By 2003, Ken Drazan was ready to move Arginox Pharmaceuticals, the biotech company he had started as Juventis at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory a year earlier. The company's location in Long Island, New York, was hindering its growth. A major part of the decision was based on the difficulty of recruiting new talent. "The scarcity of existing companies limits the capacity of a new company to grow rapidly because local talent pools are constantly being depleted," says Drazan. "Research institutions such as SUNY, Stony Brook, are insufficient to fill these pools as their graduates have no industry or start-up experience."
Drazan would have moved to Princeton, NJ, or New Haven, Conn., but for personal reasons, he ultimately settled the company in Menlo Park, Calif. The cross-country shift has been a boon professionally. In particularly, recruitment has become less arduous. "We hired a vice president with biopharma experience from another company ...
