Mike Goguen

Mike Goguen is a venture capitalist and the founder and managing partner of Two Bear Capital, an early-stage venture firm investing at the intersection of advanced technology and life sciences. He spent twenty years as a general partner at Sequoia Capital before founding Two Bear Capital in 2019.

While at Sequoia, he led investments across cybersecurity, bioinformatics, biopharma, enterprise networking, and semiconductor sectors. His board service included companies later acquired or taken public, among them OpenDNS, Quantenna Communications, Versa Networks, Viptela, and Infoblox.

Two Bear Capital is headquartered in Whitefish, Montana. The firm invests in companies operating where deep technology and life sciences converge, with concentration in deep biotech (including oncology and neurological disease), bioinformatics, applied artificial intelligence and machine learning, enterprise software, and cybersecurity. Two Bear's life sciences investments extend beyond traditional pharma to companies applying these techniques to drug discovery, computational biology platforms, and engineered biology.

Beyond Two Bear Capital's investment work, Goguen has built a parallel operational footprint in the Flathead Valley region of Montana. He founded Two Bear Air Rescue, a search-and-rescue helicopter operation serving the region, and serves on its first-responder team. In 2017, he founded the Two Bear Therapeutic Riding Center, a nonprofit providing equine-assisted development programs for individuals with special needs.

Goguen has joined Open Door Salon twice. His most recent conversation, in September 2026 alongside Christian Schubert, Vice President and Global Head of AbbVie Ventures, covered how investors decide what to fund: the size of the problem as the first test, obsession as the founder attribute he weighs above scientific expertise, whether warm introductions still move a company to the front of the line, and a look back at Silicon Valley outcomes in which the amount raised in the early stage was almost inversely correlated with success. He also described his own route into life sciences, having studied electrical engineering at Cornell in the early 1980s, when he first considered medicine and decided biology was not yet knowable enough.

In his first appearance, in May 2026 alongside Rob Williamson, founder and CEO of Traverse Therapeutics, the episode titled “The Best Companies Start in the Worst Times” opened with Goguen's framing of the mid-2026 biotech downturn as a structural advantage for capital-disciplined founders. Across the conversation, Goguen returned repeatedly to capital efficiency as an operating principle, emphasizing founders who build a plan that holds up regardless of the funding environment. The episode also covered the differences between first-time founders and experienced operators from a venture-capital perspective, the slowing pace of biotech mergers and acquisitions, and the state of artificial intelligence in drug discovery.

The AI-in-drug-discovery segment ran across multiple chapters and surfaced a distinction Goguen drew between substantive AI application and what he called “window dressing.” The conversation referenced platforms such as AlphaFold and the in-silico-to-in-vitro feedback loop as substantive examples, and Goguen described AI applications layered onto traditional workflows as the pattern that signals marketing language has outrun experimental advance.