“Coming from academia, there’s a myth that it’s really risky to join a startup, and in my experience that’s not true at all,”

Tell that to CS PhDs. Granted, this is mostly about bio, but even here there is a lot of hope with the bioengineering applications and the disease modeling. Generally, my anecdotal view is that folks don't want to go to industry as they all see themselves as getting a tenure track job. Then the 2nd postdoc is not a startling success and they change tunes with only 3 months of funding to go.

Also, as other commenters have noted, Matt De Silva of Notable Labs may have had a bad quote attributed to him.

“Think about what a ‘hacker’ was to traditional computer scientists. Startups need the life sciences equivalent of that.”
This, as most people looking at bio from CS, is a laughable statement. I started out as a physicist and got interested in neuro. I thought that it was just because the bio peeps were lazy at learning the math, that a mathy person could sweep in and teach 'em real good-like. Bio is a astoundingly complicated field. You have N overlapping Gaussian curves describing just 2 variables and each interacting in an unknown number of orthogonal (you hope) dimensions and variables. Just take a look at the KNOWN pathways for mammalian mitochondria [0] at some pressure, temperature, salinity, etc. Any variable can throw this off incredibly so, or not, or maybe a little bit. Also, what about muscle cells versus glia? But your study was on mice, not humans, or the humans' mitochondria has a mutation in it's own DNA (yes mitos have their own DNA). Oh, and this is just the people you could get samples from. Bio is soooo very complex. Bio people are nothing but hackers. We have a very small idea of what is actually going on, and we try to exploit that in any small way we can. Look at Rita Levi-Montalcini's discovery of NGF for proof [1]. She is an admirable person and a cherry picked outlier, but a hacker in the truest sense of any CS person. She set up the lab in her bedroom after being fired for being a Jew in WW2 Italy. Her dedication to knowledge for knowledge's sake is amazing. She discovered there is a molecule that pre-destines daughter cells to be neurological by playing with chicken eggs and viper venom in he closet. If that is not a hacker, please define.

“The story of a business is about vision and progress: What are you going to do, how far have you gone so far, and how are you going to make money.”
This is exactly how grants are written as well. They claim a difference, but there really is none. You have to sell your grant just like you sell any pitch. Yes, the grants are mostly on paper and not in front of a person, but the story element is the same.

“In academia, there’s no wheeling and dealing around the grant process."
Yes, there are a lot less places to apply to than there are investors to find, but there is a LOT of behind the scenes stuff happening here as well. If you have a proven track record of getting grants and of getting out research, you get the grants with a lot less questions asked. But, yes, I admit there are a lot less rejections. A grant a month is typical. 2 a month is a little high.

Overall, the article was largely a PR piece. I think to help Ycombinator (the site I am posting on) to drive people to them for investment. Not surprising really. I could feel a bit of the "pick up artist's" technique of 'push-pull.' You insult a little, then you back it off and repeat. I don't think that was intentional though. I like the article, but I feel it had a lot of naivete. Maybe a lot of VCs out there see biotech as a great space, as there is not really a lot of people in it and the ground seems fertile. I would caution against that. Biotech is very very hard to get going. FDA approval is notoriously difficult and expensive. The flip side to that, however, is that once you make it through, there is almost no competition and you essentially have a monoploy (hooray patents).

[0]http://s437.photobucket.com/user/teriden/media/metabolism.jp...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Levi-Montalcini