I often encounter quizzical looks when I say that Unlearn is a tech company. To be completely honest, I don’t know why, but I suppose it’s because our customers are biotech and pharmaceutical companies. I even once made a list as one of the top 25 CEOs in biotech. But, I swear, we aren’t a biotech company! Rather, I think of Unlearn as a tech company at the bio party. We’re here to make some friends and have a good time, but we aren’t here to fit in.

In my mind, the difference between a tech company and a bio company is primarily cultural. So, when I say that Unlearn is a tech company I mean that we strive to have a tech company culture.

Cultural differences between tech and bio companies run deep. Some of that starts with the people, long before they ever join a company.

Tech companies employ large numbers of computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers; bio companies employ large numbers of medical and biological scientists. Even these academic disciplines have dramatically different cultures; for example, machine learning researchers publish papers at conferences rather than in journals, whereas biologists aim to publish papers in high impact journals and mostly present posters at conferences. Machine learning research moves forward through preprints and blog posts—nobody really cares about peer review; whereas biology researchers debate whether preprints should be allowed at all! I’m not the first to write about these differences (e.g., The two cultures of mathematics and biology) and there are many more.

The main cultural differences between tech and bio, however, originate from product differences. Both tech and bio companies are involved in innovative research and development, but tech companies do theirs in a computer whereas bio companies do theirs in a wet lab or clinic. It takes much less time to do an experiment in a computer than in a wet lab. It’s not even close. Tech companies can perform thousands of experiments in the time it takes a bio company to finish one experiment!

In addition, software can be easily updated even after it is launched. By contrast, it’s pretty unusual and difficult to keep updating a new drug after it is launched. Therefore, tech companies have an ability to build in public that most bio companies cannot access. A tech company can release a software product, and then use feedback from customers to constantly improve it. Bio companies can’t really do that.

These product differences get to the crux of it; tech companies use rapid experimentation to build in public with the aim of continuously pushing product improvements to customers in close to real time, whereas bio companies rely on bigger, slower moving experiments working towards the eventual launch of a finished product that doesn’t need to be updated for many years. To be honest, even if the bio company’s product doesn’t work well it would take years to update anyway. It’s agile vs waterfall.

People often pejoratively refer to this tech culture as “move fast and break things” a la Facebook, but I prefer to think of it as “move fast and fix things”. Sometimes there’s a culture clash, sure. But this tech culture is a feature not a bug, one of the superpowers of working with computers that has made it possible for software to eat the world.

By these definitions, Unlearn is very clearly a tech company. Our products are based on generative AI models for clinical time series. Our machine learning engineers run dozens of experiments every single day. We aim to release new products quickly, and update them as often as possible. This culture permeates the entire organization: we move quickly, we iterate, we improve, every day.