10 February 2005 Blog Home : February 2005 : Permalink
Although it refers to Biotech startups, a recent article in “The Scientist” is interesting in the way it tries to describe what sort of people work best in startups.
Frank Eeckman, cofounder and chief scientific officer of Centient Consulting, a San Diego firm that advises biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, once heard a venture capitalist describe a biotech startup company as a "boat on fire," meaning that everyone on the boat needs to paddle as hard as they can lest all be lost.
While less bureaucracy, the freedom to try different jobs, intellectual satisfaction, and potentially lucrative stock options lure many scientists into small biotech companies, leaving a solid position in industry or academia can be a relatively risky move. A sizeable proportion of biopharmaceutical startups close up shop every year
"Only a subset of people really fit into (the startup) environment," says Eeckman. Scientists should be prepared to work long hours, explain and promote their research to investors or other nonscientists, and have a teamwork-oriented mindset that keeps the group rowing the boat towards shore. However, it also helps to be an independent thinker and to take initiative, Eeckman notes. Services that would be taken care of in academia or Big Pharma, such as buying plane tickets or ordering lab supplies, may fall on the shoulders of the new chief scientific officer or head of research and development.
Much the same applies to would be entrepreneurs in other fields than biotech as well and applies to both the entrepreneurs and those who want to fund them. Although the life of an entrepreneur or startup founder sounds exciting the reality is that for many people a large organization provides a structure that really helps. Many people find that they need a hierarchy or provision of support services in order to work effectively – even though they may frequently complain about shortcomings, the truth is that for many people even inconveniently provided services are better than having to do them oneself.
This is, it seems to me, a mindset. Workers in small companies need to have an awareness of the whole company from customer to product development and back office management. In a small company one must expect to have to handle everything oneself since there is no backup. This means that small company workers must be flexible and capable of self-direction and prioritisation of work tasks. Many people have noticed that the US seems to be more entrepreneurial than Europe, and many have noticed that in recent years Taiwanese, Chinese and Indians are also showing great entrepreneurial flair. None of these countries has much of a social security system and neither did Europe in the heyday of European invention. Is it possible that the European socialist welfare system, which provides structure and support for life as a whole, is training people to prefer well-structured environments and thus eschew entrepreneurial enterprises?