Larry Bock grew up in Chappaqua, New York. His father was a stockbroker with Bear Stearns Companies and his mother was a professional chef. Bock attended Bowdoin College in Maine, where he majored in biochemistry. He aspired to attend medical school after graduating but struggled to get accepted to a program. Instead, Bock began exploring research jobs in the biotechnology field. He applied to several companies and was eventually offered a job at Genentech in 1981. There, Bock personally worked on foot-and-mouth disease. Bock continued to apply to medical schools, but ultimately decided to attend the University of California, Los Angeles for his master’s in business administration. Bock was then recruited by Fairfield Venture Partners in Fairfield, Massachusetts, to start the company’s west coast offices in Costa Mesa, California. He, along with his coworker Edmund Olivier, pushed Fairfield Venture Partners to invest in the biotechnology field. While working for Fairfield, Bock met Kevin Kinsella, a venture capitalist who founded Avalon Ventures. The two collaborated on various ventures, such as forming Athena Neurosciences.

Bock later left Fairfield Venture Partners to join Kinsell and Avalon Ventures full time. The first company Bock took on with Avalon Ventures was Metrad Biosystems. He initially struggled to find investors, but after focusing his pitch on diagnostics, he was able to secure funding from Kleiner Perkins and Delphi Bioventures. Bock also coordinated a limited partnership between Avalon Medical Partners and Sandoz, which allowed them to open ten biotech companies by 1987. These included Neurocrine Biosciences, Pharmacopeia Inc., Idun Pharmaceuticals, Argonaut Technologies, and Caliper Technologies. Kevin Kinsella eventually left Avalon Ventures to become the CEO of Sequana Therapeutics, after which Bock stayed on and raised funds with Institutional Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins to form the bioinformatics startup, DoubleTwist. He continued working with biotech companies, such as Illumina, before switching fields to nanotechnology and founding Nanosys. Bock later retired from full-time work, though he remained a venture partner at Lux Capital, and spent a year in London, England with his family. After traveling in Europe, Bock became interested in science education and founded the San Diego Science Festival in 2007, which aims to get children interested in science and engineering.