When I invest in biotech, I have a sort of a model for the type of person I’m looking to invest in. There’s sort of a bimodal distribution of scientists. You basically have people who are extremely conventional and will do experiments that will succeed but will not mean anything. These will not actually translate into anything significant, and you can tell that it is just a very incremental experiment. Then you have your various people who are crazy and want to do things that are going to make a very big difference. They’re, generally speaking, too crazy for anything to ever work. You want to find the people who are roughly halfway in between. There are fewer of those people because of these institutional structures and whatnot, but I don’t think they’re nonexistent. My challenge to biotech venture capitalists is to find some of those people who are crazy enough to try something bold, but not so crazy that it’s going to be this mutation where they do 100 things differently.

• Uncategorized