The unreasonable effectiveness of plasmid sequencing as a service (Plasmidsaurus)
Note: thank you Mark Budde, cofounder and CEO of Plasmidsaurus, and Maria Konovalova, a growth/marketing/talented-person at Plasmidsaurus, for talking to me for this article! Also thank you to Eryney Marrogi, who helped answer some of my dumb questions about plasmids.
Despite billions in funding, the brightest minds the world has to offer, and clear market need, creating an enduring company here feels almost impossible. Some of this has to do with the difficulties of engaging with the world of atoms, some of it has to do with the modern state of enormously expensive clinical trials, and some of it still can be blamed on something else. To some degree, this is an unavoidable facet of this field; working in it means you’re here for the ‘ love of the game’ than anything else.
But is it necessarily fair to equate all for-profit life-science endeavors with grueling, decade-long struggles to bypass scientific obstacles? Is there a world in which life-sciences startups can have a more traditional tech culture ethos in how they approach things? Unfortunately, probably not for a startup aiming to do the traditional therapeutics play.
