Success is rarely replicable; what matters is finding your own path | 5Y View x Bota Bio x METiS Pharmaceuticals
Cross-disciplinary methodology for entrepreneurship.
In this conversation, two entrepreneurs deeply rooted in the life sciences — Cheryl Cui, CEO of Bota Bio, and Chris Lai, CEO of METiS Pharmaceuticals — joined Xutian Jing, Managing Director at 5Y Capital, to discuss the future path for biotech companies.
Before finding their footing, both went through many rounds of exploration and trial and error. On building teams, finding actionable methodologies, and building something more enduring across cycles, they shared their stories and insights. Perhaps their reflections will offer you some fresh perspective :)
Guests:
Cheryl Cui, Founder & CEO, Bota Bio
Chris Lai, Co-founder & CEO, METiS Pharmaceuticals
Xutian Jing, Managing Director, 5Y Capital
An Interdisciplinary Methodology
Xutian Jing: Cheryl and Chris are both young PhDs and former classmates at MIT. Though both companies are relatively young, they've already achieved technology progress on par with global leaders in their respective fields. Please briefly introduce your companies and businesses.
Cheryl Cui: Hi everyone, I'm Cheryl. Bota Bio is a globally operated synthetic biology industrial company with roughly 200 employees. We officially began our industrialization process in 2023.
Chris Lai: Hi everyone, I'm Chris from METiS Pharmaceuticals. We develop an AI-enabled drug delivery platform, using AI technology to create nano-delivery tools that empower the development of breakthrough drugs. We're based in Hangzhou with a team of about 170 people. Our technology has reached Phase III clinical trials, and we hope to soon see our products actually used on patients.
Xutian Jing: Both companies are applying interdisciplinary technology in industry. Let me start with Chris — I've noticed that METiS's executive team spans a wide age range, with veterans from three generations. You're quite young, yet among your co-founders is a senior member of the US National Academy of Engineering, and your team includes even more seasoned industry veterans. As CEO, how do you build a team with such a large age gap, from cross-disciplinary backgrounds? Especially when many of these people have accumulated successful experience on proven paths, why would they be willing to join you in pursuing more challenging technological innovation?
Chris Lai: It may be industry-related. Our team ranges from 30 to 60 years old, and not just in age — there's also tremendous cross-disciplinary span. So we have many different languages within the company: genetics and computer science languages, people who've worked on genes, proteins, and cells, people who've worked on computers and algorithms, even someone who designed rocket physics engines. And pharmaceuticals is a long chain: some work on upstream drug development, others on manufacturing, clinical, and sales. Putting these people from different dimensions together is extremely difficult, and we invested enormous energy from the very beginning.
But we discovered that the core of language is translation. We have a culture where certain people within the company are responsible for translation — coordinating and communicating between different languages. Though many of our colleagues are young and lack pharmaceutical experience, they may understand chemistry well or know how to see things from a computer science perspective. They can do the translation, enabling both sides of very senior people to work together. At the same time, we have many experienced people on our team who are also willing to try technology integration.
Organizationally, we're more like an internet company with many matrix structures. Most projects are led by small project owners, so you might have a 30-year-old leading a team of many people in their 40s and 50s. Once OKRs are set, everyone can work together. Culturally, we intentionally encourage trial and error. For some directions, we don't know if they'll work, but we'll deliberately do some exercises, trying to put people from different frameworks and systems together. Through training across several projects, we can quickly integrate people of different ages, different languages, and different segments. After this training, they can better fuse together.
Xutian Jing: Chris shared a very practical methodology, but I'm sure this wasn't there from day one — it was gradually figured out. In the process of figuring out this methodology, did you encounter negative feedback?
Chris Lai: A tremendous amount, especially in the early days when the algorithm team and chemistry people were integrating. The friction between departments was very severe. Finding balance between the two took enormous energy, and we even deliberately allowed some waste — letting them exercise in algorithm development, large language model construction. Some approaches that pharmaceutical people found quite unreasonable, we would let play out.
Because the unique thing about AI is that it's not a continuous, gradual improvement process — quite different from traditional pharmaceuticals. AI development often follows a non-linear pattern: you might have months with no breakthroughs, then once a breakthrough happens, there's an order-of-magnitude change. In this process, patience is crucial. We need to try various methods and strategies, exploring from different angles, rather than relying solely on a single success-failure metric. The key is identifying and focusing on core technology points that show potential early on. When these points begin showing results, sustained investment can lead to major breakthroughs.
Xutian Jing: Thank you Chris, very practical. Cheryl looks quite polished today, but usually when I see her she seems more like a factory forewoman. On one hand, you're holding globally leading AI + automation synthetic biology tools; on the other, you may be dealing with fermentation factories across the country. In this process, have you encountered setbacks or psychological gaps?
Cheryl Cui: Actually, I haven't felt any psychological gap. Perhaps you could say this has been the most interesting growth experience of the past two years. Since founding the company in 2019, our team members have come from internationally top-tier synthetic biology R&D companies. From the early startup days, we've firmly believed that technology must be combined with pragmatic industrialization. One of the biomanufacturing industry's biggest challenges is building industrialization capability. Initially, we only had a rough goal and direction, without clear plans for when to move toward industrialization. At the same time, we deeply understood that the time cycles and capital investment required for industrialization would be a significant test for a startup. We're very gratified that through efforts over the past two years, we've completed our first case of technology empowering industry, and now have our own production base.
In the early days of the company, we first hoped to learn from the best. So we chose to partner with the most outstanding companies in China's chemical industry. Through this collaboration, we witnessed their refined management and persistence in continuous cost optimization — the efficiency and intensity of this production management deeply impressed me. Ultimately, through 30 years of accumulation, they've achieved global leadership in multiple categories. In the process of working with leading industry companies, we've continuously learned and accumulated, laying the foundation for Bota's industrialization. Second, you have to go to the front lines. For example, we discovered that geography determines the most important, most fundamental, and unchangeable cost elements for production-oriented enterprises, including water, electricity, energy, and labor costs. We've visited over a hundred enterprise factories, from Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, to Shandong, Henan, and elsewhere. Through these exchanges and on-site inspections, we gradually built capabilities that were originally relatively weak on our team. Going deep to the front lines is a crucial element.
Ultimately, we achieved using our own technology to help factories reduce costs and increase efficiency. In this process, many interesting things happened. Originally, our R&D and production segments were siloed. Lab colleagues and production colleagues had huge differences in understanding the same matters, and we needed to actively coordinate. This process also brought tremendous positive feedback to the team — feedback that not only strengthened internal communication and collaboration, but also showed us opportunities to create value on the production front lines.
Boundaries and Challenges
Xutian Jing: These are all difficulties and challenges brought by cross-disciplinary technological innovation, but I'm glad to hear both of you have found ways to overcome them. Another question: why do we see Chinese technology companies able to reach global leadership in vertical technology fields in relatively short time? What experience and methods do you have?
Chris Lai: I think the pharmaceutical industry is different from semiconductors — there may not be much possibility of leapfrogging. In this track, you'll find that creating real clinical value requires extremely high technical reserves. Making a great drug in Alzheimer's, oncology, or diabetes and weight loss is extraordinarily difficult. We can only achieve breakthroughs in certain areas where big pharma doesn't do as well and where the industry itself has many unknowns. So we chose the emerging field of drug delivery — extremely important in future pharmaceuticals, and a chokepoint direction much like chips. But big pharma's investment isn't as complete here, so we felt this was a track where we could break through.
At first we were catching up. We identified where our leading strategy was, set some fully measurable indicators, defined what "good" meant, and started chasing. We found that our chosen technical route might be more advantageous — using AI-enabled high-throughput molecular simulation computing, an approach that traditional industry would never imagine — and we discovered we could actually do better. Especially in some collaborations with big pharma, we could achieve in six weeks what they couldn't in two years. So we felt we might have truly found the right direction. It's a bit like cycling: I accidentally took a wrong turn onto a road no one was on, but discovered it was actually a faster route to the final solution.
But at this stage, we encountered many new challenges. We started asking where the boundaries are — what are the technical boundaries of drug delivery and gene therapy. At this point there's nothing to chase anymore, and we instead feel somewhat lost, unclear which direction is right. The cost of trial and error is also getting higher. We may need to collaborate with excellent companies across multiple tracks, translating new things.
Mutual collaboration with big pharma is also very important. Like when a coach helps you break wind in cycling, many Western big pharma companies are willing to play the windbreaker role. They know we have great potential but may currently lack the ability to break wind ourselves, and they're very willing to collaborate with us. Our company has always believed that to do well, you must learn from the world's best people and cooperate with the world's best companies. Because if we succeed, they can make dozens of drugs that no one can currently make, saving more patients. So continuously doing the newest, boundary-pushing things, and collaborating with major players in the ecosystem — I think this is a very core part.
Cheryl Cui: I think that over this past period, domestic technology companies have undergone a shift in thinking. The reason a company can achieve long-term stable success is not merely because it possesses unique technology or a uniquely priced and performing product. These are merely final results. What's more important is what capabilities a company possesses to achieve these breakthroughs, and can continue achieving such breakthroughs. Success with a single product cannot bring permanent relief; what truly works is what kind of R&D system, sales system, or production system a company builds in this process, enabling sustained output and competitiveness. This is far more difficult than simply completing an R&D project.
Bota Bio belongs to the biomanufacturing field, aiming to integrate biotechnology into daily public life to promote more sustainable and healthier lifestyles. But due to industry chain complexity and scarcity of professional technical talent, we must undertake the important tasks of role definition and R&D process construction. We've found that within our company, and even across the entire industry, few colleagues have full industry chain R&D experience from lab to production implementation to sales to market. If we achieve success in this area — cultivating professional teams that can effectively transform market needs into R&D projects, forming shared understanding, and driving the application of biotechnology-inspired creativity in life scenarios. As Chris said, you must find the best people in the industry, think about where these capabilities are currently accumulated, go there to find their experience, and bring it into your team.
The Longer-Term Things
Xutian Jing: The last question may be rather direct. In today's challenging macro environment, as technology-driven companies with heavy R&D investment, how do you ensure you build your company to last and endure in terms of execution and cycle-crossing? Traditional biotech may have very strong cyclicality and rapid turnover — how do you become a long-lasting company?
Chris Lai: Actually, we've always had a sense of responsibility — to turn these things into medicines that can truly help patients. If you have a pile of good technology but can't survive the cycle, it's a terrible shame. We're also thinking about how to live long and continuously make good products. Living long is somewhat paradoxical for biotech, because it's inherently a nine-deaths-one-life situation. In the US, over 90% of drugs may fail. Many companies only have that one drug; perhaps only 10% of people survive. This is a very real and very difficult thing about biotech.
For us, we need to think from a different angle: how to avoid cycle impacts. Our company is a platform-type pharmaceutical company, which may be a relatively distinctive label. Early on, our delivery platform could collaborate with different pharmaceutical companies in a chip-like manner. When you have some breakthrough technology that truly becomes the best globally, big pharma is also willing to provide sufficient resources and funding for us to trial-and-error and continue surviving on the track. This cash flow support allows us to make the entire platform longer and deeper. Additionally, we have some pipeline arrangements for mid-term cash flow. We've always emphasized being short, flat, and fast — now on average we can push a pipeline to Phase II or III clinical trials every 2-3 years, quickly advancing to key clinical stages. This gives us self-sustaining capability to support company development in the medium term.
The longest-term and most difficult question is how to integrate the translation capabilities and technology platform advancement we just discussed, and grow bigger and stronger. This is probably the truly difficult direction. So our next step is to think about how, while meeting domestic capital market demands, to do some heavier pipelines. Initially we still want to co-develop with large US pharmaceutical companies, taking what we believe may be new RNA pipelines that could disrupt oncology and Alzheimer's, and pushing these pipelines forward through co-development.
Finally, I want to mention something quite different. Because we're a cross-disciplinary field, the characteristic of AI pharmaceuticals is scalable, batch pipelines — this may be different from general biotech. We don't have to bet on a single pipeline's cycle, because we can continuously generate pipelines. We can relatively flexibly adjust pipeline risk and return profiles, ensuring we always have positive returns over time, while also being able to undertake some relatively high-risk investments.
Xutian Jing: If the biotech industry wants long-term development and to break out of the vicious cycle, it still needs to continuously research the world's most leading technology and platform capabilities.
Chris Lai: Beyond building the platform, investment in earlier-stage drug discovery and biology is also important. But the key breakthrough point is still having platform-type capabilities that allow us to continuously replicate such success.
Xutian Jing: In recent years, synthetic biology and materials in China have been intensely competitive. Cheryl, what are your thoughts on this, and how can you break through and respond in such an "involuted" environment?
Cheryl Cui: We're rooted in the industry front lines and can feel this homogenized competition. However, this phenomenon also reflects enormous market development opportunities from another angle. For us, the key lies in deeply understanding our own team characteristics, clarifying our advantages and core DNA, and identifying and弥补 our shortcomings. Only by integrating these elements can we shape our unique competitive advantage. Successful paths are often non-replicable, so we need to rely on independent thinking to explore a path that matches our own characteristics. Only then can we clarify the meaning and value of our company's existence.
More importantly, this also helps escape the dilemma of homogenized competition, because what ultimately determines a company's survival and development is its sustained competitiveness. A company needs to clarify its positioning in the industry, and which resources can be gradually accumulated and built through long-term effort. Only then can a company truly achieve differentiation and bring different changes, rather than simply copying others' past paths to success. Unique competitive advantages and continuous innovation capability are the keys for a company to stand out in fierce market competition.
After reading their conversation, what insights would you like to share? Feel free to leave a comment below. We'll select 2 featured commenters to receive a mysterious 5Y Capital portfolio company gift package after the Spring Festival :)
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