At Google Venture a decade ago we searched for AI enabled companies and came up dry. That has changed. AI is going to eat software companies. Primarily because it creates entire new UX that incumbents can’t adopt without breaking their product. 10 year hypercycle just started.
One of the greatest projects humans can work on is to turn aging from inevitable to controllable.
@brian_armstrong
and I are cofounding NewLimit to uncover scientific truths and build products to extend all of our lives. Come join us.
$400B of market cap generated by GLP-1s. Thats more than all drug startups over the last 30 years combined. After decades of being a bit too focused on probabiity of success, GLP-1s have reminded the drug discovery industry to be a bit more ambitious.
For those curious about our quest
@newlimit
to reverse aging. We are presenting our work over the last 6 months and our plans over the coming years in a livestream at 5:30pm pst tomorrow 4/13.
Humanity is 100,000 years old. Cells propagating on loop. As individuals, we all age and die but somehow our cell’s have figured out how to reverse their age when we have a kid, back to 0. One day we are going to figure out how to get a taste of this immortality for ourselves.
Most important projects you can work on today
(as judged by multigenerational impact * chance of success):
1. Artificial General Intelligence
2. Dramatic increase in human healthspan
3. Brain machine interfaces at high bandwidth
4. Abundant cheap energy
5. Humans/intelligence
We’ve figured out how to make old immune cells “look” younger. Next step is making them “act” younger. (Also, we keep scaling the engine behind these discoveries: 1.7x q/q TF sets tested.)
Today we’re announcing two new funds, KP21 and Select III, to continue partnering with founders in the pursuit of building history making companies.
Read more👇
A surprising number of people don’t think we should try to reverse aging and extend human life. I suspect all of these detractors will take a life extension medicine when it becomes available.
.
@newlimit
we started with de-aging your immune cells. Now we are expanding into de-aging your liver. Adding serial biotech founder Markus Grompe to our advisory board to assist!
2023 was NewLimit’s first full calendar year of operations. Some highlights from the year:
🧬 50X more reprogramming factor sets tested than the field has cumulatively ever tested
🎯 20X increase in the signal-to-noise of our pooled screen demultiplexing assay
🧪 7X the
New site, open roles. NewLimit is being built from the ground up: everyone *must* contribute to data generation, analysis and planning. Don't expect to be told what to do, expect to help decide what to do and do it.
AI prediction: in 5 years there’s a foundation model oligopoly made up of 4 companies.
OpenAI and Alphabet in. Meta and Xai have a shot. Anthropic in trouble unless Amazon saves.
The great filter will be the ability to raise $50B over the coming years.
NewLimit progress update - sharing our progress over the last year and some early hints we are on the right track to reversing age. Hear from
@brian_armstrong
,
@jacobkimmel
, Greg Johnson, Burak Dura and myself.
@bgurley
The problem is that Chloriquine has been shown to "work" in vitro against many viruses (HIV, flu, Chikungunya, etc.) but it has failed every clinical trial. In fact, in the best studies, it looks like it makes the disease worse bc it suppresses patient's immune systems.
Excited to back Marc Tessier-Lavigne's $1B Series A for Xaira. "Taste" is the key attribute missing from most AI bio companies. The AI models are good enough to improve iterations but not good enough for problem selection (target + indication). Marc has great taste.
Fundamental discovery through basic research is the main driver of societal advancement when you zoom the timescale out to centuries. I’m excited
@patrickc
@pdhsu
and
@SKonermann
are innovating on the organizational and funding model for basic sciences. Need more of this.
I've long been interested in new ways to organize science and enable curiosity-driven discovery. Today, in partnership with
@Stanford
,
@UCBerkeley
, and
@UCSF
, we're excited to announce Arc Institute, a new undertaking in this vein: .
BREAKING: Cities have broad power to evict people from street encampments and confiscate their property, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in a case affecting hundreds of thousands of homeless people nationwide.
I met
@shaunmmaguire
when he was a Caltech PhD student and eventually convinced him to work with me
@GVteam
for a few years. He’s a special talent who is not afraid to tell you what he thinks. Great interview
@HarryStebbings
!
This is one of the most honest & open discussions we’ve ever done on 20VC.
@shaunmmaguire
does not hold back on:
🇺🇲 Has Kamala won the election?
☮️ Why Trump is our best hope for peace in the Middle East
🔇 Have we lost all freedom of speech?
🚨 Why DEI is a cancer for
Google inventing and releasing the Transformer is the modern successor to AT&T inventing and releasing the Transistor. 75 years of companies trying to mimic Bell Labs and finally it happens. Fittingly, value not immediately appreciated and results published publicly.
One really rewarding aspect of biotech is that you get to accumulate ~time invariant knowledge.
For many other businesses their iOS strategy, infrastructure design, partners, etc are all knowledge that atrophies in weeks to years.
Prediction: Epigenetic editors will treat more people than DNA editors over the next 20 years. Reasons include the finality of dna editing, application space, etc. (60% confidence)
We have added Alex Marson (UCSF) and Mark Davis (Stanford) to our Scientific Advisory Board. They are among the most productive and creative scientist in the world. Lucky to have them
@newlimit
.
We used to sit around our house in 2011 talking about paths to the first high bandwidth BMI device. Many of the people in that house would go on to found Neuralink. An amazing mile marker — now on to serving patients. Congrats
@djseo8
@shivon
@JosephODohert11
@maxhodak_
and team!
We are excited to share that we have received the FDA’s approval to launch our first-in-human clinical study!
This is the result of incredible work by the Neuralink team in close collaboration with the FDA and represents an important first step that will one day allow our
I'm back to building! Excited to share I've started a company with
@pariljain
and
@lukeholoubek
. We're building bots that do chores so you don't have to. Everyone is busy. Bots can help.
So many things compete for our time - commutes, longer working hours, and the complexities
We'll be hosting our second annual Progress Update event on May 23rd in South San Francisco!
We'll be welcoming a few guests to join us in person.
If you'd like to come, apply here:
THE MACHINE THAT BUILDS THE MACHINE
Today we are excited to announce the latest updates from Factory and the next steps in our mission to Bring Autonomy to Software Engineering.
Droids are autonomous systems that solve problems for engineers. Not just in demos. Not just in
@bgurley
We should be careful to extrapolate from in vitro assays. If we want to hold out hope, we should look to Remdesivir. A drug tailor made for RNA viruses by Gilead (the very same company that cured Hep C and makes 94% control rate HIV drugs).
@bgurley
@ericvishria
Artificially high list prices exist so PBMs can claim they got their corporate clients a "discount." Emergent super dumb artifacts of our system. (But even with those discounts, the US still subsidizes drug R&D for the rest of the world through higher Rx prices)
LLM powered apps are in a tweener stage. Enough results for "this time is different" plus strong sense LLMs will improve. But even LLM builders can't predict in which ways LLMs will improve. This makes product planning challenging... but also means the app field is wide open.
@jaltma
Yes. There is new research in epigenetic reprogramming that is especially exciting. The field is very early, and despite all the “buzz” relatively little capital and companies are pushing the field forward. Of the $200B/year on drug r&d <0.1% is spend on longevity research.
@tomloverro
It’s an inefficient policy but it isn’t the driver of California’s education issues. We spend lots of money on K-12. We just spend it very poorly. .
There was a period of time where Google's progress in self driving cars made all the car companies believe they could build their own self driving cars. That belief prevented any *real* partnerships from forming between Google and car companies. Now the car companies have learned
@rabois
@balajis
@acoustik
@zachweinberg
Still can suffer from confounders. Does a glass of red wine really increase lifespan, or are the wealthy more likely to drink wine and thus you are really measuring wealth effect on life expectancy?
@kimmaicutler
Tax is not the key source of our problems. Gavin Newsom has increased *per capita* spending by 63.9% since he took office, 2x the pace under Governor Brown (10.4% vs. 4.7%).
@wolfejosh
Then how is Roivant valued at $8.5B today? I can think of legit criticisms of Roivant, but claiming it was all an obvious short term rug pull is clearly a bad faith claim.
Humans have genetically encoded world models and classifiers. Just as other animals do. You are created with embedded knowledge. You just can’t compare data required for human learning vs data for AI training.
@pdhsu
Solving obesity would be great, but it would only buy an extra 1-2 years of healthspan (active lifespan) for those who are overweight and obese. Only way to buy ourselves +10 years is by going after deeper mechanisms of aging.
@mhdempsey
@harjtaggar
@brian_armstrong
Even more of a 180 than people realize. When Brian published that letter some Google execs criticized him, only to copy him four years later.
@aaronmring
Almost no one, in tech and biotech, takes on early stage debt. Let’s say you pull down $5M on a 4 year term. Now you are paying $400k/year on interest. Even worse, during your next capital raise you need +$5M just to pay off the debt. Investors won’t be excited about this bc the
Overturning Chevron is an even bigger deal than Grant's Pass. The Kochs know how to execute. (for those unaware, the Kochs assembled and funded the organization that pushed this case through the courts for years)
If I were to Hail Mary a few supplements bc for some reason I just had to take something: metformin, GLP-1, rapalog (rapamycin). Still. I’m not taking any of these.
@mike_matas
Mike, the polaroid fade in was a beautiful way to start a story filled with nostalgia. Rare to have a website generation the right emotional tone before you even start reading. very very well done.
@Jason
@friedberg
Solid not perfect test. I say "solid" because we don't have many alternatives for early detection of cancer. Think of this Galleri test as the blood version of the Prenuvo (MRI) screen you guys have discussed.
Why early detection useful? Of all cancer patients diagnosed at Stage
@wolfejosh
Okay, this statement is more fun! You are short their 10 completed phase 3 and commercial stage products. That's more accurate than "dug fails, investors were wiped out." :)
@matthuang
General theory: all products are enabled by speculator capital (venture, loan, liquidity, etc). Crypto just moves speculator capital flow and ownership to the network.
@lessin
@JTLonsdale
@levie
@DavidNelson333
This makes no sense. Buybacks return capital to shareholders. Qualified dividends are already taxed at cap gains rates. SP500 Dividends + Buybacks -> $1T+/year to shareholders. How on earth are buybacks some flashpoint beyond a made up fight thats actually about something else.
@FEhrsam
This is a decentralized return to how art was funded for most of history: upfront. The great artists of the past (e.g. Michelangelo) had individual pieces commissioned or were on retainer from Kings and clergy. Now, The People are the Popes.
@celinehalioua
We are starting with T cells and looking to do in vivo delivery. ~same cost as covid vaccine... hopefully!
Very unlikely to do our own cell therapy program. We are considering letting others use our reprogramming factors to improve their cell therapy products.
I also wonder how many beleaguered Ivy League presidents could raise $1B to start an ambitious new company. Not saying this should be the sole determinant of qualifications for a university presidency, but it does signal something...
@bgurley
Also, Remdesivir looks like its going well. Almost every critical patient in the major CA academic medical centers is getting it through a clinical trial or on compassionate use. Phase III readout in April.