Intro
I see the genius of Israel at work every day. Part of it, is taking roads less traveled.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
—Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
This week we share the Life Sciences Today episode with Ronel Wexler, co-founder and CEO of Promise Bio. They’ve taken a different approach to the science and to the business. The founding team has a unique mix of biology, engineering and computer science.
We’ll talk about learning from customers.
How your buyers don’t want sales tactics, account management or features.
They want better thinking.
Let’s get it on.
The Commune
After seven years as a programmer at an Israeli defense contractor, my wife and I chose a road not taken.
We left Tel Aviv, left high-paying jobs, and moved to a commune in Gush Etzion. Elazar was a communal moshav: it worked like a kibbutz, with communal economics, but each family managed its own budget.
The next seven years were the best and the hardest of our lives. Imagine the beauty of a hilltop community mixed with the pain of a startup, and you’ll get the flavor.
The commune ran several businesses. One of them was software. At first, two people worked as contract programmers for government offices in Jerusalem. Then another family joined—both software engineers. Overnight we grew from two to five.
We had talent. We didn’t have a business.
So we took a bet on a new platform: VAX/VMS. This was the early ’80s, and VAX was the best computing platform ever built—developer-friendly, cost-effective for users. DEC was looking for design wins and partners for business applications.
Within three years, we were a DEC OEM with Fortune 100 customers for our financial systems.
The Lesson I Learned
I learned to learn from customers.
We were competing for a contract with a Fortune 100 semiconductor company with our financial management application suite.
The CFO announced he would visit our offices with his team.
They arrived early. That morning was my turn to wash the floors. Commune life.
I greeted them barefoot with a mop in hand. I was certain we’d lose the deal because it looked bad - like we were poor and not professional.
Instead, the CFO called the next day:
“If the team leader is committed enough to wash the floor himself, he’ll be committed enough to support a successful implementation.”
We signed a multi-year contract.
That day I learned an important lesson.
Your buyers don’t want sales tactics, account management or features.
They want better thinking.
They might consume your marketing content and case studies but their frame is different:
They want to see if you can walk the walk.
They want to see if there is an execution layer behind the principle.
They're assessing your worth and the potential ROI of working with you.
And when you give them better thinking, they want more of your thinking.
Which means they want to buy your solution.
Promise Bio’s Road Not Taken
This week’s Life Sciences Today episode is with Ronel Wexler, co-founder and CEO of Promise Bio.
Most biotech founders stand at a fork between genomics and transcriptomics. Ronel looked down both roads, saw them crowded with well-funded incumbents, and asked a different question:
What if the real signals are in the proteins?
TechBio has fairly standard roads that founders take:
Genomics: from 23andMe to Foundation Medicine.
Transcriptomics / single-cell RNA-seq: crowded, noisy, overfunded.
Clinical services CRO model: profitable for a while, but “hours for dollars.”
Promise Bio chose a different road:
Epiproteome as the map — instead of genetic predisposition, they study what proteins are doing now in inflamed tissue and blood.
Platform, not project — every client engagement feeds a compounding data lake, turning service into R&D
Hybrid growth model — pharma service revenue today, diagnostics tomorrow. Few attempt that bridge; fewer succeed.
The lesson for founders
You can choose a path less taken, but make sure you have the right team, the right science and right engineering to get to the other side.
Join the private network for techbio entrepreneurs.
I’m a 5x founder who learned hard lessons the hard way. Building a private network for TechBio founders.
Trusted by leaders from Menarini, Merck, IQVIA, Medtronic, Flatiron Health, Debiopharm and 900+ more.
Join us here
About Promise Bio
Promise Bio is an early-stage tech-bio company coming out of AION Labs in Israel with strategic investors – AstraZeneca and Pfizer. They’ve built a cloud-based AI platform that uses advanced mass spectrometry-based proteomics and provides value for pharmaceutical companies in 4 ways: identifies new drug targets, predicts treatment response, analyzes the mechanism of action, and supports pathway engagement analysis.
Visit Promise Bio here
You can see the episode with Promise Bio here
