In this episode, we interview Vineeta Agarwala, MD, PhD, a general partner at Andreesen Horowitz (a16z) where she leads investments in the group’s bio + health fund. We talk to Vineeta about investing in synthetic biology startup companies, a day in the life of a VC, following the good people, and more!
Disclosures:
The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. In addition, this content may include third-party advertisements; a16z has not reviewed such advertisements and does not endorse any advertising content contained therein.
This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly as well as unannounced investments in publicly traded digital assets) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/.
Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.
For more information about EBRC, visit our website at ebrc.org. If you are interested in getting involved with the EBRC Student and Postdoc Association, fill out a membership application for graduate students and postdocs or for undergraduates and join today!
Episode transcripts are the unedited output from Whisper and likely contain errors.
In this episode, we interview Vineeta Agarwala, MD, PhD, a general partner at Andreesen Horowitz (a16z) where she leads investments in the group’s bio + health fund. We talk to Vineeta about investing in synthetic biology startup companies, a day in the life of a VC, following the good people, and more!
Disclosures:
The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. In addition, this content may include third-party advertisements; a16z has not reviewed such advertisements and does not endorse any advertising content contained therein.
This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly as well as unannounced investments in publicly traded digital assets) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/.
Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.
For more information about EBRC, visit our website at ebrc.org. If you are interested in getting involved with the EBRC Student and Postdoc Association, fill out a membership application for graduate students and postdocs or for undergraduates and join today!
Episode transcripts are the unedited output from Whisper and likely contain errors.
Hello and welcome to EBRC and Translation. We are a group of graduate students and postdocs working to bring you conversations with members of the engineering biology community. My name is Fatima Inam and I'm a postdoc in the Sonnenberg Lab at Stanford University. And I'm Andrew Hunt, a recent PhD graduate from the Jewett Lab at Northwestern University. Today we are joined by Vinita Agarwala. Vinita is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, or A16Z, where she leads investments in the group's BioPlus Health Fund. Prior to joining A16Z, Vinita has held many different roles in the healthcare space, previously working as a venture investor on the Google Ventures Life Sciences team, as a clinician at Stanford Medicine, a director of product management at Flatiron Health, as a data scientist at Kairouz, and a management consultant at McKinsey. She completed her MD PhD at the Broad Institute in computational biology and human genetics and went on to complete her residency at Stanford. Thank you so much for joining with us today. Thank you for having me. Okay, so we wanted to get started with your personal journey. You did have quite a winding path to venture capital, starting from getting trained as a physician scientist, but transitioning into venture capital. And I guess this is more of a two-part question. So what got you interested in working in this area? And also for our listeners, who may not be as familiar with venture capital, what is VC? You know, in medicine and in translational research, there's this phrase that gets thrown out a lot, which is from bench to bedside. And as trite as it might sound, that was the nidus of my interest in venture capital. I think it is really, really hard to make that transition for any piece of innovation, whether that's, you know, a new synthetic biology tool that one of you are inventing, or whether it's a new biological insight that others might want to act upon, or whether it's a new device. Really, in any part of the medical innovation sphere, getting a piece of innovation from bench, or so-called the research paradigm, to the translational world of clinical impact is very, very hard. And it requires a lot of capital. And so that was kind of some of my early observation, just as a scientist sitting in shoes just like yours, where I had a really fortunate opportunity to be a part of really exciting projects. I did some of my undergraduate thesis research on novel types of semiconductor based PET imaging, or you know, molecular imaging, and just kind of starting to sketch out the path by which something that we found in the research lab would actually make it into, let's say, a PET scanner that a cancer patient could benefit from. That process crystallized, you know, for me as being very long, very capital intensive, very difficult, very difficult to have all the right talent available. And that talent changes, right? From the time that a discovery is made in the lab, that's a very different pool of talent. That's really important at that stage. From the pool of talent, that's important to push something through to regulatory approval and translation and commercialization. And so I think this kind of just recognition that the bench to bedside process was so challenging sparked my own interest in venture capital and early stage startup creation and support. And specifically that lens that actually that process is capital intensive is, you know, is I think the answer to the second part of your question, Fatima, which is what is venture capital and why does it exist? You know, I think it exists because there's a large pool of capital that's looking to take strategic, diligent risk on certain technologies that have the potential to have extraordinary impact. So you don't see venture capital typically involved in sectors where there is nominal innovation or, you know, or actually where the risk is not that high. Usually the risk is high. There's high technical risk, there's high clinical risk, there's high regulatory risk, there's high team building risk, but some set of investors are willing to kind of spend a lot of time understanding that risk, scoping that risk out and figuring out how to mitigate that risk and then are therefore willing to put capital into discharging that risk. And so it's a very unique funding model that is totally different from issuing a grant where you don't actually work on mitigating the risk, right? That's the fundamental difference in some sense between venture capital and a grant where you write the grant and walk away. And what we do in venture capital, which is especially in the biology space, we spend a lot of time with the teams, the companies, and hopefully work collaboratively to discharge risk. Right? That was a long-winded answer. Not a problem at all. I like that framing of the difference being primarily about the de-risking component of it. Could you talk a little bit more about what specifically your work at A16Z involves? Yeah. So in recent Horowitz is a large venture capital firm based in the Bay Area. Started on the thesis actually that specifically software is eating the world. And that's because software is now involved in helping us get from point A to point B. Software is involved in helping my sandwich get from point A to point B. Software is involved in helping me in every part of my daily professional work and same with many other industries. Software is helping me conduct a financial transaction. And we thought the same is going to happen in a lot of different industries, including the bio and healthcare industry. And so with that kind of original theme, we broadened that to really mean not just software per se, but also engineering disciplines will have the ability to fundamentally transform how we diagnose, treat, and manage disease. And that's kind of our core investing thesis that we believe engineering, computation, and software will play a significant role in our ability, again, to diagnose, treat, and manage disease. And that's kind of a pretty broad mandate, but it's a really exciting one. And we think that the form of that engineering and computation can be quite varied and the form of the specific innovations can be quite varied. And so really our aperture is very broad in that sense, but that's our core belief. And it's not so much that I should caveat, I should say it's not so much that we think computational engineering will replace other aspects of early stage biological translation. For example, it's not going to replace what you're doing in your lab. It's not going to replace the need to do wet lab experiments. It's not going to replace scientists per se. That's really not the image that we have, but it's more that it will be difficult to imagine 10 years from now creating a new drug without having leveraged some cutting edge computation that we think is now starting to take root in the industry in a broader form. And so it's really about the collaboration between people and engineering tools. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I'm curious in that lens of computation and biology and engineering, your portfolio has a number of companies in the synthetic biology space. We're curious what you see as evolving in the next 10 years in synthetic biology that you're most interested in seeing commercialized. Yeah, so I'm actually very curious to get your take on how we define synthetic biology in the first place. But we're seeing obviously synthetic biology advances percolate into a very large number of our companies. That could be everything from companies leveraging cheaper DNA synthesis to do high throughput screening in a functional context all the way through to companies making synthetic plant-based meat. And so it really is kind of a full spectrum at this point of tools and technologies. Speaking of that spectrum, I think there are a couple major buckets where we're particularly excited about synthetic biology. So one are tools that kind of lift all boats, a tide that lifts all boats, so to speak. That's kind of novel methods for cell-free protein synthesis, for example. That's an example of a technology that multiple companies in our portfolio are experimenting with. Big Cat Bio recently brought a core set of IP in-house on that front. That could be companies that are innovating on our ability to more scalably and efficiently conduct a portion of the research value chain without leveraging some of the laborious tools of the past, including living systems. A second big bucket is in manufacturing, and so that's where Asimov sits. And by that, I mean commercial manufacturing. So how can synthetic biology tools actually be used to produce clinical products that get put into patients in a better, faster, scalable way? Can synthetic biology tools be used to create greater reproducibility? Can it be used to create greater batch efficiency in manufacturing? Can it be used to create the ability to iterate more nimbly on patient-specific products, such as patient-specific cells or genetic medicines? So that's kind of another bucket represented to some extent by our portfolio company, Asimov. And then the third bucket is actually outside of human therapeutics. So as you all know better than I do, there's just kind of myriad applications of synthetic biology to create products that are not necessarily therapeutic medicines. We've invested at this point in a variety of food product companies, you know, kind of other types of products that could be created in ways that leverage the tools of synthetic biology. We invested in a company called Apeal that creates a new type of produce coating that increases shelf life. You know, their motto is food gone good. And so, you know, things like that are just really interesting. It can have a huge impact on global sustainability. So, but those are some of the buckets where we see syn-bio innovation. All very cool. To be honest, I think many people would define synthetic biology a little differently, and I would define it fairly broadly and all the things you just mentioned would definitely fit for me. How do you guys define it actually? I would just call it science of programming organisms with artificial DNA, maybe. Keep it as broad as possible. What about you, Andrew? Science of programming organisms. Okay, I like it. Putting me on the spot. Yeah, I think a lot about synthetic biology at a more of a molecular level. I think a lot about protein engineering on a day to day level. So that really colors my perspective. I would say biological molecular engineering is sort of what I think of. Right. So not even organisms. You're saying cells. I mean, I definitely include all of the cell engineering in there. And cells and multicellular structures are incredibly important components of biology. But that's what I think about, at least on a day to day basis. So as we can tell from the three of us, it's a pretty broad definition at this point. But I think what all of us are saying is that those tools help us move away from a world in which we're conducting empirical readouts of biology as it exists in nature, but instead helping us get to kind of iterative programming where we can tinker with natural biology in a more nimble way and hopefully start to learn rules for what that tinkering is likely to do and predict what it's likely to do. Yeah, that's definitely what I'm interested in, at least. Maybe following up on what we just discussed, what are some risks that you consider, especially while making these investment choices, even circling back to your first point, scaling, which is a big deal. And I'm just thinking of like increasing capacity. It's super expensive. I mean, I see a lot going to like contract manufacturing, for example, like if you want synthetic biology to play a role in the bioeconomy, we obviously have to make it cheaper. And scaling is the way to go. And are VCs ready to fund those type of investments? So I think, yes, VCs have voted with their feet, ourselves included, on funding ambitious manufacturing infrastructure. So Asimov is an example, resilience is another example, both are VC backed. Elevate Bio is a third example, also VC backed. So there are a number of companies kind of recognizing this horizontal need for all of the other vertical full stack companies in the space to leverage next generation manufacturing capacity. The drivers could be improved quality, as you said, the drivers could be improved efficiency, lower cost, the full gamut. At the same time, there is also a trend for, and we'll see this kind of there's always companies that buck the trend, or, you know, these trends change over time. But there's been a little bit of oscillating pendulum in terms of how much of that manufacturing capacity companies want to keep in house, and actually not outsource at all. And there too, you can find examples of lots of examples of VC backed companies that chose to keep quite a bit of their manufacturing in a house. So that could be manufacturing of an IPSC derived cell therapy pipeline, all from a master cell bank that's kept and maintained in house at a cell therapy biotech company. That could mean manufacturing your own lentivirus in house for your own preclinical R&D experimentation and screening. That could mean manufacturing your own biologics in house. My point is that those companies have also been venture backed. So absolutely venture dollars have gone into building both horizontal as well as deep vertical manufacturing infrastructure. And by horizontal, I mean, the company is not making its own therapeutic products, but rather servicing many companies. And by vertical, I mean, the company is making its own therapeutic products as the value driver for the company, but leverages their own in-house manufacturing. So one thing I was curious, and also I'm sure many listeners will be, what is the day in the life of Finita, the venture capitalist look like? This is an interesting question. I should caveat that I do think like every firm and team and construct and fund size and stage of investing look very different. So a pre-seed fund looks very different from a growth stage fund and everything in between. A big source of variation in the kind of day-to-day experience of venture capital is just the team around you, like with anything else, just like it can be night and day to do a PhD in one lab versus another lab based on how big that lab is and who you interact with every day and how many mentees you have and how many supervisors you have. It's the same construct here like in every other industry that I think the biggest driver of your day-to-day experience to some extent is your team and the companies you invest in and the stage at which you invest. That being said, I think we often talk about kind of three major categories of work that we consider our primary professional responsibilities and that is sourcing, picking, and supporting portfolio companies. And so sourcing means the next time you have a phenomenal discovery in your lab and you're thinking about making a company and forming it and recruiting for it and raising your first round of capital, I have to figure out how to get you to call me, and so that's just kind of a transparent view on how sourcing works. We value our ability to be credible partners to you at that stage. That means academic founders, that means kind of seasoned biotech founders, that means everything in between. It takes effort to make ourselves, hopefully, be a group that has the privilege really of working with someone at that stage who's looking to start a company. We call that sourcing. That means kind of following the science, following where we think a company might want to be created. Maybe in contrast, Andrew, you haven't thought about starting a company, but you published a really great paper. So another format of sourcing is for me to reach out to you and say, Andrew, do you want to work together on starting something? My team brings company creation expertise and translation expertise and you're bringing all the basic science expertise. Maybe we team up, right? So those are two different formats of sourcing. The second bucket that I mentioned is picking. So no matter how much I like you, Fatima or Andrew, or kind of really want to work together with you, I do need to spend some time thinking about whether that technology is scalable and could form the basis of a big company. And so there's a very long list, I would say, of diligence questions that are really important for us to understand. That means, what is the IP landscape in the space that you're working in? How many times have you done the experiment you're talking about? How reproducible is it likely to be? How scalable is it likely to be? Even if it all works, how big is that market that you're going after? Is the technology going to be applicable to a lot of different disease areas or only very few? How does it compete with other similar technologies that might achieve the same mechanism? A whole bunch of these questions about the core technology, the market it would go into, and the protectability that you have, the edge that you have around being a winner with that technology. That plus a lot of other diligence that we conduct on the team itself and how likely that team is likely to be able to translate that technology. All of that we call picking. That's deciding which investments we'd like to make. And then the last category I mentioned is supporting. So I increasingly spend a lot of time working with the companies that I'm really lucky to be partnered with already. You guys mentioned some of those companies, but that means serving on their boards. That means helping them navigate strategic discussion topics, make choices about what to work on and what not to work on. Importantly, hiring and growing their team, helping them with fundraising. Frankly, every company in our space to reach their full potential will have to raise a lot of money over multiple rounds from multiple groups. And so that's another activity. So there's a lot of ways in which we try to support companies after we make investments as well. So that's kind of how I spend most of my time is sourcing, picking and hopefully productively supporting. That sounds like a super exciting job and you still get to wear so many different hats. Maybe going back to your picking bucket, doing the diligence, what criteria do you use to decide whether or not to invest in a company? Any area of diligence can sometimes become a kind of rabbit hole and you could sometimes feel like, well, I could spend a year really understanding something. I'm never, by the way, the scientist with the deepest technical knowledge on any space, really, which is kind of always humbling. The founders I'm talking to will 100% of the time always know more than me. And so it is important to figure out some heuristics that help us make what we hope are reasonable decisions and also help us actually give feedback to folks and maybe even shape ideas into ideas that we might want to invest in the future as well. So the general categories that I spend a lot of time thinking about are team, technology and TAM or total addressable market. And so in all three of those buckets kind of spend a lot of time trying to get to conviction on whether an investment makes sense for our fund. So on the team side of the house, that involves understanding deeply founder backgrounds, what they've done before, what they will need help to do, getting a sense of whether we can work together well. We learn a lot about founders just in the way that they help us conduct technology diligence as well. Because again, they know more than we do definitionally, but being able to communicate about that technology is not always easy. On the technology front, we look a lot at kind of competitor technologies and what is uniquely achievable by a certain technology. You guys live in this world too, when you publish a paper, often when certain ideas catch steam and you know, catch wind, multiple groups are working on something that is related or could have similar potential. You know, a good example in this space right now is in the world of genetic medicines, everybody's trying to figure out how do you deliver the payload of a genetic medicine? Okay, well, you could do it with an AV, you could do it with an LNP, you could do it with the polymer nanoparticle, you could do it with, you know, a VLP, you could do there's so many, you could do it with a fab fragment that's circulating. There's a lot of different ways and there probably will be at maturity many different ways. But if we're going to look at a certain one technology attack vector, it's important for us to have a view at least on how that contextualizes relative to others or competes with others or what part of the market we see taking on a certain share and so on. And so often you can't be completely quantitative on all of these things, but really understanding the technology and where it would have an edge is important. And then the TAM question is really kind of, okay, let's say all the technology works. Let's say you get all the IP protection you need. Let's see this team is wonderful and just a magnet for more talent to come to the company and everything else works. How big is that opportunity, even if everything works? And every now and then we'll come across the technology that, you know, even in the best case scenario is really limited in its scope or it's likely scaled commercial impact and patient impact, just by virtue of the patient populations in which it might be applicable or so on. And sometimes that determination is actually just a function of our fund being a large fund. For a particularly large fund, it would not make sense, for example, to invest in companies that just cannot scale beyond a certain threshold. And so that's something we have to think about, but those are kind of the major categories. And do you think the pandemic has changed anything in terms of maybe even just areas that you're looking at? Or I know it has highlighted what we haven't seen before in the biotech industry, right? The future of therapeutics or sustainability. How has that changed the way you invest? You know, there's some of the obvious things about, okay, we sort of certainly push the limits on how quickly a new genetic medicine could make it through the regulatory process and so on. And I think some of the specific infrastructure built for COVID vaccine manufacturing and scale up and administration and safety monitoring, I think has certainly been a boon for the genetic medicine space. But kind of that aside, I will say, I'm not sure COVID per se dramatically changed our rubric for investing. I do think there was an uptick in startup activity. And so I think we think that was probably multifactorial. Some of it was people were actually became bizarrely a little bit more capable of collaborating across labs and across states and across, you know, I backed a team where founders live in three different states. It's a biotech team. I really I'm not sure that company would have started before COVID with CEO in one state, head of chemistry in another state and a head of comp bio in a third state. But it was so facile and easy for them to collaborate with one another and stay really connected to one another, even if they only saw each other physically on a more limited cadence. So I think there was actually a change in the opportunity set that presented itself to investors like myself, more people interested in founding biotech companies and working in the space, just given that clearly the industry was kind of this miraculous, beautiful impact on society that was really on display. So I think in some sense, it created more investment opportunities, not necessarily more companies that we can invest in any, you know, in any given year, given that we have limitations, but that's actually probably the biggest impact is that I think it actually changed some of the landscape of the startups that are out there. Changing direction a little bit. I'm really curious how your background really influences your perspective in VC. I actually don't know what the typical VC is or what they look like, but you have an MD PhD, which I'm really curious how that influences what you think about and VC world. So lots of my colleagues in biotech venture are also physician scientists. And so I don't, you know, I think there's a pretty sizable group of us, but I think to be totally honest with you, I don't think there's a specific background that prepares you or doesn't prepare you for investing. There's a lot that you learn from people kind of senior to you in the industry. I learn a lot from people who've been in the industry longer than I have. And just like in every other sector, you learn a lot by observing, by listening, by getting feedback and learning about something you could have done better. And so, you know, that's how I approach everything from board engagement to diligence is I am constantly learning a lot from other people in the, in the industry, some of whom are physician scientists and some of them have totally different backgrounds. Some have different backgrounds in finance. Some have backgrounds in, you know, equity research on the biotech side. Some have backgrounds in early stage investing, but for a long time, some were professors and did academic research. And so I think to some extent, there is one thing you have to get good at in venture is actually assimilating the perspective of a lot of people from a lot of different fields and, and spaces. And so I think, I think in some sense, maybe that's what I would attribute to the physician scientist training is it's something that you have to learn as a physician scientist is like that there are, you know, physicians and scientists are actually very different. And so I feel like having an empathy for both types of investigators and types of experts helps me interact with people with, with both primarily science and primarily clinical backgrounds. And it's important in our space to take into account both perspectives. You might have really novel technology that doesn't really scratch a patient need or vice versa. It might be the case that off the shelf technology is a really great way to solve a patient need and you have to be receptive to both. Definitely. Sort of building from all that you did your MD PhD and actually while preparing for this interview, I listened to an interview you did, I think on the Timberman report a while back. And I was really impressed by the different number of things you've done to get to where you are. You've really touched a lot of different jobs and had a lot of different job descriptions. And it's something that I've been thinking a lot about as I'm working through my own career is sort of deciding what to do next and how to make that decision. And you've done a lot of things and I feel like I kind of have the impulse to try everything. And I'm curious if you've ever felt the need to sort of tame that or how to manage that, or clearly it's worked really well for you to do what you've done so far. So I'm curious how you think about navigating the next steps in your career. Well, Jerry's still out. But I think the common theme and I think this is again similar to advice that you often if you meet a new graduate student rotation student and they ask you, hey, how should I decide which lab to join? I think probably most of us would say pick based on the people. And almost above all, it matters who you're around and who you're going to spend day in day out with and who you're going to learn from and who you'll be mentored by. And an environment where there's enough freedom, intellectual freedom and flexibility, you can achieve your goals in a lot of different places. But you do need that mentorship and that set of people around you. And so I always tell people kind of regardless of specific subspace or functional characteristics of the jobs that you might be looking at or opportunities you might be looking at focus on the people. And typically, if you can convince yourself that hey, for the next two or three years, I cannot imagine better people to work with. Almost no matter what they're doing, with some exceptions, like you're not going to regret it. Because those people will bring around them other people who will really impact your life in ways you might not be able to predict. And so you just can't go wrong. When you're working with people that you really enjoy working with. And that's candidly, I think what led me to make a lot of the career choices that I had the opportunity to make was about, wow, I could learn a lot from that person or that set of people. And it's okay if what they're working on is a little bit different from what you've done before. Because if they're giving you a job, and they're giving you the opportunity to do something, trust them to say, hey, I'll give you the support and the learning and the mentorship you need to be successful in that different job than what you did before. And the converse is true, right? If you really want to make a career switch and jump into something totally different, but do it with people who are terrible or not supportive or not excited about welcoming you in that new field, things could really go south fast. And so again, it all comes down to the people. And to some extent, just being open minded about not knowing where the next exact three year window is going to lead. I think it's candidly, it is admittedly different from the way a lot of the academic career trajectory and clinical career trajectory works. As in, you're typically planning five, six years out in advance, maybe 10 years in advance, and the industry mindset can sometimes be a little bit more agile. But even in academia, I think elements of that apply. As you think about places you want to spend two to three years, projects you want to spend two to three years on. That's what I would kind of encourage you to think about. You don't have to tame any impulses per se, but stay focused on really good people. I really love that. I'll work towards that. Okay. So for our listeners, I think especially after listening to this episode, they may be thinking about careers in VC. So what advice would you give to someone interested in getting started? And especially like you mentioned, having a foot in the lab as well as the boardroom. Again, I'll caveat by saying it is a really diverse industry. Like if you want to do pre-seed investing, that is a totally different kind of day-to-day activity almost than doing later stage investing. Exactly which subsector you want to invest in, completely different, healthcare different from biotech, different from agricultural innovation, so on. So I think with that kind of preamble that VC is incredibly diverse. I do think kind of one of the most important things you can do if you're coming out of academia is jump into a startup. And ideally, it's a venture-backed startup where you kind of get some appreciation for what it's like to found, start, be involved in helping to scale a fast-growing startup that's trying to execute the process of scaling innovation from what's going back to our original comments on bench to bedside. You'll just learn so much from how that startup team operates, what's really hard for that startup team, what the pitfalls are, where they get caught up, where they fell into an analysis paralysis, where they move too fast, where they move too slow. You'll just learn so many things in that environment. And ultimately, venture is kind of sitting extremely adjacent to the startup world. If the startup world is not exciting and you don't love hearing about new startups or kind of thinking through startup operations and challenges, then it's unlikely that I think you would love the venture world. And so it's a good litmus test a little bit as to whether or not you love early stage organizations. So that would be my top advice is jump into a startup. So as I've been getting out more into the world after finishing my PhD, something I've been becoming increasingly interested in is the work that I sort of see as decidedly important, but oftentimes maybe difficult to commercialize with something like a standard VC model. So I think some examples here might be things in like global health related to maybe pandemic preparedness, antibiotic resistance, or cheap therapeutic interventions in developing countries. I'm curious how you think about this from the VC side. Do you think there can be a role for VC in funding this type of work? Or is this something that will sort of always end up falling to government or philanthropy? Yeah, I think it's a terrific, terrific question. I think it's something our industry grapples with. I will say in the context of pandemic care delivery, there have been a number of venture backed startups that I think have made really valuable contributions, whether that was on scaling, you know, testing, or whether that was on kind of the infrastructure by which to administer testing and track results and do kind of employee health management. So companies like Color and lots of venture backed companies, I think have played a really significant role in pandemic response broadly, not to mention, of course, the vaccine manufacturers such as Moderna and so on. And so I think absolutely venture backed businesses have a role to play in public health. The question on tackling an issue like antibiotic resistance is a really good one. Same with vaccines in general. It has been hard, I think, to get commercial credit for preventive health interventions. That's just a reality because they're not priced in a value based way. And so if you invent the next great antibiotic that prevents patients from being in an ICU, you don't get paid what you would have saved on an ICU admission and instead you get paid on a one time non-chronic administration of still a curative or potentially curative medicine. And so that's a tough business model. Sometimes I think there's a role for venture capital to really team up in interesting ways with other sources of funding, whether that's philanthropic or government funding. A good example of a company that I had the opportunity to engage with when I was in my prior role at GV is a company called Sparotherapeutics, really phenomenal company working on next generation antibiotics that leverage lots of different mechanisms of action. And that company raised a very significant amount of financing right from the very beginning of their starting. They're now a public company, but from BARDA, the government agency, Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. And I think that funding has now totaled for the company in excess of $50 million over the course of the company's life and over the course of multiple grants and funding that really de-risked various parts of the science and technology and made it more and more venture investable, so to speak, at different stages of their existence. And so that's a good example. But sometimes in order to achieve a great societal impact, it needs to be maybe a combination of very early discovery work funded by government agencies, funding agencies, grant agencies, philanthropic agencies, public health initiatives. But then certainly some of the final push to bring something to market could be venture backed. Another good example is a company that we invested in here at A16Z called EQRX. The goal of the company is to lower the cost of expensive precision medicines in settings like oncology. And they have a really interesting go to market strategy whereby they want to bring drugs that have tried and true mechanisms such as checkpoint inhibitors or TKIs and oncology to market by conducting clinical development more efficiently and contracting upfront with organizations that really care about population health management. And so that means partnering upfront with major payers, health systems, government entities like the National Health Service in the UK. And so they've described their work, for example, with the UK health authorities on creating societal level impact on lowering the cost of oncology care by doing this creative format of clinical development at lower cost. So I think there's lots of really interesting ways in which venture capital can interface with other sources of funding and support. Yeah, I like all of that. And I'd love to see where we get as those types of efforts progress more. I guess while we're on the page for non-conventional investments, and this is on a lighter note, what's the most crazy company or idea that you backed or almost backed? Would love to hear either. Yeah, there are several that are kind of too early to describe just yet. But sometimes we really do just take kind of technical bets on, hey, if this works, wow, that would be amazing. And so we have got a couple of those that are cooking, I would say, or completely novel therapeutic mechanisms of action, pathways that haven't been drugged before, you know, all kinds of creative things like that. A couple that I can speak to that are already publicly disclosed. One is a company I mentioned called Appeal. This is the food gone good company, a company leveraging novel synthetic biology tools and products to extend shelf life for common food products like avocados. And, you know, they're at the time that my partner invested in the company, Vijay Pandey, my partner invested in this company many years ago. But really, at that time, you know, I think it was a pretty out there idea to use synthetic biology tools to fundamentally change food supply chains. But that, you know, they've scaled and are now distributing appeal coded products, all kinds of common locations. And, you know, have really kind of brought that all the way to the point of consumer adoption and impact. And so I think that's just a really interesting story if you kind of dig into the business that James Rogers built at Appeal. Another that I'd call out, again, crediting my partners on this one is in the early cancer detection space. So now we have lots of companies operating in that space to create liquid biopsies, you know, to detect cancer very, very early. But Freenome and Grail were some of the early companies in this space when no one else thought it was really possible to, it seemed very futuristic to draw a patient's blood sample and kind of try to triage whether or not they might have cancer without any symptoms yet. So Freenome was a company that we had the opportunity to invest in at seed stage. And again, has kind of scaled and brought forward a multi-omic blood biopsy for cancer detection, starting with colorectal cancer. And so that's another one that felt really out there and has gradually over the course of multiple years, started really feeling possible, intractable and real. Well, that's great. It's fun to hear about things that didn't sound as reasonable a little while ago and are becoming successful. So excited to see where those go to as well. We're starting to run out of time here, but thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been a pleasure speaking with you. Before we wrap up, is there anything you'd like to promote to our audience? No, I don't think anything I'd like to promote per se. I think we covered it, but I mean, to anybody listening, if you ever want to kind of jam on a potential startup idea or run an idea by anyone on our team, at this point, we've got a really fun squad of people, most of whom are ex-scientists just like yourself and have kind of been in your shoes in some sense. And so if we could ever be helpful on talking about a startup idea or helping you build one, please reach out. Thank you again so much. This was a super fun conversation. Thank you guys. This has been another episode of EBRC in Translation, a production of the Engineering Biology Research Consortia's Student and Postdoc Association. For more information about EBRC, visit our website at ebrc.org. If you're a student or postdoc interested in getting involved with the EBRC Student and Postdoc Association, you can find our membership application linked in the episode description. A big thank you to the entire EBRC SPA podcast team, Catherine Brink, Fatima Inam, Andrew Hunt, Kevin Reed, Ross Jones, Kogzili, David Mai, Heidi Klumpi, Reina Saeed, and thanks to EBRC for their support and of course to you, our listeners, for tuning in. We look forward to sharing our next episode with you soon.