Origins - Inside Venture Capital, Hosted by a GP and an LP · OpenLP from Sapphire Partners

Building The YC of Biotech with Zach Weinberg

·58 min·3 clips

Curie Bio builds a "giant shared services organization" and a venture fund around it.

1. Origins uses its 100th episode to focus on Zach Weinberg and Curie Bio, a biotech investing model built around early drug discovery. 2. Beezer Clarkson identifies Zach as a Hunter College High School classmate, an Invite Media founder, a Flatiron Health co-founder, and the builder behind Curie Bio. 3. The episode asks whether Curie Bio can become "the YC for biotech" by combining capital with scientific execution support. 4. Zach says Hunter College High School in New York City was a "life-changing experience" because it was a public magnet school with smart, hustling students and many kids of immigrants. 5. He compares Hunter's competitiveness to Wharton and says he learned early that he would not be "the smartest person in the room." 6. Zach explains that he dropped out of Wharton in his last year, and Josh Kopelman at First Round Capital helped fund Invite Media. 7. He says Invite taught him that team quality matters more than anything once early product-market fit exists. 8. Zach says Google bought Invite Media for about $80 million, and he later spent two years at Google learning how much smart people matter. 9. He describes Flatiron as a recruiting-focused machine, with detailed job specs, interview training, and calibration. 10. His move from Flatiron to Curie came from the realization that better drugs, not just better downstream processes, create the biggest impact in therapeutics. 11. Zach contrasts software's fast, cheap iteration with drug discovery's slow, expensive cycle of make, test, and iterate. 12. He says one wrong target, biology assumption, or modality choice can leave a company worth zero dollars. 13. He walks through the need to evaluate small molecules, antibodies, bispecifics, and antibody-drug conjugates for each target and disease. 14. He says pharmacokinetics matters because a drug that is metabolized out of the body in seven minutes is useless. 15. Zach compares drug development planning to architecture, where a mistake in the blueprints can force the whole structure to be rebuilt. 16. He argues that biotech requires the best people at the beginning, when the company has the least data and the highest risk. 17. Curie Bio's answer is a remote-first shared-services team, with 87 people today across San Francisco, Boston, New York, Europe, New Jersey, and San Diego. 18. Zach says Curie combines that team with a roughly $1 billion venture fund and about $250 million for the shared services organization. 19. He thinks founders should listen if they care about biotech, recruiting, venture structure, and the economics of early drug discovery. 20. He suggests skipping it if early-stage therapeutics, reimbursement math, and capital-intensive science do not interest you.

As heard by us

A clear look at why biotech venture math is slow, expensive, and unforgiving.

Origins uses its 100th episode to look at biotech venture as a business of people, time, and expensive risk. Zach Weinberg keeps pulling the discussion back to staffing, dilution, and fundraising math, which is where the pressure really sits.

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Want the biotech VC math, not the startup fairy tale?

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