Global Bio-Entrepreneurship Course (GloBE)

Building a Lean Biotech Startup

Starting a successful bioscience company is hard. This is a heavily regulated, capital intensive sector, and investors are becoming increasingly difficult to find. However, the payoff to patients, the number of new jobs, and financial rewards for founders and investors CAN be extraordinary when it works: think Genentech, Illumina, Amyris, or Wuxi Pharmatech. If startups are going to overcome the challenges and make their way to success they will need the right tools—tools borrowed from the hard won experiences of both the winners and the losers, from small and large companies, from the biotech and other tech sectors. This is exactly what the Global Bio-Entrepreneurship (GloBE) class will do. We will investigate the management framework that is emerging from the best companies in the world both big and small, and then show how these can be applied in a practical way to your Garage company.

As business leaders have argued, building a successful startup is really a management problem, and the best management approach may be the “lean startup”. Obsess about customers. Identify your “white hot risk” and work on that to the exclusion of nearly everything else. Measure your progress. And of course go further on less. These are the hallmarks of companies ranging from Toyota to the best internet startups. Here we will apply those principles to biotech. It may be easy to apply these to a research tool company, but how can these ideas be applied to therapeutics or biofuels companies? Simply put, you just have to be more creative. For instance, early partnerships—really early partnerships—can be the solution to getting the market feedback you need to allow your company to grow or pivot.

Not only will the course instructors and reading material give you the foundation for these new techniques, this class is also an opportunity to learn from the best. Each module will include seminars by some of the most successful entrepreneurs, investors, and industry experts. We will also span the range from the theoretical to the practical with hands on case studies, training in how to make the most effective pitch, and opportunities to get feedback on your vexing business model or management challenge.