Startups are, in fact, vehicles for social mobility. In many cases, synergistic with the success of the company. Beyond money, startups should catapult founders into an entirely different lives, exposed to different groups of people that help you think better.

Economics of biotech are broken. Making drugs just isn’t that valuable today.

Working in biotech white space (aging, cosmetics, etc) will remain facing reality headwinds so far as it remains the tail of the dog. Fundraising, commercializing, etc is all about leverage. You don’t have any insofar as you’re only option to survive is raising more and more.

The danger of niche, intellectual bubbles: you start accepting things as truths when they are merely opinions. Don’t work on problems that are thought to be ‘true’ merely due to group think within a niche community. Macro reality is equally as important. Particularly when working on a startup, are you working on something that is truly something or something that everyone has created ‘reality distortion’ around to be a true bet (hint: many empirical, first-principled bets that people believe will fundamentally work are often still opinions).

Need more boring approaches in bio -> pharma startups. Hard enough to build within frameworks that already exist.