This week, Loyal founder Celine Halioua shares the deep tech builder’s guide she couldn’t find when she was starting out.
Building a Deep Tech Company? Most Startup Advice Doesn’t Apply — Read This Instead
It’s hard to iterate your way into product-market fit when you're contending with the scientific method.
Take it from Celine Halioua. She’s the solo founder behind the startup that’s developing drugs to increase healthy lifespan in dogs, Loyal. “Due to the extensive regulation, the final product — the drug — is locked years before it launches. If the drug doesn’t work, there’s no iterating,” she says. “If you want to modify the product, you need to restart the entire process over again.”
That constraint shapes the calculus behind every decision she makes. And whenever she’s sought out advice online or from other folks in tech, she’s found that most startup wisdom doesn’t really apply. “For deep tech founders, it can be a company-killing move to just copy-paste advice for B2B SaaS,” says Halioua.
Some of the unique hurdles she’s confronted: Lengthy development cycles, constant regulatory delays and pitching a milestone-based business to metrics-loving investors.
But she’s managed to clear them in an insanely impressive timeline. Just a few weeks ago, five-year-old Loyal crossed a major milestone by securing the second-ever efficacy approval for their longevity drug for senior dogs (the first ever was for Loyal’s other product, a drug for large dog breeds). This could make an FDA-approved longevity drug a reality for millions of dogs in the not-too-distant future.
In this exclusive interview, Halioua offers up her methodical approach to planning, fundraising and product strategy while navigating a byzantine regulatory approval process. Here are a few of her tactics:
- Give investors new mental models. Deep tech founders can’t tout ARR growth or user adoption rates when fundraising for early rounds. Halioua has had to learn how to translate technical progress for investors who aren’t familiar with the space. “My advice is to build every fundraise around an increased probability of success of unlocking this market. Break down the drivers of that — both objectively, such as making regulatory progress, but also on what investors will care about,” she says.
- Build a board that spans domains. Loyal’s business straddles several disparate areas: veterinary regulation, deep tech operating and biotech company building. Outside of perhaps Halioua herself, no single person has expertise in all of them. So she built a diverse advisory board. “The solution is not to waste your time looking for a single unicorn advisor who understands everything, but to assemble more of a constellation of perspectives,” she says.
- Draft extensive contingency plans for inevitable delays. Halioua sketches out how she hedged her bets in the years-long wait for Loyal’s efficacy package: “I sat down with my regulatory advisors, who've gotten dozens of drugs approved, and asked them, ‘If this goes wrong, what would that look like? Is there precedent for this happening? Is there precedent for that happening?’” she says. “Then we map out that we think there's a 40% chance of this and a 20% chance of that. And then we decide which scenarios are worth building redundancy against.”
- Stay emotionally attached to the mission, not the method. “From Day 0, I have always been emotionally attached to getting the first FDA-approved drug for lifespan extension,” she says. “Just don’t get emotionally attached to your approach until there's objective data to prove that you should.”
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review Editors
Recommended resources:
-Dive deeper into Loyal’s journey with Halioua on The Eric Ries Show.
-A directory of the tiny teams behind huge tech companies.
-Why generalists will have an edge in the age of AI.