The Boarding School for Biotechs

In 2014, if you wanted to start a biotech company, the science was rarely the first obstacle. The building was. A new venture would spend a year or more and a large share of its first check on something that had nothing to do with discovery: finding raw space, designing it, permitting it, installing the power and exhaust and waste systems a wet lab needs, and hiring people to run all of it. The science waited while the infrastructure caught up.

We started Mass Innovation Labs to remove that wait. The idea was simple to say and hard to build: take enterprise grade laboratory space, operate it as a shared utility, and let a company move in and start experiments in weeks instead of years. When we launched our first space in Kendall Square, the Boston Globe described it as shared space that helps new life sciences ventures get off the ground. STAT covered the same shift, framing co-working labs as a new model for science in crowded, expensive cities.

The metaphor that stuck came from MedCity News, which called us a boarding school for biotechs. I liked it, because it captured something real. We were not just renting benches. We were giving young companies a place to grow up, with the shared services, the equipment, the operations team, and the neighbors that a first time founder cannot assemble alone. The Globe, in a profile around the same time, gave me a title I did not put on a business card: chief encouragement officer. That one stuck too, because so much of the early job was convincing scientists that they did not have to become facilities managers to do their work.

What we offered, in the words BioPharma Dive used, was an invitation: call us home. Underneath the friendly framing was a serious operating thesis. Most of what slows a biotech down in its first two years is not unique to that company. It is the same lab buildout, the same equipment, the same compliance, repeated company by company at enormous cost. Pool it, run it well, and you free founders to spend their scarce capital and time on the one thing only they can do, which is the science.

I think about those first years often. The buildings got bigger and the model got a real name later on, but the core conviction never changed. The hardest part of building a company is rarely the idea. It is everything that has to exist around the idea before the idea gets a chance. We set out to build that everything, and to make it shared.