What Being an Outsider Taught Me About Investing
There’s a particular kind of clarity that comes from being the person in the room who clearly doesn’t belong there, at least by someone else’s definition.
I moved to the United States from Jordan in 2008 with a background in pharmacy. I hadn’t grown up inside the American startup ecosystem. I didn’t know the names of the major venture funds, hadn’t attended a pitch competition, and didn’t have a professional network here. My path into biotech entrepreneurship didn’t run through the traditional on-ramps. It came through scientific research and a conviction that promising ideas could become therapies if someone was willing to do the hard work of bridging those two worlds.
That outsider position turned out to be one of the most useful things I’ve brought to everything I’ve done since.
I’m Leen Kawas, co-founder and Managing General Partner of Propel Bio Partners. What fifteen years of building, fundraising, and investing has shown me is that people who haven’t absorbed a field’s assumptions from the inside often see its inefficiencies most clearly. In drug development, where the cost of avoidable mistakes can be catastrophic, that kind of fresh perspective carries real weight.
The Pattern in the Data
The contribution of immigrant founders to American innovation is well-documented at this point.
According to a 2022 analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy, immigrants founded 55% of America’s billion-dollar startup companies (319 of 582). Seventy-eight percent of those companies have at least one immigrant in a senior leadership role.
These numbers aren’t just a demographic footnote. They point to something structural: people who have had to learn how systems work from the outside, rather than inheriting that knowledge, tend to develop a sharper instinct for where those systems are broken and where the conventional playbook is costing more than it delivers.
Drug development accumulates assumptions in layers over decades. There are ways of doing things that persist because no one has asked whether they’re still necessary, or whether a cheaper, faster approach might produce equivalent results. Coming to the field as someone who learned it deliberately rather than absorbed it culturally gave me a different vantage point. I questioned things that people who had spent their entire careers inside the system sometimes didn’t think to question, because those things had always been there.
During my time leading a company focused on neurodegenerative disease, that habit of questioning led toward decisions that ran against the conventional approach: modified trial structures, technology partnerships that were unusual at the time, a relentless search for redundancies worth cutting. Some of those instincts came directly from not having been trained to see the current method as inevitable.
The Funding Gap That Still Exists
Women founders carry their own version of this experience, and the data here is direct.
In 2024, women-fronted biotech companies received $4.3 billion in venture funding, representing 8.5% of overall sector funding. That’s real progress from prior years. It sits against a backdrop, though, where female founders captured roughly 2% of all venture capital over the past decade. Of 102 new biotech companies formed since late 2023, only nine were led by women.
When I took a company public in 2020, I became one of only 22 women founders in the United States to have done so at that time, and the first woman in Washington State to accomplish it in twenty years. The statistic is striking less for what it says about me and more for what it says about the conditions everyone in that same pool had to navigate.
What I’ve found, over and over, is that founders who’ve had to work harder to be heard often build more resilient companies. They come into investor meetings over-prepared. They’ve already pressure-tested their conviction in ways that founders who operate with default credibility sometimes haven’t. They’ve learned to persuade skeptics, find alternative routes when the obvious ones close, and hold a vision together under conditions not designed to support them. Those capabilities are genuine, and they’re hard to acquire any other way.
How This Shapes Who Leen Kawas Backs
When I’m evaluating a company at Propel Bio, one of the questions I carry into every conversation is this: what does this founder understand about their problem that someone who came up inside the system might not?
The answers to that question, when they’re specific and grounded in actual observation rather than outsider mythology, are often the most interesting thing in a pitch. They signal a founder who has thought carefully about their space rather than simply executing the standard playbook.
The companies in Propel Bio’s portfolio were chosen because their science was strong, their mission was clear, and their teams understood something real about the problem they were solving. When I look at what those teams have in common, a recurring pattern emerges: they’ve each had to build something in conditions that didn’t automatically support them.
That experience tends to sharpen certain capabilities. You learn which conventions are actually load-bearing and which ones are just convention. You get more comfortable operating without complete information. You develop a tolerance for being underestimated that most people who’ve always had institutional support never need to build.
What I’d Tell Anyone on an Unconventional Path
If you’re entering this industry, or any industry, from outside the expected profile, resist the impulse to paper over that difference. The instinct to blend in, to speak the language fluently, to reference the right names and mimic the approved style, is understandable. It can feel like the safer option.
Leen Kawas has spent fifteen years on both sides of this story, as someone who built from the outside and now invests across the full range of founders navigating it. The outsider advantage is genuine. It asks something of you, but it gives something back that’s hard to manufacture any other way.
Leen Kawas is the co-founder and Managing General Partner at Propel Bio Partners, a life science venture capital firm dedicated to supporting entrepreneurs developing breakthrough health innovations. She is a longtime advocate for diverse and underrepresented voices in biotechnology, including women in life sciences and scientist-entrepreneurs.