I like everything about this piece except the “boring” tag.
“Boring”, paradoxically, can be a term of praise in the startup world, because as Abhishaike notes, “boring” things like payments processing can be extraordinarily lucrative and valuable. So maybe it’s good branding to call fields “boring” if you want more good people to go into them.
But actually, speaking as a prototypical chaser of the shiny and interesting, what makes things “not boring” is a combination of impact and intellectual engagement.
Stripe is “interesting” on the impact front because “take a percentage of all transactions online” is a LOT of money; on the intellectual-engagement front, it’s not as interesting to me but it presents many fascinating problems under the hood for people with a finance or software orientation.
Abhishaike’s examples of “boring” biotech companies he wants to see more of are… CROs and drug repurposing.
Which are NOT BORING AT ALL.
As someone who has tried to pitch manufacturing innovations to biotech/pharma, it became clear to me that most of them are outsourcing their experiments and their manufacturing to these specialized third party orgs. If you have an extraordinary improvement in experimental or manufacturing METHODS (and we all know methods drive progress in biology!) the place to do it is a CRO or CDMO.
Want to fulfill the promise of cell and gene therapy to cure “all” diseases? You’re gonna need to make manufacturing not suck. Who does that? CDMOs.
Want to make preclinical research suck less? Yeah you do. 95% of drug candidates fail in the clinic. Most of the cost of drug development is clinical trials. If preclinical research actually predicted clinical success, that’s THE WHOLE GAME. Think about the money. Think about the reduced time to cures that work. Preclinical research methods with better predictive validity ARE a wild ambitious galaxy-brained dream! And you know where you can build em? IN A CRO. “Boring” is underselling it!
Both of these are “fun”, meaty, interdisciplinary problems: biology, engineering, automation, etc. Want to integrate AI & robotics into a physical facility to make it more efficient? In a biotech context? That actually might be a better fit for a CRO or CDMO than a drug discovery startup.
Oh, and drug repurposing?
BUDDY THAT IS NOT BORING.
Let’s say you think biotech is cool but you’re a software guy not a lab guy. You want to use AI methods to predict which drugs will work. For you, ADME and toxicology are headaches you will regrettably have to hire someone to deal with someday, not fun problems to solve. It would be lovely if you could get biotech-founder money and impact while minimizing the amount of icky, pricey, risky lab-and-vivarium science your company has to deal with.
If this is you, REPURPOSING IS YOUR FRIEND.
Also, if you are a “correct contrarian” and voracious reader of the scientific literature and biotech news and financial filings, if you think you can figure out where the industry has missed opportunities, if you think people are crazy and the world is mad, if you think you’d be a good investor — REPURPOSING REPURPOSING REPURPOSING.
Drug repurposing and high-tech CROs do not actually have a lower ceiling on impact than drug discovery! Neither do they lack for grand scientific/technological challenges!
NOT. BORING.
