5 START-UP OR LARGE VENTURE

At the end of my postdoc, I had the choice of continuing with a promising start-up in which I was involved or joining a new venture at Google. The start-up was a university spinoff using synthetic biology and protein-engineering technology that I helped develop. The Google venture was very secretive, but it was Google's first foray into life sciences and promised to be different from any biotech I previously knew. The advantage of a venture backed by a large company is that it gives you the ability to think about big problems and not be pushed to achieve financial results in a short timeframe Tackling longer-term objectives are often difficult in a start-up environment where monetary contraints force you to focus on tasks with the highest financial return.