Market Selection for Biotech Platforms

That is like the blessing and the curse of a platform company is like you can do everything, but obviously like you'll fail if you— and that's like a classic, like, and I don't know, I've probably had to learn myself, like a seed kind of issue is that you have this like big vision of like, oh, it's like a platform and like it can do anything. But if you don't have like a good story around like what are some specific markets that like it's really compelling for, then that can be really challenging to like have a compelling story about like, okay, like why is this exciting and investible? And I think just to start off, I think people maybe over-index a little bit on like, oh, like when you're doing your seed round, like this market that you said in the deck is like the exact market you're going to go after like 10 years from now. I think what was more helpful to me at every stage of the company was the thought process that you went into when you're selecting that. And you might pivot the exact market as you develop the technology and you move along. But what's important is you have that thought process of like going to market and like understanding like Okay, like what are the advantages we have? Like where can we not go? 'Cause maybe we don't actually outcompete. So it's more of like a philosophy of like, in some sense it matters less what you choose and it's more that you have a mentality of choosing and like iterating on that and like making sure that you're always thinking about, okay, like I have a cool technology platform, but like where is it headed? And like having that product mindset, that can be like a really big trap I think is just like staying on the technology and then just assuming that like, oh, people partner, like, you know, Um, so I think that's the high level. So then once you do that, like you can stack rank things however you want. There's like market size, there's like time to market. I think something that's underappreciated there, um, is this idea of kind of the proof points, like regardless of market size, even is like maybe something you want to optimize for is just progress and like showing that the technology works. And maybe you do that with a market that's frankly like not commercializable in many ways. And, you know, hopefully it is and like you work something out, but maybe you're actually just optimizing for, hey, hey, this CRISPR works and it is something that's efficacious and it like is safe in humans. And even if that's on some tiny disease that maybe wouldn't be very commercially profitable, that could be huge in terms of like funding the company for the long term and like getting partners excited about targets you do care about. And for technical reasons, that small market might be way easier to achieve those technical milestones with. So I don't like it. People sometimes see that as like a dirty word, like, oh, like it's not the right market size or something. But I think That's something I've definitely come to appreciate is that there's many other factors that just because it's not like business school, like, oh, like the right market or something doesn't mean that it's not the right thing to go after. And you have to just really understand like the market dynamics of like the industry you're in. What are investors looking for? If you're trying to build a long-term company, you're going to need to raise a lot of money. So you need to understand like who your customer, what your customers want. And one of your huge customers are VCs because otherwise, like, yeah, you might chosen the right huge market, but you just die because you don't reach the right proof points. And unfortunately, the technology doesn't reach its full potential.