The interesting thing about Matt Middleman’s new agency is how much of it predates the agency. When Valence Communications announced its launch on June 29, 2026, the founder and CEO arrived alongside Dan Perlmutter, Brittany Leigh and Jason Braco. All three had worked with him at LifeSci Communications. The company name was new. The working relationships had already put in their hours.
There is something pleasingly unromantic about that beginning. The usual startup story requires a solitary flash of inspiration, preferably somewhere with inconvenient seating. This one starts with colleagues who know one another’s work. Middleman had founded LifeSci in 2017 and spent nearly a decade building it. For the next venture, experience together was part of the proposition.
At launch, he described “a very deliberate focus on the team.” It is a plain sentence for an industry paid to make sentences interesting. It also gives the story its direction. Follow Middleman through the changes in his career and the recurring question becomes less about the business card than about the people sitting around the table.
Before the agency, a change of audience
His route into communications included Cornell, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences, and Mount Sinai, where he earned his M.D. He held faculty appointments at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center. He also worked as a biotechnology equities analyst before becoming a vice president at Russo Partners. It is a career with several professional dialects.
Those jobs placed him on different sides of an explanation. A teacher has to make an idea understandable. An analyst has to decide what that idea is worth. An agency adviser has to help somebody else describe it accurately enough to survive questions. Read together, the jobs suggest a useful connection: expertise gains another purpose when it can travel between people who want different things from it.
The sequence of jobs adds some texture. Avalon Research appears in 2005 and 2006; Russo Partners runs from 2011 into 2017. These were successive jobs with different expectations, rather than a collection of honorary affiliations. By the time Middleman was ready to run an agency, he had worked with both the underlying material and the financial audience trying to assess it.
In February 2017, LifeSci Partners announced LifeSci Public Relations with Middleman at its head. Andrew McDonald described a business that would connect public relations with the group’s existing investor relations work. Middleman’s own stated aim was to align communications advice with clients’ corporate goals. The original proposition already reached beyond arranging a flattering introduction to a reporter.
- FacultyExplain an idea
- Equity analysisAssess its value
- Agency leadershipBuild the team
The first hire remembers the wager
Founding announcements tend to sound certain. First employees have to live with the uncertainty. Kristin Politi, who identified herself as LifeSci Communications’ first hire, later recalled joining Middleman at the beginning of an ambitious idea. She described herself as usually averse to risk. Even so, the decision had felt unexpectedly easy.
What persuaded her was the founder. From their first conversations, she wrote, “his vision and ambition were undeniable.” Looking back after almost eight years, Politi described helping build a collaborative team piece by piece. Her account gives the launch a human scale: before an agency can offer expertise to clients, someone has to choose to join it.
The distinction matters in a service business. A founder can sign a lease and commission a website, but the work still depends on colleagues choosing to bring their judgment to it. Politi’s recollection is one person’s experience, and it is useful precisely at that size. It shows what an early commitment looked like from the employee’s side.
There is another small glimpse in a public recommendation from recruiter Lance Winsaft. He described Middleman as attentive to employees’ success and “down to earth and very easy to talk to.” These are colleagues’ assessments, rather than a personality diagnosis. Together, they suggest why the team deserves a place near the center of his story.
The numbers behind the longer name
By January 2020, the agency had changed its name to LifeSci Communications. Its announcement described more than 50 clients around the world and more than 1,300 media placements during 2019. It also said half of the account services team held advanced degrees. Those are dated figures, belonging to that stage of the company’s life.
The new name accompanied a wider set of responsibilities. Social media, digital and creative departments sat alongside the original media relations work. The company had its headquarters in New York and a growing Boston office. The change from Public Relations to Communications was a small alteration on the page and a larger one in the work being offered.
An earlier hiring announcement supplies a useful intermediate frame. In November 2017, the business added senior communications executives Linda Dyson and Drew Levinson. Middleman said the team then included seven M.D.s and Ph.D.s. The combination was already taking shape during the first year: people trained to interrogate technical material working alongside people experienced in getting a story heard.
That arrangement has a practical appeal. A clear sentence takes work when its subject is complicated. Someone has to decide which detail earns its place, which qualification prevents a misunderstanding, and which explanation merely sounds impressive. An agency built around several kinds of expertise can bring those arguments inside the team before the copy leaves the building.
Thirty-six minutes of practical questions
Middleman’s 2021 appearance on the Business of Biotech podcast put the trade’s everyday questions in the foreground. The episode, Biopharma PR 101, ran roughly 36 minutes. Its agenda covered when a company should begin public relations, how that work relates to investor relations, what qualifies as news, and how results should be measured.
It is a useful set of questions because each one limits the temptation to confuse activity with progress. A company may have plenty to say without having something a reporter needs. It may want attention without having decided which audience matters. The episode’s framing places those decisions ahead of the familiar machinery of pitches, posts and announcements.
The distinction between public and investor relations also returns to LifeSci’s founding premise. Different audiences can receive the same corporate announcement and ask quite different questions about it. Keeping those conversations connected was part of the agency’s design from the beginning. Middleman’s podcast appearance offered a way into that work without requiring the listener to have commissioned an agency first.
In 2023, LifeSci added Tim Bird to lead client services and Sarah Wheeler to lead another specialist communications practice. Middleman welcomed the experience and perspective they would bring as capabilities expanded. There is a consistent sequence here: broaden the work, recruit people who understand it, then explain what the combined team can do.
The reunion has a business model
LifeSci’s next leadership chapter became official in December 2025, when Ian Stone was promoted to CEO. Stone had joined as president that January. Middleman’s place in the company’s history is as its founder and former CEO; his current venture is Valence. The distinction keeps two active businesses, and two chapters of his own career, in their proper places.
Valence’s launch brought the familiar cast back into view. Perlmutter, Leigh and Braco joined Middleman as co-founders and executive vice presidents. The company announced that it already had clients when it introduced itself publicly. A public launch, in this case, marked an introduction to the market rather than the first evidence of work.
The operating promise is that founding partners will remain closely involved in assignments. That is a concrete choice about how an agency should run. Clients considering the firm can ask who will actually attend the meeting, read the material and make the recommendation. The model makes the founders’ participation part of what the company offers.
At the launch, Middleman emphasized judgment, clarity and the ability to carry out assignments under pressure. Each responsibility carries a different obligation. Judgment means choosing. Clarity means making that choice understandable. Execution means getting the work done when the calendar has stopped being accommodating. It is an account of communications with considerably less confetti.
“It is judgment, clarity and execution under pressure.”Matt Middleman · On the Valence launch, 2026
Twelve animals, and another beginning
Away from the agency, Middleman is married and has three children. He is also caretaker of a household with 12 animals, a detail that would be difficult to improve with a branding exercise. That is a considerable constituency for someone whose professional life already involves keeping several audiences in view. A quiet room may have competition.
It is a welcome domestic footnote to a career usually described through institutions and job titles. The faculty appointments, the analyst role, the first agency and the second founding all belong in the record. So does a household whose animal population requires two digits. A person can have an unusually varied professional history and still have very ordinary demands on his attention.
That home life gives the polished professional timeline a different ending. There are three children and a dozen animals beyond the next appointment, each with priorities unlikely to have been agreed in a messaging workshop. It is a small, specific reminder that the founder remains a person after the meeting ends. The next chapter is still being written through the work Valence takes on. Its stated ambition is to help companies earn credibility, awareness and influence, with experienced partners staying close to the assignments. For Middleman, the most revealing fact about this beginning may be the people who joined him. The first agency began by persuading someone to take a chance. The second begins with colleagues who have already seen him at work.