Do you have "hurry up and wait" problems?
Of all the different kinds of problems that biotech startups face as they evolve, the most insidious ones come in the form of “hurry up and wait” problems. These are problems that appear suddenly, with minimal if any warning, and urgently, with potentially existential ramifications, then once they’re addressed, go dormant for an unpredictable amount of time.
There are a number problems that come in this form, but the example I always think of is target selection: Most startups do this once in the beginning, then they put their resources into building programs around the targets. Then one of the programs hits a wall and suddenly you need a new target. In fact, you need it yesterday because you’re now behind schedule. Or a potential partner shows interest in your platform but wants to pursue a new therapeutic area. Before you can start negotiations, they want to see a half dozen potential targets. Or you get funding to start three new programs. Or you’re evaluating a new strategy and you need a list of potential targets. And so on.
Target selection is an intrinsically complex and subtle problem. But what makes this particularly insidious is that it’s almost impossible for a biotech startup to create repeatable machinery around any “hurry up and wait” problem:
Each time the problem comes up, it’s too urgent to build a carefully thought-out solution, or even to start looking for an off-the-shelf tool. You throw together some Jupyter notebooks, write some one-off code and make the decisions through email chains and ad hoc meetings. Given the urgency, this is the only responsible way to do it.
Then, once the crisis has passed, you say “That sucked. I don’t want to do that ever again. Let’s find a repeatable solution so we can do this more thoughtfully next time.”
But, of course, next time feels very far away. It’s over the horizon. It isn’t on any long-term plans. So does it make sense to invest in that now? There are much more urgent things that you should really work on instead.
Then, the next time it does come over the horizon, it appears suddenly and urgently and you go through the same process again, exactly like the last time.
And repeat.
In my experience, every biotech startup faces a number of “hurry up and wait” problems at different scales and frequencies. And once you’ve recognized that you have one, there are basically two things you can do to address it:
1) Try and build processes and communication patterns that will help alert you farther in advance. For target identification, this may mean keeping tabs on early partner negotiations, post-funding plans and programs that are in trouble.
2) Push harder to start building the infrastructure to solve the next iteration while it’s still over the horizon.
Both of these are a core part of what it means to be a data driven startup. And the more you can push your organization to be data driven, the easier it will be to turn “hurry up and wait” problems into solved problems.
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