#34 - Elizabeth Iorns on Biotech Companies in YC

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Elizabeth Iorns. She is the CEO and co-founder of Science Exchange. She went through YC in the summer of 2011, and she is now an expert here at YC, helping out with biotech companies. I thought it'd be cool to have Elizabeth come by and answer some of the most frequently asked questions about biotech companies in YC. And so we did that in this episode. But if you have more questions, you can feel free to tweet our way, and maybe we can set up a round two of this podcast. So just two quick announcements before we get going. The first of which is YC is going on a fall tour. So if you want to see the dates and locations, you can check out blog.ycombinator.com, and we have all that stuff up there. And the second of which is the winter 2018 application is open, and that is at ycombinator.com/apply.
All right, here we go. So welcome to the podcast.
How about we just start with your just quick background?

**Elizabeth Iorns** (1:00)
So I'm Elizabeth Iorns. I'm the founder and CEO of Science Exchange, and I'm a cancer biologist by training. I did my PhD at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, and then did a postdoc at the University of Miami and became an assistant professor there.
And then I left in 2011 to create Science Exchange, and that was part of the 2011 summer batch of Y Combinator. So that's really where I first got involved with Y Combinator and then have subsequently continued to grow Science Exchange. And two years ago, I joined as a part-time partner, which is now called the Expert Program, here to help out with the biotech companies that were starting to apply to Y Combinator.

**Craig Cannon** (1:40)
And so let's just get this out of the way.
A very common question is like, I'm a biotech company, like I'm a founder. Why should I do OIC?

**Elizabeth Iorns** (1:49)
Yeah, we definitely get asked that a lot, and I think there's kind of two camps. One is that there are people who are genuinely not heard of Y Combinator previously, so they ask, oh, what is Y Combinator? Why should I do it? More from a sense of, I'm not sure what this program is, what will the benefits be? And so that's more a generic answer of, YC is a great starting point for companies that want to kick off the launch of their company successfully. We provide a lot of expertise and resources around how to incorporate, how to really focus on building that first initial stage of creating product market fit and getting a company off the ground.
So there's that kind of avenue, and that's usually PhD students or post-docs who maybe haven't been exposed to entrepreneurship first, and I think that's a great program for them from that aspect. But then we definitely have more established biotechs or people who are in the biotech world, and they sort of look at it like, well, why would I do that, or why would any biotech company want to do that?
And really our answer there is around the tremendous access to capital and the expertise around fundraising, the opportunity to interact with really different sectors that you may not have been familiar with. So we have a very diverse and cutting-edge group of companies that are part of every single batch, and so you actually get access to things like artificial intelligence, all of the technologies that are being developed in different verticals. You're exposed to those as you're part of the program, and that can really benefit the companies in interesting and unexpected ways as they participate. But one of the unexpected ways is that there's been a lot of crossover funding that has occurred for the biotech companies. So many of our biotech companies have been able to raise significantly more capital than they would have been able to if they'd just sort of stuck with the traditional biotech venture world and not taking part in the program. And that's, I think, an area where people didn't expect that there would be such an appetite, but there has actually been over $200 million of capital raised for these companies already.

**Craig Cannon** (3:56)
And so how do you see a batch play out for an average biotech company? Because one of the main questions I get during office hours is, you know, why is this three months long?
What do I actually do in three months? This is a decade-long project. So how does it work out normally?

**Elizabeth Iorns** (4:12)