Stemcentrx and the New Startup Dispersion

Yesterday was an M&A bonanza with some $50 billion in deals announced, led by pharma and rounded out by Comcast’s acquisition of DreamWorks Animation. But the deal that caught my eye the most was the sale of Stemcentrx, a South San Francisco startup trying to eliminate cancer, to AbbVie for $6.2 billion in upfront cash and stock and as much as $4 billion in earn-outs.

I caught up with Stemcentrx CEO Brian Slingerland yesterday after the deal, and the investment banker-turned-biotech-executive didn’t want to place broader significance on the sale, for pharma or the Valley. “We are very different from anything that exists in Silicon Valley,” he noted.