Many founders start their companies because they’re looking to build a career around finding a solution to a problem or pain point. Scientists are no different, and yet, you don’t see as many scientists becoming founders as you would engineers or operators.
It’s common to see biotech firms started by scientists and researchers, but many other fields have companies that utilize and base their work on research done by scientists who are unlikely to become entrepreneurs.
So why is it so common to see outsiders bringing research out of the lab and not the scientists themselves? Sure, some scientists would rather focus all of their time on research, but bringing the fruits of that work into the real world is generally the only way to apply them to the problems all that labor was meant to solve in the first place.
It’s a complex knot to unravel. First off, there is the stigma in the startup ecosystem that scientists generally don’t make for good founders. This opinion seems to largely exist because they often hail from academia, which can be a pretty isolated field with very different structures and nuances than startups or most businesses. That gives rise to the notion that they wouldn’t have the skills needed for the job.
But like all generalizations, it’s often not true. Stacy Blain, the co-founder and chief science officer at Concarlo Therapeutics, said on a recent Found podcast episode that she’s heard all the reasons why certain investors don’t think scientists make strong founders, and she doesn’t buy it.
Blain came to entrepreneurship after spending more than two decades researching the same type of protein that could lead to treatments down the line for drug-resistant cancers. But she realized it was time to launch a company when her research was moving toward developing drugs, which caused her grant requests to be denied.
While Blain admits that she’s had to learn a lot since becoming a founder, she points out that there are more commonalities between the two careers than people think.
“The beauty of being a scientist is that we can learn a lot,” she said. “That’s what we’ve been trained to do for decades: Look at a situation, figure out what’s important, troubleshoot and learn the appropriate things.”
Blain said scientists also come with a lot of experience managing capital, working with a budget and trying to get the most done with a limited amount, which qualifies them to handle VC cash.
“We’re used to talking things through and deciding things together,” she said. “We’re not ‘it’s my way or the highway.’ It’s showing the data. Let’s assess the data as a team, whether that’s financial, strategic or scientific data. That’s what we do. In that sense, we’re really well suited for this role.”
But at the end of the day for scientists like Blain, becoming an entrepreneur was the only way to turn the research they’d been working on not just into a product, but into something that could actually help who it was meant for. If her research never left the lab, she wouldn’t actually have taken the next step of trying to turn that research into something that could potentially help people.
However, where scientists like Blain don’t take up the mantle, it seems others are more than willing to when they see the potential of the solutions that were born in the lab.
For example, ZwitterCo, which uses membrane technology to clean up waste water, was founded after its co-founder and CEO Alex Rappaport decided to commercialize research on water membranes he came across as a Tufts University student. That research had been done years earlier by a professor at the university.
Rappaport told TechCrunch’s Found podcast earlier this year that he wasn’t 100% sure of all the chemistry behind the company and didn’t get commercialization right on the first try. But the company has since raised $40 million in venture funding and landed customers in the agriculture and food and beverage spaces. If Rappaport hadn’t taken that research out of the lab, it may never have turned into the commercial solution it is now.
Another similar company is Colossal, which serial entrepreneur Ben Lamm started based on scientist George Church’s research on de-extinction. The company is on a quest to bring back extinct species like the wooly mammoth in ways that could help conservation efforts.
There is even a new venture firm, Aventurine Capital Group, which just launched a fund that is meant to be an accelerator focusing on intellectual property. The accelerator aims to help spin companies out of the lab and academic settings so that their scientific founders can keep grinding away at the bench if they want to.
“It’s [a case of], ‘No, don’t do what you’re not wired for; it’s not what you chose to do with your life,’” said Joe Maruschak, Aventurine Capital Group’s managing director at the time. “‘We have people who can grow companies; you stay there, do the research … we don’t want to fund you to stop doing what you spent your entire life doing,’” he said.
So while it’s great that many companies are being built off research that founders find worth pursuing, without more scientists seeing entrepreneurship as a potential career, the startup ecosystem is losing out. Without scientists and researchers’ expertise, things will inevitably get overlooked.
And especially with really technical and science-heavy fields such as AI, climate tech and deep tech continuing to grow and garner investment, venture capital and startups alike are better off getting more scientists into the mix than not.
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