When Playing It Safe Is the Riskier Move

Will Abel didn’t plan to leave a steady job to build a startup.

He planned to go to med school.

“My plan in undergrad was to do an MD-PhD,” Will says. “I took the MCAT, I had a publication, I did research for all my years at Michigan.”

Everything was lined up. But when COVID hit right as he was graduating, Will realized something he couldn’t ignore: medicine wasn’t going to satisfy the part of him that wanted to create something from scratch.

“I knew I wouldn't be a surgeon. I couldn’t really think about what specialty would really pique my interest. And I didn’t feel like it was going to suffice that kind of urge I had to build something,” he says.

Lost, he reached out to twenty MBA programs. UNC told him he could come in without prior work experience. He took the chance.

It wasn’t easy. Surrounded by classmates who already had years of corporate jobs behind them, Will struggled to land internships. While everyone else seemed to be locked into their summer plans, he couldn’t even get a callback.

“It was extremely difficult for me to get any internships,” he says. “It took a long time to get a couple companies to even interview me.”

In the depths of that frustration, he started his first company, Camillo Therapeutics—an Alzheimer’s research startup with his former molecular biology professor.

They tried to fund it through grants, because it was too early for venture money. They wrote night after night, pushing through the complicated, grueling grant writing process. Will saw how much time and energy went into trying to secure funding—time that could’ve gone into research itself.

It stuck with him.

Eventually, Camillo Therapeutics wound down. Will took a job at GlaxoSmithKline, working in finance while still carrying that itch to build something better.

That’s when he reconnected with Chris—an engineer he’d built an app with back in high school. Chris had been working at a hard tech incubator, where he kept seeing the same problem: brilliant scientists burning out just trying to survive the grant process.

They decided to build something together.

That’s how Grantease started—a tool designed to make NIH grant writing faster, easier, and more productive, without removing the researcher’s own fingerprints from the work.

He called his dad that weekend and said he was quitting and would start Grantease once his time at GSK ended. And he did.

“It felt like it was more risky for me not to put my all into this,” Will says. “I just kind of had the mindset that this is an opportunity. And it felt important enough to take the risk and leave behind something so stable.”

The early days were rough.

They launched their first version of Grantease focused on general grants—and immediately realized it wasn’t specific enough. They pivoted hard to focus on NIH grants, a massive but highly specialized market Will knew firsthand.

The day they were ready to launch, NIH funding got paused during political negotiations.

“That was the launch day for us,” Will laughs. “It was pretty crazy.”

They didn’t quit. They kept building. They kept talking to users—even when the feedback was brutal.

“The building of the tool was basically finding those bad conversations as much as we could,” Will says. “They’re embarrassing. They’re awkward. They’re not fun. But that's how we make it good.”

They didn’t wait to perfect it before showing it to users. They wanted the criticism early.

“I explained to my dad: we will never be done coding. It's going to be terrible for many iterations until finally it gets good,” Will says.

The first real breakthrough came with the third version of the tool. Someone finally said: “I really like it.”

Today, Grantease has users at Stanford, Duke, Scripps, Mount Sinai, and beyond. Researchers are saving hours—sometimes days—off their proposal timelines. Some users spend hours a day in the tool.

And now, they’re expanding: building features like a citation engine and a literature review accelerator, making it even easier for researchers to focus on what matters instead of administrative overhead.

But Will knows they’re still early. And that’s exactly what excites him.

“I think over time we'll be able to turn this into more of an overall productivity app,” he says. “But right now, it’s about helping people get their grants done faster and better—and making sure it’s still their work, not just AI writing for them.”

He’s still chasing the hard problems.

Because that's what he signed up for.

Not the easy road. Not the stable paycheck.

The chance to build something real.

The kind of thing that could make it easier for the next generation of researchers to bring real breakthroughs into the world.

It’s not a straight line.
It’s a leap of faith.

And Will wouldn’t have it any other way.

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