6 ms·

The breathless tone of this TechCrunch article reminds me of this commentary on Atomwise (also a YC biotech): http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2015/03/26/to

The breathless tone of this TechCrunch article reminds me of this commentary on Atomwise (also a YC biotech): http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2015/03/26/tone_it_down.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2015/03/26/tone_it_down... In my opinion, YC has no idea what they're doing in biotech. Here's a much more credible neuro disease startup that was recently launched: http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2015/05/14/former-genentech-researchers-raise-217-million-for-company-to-fight-alzheimers-and-parkinsons/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2015/05/14/former-... I'm sure Alice and Jason are very intelligent and motivated, but the smart money's on Marc Tessier-Lavigne any day of the week. The industry dynamics of biotech are totally different - the small and nimble upstart with unconventional thinking rarely wins.

deleted 11y ago
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cge 11y ago
This is what happens with media coverage of pharmaceutical development, and often science in general. Journalists want stories that people can relate to, that don't have the uncertainty that is inherent in science, and that will grab the public's attention. The ridiculous tone is often something that horrifies the people being reported on, but seems very difficult to escape. It doesn't help that here, I think, we're seeing a community and media largely centered around software development trying to deal with a field that is far, far riskier, and has far less certainty at every step. Good ideas in software might not catch on, but good ideas in science more often than not turn out to be entirely wrong. Do a closed beta of your software, too, and while your users might not end up liking the software much, it's very unlikely that it's just going to fundamentally fail to work at all. Clinical trials can often end up that way.
eliben 11y ago
Whether YC has an idea on biotech or not, I'm very happy to see more startups in this domain. I think we've had enough social networks and mobile app frameworks. Seriously cool that YC starts backing companies that want to bring real change to the world.
epistasis 11y ago
Mathew Herper's hype is more subtle than Tech Crunch's but it's hype nonetheless. He plays his favorites just like Tech Crunch. At least he's not as unseemly as Tech Crunch though.
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timr 11y ago
The biotech companies in the last batch were mostly reasonable, if a little too breathlessly overhyped by their press launches. Say what you will about that Atomwise article, they're playing in a well-known space. There are existing companies (generally small) selling exactly that sort of service to drug companies. It's an open question whether or not their particular approach is sufficiently better to give them a sustainable advantage in what is an extremely competitive, low-budget space (relative to med-tech), but the business model is plausible. Most of the biotech companies coming out of YC are what I'd characterize as total fliers -- unlike the company highlighted by the Forbes article, these startups aren't being founded by a collection of gray-haired biotech executives with a collective 200 years of research experience in a single disease. And that's fine. One of the biggest problems in biotech right now is that everything is too stodgy and conservative. When I got out of grad school, there was no way of starting a biotech company without putting in 20+ years in academia or at drug company. You wouldn't get funding. If funding a few grad students for oddball biotech startups leads to a single success, it has the possibility of really opening up the field. And in the worst case, very little money will be lost. I think it's a good thing. If nothing else, maybe it'll turn the attention of smart, ambitious people to something more important and meaningful than photo-sharing apps and YuppieFoodDelivery.com v87.0. Let a million flowers bloom...as long as they all don't try to crowd into San Francisco, that is.
- bbgm 11y ago
  The thing is this kind of idea is not new. Finding new targets is hard science that needs a ton of experiments to validate that your theoretical models even work. For now this is low risk and no cost to the pharma partner, but it's a not a new model and in my experience not one that works.
  - timr 11y ago
    "The thing is this kind of idea is not new." ...most startup companies aren't doing anything new. How many different food-delivery services has YC funded? Photo-sharing services? Video startups? AirBnB wasn't anything new in 2007, either. Dropbox was criticized because everyone knew that file sharing had been done before. This goes back to what I was saying about biotech being stodgy: the one thing the software industry has going for it is that it's willing to fling seed capital at re-tread ideas. If success is mostly about being in the right place for luck to occur, then the secret is putting enough companies in a place to experience luck. I think that's basically what YC does. So-called "biotech investors" tend to want to wait around for commercially ready tech to just fall out of academic labs, so that they can avoid putting any investment at all into R&D. There are probably a lot of inexperienced teams that could make a business in biotech if only they had access to cash.
sethbannon 11y ago
It's been the case in nearly every industry that the "small and nimble upstart" rarely wins. Until they do. Biotech the seems ripe for the same sort of nimble innovation we've seen in software and hardware over the last couple decades. Wrote a bit about this here: http://www.sethbannon.com/biotech-in-the-garage http://www.sethbannon.com/biotech-in-the-garage
- w1ntermute 11y ago
  Your article employs the same sort of breathless rhetoric as TechCrunch: > A smart software developer can build and launch a web or mobile app and get paying customers for under $2,000. The same will soon be true for biotechnology. Moore's law is a unique phenomenon, and it most certainly does not apply in biotech.
  - sethbannon 11y ago
    It's true that Moore's law doesn't apply everywhere. In fact, some costs (like the costs of sequencing a human genome) are falling much faster than Moore's law would predict: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/DNA_Sequencing_Cost_per_Genome_Over_Time.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/DNA_Sequ...
    - w1ntermute 11y ago
      1. That graph completely omits the quality of the sequence data being generated (hint: it's pretty terrible). 2. Hyping up cheaper sequencing the way you are is nothing more than what Sydney Brenner referred to as "low-input, high-throughput, no-output biology" (video source: http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/reading-the-human-genome-with-sydney-brenner/much-ado-about-nothing-systems-biology-and-inverse-problems http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/reading-the-human-geno...). Also see: http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2015/03/cancer-genomics-and-technological.html http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2015/03/cancer-genomi... 3. Here's a more useful Moore's law derivative that's seen in the life sciences: http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/fig_tab/nrd3681_F1.html http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/fig_tab/nrd3681_F1....

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[deleted]

cge 11y ago

This is what happens with media coverage of pharmaceutical development, and often science in general. Journalists want stories that people can relate to, that don't have the uncertainty that is inherent in science, and that will grab the public's attention. The ridiculous tone is often something that horrifies the people being reported on, but seems very difficult to escape. It doesn't help that here, I think, we're seeing a community and media largely centered around software development trying to deal with a field that is far, far riskier, and has far less certainty at every step. Good ideas in software might not catch on, but good ideas in science more often than not turn out to be entirely wrong. Do a closed beta of your software, too, and while your users might not end up liking the software much, it's very unlikely that it's just going to fundamentally fail to work at all. Clinical trials can often end up that way.

eliben 11y ago

Whether YC has an idea on biotech or not, I'm very happy to see more startups in this domain. I think we've had enough social networks and mobile app frameworks. Seriously cool that YC starts backing companies that want to bring real change to the world.

epistasis 11y ago

Mathew Herper's hype is more subtle than Tech Crunch's but it's hype nonetheless. He plays his favorites just like Tech Crunch. At least he's not as unseemly as Tech Crunch though.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

timr 11y ago

The biotech companies in the last batch were mostly reasonable, if a little too breathlessly overhyped by their press launches. Say what you will about that Atomwise article, they're playing in a well-known space. There are existing companies (generally small) selling exactly that sort of service to drug companies. It's an open question whether or not their particular approach is sufficiently better to give them a sustainable advantage in what is an extremely competitive, low-budget space (relative to med-tech), but the business model is plausible. Most of the biotech companies coming out of YC are what I'd characterize as total fliers -- unlike the company highlighted by the Forbes article, these startups aren't being founded by a collection of gray-haired biotech executives with a collective 200 years of research experience in a single disease. And that's fine. One of the biggest problems in biotech right now is that everything is too stodgy and conservative. When I got out of grad school, there was no way of starting a biotech company without putting in 20+ years in academia or at drug company. You wouldn't get funding. If funding a few grad students for oddball biotech startups leads to a single success, it has the possibility of really opening up the field. And in the worst case, very little money will be lost. I think it's a good thing. If nothing else, maybe it'll turn the attention of smart, ambitious people to something more important and meaningful than photo-sharing apps and YuppieFoodDelivery.com v87.0. Let a million flowers bloom...as long as they all don't try to crowd into San Francisco, that is.

bbgm 11y ago
The thing is this kind of idea is not new. Finding new targets is hard science that needs a ton of experiments to validate that your theoretical models even work. For now this is low risk and no cost to the pharma partner, but it's a not a new model and in my experience not one that works.
- timr 11y ago
  "The thing is this kind of idea is not new." ...most startup companies aren't doing anything new. How many different food-delivery services has YC funded? Photo-sharing services? Video startups? AirBnB wasn't anything new in 2007, either. Dropbox was criticized because everyone knew that file sharing had been done before. This goes back to what I was saying about biotech being stodgy: the one thing the software industry has going for it is that it's willing to fling seed capital at re-tread ideas. If success is mostly about being in the right place for luck to occur, then the secret is putting enough companies in a place to experience luck. I think that's basically what YC does. So-called "biotech investors" tend to want to wait around for commercially ready tech to just fall out of academic labs, so that they can avoid putting any investment at all into R&D. There are probably a lot of inexperienced teams that could make a business in biotech if only they had access to cash.

sethbannon 11y ago

It's been the case in nearly every industry that the "small and nimble upstart" rarely wins. Until they do. Biotech the seems ripe for the same sort of nimble innovation we've seen in software and hardware over the last couple decades. Wrote a bit about this here: http://www.sethbannon.com/biotech-in-the-garage http://www.sethbannon.com/biotech-in-the-garage

w1ntermute 11y ago
Your article employs the same sort of breathless rhetoric as TechCrunch: > A smart software developer can build and launch a web or mobile app and get paying customers for under $2,000. The same will soon be true for biotechnology. Moore's law is a unique phenomenon, and it most certainly does not apply in biotech.
- sethbannon 11y ago
  It's true that Moore's law doesn't apply everywhere. In fact, some costs (like the costs of sequencing a human genome) are falling much faster than Moore's law would predict: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/DNA_Sequencing_Cost_per_Genome_Over_Time.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/DNA_Sequ...
  - w1ntermute 11y ago
    1. That graph completely omits the quality of the sequence data being generated (hint: it's pretty terrible). 2. Hyping up cheaper sequencing the way you are is nothing more than what Sydney Brenner referred to as "low-input, high-throughput, no-output biology" (video source: http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/reading-the-human-genome-with-sydney-brenner/much-ado-about-nothing-systems-biology-and-inverse-problems http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/reading-the-human-geno...). Also see: http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2015/03/cancer-genomics-and-technological.html http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2015/03/cancer-genomi... 3. Here's a more useful Moore's law derivative that's seen in the life sciences: http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/fig_tab/nrd3681_F1.html http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/fig_tab/nrd3681_F1....