| Can you name one that fits your line of thinking? > Does it solve something that slots in I'm not sure what you mean by this... > they have something close enough that disrupting the pipeline isn't worth it This is another incident of thinking that IT startups are the same as Biotech startups, or any science startup. Marginal increments in IT can be worth BILLIONS, marginal increments in Biotech aren't worth the paper they are printed on (that may be a bit of an exaggeration), and the biggest reason is cost to get into market. IT has low costs if any to enter a market place, except in the rare exceptions where the FCC is involved, the average cost to get a drug to market is something like $500MM and YEARS of regulatory approval. It's not worth investing in a marginal increment, you invest in moonshots and as you collect more data and better understand how the drug performs to either continue to invest (if it remains promising) or shelve it if it only looks marginally better. While the market analysis needs to happen it is much less rigorous than IT startups. Hey 100,000 people die every year from infections acquired in hospitals, great lemme call around see what hospitals are willing to pay and sell to them. Lets not forget the other 600,000 that acquire infections from hospitals, for which under the Affordable Care Act the hospital has to pay for. Great sounds like I have a business as long as my product doesn't surpass a certain price threshold. In biotech you are either a billion dollars or a bust, there is no in-between because new products cost so much you have to have those high returns. Not many IT startups NEED $500MM just to get their first sale. |