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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 At

by 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.
  - w1ntermute 11y ago
    > ...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. There's a fundamental difference between trying something again where the customers weren't receptive and trying something again where the product couldn't be created. Customer reception can change over time, often quite rapidly and drastically, making previously failed business models successful (ex: Webvan -> Instacart). But nature doesn't just change (at least not over short timescales). Moreover, as cge explains elsewhere in this thread, you cannot really iterate in biotech: > 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. Contrast this to business model-based innovation in tech, where a slight tweak can be the difference between a unicorn and a dud.
    - timr 11y ago
      The difference between success and failure in biotech lead generation is finding a good lead. That's something that is strongly influenced by luck. I can point to famous researchers who have made entire careers out of this sort of momentary serendipity, actually.
      - w1ntermute 11y ago
        Yes, that is exactly my point. You cannot iterate your way to a serendipitous discovery.
        timr 11y ago
        Actually, that's the only way you get to a serendipitous discovery: you make lots of shots, and some of them go in the goal.

by timr 11y ago

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.
- w1ntermute 11y ago
  > ...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. There's a fundamental difference between trying something again where the customers weren't receptive and trying something again where the product couldn't be created. Customer reception can change over time, often quite rapidly and drastically, making previously failed business models successful (ex: Webvan -> Instacart). But nature doesn't just change (at least not over short timescales). Moreover, as cge explains elsewhere in this thread, you cannot really iterate in biotech: > 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. Contrast this to business model-based innovation in tech, where a slight tweak can be the difference between a unicorn and a dud.
  - timr 11y ago
    The difference between success and failure in biotech lead generation is finding a good lead. That's something that is strongly influenced by luck. I can point to famous researchers who have made entire careers out of this sort of momentary serendipity, actually.
    - w1ntermute 11y ago
      Yes, that is exactly my point. You cannot iterate your way to a serendipitous discovery.
      - timr 11y ago
        Actually, that's the only way you get to a serendipitous discovery: you make lots of shots, and some of them go in the goal.