Editors’ Note

Jenna Foger joined Alexandria Real Estate Equities in 2014. Prior to this, she was an Associate at Windham Venture Partners. Before joining Windham, Foger worked as a Senior Consultant at Easton Associates, and obtained extensive laboratory research experience at the Rockefeller University. While at Rockefeller, she completed her master’s degree in Biotechnology from Columbia University. Foger graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree summa cum laude in Cognitive Neuroscience.

How do you define your role at Alexandria?

Multifaceted, with a strong focus on community building, business development, and venture investing. As a Principal on Alexandria’s Science and Technology team, my responsibilities span three core areas of our business – real estate, thought leadership, and venture investments. On the real estate side, I am heavily involved with tenant underwriting and networking activities. It is critical for us to identify and attract high-quality tenants that represent the best companies and talent in the industry to ensure the strength, stability, and diversity of our portfolio.

We provide our world-class network with unique and interactive programming that inspires collaboration and innovation. To that end, we support the executive event planning and regional teams by providing industry insights and related content for local community events and other important programs, most notably our Alexandria Summit. We also attend several community events and industry conferences to build relationships, promote the Alexandria brand, source new tenant and investment-related opportunities, and further integrate into the life science and technology communities.

The third component is our strategic venture capital arm, through which we take limited partner positions in blue-chip venture funds and invest equity and venture debt directly into cutting-edge companies. This helps us closely track the pulse of innovation, expand our network, and support transformative early and growth-stage companies across our core cluster markets.

Is the investment focus specifically on the life science and biotech sector?

We invest in disruptive science and technology companies focused on biotherapeutics, medical devices and diagnostics, agricultural biotechnology, and other healthcare platforms. Digital health has become interesting to us as science and technology continue to converge at a high level.

We have also made some pure technology investments in transformative companies such as Google (we were early investors at $1/share) and, more recently, Uber, and will likely continue along this trajectory. In general, we invest in areas of high unmet need, in entrepreneurs who are focused on changing the world, especially the lives of patients, and alongside the best investors in the industry.

Overall, our performance has been pretty stellar. Since 2013, we have had 16 IPO exits and five M&A exits, which puts us among the industry leaders.

How do you avoid losing that innovative edge as you grow in size and scale?

We are becoming even more innovative as we continue to expand our network and reach. In every aspect of our business, we think carefully about the strategic rationale – for each building design, each tenant lease, each investment decision, and each thought leadership program, we evaluate the impact for our brand and for the industry. By having a strong executive management team and dedicated regional teams in each of our core clusters, we have the bandwidth and diversity of talent and expertise to continue to innovate at every level while satisfying the specific needs of our client tenants. As such, we continue to deliver unique and collaborative multi-tenant campuses as well as creative innovation spaces, and invest in growing each of our clusters.•