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How to Start a Biotech Company on a Budget

blog.ycombinator.com

11–20 of 47 posts

Re: How to Start a Biotech Company on a Budget

#11
post #8

I've just started a bootstrapped biotech company in the last ~4 months, and it's definitely possible, but does depend on your niche. I'm lucky because I can live with my parents and convert my room into a lab, but normally you have to rent a lab to even get things shipped to you. I also previously had intentionally developed the skills to do work on an actual "DIY" capex budget, which most folks coming out of academi…

I'm interested in lab automation, and ramping up on that. Do you have any automation needs?

Re: How to Start a Biotech Company on a Budget

#12
post #4

> Intensely focused on demonstrating technical feasibility, he and his co-founders found $75K in grant money and hired a postdoc at Cornell to do the first proof-of-principle study. That's still quite a budget. Not the sort of thing accessible to many people. What if you're a grad student that just finished their phd (coming off of making 40k a year for half a decade), and not, say, a professor that has connections?…

Well, hopefully you networked with your profs and their contacts during that time? They can probably help...

Re: How to Start a Biotech Company on a Budget

#14
post #4

> Intensely focused on demonstrating technical feasibility, he and his co-founders found $75K in grant money and hired a postdoc at Cornell to do the first proof-of-principle study. That's still quite a budget. Not the sort of thing accessible to many people. What if you're a grad student that just finished their phd (coming off of making 40k a year for half a decade), and not, say, a professor that has connections?…

[deleted]

Re: How to Start a Biotech Company on a Budget

#15
post #4

> Intensely focused on demonstrating technical feasibility, he and his co-founders found $75K in grant money and hired a postdoc at Cornell to do the first proof-of-principle study. That's still quite a budget. Not the sort of thing accessible to many people. What if you're a grad student that just finished their phd (coming off of making 40k a year for half a decade), and not, say, a professor that has connections?…

Well, hopefully you networked with your profs and their contacts during that time? They can probably help...

Not all professors are good at that, or even practicioners. Ironically if you get away with doing good science as a grad student there may even be an inverse correlation. Less time networking = more time at the bench.

While I appreciate that self-promotion is a valuable skill, I believed (possibly flawed) understanding? narrative? that part of the reason why YC / tech incubation / tech can be effective is that it provides a structure where folks who are highly technically minded and historically preferred to spend time leveling up on that can be given easy access to networks with a builtin trust biased to some relatively technical merit, and resources to help level up on networking at all stages (whether that's PG's imprimatur that gives you access to VC offices for late stage companies or resources to help you find networkers in early stage companies).

If YC doesn't acknowledge the structural barriers that make identifying technically meritorious biotech founders (vs biotech founders that have focused on buzzwords and networking) difficult then it's going to have a rough time meeting the success expectation it has for software, on biotech. It's nice to say you want biotech portfolio, but the proof is in the pudding what are you actually doing differently to get it done?

Re: How to Start a Biotech Company on a Budget

#16
post #7
post #4

> Intensely focused on demonstrating technical feasibility, he and his co-founders found $75K in grant money and hired a postdoc at Cornell to do the first proof-of-principle study. That's still quite a budget. Not the sort of thing accessible to many people. What if you're a grad student that just finished their phd (coming off of making 40k a year for half a decade), and not, say, a professor that has connections?…

Grant money is definitely accessible at least here in the USA. I have seen grant funding available for various industries in my state alone, and it doesn't require any specialized expertise to apply for. Typically anything <$100k seems easier to come by.

Real questions, I'd like to know from someone successful at it (is that you?): What was involved? How much of a proof of concept was necessary? How many connections did you have?

Re: How to Start a Biotech Company on a Budget

#17
I'm the Co-founder and CTO of BillionToOne, one of the biotech companies profiled in the post.

We're recently opened up a position for a Staff Software Engineer (https://apply.workable.com/billiontoone/j/2F0405817C/).

If you're interested, please reach out to me directly at david+hn@billiontoone.com

Re: How to Start a Biotech Company on a Budget

#18
post #8

I've just started a bootstrapped biotech company in the last ~4 months, and it's definitely possible, but does depend on your niche. I'm lucky because I can live with my parents and convert my room into a lab, but normally you have to rent a lab to even get things shipped to you. I also previously had intentionally developed the skills to do work on an actual "DIY" capex budget, which most folks coming out of academi…

I'm interested in lab automation, and ramping up on that. Do you have any automation needs?

Sure.

Right now, Opentrons rules with their open source robots, so liquid handling robots are pretty well handled. Xarm makes good arms for interfacing with Opentrons, so then it comes to everything else necessary to get to full automation.

1. Automated plate hotels I need plate hotels to storage samples that interfaces with my robot arm and robot systems. This I'm basically using Theo Sanderson's designs for this https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2668120 since buying them commercially is so darn expensive. I really need this for my system, so I am building em.

2. Plate sealer / unsealers My entire full automation pipeline is built around NOT needing a plate sealer or un sealer (something you can't do with the vast majority of screening systems). Automated versions of just the sealer itself cost more than 2 liquid handling robots and a robotic arm combined (and all it does is seal plates!) I think there is an opportunity for building simple but effective automated plate sealers and unsealers.

3. A train system I think Concentric (Ginkgo's COVID company) uses something similar, but basically a system that can use small trains to bring plates and reagents around a lab to different robotic stations. I'll probably just do that with lines of robotic arms, but I definitely spent quite a bit of time thinking of how to do this. (in my factorio megabase I really learned how to route trains, and I think it's exactly the same problem I face with my robotic work stations). I'm not sure how to scale the selling of that though.

Re: How to Start a Biotech Company on a Budget

#19

How can I take this seriously when it doesn't mention ebay anywhere?

Explain?

You can buy a ton of very expensive biotech equipment off of ebay for very little, which is what a lot of bootstrapped biotech companies do (plus gov-deals and other pharma auction sites)

Re: How to Start a Biotech Company on a Budget

#20
post #17

I'm the Co-founder and CTO of BillionToOne, one of the biotech companies profiled in the post. We're recently opened up a position for a Staff Software Engineer ( https://apply.workable.com/billiontoone/j/2F0405817C/ ). If you're interested, please reach out to me directly at david+hn@billiontoone.com

Did you guys use a law firm to file your patents? How difficult was the process?
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