Star founders, in­ves­ti­ga­tors hud­dle around new Boston ac­cel­er­a­tor spot­light­ing young en­tre­pre­neurs

As a wide­ly rec­og­nized biotech hub, Boston is un­doubt­ed­ly one of the best places to start a new com­pa­ny at the fron­tier of bi­ol­o­gy and en­gi­neer­ing. With a dense net­work of in­cu­ba­tors, ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists and tal­ent, sea­soned com­pa­ny founders can have their pick of part­ners and mod­els launch­ing their lat­est star­tups.

But for young, as­pir­ing en­tre­pre­neurs, it’s a very dif­fer­ent scene.

Big VC firms might hire you to work on their ideas in­stead of yours, and ac­cel­er­a­tors may not of­fer the kind of deep tech­ni­cal ex­per­tise and guid­ance need­ed to make it in the field.

“There was no for­mal path, and re­al­ly, there was no ecosys­tem,” Bri­an Baynes re­called about join­ing Flag­ship Pi­o­neer­ing 15 years ago, fresh out of his PhD pro­gram, af­ter find­ing “that tiny lit­tle crack in the wall” from acad­e­mia.

While most of his bright­est class­mates back then would have been set on be­com­ing pro­fes­sors, to­day MIT and Har­vard are full of stu­dents who are keen to trans­late what they do in their labs in­to the re­al world. That’s why Baynes is team­ing up with Tony Kule­sa — who’s just fin­ished a PhD in bi­o­log­i­cal en­gi­neer­ing — and long­time in­vestor Jamie Gold­stein to launch Petri, an ac­cel­er­a­tor built to sup­port a broad swath of bi­o­log­i­cal in­no­va­tion.

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