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But even with Bioinfo startups, it is hard to monetize because the culture of open source bioinfo tools is quite prevelant in academia and industry. I actually
by menloparkbum 18y ago
But even with Bioinfo startups, it is hard to monetize because the culture of open source bioinfo tools is quite prevelant in academia and industry.
I actually think it's harder to monetize because you have so few customers. If you make a bioinformatics tool, there's probably a few hundred potential companies that may need it, and probably only a few dozen of them are actually interested. Thus many of the tools become grant-funded open source projects because there's hardly anyone to sell to in the first place.
23andMe is interesting because they are the only bioinformatics startup I've heard of that also sells to consumers.
- buckwild 18y agoYeah, I kind of felt the same way. One would have a hard time selling bioinformatics. One would have a much easier time selling information derived from bioinformatics. A very important point to be made indeed, especially since most of the bioinformatics packages and software I use are free (and I would love to keep it that way!). In fact, the open source community is vital to the field; otherwise everyone would just keep having to re-invent the wheel. Just to keep everyone up to date, I talked to a few professors this afternoon about grad school. The condensed version of what they said is that given my major, I can choose to research in a field that applies bioinformatics (i.e. evolution, molecular biology, etc), or I can study bioinformatics itself (making better tools, optimizing algorithms, etc).
- biohacker42 18y agoThat's mostly true for research software. But there's a ton of cash floating around for process improvements in the for profit biotech/healthtech sector. That may not be much more exciting then business apps, but it pays the bills and it's still interesting work.