Ep143: Zach Weinberg and Alexis Borisy on Freeing the Biotech Founders

Welcome to The Long Run. This is a podcast for biotech adventurers. I'm your host, Luke Timberman.

Today there are two guests, Zach Weinberg and Alexis Boresy. They are co-founders of Curie Bio. Curie is a venture capital fund with $520 million mostly for seed investments and series A rounds in biotech startups. It also is building up in-house R&D expertise which it uses to help the companies it backs.

Curie pitches itself as different from other venture firms in part because it allows the CEO founders it backs to hold on to a greater percentage of ownership than traditional VCs have been willing to hand over. Curie also says it wants to allow entrepreneurs to retain more control over decision-making. This boils down to a battle cry of 'free the founders'.

Now, these two are definitely tapping into a popular zeitgeist of the moment. Too many biotech entrepreneurs feel they sweat bullets for years, shouldering too much of the hard work and risk without reaping enough of the reward. It's still early days for Curie Bio, but this is definitely a conversation worth having about the terms of engagement in biotech startups.

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Now, please join me and Zach Weinberg and Alexis Boresy on The Long Run.

Zach Weinberg and Alexis Boresy, welcome to The Long Run.

Okay, you guys have started this thing called Curie Bio, a venture firm with this model, 'Free the Founders', which sounds like a battle cry, a little bit provocative. We're going to get to that in a bit, what that's all about. It's really, really interesting. But just to get our listeners familiarized with what it is you're doing, I want to start with a little bit about who you guys are. So Zach, maybe can you just give me the abridged version of your entrepreneurial journey. You started as a tech entrepreneur, right?

For those not familiar, Zach, Flatiron Health was electronic health records for oncology practices specifically. So this is sort of like biotech adjacent. It's health IT, I guess you'd say. What problem were you solving there?

Okay. So you got a lot of experience there as a tech entrepreneur learning the ropes of health IT and then some of the issues that large pharma companies were trying to solve. Now Alexis, you come from a more, I guess you'd call it, biotech traditional background. How would you describe your entry in this industry?

Yeah, you know, Luke, I describe myself as a serial biotech entrepreneur and accidental investor. I started out in chemistry and chemical biology. I was working on my PhD at Harvard with Stuart Schreiber, which I ultimately dropped out of. So, I'm a PhD dropout. And Stuart had been involved, as has been chronicled in some publications, in the early days of Vertex Pharmaceuticals. And when I was in the lab, he was involved with the starting up of Ariad Pharmaceuticals. And back then things were a little bit more fluid and I'd start an experiment in Harvard and I'd carry over some of the results over to Ariad. I'd pick up some things in Ariad and bring it back over to Harvard. And that opened up my eyes to this thing called biotech. And I just got really excited about it. I started cross-enrolling in some classes at Harvard Business School because you could do that. And I just got fascinated by this world that I hadn't seen. I was coming from a very academic background and so my eyes were opened to this new world. I dropped out of my PhD program, took the masters and ran to go get a real world practicum, if you will. Not knowing anything about business and being in Boston, that meant I joined a strategy consulting firm. I thought maybe I was leaving biotech, pharmaceuticals, life sciences altogether. But this one firm had a rainmaking partner who was good friends with the CEOs of three of the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies at the time. And I spent a couple years having that practicum basically working for the offices of these CEOs on key issues they were facing from new technology, discovery programs, new product launches, clinical strategies, sort of across a field force incentivization, everything from discovery, development, commercialization in the pharmaceutical industry.

And once, and keep in mind, Luke, right, I'm in my 20s at this point, so there's a little bit of hubris of youth, but once I felt that I thought my learning curve was beginning to level off a little bit, I said, I'm going to go out and I'm going to start my own biotech company. Not really appreciating at that time that that wasn't something you were supposed to do. Maybe people do that in tech all the time, but that definitely wasn't what they did in biotech. And we'll come back to that, you know, as we talk about Curie. And I just went and did it and that was CombinatoRx with several other wonderful co-founders and we took that company public and put a bunch of programs into the clinic and made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot and tried to make a difference for patients.

After having led that for about seven years, I founded my second biotech company which was Forma Therapeutics which I was able to do with my former thesis adviser Stuart Schreiber and Todd Golub from the Broad Institute and Mike Foley. I was still running CombinatoRx and I thought, 'Oh, this is an enormous amount of fun starting up another company again.' And so I really got that appetite and so I left CombinatoRx and there was the next idea was already brewing at that point which became Foundation Medicine. And again with a spectacular group of co-founders including Eric Lander and Todd Golub and Levi.

And for those not familiar, Foundation Medicine was trying to do what exactly?

Well, it seems like something that is standard practice today, which was if you have a cancer, particularly late-stage cancer, cancer is a disease of the genome. So, sequence the genome and know why that cancer is a cancer and are there clear therapeutic drugs to be given given the genomic information. When we started Foundation Medicine, the Broad Institute and WashU and St. Louis had each just sequenced the first cancer patient. And Luke, I remember Todd Golub invited me to dinner. This is September 2008. And he said, 'I want to tell you that we just sequenced the genome of the first couple of cancer patients, and I'm going to paint a vision of what we think the future of cancer care is going to look like. This is something that needs to become available just in day-in, day-out clinical practice and it needs to be done right and we're worried that there's lots of ways that it might be done that are not done right and we want to build a company that will establish that standard of care.' Now, at that time, there already were some drugs on the market that were designed to go after specific mutations in cancer patients like HER2 or EGFR. And maybe they had a one-off diagnostic where a doctor could find out if you had one of those mutations and whether you were a good candidate for the drug. But there was nothing. There was no widespread ability to just assess a given cancer patient's tumor for a whole bunch of different potential mutations and then give them that information to figure out okay well what might be the best way to treat this person.

Exactly right. Comprehensive genomic profiling, read all the information that would be possible in one go. Okay. So you were generating all this information at Foundation Medicine about cancer mutations and in this parallel world Zach over here is working on Flatiron to help oncology practices better manage all the information that they have, not just cancer genomics but other types of information too. And this is where you guys converged. This is where you actually met and found some shared interest and maybe some compatibility that lasted.

Well, I think we liked each other, sort of enjoyed the engagement of minds. We formed a strategic collaboration between Foundation and Flatiron as Zach said. Actually, from Foundation's perspective, we tried to buy Flatiron, that wasn't successful, but that's how highly we thought of what Zach and the team were doing.

I'll put one other just sort of anecdote in here, Luke, which is so Foundation Medicine had been my third company. In parallel, I also got Blueprint Medicines going, which was sort of the sister company focused on the therapeutics for Foundation Medicine. But what something that Foundation Medicine and Blueprint shared is they both had Third Rock as their founding investor. And in the process of building Foundation and Blueprint, Third Rock was raising their second venture fund and said, 'Hey, this is a lot of fun. We just had building these two companies. Why don't you join us as a partner?' Which I did. In this as well, and keep in mind here, I was a brand new partner, totally wet behind the ears. That's when I first met Zach. And you know, Krishna had said, 'Hey, why don't you invest a million dollars into Flatiron Health?' And I remember again being impressed by what they were building and I went back to my partners and I was like, 'We should do this.' And they're like, 'What do you know about this space? You know nothing about this space, this is crazy.' And acknowledgingly, I didn't know anything about the space. But it's one investment I always regret not having made. And it's also around the time when I, as I said, became an accidental venture capital investor. So I figured with Zach, you know, over time we were able to end up forming a strategic partnership between Foundation Medicine and Flatiron. And ironically both companies ended up being bought by Roche, but I completely failed as an investor to invest in Flatiron Health and I failed from the Foundation Medicine side to acquire Flatiron Health.

Okay. Well, you found other things to do that were worthwhile, I guess, while you're at Third Rock Ventures. You got to know a lot of people and got exposed to a lot of cool technologies here in the 2010s. Now, just in terms of the timeline, both of you guys, well, Zach sold with your partner Flatiron Health to Roche for about $2 billion. I believe that was in 2018. When was the Foundation Medicine transaction? Was that before or after or pretty close?

It was a two-part transaction and the first part was 2015. That's where they bought a controlling interest and then in 2018 they bought the rest of the company.

Okay. So both of these really interesting platforms for improving the treatment of cancer ultimately, they get absorbed into Roche. And now Zach, as an entrepreneur, you're then I guess a free agent to do pretty much whatever you want. What was it that you were thinking that you wanted to do next?

Yeah. And almost to the extreme where you kind of have to put the product out with some bugs in it because if you don't you don't get the feedback and so you don't even know you're wrong until you've put it in the hands of somebody to actually use the product. And so you move, you know, this is the old school Facebook like 'move fast and break things' and there's a reason for it in software. That does not work in therapeutics, right? It's not just that you have to have PhD-level education, you have to have these multidisciplinary teams and work on complex both biology and chemistry and kind of other areas, but you also basically can't make a mistake in the beginning. And that mistake could be in everything from the target selection to the experiment design to finding the right vendors, contracting with that vendor, interpretation of the data. There's so many things you have to get right all at the same time. And if you screw any of them up in any material way, those are not bug-in-the-code mistakes, right? Those are high-consequence decisions you make early and you can't just iterate, iterate, iterate on them because if you try to do that, I mean, that means you go back to square one in many cases, you start over and you're going to spend a lot more time and money, your investors are probably not going to be happy.

This sounds like a way to lower the barrier to entry, so to speak, for new entrepreneurs to get in the game and really pressure test their ideas. But there's more going on here, too. Now, Alexis, when you probably look over at guys like Zach, tech entrepreneurs, we've seen success stories like this, especially with guys when they're young, and think, man, they're just playing by a whole different set of rules, just different rules to that game. Did you think that, what made you think I guess that maybe biotech entrepreneurship could borrow some of the principles at work in tech entrepreneurship and make it easier for people to start things, fail fast, fail cheap, try again?

Well, Luke, as you know, and as we've had conversations over the years, I've seen how things have developed in biotech startups and investing over the past couple of decades. And interesting couple of sort of trends in different directions. One, you know, go back into the 2000s and, you know, my first round of CombinatoRx was a $15 million Series A. And that was considered a good size round then. And then a couple years ago if you weren't doing a hundred million Series A it wasn't anything of interest. So capital deployment, round sizes had grown, a lot of that driven by the increasing size of funds in our sector. A second thing is technology was changing and technology particularly in serious therapeutics is not a panacea, right? There is so much, so many details that need to be paid attention to. It's not just a question of, oh, have this computer program just make a drug for you. However, there are lots of things that technology enables that was science fiction 5 years ago, 10 years ago. And so the possibility that you can achieve greater efficiency is not just a possibility but is a reality.

And you know what happened is Krishna Yeshwanth who you heard Zach mention earlier, a partner at GV Ventures, and GV had been a backer of both Flatiron Health and Foundation Medicine and Krishna is a good friend. Krishna and I often like to go for walks in the woods in Belmont, Massachusetts near where both of us live. And Krishna said to me, 'Hey, Alexis, have you caught up with Zach recently?' This is of course in the middle of COVID. I said, 'Krishna, it's the middle of COVID. I haven't talked to Zach since before the pandemic began.' And Krishna said, 'You really should catch up with him because he's got something that he's thinking about that knowing the way that you've been thinking and things that we've been talking about, you're going to be interested in hearing how he's thinking.'

Little later that afternoon, totally disconnected, I got a phone call. Actually, it was Mike Pini going back in sort of the Foundation Medicine and Flatiron connections, and he said, 'Have you heard what Zach is up to? Is this crazy? Is this possible? Is this insane?' So now Luke, of course, I'm naturally very intrigued. I'm like, 'Okay, got to catch up with Zach.' And we started talking and then Zach immediately popped up to Boston from New York and we started spending a bunch of time together brainstorming and realized, you know, and you heard a little bit in this podcast as we begun, the world was very different for tech entrepreneurs than it has been for biotech founders. And if you will, the saying, right, like tech entrepreneurs, you know, two guys and a dog in a garage start the next great artificial intelligence or enterprise software or e-commerce company. And the problem is that you haven't been able to start a serious therapeutics company in your garage.

But now maybe you can if you have the right creative idea, but if you can have access to the right type of material support of real expertise because you need that real expertise from some of the best drug hunters and drug makers in the business. Can it be, yeah, no, not literally in your garage, but in your metaphorical garage. Can founders start a serious therapeutics company and in a much more efficient manner really go make a difference?

Now I want to try out an analogy here. I think what you're getting at here is that technology was improving very quickly but it also requires the people who know how to use it and put the pieces together. Now if I think about what was enabling this wave of tech entrepreneurship back when Zach was getting things started, one of the key drivers was the development of cloud computing and AWS so that, you know, a new company didn't need to spend a whole lot of money, time and money getting their own servers and managing all of this stuff. They could save money, move quickly. The entrepreneurship itself was getting leaner, faster, cheaper. Now in biotech in parallel, now this wasn't happening at exactly the same time. It was coming along a little later, but certainly you saw this at Foundation Medicine when you started this thing 15 years ago. DNA sequencing was a lot more expensive than it is today. That price has come down. It's become democratized. And there's all these other technologies too like single-cell analysis, proteomics, spatial biology, cryo-EM, I mean imaging of tissues, I could go on and on, right? The modern lab has a lot of these technologies that have really gotten better and in some cases more accessible, cheaper, and it's aided by that underlying technological development such as cloud computing before you even get into the analysis and software and all that.

So you saw these technologies improving. You also happen to have a pretty good network of people who are experts in these fields and certain therapeutic areas that can put them to good use. And you thought maybe we can put together the tools and the people that provide the support, we can kind of raise the platform. Maybe that's not the right word, but make it easier for biotech entrepreneurs to start things.

So Curie Bio is both a venture investor and co-operator, I guess you could say, with the entrepreneur.

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Okay, so now some people listening to this might think, gosh, this sounds a lot like venture creation or what Third Rock Ventures where Alexis used to work. That's kind of what they do. They incubate these companies for quite a while before they emerge with a sizable Third Rock investment. And they're not the only venture firm that does this, of course. There's lots of others that take a pretty hands-on role. Atlas, Flagship, Arch, you know, there are others. What's different here?

Okay. Alexis, what would you say is different here between what Curi's doing and the venture creation model at some of those other firms I mentioned?

Yeah, and I think Zach said it well. First of all, there's a bunch of really great firms, Luke, as you said, and Third Rock and Atlas and Flagship and Versant amongst others, and they do great things. I think a point of emphasis, and Zach mentioned it but I'll just underscore it, it's the founders' companies. It's not Curi's company. It's their company. The founders still control the company. They own the majority of the company. We co-pilot. We're there to help. But they're making their strategic decisions. And we don't have a veto on that as it goes. The second thing is, we are really there to be helpful in the weeds, or as Christoph Langau, who leads a lot of these efforts for us at Curi, is another partner of Zach and mine. We do real work. The people that make up the bulk of the team in the CSO partner organization at Curi, these are not investors. These are people that you would see inside pharma or biotech companies that have led programs with 15 to 20 years of experience. And it's at that level of detail, engagement in providing that support to the founders, because if you step back from it for a moment, Luke, what we're looking for in founders are people that have that creative idea, that new insight of an opportunity. Why is it that we expect that those people will necessarily have all the experience to know all the ins and outs from going from that creative idea to the industrial-grade drug embodiment of that? And that's what the drug makers and drug hunters at Curi are there to help the founders be able to come up with that detailed experimental plan that will do it in the most efficient and effective manner and help them execute that in the most leveraged and again most efficient manner.

Now there's a social and cultural aspect to this thing too, where I've covered a lot of companies over the years as they go public and if you look at their capitalization tables and you often see the CEO founder who poured his or her heart and soul into this thing for many years comes out with a very small single-digit percentage ownership, maybe two or 3%. And if you look at tech companies, it doesn't work that way at all. They have a much bigger slice of the pie. And it sure seems like there's some consternation out there in the biotech entrepreneurial community about founders maybe getting a little less than they deserve or getting the short end of the stick in the negotiations with VC firms, to be a bit blunt about it. Do you think that's a real thing out there and that's something that you are able to tap into in the entrepreneurial community?

Well, I think it's an objective statement that you can say that in the tech world it is not uncommon at all to have founders that have 10, 20, 30% ownership not after their A-round but in a fully mature company. And you have obviously examples of some where they still maintain an outright control of the company even when it's fully mature. There are very few examples of that in biotech historically. We would hope in the free the founders mantra that what we're doing at Curi will both result in some amazing therapeutics that will make a big difference for patients, but we also hope that finding founders that have those 10, 20, 30% ownerships when their company is fully mature becomes something much more common in biotech.

So you're an investor and you still, I mean, you're putting real work into these companies too from the sounds of it. What kind of ownership stake is Curi seeking to have?

Yeah, I mean it varies on the idea and it varies based on the amount of money the company needs, but I would say typically early stage we are writing somewhere between $5 and $10 million checks into these businesses. Part of what we're doing frankly is mapping out what are the right set of critical path experiments these companies should be doing so they don't make those mistakes. Right, you have to remember, and this is something we talk to founders about all the time, dilution does not just happen at the seed, right? It happens at the A, it happens at the B, it happens at the C. And if you don't get the right strategy and execution done early, you may save a few points of dilution now but you will pay for it later. And so there's the balance of maximizing ownership at any point in time as a founder with long-term ownership, which is something we always try and convey. As Curi, I would say we have a good fair deal that allows the founders to retain control of their own businesses, but you may find cheaper money out there to be clear. I mean there's always somebody potentially willing to give you cheaper money without the help. And so we try and find a balance between the two. Roughly $5 to $10 million checks, I would say typically our seed fund owns 33-ish, 35, 40% or so. And then we bring the services for sweat equity. So we're typically taking 7.5% sweat equity from these companies in founder common, which I think is actually really important. We put ourselves and our services at risk. We don't charge cash for them. And we take what I think of as the lowest of the capital stack, meaning if this company is not successful, neither are we. Maybe more importantly than equity, I think equity is like one consideration a founder should care about. The other is just control and upside and agency. And so these are not businesses we control. We very explicitly are not in charge of the company. We don't have a controlling board setup. And so even as these companies mature, one of the things I found in software was really compelling is, you'd have founders who were no longer majority owners obviously, but they cared deeply, right? They cared deeply about that company because they owned enough and they were in charge of thinking through succession planning, whether it was time to bring in a CEO in the future or a COO. But these were folks who were involved and are involved in their businesses all the way through. And that's really what we anticipate will happen here. I think you'll have a wide variety of companies where some the founder stays all the way through as the CEO, some they hand it off to an experienced developer early, some they hand it off to a commercial leader later, and some, as I said, make it from one end to the other. I think all of the above. But most importantly, it's really theirs, right? It's their decision to make at the end of the day. And that paired with deep, deep help to avoid the mistakes and by avoiding mistakes avoiding future heavily dilutive rounds ultimately should mean net new biotech, net new science, net new founders, and that's what we're aiming for.

How big is your actual support company, if you will?

We will be roughly 70 people within the next 12 months or so. So we're about 38 or so today. And growing pretty quickly. So about 70 at peak. And then we have obviously a larger network of non-fully... Those are full-time employees by the way. Those are not advisers or venture partners. Those are FTEs. This is their only job. They're full-time employees and they're domain experts in one aspect or another that's critical to making these early decisions. And they will kind of move from one project to the next or one portfolio company to the next to I guess keep things interesting for them.

Are you thinking that when you make a portfolio investment whether you call it at a seed or an A round that at some point, I mean it's I guess it's the lonely entrepreneur or a couple of people in the beginning with that concept and then they gradually build their own team of their own FTEs and they sort of graduate or leave the nest?

You know, I talked to a VC just another week ago who said something funny about how we're patient about the markets and when they might reward us, but we're not patient about the path to getting data that validates the idea or not. And it sounds like that's sort of one way of saying that they're subscribing to this leaner startup model.

Okay. So these are still pretty early days for Curi but you have made a few investments I think. Are there some examples you can point to from the portfolio that might illustrate what you're trying to do?

Well, I don't know about that, Zach, but I'll give you a couple examples that I think give a beautiful flavor of them. One is a company called Forward Therapeutics and they have a beautiful idea of which Luke has become involved while they've been working in their seed, which is creating oral small molecules against blockbuster immuno-inflammatory targets. And we were able to help them go from their creative ideas at the start of the seed and effectively on the scale of seed that Zach was talking about, be at development candidate at their most advanced program, in lead optimization on the second and an early lead on their third, all on this sort of single-digit millions of dollars. And it's the type of thing where there's two people in the company, they're an amazing team coming at it from a chemistry and pharmacology perspective and I think we were able to provide them an additional depth on the biological side and an extension of their capability and an interface to that external vendor world to be able to make that type of progress in a very efficient manner.

Interesting. Well maybe necessity is the mother of invention here. It's really, you say it but it's really true like when you think about what is the critical path and you spend a lot of time in that area. I mean and this is true in any industry. I think you end up with just better plans because you're not thinking about what are all the things I could do. You're thinking about what are the critical experiments I must do in order to convince the next set of investors. And actually one of the things I think we really like about this model is if you focus and we do, we focus our effort on the seed, what that really makes you think about is like what is the data that is going to convince a Series A investor to put not $10 million into this but 25 or 30 or 40 or 50. And that's a really nice forcing function to make both Curi and the founding teams think about what matters the most. And these are I think where a lot of founders make mistakes, right? They do some experiments that may give you an answer, but they don't give you the answer or the most important answers. And you end up in a world where you've spent a bunch of money and done some wet lab work, but you really haven't answered any of the critical questions and those become kind of like the zombie businesses that are very, very tough and kind of unlikely to survive. I was just talking yesterday to a cell therapy entrepreneur who emphasized to me that he was not building a Taj Mahal for cell therapy manufacturing. He had the construct that was in good shape from the early days on a small amount of money and was forcing himself to think about the critical questions for the patient like what kind of product profile does the patient really need and that ultimately will win over standard of care today. And I thought, you know what, maybe you're not getting $100 million today like you wanted, but seems like you're going through a pretty healthy exercise right there.

Well, and Luke, thinking through that target product profile is tremendously important. We see a lot, and we're investing across the board, small molecules, biologics, engineered biologics, gene modifying therapies, cell therapies, a common thing across all of them. And some of them are an individual product idea. Some of them a group of product ideas around a concept. Some of them platforms. Again, common through all of them is okay, what's the best first embodiment of what you're doing? And then what's the second best drug embodiment? And in that best drug embodiment, right? If it's a platform, okay, what's the best application of it? What is that target product profile? What is it you're trying to make? Why is that something that's going to be amazing for patients and amazing for society? And if you force your thinking through that, that helps illustrate what are the experiments you need to do to really show that. And one of the things we try to do with founders is to help them think through not only what is it you need to show in the seed to get to the A, but then what's going to be the value proposition for the investors at the Series A to go get the Series B or the crossover. And then for those investors to go whether it's selling the company or taking the company public, whatever the founder wants to do in this journey but think it through all the way from what is that target product profile that you're thinking about. And Luke, that is hard to do which is why so many entrepreneurs and venture investors don't do it and you have to be humble because there's lots of degrees of freedoms and there's lots of things you don't know. And so another thing we're trying to say is you're not trying to predict the future. Maybe it will look like that, maybe it won't. But can you at least envision a path? Because if you can't envision a path, then you're going a little bit on a wing and a prayer. If you envision the path, it's unlikely that things will play out exactly on that path. But now you are framing it up and you understand what the steps can look like.

What's the path look like for Curi? How do you measure your success long-term?

Zach, you said net new entrepreneurship. Should we expect to see an openness on your part to a different sort of phenotype of entrepreneur? I know you guys mentioned the experience of the people on your team. And I know that there's a lot of younger entrepreneurs out there who wonder why they don't seem to get the same breaks in biotech as tech entrepreneurs do. Do you think there's an undertapped pool of young entrepreneurs out there that you can and want to work with?

I think we have it coming from all types. Luke, there's going to be the person straight out of grad school or postdoc or there's going to be a person like Zach described who's just sort of hunting for an idea and finds a scientist and pulls that idea out. There's going to be people from industry, from mid-level of industry. There's going to be, you know, grandees, of course. I think ultimately, you hit on it a little bit there. I think there's going to be a broader array of people that can envision themselves as a founder of a biotech company. And I think we're going to see that. I think we're seeing that already. One thing I would add on this, to it, as Zach says, net new founders, net new science. One pushback we heard from some people as we got Curi going was all the ideas, you know, it's saturated. All the ideas are already getting turned into drugs. And Zach and I literally were like, 'Oh man, if that's what people think, like if that's the counterargument, that is a bet we are willing to take any day.' Because we believe very much in human ingenuity and entrepreneurship and that if you have the right structures you can really set that creativity free. And I think every time that people have said an area is all played out or at its maximum that has been proven wrong and we see that already in multiple companies that we've already done. You know some of them are brand new ideas, somebody's just developed this computational approach for this gene modifying thing that nobody's thought about before. Okay, hot off the presses. Others of them are ones that everybody else I think has said no to. And you know what? We are happy to look at both of those. And if it's exciting and we see a compelling proposition, we'll do it.

Yeah. Those are the invisible phenotypes. The person with 10 years of experience at a big company who's really good at what they do and just hasn't had a shot to start a company, maybe didn't have the networks or the confidence or whatever but has a great idea and that person can start a company at 38. That's the reality, right? Like, if you're a mid-level executive at a big pharmaceutical company and you're great at your job, but look, you may still have student debt from your postdoc, you've got kids, kids are going to college, there's life that kind of hits you in the face and I completely understand why people don't take the risk if they feel that the path to get there is incredibly complex and nearly impossible to do on their own. And then the reward on the other side isn't really worth it, right? Like the opportunity cost is material for many people. And so I get why it doesn't happen. And our hope is an increasingly larger number of those folks do decide to make the leap or at least consider making the leap by coming and pitching the idea and letting us work on it with them. And I think this applies kind of all across the board. So the beginning of your career and at the end.

Last thing I want to ask you guys is kind of a big picture question. Why is this a good time to start a biotech company?

Well, because I think it is an absolute amazing time of ever-increasing understanding of the biological basis of who we are and disease and the opportunities are therefore huge to make a big difference in the quality of people's lives. And I think the fundamental demand is there, people want to have large, long, healthy lifespans. They want to live the best life that they can. And so if we have more tools in terms of our understanding of the biology, more tools in terms of our ability, if you understand that biology to shape the drugs across more modalities than we've had. And if you can do that now in a more efficient manner in all the ways we just talked about from a founder's experience, why wouldn't this be an amazing time to go do it?

Yeah. And I'll just add on like a purely emotional note, right? Because it's fun. It's intellectually deeply challenging and rewarding. And there's nothing that feels better than when you actually are successful in creating a drug and then seeing that therapy make a difference in people's lives. And so, there's lots of amazing careers and businesses and different fields that people can go do. But if you have the creative idea and you think about giving it a go and sort of starting a therapeutic company, a biotech company, I mean look, it's pretty damn awesome.

You know, as someone who's been writing about these startups for quite a long time, when I look at the maturation of all these discovery technologies, the enabling technologies, the growth of the number of people and their accumulated experience, all this accumulated know-how of how to do things, and of course there's money that's there it seems and of course the needs for patients haven't gone away. It seems quite obvious to me that this is an amazing time to be starting companies in this world. And I understand why people might get down over the stock market or their individual stock prices. You know, it's not been fun, but I mean, look at some of the things that the industry has done, the success stories, the even COVID times. Look at, forget about a lot of the noise around it, but the sheer speed of learning, how quickly ideas were translated into action, it just says to me that there's just lots of good things ahead.

I think that's right.

Totally agree, guys. Thank you so much for joining me today on The Long Run.

Always a pleasure. Thanks again, Luke. Appreciate it.

Thanks for listening to The Long Run, a production of Timberman Report. Peter Rossado of Headstepper Media was the sound editor. Music is from DA Wallach. See you next episode.