Debugging the TechBio development process
Start by deciding if you are a product or a service company.
Welcome to another Friday edition of Clear Thinking - the newsletter that helps TechBio founders debug complexity and build software that scales.
For TechBio founders who refuse to choose between science and scale.
Intro
You can’t straddle a service model with a software engineering excellence model.
The physics are not compatible.
One optimizes for good-enough quality and billable hours. The other for great teams and software.
I’ve interviewed over 40 guests on my podcast, many of them TechBio founders navigating exactly this tricky path.
A recent guest was Ronen Veksler, Co-Founder and CEO at Promise Bio.
Promise Bio is an early-stage TechBio company emerging from AION Labs in Israel, backed by strategic investors like AstraZeneca and Pfizer.
They’ve built a cloud-based AI platform that applies advanced mass-spectrometry-based proteomics to deliver value for pharma in four ways:
identifying new drug targets
predicting treatment response
analyzing mechanisms of action
supporting pathway-engagement analysis
Promise Bio is a very TechBio platform. Take something from nature, and apply a modern engineering mindset to it – going from scientific discovery to a very intentional engineering process harnessing biology. This is borne out in the founding team, who have super-strong backgrounds in engineering and systems-biology.
TechBio companies like Promise Bio can generate revenues early on.
They have unique capabilities that other companies can pay for, or collaborate with – similar to a CRO model. They might collect revenues from milestone payments, royalties, or subscriptions.
But the CRO pay-for-services model can be a trap.
Most TechBio founders think their biggest risk is running out of cash.
It’s not.
It’s building a TechBio company without a strategic position.
5 principles on positioning from David Ogilvy
David Ogilvy’s thinking on positioning is deceptively simple but effective for TechBio founders who are navigating from their initial project deliveries to production platform operations.
Here’s the essence, distilled from Ogilvy on Advertising.
Positioning is about owning a place in the prospect’s mind
“Positioning is not what you do to the product. It’s what you do to the mind of the prospect.” — Ogilvy quoting Ries & Trout
You can’t say everything — you must decide what single idea, benefit, or attitude you want to own. Ogilvy called this the “big idea” — something you can express in one sentence and repeat for years.
You can’t own an AI super-model for cancer biology and ALSO be a service provider to CROs for clinical trial patient matching.
Differentiate or die
Ogilvy believed every brand should be built on a “unique selling proposition” (USP) — one clear reason why it’s different and better.
He hated fuzziness. His rule:
“Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.”
For TechBio or consulting, this means: don’t talk about what you do — talk about only about your outcomes.
Keep it simple — clarity beats cleverness
He said:
“When you advertise fire extinguishers, open with the fire.”
The positioning should hit the reader’s gut before it hits their intellect.
Simple = memorable = profitable.
Respect the buyer intelligence, but never make them think too hard
Ogilvy wrote copy as if he were talking to “a well-informed friend.”
Your positioning line should pass the pub test — could you say it to someone over a drink, and would they get it instantly?
Build consistency — repetition creates reputation
Ogilvy warned against changing your positioning too often:
“Great brands are built the way great churches are built — over time.”
Pick your hill, plant your flag, and stay there long enough for people to associate you with that idea.
7 practical strategies for staying focused
Here are 7 practical strategies for staying focused, hitting delivery dates and building solid teams.
Don’t waste your time on work that doesn’t improve your product.
My first guest on the podcast back in April, was Orr Inbar from Quanthealth. When we talked about what they needed to do; shortening the cycle time to deliver their predictive model for a given clinical trial was their top priority. This week Orr announced that in Q3/2025 they achieved that goal and more:
Broke the $10M sales barrier
Brought their sales cycles down by 30%
Signed on more than 20 new clinical programs
Signed 4 major partnership deals
Minimize dependencies on other teams. Your engineering and customer-facing can move fast when they don’t need to ask permission or figure out interfaces with other teams. This was a strategy that evolved quickly in the 90s at companies like Microsoft and Intel. At Intel, they called it simply: SMT - self managed teams.
Brew great coffee. A story from an old-style coffee shop.
On the way to the office at one of my companies, there were 2 coffee places right next to each other. One had consistently great coffee, the other varied between ok and terrible. When I tried to understand the difference, I asked the manager at the great coffee place, “What’s your secret? She said, “Look at our coffee pots. You’ll see a little line on the glass. When it goes beneath the line, we immediately start a new pot. The barista doesn’t do anything before starting that new pot. The 15s to start a new pot, saves a 7 minute wait. To make good coffee, you have to let the entire pot of water drip through, so that the initial sludge can mix with a full pot of hot water. If you pour too early, it’ll be too strong, too late, it’ll be too weak.
That’s our secret - and the results have nothing to do with the skill of the people working here.
You can’t please everyone. This goes for team members and customers. “Don’t waste your time on work that doesn’t improve your product.
Minimize interruptions. At a micro-level, this means as few meetings as possible, as short as possible and as effectively as possible. It also means starting meetings on time. A meeting with 10 people that starts 12’ late interrupts work for 2 hours.
Eliminate stagnation. Expert engineers often get stuck in the same slot for several years. Intel was ruthless about this. The safety officer at Intel Fab8 was a senior manager with a PhD in environmental science from Berkeley. After 5 years in the job, the fab manager told him that he needed to move on to another job. He said, “But I love my job, and I’m good at it, and safety is core for the fab”. His manager said, “You have until August to choose whatever position you like but you cannot stay in this slot”. The safety officer didn’t choose. In August - the fab manager fired him.
Corrective action immediately. If there is an incident, human, technical or commercial, debrief it within 24 hours. Implement corrective action immediately. Don’t wait. It’s simpler, cheaper and it serves “Don’t waste your time on work that doesn’t improve your product”
This Week on Life Sciences Today
My guest this week was Rajesh Krishna, Senior Distinguished Scientist at Certara and a recognized leader in drug development. With 25+ years of experience, he’s shaped model-informed strategies for biologics, vaccines, and small molecules, and is consistently ranked among the top 2% of influential scientists.
Drug development is too slow and expensive. Certara helps companies design better trials, predict outcomes, and reduce risk using modeling, simulation, and AI. The goal is straightforward: make it faster and more efficient to bring safe, effective drugs to patients.
You can see the episode here - Drug development with Certara Life Sciences.
About me
I’m a 5x founder who learned hard lessons the hard way. Today, I work with early-stage TechBio companies to help them stay focused, hit their ship dates and sustain solid teams.
My private network is trusted by leaders from Medable, Menarini, Merck, IQVIA, Medtronic, Flatiron Health, Lindus Health, Debiopharm, Unlearn, Cornerstone AI and 900+ more.
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