The hottest running app has nothing to do with speed | E2303

This Week In Startups is made possible by:Agree - https://agree.comQuo - https://quo.com/TWiSTSuperhuman - https://superhuman.comToday's show:In this double-header, Jason and Lon chat with Louis Phillips, founder of the gamified running app INTVL, which turns a quick job around the block into a worldwide turf war competition. Find out how he grew the app to over 1 million downloads without any paid ads, just making videos from his home office. PLUS Alex sits down with Alice Zhang, CEO of Verge Labs, which pivoted from making drugs to building the AI infrastructure that helps pharma companies develop their own treatments. Find out how they accumulated one of the world's largest proprietary brain datasets and why brain tissue is the "LiDAR of neuroscience."Guests:INTVL: https://www.intvl.com.au/INTVL on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/intvl.appLouis Phillips on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/louisphillips12Verge Labs: https://vergelabs.com/Alice Zhang on X: https://x.com/AliceXinliZhangRelevant LinksMeta's Ad Library: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/Strava: https://www.strava.com/Pokémon Go: https://pokemongo.com/Fitbod: https://fitbod.me/Tonebase: https://www.tonebase.co/Calm: https://www.calm.com/Hamilton Island official site: https://www.hamiltonisland.com.au/"Mr. Inbetween" trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EooRG3QhQOYArticle: "Verge Genomics Rebrands as Verge Labs": https://trial.medpath.com/news/verge-genomics-rebrands-as-verge-labs-following-als-drug-trial-failure-pivots-to-ai-driven-target-discoveryEli Lilly: https://www.lilly.com/Chai Discovery: https://www.chaidiscovery.com/Noetik: https://www.noetik.ai/Tempus: https://www.tempus.com/Timestamps:0:00 Louis on building in Melbourne, Australia 7:44 Why INTVL ignores how fast you run 9:59 Agree - Stop chasing invoices at https://agree.com and tell them Jason sent you to get 50% off for life! 15:52 Using gamification for good 19:10 Powering INTVL's impressive growth 19:55 Quo (formerly OpenPhone) - Quo gives you a clean, modern way to handle every customer call, text, and thread all in one place. Try it free at https://quo.com/TWiST 26:16 The future of TWiST Australia 27:14 Will AI ever cure cancer? 27:54 Inside Verge's rebrand 30:31 Superhuman - Get AI that works where you work. Unlock your Superhuman potential at https://superhuman.com 32:01 Brain tissue as "ground truth" 36:01 Why brain tissue is so valuable as data 43:52 Verge's Eli Lilly partnership 51:34 "You're going to tell me when I'm going to die" 56:11 How AI could impact drug prices 58:19 Clinical trial FAILS and how to move onSubscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisCheck out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We created Interval, which is a gamified running app. You run around the block and you claim territory on a live global map. People are just so much more motivated to go out and do that activity when they get a notification that their territory has just been stolen.

• 0:14Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 0:14Speaker 00

  It becomes quite personal.

• 0:15Speaker 02

  You're taking the competitive spirit. You're taking the slot machine nature of apps and smartphones, and you're using it for good.

• 0:24Speaker 03

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Superhuman. Get AI that works where you work. Unlock your superhuman potential at superhuman.com. Quo, formerly OpenPhone, gives you a clean, modern way to handle every customer call, text, and thread all in one place. Try it free and get 20% off your first six months at quo.com/twist. And agree.com. Stop chasing invoices and automate your entire contract to cash stack. Go to agree.com and tell them Jason sent you to get 50% off for life.

• 0:57Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to Twist.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  We're talking to the founder of Interval. It is a running app that's gamified, Jason. So you don't just do your daily run. You claim the territory around which you've run. And so it turns it into sort of a social community, you know, sort of feature. Let's meet the founder, Louis Phillips. Louis.

• 1:18Jason Calacanis?

  Louis, how are you?

• 1:20Speaker 00

  Very well, thanks. Thanks so much for having me on. Really excited.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for showing up.

• 1:24Jason Calacanis?

  Great studio there.

• 1:25Speaker 02

  Louis is in Australia, Jason, so it is the middle of the night.

• 1:29Jason Calacanis?

  Hold on, let me hear the accent. Say the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Go ahead, let me hear it.

• 1:34Speaker 00

  The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

• 1:36Jason Calacanis?

  Louis seems kind of tough.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39Jason Calacanis?

  So I was gonna go with Melbourne, but he's not that tough.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:44Jason Calacanis?

  He seems kind of nice.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  More like a Brisbane guy you're thinking now?

• 1:47Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's the Sydney guys are a little softer on the range. So I'm gonna go Sydney. Where are you from?

• 1:54Speaker 00

  I'm from Melbourne. I'm calling in from Melbourne.

• 1:57Jason Calacanis?

  So you're performative right now. You're being a little professional, but you... Talk how you actually talk.

• 2:04Speaker 00

  Exactly. No, this is, this is it. This is how I actually talk. Um.

• 2:09Jason Calacanis?

  How about if I said, "Hey mate, can you get the fuck out of the way and let me get to the bathroom?" What would you say?

• 2:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I feel like I'm home. I feel like I'm home. I was actually born in Western Australia, which is.

• 2:18Jason Calacanis?

  Wow. You notice the difference, Lon? You hear him now?

• 2:20Speaker 02

  I did, yeah, a little bit.

• 2:22Jason Calacanis?

  You see? He let it down. This is a Melbourne guy trying to sound fancy like the Sydney guys. You should just embrace your Melbourne. You ever see this Mr. Nobody?

• 2:32Speaker 00

  I haven't, no.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Are you talking about Mr. Nobody or Mr. In Between?

• 2:35Jason Calacanis?

  The guy who's like a hitman gangster.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Wasn't that Mr. In Between? I think that, that's the Australian series. Yeah, yeah. The Scott Ryan, I'm pretty sure that's what you're thinking of.

• 2:46Jason Calacanis?

  Oh.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Cause you told me to watch it. You, you were like, Lon, you gotta see.

• 2:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's Mr. In Between. Look at this guy. This is the classic Melbourne guy.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, nice. I have, I've seen shorts of him on, on TikTok.

• 2:58Jason Calacanis?

  This actor.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  That's parts of Melbourne for sure.

• 3:01Jason Calacanis?

  No, this, this is your classic Melbourne guy. You shaved your head.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Scott Ryan is that guy's name.

• 3:05Jason Calacanis?

  And this guy stopped doing it. He's got the greatest character of all time. This character is literally the level of Tony Soprano or Walter White.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Wow. High praise.

• 3:16Jason Calacanis?

  In Breaking Bad.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  High praise.

• 3:17Jason Calacanis?

  Or the guy in The Shield. What's the guy from The Shield? Um.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  Oh, oh, oh, God, Vic something?

• 3:24Jason Calacanis?

  Vic Mackey.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Vic Mackey, of course. How could I forget?

• 3:27Jason Calacanis?

  If you want a canonical tough guy, anti-hero, this guy is so tough.

• 3:35Jason Calacanis?

  They need to make a crossover between him and Walter White for a series where like one's trying to get.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Walter White's dead though. Breaking Bad spoilers, folks.

• 3:44Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe. Or, you know, maybe you could do an integration.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Alright, alright.

• 3:47Jason Calacanis?

  Luis, we've, uh, we, a little, that's just a little Australian shenanigans. I've missed Australia. You know, we used to have a great partnership with, uh, Sydney.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:55Jason Calacanis?

  And we would do launch festival there. And I'm, uh, considering bringing Founder University back to Australia or New Zealand.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 4:04Jason Calacanis?

  Cause I just love going there. I've never been. I've never been. Uh, Hamilton Island, Great Barrier Reef.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  You're in some good spots there.

• 4:13Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, man. How great is that, man? Have you been up there, Cairns?

• 4:17Speaker 00

  Uh, I've never been to Cairns. I've been to Hamilton Island, though, and that's kind of quintessential.

• 4:21Jason Calacanis?

  Tell them about Hamilton. Just briefly.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, Hamilton Island is a beautiful island off the kind of coast of Queensland. Um, and so it's in the Pacific Ocean, and it is absolutely stunning. It's just classic kind of Australian tropical, kind of beachy. Uh, it's the ultimate relaxation spot. Um, I think they just got acquired by.

• 4:40Jason Calacanis?

  They did.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, didn't they?

• 4:42Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know who bought it.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  They were waiting for it to go through. It was private equity. Uh, I'm pretty sure.

• 4:46Jason Calacanis?

  So it was owned by a family. Uh, some family owned this island, and I went there on vacation one time when I was in Sydney for launch festival. And then we went there and I rented a little boat and we did a little scuba diving trip. And we brought like eight of us on a like overnight thing, but Hamilton Island has the Whitsundies beaches.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Blackstone.

• 5:06Jason Calacanis?

  Whitsundies. If you pull up Whitsundies, Whitsundies Beaches is the most beautiful beach on planet Earth. According to the people who go out and gallivant around the world. Incredible. Have you, have you hit the Whitsundies?

• 5:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I mean, that's, it's kind of in the Whitsundies, but yeah, I've, I've been there. The other one is, you know, I'm, I was born there, but Western Australia, I'd say that is like peak Australian kind of postcard. If you, if you ever get a chance, I'd recommend heading across. It's a long flight, but uh.

• 5:39Jason Calacanis?

  What is it, six hours, seven hours to get from the east to the west?

• 5:41Speaker 00

  It's, it's like four and a half on the way there, three and a half on the way back because you've got the wind behind you.

• 5:46Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so it's basically like going from California to New York, something like that.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  That's nice. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:52Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Thanks for tuning into This Week in Australia.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Blackstone, the private equity firm, they bought Hamilton Island in December 2025 for 1.2 billion Australian dollars. It's about 804 million US.

• 6:04Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I kind of think Bezo should have bought it. If it's, if that's the price, I would have.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  He could afford it. Why not?

• 6:12Jason Calacanis?

  That, I mean, it's unbelievable when you go there. Beautiful. But I want to go to the west because that's like raw. Right? The west coast is raw.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  Red dirt. That's proper Australia. That's where you'll see, you know, the types that we spoke about before in that TV show. That's, that's proper.

• 6:27Jason Calacanis?

  Proper. In other words, if you were part of the penal colony, that's kind of where you stayed. You didn't go to these fancy dancy cities to get your flat white.

• 6:36Speaker 00

  Exactly. You're right, kangaroos.

• 6:38Jason Calacanis?

  And your bowl. Get a flat white and a bowl. Bowl culture. You know about bowl culture, Alan?

• 6:43Speaker 02

  I don't. I don't know what you're talking about.

• 6:45Jason Calacanis?

  So Australians started like bowl culture. You go for breakfast or lunch, they have bowls. The bowls got a little quinoa, it's got a little salmon, it got a little this, little of that. Everybody likes to eat a bowl.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 6:58Jason Calacanis?

  You know, we have sandwich culture and Sammy culture here in the United States.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  I mean, I feel like we also kind of have a bowl. There's like a lot of.

• 7:03Jason Calacanis?

  We cribbed it.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  Poki bowls and, uh, you know.

• 7:06Jason Calacanis?

  Nope. We cribbed it from Australia. They've been doing it for twenty years.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  I didn't realize. I didn't realize we stole that from the Aussies.

• 7:10Jason Calacanis?

  Where's your favorite flat white? Where's your favorite bowl?

• 7:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Well, acai bowls is big here. Uh, it's kind of like that breakfast. Yeah. Um, and then favorite spot. I mean, we just have the best coffee here in Melbourne. That's what we're known for. Um, so any coffee shop, you can't beat it. We love a flat white. Yeah.

• 7:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Flat white or fuck off is, uh, basically.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  They're, they're British. Those guys are British.

• 7:32Jason Calacanis?

  Pretty much. If you want a cappuccino, go back to Italy or New Jersey. All right. Why don't you show us? Show us what you built.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  Sure. Sure. Sure. Absolutely. I'll, I'll share my screen and I can kind of, um, walk us through it. So we created Interval, which is a gamified running app. Um, it's essentially a game where you run around the block and you claim territory on a live global map. Um, for example, we are here in Austin, for those that are watching.

• 8:00Jason Calacanis?

  And there's the lake.

• 8:00Speaker 00

  All those different colors are different people's territories. So we can see here, if we click on this specific run, Michael has gone for a sixty seven kilometer run. I think that's around like forty miles.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, wow.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Uh, and he's captured a lot of Austin. So what happens is Michael went out for his run in the morning and he aimed to do forty miles. He ran. And around a perimeter, wherever he decided to run and then finish his run within 200 metres of where he started. After he pressed stop, he claimed that territory. So everyone inside of his territory gets notified that their territory has just been stolen. So a pretty simple concept, a global game of turf wars. As you can see, we've also got kind of leaderboards where the goal is to climb the leaderboards. Michael is obviously the king of the area in Austin with a fair few following as well. Um, on top of that, we have a complete like community feed where people kind of upload,

• 8:59Speaker 00

  you know, different posts and stuff. There's some very funny ones. You can chuck things that like, comment on them. Uh, and so on. So a pretty simple concept that seems to work really well. And the reason we brought it to market was we found that no one else has done this concept as well as what we could have done. We found the types of people who tend to do it were kind of like into medieval games and different kind of, you know, very computer game-esque where we wanted to take that Strava level UI and UX and implement that into a cool game that people can use day to day, uh, which has led us to.

• 9:36Jason Calacanis?

  So do I win by making a longer run and encircling him at plus 10K kilometres? Or can I just do another circle within his and beat his speed maybe? Because there are multiple vectors for running. One is distance, one is speed.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So right now there is nothing for speed inside interval, which was intentional.

• 9:59Jason Calacanis?

  We love an exclusive here on the pod and I have an amazing deal to announce that's just for Twist listeners. Go right now to agree.com, sign up for their easy to use all in one contract to cash stack. And if you tell them Jason sent you, you're going to get 50% off for life. That's right. 50% off for life. It's really important to have a tight system to get paid. Agree is the number one fastest way to go from contract to cash. That means gathering e-signatures, invoicing, billing, payments and revenue recovery if it comes. To that, no more jumping between four or five different platforms just to write out a contract. Get it signed, set up billing and start sending invoices. Check out these numbers.

• 10:40Jason Calacanis?

  The average time from contract sent to signature is under seven hours using agree.com. And the median time from invoice sent to invoice paid is just 36 hours. So if you want to stop chasing invoices, go right now to agree.com. If you tell them Jason sent you, you'll get 50% off for life.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  So I've found, you know, I'm a runner myself, not a very good runner, but I can run. And I found on Strava, I just, I cannot ever compete with people because it's essentially Olympians at this point. What I can do though, is I can go out and I can run, you know, in a volume. Like I can do multiple runs a week. I can run slowly, I can run and kind of be more committed than people in general. So interval is not based on speed. You run around the block and you claim land, but other people can steal small bits of your territory. So for example, if I did a run around my local block, the grandma who lives next door to me can technically go and walk around the block in whatever pace she wants to capture that territory off me.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  And what it's done is it just brings in this element of anyone can compete against anyone.

• 11:48Jason Calacanis?

  Love it.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  And, and it's a lot of fun.

• 11:50Jason Calacanis?

  So Lon can go and beat this guy's ass. Just walking and lollygagging with his dog as he has want to do.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  Dripping sweat. I, I did have a question though. I've actually two, I have two questions, Jason, if you'll, if you'll allow me. The first one, it feels to me like if, if it's just whoever ran the most recently, like how, how do you keep that sort of interesting in an ongoing gamified sort of way? Like if I run around my three blocks and then somebody takes a run an hour after me and they claim those three blocks and like, well now it's theirs, not mine. Like I, I, am I motivated to go back and reclaim that territory the next day? It just, it feels a little ephemeral in some ways.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, initially it is, the, the, the game is literally just you go out, capture the territory and then someone captures it back off you. And then we have kind of leaderboards and different kind of local battles where you're competing against that specific individual. To make it fun and exciting.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  We do have things for solving that. So right now, there is a, the game is fun at a specific level of density and we've pretty much got that particularly in Melbourne, Australia. I'll, I'll go across to Melbourne, you can see we're pretty popular here. Um, particularly in Melbourne, like there is a lot of density. So if you go for a run and then you come back, your run, some of it might already be captured. What we want to do with that is creating like an onion skin around the globe where you can climb up the levels by capturing more and more territory.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  On top of that, we do have a solve for um, the pace element. So uh, oh, sorry. We do have a solve for the pace element. So what we're going to create and what is in, in works at the moment is something called arenas where to capture a certain really, you know, uh, active spot, let's say it's Central Park in New York, you need to be the fastest around that spot on that day. And then you get the, you know, the yellow jersey or you, you get that territory for that day. We'll have specific leaderboards for that that are based on time and then we'll also have a volume based leaderboard as well. So if you want to capture territory by, you know, walking or, or just going about your day, then the rest of the territory map is for that. Whereas

• 14:05Speaker 00

  if you want to really lock in and, and run at a fast pace, um, this will be resetting every single day, uh, then go to one of the arenas.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. I like that too, because I, I think, um, one, one thing this made me think of right away was four square. You guys remember like where you'd become the mayor, you would check in at your favorite coffee shop or arcade or whatever bar and you could become like the mayor of that place if you checked in the most. And for like, there was a summer or two there where I, everybody I knew was like obsessed with becoming the mayor of their favorite sandwich shop or whatever, like they wanted to be. And then, and then it sort of burned out. So I think there's a huge opportunity here, but you do have to be like, you got to keep it fresh and new and exciting for people. My, my other thought was having just been on, uh, I went, I went to, uh, Europe with a friend and she's a big Pokemon Go fan. And every time we went to a new place, like a new

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Landmark. She'd have to pull up her phone and check what are the Pokemon Go things happening around here?

• 15:02Jason Calacanis?

  That's a little, that's a bit annoying, I think. How, how long did it take her to check in? And then what is it? Is this a special friend that I'm unaware of?

• 15:10Speaker 02

  It's just a friend.

• 15:11Jason Calacanis?

  A companion?

• 15:12Speaker 02

  A traveling buddy that I went to Europe with, but, but, uh, but you know, like, I feel like there's an element there where you're visiting somewhere different. If you want to like do a run in Rome and claim Rome as separate from your home, like, I think there's an interesting element there too, like of getting, encouraging travel and checking in wherever you go, I think is a, something sticky.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And, and adventure is the whole point of interval. We don't want people just doing their average out and back runs every single day. The idea is that you go out and go and explore new areas. A big thing for us as well is we've found that people are just so much more motivated to go out and do that activity when they get a notification that their territory has just been stolen.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  So you're like so much more likely if you get told, oh, you've just been sold, you know, and, and then you, you have like an individual's name and face put to that territory. It becomes quite personal.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:04Speaker 00

  So, um, yeah.

• 16:05Jason Calacanis?

  Luis, you know what it is? You're doing gamification for good. You're taking the competitive spirit. You're taking the slot machine nature of apps and smartphones and you're using it for good. Fantastic. You know, Strava has a little bit of an issue with speed runs and people getting hurt. Um, and they've had to be a little bit careful because people started bombing and running red lights and they crashed into people. And tragically, literally in San Francisco, somebody died, uh, a bus, I, I believe, uh, this is 20 years, 15 years ago, I think now. Yours is not encouraging people to like do a lap in an ungodly amount of time and run red lights in order to accomplish that. So great.

• 16:49Jason Calacanis?

  And, and I'm not blaming the people at Strava for what their users do. It's just the nature of. Competition, people who are competitive. And we, there's just a great TV show on right now. The Dark Wizard about free climbing and free soloing and just the competitive nature of that. And people dying or, you know, risking their lives. I think a really interesting way for you to expand this would be

• 17:13Jason Calacanis?

  to do, say, skiing or biking or, you know, other kayaking, whatever it happens to be. And let people claim the water, the mountain, et cetera. And then you could also do it based on, I like not doing speed because again, speed equals death in a lot of these pursuits like skiing. But you could do completeness. And so, you know, when I, you ski a certain mountain, let's say there's 50 runs. How many of the runs, and this might include some element of speed, but just how comprehensive are you? How many times have you done the run? You know, not speed, just percentage of the mountain you covered. And, okay, so today I did 80% of the mountain, Lon did 82%. He wins today. Tomorrow I do 85, he does 75. Boom. Wonderful.

• 17:59Jason Calacanis?

  And these become viable, these apps, in the days of vibe coding. This app would take a company of 12 people, but five or 10 years ago, if you were going to seed invest in a company like this, you'd say 12 people to build the app, two platforms, customer support. Marketing, administrative. Everything. Yeah, yeah. A minimum of 12, which means you got to raise about three to five million dollars to do this. So Louise, give us an idea of, in the age of AI, what it costs to stand up this app and get to revenue? Because you're charging for this. I'm assuming you charge 50 or 100 bucks a year is my guess.

• 18:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we've got a team of five of us, total three developers. My co-founder built this from the ground up, pretty much to what you see the app is right now and what I just showed you. In 30 days, we're launching a complete UI UX overhaul and also launching bike mode, which will be our biggest launch yet. With that, the, the, the team we've got on, so two extra engineers, has just been our speed is. Is so much faster, uh, obviously, but we've managed to keep it pretty lean like Jordan building it from the ground up. We got to profitability, which was pretty cool. And then I was doing the marketing side just through social media without any paid media. Um, and we grew that to about a

• 19:20Speaker 00

  million downloads and about a hundred thousand followers on Instagram. Wow.

• 19:23Jason Calacanis?

  Um, I heard that you're, uh, I heard your, um, your, uh, paid and social game is strong. That's what my producers tell me. Maybe you could talk a little bit about tactically what's worked in terms of acquiring.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  Producer Jacob actually saw an Instagram ad for this product and that's how Louis got booked on our show today.

• 19:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So tell us a little bit about that because, uh, most people in the app business are like, oh my God, I can't make it work. The, it's too expensive to do a paid motion in the world. Any new company needs to focus on their customer pipeline. That funnel is the lifeblood of your business. You can't afford to miss calls, even if they're coming in during off hours or on the weekends. That's why today's episode is brought to you by QUO, Q U O, the smarter way to run your business communications. I use QUO, I love QUO, my team uses QUO and you can use it on your phone or your desktop. QUO is the number one top rated business phone system on G2 and it's trusted by

• 20:24Jason Calacanis?

  more than 90,000 businesses. They're going to bring all of your calls, all of your texts and contacts together in one shared collaborative space. That means your entire team is going to use one shared phone number if you want. So there's no more missed calls and no more disconnected conversations. Plus their AI automatically logs calls and it generates summaries and it even recommends next steps. So here's your CTA. Money is on the line. Always say hello with QUO. Try QUO for free plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com/twist. That's Q U O dot com slash twist.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  It is. Yeah, yeah. Well, so for us, I think the biggest thing with social media is you've got to prepare to suck. And you've got to prepare to suck publicly. And I think I've found a lot of founders, particularly in Australia, are not willing to fail publicly and look like an idiot online. Whereas I, I don't really like, I obviously care about my image online, but I've been doing social media for about four or five years now. And I'm not too worried about looking like an idiot. So getting on on camera, getting in front of camera was huge for our our growth. And, you know, if you can get prolific with social media, you essentially get free marketing. So for us, the kind of content that worked was game explanations.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  It's a little bit like complicated to understand if it's just a video without anyone talking. So I would literally jump in this studio or back at my house and explain the game with some overlays above my head. And that in itself got us to a hundred thousand followers pretty quickly. So just that like talking head style of content really helped.

• 22:03Jason Calacanis?

  And for a little tactical practical tip for folks, you know, everybody tunes in here for tactical practical. Meta has an ad library and here's interval and here's their ads. So anybody can do competitive intelligence on other people's ads. And you can see here a range of ads lawn. What type of ads work for you in combination? Like there's the one with the meme. See that one with the woman with the blonde hair, the second one over? Like, go ahead and play that one. This ad seems to have worked or not. I don't know. I can't see the stats there, but yeah, there. Is that you or is that your partner?

• 22:36Speaker 00

  That's that's my, no, that's that's Max. He's head of content.

• 22:39Jason Calacanis?

  And look, he just did the Austin route and that's probably what my guy saw. And there it is. And like, this is a beautiful, it's your same studio, it matters. So you do a podcast studio, you show these 3D graphics. Really cool. Yeah.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  And it makes it look fun. You're like, oh, okay, I get it. It's a game. I run around, I get to claim territory. Like, it's very immediate.

• 22:58Jason Calacanis?

  Do these ads work yet? What is the cost of acquiring a free user, a paid user? What's the, what's the economics here?

• 23:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. So the the ads has been. Great, because it adds a level of predictability into our into our business. Previously with organic content, we're just solely reliant on hitting the algorithm. And it meant that we had months which were astronomical and we couldn't believe we could, you know, get this many downloads and subsequently make money. Versus other months which were just absolute flops and it's kind of crickets. You can't get anyone to download the app. So ads really ironed that out for us. And the cost per trial start for us currently is about $12 on Meta. And then, yeah, we're seeing, you know, average customer lifetime is about 17 months.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  The app changes a lot, so it's hard to get really ironed out metrics on that. But where the ad side has just been, yeah, revolutionary for us. And we've got a good ad team that helps things out as well.

• 24:01Jason Calacanis?

  You're doing it all internal or are you using external consultants to help you with it? Or you believe inside your company, you need to have this expertise? What's your philosophy, Louis?

• 24:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we're actually using a third party. It's called Scale and they have just been incredible. You essentially pay them a monthly fee and they handle all the.

• 24:21Jason Calacanis?

  A flat rate or on top of your spend, like a percentage of spend or just a?

• 24:24Speaker 00

  It scales with the spend, yeah.

• 24:27Jason Calacanis?

  Done. And they can't charge you more than your economics make work. And so $12 to start a trial, the product on average costs 50 bucks a year? Is that about right?

• 24:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, about 60 US a year.

• 24:41Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect, yeah. So I went through this with Com. So that means if you get one in five people to convert, you know, five times 12, you hit that $60 and you said they last for 17 months, which means on average they make you $90 or $85. So you can, and then maybe they tell a friend about it if it has an internal feature on. So you can maybe add a factor of like one in five, add a friend, which you divide the 17 months by five, you get another three months and each month costs $5. You get an extra $15 in value. So there's all kinds of return on ad spend, ROAS and cost per install. And it's a really interesting science and there are funds that can help you.

• 25:24Jason Calacanis?

  I went through all this with Com, FitPod. We have a great company called Tonebase that does music, Musician that does music, Steezy that does dance, and it just becomes really hard to get this right. But if you do get it right, you can have an incredible flywheel and build an incredible brand like Calm and Fitba did and Tonebase. Steezy didn't work out exactly for that. That was a harder one to make work, dance. But yeah, continued success, Luis, and thank you so much for sharing all your secrets.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks, Louis.

• 25:59Jason Calacanis?

  Continued success. I'll see you when I'm down under.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  Sounds good.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  I'm joining for that one. I'm coming along on the Australia trip.

• 26:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, you are. Well, you know what I'd like to do is there's four cities there, Perth, Sydney, Melbourne. What's the other one that always competes for startups?

• 26:18Speaker 02

  Brisbane.

• 26:19Jason Calacanis?

  Brisbane. So there's like four centers of excellence. So what I want to try to do is get, you know, two or three or all four of them to join forces to bring my stack to Australia. So I want to fire up this week in startups, Australia again. Mark Pesci used to do it for me. We did like 12 seasons.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  Many years ago, we started doing that. Yeah.

• 26:42Jason Calacanis?

  So it'd be great to get that fired up again to bring Founder University there and to bring the Launch Accelerator there. And then my vision for it would be to get those three cities to collaborate, chop up the cost of doing this.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  Oh, sure.

• 26:54Jason Calacanis?

  And then rotate it. So Founder University is in Perth, then it's in Sydney, then it's in Australia, then it's in Brisbane, and it just rotates.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  Canberra too, maybe? Canberra also?

• 27:04Jason Calacanis?

  Whoever wants to, you know, chip in to get the flywheel going. I just want to have an excuse to go there, frankly, when my family wants to.

• 27:12Speaker 03

  Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Twist. This is Alex. Now, AI is having a moment. People are mad about data centers. People are mad about Anthropic. People that like Anthropic are mad at OpenAI. SpaceX AI is suddenly a hyperscaler. Job loss is either here or never coming, and AI regulation is becoming a battlefield. Are you tired of all the negativity? Well, something that many AI believers love to trot out is that AI is going to cure cancer, bro. And the thing is, maybe. That's why I wanted to get Alice Zhang from Verge Labs on the show to tell us about the state of using AI to discover new drugs to tackle our most intractable species-level diseases and maladies. So please join me and welcome to the show. It's Alice. Hey, how you doing?

• 27:52Speaker 04

  Good. Thank you for having me on the show, Alex.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  I'm so glad you're here. We're also talking to you mere days after the company were branded from Verge Genomics, the name that I've always known it under, to Verge Labs. So one, congratulations on the rebrand. And two, from a very high level, why was this the right moment to kind of change the name of the company and redirect in a new direction?

• 28:13Speaker 04

  So we started 10 years ago, really with the mission that drug discovery could really be turned from a guess and check problem to really a prediction problem, and that the missing piece was really missing data. So we, over the last decade, have built one of the field's largest brain data sets directly from patients, over 12,000 human brains and 6,000 patients. And we initially used that to develop our own drugs. And we went through that experience, which was really useful, but that experience really taught us the importance of an even kind of more valuable problem, which is, once you've developed the drug, how do you actually predict what patient will respond to that drug, which is something we did not originally foresee?

• 28:57Speaker 04

  So the first thing is that we learned this really hard lesson about this very valuable problem, and we also had the data sets that were necessary to really solve that problem. The second is that the architectures in AI have finally gotten to a point where they can actually solve one of the key challenges that actually prevented us from solving that problem in the first place, which is the kind of incomplete and fragmented state of most patient data sets. So it was really the kind of intersection of the fact that our data actually achieved the scale we needed, and the multiple architectures were advancing to the point where we could actually make use of these data sets, that let us see this much larger opportunity, which

• 29:39Speaker 04

  is, instead of just buying a lottery ticket and developing a drug ourselves, can we actually make a better machine that sells those lottery tickets? And that's really what drove the shift, is this kind of culmination of all of the above.

• 29:51Speaker 03

  I've never heard a startup founder come on the show and say, "You know what we're doing now is we're selling the lottery tickets instead of scratching them ourselves. You can invest right here." No, I really appreciate that summary. I now want to go through that in a bit slower pace to let people know what's changed. How technology has kind of brought you to this point. So I think it's a very important story. So in the earlier days of Verge Genomics, you guys were working on Converge One, which actually helped you select a candidate drug that you then took into testing, if I'm right. And I'm curious about the process to getting Converge One built. And how surprised or not surprised were you when you took it to the real world with this drug you put together? The results didn't quite match what you were hoping for.

• 30:31Speaker 05

  Most AI tools are adding friction, not making your life simpler. And it's another tab to switch to, and maybe you forget to even do it. It's arduous. What you really want is one system that's going to make you more efficient and save you time every single time you do work. That's why I love Superhuman Go from the amazing team behind Grammarly, which I have insisted all my team members use since day one. Now, it's an AI chat that lives on the side of your browser. It's always there. Maybe you're drafting an email mid-meeting. It goes and helps you finish it without switching apps. Maybe you got a 40 email thread to get through before that call. It's going to summarize it for you in seconds without losing your place. No new tabs, no starting from scratch, no context switching.

• 31:13Speaker 05

  Superhuman Go has the context of everything you're working on. It works inside the tools and sites you already use. Your inbox, your docs, your browser. Maybe you're doing social media all day long like me. It's part of my job. You can try many of Superhuman Go's features for free. Find out more, superhuman.com. That's superhuman.com.

• 31:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, so what we built Converge originally is what we call, it's called a target discovery engine. So it's how do you actually find the proteins to go after that cause disease? And then design drugs around them. So to do that, we started accumulating this very large data set, which is that instead of starting with a mouse or a cell, which is how most researchers start, we asked, why not actually go directly to the source, which is the brain? If for neurological diseases, because that's where it happens. And so we started sequencing these brains. We paired them with multimodal data, like their clinical records, how they progressed in the disease.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  Can I, can I ask a question about that? Just because I'm really curious. My brain's inside of my skull and hasn't ever, to my knowledge, left. So when you're talking about getting brain samples, number of patients, number of brains, how much tissue are you getting? Are these from politely living people? Are these the recently deceased? I don't know. And I just thought I'd ask for everyone out there who's curious.

• 32:30Speaker 04

  So they're from deceased patients. This is why it's actually it's so hard is because, you know, in cancer, the problem of how do we actually find the right patient and match them to your right drug has been partly solved because you can actually take a tumor, right, from a living person. Um, you can profile it and analyze it, and then you can match it to the therapy that you want that patient to be on. In the brain, you know, um, you can't take a brain from a living person, right, in neurological disease. And so you can only take it from autopsy patients. And so that is what we have done is that we've partnered with more than twenty four different tissue banks, hospitals, academic centers across the world

• 33:12Speaker 04

  that have thousands and thousands of patient brains from people that have passed away from disease and donated their bodies for research. And then we've built an end to end infrastructure that can actually ingest these samples, quality control them, dissect them, um, for our data consistency, quality and traceability. And then we essentially digitize them, which means that we sequence them. So we capture the behavior of all thirty thousand genes in the genome at multiple levels from the DNA to RNA to protein.

• 33:41Speaker 03

  Okay, that's super cool. But I think when you guys were working on Converge One, the first iteration of this engine, uh, there was a mismatch between the samples of data that you could collect from the, I guess, tissue banks of the world and maybe the brain of someone who had a particular, uh, disease you were going after trying to fix. And there was a bit of a, uh, a gap between the two?

• 34:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, what, what you can, right now, you can only get brains from deceased individuals. And one of the challenges is that when you actually go into clinical trials, right, you're actually going into a living person. So how do you actually measure what's happening in that person's brain? Which is the really only window into what is happening with disease. And so what we've developed in the last year is a world model of disease that can ingest all this brain tissue that we've collected, combine that with patient data from living patients, and essentially create what we call a virtual biopsy of the brain. So that's essentially a reconstructed picture of what's happening in your brain that can be built from just

• 34:44Speaker 04

  a single blood draw. And so that allows us in a living patient to actually say, hey, what stage is your disease at? And how might you actually respond to a given therapy?

• 34:54Speaker 03

  So with the information you have from the deceased and these tissue banks, and some information about living patients, you can kind of bring the two halves together using AI, which is what's changed since you started the company, and therefore kind of close the gap using, I guess, the power of generative AI?

• 35:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, and that's what the power of what these models have brought in the last few years is if you look at traditional deep learning or machine learning models, they've really had required every patient to have every single measurement. So you have to have the brain, the blood, the clinical treatment data, all in one. But that's not how it happens in the real world. In the real world, you might have a patient that goes into a clinical trial, and you might have a different patient that gives their blood, and then you might have yet a different patient that donates their brain tissue. And the power of these transformer-based architectures is that it allows you to actually piece together missing data and infer missing data from what you have. So you can start creating

• 35:55Speaker 04

  a unified representation of what a patient looks like and start filling in missing data modalities.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  Now, you guys said that brain tissue is the LiDAR of neuroscience, applying the kind of world models we've heard about from self-driving companies like Wave, and I think also Wabi and so forth are working on that. And you think that brain tissue is going to help your world model have high fidelity and high accuracy. Are people out there trying to build similar world models for similar tasks without using actual brain tissue as part of the data grounding for that work?

• 36:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we We are using world the very kind of same models that some of the self-driving cars are because it allows you to not just pattern match based on observational data, like it doesn't just pattern match how their previous driving scenarios happen, but it can predict a new person in the road. And similarly, that's what we're doing with our world models. Um, there are world models in oncology because that's a much easier space to get data. In fact, that's kind of a pattern you see in the space that AI companies get just simply built because of where it's easiest to get data set. But we've kind of taken the opposite approach is we've actually asked, what's the biggest problem right now? And then how do we actually do the hard work of collecting the right data?

• 37:15Speaker 04

  So with neuroscience, most of the data, um, it's not that there are people building world models with the proxy data. It's just that that's where most of the data is today. So it's probably tempting to go there first. Um, but the issue with the proxy data, and when I say proxy data, I mean things like blood, you know, brain imaging, you know, spinal fluid that can easily be collected from a living person. Is that they're all just downstream consequences of the disease. They're like shadows of the disease. Right? So uh, in order to really understand what is happening in disease, you need to go into the brain where it's happening. And so the reason it's a bit like LIDAR is it's like thinking about self-driving. If you were to build a model only on just camera

• 37:56Speaker 04

  data alone, like kind of Tesla has, you have limited information, but we saw that when Waymo integrated cameras with LIDAR, which was an actual direct reading of 3D depth, that could vastly increase the speed at which they could get accuracy in self-driving. And so in a very similar way, that's why I say brain tissue is like the LIDAR of neuroscience in that it's just the molecular ground truth of disease. And for the model to work, you need that anchor to be able to anchor the relationships between blood, between your brain images and to actually what's happening in the brain.

• 38:27Speaker 03

  Okay. So some people are spinning up, uh, drug discovery companies using AI and they're going to where there's a lot of data because everyone knows if you can bring a lot of data in, you can find a model, you can therefore do a lot of work with it. But you know, honestly, Alice, if everyone's going to Go just to where there's easy data. It seems like they're all going to be competing kind of along the same vector. Whereas you guys having done years of data collection that's special and unique will have a different approach. Okay, that makes good sense to me. Now, when it comes to world models for this work, I'm a little bit confused. Because when I think about a world model in the self-driving context, I almost imagine like a video game, if you will. Like a place where there's, you know, physics and people moving around and interactions and so forth.

• 39:07Speaker 03

  When you're doing world models for brains, what does that look like? Or does it actually look like anything? Or is it just code?

• 39:16Speaker 04

  So it's what a world model looks like is that, so in the self-driving world, instead of pattern matching on a previous scenario, it creates an internal representation of how the world works, you know, and so that it can anticipate new scenarios. So similarly, you know, instead of a road, our road is essentially the patient or the human, exactly. But what we do is that we take all of these inputs ranging from your genetics, from your blood, your brain images and your brain tissue, and we fuse those into a single internal representation of each patient. So actually, each patient is represented essentially as a 512 dimensional vector.

• 40:00Speaker 03

  Okay, so this boils down to a series of numbers in a list.

• 40:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. It's a lot like, a lot like the kind of current large language model architectures.

• 40:09Speaker 03

  Not to be a total brat, but vectors are, I think, one-dimensional tensors. Do you actually use vectors or do you use higher-dimensional tensors?

• 40:19Speaker 04

  So the actual model architecture is at the kind of core is the transformer in the same vein as ChatGPT Claude and other LLMs. So it leverages the flexibility of those transformers, but it has several innovations that are unique in the bio. The first is that each data actually gets its own encoder, each data type, so it's multimodal. And that maps it to the shared kind of mathematical space. So blood, brain and genetics can all kind of live in the same kind of mathematical language. And then we fuse all the data layers into a single unified vector that represents each patient. The way you think about it is essentially like a patient fingerprint.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 40:54Speaker 04

  Right? And then the last thing we do is we use what we call contrastive alignment. So this is actually a new architecture. We use a form of it. That's a new architecture that's only been developed in the last eighteen months. Which is called contrastive multimodal learning. So unlike your kind of classic contrastive alignment, which, you know, image models often use, and that only keeps two types of, the kind of data that two types of data agree on. Ours keeps three things, which is, you know, what the blood knows on its own, what the brain knows on its own, and then what's the synergy between both? That combines them. And in biology, the synergy is huge because it's where kind of real signal hides, where no kind of single measurement can capture. And so lastly, once we have the fingerprint, then we freeze it.

• 41:39Speaker 04

  And we can build a bunch of task heads on top of it that answers specific biological questions, like who is going to respond to this drug? What does their brain look like? And what is cool is that this form of training, because we're using masking, actually starts to learn tasks that it was never explicitly trained on.

• 41:56Speaker 03

  Can you explain masking for me in that context?

• 41:58Speaker 04

  It's a bit similar to kind of how AI does masking, right? Which is that, so in large language models, AIs do masking by actually, you know, hiding a word and then predicting what that word is. For us, we have all types of data, you know, blood, genetics, brain. And what we do is we can hide one type of data, and the model trains by learning what data type is missing and how to fill that in. So as a result, it can start learning tasks that it wasn't taught. So we have seen that our own model with high accuracy can actually accurately reconstruct brain activity from blood alone. And that's actually not a task that it was asked to do. It's just a simply emergent property of this training task.

• 42:44Speaker 03

  I love AI. It always finds some new way to delight me and make me excited about the world. Okay, so you went from the first iteration of the company, Verge Genomics, we're going to identify candidate drugs and test them and bring them to market. And now you've realized that your technology is probably a better tool for other people to go out there and do the very expensive guessing and trials work. It makes a lot of sense to me. Who is the the target customer for this new iteration of Verge?

• 43:11Speaker 04

  So it's really anyone that's developing a drug, right? It's the whole pharmaceutical business. Companies can work with us essentially three ways. They can first come to us with a specific problem and we can run our targets against it. We can also directly license insights or targets that we've already found, or we can license the data and models directly. So for example, if you're a company with a phase two drug in schizophrenia and you're like, holy cow, there's my drug, this drug is behaving differently in every patient. You can come to us and we can help you pick out which patients to roll on your next trial that actually respond to your drug. And let you design a much smaller and cheaper clinical trial.

• 43:52Speaker 03

  That's so many ways to make money and the companies that you're going to have as customers are famously large and frankly, quite wealthy, which is good for you guys. Do you charge for this on like a per case basis? It sounds a little bit custom on the pricing side, if that makes sense.

• 44:08Speaker 04

  So we have, you know, we've done two major partnerships already, actually with Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca, Lexion. Those are target discovery partnerships or a show more traditionally structured. So it's in those cases, it was a 25 to 42 million upfront. With then milestones that total up to anywhere between 700 to 800 million dollars each. As a very traditional therapeutic structure, now we've opened up new platform models as well. That allow you to engage with it more kind of how you might used to be engaging with kind of a direct model license. Right? So, you know, companies like, you know, in the space like Chai and Noah Tech have done kind of these multi-year licenses to pharma companies. We also work with small

• 44:53Speaker 04

  Our biotechs as well in a kind of platform as a service format where they have actually a specific question. They can come to us and we can kind of answer on a on a question by question basis.

• 45:04Speaker 03

  The deals you're talking about back when you raised your series B in 2000, I think it was late 21. You said that the company had announced a $706 million partnership with Lilly to quote, develop new treatments for. Oh, hell, oh, ALS. There you go, using this platform. So how did that? Contract go? Did the milestones come in? Because one thing I noticed, Alice, is that you guys haven't raised money in a while. Which is fine, but also may imply that there was some revenue along the way.

• 45:32Speaker 04

  We did. Well, we haven't announced publicly any additional funding, but we have done those actually a few major deals. And we've raised some unannounced funding in between. Those partnerships are also did provide some milestones. So Lilly actually in 2024 announced that. They actually optioned two of those targets into their internal ALS pipeline. So it's actually the first. AI derived targets that were actually internalized into their ALS pipeline, which we're.

• 46:00Speaker 03

  Well done.

• 46:01Speaker 04

  Quite proud of. And one thing that was actually really quite striking from that partnership was going into the partnership. Lilly had said to us, you know, even if 20% of these targets validate in the lab. We would be very, that would far surpass our expectations. And we actually found at the end of that partnership that 83% of those targets actually validated. In wet lab experiments. So that kind of far surpassed even our own internal expectations and starts to create this kind of surplus bullpen. Of targets that we can continue licensing.

• 46:33Speaker 03

  And by targets, we're talking about ideas for drugs that might solve. Okay, cool. Sorry.

• 46:38Speaker 04

  Well, there it's actually like, what are the proteins to go after with a drug that might cause disease?

• 46:44Speaker 03

  The target proteins to go after to help either reduce or resolve ALS in this case.

• 46:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly, yeah.

• 46:49Speaker 03

  Ah, okay. So you guys are focused on the brain, which I think is fantastic because I'm a big fan of having my brain and working and all those good things. And also, I would like to live for a long time with my mental faculties. But I'm curious about the idea of taking in people's information, tissue samples, and applying AI to them. Does that work in a similar way, for example, in my liver? Or is this more of a system that is set up because the brain works a certain way and it wouldn't be applicable to other organs in my body?

• 47:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. And there are other companies that are doing something similar in cancer. The reason it is such a big problem and so hard in the brain, though, is because the brain is the hardest organ to access. So pretty much in any other disease, in cancer, in fact, it's standard of care to get your tumor kind of taken out, to get it analyzed. In IBD, you often do that. That most tissues, you can actually go and take a sample of that tissue, and the patient can continue living. With a brain, you simply can't do that. So being able to accurately reconstruct what's happening in the brain has been one of the field's longest standing challenges. And it's why I think, you know, neuroscience is

• 48:03Speaker 04

  long behind cancer by 10, 20 years. And it's really, honestly, probably the biggest driver of mortalities in the next generation as we get all get older, will really be Alzheimer's disease and dementias.

• 48:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I'm, I mean, I'm at the age now when my parents are in their mid 70s, and you start to have thoughts and fears about how they're going to do and what we can do for them and how to care for them. So this is, this is very apropos to, you know, things that are near and dear to my heart. One thing, though, that I've heard from basically every AI-ish CEO that I've spoken to, and I include you in that bucket, of course, is that if they have more compute and they have more data, they can do a much better job over time. It's kind of a standard, kind of like path that direction. Does that same relationship apply to the second version of Converge? And also, like, the understanding which proteins in the brain we want to go after? Or is there a limit that is different from other applications of AI in that context?

• 49:00Speaker 04

  So actually, what we have found so far, we actually have not deliberately chased parameter counts in calc yet. Because the biggest gains we've seen have actually come from scaling data and modalities. So it's not about making the AI bigger, it's about feeding it the right pair of data. But you kind of contract like something interesting between kind of text models and bio models are of course in text models. Scaling just works, you have this kind of, everyone believes that if you just make it bigger and it gets better. But you know, the reason why that is in text, and I don't think most people realize why is because when you're actually training. A text model, you're predicting the next word in a sentence. And that task inherently forces the model to learn everything about reasoning.

• 49:45Speaker 04

  For example, reasoning, code, tone, everything. But when you interact with the real world like biology, self-driving robotics, it's much, much harder because first of all, there's no single task. We're predicting the next thing can teach you whether or not a drug works, in which patients, whether it be toxic. Most biological data are actually proxies, so they're kind of shadows of what's happening. And most biological data is observational, but you're actually wanting to ask counterfactual questions like what if I take this drug? What will happen? And kind of analogous is kind of self-driving again because you know, Waymo didn't solve self-driving by collecting just simply more and more camera footage. They've used sensors, cameras, LiDAR, radar, maps, et cetera.

• 50:30Speaker 04

  And so biology is the same, you really need to fuse modalities rather than just scaling one. And but it's even harder because you don't have a perfect geometric representation of the world like LiDAR does. Biology doesn't have that kind of same sensor. So the takeaway in biology is that scale really only matters when it's pointed in the right data and the right direction. Um, so it's not to say that scaling doesn't matter, but as I think in the beginning, the gains will come from kind of combining the right data sets and scaling the right data.

• 50:59Speaker 03

  So then would a major unlock for the company then being able to access more brain tissue samples to expand your underlying data?

• 51:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, and that's what we're doing, not just more brain tissue, but more modalities. So on the roadmap for us next is bringing in imaging, bringing in proteomics, bringing in even longitudinal data so that we can not only predict a snapshot of the brain, but we can actually create a virtual model of the patient in time where we can actually run forward each person, see when they'll get the disease, how the disease will.

• 51:32Speaker 03

  Ah, wait, no, I don't like, no, wait a minute. Everything you've set up to this point has been fantastic, but then you just told me you're gonna tell me when I'm gonna die and I don't, I don't know, Alice, if I'm on board for that one.

• 51:44Speaker 04

  More and knowledge is power.

• 51:46Speaker 03

  Is it though? I, sometimes ignorance really is bliss. Okay, but if, if I'm being serious, if you were to tell me you're at risk of getting Alzheimer's or whatever dementia early, then I presume that I could take at least some steps to limit that risk and manage it. Okay, that, that makes a lot of sense.

• 52:08Speaker 04

  And Alzheimer's disease, a lot of people think it's actually not even just finding the right drug, it's actually being able to intervene early enough to change your trajectory. So that becomes even more important.

• 52:18Speaker 03

  But I want to get back to the, the, the data point. So scanning parameters not that important, having the right data very important. Is there, when it comes to tech, you can scan books, right? It's a little bit easier to talk about than deceased people's brains. But is there a, a good pipeline of fresh deceased brains that you can, if you wanted to, access, collect more and then expand your data sets over time as you learn more and tune your own models?

• 52:42Speaker 04

  I mean, that's really what we still spent the kind of last 10 years building is that end to end infrastructure and it really took us 10 years. And people always ask, you know, why aren't just big pharma companies doing this themselves?

• 52:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:54Speaker 04

  I mean, the real answer, it's not impossible, but it will just simply take a very long time and it's very hard. And so it's really the kind of unsexy blood, sweat and tears that we put in over the last 10 years that have created the moat for us.

• 53:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:07Speaker 04

  And it's how we'll continue scaling these data sets. And what's exciting is that we are seeing scaling laws in our data, right? Where we're and they're nonlinear and increase as we add samples. And we haven't even started working on scaling the the compute and the parameters yet. So there's still massive headroom for growth.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  Okay, so basically you've done all the hard work to have a pipeline of of useful brain tissue samples. Other companies don't have that. So not only are you ahead of the game in your particular niche, but also you have a unique advantage of having more data. Okay, I want to spin the clock and look ahead a bit, like like not this year, not next year, but a couple of years down down the road. I think some people have been impatient incorrectly, but impatient with the pace of medical progress in the AI era. I think people have been seeing, I've seen coding agents do so well and say, hey, why aren't we there with drug discovery and health yet? So if you could take a like a 50% confidence interval guess about where both Verge is and other companies in the bio AI space, where are we in five years? What have we unlocked?

• 54:08Speaker 03

  And are we going to feel that difference in our kind of lived medical reality?

• 54:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think even with some of the text models, right? That progress all happened very quickly. And there was also ongoing, you know, work that was going on behind the scenes that enabled it. I think with every technology, it's always a process of iteration and learning and facing setbacks and then learning from that. And then once things start clicking, right? Progress gets made exponentially. Right now, I think that what's really exciting is just some of these transformer based models and these world models are just performing in ways that we didn't expect. Even with us, we're starting to see, you know, performance on tasks like brain prediction directly from blood that it wasn't trained on

• 54:58Speaker 04

  that are far exceeding current clinical tools. We're seeing, you know, prediction of responders. And so what I see in five years. Is really, I think AI will come into the pipeline at multiple points from multiple different models, right? I think you'll have models that are able to, you know, predict, hey, what patients will respond to what drugs? And I think the future vision for that is you can have a continuous monitoring of your health state, right? You can figure out, you know, when you're going to get disease, when you want to intervene. And that really brings us to a world of true personalized medicine, where we're no longer just thinking of Alzheimer's disease as one disease, but we're thinking about hundreds of diseases, where you might just have one, one form of a disease, and you can really then seek

• 55:42Speaker 04

  a therapy that perfectly matches to the specific disease that you have as Alex, or that I have as, as Alice. And that's really the way to start extending, you know, health span and age span is really by being able to address these chronic diseases.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  So when we sequence the human genome, it cost like a bajillion dollars and took a while. Now we can do it for like, four dollars or something crazy. What you're describing to me sounds fantastic, but I'm curious about the price curve. And if you think it's going to become something that is accessible to people, let's say on Medicaid, versus with all of our friends and their concierge doctors will get it first, but will it make it down to the people that are less resourced?

• 56:25Speaker 04

  Well, so I, in terms of pricing, the thing I always think about is why are drugs so expensive now? It's expensive because it costs five billion dollars on average all in to develop a single drug, right? And so that's reflected in the price. Why does it cost five billion dollars? Actually, the vast majority of that five billion is getting spent on failures. It's because nine out of the 10 attempts fail at the last stage in the most expensive stage. So if you can actually be able to reduce that, even by a small amount, that has huge implications for how much is saved. And that ultimately is going to be the thing that drives down the cost. Of prices sustainably is actually being able to be much more efficient at how you develop drugs.

• 57:09Speaker 04

  So that's really what I see as the long term solution is if you can perfectly with accuracy predict kind of which drug will succeed, it goes from five billion to really, you know, tens, tens of millions to really get a drug all the way through. And so you can see orders of magnitude reduction kind of then get pulled through to actual, you know, what the average consumer will see in and how much it's paid for drugs.

• 57:31Speaker 03

  So as we have better selection of possible drugs, we'll have a lower failure rate. Therefore, we'll spend less money spinning our wheels, spend less time wasting there. We can therefore offer better, more targeted drugs at a lower price point, keeping this in everyone's medicine cabinet, to use an analogy, I suppose. That's fantastically good news. I'm pretty excited about all this. Is there anything that like you're worried about that might not work out? Because this all feels like you have the tools, you have the technology, you're going to have the data, and off to work you go. But are there any like, science risks left?

• 58:03Speaker 04

  I mean, I think the biggest thing I always like to warn people about is that, you know, people always like to be very reductionist about how they view technologies.

• 58:12Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 58:12Speaker 04

  You know, they always like to say, oh, you know, this drug has failed in clinical trials. AI doesn't work at all. Right? And rarely in the case of any transformational technology has the first attempt ever been the blockbuster success. In fact, actually, transformational technologies get built because people continue to learn from setbacks. They feed that back into their platforms and then they improve from those. And so I think the biggest risk is more of a sought like a human one, which is that we kind of lose interest in AI or in the application of AI in healthcare just because we kind of face one setback and we generalize that about the promise of the whole technology.

• 58:54Speaker 04

  But I think that technology is built through iteration and transformation and kind of continued persistence.

• 59:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I I hope that no one takes an early failure as indication that things don't work. I mean, if we believed that, we would never be in rockets, for example, as a species. Because if you go back to the early days of rockets, it wasn't exactly like they were coming out the assembly line and going straight up. They were not. So it takes a lot of time.

• 59:16Speaker 04

  And in pharma, there's this tendency, when you have a clinical trial failure, to essentially just look away and just move on to the next thing. And that's why when we had our clinical trial, which didn't pan out, instead of looking away, we published the details and results in detail. We took all the data and we fed it back in the platform and we said, hey, this taught us a really hard-won lesson about what's important in this space. It gave us all the data to be able to address that challenge. Now let's feed it in, make the next version, actually address what we missed, and then actually build an even better kind of tool on top of that.

• 59:50Speaker 03

  Well, you have me feeling both optimistic and excited, because I'm starting to reach the age in which my body gets dings and scrapes and nicks and needs a little bit of help here and there. So I'm really glad that you're working on this problem and other companies are working on cancers and so forth, because who doesn't want to live forever, Alice, you know?

• 1:00:08Speaker 03

  All right, for folks who want to know more, it's no longer Verge Genomics, it's Verge Labs. What's the URL and is there a job you want to shout out to the audience in case the right candidate is tuned in?

• 1:00:17Speaker 04

  Verge labs dot com, V E R G E labs dot com. And we are always looking for great AI research talent. So if you are interested in AI and biology, give us a shout.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  How how hard is it to hire right now in that digital space?

• 1:00:33Speaker 04

  I know, it's crazy.

• 1:00:35Speaker 03

  No, I I'm actually, I'm actually curious, because I'm not sure if the people that are going to work for Anthropic are interested in the same problem space. So I'm kind of curious if your your focus gives you access to talent that might otherwise be absorbed by the major labs.

• 1:00:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's kind of in in the space. What is hard is finding the intersection of, you kind of have to ask, do you want AI? Do you want biology expertise? Because there's kind of folks in the frontier AI labs, and then there are folks with kind of biology training that have developed foundation models. We kind of sit in between both, so it's actually more about finding the unicorns that like are interested in both. So it's either people that have had deep frontier AI. Experience that may have had a personal experience really with one of these diseases. And so actually what we find that once we find those individuals, it's actually quite easy to recruit them because there's such a strong mission.

• 1:01:22Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:01:23Speaker 04

  Alignment and it's so kind of what we're doing is so differentiated from a lot of the other companies out there, but it's actually about finding those people that that have both.

• 1:01:31Speaker 03

  If you're curious founders, what people mean when they say mission, that is mission, not improving barber shop CMS phone call, a cold outreach response rates. All right. Alex, an absolute treat. Please come back on in six or eight months when you have more news. I really want to keep talking about what you're doing because I think it's fantastic. Thank you.

• 1:01:47Speaker 04

  Thank you so much, Alex.

• 1:01:48Speaker 06

  Thanks for watching This Week in Startups. If you liked this episode, check out more. If you're a startup founder, Founder University Cohort 13 kicks off this fall. It's a 12 week program that provides guidance on building your product, launching to real customers and pitching to investors. Top startups receive $25,000 or $125,000 in investment. Apply now at founder.university/twist. Already have traction? The Launch Accelerator invests $125,000 and connects you with 500 plus investors to help you raise your next round. Apply at launchaccelerator.co. If you're an accredited investor looking to gain access to quality deal flow, apply for Jason's Angel Syndicate at thesyndicate.com. We find two to three deals a month.

• 1:02:33Speaker 06

  And check out This Week in AI, Jason's experts only roundtable with top AI founders and operators every week. Find it thisweekinai.ai. Check out the TWIST ticker, our daily newsletter at thisweekinstarups.com/ticker. Follow the show on Instagram. Follow the show on X.com. This Week in Startups publishes three days a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 5:00 PM Central Time. You can submit an audio or video file question by emailing it to thisweekin.com.