There is a quiet confidence with which financial analysts deploy the discount rate—that tidy little variable in a discounted cash flow (DCF) model that purports to capture the riskiness of future earnings. In biotech, however, this confidence is almost always misplaced. To apply a neat, fixed percentage to an

There’s a certain temptation, once things start working, to exhale. The team is humming. The product is shipping. The pitch deck hasn’t been updated in two months because, for once, nobody’s asking for it. The metrics look decent. The cash balance looks respectable. You might even start

Every founder eventually learns the same lesson: the market does not care about your milestones. It doesn’t care that your trial data is almost in, or that your deck is sharper than ever, or that you just found product-market fit after 18 months of wandering the desert. When

There’s a certain kind of career that doesn’t start with a big idea or a grand strategy. It starts with reading the fine print. Not because anyone asked you to. Not because it was glamorous. But because you were curious, or maybe just stubborn, and decided to pay

Moonshot thinking—a buzzword beloved by tech moguls and governments alike—has long dominated discussions in fields like AI and space. The idea is straightforward: set an audacious goal, throw money at it, and let innovation take care of the rest. But in biotech, moonshots often feel less like the

By the last man in the office There are two types of people in the world: those who take holidays, and those who pretend they don’t need them. Guess which one runs the startup? Yes, it’s me—the one-man conga line of capitalism, waving to the cleaning

Ask most founders to list their favourite films and you’ll get a mix of productivity porn (The Social Network), tortured genius mythology (Steve Jobs), or the occasional Tarantino flick if they want to signal “creative but dangerous.” But if I’m being honest, my favourite films are all about

For an industry so obsessed with metrics, dashboards, and KPIs, business is surprisingly full of art. Not just metaphorically—though there is, of course, a “craft” to negotiation or a “composition” to strategy decks—but literally. Go to any private bank in Zurich or London, and you’ll find walls

There’s a particular kind of founder bravado—equal parts necessity and ego—that leads you to believe you can do everything yourself. You’ll write the pitch deck. You’ll tweak the logo. You’ll manage the website backend, negotiate the venue for your next event, and fix the

There comes a point in many startups where the founder stops being the force that propels the company forward—and starts becoming the gravitational center that holds it back. It’s not always dramatic. No botched product launch, no term sheet collapse. Just a growing awareness that the skills required