You don’t need a PhD, but it helps.

If you want to have a decent shot at getting funding from biotech VCs, the team overall needs experience in biotech AND startups, and the less experience the founder has in biotech the more the team will require to compensate for the deficiency. And vice versa for business experience, a freshly minted PhD is going to need team members with significant biotech BD experience.

A PhD or MD counts towards experience in biotech. MS + years of industry experience also counts, as would BS + many years of industry experience.

A PhD is nice because because it demonstrates deep experience in a narrow field plus an understanding of context. The context part is key. Autodidacts tend to miss out on the context, and their learned knowledge tends to be more fragile as a result, so there is a slight bias towards advanced degrees.

Insufficient experience is a hard no for biotech. Nobody wants to see another Theranos, and notably biotech VCs didn’t put any money into Theranos. We’d like to keep it that way.

> "You don’t need a PhD, but it helps."

> "A PhD is nice because because it demonstrates ..."

An employees willingness + investment to singularly do just one thing for the rest of their life.

It works as really good signaling for a CEO / hiring manager to assess someone as a really consistent employee.

Depends what sort of company you wish to produce. 23andMe you could definitely have done without a PhD as its much more traditional market fit "lets do logistics". But Illumina to produce the micro array in the first place or have the software to optimise probes etc. that takes a certain level of understanding have noticed or seen the value of that thing laying around in academia before it was mainstream. All the interesting new ideas/IP are sat within an academic network more than a company one at the moment so accessing that network is a big reason for a PhD.

Presumably, this hypothetical biotech startup is going to be focused on some narrow niche of CRISPR technology, so being a specialist is exactly what's required in my mind. If the OP just wants to learn about CRISPR he could probably do a masters or even a year or two of self study. I find it very unlikely that they would be able to come up with something novel and marketable without even more hands on time.

But if PhD is basically learning followed by research, you could also just do a masters / learning followed by research at a company (directly relevant to what the company is doing)?

There is a lot of professional development during PhD too. Especially if you're at a well funded institution with enough prestige to have a lot of international collaboration. The resources are typically a lot more experimental and RnD focussed than you will find in many companies. Having done a masters I'd say the "learning" there is rote and the sort of thing you do in school. PhD what you learn is how to actually see through BS you otherwise took as "truth" on a masters, see the landscape of research at play, which ideas have merit, which don't, what's interesting and likely has large implications etc. The actual skills and exposure is something quite tricky to explain but unless you do research in a really big company, it might be a lot harder to develop those. Especially if you are an entry level technician, as most of the more senior positions are likely to be those with PhDs already. At least in biotech, software and hardware it's way more about industry career paths and RnD.

Yeah I'm not sure I agree you need a full-blown PhD just to understand this stuff. Some-hands on work, definitely. I would say that you need a PhD to be taken seriously as a leader on the science-side of a biotech company though.

You don't need a PhD to find market fits for these types of products. They are self aggrandizing.

Market fit isn’t the only thing that matters.

Theranos had an excellent market fit—-people hate having blood drawn—-but the technology did not work and fundamentally could not work. The whole point of being a subject matter expert is to learn about things like that.

It’s true that there are other routes to becoming an expert in something (and proving it). A masters and a stint at a well-known company certainly works for many people; bootstrapping your own company might be an option too, but you’d need to be very successful to establish your bonafides. The advantage of a PhD is that it’s a fairly well-known quantity.