If you want to have a decent shot at getting funding from biotech VCs, the team overall needs experience in biotech AND startups, and the less experience the founder has in biotech the more the team will require to compensate for the deficiency. And vice versa for business experience, a freshly minted PhD is going to need team members with significant biotech BD experience.
A PhD or MD counts towards experience in biotech. MS + years of industry experience also counts, as would BS + many years of industry experience.
A PhD is nice because because it demonstrates deep experience in a narrow field plus an understanding of context. The context part is key. Autodidacts tend to miss out on the context, and their learned knowledge tends to be more fragile as a result, so there is a slight bias towards advanced degrees.
Insufficient experience is a hard no for biotech. Nobody wants to see another Theranos, and notably biotech VCs didn’t put any money into Theranos. We’d like to keep it that way.
> "A PhD is nice because because it demonstrates ..."
An employees willingness + investment to singularly do just one thing for the rest of their life.
It works as really good signaling for a CEO / hiring manager to assess someone as a really consistent employee.
Theranos had an excellent market fit—-people hate having blood drawn—-but the technology did not work and fundamentally could not work. The whole point of being a subject matter expert is to learn about things like that.
It’s true that there are other routes to becoming an expert in something (and proving it). A masters and a stint at a well-known company certainly works for many people; bootstrapping your own company might be an option too, but you’d need to be very successful to establish your bonafides. The advantage of a PhD is that it’s a fairly well-known quantity.