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In short, VCs in these frontier domains essentially need multiple miracles for these companies to succeed. Compare those scale up challenges to traditional biotech and pharma, where the entire industry has designed systems and processes to prove safety and efficacy and grow production. There’s still serious technical risk, but it’s knowable technic... See more

Second, because VCs are investing earlier, they are taking far more risk on the ability to scale up these technologies, even if they can be proven to work.

We can’t allow the excitement of science fiction to occlude the challenges of realizing it into science fact. Condensing fact from the vapor of nuance means finding the rare but tangible scientific advancements and propelling them forward on the path to commercialization. Otherwise, you’re investing in steam, and those returns on capital will just ... See more

Third — and here I can only describe what I am observing across the industry — marketing seems to be substituting for real, hard science in the presentation of these startups.

None of this bodes well for many of the new VC entrants who have suddenly become enamored by the capital return potential of science. We have a view that real advances in science are relatively rare, that they are hard to produce, and they tend to be signaled by clear research evidence years if not decades in advance. Venture capital is not a fit f... See more

No phrase better encapsulates science investing today than the challenge of “condensing fact from the vapor of nuance.”

It’s possible to identify a few patterns across these domains. First, VCs are investing in science much earlier than they have been comfortable with over the past two decades as software and the internet monopolized the limelight.