I’ve been wearing the same pair of board-shorts for probably six months. I do wash them (on the quick wash cycle), but right back on they go! I’m relatively convinced people at my gym either think I’m homeless or, at the very least, the proud owner of one, and only one, pair of shorts.
I call them my ‘productivity shorts’ because I think they’ve at least earned a nickname by now. They even came with me to New York to ring the bell; I felt like they’d earned the trip…sitting at the computer for weeks of back-to-back meetings is tough on them and the chair in equal measure.
Why do I wear them so much? Why not?? They’re so comfortable! They’re Velcro! Who doesn’t love Velcro? I also have a Vans Velcro wallet because just the sound of Velcro makes me laugh. Does your Gucci wallet make you laugh? Why waste money if I’m already happy? To impress others?
What does all of this have to do with Turn? Literally everything.
When you’re a child and start something new, reality is just reality. If everybody is flying to work in capes, walking is your weird. If everyone is smiling and calmly talking all the time, the yeller is your weirdo. So when I entered the worlds of pharma and fundraising at 35+ with zero background, nothing made sense.
Why would someone sell away more of his life’s work because a famous investment group named after a mountain or prairie was willing to back its progress? And, why was raising more money the goal versus building more value?
And how the F*%k does any company EVER get acquired for BILLIONS of dollars before it ever makes a dollar, let alone do that INTENTIONALLY?
None of it made sense.
Then it clicked. The currency is the proof. The data is the dividend. The value of the science is what a likely acquirer would do with it, not the small company or lab creating the evidence of its effectiveness. And these large investors and funds know this. They know it’s a risk early. But they also know the rewards are disproportionately large compared to traditional investments. They’re not day traders. They fund the patient acquisition of data for the chance to be part of a disproportionate event when the data reads out:
Kite Pharma was acquired by Gilead for $11.9 billion dollars. It had no commercial revenue and its therapy was still in development. Gilead paid for was the data: https://www.gilead.com/news/news-details/2017/gilead-sciences-to-acquire-kite-pharma-for-119-billion
Dermira was purchased by Eli Lilly for $1.1 billion dollars. Its eczema antibody was still in trials. No sales. Just a promising asset in development: https://investor.lilly.com/news-releases/news-release-details/lilly-announces-agreement-acquire-dermira
Proteologix was acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2024 for $850 million dollars plus milestones. The company had no products and no revenue, only an antibody that suggested potential in the lab: https://www.jnj.com/media-center/press-releases/johnson-johnson-completes-acquisition-of-proteologix-inc
These deals were not wagers on dreams or influencer campaigns; they were purchases of cold, hard evidence. The absence of revenue did not equate to an absence of value. The value was stored in something less visible but far more durable: proof.
For those who build and fund these companies, every dataset is a dividend…a measurable return on the belief that the data itself is the most valuable output.
That is the strange and beautiful truth about this industry. Data, not revenue, not brand name investors or fancy websites, is what drives value. Data…binary, objective, answers to the age-old “do you work and are you safe” question, moves markets in pharma. A single data release can catapult a company’s valuation overnight. When results show success, risk dissipates. When results fall short, risk returns.
The pattern might seem volatile, but it is rational. Every new dataset alters the probability of success. Companies rise and fall on the strength of their data. And, selfishly, for somebody whose risk tolerance has grown increasingly low over the years, there’s nothing quite as warm and fuzzy as starting a major phase 2 trial with so much safety data at hand. You may have even noticed I voluntarily locked up my ability to sell a single share of stock for a long while. Why? Pharma doesn’t reward day-traders. It rewards those who wait for the data.
The companies that endure are not always the most visible or the most funded. They are the ones that can demonstrate, through clean data, that their science works.
Data is the currency of pharma because it represents the only form of wealth that cannot be inflated by influencers or fancy marketing campaigns: statistically-validated reality viewed on pages and pages of datasets. It’s not romantic, but it’s also not subject to the moods and sentiment of traditional retail companies who can lose hundreds of millions overnight if an Instagram star gets too political. Data is walled off from BS, locked in a database being constantly audited by statisticians, and ultimately sent in an email to the people that ordered the trial, not in a limousine. It’s read by people in Velcro shorts, not made prettier by an Instagram reel accompanying a new lip liner. It just is. And in our world of so many opinions, I find the binary nature of a good or bad dataset as comforting as my productivity shorts.
