The Maintenance Phase: What Nobody Tells You About Surviving Between Breakthroughs

There is a moment in every biotech startup’s lifecycle where the champagne has been corked, the deck has been revised, and the last round has closed. The press release is out. The milestone has been hit. And then—utter silence. No new data for 12 months. No major inflection points. Just... operations.

Welcome to the maintenance phase. It is the long, barren, vaguely humiliating stretch between breakthroughs. It is where companies go not to die, but to drift. And in many ways, it is more dangerous than outright failure.

This is the part of the startup cycle no one prepares you for. It doesn’t make for a good keynote. Investors stop replying. Team morale wobbles. Conference invites dwindle. Everyone wants to be around at the beginning or the end—not the middle, where the work happens. And in biotech, this middle can stretch into geological time.

Clinical development, after all, is not designed for narrative pacing. Trials don’t read like a Netflix mini-series. There are no dramatic reveals in Q2. There are protocols, enrolment delays, site initiations, slow IRB approvals, and the omnipresent spectre of data that is just not ready yet. Meanwhile, burn continues. Staff need purpose. Founders need to justify their continued existence.

And yet, this phase is also where real companies are built. It is here that culture is forged, manufacturing is stabilised, partnerships are pursued, and regulatory groundwork is laid. But because nothing explodes or collapses, it is routinely underestimated. Founders go quiet. Boards get nervous. The company becomes an empty Slack channel with occasional updates.

The tragedy is that the maintenance phase is often the most critical determinant of long-term success. Not the headline win. Not the splashy Series A. But how a company performs when nobody is watching.

Those who survive this period do so not through charisma or capital, but through discipline. They set goals even when external validation is absent. They run tight operations without becoming reactive. They invest in relationships that may bear fruit in 12, 24, or 36 months. And most importantly, they understand that biotech is a game of tempo—not velocity.

The challenge, of course, is psychological. When the news cycle moves faster than biology, silence feels like failure. When your peers are announcing licensing deals and token offerings, holding your ground feels like falling behind. But the truth is: steady is underrated.

So what to do in the maintenance phase? Plan the next three outcomes, not just the next round. Keep publishing. Talk to regulators before you need them. Make sure your team believes the silence is part of the process, not the end of the story. And above all, resist the urge to manufacture momentum.

Because biotech isn’t about perpetual drama. It’s about staying sane long enough to matter.

And that’s the real milestone nobody celebrates.