From Academia to Startups - Common Founder Foibles
I completed a BSc in neuroscience and started a Ph.D in health economics at one of the most traditional academic institutions in the world before leaving to work on and invest in biotech companies in Silicon Valley. I now run the biotech startup Cellular Longevity (Loyal).
During this process, I have met, worked with, interviewed, and employed many scientists from academia. I also had to (quite painfully) un-train many of the bad habits I gained from seven years of academic scientific training. Here are the most common foibles I’ve seen in myself & others.
Moving slowly
In academia, the duration of each stage of your career is pre-set. A bachelors is 4 years, an American PhD 5 to 7 years, post-docs 1 to 3 years each. Working extra hard may net you another paper or shave a year or two off at best. Regardless of your competence, shortcutting the process is generally impossible.
Such inescapably long timelines reduced my imagination for what is possible to achieve in short periods of time.
Even if speed-oriented, most academic groups have to choose saving money over saving time. Scientists are often trained to work sequentially, not in parallel, and to de-risk each step before moving forward.
Almost always, a (funded) startup should choose to spend money to save time; each week lost is a week lost on your timeline, an extra week of burn without increased derisking of the company.
Being dogmatic
Many successful companies were considered impossible or bad ideas by their industry’s incumbents. First principles thinking is one of the key skills of excellent entrepreneurs. As a founder, you need to be able to wade through a field’s set norms to understand which are rooted in fact and which are rooted in tradition. Often, scientists have been trained in these dogmas, find comfort in them, and resist breaking them.
Over-indexing on hierarchies and titles
Academia is hierarchical - you start on the bottom and spend a pre-defined number of years jumping from step to step. In some ways, the academic institution is dependent on you buying into its hierarchies.
The mentality this encourages can be terminal in startups. While a title can give signal of someone’s competence, it is just that - a signal, not a guarantee. Titles can masquerade incompetence; while one incompetent professor will not destroy a university, an incompetent executive may very well destroy your startup. Founders must be comfortable interviewing, managing, and questioning people double their age with quadruple their credentials.
Naive view of the world
Politics, relationships, patterns, and money drive many interactions in the ‘real world’. Most scientists spend their 20s and 30s protected from this reality by academia’s walls (academia is far from exempt from politics et al, but in my experience, it’s the professors who feel this, not the graduate students). Personally, this was one of my steepest learning curves.
One instance this comes into play is in fundraising. Many academic-rooted founders do not take the time to understand how investors think. They believe that the investor simply needs to be convinced of the scientific validity of their idea. There are many social variables that play into closing a deal; most of the academic founders I meet struggle to identify these and instead default to science-heavy pitches as that is where they are the most comfortable.
Unclear communication
Academic communication tends to be technical, formal, overtly humble, and somewhat pedantic. In comparison, good startup communication is concise, information-dense, and direct.
Many scientists trying to crack Silicon Valley are quickly written off by its incumbents - not knowing the Valley’s norms is the fastest signal that you are an outsider.
Missing the forest for the trees
It is quite easy to destroy an idea. If you ask the average scientist to diligence a company, nine times out of ten they will return with a laundry list of reasons of why it will surely fail. This ultra-realist mindset is an asset when derisking an experiment, but also hinders the disruptive thinking necessary for startups.
A good founder has an equally critical mind, but is able to differentiate between terminal flaws and acceptable risks. The magic is in finding the gold nugget at the center of a mostly wrong idea.
Trying to be CSO and CEO at the same time
The role of the CEO is not to run the science. Your primary job is to raise money, hire the best team possible, and facilitate that team to do their best work.
This can be a huge sacrifice for the scientific founder. I miss the early days when I had creative input on our experiments - but I have hired people who execute on the science so much better than I ever would.
A drug that works in a dish vs. a drug product
A common flaw in early biotech companies - and a mistake I made too when I started Loyal - is that the founder often isn’t aware of the many additional variables in play when making a drug. It’s not just about whether you drug might be efficacious - you need to consider whether your drug would be a good product.
Commonly neglected variables include:
Final price point relative to other therapeutic options
Manufacturing complexity and logistics
Patient and patient preference
Regulatory considerations, risk tolerance
Acquisition market
Clinical study feasibility
What you want to know vs. need to know
A scientist might spend their entire career unraveling a single cell signaling pathway. You learn to learn, to increase the world’s understanding of a corner of biology. These learnings may have a future translational value, but they equally may not.
Startups require pragmatism. You have very limited time, money, and people hours to learn what is necessary to push forward your project. While big companies have the luxury of basic science research, most startups must eschew studies they may want to conduct to have the resources to complete the studies they need to conduct. This type of ruthless prioritization is uncomfortable, but is necessary for a startup to quickly and efficiently find a product that may work.