Long Island is an expensive place to do business. Just like anywhere else, the success of a biotech startup depends on being able to find funding, and the availability of that funding fluctuates with time. The 1980s were boom years for biotech start ups, because the big success stories like Genentech were on investors’ minds and it seemed that even in a very expensive area like Long Island, the funds were there. “It all boils down to money,” Steve Blose recalls about the logistics of setting up Protein Databases, Inc. in Huntington Station in the 1980s. If there was enough money available, you didn’t need to worry too much about the details of getting labs and office space set up. “If you can come in and hire people that can actually put all that together,” you can focus on “the progress of your science and your product development, the science side, [and] that’s what happened at PDI. There was enough money around, and they hired industrial people to come in and set up the labs, and they had a financial officer who worried about the money. It seemed to be very easy. Those were the days when people threw a lot of money at biotech without a lot of strings on it. It was easy to get money. Now it’s very tough, but back then… it was a frenzy.”
