Co-Founding Partner at Third Rock Ventures · Joined 2007
View Live Interactive Profile →Kevin Starr co-founded Third Rock Ventures in 2007 alongside two other former Millennium Pharmaceuticals executives, after the trio grew frustrated watching big pharma and traditional VCs abandon early-stage drug discovery. Rather than simply fund existing startups, they built a genuinely different model: touring academic research facilities, workshopping breakthrough science with scientists for one to three years, then constructing companies from scratch around it - a 'Discover-Launch-Build-Transform' approach that helped create Bluebird Bio, Agios Pharmaceuticals, and Foundation Medicine. Starr focused heavily on ultra-rare and orphan diseases throughout his active years at the firm, and in 2016 he stepped back to an advisory role for Third Rock's fourth fund, a deliberate pause he attributed to the firm's team-oriented, long-term operating model no longer requiring his direct day-to-day involvement in starting new companies.