A Conversation with Elizabeth Iorns - Advice for Biotech Founders

TL;DR

Elizabeth Iorns founded Science Exchange (originally called The Bench) in 2011 to solve the inefficiency of forming collaborations for specialized scientific experiments, inspired by Y Combinator’s advice to solve your own problem. She highlights that building a B2B marketplace requires curated supply, quality assurance, and project management, and that demand is harder to acquire than supply.

Key insights

• The main competitor for Science Exchange is the status quo (e.g., SharePoint processes used by large companies), not other platforms.
• Science Exchange’s Net Promoter Score (78) and its suppliers’ NPS (67) far exceed the industry average of zero; structured expectations and performance transparency drive better outcomes.
• In biotech, the science is the science – you cannot pivot the way software companies can; key milestones must demonstrate risk mitigation for the drug.