There is a specific moment most founders in this community will recognise: the incubator space is full, staying flexible is starting to incur opportunity costs more than committing would, and someone tells you it's time to sign a real lease. It arrives dressed up as a facilities decision. It is rarely treated as what it actually is: one of the more consequential, and least reversible, strategic choices you will make as a company.
Where you build determines who you can hire, and how hard you'll have to compete with incumbents for them. It sets your cost base for years, often before your Series B thesis is even settled. It decides how far you sit from the regulators, the CDMOs, and the investors you'll depend on. And once you've signed, most of it is expensive to undo.
This is why the conversation is worth having with someone who thinks about it as a strategist first, not just as a broker.
In this session, Alex will walk through three things every founder eventually needs and few are taught:
The full journey, and where you still have room to negotiate. Most founders focus on the moment they sign the lease. But the decisions that actually shape the outcome happen earlier, in the search and negotiation, and later, at renewal or exit. Alexander will map that full journey and show exactly where the negotiable levers sit - term flexibility, fit-out contribution, exit and break clauses - and where they don't.
The real cost picture. Rent is the number everyone models. Fit-out, equipment, and exit costs are the ones that quietly break the model. He'll also walk through the lease terms that are easy to agree to and expensive to live with.
Why the same decision looks different depending on where you point it. Using real comparisons — Cambridge and Oxford, Zurich and Basel, the BeNeLux cluster — Alexander will show how talent depth, headcount cost, tax treatment, and regulatory proximity trade off against each other, and why the cheapest option is rarely the right one.
Why this matters for you
Most early-stage CEOs will revisit their fundraising strategy several times. Very few will revisit their site. It's one of the few decisions made once, under time pressure, that still has to make sense at Series C and at commercial launch. Getting it wrong doesn't show up as a bad quarter — it shows up two years later, as a team you can't scale in a location that no longer fits the company you've become.
A few questions worth thinking about beforehand:
In your current lease or LOI, what have you assumed is fixed that might actually be negotiable?
If your headcount triples in the next 18 months, does your site still make sense, or were you solving for today's team?
What would being wrong about this decision cost you, in both capital and time?
Dr. Alexander Nuyken is EMEA Head of Life Sciences, Leasing Advisory at JLL, where he leads the firm's life sciences real estate practice across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, advising biotech and pharma companies on site strategy and transactions. He joined JLL in 2022 after a career built at the intersection of life sciences and capital: as a Partner at Ernst & Young, where he led the EMEIA Life Science Strategy and Transactions practice, and earlier as an investment banker at Lehman Brothers/Nomura and UBS, focused on pharmaceutical, consumer health, and medtech clients. Alexander is a corporate lawyer by training. With over two decades in the sector, he brings a strategist's read on real estate decisions rather than a broker's.