Venture Associate Says Not to Listen to Those Who Tell You No

Name: Hannah Jacobs (she/her)

PhD: Biology, MIT, 2025

What is your current job?

I am an Associate for Safar Partners, based in Boston, Massachusetts.

My job entails due diligence on companies, building investment memos, site visits, and screening companies.

What is your favorite thing about your job?

I can be myself with my colleagues, people seem happy, and I get to help founders trying to change the world.

What is the most important skill you developed or experience you had during your PhD that now helps you in your current position?

Determine the scope of a problem and how to efficiently solve it, and how to ask questions during presentations that resolve uncertainty

How did you build the skills necessary for your current role?

I did an internship at the same fund, part-time, for the last year of my PhD.

How did you find this position? What were the career steps you took to get to where you are now?

Networking with another PhD graduate

PhD graduate ➡️ VC

If someone is interested in a similar role, what would you recommend they start doing now to prepare?

There are lots of fellowships and student orgs in VC to be a part of - do it part time while you are doing your PhD.

Why did you decide to not pursue a career in academia?

I was already curious about start-ups before the PhD started, but I did not know much about it. I was also thinking about pharma as well, or becoming a lecturer, as I loved teaching, and wanted a more laid back lifestyle with the rigor of science and impact. I was sort of curious about continuing in research, either as a research scientist, or maybe a PI track.

Unfortunately, academia was toxic for me, and so it came quite easy by mid-PhD to "leave," when I barely wanted to show up to work anymore. Unfortunately, I may have been a bit too honest about my desires to leave academia, and some advisors got even less supportive after I told them about my plans, but such is life.

The start-up / VC environment really energizes me, as I feel that people have generally positive attitudes. It is not perfect, and also still very stressful and uncertain, and is perhaps attacking problems with less depth than in research. But in VC, I feel like I can be myself, I do not need to hide my personality or enjoyment of life as much as I did in research. I also feel like I get more positive feedback when I do things than in academia, and I realize that energizes me. Even if it is a small comment, it means a lot for my confidence.

What advice do you have for someone getting their PhD and looking to pursue a career outside of academia?

1. Of course, do lots of networking but, not just the coffee chats or events, which are helpful, but more of the high-touch, longer networking situations. I found that even interviewing at different summer/ part-time internships helped me figure out if I liked certain types of jobs.

2. I would HIGHLY suggest doing an internship of some kind during the PhD. It was very difficult to pull this off in my program, and graduate "on-time"...but it is SO worth it.

3. Lean on the people who support you, and don't listen to people who tell you "no" because they want you to go down a certain path, like trying to "publish" again, or whatever. You are probably at that point, in your fourth year or so, and you know yourself better than you think. If that is calling out to you, listen to that voice.

Are there any components of your identity you would like to share, including how they have impacted your journey?

I am a woman. I like to dance. I love fashion and enjoy traveling a lot. I did bioinformatics, and while I did not feel uncomfortable that often in such an environment, it certainly did feel like I was trying to fit into a space that was not built for me.

It is such a stressful environment in academia, but I wanted to try, since I was doing so well in science during college, and getting attention from great researchers. I had lots of people support me and see futures in me that I had no idea was possible, so I would say my many friends and close family really had a positive impact.

And for those interested, what was your main area of research?

mRNA splicing determines which regions of mRNA will encode into protein. In large scale sequencing datasets of human tissues, we studied how mRNA splicing regions varied between individuals, finding some regions present in a small subset of tissues. We uncovered how mRNA splicing differences are regulated by genetic variants, and lead to different phenotypic outcomes, such as contributing to disease.