I’ve started a boutique, biotech investment bank.

Over the past few years, I’ve been drawn towards a few core questions:

How can you create a freestanding Pharma today?
How can you translate non-consensus biotech ideas into the world?
The economics of biotech are broken. Can we structure a better funding flywheel?

There are always important scientific questions and biological unknowns to be interrogated. But I’ve come to realize many constraints around translation of the known are human in nature. This seems like it should be a solvable and preventable problem.

These are big systemic questions (for which there are no easy answers or solutions). But I believe a bank is the best approach to answering them.

What exactly does an ‘investment bank’ entail?

When you hear investment bank, you probably think of JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, etc. Big financial institutions underwriting IPOs and advising M&A deals (among many other services). Beyond the memes of spreadsheet jockeys and manic work hours, I’ve found there is a level of abstraction as to what banks actually do (sometimes, not even analysts fully think past the DCF model they are building).

While it’s become scrutinized as a plug-and-play career for college grads, it’s one of the most versatile (& overlooked) platforms to facilitate novel technology. At its core, banks are dealmakers. They marry companies, ideas, funders, etc. They grease the wheels of capital formation around new ideas.

A boutique bank to create a new flywheel for weird biotechs

The cool thing about tech startups is they typically only need small amounts of venture funding to prove an unconventional thesis. But biotechs face a much steeper expense curve before getting to the same point.

Extraneous of scientific merit, all bio startups live & die by funding to keep going. In an extreme scenario, startup creation and survival becomes a warped game of fitting to VC pattern recognition (the tail wagging the dog, so to speak). Weird drugs, weird companies, novel biotech face an uphill battle once they leave the insulated cocoon of Silicon Valley.

Venture is an essential part of stimulating the startup ecosystem. But its toolkit is limited (cash for equity) with respect to the flywheel of capital formation around science. This is where the boutique bank gets interesting (creative funding mechanisms, unconventional pools of capital, m&a forging new species of bio companies). This is particularly worth exploring for the biotech industry where canonical venture funding model (capital in, single drug out) limits large-scale companies from forming today.

At a meta level, I see my bank as a platform to

Map an ecosystem beyond “early” biotech funding (where SV/tech has most visibility at the moment) and
Create companies that look very different from today’s startups (and perhaps, not even possible starting from baseline zero).

Areas of (starting) focus

An earnest banker might sound like an oxymoron ;) but I’m driven by ideas more than fees. The goal is to better facilitate all sorts of biotech, but I’m particularly intrigued by the following:

Select MoAs and modalities (e.g. metabolic disease and mitochondrial energetics, smart biologics/precision therapeutics, new drug/device paradigms)
Asset aggregation (can you jumpstart a pharma startup? more on this later)
Novel applications/go-to-market (n = 1 drugs, select consumer products)
AI rollups for pharma services (automation around drug manufacturing, supply chain logistics, etc)
AI Pharma advertising (this is primarily a topic of intrigue, nothing active here due to policy constraints. But I think AI pharma ads are a natural evolution of current, generic TV ads we receive. Better ways to track compliance, keep records, and provide useful and accessible info on treatments for individuals).

Starting a bank is odd- so far, I’ve borrowed a medley of know-hows from startups, firms, and agencies. There’s certainly parallels in many ways, but I’ll be building a new playbook. I’ll endeavor to document my journey here (hopefully not too embarrassing to read in years ahead).