Developing a nose for nonsense.
Biotech founders are often cast as innocent academics and prisoners of their own intellect. But in reality, many are well aware of what they’re doing. Signaling theory suggests that when people opt for ‘noisy’ signals, they do so in service of attention - not truth. And founders, turn up the volume on what they can prove in a bid to drown out what they can’t. Therein lies our job, as those looking from the outside in: to decode whether what's presented is compelling science or compelling science fiction. One delivers returns, the other a nice bedtime story that‘d put anyone to sleep.
To weed out the bedtime stories, one approach is to pass each idea through three sequential stress positions.
- The smell
- The story
- The substance
I break this down here.
I’ve written this two part series not because I wield encyclopedic knowledge, but rather as a deliberate exercise in reflection and abstraction — in that order too. Only by stepping back, can we draw more funders and founders into closer dialogue around the good stuff. Otherwise encased beneath a veneer of technical jargon and ego.
