Today’s guest is Jason Rhodes, a partner at Atlas Venture and serial biotech entrepreneur who took Dyne Therapeutics ($2B+) and Epizyme ($5B+) through their IPOs, co-founded Disarm Therapeutics (acquired by Eli Lilly), and spent years on the leadership team at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals helping pioneer RNAi therapeutics.
In this episode, Jason breaks down over three decades of biotech evolution. We trace how pharma went from fully vertically integrated to increasingly dependent on biotech for its pipeline, and why that inversion reshaped the entire industry. Jason introduces what he calls the paradox of plenty: as the barriers to building biotech companies come down and innovation pours in from China, AI, and maturing capital markets, the flood of competition makes it harder than ever to be first or best in class. We get into how Atlas navigates that by building companies from scratch, spending $2 million to test whether the science even replicates before pouring in real capital. It’s a wide-ranging conversation on where biotech has been, where it’s going, and why the biology is always immutable.