Kevin Bitterman is a partner at Atlas Venture and has helped found and scale multiple biotechs. These include Visterra (acquired for $430m), Editas Medicine ($6B market cap), and Mariana Oncology (acquired for $1B+).
In this episode, Kevin walks through his path from a borrowed lab bench at Harvard to building biotech companies at Atlas Venture. He explains the scrappy playbook behind Atlas’s model, where about two-thirds of the firm’s capital goes into companies it creates in-house. He shares the stories behind spotting CRISPR early, pivoting Visterra from bird flu to kidney disease, and selling Mariana Oncology before it ever dosed a patient. Kevin also discusses why he sees China as the biggest shift in biotech in decades, and why AI’s real near-term impact may be in clinical trials rather than drug discovery.