Ananda Developments

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As many of you will be aware Melissa (CEO) and I spent this past Saturday, 9th of March 2024, at the Master Investor Show which was held at the Business Design Center in Islington, London. Master Investor is an organisation which hosts events to connect private investors directly with companies they can invest in. Master Investor host an annual flagship event (which is the one we attended), introducing private investors to a day filled with networking opportunities, presentations and professional guidance from the leading companies and best experts within the financial and investment sectors. Covering various industries, this event caters to a wide audience. To cater to bespoke and specific industries, Master Investor also host a series of ‘In Focus’ events, aiming to target a niche audience who may be interested in a specific sector such as healthcare or mining or perhaps even specific topic such as AI, the EV Economy etc. These smaller events are hosted in the evenings and often take a more interactive approach. They also hold panel discussions to provide investors direct answers to their questions and the best advice for building an investment portfolio.

All in all, I think the day was a real success both generally and for Ananda specifically. Over 2,000 individuals attended the day and feedback Master Investor has collected so far has been overwhelmingly positive.

As a brief overview of what the prep and day looked like for us, Melissa and I travelled to the Business Design Center in the early afternoon the day before, Friday 8th of March, with all of our handouts (branded tote bags, pens and the like), video content, latest turn of the presentation I was to give and bringing up the rear in a courier van (the box it came in being too big to fit in the cab!) a poster guiding people here, to our Hub – a huge thanks to Gen from InvestorHub who designed and provided us with this poster.

Upon arrival we were directed to our booth and met James from Master Investor who was organising the whole day and given some further details on timings for the following morning and told who to go to for any potential issues. Set up went pretty smoothly and we had everything arranged well in advance of the building shutting for the night, as you can see in the video below. We did however run in to a slight hiccup with TVs…

For some reason, the TVs would not play our short video on a loop but would constantly shut off after one play. This meant we had to have both the televisions swapped out for different models which the AV team thought would work better (who knows why!). Thankfully they were right and after one final tweak to get the clip playing in landscape instead of portrait, we were ready to go!

The next morning, we again arrived nice and early in advance of the doors opening to the Public. As instructed, my first port of call was the ‘Showcase Stage’ where I would be giving a short 15-minute presentation on Ananda at 1030. The production team and I quickly ran through the deck to ensure that everything was correct and I was shown the stage & what visual aides I would have (a good lesson for next time…make sure to have any prompts/cues for me in various formats to make sure I can see them properly – they only had a computer monitor some way off so some of the prep work I had done couldn’t be fully utilised. I’ll need to bring handheld cue cards as well for future presentations). Following this 10-min prep session I was instructed to come back about 10 minutes before my slot to get mic’d up, receive the clicker to run through the slides and meet the MC for the day (more on that later…)

So it was then back to the booth to rendezvous with Melissa and await the opening of the doors at 9am. In the meantime, we took a quick walk around the venue to have a look at the other companies and their displays. A couple of which we have stolen some ideas from that we will look to use at our upcoming events!

9 rolled around pretty quickly however and just as my nerves were starting to kick in the door opened and a veritable flood of people came in! The next hour or so was a blur of shaking hands, telling our story and really getting my eye in for the task ahead.

Before I knew it, 10.15 was upon me and I headed back to the Showcase stage. I met the MC for the day, we had a quick chat and I explained a little bit about Ananda to him before making my way on stage – proceedings kicked off slightly late thanks to the first panel on the Main Stage running over but soon enough, a solid crowd had taken their seats and we were ready to roll.

Things didn’t get off to the best of starts, with the MC introducing me as ‘James’ and the microphone system (and back up mic on the stand) both failing! Just as I was resigning myself to having to shout the 15 minute presentation, one of the fantastic Master Investor show runners appeared next to the stage with an old fashioned microphone which worked.

My talk proceeded smoothly from there as I summarised (as best these things can be in such a short timeframe), the clinical trials we currently have going on, the markets we are looking to (and are actively) targeting – those being complex, chronic inflammatory pain conditions with high unmet needs in general and more specifically for now, endometriosis (condition suffered by 10% of women globally & with a poor treatment plan) and Chemotherapy Induced Peripheral Neuropathy (CIPN – 160,000 new cases every year in the UK alone, only ‘treatment’ is anti-depressants) and also some discussion on the Company itself – founder led, senior management all with significant skin in the game etc. 

Follow the link at the end of this post to watch the presentation.

I was fortunate enough as well to have timed things to leave a small window for a couple of questions which were fantastic and spoke to the knowledge base of those in attendance! I was quizzed on the funding structure of the two trials (£1.55m in combined grants across the two trials), our interest in A.I (very excited to explore how this could drive our trial pipeline!) and how our compounds compare to those of GW Pharma, the difference being that ours has (we believe) been formulated to maximise absorption. This question closed out my session and so ‘James’ exited stage left and I headed back to the Booth for a debrief with Melissa.

This ‘debrief’ ended up having to wait for quite some time (when Jim Mellon took to the main stage just before lunch) as we were so busy! All in all, Melissa estimates we collectively spoke to between 150 and 200 individuals throughout the day and from 9am through to probably 3.30pm, when things started to quiet down, we barely shut up!

We gave away all of our handouts by lunchtime and had to rely on handing over multiple bags to everyone just to hammer the point home. All my business cards were gone in lightning time and we have had a significant increase in traffic to the website and the Hub thanks to our poster.

So, this was absolutely a day very well spent and we’ve also picked up some key learnings for next time.

Firstly, we definitely need to ensure we bring more detailed handouts (and in greater number!). The current thinking internally is a one/two-sided A4 flyer which succinctly summarises everything we’re doing and includes details of where to both find out more (our website/Hub) and of course, our ticker for anyone interested in buying shares.

We may also have to consider a name change sooner rather than later… we were mistaken a number of times thanks to ‘Developments’ as a property development company, which isn’t the most ideal!

There were also some really innovative full-booth posters that people had designed and I’m thinking that next time we should increase the size of the Hub poster board into something larger & more detailed. We’d probably need to lose a TV screen were we to do this but I like the image of having more readable-from-a-distance content on the booth.

What was also amazing, inspiring and motivating was talking at the event to multiple women who have/had endometriosis themselves and some people who have suffered from CIPN. Talking face to face with people who have suffered from these conditions always brings home to me just how important the work we’re doing is and how transformative it could be, were we to meet all of our end points & successfully receive a licence to sell MRX1 via the NHS and then to look at rolling it out in other jurisdictions.

Compliments & thanks to Master Investor for holding such a fantastic event and specifically to James and Sophie for doing such an excellent job and being such fantastic hosts.