Great teams build great companies, and biotech startups are no exception.   I’ve collected a few observations on great teams while collaborating at Atlas on more than half a dozen startups that have made it past the high-risk seed stage

With today’s announcement of Roche’s deal with Spero Therapeutics LLC (here), and last month’s news regarding Biogen’s deal with Ataxion (here), we’ve added further momentum to our strategy of working closely with larger BioPharma partners to create innovative “external R&D”

Doing more with less, hanging on to fight the next fight, putting out fires on multiple fronts are all de rigueur here at the Atlas Venture NewCo factory (aptly coined by brother-in-arms, @michael_gilman).  Our seed model (here, here) focuses on

In light of the continued interest in biotech IPOs by the capital markets, there’s probably not a venture-backed biotech boardroom that hasn’t been discussing the merits of going public. Whether warranted or not, taking a company public via an IPO

Let’s face it, biotech entrepreneurs are innovation junkies.  We desperately want to deploy the most novel technologies to solve difficult problems in medicine and deliver new, life changing medicines for patients who need our help.  Independent of additional factors that

Today’s biopharma industry has a richer and more exciting late stage pipeline of compelling new therapeutics than its had in years, drawing lots of enthusiasm from analysts and investors.  Goldman Sachs (GS) recently published a report on the “10 drugs

Despite many decades of success, small molecule drug discovery appears to be increasingly challenged.  The likelihood of approval of a small molecule at phase 1 is approximately half that of a biologic; pharma companies have shifted their pipelines dramatically towards

Five years ago I stepped into my first (and so far only) CEO role. It seems impossible that it was five years ago but I definitely still remember many moments from my rookie year as a CEO – both successes

As an early stage biotech investor, the future of the industry and its structure are clearly important things to think about – especially since most of the drug programs our new startups are working on won’t get launched, if they

Humans are supremely lousy at evaluating risk. We get nervous when we fly but not when we drive. We worry about terrorist attacks when we’re far more likely to die in our own bathrooms. We flock to buy tickets for

Three years ago this month I started this LifeSciVC blog experiment and its been more fun and rewarding than I would have expected. As I wrote in my first post, the reasons I started blogging were to add a voice

Today Novartis announced its acquisition of CoStim Pharmaceuticals, a young biotech company focused on next generation approaches in the exciting immuno-oncology field (here).  Their oncology capabilities and commitment to anti-cancer immune mechanisms made them an ideal partner for us at