Pivoting a Biotech Startup

A conversation with Noam Solomon, CEO and co-founder of Immunai

In this edition of M*A*S*H* (Marketing Advice for Startups in Healthcare), we sat down with Noam Solomon, PhD, the CEO and Co-founder of Immunai, a startup mapping the immune system at unprecedented scale and granularity to help develop the next-generation of immunomodulatory therapeutics. Before founding Immunai, Noam had a dual career in industry and academia, earning a double PhD, in Math and Computer Science, serving as a post-doctoral researcher at MIT and Harvard, and working at several hi-tech companies in Israel.Despite your deep background in math and computer science, did you face skepticism when you entered biotech?When we started Immunai, my scientific co-founders – who are actually experts in immunology – told me, “If you want to be a good CEO of an immunology company, you need to study immunology.” It wasn't even external feedback from investors; it was internal feedback from our founding team.In the first two years of the company, I not only studied what I had to study in order to be a good CEO, but I took private tutoring lessons from immunology PhDs. And I ramped up on immunology and biology, management, entrepreneurship, and business development over the past four and a half years. Did initially not knowing much about the space serve as an advantage in any way?Since I didn't initially know a lot about therapeutics, immunology, or medicine, asking questions became my management philosophy. Don't assume you should know the answer going into a discussion. Ideally, know “just enough to be dangerous” so that you can ask the right questions and ensure that the team is used to a crucial honesty culture of asking difficult questions and having open debates.In Immunai’s early stages, did you ever consider pivoting the company’s focus? And what factors influenced this decision?Not only did I consider it, we definitely evolved. We shifted from an immune profiling platform to a therapeutic augmentation platform, and built a lot of new technology along the way to do so.I always believe in constant friction with the market. From essentially day one, we worked with biopharma, biotherapeutics companies, and academic institutions. Through case studies, successes and failures with these organizations, we came to understand the gap between having cool technology that can do cool things to actually moving the needle on the business side and addressing our partners' unmet business needs. During this evolution, did you consciously consider how to reposition the company?Positioning is vital to raising money, attracting talent, and having a story that you can focus the entire company around building. For external and internal audiences, articulate what you’re trying to do and define not only success, but failure, many times. Often people are going to try to do other things, and you must say we want to do A, B, and C and we don't want to do D, E, and F. Your team was an early adopter of the term techbio. How do you see the adoption of terms like techbio influencing the direction of a company at the offset?Science is about discovering what is possible, whereas engineering is about making the possible useful. The actual function of techbio is to make discoveries useful. Some companies – big pharma companies, etc. – will think of Immunai as an AI company, but we are not an AI company. We are an engineering-first immunology company, leveraging engineering and AI and other computational models in order to glean insights that other, not engineering-first companies will miss. Using the term techbio better articulates that story and differentiates what we’re doing from other biotechnology companies.Any advice for young startups and founders?Identify the business unmet needs or the big question first; don’t fall in love with the solution or the technology. Also, in the space of deep science and deep technology, the goal is to have enough financing to perform parallel experiments to fail fast enough to reach a desired outcome. Being able to fail or learn how to fail fast as a company is the only way to actually succeed in deep tech companies, I believe. I think some young startups and founders think success is just not failing, but that’s not the right path to success.Do you have a strategy around finding the right investors that would let you fail fast, or the right team that would be comfortable failing in this way?I became friends with our investors first, and built trust and understanding in that we’re doing something ambitious where failures are bound to occur along the way. With trust and friendship between us, we have been given the space to take risks together.Second, companies don't fail or succeed because of the founders, they fail or succeed because of the team. The founders and executive team should figure out a way to hire, recruit, and sustain good talent that can deal with uncertainties. It’s all about hiring and maintaining the right talent, and being agile and nimble in the way that you are making decisions in a young startup.##A big thanks to Noam for sharing his insight. You can follow him on Twitter and connect with him via LinkedIn.To learn how VSC Adrenaline combines strategic media relations and surgical digital content marketing to empower startups to build credibility and awareness while adhering to regulatory and industry standards, visit us at https://vsc.co/adrenaline/.