Derisking Milestones in Biotech

Biotech's one of those fields where you spend a lot of time and money working on something before anything obviously can be tested for real people. So I'm curious. You know, half of my career was in software development and that's pretty standard. You work on these sprints, they're usually two weeks in length. They do a build, you test it and you see the progress. You've added new features, you fix some bugs or what have you. Any of their other businesses have fairly larger cycles. But I'm just wondering obviously, like, how do you deal with such a long development timeline both in terms of like patience and resiliency? And then how do you sort of measure that progress without kind of clear kind of builds in software or in renewable energy? You see the number of systems that you're building. And how do you manage all of.

That when you mention patience? Because I think of myself as a very impatient person. And it's true. No, it would be lovely, right, if Firestack had iteration cycles like software. But all these things take a lot of time. So while it takes a long time to get to revenue, right, which is sort of. I guess you're right. If you're a startup that really matters your time to revenue to actually be able to sell the drug for humans, there are like really, really big de risking milestones along the way, right? Like, is there a target, is there a drug that hits the target that has all the right characteristics to be advanced? Does it actually work in the animal model? You know, like there's. So there's. Every year there's like a lot of like, I would say really important de risking information that you learn. And then, and then the big one, of course is your first few clinical trials. And we just put, you know, last year was the first year that we put one of our drugs into a human, right? And amazing, like really exciting milestone for us. And this year we have these two data readouts, right? So it's the first time that's kind of the ultimate test. And the scary thing too in biotech is that you can do sort of, unlike in software, you can do everything, right? And you can still be surprised in the clinic because humans are very different from mice, right? So you can sort of de risk as much as you like. But the upside, of course is that the rewards are tremendous, right? So biotech is very, I would say, high risk, high reward, like immensely high reward if a therapy can actually improve patients lives. Yeah.