Hacker News Reader

Comment by menloparkbum | Hacker News Reader

Biotech is a huge and broad-ranging field. It could be a really old, staunchy industry (people have been making drugs and making biological modifications since forever), or a brand new thing, depending on your vantage point. You need a lot of specialized equipment. Results are slow. You pretty much need a PhD in order to do any sort of meaningful work in the field. Etc. It really depends on what you mean, but the national capitals for a lot of innovative biotech work in the USA are Bay Area and Boston.

View on HN

Small correction: you need a PhD, several years of post-doctoral work, and a contact on the inside. Even then, after 13+ years of post-secondary education and slave-wage "training," you might very well find yourself un- or under-employed by age 40, because you're considered too expensive or (ironically) too specialized.

There are so many new bio PhDs minted every year that the labor supply is far out-pacing demand. Right now, the big names (I'm lookin' at you, Genentech...) are hiring extremely talented people into glorified lab-tech positions.

In short, biotech is no panacea.

"There are so many new bio PhDs minted every year that the labor supply is far out-pacing demand."

If you want a science field where demand far outpaces supply, try geology, with an eye toward either oil or mining. In the oil industry, there are 30,000 qualified geologists to fill 90,000 jobs. My sister's salary offer jumped $10K in the year she delayed entry into the workforce.

She also says that there's a huge software opportunity in geology, because existing software sucks. However, you need some pretty specialized domain knowledge, and you'll be competing against Schlumberger and Halliburton. That's great for technical superiority, but you'll probably have difficulty breaking into Halliburton's old-boy network.

Biotech in the US happens either in Boston or the Bay Area and to a lesser extent in the DC/MD/NOVA hub. I have heard that Boston is more an old boy network and that the Bay Area biotech start ups are more receptive to hiring younger people (not MD or PhD) as early employees. For starting your own biotech company, it will be very difficult to garnish credibility without a terminal degree or board of big name collaborators.

A good approach to starting a business in this space is to pick your target audience, and find out if your team can easily fix any of their biggest problems. If not, iterate to a different target audience until you find a good problem for your team.

In the medical device realm, I know of a couple groups of undergrads that have developed technologies that attracted VC attention. Titles and credentials are not deal breaking obstacles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com