Michael Young is the co-founder of Lindus Health and a former Special Advisor to the UK Prime Minister on life sciences.
Lindus has raised $55 million to redesign clinical trials from the ground up - building what Michael calls an “anti CRO” that treats the trial as the product, not a service.In this episode, Michael explains why the real bottleneck in medical progress is the way we test new treatments, how hourly-billed CRO incentives slow everything down, and what a world of real-time, adaptive trials looks like.
He also shares the 10% decisions that created 90% of the value, how to keep investors truly aligned, the hiring trade-offs in a regulated industry, and why founders should resist building a “faster horse” and instead change the paradigm.
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Chapters:
(00:00) Intro
(02:24) What went wrong during COVID trials
(03:48) The CRO incentive problem and rising costs
(04:55) What a CRO actually does
(06:05) When overruns get rewarded
(07:02) Founding story, Negronis, and first principles
(08:16) Why “anti CRO” and not just another vendor
(09:29) End-to-end partner: integrated tech and fixed pricing
(11:10) Make biotech feel like SaaS: agile, parallel, fail fast
(14:26) AI discovery vs the clinical bottleneck
(15:59) Picks-and-shovels for the AI-biotech wave
(16:24) Start simple, then scale complexity and customers
(17:58) Choosing customers: digital health vs big pharma
(19:05) Why digital health cooled and what still works
(20:29) The 10% decisions: end-to-end, adaptive trials, geo setup
(21:51) Why start in the UK: trial talent and product hiring
(24:49) The pain points: services + tech and hiring fit
(26:55) Investor alignment and avoiding SaaS-metric traps
(28:41) Running a tight fundraise: time-boxing and intros
(31:11) Updates, boards, and radical transparency
(32:46) Growth can hide sins: product and ops complexity
(34:04) If you were the VC, what would you ask
(34:55) 10-year vision: more biotechs, more adaptive trials
(35:58) Mental health
(36:56) Ethics of speed and shutting down weak arms early
(37:30) Don’t build a faster horse: change the trial paradigm
(39:02) Big bet inspiration: Palantir, Anduril, Wave
(40:18) Switching off
(47:45) What was it all for
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