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Comment by shpongled | Hacker News Reader

The key distinction here is starting a company vs leading a company. To just walk in and lead an established company - you'd be fine with a better than average understanding, as long as you trust the experts in your company to do what is right.

To found a company? How do you know where to start? If you are hiring PhDs to come up with the idea for you, how do you if their ideas are novel or worthwhile?

Not to disparage SaaS founders, but I think it's somewhat easier to look about and say "there is no app for sending texts via REST API" and do that, than it is to look at say "no one has found a way to selectively target cancer cells for CRISPR" and then go do that.

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I think the key distinction is that there is a well-established infrastructure around software, such that the average SaaS founder (even 10 years ago) is/was not doing fundamentally new things with computers. If they were, they would probably need to understand computer science well. Take any moonshot ML company- they need quite deep technical depth and usually have a founder that has spent time in academia.

We are still at a point in Biotech where companies have to do fundamentally new things with their tech to succeed. If you were starting a company that applies CRISPR to X genetic disease, you might not need a Ph D. to start the company, because you can apply existing technology to solve that problem. But that begs the question: Why has no one else done it yet?

At the end of the day, you need a unique insight to start a large company. That means experience with either the problem space or the technology space is helpful. Not discouraging OP either, if you have a vision for what the future should look like, and can acquire talent/capital... anyone can start a massive company. So OP should try to acquire that vision.

A big issue is its actually expensive to start a company that involves lab. Software can genuinely be one person in their bedroom with some AWS credit. I think the "why has no one else done this?" question is one of the worst anyone in the history of business or science can ask themselves. Any opportunity looks like that, it's why its an opportunity! The very best ones look like an obvious gaping chasm when you see them.

I'm in agreement with that sentiment. For any given opportunity, even if it's "obvious" that someone should have done it, doesn't mean it's been done before. If something seems like an opportunity you should probably try to validate it, instead of immediately discounting it. That's how I started my last company!

But there's no doubting that some sort of counter-intuitive or hidden insight is necessary. Even if that insight is: "people think this is obvious and not worth doing, but it actually IS worth doing." RE: Zero to One.

Founders generally don't start companies in vacuums. They are the result of communication with other people on the viability of ideas. They meet a subject matter expert in a field, they get to talking, they come up with an idea. The idea gets floated around to other subject matter experts. If something seems viable then prototypes are made to gauge market fit.

If what you're saying is true, there should be no reason why many of the most successful biotech management consultants do not come from a PhD background.

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