Ask not why more talented people don't work in biotech, but rather, what can we do about it?

A playbook for making biotech cool again

Biotechnologists suffer from an incredible number of pathologies that hold back the industry: they are almost uniformly kind, humble, quiet, and passionate about their work. Our technologist cousins, with their trillion+ market cap companies, suffer from none of these - they are self-aggrandizing, boisterous, irreverent, and mercenary. Even the most seemingly trivial accomplishment comes with a “Things will never be the same!?”-style marketing campaign.

Biopharma should be the coolest industry on the planet - what could be better than using centuries of collective scientific and technological firepower to save yourself, save your loved ones, save the world from certain and inevitable destruction. But it’s not. Biotech doesn’t even crack the top 10 for growth industries new grads are entering. Is it because people don’t care about saving the world? Do they not understand that it’s in their own self interest, that death comes for us all and biotech is literally the only thing that can improve your quality of life and the QOL of your friends and family as you age?

I think most exceptionally talented people do understand these points. But they see an industry that is so fundamentally broken, inefficient, and not fun that they would rather do literally anything else. Biotech should be the coolest, most fun, most prestigious industry in the world. This is a playbook and a call to action for anyone who wants to join me in remaking it.

How do we fix it? “The mission” is not enough. “Making a difference for patients” is not even close to enough; it’s used as an excuse for titanic volumes of sloppy, easily avoidable bad behavior¹, just as or more often as it’s used as a motivator. We fix it by starting with high agency and high urgency leadership, with exceptionally high standards of operational and technical excellence, exercising narrative control, and having a fucking plan.

Decades of previous leadership in biopharma and regulatory affairs.

What does it take to turn an industry around? There are so many examples in tech, it’s not like we have to guess. At risk of turning this into a listicle, I think there are 5 essential things that an industry needs - which roughly map to what a game needs, because jobs are economic games. This doesn’t mean gamification, it means design - really excellent games are designed to be challenging but not pointlessly frustrating, enjoyable but not exploitative.

How do we fix biotech by design, not by gamification? By creating intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic motivation. Everyone appeals to extrinsic motivation - the mission, the science, the patients, the fear of a painful future plagued by medical maladies - and people care about these things, sure, but biotech has not figured out how to channel that care at all. We know that “scared straight” doesn’t work.

To truly motivate exceptional people to join us in the fight and fix the industry, that takes intrinsic motivation. Here are the five ingredients:

1. Goals
2. Emotions
3. Controls
4. Toys
5. Flow

—Rahul Vohra

Goals that are concrete, achievable, and rewarding. Exceptional people are drawn to challenging problems that matter. We (humans) are the most complex systems we know of. Engineering and intervening on biology is the hardest set of problems that 1) are identified; 2) have reasonable approaches to solving; and 3) yield massive societal and economic rewards for solving them. The biotech industry could do a much better job publicizing that fact.

Hard problems only matter if you can answer “so what?” Biotech is the only field where, by working in it, you have a chance to contribute to curing fatal neurodegenerative diseases. More generally, working in biology is the only feasible approach to adding more happy days to your life and your loved one’s lives.

The achievable part is what kills biotech on this category. Your chances of success (if you don’t work at Coefficient Bio), are very low. We need to fix that as an industry, by thinking much more creatively².

Emotions. Biotech should be a joyful industry, brimming with enthusiasm and excitement. Instead, it’s one of the grimmest industries on the planet. There’s an overwhelming sense that failure is lurking around every corner, and that it’s unavoidable, because of factors outside of our control. Being optimistic in biotech is an easy way to get laughed out of a room, while being jaded, cynical, and pessimistic is seen as a badge of honor won through time served in the drug discovery mines (this couldn’t be more different from tech). Biotech is the coolest thing you can possibly work on - it should feel that way, every day. How?

Controls. Games have robust controls - you can control inputs and drive towards the outcomes you want (given enough skill). Same for tech via programming and product management. We can’t really “control” biology at any level, but we also can’t “control” markets or any other complex phenomena, and yet we still manage to build robust controls that allow us to observe and intervene and monitor the effects of those interventions, without pondering if it’s a good idea to do so. This is a completely solvable problem for biotech that more people should be working on.

Toys. The best games are fun on many levels, because they’re built with toys. Some of my favorite games - open-world role-playing and action-adventure games - contain multitudes of toys, games within games. This should be a gimme for biology - yes, our ultimate goal is to address unmet medical need with novel medicines - but we need to have fun along the way. The process, the day-to-day itself, needs to evoke the emotions we’re designing for: joy, enthusiasm, excitement. We’re literally planning and executing scientific experiments. The fact that this one isn’t already solved is a massive own goal.

Flow. Flow is intense and focused concentration on the present, without worrying about the past or future. All people in biotech do is worry about the past (we were too slow, we went after the wrong target, etc.) or the future (are we going too slow, are we going after the wrong target, etc.). How do we create flow? Quoting Rahul again:

1. You must always know what to do next.
2. You must always know how to do it.
3. You must be free from distractions.
4. You must get clear and immediate feedback.
5. You must feel a balance between challenge and skill.

Flow seems like clearly the most difficult and most important of these to fix and get right to transform the industry. How? Stay tuned. We’re working on it.

Here’s my scorecard for biopharma (December 2025); tell me yours!

Goals: 4/5. This is the strongest category. -1 for “achievable” goals; there’s a lot of wasted effort on goals that are not feasible. We need better goal setting, and less wasted effort on goals that aren’t feasible with current tools, and more companies fixing the tools to make more goals feasible.

Emotions: 2/5. The raw ingredients are there, but the industry is in a doom loop of “it’s too hard” and “the FDA will never approve it.”

Controls: 2/5. Again, raw ingredients are there, but we need faster feedback loops.

Toys: 3/5. Day-to-day, planning and running experiments, there’s lots of fun to be had at many different levels, but better controls would help massively here.

Flow: 1/5. You can’t achieve flow when you have no idea what to do next, no idea how to do it, and no feedback loop. Until we fix this, we won’t find flow, and we won’t make biotech cool. Stay tuned.

Here is a completely non-exhaustive list of companies that I think are tackling one or more of the above problems in interesting ways: Latch Bio (fix your data infrastructure), Plasmidsaurus (fix your sequencing infrastructure), Modal (fix your compute infrastructure), Inductive Bio (fix your development candidates).

The next generation

All of this creates an incredible opportunity for technologists. Biopharma has catastrophically fumbled what should be the easiest, most effective branding exercise in business.

Yes.

Being bland and pathologically risk averse invites unmanaged risk. There are phenomenal examples of new leaders in biotech taking on all of these problems head on, going after incredibly ambitious new science and trying their damndest to create rising tides for everyone.

Jacob Kimmel on Dwarkesh, Patrick Hsu on a16z - incredible scientists, unabashedly making biotech cool again in the face of cynical grumbling. I think it’s fair to say that Dave Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly, has taken the tech world by storm with his appearance on the Collison’s Cheeky Pint podcast, where he came off as personable, knowledgeable, and talked like a normal human person. Patrick Collison, Brian Armstrong, Fred Ehrsam, and Reid Hoffman are all in their bio-era and it’s amazing³. We need more of that.

For a given unit in terms of pharmaceuticals, for a given dollar unit of expense, you can access more pharmaceutical technology today than has ever been possible in history, even as healthcare costs everywhere else in the system have shot up. Pharmaceuticals are the one place where, because of the mechanism of things going generic and the fact that our old medicines continue to work and persist over time, you’re able to get more benefit per dollar. — Jacob Kimmel

The biopharma industry desperately needs our help. And we should all want to help it. Paraphrasing Jacob: pharmaceuticals are technology, and technology is deflationary. Pharmaceuticals are the only technology we have that improve your experience as a patient while lowering costs in our healthcare system. Did you know that? Do you think your friends and family know that? Do you think society’s sentiment towards biopharma reflects an understanding of that? Let’s fix it.

Getting in touch

If you liked this post or have any questions, feel free to reach out over email or connect with me on LinkedIn and X / Twitter.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jacob Kimmel, Abhishaike Mahajan, and Stephen Malina for reading early drafts of this post and providing helpful feedback.

1. Some examples include: being extremely unprincipled, non-committal, and haphazard about buy vs build decisions, piling in to crowded spaces to avoid scrutiny, and discounting or even penalizing early-stage companies that are pioneering new approaches to fix important problems.

2. Shelby Newsad has a bunch of great examples of thinking creatively in this blog post: A Playbook for Human Evidence.

3. If you’re a HNW individual and don’t have your biology life’s work figured out yet, give me a call.