Archive by category | Entrepreneurship

Choosing Risk

Choosing Risk

Grow up fifteen minutes from Silicon Valley and you will inevitably encounter entrepreneurs and their start-ups. One of my earlier experiences with a biotechnology-themed start-up was having a classmate’s dad stop by our sophomore year biology class to talk about where he worked. With the same classmate’s father, we also took a field trip to the research lab. This was back in 1998, where rather than mulling over the concept of a company built around one or two high-risk, high-payout products, I was instead fascinated with how professional and accurate their pipets were compared to the ones entrusted to us high school students. That company with the impressive set of pipets, Genentech, apparently had a number of other impressive assets: it went on to be acquired by Roche for $47 billion and has more than a dozen drugs approved by the FDA.  Read more

CalBIO

CalBIO

I recently attended CALBIO 2013 in San Diego, along with Samy Hamdouche, Andrew Lim and Weston Nichols. The event was headlined by Craig Venter and Patrick Soon-Shiong, and breakout sessions featured industry veterans who discussed topics ranging from corporate venture capital to university tech transfer. Most importantly, there were numerous opportunities to mix and mingle, both during casual coffee breaks and formal speed-dating sessions.  Read more

Koreans Abroad and at Home

Koreans Abroad and at Home

There has been considerable chatter about the glut of life science PhDs and a corresponding lack of jobs upon graduation. In the US, most graduate students in this field plan on becoming academics or industry scientists. But during my time in Korea, most life science graduate students I spoke with hoped to become professors, and nary a student spoke of industry. Despite a near-universal desire to enter academia, university positions are limited and competition is fierce (much like the US). Concurrently, Korea is gradually becoming competitive in the biotech arena, requiring more industry scientists to drive this engine of growth. Feeding all this is a large pool of domestically educated Korean scientists who are seeking positions after graduation.  Read more

Future Leaders Wanted

Future Leaders Wanted

I wear two hats, one of a PhD student at University of Cambridge, and the other of a biotech social entrepreneur – in 2012 my lab mate Christian Guyader and I started Global Biotech Revolution (GBR).  The Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), as part of its outreach to organizations that support young people, invited us to attend the annual BIO convention in Chicago, where we hoped to learn how the world’s premier biotechnology conference functions.  Read more

Insights from India

Insights from India

Continuing our interview series with life sciences venture capitalists (here for previous post) to accompany a study on venture capital in emerging markets published in the March 7th, 2013, issue of Nature Biotechnology, we turn our eye to India. Our second interview is with Aditya Kapil, who was a principal at VentureEast at the time of our interview in 2012.  Read more

Becoming a Bioentrepreneur

Becoming a Bioentrepreneur

The word entrepreneur is thrown around a lot (including on this blog), and when it’s used that frequently, it can begin to lose its meaning. The term sounds vaguely swashbuckling, as if every person it applies to is flippantly quitting a secure academic job to roll the dice on a sexy, but probably doomed, start-up.  Read more

Harnessed Serendipity

Harnessed Serendipity

In the late 1960s Spencer Silver, a chemist at the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, was hard at work developing a super strong adhesive.  Eventually, however, what he produced was fantastically weak glue.  But Silver simply refused to allow his “failed” experiment to dissipate into the ether.  So do you know what he did?  He did precisely what scientists don’t do often enough: he started talking to people and asking for help.  He gave formal company presentations, he dragooned colleagues in the hallway, and he generally chatted with anyone who’d listen.  Read more