There are two types of pivots in startup life: the accidental kind, and the one you actually plan. The former is more common. Something’s not working—funding dries up, users vanish, a competitor eats your lunch—and you find yourself scrambling, rewriting your deck at 2 a.m., hoping

Picture this: a young biotech founder in Boston is pitching their company to a room full of investors. The founder explains how their groundbreaking therapy could cure a devastating disease, and before the end of the meeting, they’ve secured millions in funding. Across the Atlantic, in Berlin, another founder

Startups rarely die all at once. They erode. Slowly. Through investor no’s, staff attrition, product-market ambiguity, and the general entropy of modern work. And in these long grey in-between phases—when the excitement is gone but the obligations remain—motivation becomes less about passion and more about

Founders are usually excellent at preparing for success. They build spreadsheets full of upside scenarios, draw hockey-stick revenue projections with understated confidence, and design pitch decks that glide over risks like a politician avoiding hard questions. What they are less prepared for—what few accelerators, advisors, or glossy startup

Biotech startups are where some of the most groundbreaking ideas in science emerge. Yet their pitch decks often feel like endurance tests, loaded with jargon, indecipherable charts, and acronyms galore. The science may be brilliant, but the storytelling? Not so much. Storytelling isn’t just a garnish—it’s the

Decoding Investor Intent: It’s Not on the Website When it comes to raising capital, founders tend to be optimists—or more precisely, pattern-seeking creatures in an environment that rarely rewards it. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the blind faith many place in investor websites. “We invest

How to Actually Find the Right Investors: A Field Guide for Biotech Founders In a previous post, I explained why just asking for money is not a strategy. In another, I warned against simping for capital—blindly emailing a spreadsheet of names like you’re handing out resumes at a

Somewhere between the lab bench and the pitch deck, a strange thing happens to many biotech founders. These are individuals with more post-nominals than a UN delegation. PhDs, MDs, sometimes both. They can explain the subtle mechanics of ion channel modulation, draw the entire MAPK pathway from memory, and

European biopharma is a maddening paradox. It has the academic firepower to generate groundbreaking discoveries but lacks the financial machinery to turn them into therapies. This is not a new problem, and it’s not a small one either. Yet every time I see another promising European biotech sell out

There’s an old saying in Silicon Valley: when in doubt, invoke physics. And so the term “first principles” has become one of those phrases—like “disruption” or “pivot”—that is routinely abused by people who’ve never used a soldering iron. Everyone wants to think from first principles. Few