Jason Rhodes Knows When to Pass the Baton

Before Jason Rhodes joined Atlas Venture, one of his future partners had already spent 36 hours in a van with him. Bruce Booth and Rhodes were taking part in Reach The Beach, a 200-mile relay. In Booth’s telling, the van smelled, Rhodes wore a retro headband, and the compression-sock arrangement was decidedly asymmetrical. Investment committees have approved people on less intimate evidence.

Booth recounted the trip when Rhodes’s appointment was announced in September 2014. Alongside the professional credentials was something harder to put in a presentation: they enjoyed each other’s company. A venture partnership can involve years of disagreement over uncertain outcomes. Discovering that you can tolerate someone in a crowded van is a useful preliminary experiment.

The relay also supplies an unusually apt image for Rhodes’s career. He has been an investor, an executive, a founding CEO and a chairman. Those titles describe different moments in a company’s life. His record is full of transitions between them, including the move from founding CEO to executive chair at Rectify. Getting an enterprise started and knowing when to hand over its daily running are separate jobs.

A history degree, then the other side of the table

Rhodes’s hometown is Kendall Park, New Jersey. He graduated from Yale in 1991 with a bachelor’s degree in history and earned his MBA at Wharton in 1996. The history degree is a small, useful corrective to the assumption that every biotechnology investor arrived by way of a laboratory bench. His route into the business ran through finance, partnerships and company formation.

He became a founder and partner at Fidelity Biosciences, the investment business now known as F-Prime Capital. There, his investments included Ironwood, FoldRx and Tetraphase. FoldRx was subsequently acquired by Pfizer. Investing gave him one view of how an early company acquires resources and direction. He later took executive jobs inside the kinds of businesses he had been backing.

At Alnylam, Rhodes led business development from 2007 to 2010. He joined Epizyme in 2010 and ultimately served as president and chief financial officer. It was a sequence that put him on both sides of the financing conversation: first deciding where money should go, then helping an operating company secure it. A spreadsheet is easier to admire when someone else must make its assumptions come true.

The money with a second purpose

By the time Atlas recruited him, Rhodes had helped bring in more than $200 million in non-equity funding at Alnylam and more than $180 million through partnerships at Epizyme. Those figures describe company financing. They also explain the appeal of a partner who could negotiate with larger businesses while understanding what the smaller business needed to keep moving.

Non-equity capital has a particular attraction for a young company: it can finance work without issuing new ownership shares in that transaction. A partnership still comes with negotiated obligations and rights. The skill lies in working out which commitments are worth making. The size of a payment is one part of that calculation; what a company agrees to do in return matters just as much.

Epizyme also raised $196 million across its IPO and a follow-on offering during Rhodes’s time there. That distinction deserves its place in the sentence. Two transactions should not quietly become one larger IPO in the retelling. His tenure covered the company’s passage from a private, early research business to a listed enterprise, with the financial and organizational changes that such a passage requires.

Rhodes joined Atlas as a partner effective October 1, 2014. Jean-François Formela, Peter Barrett, Booth and David Grayzel made up the rest of the five-person life sciences partnership he was joining. The appointment brought a former investor back to venture capital with several years of operating experience added to his luggage.

The first CEO does not have to be the last

Within weeks of joining Atlas, Rhodes was serving as interim CEO of Raze Therapeutics. Its October 2014 launch came with a $24 million Series A and an investor group that included Novartis, MPM and Astellas Venture Management. One of his immediate tasks was assembling the leadership team. The title “partner” plainly did not require him to remain at a comfortable distance from hiring.

That combination of investing and temporary operating responsibility would recur. At Dyne, Rhodes served as founding president and CEO from December 2017 to November 2018, then became chairman. The dates make the handoff concrete: he spent roughly a year in the founding executive role before moving to the board’s chair.

A founding CEO has to make decisions before there is much institution to lean on. A chairman works through a board and an executive team. Success in the first role does not make the second role identical, and changing titles does not mean the founding work has disappeared. Dyne’s 2026 proxy still described Rhodes’s knowledge of the business from its earliest days as part of his qualification to serve.

His board history also shows that involvement has an end as well as a beginning. He served on Generation Bio’s board from October 2016 to February 2026. At Replimune, he joined in 2015 alongside an Atlas-led Series A, then stepped down in June 2022 to focus on growing commitments at Atlas. A career made of company starts inevitably becomes a career of choices about attention.

Rectify’s $100 million handoff

Rectify’s public launch in October 2021 offers a particularly clear view of the arrangement. Rhodes had been its founding CEO. By the announcement, Rajesh Devraj was president and chief executive, Jonathan Moore was founder and chief scientific officer, and Rhodes was executive chair. The company had closed a $100 million Series A co-led by Atlas, Omega Funds, Forbion and Longwood Fund.

The announcement placed those people and those investors together at a specific moment. A founding executive had helped establish the enterprise; an operating team was in place; several firms were committing capital. The $100 million belonged to the company’s financing round. It was neither Rhodes’s personal fortune nor a price attached to the chairman’s contribution.

The board included Devraj, Moore and Rhodes, alongside investors and company builders such as Jodie Morrison, Otello Stampacchia, Marco Boorsma and David Steinberg. Read as an organizational portrait, the list is more revealing than a solitary founder photograph. Rectify was being built through a collection of responsibilities, with its founding CEO continuing in a different seat.

There was another handoff on July 15, 2026. Rectify appointed Constantine Chinoporos executive chairman, identifying Rhodes as a board member and former chairman. The founding CEO had become executive chair, then continued on the board as another executive took that chair. It is a useful recent addition to a career in which responsibilities keep moving, even when the names around the table remain familiar.

Devraj also appears in Disarm’s founding history. The connection shows how colleagues can meet again in a later enterprise. Experience travels with people between companies; each new organization still needs its own agreements, leadership and financing. Rhodes’s career gives that otherwise abstract business observation a set of names.

A sale price with two very different numbers

Disarm, where Rhodes had been chairman and founding CEO, was acquired by Eli Lilly in 2020. The announced terms included $135 million upfront and eligibility for up to $1.225 billion in additional future payments tied to specified milestones. The gap between the certain payment and the conditional total is large enough to deserve careful reading.

A milestone payment depends on something happening later. An upfront payment is part of the initial transaction. Adding them together produces an eye-catching maximum, but erases the distinction between a completed exchange and an uncertain future. In a career so closely associated with financing and deal-making, keeping those categories separate is part of understanding the work.

Disarm’s founding group included Atlas, Jeffrey Milbrandt, Aaron DiAntonio, Devraj and Raul Krauss; Lightstone Ventures and AbbVie Ventures invested alongside Atlas. By the sale announcement, Alvin Shih was CEO. Here again was a company that had passed from its founding leadership to another executive before a larger corporate owner entered the picture.

The permission to stop

Rhodes’s explanation of early investing makes room for an outcome that launch announcements rarely celebrate: deciding to stop. In a January 2024 interview, he described an illustrative $400 million fund with five unsuccessful $2 million seed investments. That would mean $10 million lost. Funding the same five failures at $20 million apiece would mean $100 million lost. These were examples, rather than reported Atlas losses.

The argument was about spending enough to learn before spending enough to become trapped. He linked the approach to a network of entrepreneurs who could work on another project if one stopped. There is an organizational idea inside the arithmetic: the people conducting the test need a future beyond the single company being tested. Otherwise, a decision about evidence can become entangled with a decision about their own jobs.

“Biotech is brutal for vaporware.”

Jason Rhodes · January 2024

The remark is blunt enough to survive outside a conference room. For a founder, it raises an uncomfortable question about what a company can actually demonstrate. For an investor, it asks whether enthusiasm has outrun the evidence. Rhodes’s willingness to discuss stopping sits alongside a record of starting companies and arranging substantial financings. The same career contains both activities.

Beyond the boardroom, the volume goes up

There are other rooms in Rhodes’s working life. He serves on the advisory board of Penn’s Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management and is a trustee of the American Academy in Rome. Those affiliations put education and the arts beside his company roles. His earlier advisory affiliations have included the Blavatnik Fund at Yale and Berklee College of Music’s Presidential Advisory Council.

Away from work, he mountain bikes and watches Spanish football with his family, loudly. That last detail is his public biography’s welcome concession to household acoustics. The runner in Booth’s relay story and the football spectator belong in the same portrait as the executive who negotiates partnerships. An occupation takes up considerable space in a life without filling every room.

The recurring action in Rhodes’s professional story is the handoff. Money becomes a company’s working budget. A founding executive makes way for an operating successor. A board member decides where to spend his attention. A smaller company moves into a larger organization. Each change requires people to agree on what comes next. Back in that relay van, the arrangement was easier to recognize: take your turn, then let the next person run.