What VCs Look for When Investing in Bio and Healthcare

She said early-stage founders often overweight near-term technical risk and underweight the long-term reality of competing in a “big commercial scrum 15 years from now,” and she prefers situations where the key technical risk can be de-risked relatively early.

She described it as founders surfacing “warts,” admitting what they don’t know, and actively trying to identify and address risks rather than hiding them, because hidden risks prevent investors from helping and can derail the company later.

She framed early investing as testing whether an investor and founder can collaboratively reason through “what if” scenarios when hypotheses fail, including what the next experiment would be after spending capital on the current one.

He emphasized that early-stage deep tech companies face heightened “future financing risk,” and founders should be realistic about team evolution, hiring needs, and building a talent-dense organization rather than assuming the initial team is sufficient.

She said founders should work backwards from the next round, noting seed valuations haven’t corrected as much as Series A/B, and suggested creating an (even empty) Series A deck to define milestones that will be attractive to future investors.