By Anders Månsson, Senior Advisor at Ventures Accelerated
November 11, 2026
Anders Månsson, Senior Advisor at Ventures Accelerated
Finding a partner can seem easy when the sun is shining. Many can make an impression over dinner; most eligible partners can spout impressive plans and backgrounds. The more revealing questions arrive later. Who stays calm when the roof leaks? Who understands the mortgage? Who can negotiate with the builder on house renovation projects without surrendering the house or declaring war? These might be relevant questions for partnering in your personal life. In biotechnology, there are corresponding questions, and they deserve an answer before the money runs short, not after.
Science is undisputably at the core at the start of a biotech company. But it is not, in itself, a complete operating model. A promising molecule cannot negotiate a licence, explain a cash runway, or persuade a manufacturing partner to revise a payment schedule. The data may be beautiful. The invoices that the company needs to pay remain stubbornly unimpressed by data.
Capital, strategic assets, and human capital work together over time. The point is not that science matters less, but that the people who select, negotiate with, and manage partners determine how much time and progress the money can buy. For a financially constrained biotech company, that distinction is not academic. It could mean the difference between reaching the next milestone and merely approaching it, a difference that can be profound in financial terms.
Today’s more selective financing environment sharpens this point. When investment concentrates in fewer, larger and later rounds, smaller companies face less room for error. The assumption that another financing will arrive conveniently before the bank account becomes uncomfortable is a poor substitute for a plan. Hope can sustain a founder, but it cannot be listed as committed funding.
This is why getting the right people on board means more than assembling distinguished scientific credentials. Companies need people who can speak financial language fluently enough to connect experimental ambition with the cost, timing and financing of delivery. They must be able to explain what the next round actually buys, which uncertainties it resolves, and what options remain if the preferred route closes.
That does not mean turning every scientist into a finance director or treating every development project as merely a spreadsheet exercise. It means ensuring that financial understanding has a real voice in the room, alongside scientific understanding, sufficiently early in the company’s journey. The two should challenge and translate for each other. A budget without scientific judgement can fund the wrong experiment very efficiently. A scientific plan without financial judgement can produce an excellent explanation of why the company has run out of money.
Financial fluency is most valuable when it becomes practical judgement rather than vocabulary. Someone must ask whether a milestone is financeable, whether expenditure can be staged, and whether a delay leaves enough cash to recover. These are not questions for the final slide of the presentation. They belong in the design of the strategy.
The same applies to partnership discussions. A scientific exchange asks whether the technology works and how it might be developed. A partnership negotiation also asks who pays, who decides, who owns the results, who manufactures, who carries the risk, and what happens when the timetable changes. A team that can discuss the mechanism of action for an hour but cannot explain the implications of all the other aspects of what is after all an emerging business proposition, is not yet ready for the whole conversation.
There are essentially three major lessons to take from this:
Put together a cross-functionally diverse management team in terms of skills and perspectives
Enlist the aid of consultancies, CDMOs, and/or industry partners to professionally manage the strength gaps of the company
Do both things early on
Observational analysis of drug developers participating in BIO 2026 found that those with an industry partner in their first five years were more likely to have a lead programme in clinical development than companies of the same age without one, despite not having raised more money. This is an association, not necessarily proof of causation. Stronger science may attract partners and progress faster, and failed companies were absent from the sample. Nevertheless, the finding gives boards a reason to treat partnering capability as part of the investment case, rather than as a ceremonial handshake after the science is complete.
Under financial pressure, that capability becomes especially important. A company negotiating from a short runway may be tempted to exchange too much future freedom for immediate relief. A multi-competent management team can distinguish a necessary compromise from one that will probably prove expensive later. They can examine alternatives, understand the other party’s preferences, and preserve negotiating options. They also know that being able to say no to something is often prepared months before the meeting in which it matters. And as there is a limit to the areas of expertise that can be held by a small company, the industry partnerships chosen are equally important.
An industry partner should therefore be assessed for more than one attractive capability. Technical expertise is essential, but so are regulatory understanding, operational reliability, commercial judgement and the ability to work through problems. Multi-competence is not a demand for perfection. It is recognition that life, and drug development, rarely respects the agenda circulated beforehand.
Manufacturing makes this tangible. Manufacturing or quality issues appeared in >70% of the FDA’s published complete response letters for 2020–2024 concerning applications later approved. That is not a statistic about all rejections, but it is a reminder that a technically promising medicine can still be delayed by the system required to produce it. A partner’s facilities and regulatory record are therefore not someone else’s operational detail. They are an intrinsic part of the biotech’s own risk.
The people inside the company must be equally capable of crossing boundaries. A finance professional should understand why an apparently expensive development step may protect the asset. A business development leader should understand enough science to avoid promising what the programme cannot deliver. A technical leader should be able to explain how a manufacturing decision affects cost, timing and the next financing. No one has to know everything. Collectively, the team must know where the gaps are, and who is responsible for closing them.
This is multi-competence at the level that matters: not a collection of superheroes, but a team that can translate between disciplines and make decisions together. The crucial qualification is often the ability to ask the second question. Not simply, “Can the partner do this?” but, “Can it do this at the scale, price and time we need, and what happens if it cannot?” Not simply, “Is the deal attractive?” but, “Does it leave us a viable company?”.
There is never a guarantee that you will be able to get all the answers right; sometimes you need to compromise in life. But there is a guarantee that without choosing the right mix of cross-functionally savvy managers and industry partners, you won’t even get the questions right. Recruiting and partnering, arguably similar processes of “courtship”, “validation” and eventual “choosing”, are both truly critical faculties for the success of a biotech company.