The New Rules of Biotech: A Founder's Guide to Building Great Companies

Between 2020 and 2023, biotech ran the full cycle: a historic boom, a brutal unwinding, and a reset that rewrote how companies get built and funded. The founders succeeding today aren't running the 2021 playbook. They can't.

The New Rules of Biotech is a candid, operator's-eye guide to starting and building a biotech company in the world that came after the reset. Drawing on three decades in drug development and the hard lessons of building a company from the lab bench up, David Craig walks founders through the full arc, from the question you should ask before you ever incorporate to the exit most companies will actually take.

There's no hype here and no theory for its own sake. Just the decisions that matter and the traps that end companies: the new cost of capital, what the FDA and the IRA expect now, platform versus asset, the modern seed round, non-dilutive capital as a strategy, term sheets that don't bite back, the clinical path from IND through proof-of-concept, manufacturing, business development, acquisition, and knowing when to stop.

For first-time founders, scientist-entrepreneurs, and anyone raising or building in biotech today, it's a field guide for doing the work with clear eyes, and for remembering, when it's hard, exactly why you started.

For first-time founders, scientist-entrepreneurs, and anyone raising or building in biotech today, it's a field guide for doing the work with clear eyes, and for remembering, when it's hard, exactly why you started.