CAMBRIDGE — The golf course has long been a venue where business people can schmooze, make new contacts, and maybe close a deal.
But in this brainy city, home to perhaps the world’s leading biotechnology cluster and a lot of avid runners, the path to success for some is a 4½-mile jogging loop. It starts outside the headquarters of Atlas Venture, a venture capital firm in Technology Square near Kendall Square, crosses the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge to Boston, passes the Charles River Esplanade, and then curves around the Museum of Science back into Cambridge before ending where it began.
Every Thursday at 7 a.m. for the past three years, venture capitalists who fund biotech startups, biopharma employees, bankers, graduate students studying science, and undergraduates meet for a run. Three dozen people showed up last week. They started off at a pace of about nine minutes a mile, which allowed them to multitask — exercising while chatting comfortably.
They looked like countless other runners along the glittering Charles — lithe, dressed in fluorescent T-shirts, Boston Athletic Association apparel, and expensive-looking running shoes. But the usual talk of speed workouts and marathon times was interspersed with chatter about drug development and the best way to raise capital for startups emerging from “stealth mode.”
“There’s no better way to pass the miles than by talking about biotechs, patients, and medicine,’’ said Bruce Booth, the Atlas Venture partner who started the club with a few runners from his firm and saw it mushroom through social media and word of mouth. “I’m sure there’s still lots of business that gets done on a golf course, but the reality is that a run is a lot healthier, and golf takes a lot longer.’’
Several regulars in the #RunningAtlas club said networking is as big a draw as fitness and making friends. Discussions during runs have led to job offers, new sources of capital, different approaches for doing business, even the birth of companies.
“I’m happy at Ironwood,” said Beckett Warburg, a 35-year-old corporate development manager at Ironwood Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, who ran with the group through most of her pregnancy and gave birth to a boy in December. “But if I do leave, the connections I made here can help me find a new job.”
Booth, a 44-year-old Oxford-educated molecular immunologist and Atlas partner, started the club in the spring of 2015. Atlas had just moved from East Cambridge to Technology Square, and Booth was assembling a team to participate in a 200-mile relay race in New Hampshire.
He asked Mark Manfredi, a cancer biologist at Takeda Oncology, to join the relay team; Manfredi had run several marathons in under three hours. Booth also hoped to recruit him to Atlas. He soon became an Atlas “entrepreneur in residence” working on a biotech that had been incubated there.
Booth and Manfredi began doing training runs every Thursday morning with a couple of other Atlas employees, including Kristen Margeson, director of investor relations and marketing. She began mentioning the group on Twitter and in e-mails, and it soon took off. She now e-mails about 150 people every week to remind them about the run.
“I already enjoyed running, but I never ran with a group until this,’’ said Margeson, 32, who graduated from Simmons College with a bachelor’s degree in math and economics. “I’m not a scientist. This gives me a unique opportunity to say, ‘What are you working on, and can you tell me in words I can understand?’ ”
You couldn’t have asked for better running conditions last Thursday. As the group approached the Mass. Ave. bridge on the Cambridge side, a cool breeze blew and the sun shone brilliantly. The runners seemed almost giddy. Several talked about races they had recently run, including marathons.
“Which is harder, Boston or New York?” one asked.
“New York,’’ said a woman. “You’ve got to do the 59th Street Bridge.”
Later, a male runner said, “Want to know how to run Boston? Go out as fast as you can.” Everyone laughed because as any long-distance runner knows, you couldn’t get worse advice.
Isaac Stoner, the 32-year-old cofounder and chief operating officer of Octagon Therapeutics, a tiny Cambridge startup seeking to discover antibiotics, told a newcomer that he’s cultivated potential sources of funding during runs. But you have to be subtle about it, he said.
“You don’t go up to somebody when he’s running and say, ‘Let me pitch you on my company,’ ’’ Stoner explained. “That’s when these fast runners leave you behind.”
Some conversations have led to new companies. Jason Gardner, an Oxford-trained specialist in molecular medicine, joined Booth a couple of years ago for a Thursday morning run. Booth told him Atlas was interested in stem cell transplants.
“We ran, we talked, and by the time I was showered and back in the office, I had an e-mail in my in-box asking if I would come on board as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Atlas to look at the area with the investment team,” Gardner wrote in a blog post. Atlas and Third Rock Ventures, another firm, soon helped create Magenta Therapeutics, and Gardner became CEO.
One runner said her job hinges on making contacts, and she doesn’t play golf.
“Golfing has generally been an old-boys network,” said Meg Wood, 39, director of business development for CureDuchenne, a nonprofit that raises money to find a cure for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. “I’ve never been invited to play golf. This is a more relatable social experience for women. Plus it’s local, it’s here, and it’s free.”
What happens if you want to get ahead in biotech in Cambridge and you’re not a runner? Are you at a disadvantage?
Not according to Booth.
“You don’t have to be a card-carrying runner to have a path into Atlas,” said Booth, one of two partners there who run. “We have six partners. There are four other very talented partners who aren’t runners.”
Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com