In her presentation<\/span> at last week\u2019s TechCrunch Early Stage event in Boston, SOSV general partner Pae Wu tossed out the tongue-in-cheek phrase \u201crecovering academic\u201d to describe founders in the firm\u2019s IndieBio program.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a fitting label, given many founders in the program are academics, and their journey from academia to accelerator has its share of growing pains as they often have to adapt to the business world without a business degree.<\/p>\n

While many such early-stage startups look outside of their founding team to add to their C-suite, Wu explains that the best approach is often simply developing skills within the existing core.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing in the C-suite is like getting married,\u201d says Wu. \u201cThese are pretty long and committed relationships and you have to be able to know how to work together, get along and have an unbelievable amount of trust with the people you\u2019re working with. I think it\u2019s important for founders to lead that charge.\u201d<\/p>\n

What, then, does a founding team do for a recovering academic? After all, giving it all up to launch a startup is the biggest risk many founders will take in their lives. It\u2019s scary, regardless of how confident you might be in your core technology \u2014 a dramatic departure from the relative safety of an academic role. One can certainly appreciate why such founders sometimes attempt to keep a foot in each world. \u201cThis is a very \u2026 difficult problem,\u201d Wu says.<\/p>\n

In many cases, professors who work with students on spinning out a breakthrough tech opt to remain at their university, only adopting a C-level title. It\u2019s something that can, and has, been pulled off successfully, but it\u2019s not without its challenges.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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