About Dual Fluency

The skill the industry needs most is one that almost no one is trained to have. Universities produce scientists who cannot read a term sheet, while business schools create investors who cannot interpret a survival curve. Value is generated in the narrow space where these two literacies overlap, and that space is nearly empty. Dual fluency, akin to a form of bilingual education for the business and scientific realms, serves as the manual for navigating this intersection, drawing from thirty years and over fifty closed transactions on both sides of the table. 

The market has made dual fluency non-optional. Capital has become scarce while scientific knowledge has become abundant. The IPO window is slowly re-opening, early venture financings plummeted from $2.6 billion to $900 million in just one quarter, and more than half of public biotechs began the year with less than two years of cash. Concurrently, the pharmaceutical industry faces its largest patent cliff ever, with approximately $300 billion losing exclusivity by 2030—three times the 2016 wave—turning dealmaking into a matter of survival. The ability to translate between science and capital is now the dividing line between companies that secure funding and those that fail despite having valuable data on the shelf.