It’s been a decade since I ventured out of academia in search of change. While I really enjoyed cancer research and the many wonderful, brilliant people I had the benefit of working with, I was also becoming increasingly weary of the many well-known bureaucratic hurdles that plague academia. This reality would hit especially hard whenever my mentor’s patients, many of whom our lab had the great privilege of meeting, would succumb to brain cancer faster than it would take sometimes for us to even learn if we’d gotten a grant we applied for months prior. And so, armed with enough of that blind ambition and naive optimism that’s typical of youth (or the youthful), I set out to forge a new career path for myself, only this time it would be in tech — an industry I knew little about but had long-admired from afar for it’s famed “move fast and break things” approach to innovation. Interestingly, and unbeknownst to me at the time, just as I began my move from the world of bio to the world of tech, so too was the world of tech beginning to move into the world of bio. By virtues of fate more so than foresight, I eventually came to find myself standing atop the very spot where these two once-disparate worlds had come to coalesce. As someone who’s gone from cancer biologist to VC-backed tech entrepreneur (that’s another story for another time) to now VC-backed TechBio entrepreneur over the past ten years, I truly believe we’re living a historical moment in biotech — the sort that mark timelines as they split the old days of impossibility from the new days of inevitability. This moment is also as much a movement that today has been aptly called “TechBio” (for a deeper dive into TechBio, I recommend this post by Amee Kapadia of Cantos).