Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Gutierrez:
If you could give advice to someone starting out, what would
you say?
Jonas:
I think that if you're an undergraduate today and you don't know how
to program, you're basically screwed. If you're doing anything remotely techni-
cal, especially on the biology side, you have to learn how to program. That's
inevitable. For my liberal arts major friends, maybe it's less mission-critical for
their career trajectory. The ability to work with data really ends up being sort
of crucial, and to that end you have to know how to talk the language of the
computer.
To people starting graduate school in sciences I would suggest reading Derek
Lowe's blog, “In the Pipeline.”
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Derek's a medicinal chemist who's been
blogging for years, and he's an amazing person of insight. He talks about
working medicine, pharma, and life sciences for thirty years and how he's
never had a drug he's worked on actually makes it into a patient. He talks
about how that's common because the median success is zero. He also talks
about how the purpose of graduate school is to get out of graduate school,
as there's nothing else that matters. I think that's really true. I would also
encourage people to go into the more quantitative programs because it's so
much easier to later become less quantitative.
To academics, I would give the advice that startups are not a source of funding.
It's surprising the large number of graduate students who approach me with
something that basically has no market and say, “Well, I think I could probably
get VCs to give me funding for this.” My response is always, “You don't
understand the game being playing here. VCs are going to want you to focus
on things that you don't want to focus on, and it's not going to work.” And
even when you have VCs who are extremely supportive, like we did, you will
eventually realize that these aren't grants they're giving you. They want you to
turn around and give them a billion dollars back. If that's not your intent when
you take the money, then that's fine, but you need to tell them that upfront
when you start.
This whole using-VC-to-fund-science is a difficult and a duplicitous thing to
do, and it's very easy for graduate students to convince themselves otherwise.
It's easy to say, “I'm going to build this tools company.” And you're like, “Well,
no. Let's apply the same rigor to this process that I apply to my other science.
How many companies are there like this? How have they been successful?
What have their real trajectories been?”
It's one of the reasons I think things like pursuing nondilutive capital like
DARPA or early consulting gigs for any of these hard tech problems is actu-
ally the right way to go. If you look at a lot of the really successful companies
