Tech has produced several trillion-dollar companies. Biotech has produced none. If I were completely impartial to what disease I treat or what modality I use, could any of the existing company-building strategies create a trillion-dollar outcome? This essay is a set of musings on

To be clear I think this model made sense for people who were very early in the game - 5 years ago there was a lot of value in being that middleman. E.g. Summit is obviously an incredibly valuable company. But those times are gone.

There are forms of US-China biotech arbitrage that totally make sense - US pharmas buying cheap Chinese assets, startups validating new risky modalities through IITs. There are others that make no sense to me whatsoever - like American VC firms buying Chinese assets to then sell

i'd never bet against Niki under any circumstances

https://t.co/KToUOBks3f

I’ve made a short film. Look at the things around you: doors, bins, staircases, furniture, railings, doorhandles, windows. Do you like how they look, or not? Modern design has become boring, but it doesn’t have to be this way. The word “beautiful” is overused. We don’t need

United States needs China the same way Batman needs Joker. Without China, the West is culturally set for complacency and decline. United States had no business in space until Soviets Sputnik-scared them. And I can only hope that Shanghai biotechs killing it on all fronts will

It’s a spectrum, of course. The secret sauce should be cooked in your own kitchen, not ordered on DoorDash. But too many cos mistake building the stove for cooking the meal - all while their patients are starving at the dinner table.

A non-trivial number of biotechs over the past decade have died from the thousand cuts of vertical integration. If your goal is to bring one or two programs to the clinic, there is no scenario where the upfront time and cost of vertically owning your platform beats outsourcing to

It is weird how temperature is the only way to control time. Like it is the only physical way we have to slow things down?

There is a sense in which wholesomeness and innocence are forever lost from our culture. From music, from movies, from the things people build and how they build them. It feels like it has never happened to this extent before.

After 10 months of work PLANET, our 1st sci-fi film, is officially live on our website!

Feeling a bit maxed out on ChatGPT bite-sized learning. My brain is craving long-form lectures on stats. Any recs?

If you think about it, ‘solving aging’ is a goal with no final destination. Yes, we are unlikely to have any ‘new’ aging diseases develop if we solve all of the existing ones, but, as long as we are part of an ecosystem that also involves viruses/bacteria / other sketchy

Huge thanks to @dwarkesh_sp, @Atelfo and @eriktorenberg for commenting on (and arguing with me about) the many drafts of this essay.

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They won’t tell you when Chinese biotech has won, but there will be signs

San Francisco men are afraid of mRNA but would happily inject themselves with something called *checks notes* Chinese peptides?!

Putting together some company slides and man… there’s really no other company like Alnylam. The sheer level of risk they took early on is underappreciated - no animal data, no prior backbone chemistry, no LNPs anywhere in the industry, no galNAcs, no way to deliver siRNAs. No

We are looking to bring a wizard bioinformatician on our team. Open to part-time or full-time. We are generating more data than we possibly have time to analyze - help us make sense of it! Must have experience: - Analyzing high-throughput screens and basic molbio assays