[untilHellbanned]

As a biologist with over a decade of experience in areas relevant to these startups, I appreciate the movement into biotech, but I'm unimpressed with the actual products.

While everyone might poo-poo academia, it would take little effort to find 100s of projects at universities across the world that are better versions of these projects.

As much as YC dominates software applications, they are woefully inferior in biotech/biomedical applications.

[bkolko]

I'm a YC founder (current batch; Shift Labs) and also a tenured full professor at an R1 university. I've got a pretty good view from both sides of this fence. I've spent over 20 years as a faculty member at research universities, produced PhD students, raised millions in grant money, written dozens of articles, yadda yadda yadda.

Universities are really great for many things. They are even really great at commercializing some kinds of technologies. But they are not great for all things, even all things related to bio or tech transfer. Sometimes crazy bets are the only way breakthroughs happen, and generally academia cultivates incremental more than transformational.

I started my company because I wanted to make affordable medical devices. The incentive systems for both med device companies and university commercialization offices are almost completely misaligned with building a business model that works for affordable medical devices.

So I went the entrepreneurial route.

Being in academic research is not the same thing as building a company. They're not the same skill sets, or even the same language. Lots of academics become technical advisers to startups built around their research. That's not the same thing as building a company. YC is about building a company.

I wrote about being a med device company in YC here: http://bit.ly/1LlmZjk, but I think really what I was writing about was being a researcher learning to build a startup.

[untilHellbanned]

This is great and all, but I'm not talking about academia vs. industry/YC. I'm talking about the actual products. They just aren't very good.

[koji]

This may just be a result of their maturity. The YC companies may seem "not very good" because they're closer to market and practical application.

When it comes to research, particularly in academia, it's much farther from market. This makes it much easier to expound on the broad possibilities. News headlines have a bad habit of doing this (think fusion and carbon nano-tubes).

[paul]

And which of these products do you have actual experience with? My guess is "none of them".

[tikhonj]

I actually agree. Exactly the same is true for most software coming out of YC. But that's not bad at all: the point of YC is not to do cutting-edge research—although a few companies do—but to execute and take a product to market. It's a vital part of an idea's development, but at a later stage than academic research.

University projects are incredibly valuable, but only the rare exception produces something commercially viable much less supported and marketed enough to be relevant to consumers. Even in CS, an academic field with disproportionately strong industry ties, projects like this a rare exception (see how venerated Spark is); it's even rarer in other fields.

This is a different sort of work than raw R&D, but it's still difficult and relevant—just in a different way. I completely sympathize with not being interested in it, but that says more about you (and often me) than it does about YC.

If anything, the role YC plays is actually more important in biotech than in software because creating, deploying, marketing and supporting a software project is an easier problem with more existing support outside of YC. Software takes less resources, has less risks and has more buy-in from funding sources and other parts of the community than biotech. (At least, and especially, in SV.)

But, unless you're excited by an accessible version of something specific, none of this is going to be particularly relevant to you. Not only is this perfectly fine, but it bodes remembering for people in the startup community who tend to get so enamored with and immersed in what they're doing that they forget that it is not universal.

[woah]

Yea I mean look at Airbnb. It is, (in software jargon) a "crud" app. Virtually any software project you could care to choose in academia today is more advanced than airbnb's tech.

[softdev12]

While I appreciate what you are saying, I think this statement is not really accurate if you look at the facts. I would not say "virtually any" because there are numerous academic projects that are now abandoned and whose creators consider a failure. So, semantically, "some" might be a better word in the place of "virtually any". In any case, I think you are underestimating how complex Airbnb's tech is. They have tons of banking regulations that they have to follow because of their payments and to think that their tech is "crud" is just a testament to how well they make the complex seem easy.

[vqc]

YC is telling us that there may be a lot of value in batching and accelerating these types of products/companies. Maybe we should start a biotech focused accelerator (as opposed to software) that turns post-doc chemists/biologists (as opposed to software engineers) into rockstar founders.

[george88b]

Something like this is already being done. Indiebio just launched in SF and they are doing great work at bringing in pot-doc chemists and biochemists and de-risking their academic work and turning them companies.

Disclaimer, my company Pembient is in the first class.

[vqc]

Ah, that's perfect; the idea is validated. Time to start a competitor in other bio hubs. =)

[srunni]

There are already many well-established biotech accelerators/incubators in Boston (Lab Central, PureTech Ventures, Third Rock Ventures, Flagship Ventures, Atlas Venture, etc.), Seattle (Accelerator Corporation; also in NYC), NYC (Harlem Biospace), and San Diego/Montreal/Vancouver (Inception Sciences).

[stochastician]

I want to take issue with "it would take little effort to find 100s of projects at universities across the world that are better versions of these projects", both as a trained biologist (neurobiology), current postdoc, and former entrepreneur.

I share your intuition, I really do. I even said similar things in grad school (and still do, sometimes). But the reality is that:

1. These are not supposed to be projects, they are supposed to be companies creating products. The gulf between "Nature paper" and "something someone will buy" is incredibly long and arduous. Plus, these are VC-backed, meaning there's an expectation of timeline (short) and return (high). These aren't "take $20m from darpa and engage in another four years of R&D" type endeavors. So while they might look trivial scientifically (although I do not think that they do), they have to be working sooner rather than later.

2. "Better versions" is also a tough thing to assess. The people involved matter a lot -- thus even technically superior solutions from very smart people might still not be "better versions". I know many grad students who are much more knowledgable than some of the top data scientists, who nonetheless would fall on their faces if they tried to do a data science startup. Similar for life sciences and biotech.

I think the people who poo-poo academia are largely setting up strawmen -- even Peter Thiel (whose first VC firm, Founders Fund, backed both of my startups) admits that there's a substantial role for government and academic activity in enabling long-term technical innovation.

As biologists, we know just how hard it is to make _anything_ work in this space. Most new drugs fail, most clinical trials fail, most pathways end up being hard to target, etc. etc. Often building a company in the biotech space is like trying to build a microprocessor company where we're still not entirely sure "how the silicon works".

The challenge for YC and other VCs is to identify technologies that are "almost there", and help turn them into companies and products. That's very hard, and I'm not really even sure that we (as academics) are any good at it either.

Will some of them fail? Sure. Will some of them leave the startup scene and maybe go back and do a postdoc or work for an industrial research lab or do another startup, much wiser? Of course. But that hardly seems like a horrible outcome, especially if the scientists learn a lot along the way.

[foobarqux]

If these biotech and hard-science startups fail, backed by the best startup accelerator on earth, then the effect will be a hard-science investment winter. So there is more at stake than you let on.

[jessriedel]

It's unfortunate that people are downvoting you since outside criticism is a lot more useful than a thread full of people cheering on YCombinator. (Unless you're a troll, as suggested by your user name.) Still, your comment would be more helpful if you were a bit more specific.

Could you point to a few of the University projects you're referring to? I think we'd especially want to know if they require similar levels of investment, since cheap long-shot approaches compliment, rather than are made obsolete by, expensive traditional approaches. (If you think cheaper approaches are hopeless, maybe you could expand.)

[ndamiano]

We started our company out of the Stanford Biodesign fellowship and are part of the current YC batch. We are making an implantable medical device - the old school kind with no software involved.

Medical device innovation is broken. Companies developing devices like ours are taking 10 years and $100M to see revenue, and most people in the industry consider this time and cost inevitable. For that reason, investment in the space has plummeted. ROIs suck. The thing is though that it's not inevitable. The space is ripe for smarter and more efficient ways to bring products to market. This process innovation is not coming from academia, nor will it ever. Academics just doesn't think that way, and they're categorically not good at commercialization. This new thinking is coming from independent startups that embrace a hacker mentality and reject conventional wisdom. As we all know, that's very similar to the ethos of YC.

Stanford Biodesign has a stellar track record of producing medtech winners, and that's because its process works. The advice we've heard from the YC partners in the program has aligned very well with the advice we heard from the top forward-thinking entrepreneurs in the industry at Biodesign. They get it. YC partners may not understand the intricacies of healthcare as well as industry veterans, but it doesn't need to. They understand how to build a great company regardless of vertical. YC brings in top founders from industry, who already have the necessary expertise and connections, and encourages them to think big and think differently. I don't see how that's not a winning formula. Yes, healthcare is different, but it's similar to other typical YC verticals in more ways than you think.

[sama]

The difference between companies and projects is huge. We look for companies.

[srunni]

Those projects are turned into companies if they have translational value: https://www.bio.org/media/press-release/report-shows-academi...

[untilHellbanned]

I called everything a project. See my response to Paul.

[paul]

Care to give a few specific examples? Also, these are companies, not "projects" -- it's important to understand the difference.

[untilHellbanned]

I called them all projects.

Haploid genetics[1] is just one example of a technology that is doing real, far reaching stuff in human genetics (sorry, SNPs). There's numerous companies being developed from discoveries using this technology.

I love YC (and huge props to you personally for all the amazing things you've contributed, I'm very honored to be speaking with you), but in talking to many colleagues, the money involved $100K or the hype machine involved in YC just doesn't move the needle in biology. So, you're unlikely to get any real players interested.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21866103

[car]

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. This is very cool and groundbreaking indeed.

[refurb]

I guess it depends on what YC is trying to do. You have to remember a lot of investors shy away from biotech due to the huge capital investments that need to be made for new drugs or devices.

What I've noticed with the latest YC biotech start-ups is they tend to be much more focused on ideas that don't require a huge amount of capital (diagnostic platforms, biofuels, etc).

[IndianAstronaut]

There is actually investment into the area of minimizing capital requirements.