Next generation of biotech, built different
Biotech founders sit down with each other, and with the investors who will back work nobody has done before.
Request an invite 24 seats. Invitation and referral.
founder effectn. population genetics
When a small number of individuals break away from a larger population and establish a new one, they carry only a fraction of the original variation. The new lineage is not a copy of the old one. It evolves on its own trajectory.
We took the name from population genetics because it describes what we are trying to do. A small group leaves, and what it builds is not a copy of what it left behind. That idea decides who we put in the room and what we ask them to argue about.
Biotech has been a closed industry for most of its life. The people who did well early on decided what got funded and who got taken seriously, and that worked out well for everyone inside the circle. A lot of good science never got a hearing.
That is changing. Ideas now move between companies instead of dying inside them, and founders here help each other long before they compete. The proposals worth hearing are the ones that sound impossible until somebody works out that they are merely difficult.
San Diego is the right place to test it. Dollar for dollar nowhere in America builds a drug company more efficiently: 18 of every 100 biotechs here are acquired, against 9 in San Francisco, and they return more than twice what a Boston company does.
That argument goes better with investors in the room than without them.
What one company learns, the next one can use.
The best ideas here sound like bad ones at first.
The argument earns the seat, not the CV.
Founders, scientists and investors normally get introduced to each other by a banker or a lawyer. Here they just sit down together.
Every dinner runs on one argument. Two people who disagree open it, and after that it belongs to the table.
The people who buy companies and the people who fund them sit with everyone else rather than on a stage. We tell you who is coming before you accept.
Some of us compete for the same money and the same people. We still build together, because the only thing that counts here is what reaches patients.
These are the sentences somebody will have to defend. The ones that split the room hardest get a table first, so tell us which side you are on.
We run six dinners a year, and a larger room every quarter for the people the dinners cannot seat.
The first tables are small and they fill by referral. Tell us what you are working on, and name the two people you want in the room with you.
We are assembling the first season now.
If your firm should be on this page, write to hello@joinfoundereffect.com.