulting firm.

"We don't have a Bob Ingram deal, a Clay Thorp deal, a Christy Shaffer deal...