To generalize from my very limited experience, people doing this use the same hiring strategies as companies, but 1) rely on personal connections and relationships more, since they're often trying to stay a bit under the radar, and 2) are more connected with academia than your average hirer. One approach could be to network at non-mainstream events in your area that are more about creating and seeing cool stuff than networking, such as dorkbot. Also, probably just networking aggressively would work, at whatever are the best gatherings in your interest area, such as the web 2.0 summit, or health 2.0. These people are probably there somewhere, and if not, their friends are.

If you're awesome and into bioinformatics, and are in austin, the bay area, or the pacific northwest, ping me. I'm not in the same league as the folks in the article, but this is more or less my approach right now, and I know another couple people in similar situations.

I don't know if I'm "awsome" or not, but is this bioinformatics thing... what ever it is, for real? Or it just a few enthusiast having fun learning? (Nothing wrong with that, it's just not something that would dislodge me form my "for reals" big corporate bioinformatics dayjob in the North East.)

To answer your question as best I can: it's exploratory at the moment, like the examples in the original article. The immediate goal is to pursue directions one of which will hopefully produce software and knowledge clearly valuable enough to warrant significantly increasing resources devoted to it--the next inflection point. Risks and rewards are high at this stage. I won't go into a why starting or joining a startup is fantastic, though, as PG does that just fine[1].

Capturing created value outside of the research arm of a big pharma company is of course a key challenge in bioinformatics, and I'd love to meet or chat with you if you're thinking about this too.

In the missionary vs mercenary divide that John Doerr uses to segment startups, I'm now a missionary. The end goal is to cure disease.

[1]: http://paulgraham.com/notnot.html; http://paulgraham.com/boss.html; http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

I don't need convicing that it is easy to inovate outside of big pharma. Altough bioinformatics startups do require quite a bit more cash then pure software startups.

However, the biggest part of capturing value is the regulatory burden.

In other words, lets say you have a great way to discover biomarkers. Even more so, you go ahead and DO discover a pile of biomarkers with great potential.

Then you attemp to sell those biomarkers to big pharma, and that is when you find out:

Even with all their beurocracy and horrible return on R&D investments, big pharma is sitting on a huge pile of biomarkers.

Pushing any one tratment through the pipeline costs a metric tonne of cash and takes 10 year before you even know if it's worth to keep going.

That is why there's a huge backlog of potential drugs, biomarkers, treatments, etc.

Thus merely finding new things with potential is only slighlty better then nothing.

Agreed. You've got to address the real problems, or you won't get anywhere.

If you specifically want to sign up with Birch's Monkey Inferno, feel free to get in touch with me ([email protected]) and I'll pass your contact details along - I know a couple of people who are involved.

I work for a business that is exactly like that, owned by a Gentleman general entrepreneur.

It's very weird, a little C/C++ in the morning, some PHP in the afternoon, and then massaging some huge datasets with Python and JavaScript in the evening could be just your regular day, in fact, I think I had at least three just like that. It could be fun, if you like that sort of thing. It can also be absolutely exhausting.