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The death of having a career

The death of having a career

Building a career portfolio & 4 lessons from Enveda Biosciences

Giammarco Pacifico
July 19, 2023

Last week we talked about how to choose your career direction.

But what if you have multiple interests and passions?!

Then there is a new type of career waiting for you.

Your grandparents worked in 1 or 2 jobs their entire life and happily retired after 50 years.

Your parents probably tried a few more jobs before ending up with a permanent role where they stayed for a few decades while building a family.

Things have been evolving for a long time but the goal didn’t change:
finding one company that could give you a stable job for decades to come.

That meant career success and allowed countless generations to thrive.

This is not true anymore.

Today company-employee relationships look more like short-term agreements for mutual benefits than marriages:

If you die, your company would look for your replacement within a week
50% of millennials are looking to change jobs within the next year

Why is this happening?

One of the main reasons why people used to “settle” at the first good-enough job was not knowing about all the opportunities out there.

Nowadays most employees would rather work multiple jobs, spend their time on different projects and explore their creativity than be forced to work 100% of their time for one company.
(and everybody knows how much time is wasted in the workplace anyway 😉)

This is a pivotal moment.

People are much more energized by working on different projects and it also makes their careers a lot more resilient.

How?

A good investor would never choose to put all their money into one company.

It would be extremely risky. Instead, they build a portfolio.

A career portfolio means spending your most valuable asset, time, on multiple projects, companies and activities.

Each with a different time investment and a potential upside.

This means having multiple roles, from part-time to volunteering, from sweat equity to small online businesses.

There is no doubt that it's still hard for most people to work on multiple projects and create a career portfolio but it’s becoming easier every day.

In the same way, remote working seemed impractical for most people who used to go to the office every day for decades.

Things change.

What are the advantages of a career portfolio?

Own your career. Nobody will put you on the path to success
Your professional identity evolves with you
Activities will cross-pollinate each other (even if they are very different)
Not being in a box, will allow you to go after new opportunities

That side project that you added at the end of your CV for fear of not being relevant, might be the very best thing that leads to your next opportunity.

But wait…what about job security?

I hear you!

Did you ever wonder why so many exceptional graduates end up being unsatisfied after a few years in a large company?

Because traditional full-time employment is a safety net for underperformers.

And if there is one thing high performers hate is working with slackers.

❝

Any ambitious person in the next few years will have a career portfolio.

There is no better way for a high-output person to invest their energies than to invest their time into multiple opportunities and reap the rewards of a well-balanced portfolio.

The biggest risk?

We’ll have to learn how to reframe our identities and redefine ourselves in a world where labels stop mattering.

4 lessons from Enveda Biosciences

An unorthodox path to build the new generation of biotech companies.

Enveda Biosciences leverages natural products for drug development.

Despite the historical success of natural products in medicine, especially Ayurveda, the pharmaceutical industry has moved away from them.

Enveda aims to challenge this approach by using large-scale metabolomics and AI to accelerate natural product discovery.

Enveda was founded by Viswa Colluru, who merged his previous experience in AI-driven drug discovery at Recursion Pharmaceutics with his Indian origins.

Instead of starting with a proven IP and lots of funding to kickstart operations, the company’s initial focus was to develop algorithms and a knowledge graph to map the existing landscape of chemical knowledge.

Enveda's early platform involved using such knowledge graphs to draw connections between chemicals, proteins, and disease modifications.
This enabled them to create a computable map of human ethnobotany and represent chemical knowledge.

Lesson #1 - AI from Day 1

A practical AI approach as the foundation of their research gave Enveda the opportunity to properly set up the experimental part while building their own wet labs instead of jumping to expensive outsourcing options.

Lesson #2 - Nimble initial funding can take you far

With only $225k of pre-seed investments from angel investors, Enveda set up labs in India and built a distributed team from day 1 by recruiting talent globally.

Thanks to their early computational work, they realized that relying on reference libraries would limit their ability to discover new chemical compounds.

So they build a transformer model to directly predict molecular structures from raw mass spectroscopy measurements instead of relying on available databases.

This meant having proprietary data and full control of many input parameters at the price of having to run a lot of experiments first-hand, which turned out to be a good investment given MassSpec data is also relatively cheap and straightforward to obtain (compared to many other biological data).

Lesson #3 - Strong proprietary data is not a mirage

Lab automation together with transformer technologies can turn most manual lab processes into a stream of raw data (if done right).

Enveda has so far raised $175M to bring its drug into clinical trials.

They started by addressing pain and inflammation where natural products have shined since the beginning. After that, they will expand to other indications.

Lesson #4 - Getting early wins

Focusing on key strengths early on and getting some wins under your belt before going for the moonshot pays off with both customers and investors.

This is only the beginning: the next generation of biotechs will operate more like founders-led tech companies.

Instead of raising $10s of millions from the very beginning to fund years of research, biotech entrepreneurs are going to leverage the latest technologies to derisk research and product development cycles.

This week's top reads

Chest X-rays can predict Type 2 diabetes (Nature)
Should Biologists Scrum? (The Aliquot)
A.I. May Someday Work Medical Miracles. For Now, It Helps Do Paperwork (New York Times)
Diffusion Models in Generative Chemistry for Drug Design (Medium)
De novo design of protein interactions with learned surface fingerprints (Nature)

Latest funding rounds in health & bio

These could be your next career opportunities. Want to learn how?

Sonio raised $14M to kick off commercial development of its AI prenatal screening solution in the US 🇫🇷
Causaly, an AI-powered preclinical discovery platform raised a $60M Series B after tripling revenues and client base 🇬🇧
Piur Imaging raised €4.9M to further develop its vendor-independent tomographic 3D ultrasound solution 🇦🇹
OrganOx raised £25M to further commercialize their device that increases the number of organs available for transplantation 🇬🇧
MoonLake Immunotherapeutics raised $400M in a public offering on NASDAQ after positive results from a Phase 2 study 🇨🇭

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