A guest post by Elliot Hershberg on the four forces reshaping biotech startups

Why invest in biotech, you ask? You’re not alone. One of the most frequent questions I get from LPs and potential LPs is why in the world Not Boring Capital would invest in biotech. Historically, biotech has been a very specific and separate discipline from traditional venture investing. Getting a therapeutic to market is risky at best, and even if it works, it’s incredibly cash consumptive. A small fund investing in early stage biotech is bound to be diluted to smithereens by exit time.

But Elliot’s thesis, of which I’ve become convinced over many conversations with both him and founders building in the space, is that there’s an enormous shift afoot in which biotech companies are beginning to look a...

A guest post by Elliot Hershberg on the four forces reshaping biotech startups

Why invest in biotech, you ask? You’re not alone. One of the most frequent questions I get from LPs and potential LPs is why in the world Not Boring Capital would invest in biotech. Historically, biotech has been a very specific and separate discipline from traditional venture investing. Getting a therapeutic to market is risky at best, and even if it works, it’s incredibly cash consumptive. A small fund investing in early stage biotech is bound to be diluted to smithereens by exit time.

But Elliot’s thesis, of which I’ve become convinced over many conversations with both him and founders building in the space, is that there’s an enormous shift afoot in which biotech companies are beginning to look a lot like software companies did a decade or so ago, propelled by forces akin to the rise of AWS, founder-friendliness, and a growing ecosystem of primitives with which to build. Founders are getting closer and closer to programming atoms like software engineers program bits. The capital, and team size, needed to start and scale these businesses is declining. Multi-billion dollar outcomes and 100x returns are becoming more frequent.

The shift is so big that the category needs a new name: from biotech to techbio.

In today’s piece, Elliot synthesizes years of knowledge into a compact techbio taxonomy and describes four key shifts that are unleashing a wave of entrepreneurial energy on one of the biggest opportunities available to humanity: “tapping into the awesome power of biological growth.”...