Startup founding doesn’t have the same respect and admiration like it used to.
As Michael Dempsey recently wrote, it’s become more of the default thing to do that “shows you’re smart but not that interesting”. The path indeed has become the “default” for many, and clowning the pre-revenue founder has never been more fun.
This sentiment feels rather strong in the “metascience community” that pursues “untraditional funding” from public funding (e.g. Tech Labs), philanthropy, grants, and others. This community, that I’m very much a part of, often rejects the traditional paths because “not all companies are supposed to be unicorns” or “VC funding valley of death won’t let me work on my deeptech MVP”.
This is often all true, but sometimes I feel as though we miss the bigger picture in pursuit of the renaissance we’re trying to create.
Startups vs. non-traditional funding aren’t mutually exclusive—and nowadays, most founders need to be open to both. But usually, for most founders building ambitious projects with minimal credentials, startups remain the fastest, most direct path to proving yourself and learning what actually works.
Sometimes, the fastest way to build credibility is to do a startup and fail. Then do it again. Then succeed. That iterative cycle—the wins and the brutal losses—is what teaches you to sell, to execute, to lead. It’s what gives you the credentials that every funder, whether traditional or non-traditional, cares about in the end.
I hope this post can be a quick gut check for you and your research.
Credentialism is bad—at least that’s what you’d think if you’ve been SF-pilled like me. But credentialism is what the “real world” runs on, which, turns out, is most of world outside of Silicon Valley.
Being in the startup ecosystem, scrolling on X, going to “networking events”, you feel like “the world” is permission-less and you’re allowed to do anything you want and people will give you money for it. But the truth is, most of what you interact with today in the “innovation ecosystem” is a result of nearly two decades of VCs in Silicon Valley slowly determining that young, low-credential talent was best place to find upside in this ultra-high-risk investment category. The rest of the world for the most part, including philanthropy, government funding, and many “untraditional” grants, want credentials.
You want to turn your research into a product? Who’re your customers? How will you find them? With what experience?
You’ll build out a team for it? Have you done that before? What’s your experience?
First-time? Oh…… why don’t you just do a startup instead?
Though not all untraditional founders are like this, startups are still to this day the best place to build bold, expensive projects with near-zero credentials. At the end, the core components that go into ambitious projects are the same: great leadership, technical product, team, execution, and lots of money. Where’s the best place to first prove your ability to bring together any and all of these things?
Startups.
The churn is brutal, but startups remain one of the best places where failing upwards is encouraged, and actually becomes social capital.
You gotta know how to sell.
It’s a tough, mind-bending skill for most scientists, but you’re a dead fish in the water if you can’t do it well. Though almost all scientists are nerds at heart, including me, Scientist-Founders in Metascience especially can feel a bit… too nerdy.
I can see why the field over-selects for that phenotype. Niche, ambitious research with no established market or proven commercialisation track is intriguing to the metascience community. But will this person really be able to sell themselves and their research to a non-technical philanthropic advisor?
In this arena, you don’t submit a 30 page grant and call it a day. You need a rock-solid 30 second pitch, who you are, your theory of change, and why it can’t be a startup or any other traditionally legible modality. You need to hop on planes to meet funders in Dubai, follow up on every single lead like you don’t know who’s going to write you that check you so desperately need.
Where do you learn how to do this? Where do you find that grit? Where do you learn to just eat rejection after rejection, fall over hard, fall over again, and get the hell up?
Startups.
The constant pressure of delivering and the ever-increasing valuation on your term sheet forces you to articulate your vision with precision. It’s a skill that’s often forged under massive pressure.
Execution usually matters more than the funding mechanism itself. You can clown startup founders owning 5% of their company by the IPO all you want, but what matters most is that the work was done. Sometimes, we reject accessible dilutive options that would allow us to start executing today in favour of the elusive, non-dilutive funding that might be better.
The metascience community feels especially vulnerable to this “paradox of choice” for innovation funding. This caution is partly justified, since many unconventional or completely novel technologies require uniquely high-risk commercialisation strategies or immense capital.
One example where non-dilutive funding made sense was E11bio, an FRO that pioneered connectomics. Connectomics has traditionally struggled to bridge the gap between mapping every single neuron and creating something commercializable, like a therapeutic. But if execution is everything, what mattered most in 2021 when E11 started was simply that it existed at all. At the time, non-dilutive impact funding may have been the best and only way to pioneer this research at scale.
Today, it’s unclear whether connectomics remains a field so nascent that another E11 is needed. Even if its commercial path is not yet straightforward, the field may be mature enough—especially with AI-wrapped narratives—for venture funding to pick it up. As E11 matures as a FRO, we have the opportunity to see which funding mechanism unlocks the next stage of execution.
On the other hand, it seems like dilutive funding made sense for Forest Neurotech, another FRO. Forest recently became Merge Labs—an OpenAI/Sam Altman-backed private company that will apply Forest’s pioneering hardware to non-invasively interface with the brain. Whatever Forest’s initial vision, there was a reason it exited into a private company. Hardware is notoriously expensive, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they needed upwards of $200M to reach the Technology Readiness Level they desired. This is where a founder’s execution ability is truly tested; I don’t think Sumner gets enough credit for carving out this incredibly difficult path for Forest.
With most stories of innovation, we only read the version that actually happened. We don’t know the parallel universes we could’ve ended up in if FROs didn’t exist or ARIA wasn’t created. It’s human nature to look at what worked for those before us and pattern-match our way towards that same kind of success.
But the playbook changes all the time. What worked for Forest and E11 may not work again, even for the founders themselves. What really matters in the end might not be the specific mechanism they used to innovate, but whether they were able to innovate at all.
For founders today on the brink of civilisation-scale technologies, the priority is not to search for the perfect funding mechanism, but to weigh the cost of the counterfactual: another week, month, or year where the technology is not taken to the next level at all. Because we’re all fighting for the same thing in the end. We all want to make the world a better place, live healthier for longer, and be with our loved ones in a safe and beautiful world. There are many ways to do this, and sometimes, the money really is just as green on the other side.
So as you prepare for your call with NSF Tech Labs tonight, I encourage you to remember and ask yourself: “could I do this as a startup instead?”