Building Molecules. Building Companies. Building… Buildings?

I was trained to build molecules, to study biological systems, and, in what used to be a hobby, to build robots. None of that would have suggested a career in real estate. Yet today my work sits at the intersection of science, infrastructure, and development.

I did not choose real estate as a profession. I followed the bottleneck in science until it led to buildings. My first company, Advanced Peptides, completed more than 3,000 projects across 120 organizations including Harvard, Stanford, Pfizer, and Merck. That experience revealed how dependent scientific progress is on infrastructure, and how fragile that infrastructure can be.

In 2014 I co-founded Mass Innovation Labs, later renamed SmartLabs. The goal was not to build or lease real estate. It was to create a new kind of research infrastructure that could give biotech companies immediate access to enterprise-grade laboratories without the delays, cost, or permanence of traditional construction. To explain and defend that model, we had to learn the real-estate logic inside and out.

Laboratory construction can cost between one and two and a half thousand dollars per square foot. Developers acquire and entitle sites ahead of demand, installing enhanced infrastructure, redundant power, specialized exhaust, segregated wastewater, that can support roughly sixty percent of scientific use cases. A development program that might have required $1.5 billion could instead be achieved with one-third of that capital through shared investment.

I did not plan to work in real estate. The science brought me here. To accelerate discovery, I had to understand the systems that limit it, physical, financial, and civic. I still think of what I do as engineering. The medium simply changed. The molecules became buildings. I'm currently collaborating on new health and science infrastructure projects with the team at Kaliper.