Framing the biotech opportunity.
You don’t need a PhD in Microbiology and decades of c-suite experience to invest in bio and walk away in the “green.” In fact, sometimes too much expertise can work against you. Seasoned veterans, for all their knowledge, are often trapped by their own experience, focusing on reasons to reject a proposition, overestimating risks, and clinging to familiar heuristics.
It’s easy to forget that breakthroughs often come from breaking the prototype. A decade ago, who would have imagined patients willingly paying over $1,000 out-of-pocket for a month’s supply of a drug? Similarly, could anyone have foreseen an AI-driven drug discovery platform raising $1 billion on launch? Back then, most of us thought moonshot ROIs only came from asset-led companies. The same too can be said about the resurgence of CNS, particularly Alzheimer’s assets.
Instead, success in biotech investing doesn’t require encyclopedic knowledge — it requires a curious mind and a little bit of courage to get you to a moderate level of expertise. That doesn’t mean Bio investing is easy to get right — it’s definitely not.
As Adam Grant puts it, “It is when people have moderate expertise in a particular domain that they are most open to radically creative ideas.”
Newbies are prone to false positives, sure, but seasoned pros are equally vulnerable to false negatives.
In any case, for the newbies, I’ve put together a primer on bio investing. One that I presented to last years UNSW AGSM Angel Investor Course. Enjoy and welcome any opinions.
Access Deck Here.
Credit few slides to Richard Murphey. Baybridge Bio is a killer resource.
