Building a company from scratch based on nothing more than an ambitious idea is a daunting task for a young life scientist, but it is also an alternative career path that can be exhilarating, rewarding, and even lucrative.
Academia doesn’t provide the ideal preparation for a foray into the ruthless world of commerce and industry, and any scientific start-up will find the road to riches strewn with unseen obstacles and failures. “In academia, the path tends to be quite clear,” says Caleb Bell, cofounder and CEO of Bell Biosystems, a Palo Alto–based biotech startup. “In entrepreneurship, it’s the opposite. The path is not at all clear,” he says. “So you need to be comfortable with uncertainty and not afraid of failure, and then you’ve just got to jump in and get on with it.”
Eager to do exactly that, a number of recent PhDs and postdocs have decided that they’d ...
