Consensus Feels Safe. History Suggests It's Usually Backward.

Consensus feels safe. History suggests it's usually backward. The strongest biotech vintage of the last 20 years was built when capital was most afraid.

Over the past few months, I've been struck by how much biotech capital is clustering into the same "safe" consensus trades. The instinct is understandable, but it misses a structural reality of our industry:

The biology that defines the next decade is almost always started when the market is least comfortable funding it.

We saw this clearly after 2008. A cohort of companies founded between 2008–2012 looked like dead ends at the time. Many of the eventual winners fell into a few recurring non-consensus categories:

• "Science projects" - new modalities dismissed as infeasible, unscalable, or unsafe

• "Abandoned spaces" - therapeutic areas large pharma had written off after years of failure

• "Precision scalpel" approaches - markets viewed as already won by incumbents or constrained by seemingly unsolvable chemistry

Those non-consensus builds didn't just survive. They defined the last cycle.

I wrote a longer piece digging into this pattern and why it feels relevant again today.

What do you think is today's "uninvestable" sector that will look obvious in 2030?