Flagship Pioneering reviews

Virtually all of the FL companies come off as some egotistical undergrad's high thoughts -- "what IF we could cure all diseases with machine learning?!" Oh, so daring of you. And also, how embarrassingly naive of you. The company takes their 'Associates' (i.e. people who did a 3 month summer internship and fully drank the Theranos "image above science" Kool Aid and places them on some company working on a topic they know nothing about. The idea being that they'll approach this problem with a different way of thinking -- they're disruptors! The only problem is then having a bunch of untrained idiots telling PhD scientists what experiments to do and how to do them on topics they know nothing about. Imagine having a physicist impose their wishful thinking onto histology images they have no experience in looking at. Directing in vitro experiments like a high schooler assuming you can just say you want to test something and it'll magically happen. Beware of these companies at all costs -- they're directly responsible for the lack of funding hitting Pharma and Biotech right now. Companies with horrible ideas floundering and instilling a lack of investor confidence.

There is an incredible distaste for bureaucracy here. Many people at Flagship have left established biotechs/pharmas for this reason. As a result, there aren't defined processes or streamlined systems. This facilitates quick decision-making; however there are times when it is unclear who owns making the decision.