Investing in Bio — Miracles (hopefully) built on molecules.
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.
