Common tech truisms and their applicability to biotech startups

15 September 2023

Early teams need to be in person

There is objective benefit to working in person, especially for a small team. This benefit is ambivalent of startup sector. However, the tradeoffs of optimizing for an in person team differ significantly across sectors.

In biotech, your first optimization must always be getting the right team with the right skillset. This is because the risk of the wrong team - or even the slightly suboptimal team - drastically outweigh the potential benefits of being in person.

This is because:

You p(success)

You need very specific talent
Technical knowledge is earned over decades, almost always via practical experience. Thinking a problem through first principles is incredibly helpful - it’s been one of our secret sauces at Loyal - but it must be combined with the requisite knowledge.
Knowledge is very specialized
Biotech talent is often older and therefore more likely to have families, mortgages, college savings accounts - the willingness and ability to move is often much lower
There is less willingness to move to a high CoL area
This is all extra complicated by finding the right skillset and context, combined with the right culture for a startup (Pharma culture can be hierarchical, slow, and generally not

The risk of not having the right talent i

Tech engineering talent - usually some of the earliest hires in a new startup - tend to be younger, already primed on startup culture, and less specialized skillset. Therefore it is an easier

Don’t hire senior people early

Loyal’s third employee was our Vice President of Aging Biology. This was a

Stay close to the product as long as poss

One important thing to recognize is that the necessity for experience also necessitates ignoring other common

It’s a common idea that one proxy for a

Our early team was hired on normal early employee equity grants. I then split up 10% of the cap table and distributed to them (the founding team). This was while having relatively close to market salaries

There are a few reasons this is both possible and important:

The average biotech employee is older, and therefore more likely to have family, a mortgage, savings targets - or just not be into sleeping on an air mattress on the floor anymore