Middle Class Science

Grad students are an unhappy bunch these days. The PhD hero's journey has always been fraught with hierarchical dragons and a vow of poverty, but pessimism seems more ubiquitous than ever. A PhD used to be a career bond with a guaranteed credentialed payout on maturity. Stamps of approval still matter, but committing to a 5+ year program feels like a bigger gamble when the latest frontier AI model unlocks previously unheard of capabilities on a monthly cadence.

The three recognized options offered to young scientists are: continue in academia, join industry, or found a venture-backed company. PhDs quickly recognize that a PI's job, despite its status, is often more administrative than scientific. Even if they wanted to stay the course, recent funding cuts have dried up postdoc and junior faculty roles anyway. Industry offers a more lucrative path, but it often means sacrificing public-facing work and control over time and focus. In an act of desperation, many ambitious PhDs parlay the name recognition of their lab to raise venture capital when what they truly seek is autonomy over their career. The traditional academic pipeline invests heavily, frequently $500k to train a single scientist, yet the current ecosystem leaves them with a surprisingly constrained set of attractive options. To be clear, this isn't the universities' fault. They're doing the best they can with the resources and incentives available to them.

For a young scientist, VC is often the best choice on a list of constrained options. Funneling so much of our scientific talent into VC, however, is suboptimal for the asset class and society at large. With few exceptions (see Focused Research Organizations), the lack of career optionality results in "passion entropy," where an incalculable amount of expertise and energy is lost as scientists abandon their personal ambitions to pursue unicorn-scale ideas.

For a scientist trained to follow the rules since an early age, taking a hard turn off the prestige highway is scary. The venture ecosystem has reputationally derisked this with co-founder matching, campus innovation centers, meetups, retreats, bootcamps, incubators, accelerators, and, of course, financing. At the same time, VCs routinely dismiss "science projects" and "lifestyle businesses" because they don't fit into their go-big-or-go-home financial model. This is not VCs' fault either. Their funds can't absorb a 90% failure rate without a massive winner. But while the spectrum of >0 profitable ideas and venture scaled returns is wide, there are almost no supported options in between.

While VCs have seeded the category for software unicorns, there are also plenty of $10M to $100M ARR software "lifestyle" businesses (e.g., Midjourney, Kit, and 37signals) that are just plain old good businesses. I'm not the first to say we need more kinds of businesses in science. We need personal businesses that people will bleed for because it's their life's work. The "BBN" (a strong proposal in search of a catchier name) is one such form. What's missing is a category of science businesses where reaching profitability, serving a valuable niche, and retaining ownership over your work are valid measures of success.

No one sees these opportunities like young scientists. They are in the trenches figuring it out and have the most familiarity with what is broken. We've seen firsthand how dedicated students are to translating their work out of academia to the outside world. Freed from the shackles of delivering 1000x ROI, founders can focus on a mission-aligned scientific pursuit like standing up a kick-ass CRO like Plasmidsaurus, making niche antibodies like Bioventix, or selling customized cell lines like Applied StemCell. LLMs reduce the operational costs of these businesses because a scrappy founder can quickly learn a new function, like data analysis, that they would have previously needed to hire someone else to do. These profitable, sub venture-scale businesses enable an "infinite game" to dedicate time and resources to R&D or whatever pursuits they see fit. It's good for the scientist to have ownership over their time and good for society to create profitable scientific services that would otherwise be unavailable, expensive, or slow.

VC has already authored the blueprint for the supportive infrastructure needed to bring things to life and justify a path less traveled. Creating a home for scientific misfits with shared lab space, help navigating IP, a variety of financial support options, and a tribe of equals can bring Middle Class Science to life, the scientific answer to the middle class for startups. Forcing our most ambitious early-career scientists to choose between academia, industry, and venture-scale businesses is too narrow.

For scientists who have started, or want to start, a business like this, what's holding you back?
For university and tech-transfer teams, where do promising projects fall outside the available pathways?
For funders and investors, what models elsewhere should we learn from?