Episode Details

The biotech industry is booming, but there’s a problem nobody talks about enough — and it has nothing to do with science. While brilliant researchers are developing breakthrough therapies, their companies are quietly hemorrhaging money on technology decisions that never should have been made in the first place.

Here’s what’s happening. A promising biotech startup clears early research milestones and attracts seed funding. The founders, usually scientists with deep domain expertise, suddenly need to build digital infrastructure. Someone has to make decisions about cloud architecture, security protocols, and development practices. But nobody on the team actually knows how to do this ... at scale.

So they wing it. They hire a developer or two. Maybe they bring on an IT person. These folks are competent at their jobs, but they’re not strategic thinkers. They’re not asking whether today’s decisions will create bottlenecks when the company triples in size next year. They’re not thinking about what venture capitalists will want to see in due diligence. They’re just trying to keep the lights on.

Fast forward eighteen months, and the company is approaching Series A. Suddenly, those makeshift systems are crumbling under pressure. The database structure can’t handle the data volume from clinical trials. Security gaps emerge that could jeopardize regulatory submissions. The development team is drowning because nobody established scalable practices from the beginning. And now, right when the company needs to look polished for investors, everything feels held together with duct tape.

This is where growing biotech firms are finding a smart solution that doesn’t involve hiring a three to five-hundred-thousand-dollar Chief Technology Officer before they’re ready. They’re bringing in fractional technology leadership — experienced executives who provide strategic guidance on a part-time basis, exactly when and how the company needs it.

The difference between fractional and interim leadership matters more than most people realize. An interim CTO typically fills a temporary gap, often while a company searches for a permanent hire. The short term mind set may be less invested in long-term outcomes because they won’t be around to see them, or deal with the repercussions.

A fractional technology executive is different. This is someone who commits to your company’s success over time, but does it on a flexible schedule that matches your current needs and budget. During intense periods like system implementations or fundraising, they ramp up their involvement. During quieter stretches, they scale back. But they maintain continuity and institutional knowledge that interim arrangements often lack.

Think about what actually needs to happen when a biotech company is scaling. Someone needs to define how your data architecture should be structured so it supports both current research and future commercialization. Someone needs to evaluate whether that shiny new AI platform your developer wants to adopt will actually serve business goals or just create technical debt. Someone needs to build realistic budgets for technology spending and explain to your board why cloud infrastructure costs what it costs.

These aren’t tasks you can simply outsource to a contractor or pile onto an already-overworked senior developer. They require executive-level judgment from someone who has been through this exact growth stage before, preferably multiple times, preferably in life sciences specifically.

The best fractional technology leaders have usually been founders themselves or served as early executives at startups. They understand the resource constraints and competing priorities that define early-stage companies. They can switch between strategic planning and hands-on problem-solving because sometimes the strategy is helping your team debug a critical integration that’s blocking a regulatory milestone.