Unexpected upsides of building a hard startup

25 Nov 2023

One of my favorite startup articles is Sam Altman’s Hard Startups.

These are upsides I was surprised to learn over the last four years of building a very hard startup: dog longevity drugs.

Quality of thought > hours of work

One hour of quality thinking by the right brain is much more valuable than even a hundred hours work without the right context. Time to output is much less related when building deeply technical products.

Many decisions are two-way doors, but going through the wrong door can be much more time and capital intensive in hard startups than when building software or similar. Therefore it is logical to take the time to gather more data before a decision - and potentially save your company timelines and millions of dollars.

Building a deep tech company is a true marathon - because of this we are incentivized to give our team unlimited vacation and actually mean it; we take off time as a team frequently; and yet we execute years faster than incumbents. This is not to say we don’t have intensive sprints at Loyal - we often do around things like regulatory filings - but these are usually artificially created for e.g. fundraising milestones, and not related to technical product success.

Less competition

It is hard to build hard things. Few founders & teams have the requisite context to work on hard, technical problems; even fewer have the context to do it well. Additionally, building these companies usually requires an insight that is only earned over years or decades.

In biotech, I’ve found that current thinking is so entrenched and static that recognizing the validity of new ideas takes much longer than you would anticipate. Competitors undoubtedly emerge, but only once your insight is validated - giving you a very important moat: time.

Time is an impenetrable moat

There are many moats when building something deeply technical - patents, federal incentives, the team. A moat that is often overlooked is simply: time.

When working in atoms, it takes a fixed period of time to hit certain milestones. In animal drugs, every time you submit a technical section to the FDA the review period is six months. This is the same for a little company like Loyal and an $80B behemoth like Zoetis. FDA mandated studies such as Safety and product stability must be run for a specific duration. No amount of resources can make those go faster - a valuable advantage for a startup.

Mission motivation

A truly mission-motivated team can create outcomes that would be considered impossible at another company. It is much easier to motivate a team to new heights when you are building something important.

While the importance of mission motivation isn’t unexpected, the degree of outcomes possible with a mission-motivated team is: one timely example is the outcome of the OpenAI fiasco was likely swayed if not decided by the team’s unified weight pulling in favor of sama. It is unclear if this would have been possible at an ‘easy’ startup - would the team had been as motivated to pull for their ousted CEO, and would that pull carried as much weight?