Pod Insights How I Invest with David Weisburd E360: The Hardest Lessons I Learned from Building 4 Unicorns About this episode What if the biggest breakthroughs in biotech don’t come from more capital—but from building better systems for innovation?
In this episode, I sit down with Errik Anderson, biotech entrepreneur and founder behind multiple billion-dollar companies, to discuss how building infrastructure, not just drugs, is reshaping the future of healthcare. Errik explains why most biotech companies fail the same way, how reducing the cost and time of experimentation unlocks more innovation, and why staying private longer enables better long-term decision making. We also explore compounding in biotech, the limits of scaling creativity, and how conviction, mission, and talent ultimately determine which companies change the world.
Transcript 12,216 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 David Weisburd? So you just announced your Series E, which came in at a billion dollars. So you now have another unicorn. What number unicorn is this?
0:09 Speaker 01 This will be my fourth, actually. Yeah, yeah. This is of companies where I've been the founder or the co-founder. That's right.
0:15 David Weisburd? And what makes Alloy Therapeutics different than the other three companies?
0:18 Speaker 01 It's a true biotech infrastructure company that is taking a very long view of both services, technologies and the drugs that flow from that. So we're looking at the entire value chain from early-stage drug discovery all the way through to commercialization. And we're putting together the pieces so that we can coordinate that ecosystem of innovation from what happens in our academic labs all the way through to servicing pharma and late-stage clinical. And we started in one particular area and we've expanded more and more to be able to touch the whole supply chain. What distinguishes Alloy from some of my other companies is it is a biotech infrastructure company, meaning that we're going to touch a whole bunch of different pieces and just be the faithful servant and supporter of hopefully all of pharma and all of biotech as we go forward.
0:58 David Weisburd? And I call you often on the podcast, but specifically, I love this concept. You built the business that you wanted to work in for the rest of your career. How's that played out? This was something you told me in 2019, I think. This was like one of your main organizing mechanisms for Alloy Therapeutics. How's that played out?
1:14 Speaker 01 That's a philosophy we have to kind of build the business that you want to work in. It's, it a little bit comes from our single-family office where we realized as we've been building companies for 15, 20, 25 years now, that when you invest in companies, you write a check and then you spend your time making sure that your investment goes well. But as an operating business and as a builder, what I've learned is it's far more effective for us to think about where do we spend our time? And then our capital and everything flows from that. So it first comes from this principle of, well, what are the problems in the world that we think are worth solving? What engages us intellectually? Where do we feel like we have an edge in being able to do something useful? And so the vision for Alloy was the world needs great tech-enabled services specifically. So really cutting-edge technology that constantly is refined and gets better over time.
1:57 Speaker 01 And it needs to be wrapped in a service because the vast majority of folks only discover one drug or two drugs for their whole, for their whole company. Most venture-backed companies only end up with one or two drugs. But you still want to have the absolute best world crushing services and technology at your fingertips. And so at Alloy, we think we're good at what we do. We have, at this point, 22 drugs in the clinic already at Alloy, over 100 partnered drug programs. And we feel almost an obligation to do a good job of discovering drugs for other folks. So we're good at it. We enjoy it. And I will say it's really, really hard. So it's almost started laughing when you're like, the business that you want to work at.
2:35 David Weisburd? Easier said than done.
2:36 Speaker 01 Easier said than done is a good point. It's like, I'm sure some people have jobs that like every day is just like, it's all fun and sunshine and rainbows. Discovering and developing drugs is very, very hard. As anyone in biotech or pharma will tell you, it's deeply rewarding when it works. But at the same time, there's nothing about it that's easy.
2:53 David Weisburd? Another quote that I have quoted you on several times is, on your worst day, if somebody comes in with a suitcase of $200 million, $300 million in cash, it's hard to say no.
3:02 Speaker 01 Hard to say no for me, hard to say no for you.
3:04 David Weisburd? This was a decade ago. So let's call it 2 billion to 3 billion today. We're talking about the ups and downs and how when somebody comes to you with a deal, it's hard to say no, although obviously if it's not.
3:12 Speaker 01 How do you continually say yes? How do you create opportunities so you can say yes to the thing that they really want? So if what they really want is access to a technology, and somebody's coming in trying to buy your whole company, we'll stop and listen and say, what is it you really want? Do you really want to own this exclusively and then have the problem of managing the team and also the problem of managing future innovation? Or is it really you just want to own the one or two or three drugs that we already have that might have used the technology? I think mostly what pharma wants is drugs that really work. I think the ability to maintain a competitive advantage and think about other drugs that look like that. Sort of sometimes you want to own the platform. We can accommodate that in a way that our partners will be happy. So you can give certain
3:56 Speaker 01 restrictions around what other things are we allowed to do after the partnership, perhaps? You can give target exclusivity, you could give domain exclusivity, we could give time bound exclusivity.
4:06 Speaker 01 So yeah, someone coming along and saying, hey, here's so much money that you want to walk away. I would, I don't want to walk away because I think we've got a lot of work to be done.
4:14 David Weisburd? That's kind of the test. That's how you test your thesis. Is this the business that you want to work in the rest of your life? So another way, is there amount of money that could, that you would sell for? And if the answer is no, although obviously there's always these crazy amounts. But if generally it's no, that means that is the business.
4:28 Speaker 01 There are crazy numbers where you're like, oh my gosh, especially for my shareholders, my employees and everyone else. Of course you would have to say yes to something, but I would, what I know is on the other side of that number, the acquirer still owns the problem of future innovation. And that acquirer is going to be sophisticated enough to know that it's, it's an enormous challenge to wake up every single day and to create the right structures of how to manage people and how to manage future innovation. I think that's one of the challenges of innovation is that you can't just throw more money at the problem and get more innovation. You can't just scale up fundamentally creative processes. It has to be a way that you reward people for their innovation and you make them feel safe and supported. And I mean, we don't even have a bulletproof playbook on it.
5:09 Speaker 01 This is more of the decentralized model of how we support really creative people and building new technologies and doing new drug discovery. So if someone came with a sufficiently large check, I would listen and I would try to engage in a conversation of, well, how do we give you everything that you want plus what we have? How do you let me and let us actually try to manage future innovation? And maybe there's a consortium model here. Maybe, maybe you have a vision for how massive amounts of capital can accelerate what we're doing. Great. I would love to have that conversation. What I believe is on the other side of that, there's going to be more opportunities to create even more value and more medicine if we collaborate with others. So we shouldn't just.
5:41 David Weisburd? I tried to stump you with a binary choice. You gave me a framework. We've known each other since 2010, convinced me to go talk to business school. That's where we first met. And we've had a lot of these, I guess, not really late nights, but early morning kind of philosophical discussions. And we started in the mid 2010s, probably 2014, 2015, talking about this concept of the perpetually private company. Palantir at that point had not gone public. I think it was like 10 years in or something. SpaceX was still probably seven, eight years in. How have your thoughts evolved around this perpetual private company? Does it make sense? Are there private companies that should stay private for long, forever?
6:16 Speaker 01 There are some companies that probably should stay private. That there are, there's an advantage to being perennially private. So I think it's still a similar philosophy, which is you should go public when the value of being public is, is greater than the value of being private. And for a lot of companies, going public is the liquidity event for their investors, or it is a necessary access to capital, sort of being public. You're tapping into other things. Alloy can go public at some point, and, but I would evaluate it through that lens. At what point does it make for us, make sense for us to be public? Is it more valuable to be public than private? As a private company, we enjoy being private because we are super flexible. We don't carry the overhead of being public. There's a lot of decisions that you can make as a private company that you can as a
7:01 Speaker 01 public company and just being more nimble. But at some point, there's an advantage to us having a conversation with a million, two million, three million people. It's like, I'm jealous of the public companies that are biotech companies that, when they start talking about their philosophies on what is, what their capabilities are, whether they're going to be around in five or 10 years, that as a public company, you have a really good sense for that. I think that all over the world, as a global bioeconomy, it's a lot easier for our international partners to look at a public company and, and really get a sense for who you are, what you do. As a private company, there's always this question of like, oh, like, let's get to know each other and really try to figure out how big you are. Like on the financing, we have, we haven't raised money since 2022 because our team has executed like maniacs to be a successful private company.
7:44 Speaker 01 We just closed this recent round of financing at a good valuation as a reflection of the value that we had continued to be creating. And now we're thinking out to the future of, oh my gosh, if we 10x this again, or even 10x it twice from here, what would that look like in terms of access to capital and access to opportunity and really helping the world and scaling what we can do around the world?
8:03 David Weisburd? Expert calls have always been one of the most powerful ways to build conviction. But today, investors are asked to cover more companies, move faster, and do it with leaner teams. With AlphaSense AI-led expert calls, their TGS call service team sources experts based on your research criteria and lets the AI interviewer get to work. The magic is in the AI interviewer, purpose-built and knowledgeable-based information to conduct high-quality, context-rich conversations on your behalf.
8:30 David Weisburd? Acting as a trusted extension of your team. Then they take it one step further. Your call transcripts flow natively into your AlphaSense experience and become queryable, searchable and comparable. So your primary insights plug directly into earnings prep, digital work streams and pitch books with zero tool switching. And with AlphaSense expert call services, the AI-led expert calls are just one option because we know the importance of a hybrid expert research approach. AI for coverage and efficiency, humans for complexity and conviction. It's the institutional edge that scales research without scaling headcount. For hedge funds, that means validating thesis assumptions across dozens of experts before earnings instead of a handful. For private equity, it means faster pre-IOI scans and deeper commercial diligence.
9:13 David Weisburd? For investment banks and asset managers, that means pulling real operator perspectives straight into models and sector positioning without disconnected tools or manual handoffs. All of it lives inside the AlphaSense platform, trusted by 75% of the world's top hedge funds alongside filings, broker research, news and more than 240,000 expert call transcripts, turning raw conversations into comparable, auditable insight. Take advantage of AlphaSense AI-led expert calls now. The first to see wins, the rest follow. Learn more at alpha-sense.com/HowIInvest. And maybe it makes sense to go public. I have to be honest, my bias has been against the public markets. Obviously LPs don't necessarily want to hear that about DPI,
9:58 David Weisburd? but in general, I think most companies, most great companies should stay private as long as humanly possible. And I think we're starting to see an evolution of different vehicles and different solutions to liquidity while staying private. There's continuation vehicles that are coming from the buyout phase. By last measure, $110 billion in continuation vehicles, which is basically a secondary into a new pool of capital. That's allowing companies to stay private longer. The secondary market is starting to institutionalize. It went from kind of this black hole to this gray market to now you have like Charles Schwab and Goldman Sachs getting into this industry and really like providing more access. And now also you have these companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, which is a portfolio company
10:40 David Weisburd? raising these insane amounts of money privately comparable to the SpaceX IPO. I think it's probably going to be roughly about $30 to $50 billion. Also a company of mine, but I don't have any insight there. But.
10:52 David Weisburd? If the private market starts to catch up to a public market, why should a company go public?
10:56 Speaker 01 Well, if you can continue to get access to capital as a private company at good valuations, where everyone continues to see their investment go up, reflected on the fundamentals of the business. So not just like total hype, but you actually can kind of see a path to future cash flow. I'm a little bit provincial in my thinking. I do still think in terms of discounted cash flows and like building real businesses, real revenue, real profit eventually. That place where you can get access to capital and you stay private. I mean, for most companies, that's going to be, that's a great place to do it. Post GFC, right in 2010 ish, when we were all looking around and debating whether companies would stay private or go public. There was a lot of liquidity crisis there of LPs who were unable to fund their capital calls into the privates. And remember back then, we're like, oh my gosh, we think this is the end of privates.
11:40 Speaker 01 It's like private equity is going to get smaller, maybe venture capital in these. But actually the opposite happened. The market became more sophisticated in its ability to underwrite. And I think as companies stayed private longer, we saw all the alpha flowing to those companies. So why was that? Being private allows you to have a conversation with investors in a deeply involved way where they can understand your business and stick with you across a time horizon that's more than a quarter or a year. And I imagine for a lot of public investors where their capital is flowing in and out all the time. Maybe it's in a mutual fund and kind of an extreme case. But even in hedge funds, right, that are very highly specialized in the biotech space, you always have this threat of redemptions in the capital coming out. As a private company, especially a private company that's
12:25 Speaker 01 profitable, say as a company like Alwad that's continued to scale as an EBITDA positive company. That allows us to have a conversation with our investors about how we put capital in and we compound over time. And being locked into a trajectory that says we're committed to a path that's going to play out in five, 10, 15 and 20 years. And being able to demonstrate that you have accretion in your business model, you have an accretive business model and you have, your stock price is going up over time because you're helping people get in and out of your stock, even in the private markets. Well, then why wouldn't you stick with that engine that compounds over time?
13:00 Speaker 01 I'm sure a lot of family offices have this problem, but so do large pools of capital. One of the challenges you have is when you have an exit, you've got to do something with that capital. It's like, don't give me, like, there's so many investors I talked to, especially on the family office side where they're like, no, no, I don't want you to sell your company. Like, can you just keep compounding it? And I wonder where-
13:15 David Weisburd? I think that's uniquely to your cap table, but-
13:17 Speaker 01 It's maybe a little bit unique to my cap, but I talked to a lot of other folks who have a similar issue. I mean, well, just look-
13:22 David Weisburd? Well, a thought experiment is like this, and this is how I think about my companies that go public. Okay, so I sell it, then what do I do? I paid 32% tax and then put in the S and P 500. You need to have a good answer to that second question. Warren Buffett said the number one consideration in investment is this opportunity cost. Well, it's opportunity cost, and sometimes opportunity cost could be getting into the next pre-seed company that could go 100x.
13:43 Speaker 01 Sure.
13:43 David Weisburd? In theory, at least, but you have to think about what am I doing with that capital? People just want this reinforcement, oh, I crystallized this 10x, which I think is kind of a simple way.
13:51 Speaker 01 Warren is a perfect example, like, so why aren't there more companies that look like Berkshire over time? Where he has, I mean, he's, he's sitting on a ton of cash right now, like, waiting to deploy. We'll see, we'll see what happens, right? The, but he has, on the behalf of his shareholders, he has solved the compounding problem to some extent.
14:07 David Weisburd? Structurally.
14:07 Speaker 01 Structurally, exactly. So why don't we see more companies like that, sort of large conglomerate companies with permanent capital? I wonder about that all the time. At Alloy-
14:17 David Weisburd? That's Bill Ackman, Bill Ackman's dream. That's what he's trying to do.
14:19 Speaker 01 It completely is, right? And it's, and it's, I think we all understand how amazing and how awesome that would be. And you'd love to just give someone $100 and have it just keep compounding forever. And you just check in, like, how's my investment? And it's just, it's doing great. We do see Alloy as a compounding engine. I mean, when I, when I think about Alloy, not just from a dollars and cents standpoint, although that should play out as well. But there are some things in cutting edge technologies where you, you compound your insights as much as your capital. And it's not just a synergy of one plus one equals two, or one plus one equals four. It's really, there are insights that only come from the intersection of, of the parts of the puzzle coming together. And biology is a complicated, multi-dimensional problem. Warren Buffett, if you, if you look back, right?
15:01 Speaker 01 How did he get, in the, in the last 40 years, he's, he's returned about 100 times his money, if my, if, if, if my data are correct. Okay, that's about a 14% compounded rate, which 14% doesn't seem like a lot for like a really high tech company or risky company. But if you told me you could give, like, you have an opportunity where I could put in $100 and you will make, give me 100 times my money in 40 years, I would do it in a heartbeat.
15:25 David Weisburd? Yeah.
15:25 Speaker 01 If I believe you.
15:26 David Weisburd? And tax is a big, tax is a big aspect of that. There's that whole retirement paradigm where if you put in a thousand dollars now and like 40 years, it'll be, it continues to compound. It breaks down in many different ways. One is people take it out, people don't hold. It's not a tax deferred way. So, so, but it does, the math does work. It's just there's so many nuances to that and how to execute it.
15:44 Speaker 01 One of the things we talk about at Albo is we reinvest 100% of our revenue back into innovation and access to innovation. And the reason why I can say that with such certainty is I know there will always be one more opportunity where we can leverage our technologies, our services to create a new drug. You know, may we live long enough that we've cured all disease that I'll be made a liar by the, like that statement, we continue to reinvest.
16:06 David Weisburd? We can no longer deploy.
16:07 Speaker 01 It kind of comes like, there is always something more we can deploy. And it's innovation and access to innovation as it relates to making medicine. But, but there's, there's always going to be a supply chain problem, even on the back end of a new drug that we've discovered, trying to reduce the cost, trying to increase the access around the world. I get excited about those problems. And so that's a, that's a statement we can make as a business that we are so fully committed to taking the knowledge that we have, the capital that we have, the resources that we have, and then trying to figure out what is the best way that we can use those, those resources to make an even better drug and even better technology that will lead to a better drug or even access to those drugs. So at the end of the day, maybe we're just like a big logistics company, just moving around drugs.
16:46 David Weisburd? My bias against public companies is the short-termism and also the implicit lack of control from founders. And obviously Google and Facebook has these super voting shares. Have you looked into that and looked in the, how do you make public companies function more like private companies?
17:00 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And I think the controlling class of stock is a really important one. It's more common in tech.
17:04 David Weisburd? Does it work in practice?
17:06 Speaker 01 I think it works in practice. I, I think it comes down to the quality of the leader and what do they believe?
17:11 David Weisburd? So it works both ways. Yeah. It's if somebody has control, it's two, two edged sword.
17:16 Speaker 01 Exactly. You could drive that, you could drive that car right off a cliff if you've got the wrong driver there.
17:20 David Weisburd? And I think also the market punishes that, at least historically, last time I looked at this, Meta was trading lower because Mark Zuckerberg had that premium. Maybe that's changed since then, but the market does not like control in the, in the hands of the founders.
17:33 Speaker 01 It's impossible to completely run that experiment, right? But does, does Mark take a near-term hit? Like the, the market today gives him a haircut, but he's going to win over the long run. And.
17:46 Speaker 01 For the right founder with control stock, who also surrounds him or herself with good people advising them and is mindful of what's happening in the world, you can make a lot of mistakes as a very, very profitable company that you have control of over. But if you integrate it as a learning model, I believe you'll win over the long run. If we look at some of the colossal mistakes, perhaps historically around acquisitions, like AOL Time Warner immediately comes to my mind. It's like, was that a good acquisition at the end of the day? Like, is everybody happy with the level of dilution that was taken through that merger? Not really. Public markets don't necessarily get these things right as well. And the short-termism that you talk about is a real challenge for public companies, obviously. The pressure that you feel as
18:30 Speaker 01 the management team, looking at your stock price every day, and really your employees and how you manage their psychology, it's how do you get outside of that trap? How do you stay focused around real value creation? It's a big challenge. In the biotech and the biopharma space, I think most people are not familiar with the control provisions in the stock class that Regeneron has. And so there's an incredible success story that the founders of the company had a special class of stock that gave them more control over that outcome than not. And so they were able to prevent an acquisition through that special control that they had. And that gave them the room to do the right things to invest in science over long time horizons. I mean, there were many different scientific
19:11 Speaker 01 bets that they placed that had to play out in a little bit longer time horizon and eventually were very correct in a lot of different technologies and have great drugs and a great pipeline. So they were able to kind of make it through that transition to being a very big, very successful pharma company without getting acquired, in part because they did have that.
19:27 David Weisburd? It's another way, the public markets, obviously, are extremely efficient, but they're extremely efficient in the short term. And they keep founders and management from doing the things that you need to do for the long term. They're just shortsighted.
19:38 Speaker 01 The world is changing really, really quickly. We think about OODA loops a lot. Does it ever come up with your folks that have observed, oriented, decided, and act? So John Boyd wrote the playbook around dogfighting for the US Air Force. And it's this principle of you have to observe what's happening in the world, you have to orient yourself to it, you decide, and then you act. And as a fighter pilot, if you can do that, if your OODA loop is shorter than your adversary, Your adversary is totally cooked, right? Because you can change and update. I saw that back when I was at Lehman Brothers Venture Capital during telecom deregulation in the first internet bubble. We saw this pattern where we could, I mean, it almost seemed like we could start a whole telecom company or telecom equipment company and start to get it financed faster than the
20:21 Speaker 01 incumbent telco could schedule their third meeting. Just like the OODA loops there were like kind of amazing. The pace of your decision making and your ability to make decisions and to be very rapid to adjust to market conditions is incredibly important. And sometimes as a public company, you can't do that because it functions a bit like a bureaucracy. It's like you have to bring constituents along. You are not the viceroy always in charge of, with absolute power of your decision making. And you have to bring folks along. You have to bring the markets along and your stock price can get punished if they don't understand what you're doing in the near term. Or perhaps they understand what you're doing in the near term. They just don't believe that it's worth the payout that might happen in year five or 10 and sort of thinking about it in an indefinite future. I think a lot about the temporal arbitrage of how do we make investments today?
21:06 Speaker 01 How do we tell stories today? How do we have conviction today about what the future will look like in an uncertain future? And the more indeterminate what's going to happen in the future, biotech, AI, sort of even regulatory policy, the threat of competition from foreign adversaries in our industry, these are all unknowns. And if you sit back and try to predict the future because you believe that the future will come with or without your intervention, I think you do get punished as a public company. You have a bureaucracy and effectively you're managing it. But how do you exert your will on the future so that you build the future that you want to live in? And you create the system or the technology or the drugs that you want to see exist and you've gotten, you change the industry to make sure the future that arrives is one
21:49 Speaker 01 that's efficient and is a learning model that allows us to make better drugs. And I mean, it's almost easier to do that as a private company where you have complete control.
21:59 David Weisburd? I've been curious about this. You started your first company, Atomab. You co-founded it while you were at Dartmouth and you weren't even a biotech background. You taught yourself and you learned through your master's program and created this phenomenal business. And you've just kept on creating businesses and creating the future that you wanted to see throughout your career. Do you believe in the great man in history? Or tell me about kind of your updated model.
22:19 Speaker 01 I believe in the great man or woman of history for sure. How much credit you ascribe to the agency of the individual or not, like fair, but at the heart of what we do at Alloy, I mean, this is the most important thing I ask the folks who work at Alloy is that you gotta believe that what we do matters. That like if you don't believe that what you do every single day, the care that you take at the bench, or the thought you put into the analysis you do, or the conversations we have with our partners, or paying attention to the problems of the pharma companies we work with, or the academics we work with. If you don't believe that what you do matters, this is not the place for you. And it's again, we're just not going to debate it. Like it's just, there's, there's no quarter here to sitting back and deciding like, oh my gosh, maybe it doesn't matter. And if I don't do this job, somebody else can do this job.
23:01 David Weisburd? Is there a way to weed through that during recruiting?
23:03 Speaker 01 I think we try. I mean, we do. A lot of it's just like looking someone in the eyes and trying to figure out other questions we can ask. We use various different sort of like personality or communication models. The part of our philosophy of recruiting is we try to tell people who we are.
23:18 David Weisburd? Anti-selling.
23:19 Speaker 01 Anti-selling a little bit. Like I love that you like who we are is like anti-selling. Like, yeah, I mean, it can be.
23:23 David Weisburd? Well, it could be to the wrong person. It is anti.
23:25 Speaker 01 Absolutely. It's, look, it's, it's hard to work at Alloy.
23:29 David Weisburd? Hi, my name's Eric.
23:31 Speaker 01 Like this job's gonna be terrible. Like, by the way, like, we're gonna ask more of you than anyone else has ever asked of you and try to hold you accountable. But hey, dirty secret, you're gonna have to hold yourself accountable because we're all too busy, you know, working on all of our things and trying to stitch it together. The, I do believe in the great man theory, the great woman theory of history, because people need to wake up in the morning and they need to believe that what they do matters. And if you don't believe that, I don't, I don't think you push the future into the place where you want to live or anyone else does. Now, how much of it is a single individual? You know, there's a lot of things in the world where you take out a single person and I don't know that that ever happens. One of, one of the things we do talk about is sort of the history of companies. This is, you and I've talked about this before, I'm sure.
24:13 Speaker 01 This idea that in the history of all mankind, humankind, every company has failed for the same reason, and it has failed because it ran out of money. Right? That's why the failure mode is always the same, but the success mode is highly idiosyncratic. It is of a moment in time with just the right people, with just the right macro environment, cost of capital, what the competition is doing, you know, is there a war going on overseas right now? And how it affects your gas prices and everything else? These are all the idiosyncratic things that sort of add up to the moment in time of a company that can be successful today.
24:44 Speaker 01 That requires the person and the people also being there and showing up to the office today to do the work that needs to be done today. And if you don't take advantage of that opportunity, or you don't build that thing, the moment will pass by, and that isn't necessarily that the moment will pass by and someone else will build the thing that you are building. I mean, do we think someone else would have built SpaceX in our lifetime if not for Elon? I don't think so. I don't think so. Very low chance. I think so. And by the way, like get someone on the podcast or get someone to try to make that case. And I want that, I want to build, I want to build a company with that person. The person who thinks they can do that and like truly believes it in their bones. Great, let's go do it. Let's, let's, you go do something and I'm here to support you. I would love to get behind that. Let's go do something great.
25:30 Speaker 01 Holding greatness in your mind of like what, like something that's like scary in the future that you want to see the future look like, and then having the will to go out and try to motivate, not only yourself, but others to build it is hard. It's just really hard. And you know, where we sit in this crossroads of biology, there's a lot of things that are super exciting in the biotech industry right now. But I don't believe if left to our own devices, all of those things will emerge. I think it does require great scientists, entrepreneurs who wake up every day, a little bit psychotic about doing the thing that needs to be done today. And if anything, it's even harder in this industry because we all have pretty good knowledge about where the competition lies. Like if you're working on a particular drug target, maybe you published it in your academic lab, and then maybe we saw 30 or 40 million dollars of venture capital go behind that, and we're aware of the target and what you're doing.
26:15 Speaker 01 And then all we know is that you went out of business. It's reasonable that like, maybe you collected some data that said that that was a bad drug target, or that there was something about your medical hypothesis, your scientific hypothesis didn't work out. We don't have perfect information, we just use it from the outside. That might set that biology back by five or 10 or 20 years. Right. There's, there's so many incredibly complicated problems that are at our fingertips today as an industry that you're constantly deciding which bet to place. If I only had $10 million, what's the drug target? Like, what's, what, what is the, what is the scientific problem that I want to go solve? And so I worry a lot about when we work on a drug program that if we screw it up, there might not be a second shot at it. And so we need to take me as, as the partner for our folks, the customers we work with.
27:00 Speaker 01 I want us to take really great care because there might not be a second or a third opportunity to go hit that in the next five, 10 years. Eventually we'll probably figure it out, but eventually it might happen a long time.
27:09 David Weisburd? It might use the water for the entire.
27:11 Speaker 01 It can muddy the water. I mean, look what happened with gene therapy or cell therapy or just kind of gene therapy in particular in these early days, like we had some, we had some problems with the technology and how we handled it and as an industry. And it did set us back a bit by maybe as much as a decade or so in where we're at today.
27:29 David Weisburd? Said another way, the entrepreneur that, let's say an entrepreneur decided to go after that in two years, every investor is going to be asking him this question, asking him or her, every potential high intelligent employee is going to ask him the same question. So you have all these frictions above and beyond starting a company, which itself is hard.
27:46 Speaker 01 Sure.
27:46 David Weisburd? So it's like, what target are you going to go after? Unless you're very passionate about this one target, you're going to go after something that has less friction.
27:52 Speaker 01 Right. And, and boy, we live in a crazy industry with biotech or biopharma because the time horizons of answering that question are years, if not decades. The amount of capital required historically has been 10, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. And so these are not small experiments and they're not ones that are, you've got a great feedback loop, like your OODA loop kind of stinks for drug development and drug discovery.
28:12 David Weisburd? There's no lean startup.
28:13 Speaker 01 There's no lean startup, although that is the alloy dream. That is our model, which is how do we help everyone operate a bit more lean? And truly to be committed to that, to, to reduce the cost of every single step of the process. We started in drug discovery and we started in antibodies. We've expanded into other types of biologics and ever increasingly we're doing more in pre-clinical and clinical development, but it's all towards an eye of how do we reduce the cost, shorten the timelines and increase the probability of success of every single inflection point with a goal towards making all of the revenue of answering a question. So the cost of answering a question smaller every time we do it and providing that service to the world. What you get in exchange for doing that is more innovation. I think that's what's not obvious to folks is if you have a million dollar experiment versus
28:57 Speaker 01 a $10 million experiment. As a field, we're just going to get more experiments, the less expensive they are. If you think of the bottleneck as the professionals doing the experiment. The professionals, but also the capital. I mean, biotech is- There's only so much risk taking capital. Exactly. Look, I mean, it's a specialist driven industry. Like it just, friends don't let friends invest in biotech. We talk about friends and families. We've done investments together. And like every time you do like that early stage, like friends and family round, there's, there should be no such thing as a friends and family round. But when we put money into our venture studio, we only invited colleagues and collaborators because it has to be people who are like- It's a way of diligencing your investors. Oh, it's more of like- So that they know what they're getting into. You know, if your mom asks you, because she's nice and she likes what you do, to
29:39 Speaker 01 like put money into your biotech fund, you're like, Mom, I really appreciate the support, but I don't know, this is the place where you- It's better just to grant her shares and- It's, I mean, this is, and I say that jokingly, sort of- There's only so much- Do I have money in the venture studio? No, I don't think I even let my mom- There's only so much pressure you could take as a human being. Totally. Losing mom's money is not ideal. We need to diversify as a family here. But no, it's because it's a deeply specialist driven. You look at specialists just on the hedge fund side and the crossover side and the venture capital side, like this is an area where the reason why it's driven by specialists is in part because of the complexity of the science and also the time horizons. It's just these compounding complexity. Whereas if we're building a software company, at least we have the advantage of it being something that we might use ourselves.
30:24 Speaker 01 Like you can, you can experience a software product and get a bit of an intuitive sense of whether it's useful. And if we've got a new CRM that competes with HubSpot, like I use HubSpot, like I can sort of experiencing that as an investor, someone can come to me and be like, hey, this is going to be better. Well, how would it be better? It's going to have all the features, then it's going to be one tenth the cost. Okay, great. Like if that was the pitch in biotech, like that would be pretty easy. Like I've, I've got your drug that today is $100,000 and it's going to work and it'll only cost 10,000. Now, the problem is that pitch, if you give it to me today as a biotech investor- Well, that drug won't be approved for at least a decade because of the process of how we run clinical trials today. And you kind of don't know what competition will look like in a decade. Like, a lot of things can change in 10 years. Maybe that first drug has gone
31:07 Speaker 01 generic, and then the generic competition cuts the price by 90% also. There's just, there's a lot of things can happen in 10 years.
31:13 David Weisburd? So is there a rational case for investing in biotech to get today?
31:17 Speaker 01 Absolutely. I think, and it maybe it comes down to time horizons. So I, how do you get in early? How do you invest in, how do you, how do you get into deals that no one else can get into? One of our philosophies in our family office is you want to own someone that no one else has. So sometimes something that's patented, is that super obvious? Like, a patent is something that you can own something that no one else has. You defend your IP. A brand, the New York Yankees, no one else gets to own the Yankees.
31:43 David Weisburd? It's like an NFT.
31:44 Speaker 01 It's like an NFT. Yeah, sure. It's this.
31:46 David Weisburd? That's the best argument that I've heard about sports teams, because I went deep into this. I interviewed Cass from Christopher Zuck. There's parts of me that are conservatives, investors. There's parts of me that are very gung ho as an entrepreneur. But when I see an asset bid up, like a sports team by 10x over the last couple of decades, I'm like, is this not a greater fool's theory? And the best argument that I've heard about that is that there's 30 NFTs in a specific league, and it's a index of billionaires and decade billionaires. If there's going to be more decade billionaires in the future, there's going to be more demand for these 30 NFTs, and they're going to bid up the price. There's also obviously an economic argument and cash flow, media rights, all those. But this NFT in scarcity is an interesting argument.
32:24 Speaker 01 We also have a sports team and a sports league.
32:26 David Weisburd? You want to talk about it?
32:27 Speaker 01 Happy to talk about it. Happy to track back and see the analogies in biotech perhaps. But the, if you look at the big four of the United States, and like, the most expensive teams on it, I'm not sure that's like an NPV positive. Like, just there on the, like, the value, almost the equity.
32:41 David Weisburd? Not from a DCF perspective.
32:42 Speaker 01 Yep. It has to be an equity value play, right?
32:44 David Weisburd? Yeah.
32:44 Speaker 01 And so what, why does the equity value of an NFT rise? Like, isn't that like, sort of the rarity? It's like, I don't know, like, all the Monets that were already painted, they're worth more today than they were 50 years ago. Like, why is that? They're the same. Like, the product is the same, the way that you experience.
32:58 David Weisburd? They're collectible of sorts.
32:59 Speaker 01 They're collect. There's, there's a reason why it's worth more, right? Because it, because it's unique. I think the trade in sports today. I mean, obviously, we think a lot about AI in ML. We think a lot about software. We think a lot about this in the in the field of drug discovery and development and incredibly exciting things that are happening in our labs and around the world. But I think about it a lot for our sports team as well. And so you you look at what is the value of live entertainment? And in a world where we are awash with even better AI-generated entertainment, I predict that we will value something that's real and tangible more, that we as humans, the experience like that that stirring that you have in your heart when you read something that a human wrote, where you you experience a play, or you look
33:42 Speaker 01 at a painting that you know was made by someone who's real, is that there's a whole internal story in your own mind and your own heart that connects you with that in a way that if you know that it's made by AI, it can still be is equally beautiful. Like you can experience it in a way that like, maybe it's wonderful, but the fact that there's no human there, you're just going to feel differently about it. And our experience, we experience life through a temporal lens. Like, we we consume our reality through time. Like, this this experience we're having today, there's no like, we're both spending hours of our day for this, preparing for it and otherwise. And we only have one life to live. And the true, the the only true currency that we have that is scarce is our time.
34:19 David Weisburd? Venture capital in biotech. Where is it at today? Where are the opportunities? And where can VCs still make money in biotech?
34:28 Speaker 01 Great question. The venture capital in biotech looks like venture capital in general, which is the the funds have gotten bigger. And it's logical why that happens. We talk about this a lot, you know, all of us do, which is if you're successful and you've got $100 million fund, well, then you earn the right to have a $200 million fund. And if you're successful, you're in the right to have a $500 million fund. There's just this inevitable growth that if you're good at what you do, you have a bigger and bigger funds. In biotech, there's a few exceptions to that. Atlas is a fund that has always had discipline to say that that there's like a right size of fund. I deeply respect them for that. That the the those partners, they they believe this is right scale to the number of partners they have and the amount of money they can deploy at the benchmark of biotech.
35:10 Speaker 01 They do a great job. They, you know, funds wax and wane, and it's a power law model, or even like, you look at an exit like Moderna, it's like, did we get to like a third power law there, like two powers? I mean, that was such like a black swan event. But these are, these are power law exits in in biotech. It takes a very strong person to say, this is the right size fund, and I'm not going to have an I an AUM-driven model like Benchmark.
35:33 David Weisburd? Yeah, right.
35:35 Speaker 01 Sorry, you said benchmark and like they set the benchmark and now gets upon like, yes, just like benchmark. So, but let's unpack why benchmark looks the way it does. We can, you know this as well as anyone else and I don't want to speak for them. But I, one of the things that I observe is that they also have a lot of their own capital in it.
35:49 David Weisburd? Yep.
35:49 Speaker 01 So it's a little bit like your super successful hedge fund friend that at some point wakes up and is like, I'm going all personal.
35:56 David Weisburd? During family office.
35:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
35:57 David Weisburd? Like what's better than 20, 25% carry is 100% carry on your own money.
36:01 Speaker 01 Right. And so why would you ever do that? Well, that also bumps into the gravity of the, the quality of the opportunities that you can source and manage. At some point, there's just a limit to that. You look at like rent tech and the medallion funds, there's like, it can't be a $60 billion fund. There's, there's a size of that.
36:16 David Weisburd? I don't know if anyone's ever run the math on that, which is, let's say you could be a $700 million fund with management fees and carry, and let's say you could get it 2X, let's say 2 to 2.5X. Is it smarter to do a $300 million fund and put in 50 million or 100 million of your own money?
36:31 Speaker 01 It's.
36:31 David Weisburd? It's a math question, but I don't know if anyone's actually run that.
36:34 Speaker 01 They put it down.
36:35 David Weisburd? Yeah. I'm not surprised.
36:36 Speaker 01 You can talk to some folks in our venture studio team and otherwise, we, there is, there is an optimal sized fund. If you believe in what you're doing, like if you believe in yourself.
36:43 David Weisburd? If you believe you have alpha, then there's actually a financially greedy disposition to fund size.
36:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, I like the way you say that, like a financially greedy. So, so take that in biotech.
36:53 David Weisburd? Long-term greedy.
36:54 Speaker 01 Long-term greedy, exactly. But it's a, like, where can your conviction and your knowledge, the limits of your knowledge and, and your conviction actually return alpha? So one of the challenges you have in biotech or biopharma is we spend so much money in clinical trials, in particular, late-stage clinical trials. So no one has enough money on their own to build the right portfolio. But then you also, you can't watch and manage that portfolio effectively. Where are the exciting places in biotech? We vote with our feet on this a little bit, so it's, this is self-serving, just like what we do. We go early stage, exactly. So it's also just really rewarding that you can, by being early stage, you're at the, you're at the point of, of creation of the technology or creation of the drug itself. And it's very little capital.
37:35 Speaker 01 So your reward on your own activity, on your contribution is actually very high. It's disproportionately high.
37:43 Speaker 01 And the later stage you go, we really reward capital as opposed to rewarding innovation. It's sort of just because if you're spending $200 million on a clinical trial where it turns out, especially if it's a binary event, and so it's risky, you better have a lot of capital. And so because it requires so much capital, and it crowds out other returns. I mean, these are highly predictable events. If they were highly predictable, you could go out and like raise that money or to be lower cost of capital and then more value would probably accrue to the operator. But the later stage you get, the more you get into the clinic, phase two, phase three, a lot of the value is accumulating to the capital instead of to the operator. So the earlier stage you go, it's more supporting great scientist entrepreneurs.
38:23 David Weisburd? I know you're not concerned about it, but I'm sure your investors are. What does a DPI look like for an early stage biotech?
38:28 Speaker 01 I would separate as most biotech companies are drug companies. So even if you have a platform, you're really trying to use the platform to make a drug that works. So the, the fund itself, I mean, if you're returning 3X the fund, three to four X the fund, you're doing great. You, biotech is, is uncoordinated.
38:46 David Weisburd? But in terms of, is that a 14 years until you get your money back?
38:49 Speaker 01 Oh, no, no, no, no. There's, biotech funds still have to operate within kind of the 10 year fund horizon. These, yes, some of them extend out and whether it's continuation vehicles or.
39:00 David Weisburd? They're coming to biotech as well.
39:01 Speaker 01 They are coming to biotech as well.
39:03 David Weisburd? Do you like them?
39:05 Speaker 01 I, yeah, I think it makes sense.
39:06 David Weisburd? And it's an interesting alignment.
39:08 Speaker 01 It's, well, we see so many, take the alternative where you go public and there's just a zombie company that is trading below cash. And so the public markets, because there's no readout. There's no readout, but also just, I mean, for anyone trading below cash, there's like, is there confidence from the public markets that you're creating value if, if you're trading like well below cash? There's an argument to be made that you should take that company. This is not in all cases, but like then some of those cases, you can look at it and you just look, let's just shut down the company. Let's return cash to investors and unlock value here.
39:38 David Weisburd? That's why I like it for venture and for private equity. It may not be the perfect solution. There's a lot of different issues. LPs have to re underwrite the asset, but it's better than the alternative, which is cutting off the legs from your assets, selling at a steep discount. I think it's way better than the alternative. Capital markets are more efficient. They're more driven by returns and there's a straight off between. Drug discovery, return of capital, and something else shifted with recent legislation. How do you think about this framework between we want to cure as many people, but we also have to have the right financial returns in the industry? What's your best paradigm?
40:13 Speaker 01 You have to make money. Like, it's just the capitalist system is one that helps to organize all of the world's resources down to a moment in time of like, what are we going to do today? And the decision that one of our employees makes today is, do I come to work today? Okay, great. There's like a lot of trade offs that go into that. Maybe they want to stay at home and like tend to their sick child, but they have obligations today and they want to continue to be employed tomorrow. Not that we would let somebody off like that, but like that is the calculus that goes through everyone's head. It is going to cost trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars to cure everything. And that money has to come from somewhere. And if there was some magical way to motivate people and to align the economy without having a capitalist system, like a capitalist reward system, I think we should just do that. I'd be on board with that.
40:57 Speaker 01 The truth is that if you don't reward innovation and risk taking, you don't get innovation and you don't get risk taking. There is no evidence in the history of humankind that there is a system that gets new innovation and gets creativity without rewarding those things. There's like even painting a painting that is new and is different, you will get ridiculed for that if it looks different, right? You will just like whatever's coming from your heart and to turn like into turning into a painting, you will suffer the criticisms of the critics and you will suffer the criticisms of maybe your wife who loves you or your children who are like, Dad, I thought you were good at painting. And therefore, those are all costs associated with doing something new and different. Now, what are the rewards?
41:42 Speaker 01 The rewards might be that you feel your own personal sense of satisfaction. The rewards can also be from that creative endeavor that someone values it and pays a premium because it's different, right? It's unique. It's your style. So I multiply that by like every single observation of how creativity works. Looking backwards as a student of history, if you don't reward creativity and you don't reward risk taking, you don't get more of it. And so the future that I worry about is a command and control economy that is too top down and not bottoms up, where we think we've got it all right and we tell people what the rules are and who's going to get rewarded. And we set too many of the, let's say, the constraints of the system up that limit people's ability to capture the value that they create. Because I don't worry about that because I'm gonna make less money.
42:25 Speaker 01 I couldn't care less. I just need the resources to do what we do. What I worry about is how do every incremental person that's gonna show up and give their best self today and be really creative? Because if we're gonna cure everything, if we're gonna live in this like amazing abundant future where energy is free and medicine is cheap and affordable and accessible to everyone. We all live forever. We need innovation, right? Like it's innovation that's gonna get us out of this trap that we have.
42:48 David Weisburd? It's actually the exception proving the rule, which is in spite of all these financial incentives and all this fame and accolades you could get to doing the hard thing. Still, so few people do the hard thing. So if you even take that away, where are we gonna be?
43:03 Speaker 01 Right. And why do so few people do the hard things? I totally agree with you. It just so happens that if you're, if you went to a great school, like you went to Tuck, like had a great job. You're like, you get paid a lot of money in like your job that, you know, your last jobs were probably easier than what you do today. You can, you also constantly challenge yourself. Well, it's not about the binary of like, am I gonna do something that makes money or not make money? Am I gonna do something that's meaningful or not meaningful? It's like, am I gonna do something that's a little bit easier and still get paid enough? And I think a lot of people approach their lives and they're not bad people. That's just, this is how life plays out. That they're, it's just, you kind of just wanna be home to see your kid's soccer game tonight. And you, you wanna be able to take a few vacations in a year and like you just wanna chill or get some sleep tonight.
43:46 Speaker 01 And then there's the psychos who just, for whatever reason, they're miswired. And you wake up every day feeling this
43:56 Speaker 01 feeling that you better get something done.
43:58 David Weisburd? Paradoxical because it's this deep sense of agency which becomes self fulfilling. You believe that you're the person that must solve this problem and then you end up being the person that solves the problem.
44:07 Speaker 01 Totally. And or then you surround yourself with the folks that all do. And so the most magical thing is when you can find yourself in an environment with a team where you all believe. That you're going to figure it out. And the more pressure you're under, you find yourself in situations in history where the constraints really push you to dig deep and to solve problems. And I think there are 350 million people in America, 8.3 billion people on the face of the planet. I think most folks have an opportunity for greatness and that they have an ability to perform well above what they're doing today. It's just, they don't have to.
44:41 David Weisburd? I've gotten flex or to brag about myself a little bit, I've gotten much better at developing people and kind of getting this greatness out of them. One thing that I've found is oftentimes they resist for a while till they get a big outcome and they're like, wow, I could do great things.
44:55 Speaker 01 What does that big outcome look like?
44:56 David Weisburd? Depending on the position. They work really hard, even like our editor worked really hard on our second Hermosy episode.
45:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
45:03 David Weisburd? And she hated me for that two weeks of just pressing, pressing, pressing. You could do better, you could do better. And now she's like the number one fan and she like it's meme this experience to other employees.
45:12 Speaker 01 At agency, I mean, but this is what we want for all of our children. I think you've just encapsulated like as a parent, what I want for my children, but what I want for everyone, which is you work hard enough at something that you realize that you're better than what you thought you were. And then that gives you that taste of like, oh my gosh, like I am a, I'm a, I'm a human of great worth. And it does kind of like, that's, that's the best dopamine hit possible, that the hard work that you have done leads to something that you find useful and that others maybe find useful. And whatever your domain is, coming back to the pain work, maybe it's maybe to you work in biotech, maybe your antibodies, maybe you're in our genetic medicines team that like when you're pushed and you kind of dig down deep and something works, I totally agree with that. You just, I mean, that's a drug kind of onto itself.
45:56 Speaker 01 You just want, you just want more of that, I think for some folks.
45:58 David Weisburd? To your point, you rewire your brain, which is pain, just like when you start working out, pain is pain, then pain becomes pleasure. And then you start to, your brain just rewires it to pain as pleasure.
46:08 Speaker 01 Flow state and this, this idea that you can get to this like state of flow where you like lose track of time and it's, there's a woman who wrote a book on this and I remember in her, in her preamble, it was like, ah, man, I've, I've, I've realized there was this thing called flow and I've experienced it like a few times in my life. And I forget her number, but it was like single digit numbers. And I remember reading, and I've read the whole book, but in the beginning I was like, I'm reading like the introduction, I'm like.
46:32 David Weisburd? Like a few times in your life?
46:33 Speaker 01 Like you wake up in the morning and it's like, put yourself into that, that state where you're working on a problem that is occupying your full mind and your talents. And it's hard, like it's stressful, like it's, it is actually very, very hard.
46:48 David Weisburd? One thing that I've
46:48 Speaker 01 You lose track of time.
46:49 David Weisburd? Done, learned this from Dave Fautenot from HF Zero, great accelerator. They, they just like turn these hundred million dollars AI startups in like 12 weeks. It's unbelievable.
46:57 Speaker 01 It's crazy.
46:57 David Weisburd? And he really taught me this concept of context windows. I think you just naturally do this, which is when you're in flow, you box yourself out. I don't check emails. I don't do, everything's on silent and I take it through this two hour, two hour window. Full context on everything. And then I close a tab and then I can move on to other things. But just encapsulating, basically forcing flow onto the activity has been just a game changer for me.
47:21 Speaker 01 You know what that's like? And one of the first places where I saw that, that comes from a negative place is when you like procrastinate or you get under a deadline. And I think when I was like a teenager, I'd like procrastinate.
47:31 David Weisburd? Force flow.
47:33 Speaker 01 It's like it becomes force flow. I've realized later in life that like, oh my gosh, that that tendency
47:37 David Weisburd? Have you ever procrastinated?
47:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think I'm, I'm the guy predisposed to procrastination at times, certainly when I was younger. But what I realized is you, you just, you force yourself into like, oh my gosh, here's the deadline. And ideas come better or it kind of gels in. It's just, I don't know, there's something going on, chemicals in your brain that just make you do better work. If you're writing on a deadline, for instance, I talked to friends who are, who are, who are writers, editors, or they, they have to like produce something every day.
48:06 Speaker 01 But you just, you kind of develop that muscle a little bit better. The, the writer's room for the onion, if you remember, our GC was at the onion.
48:12 David Weisburd? Yeah.
48:13 Speaker 01 Before he goes with us, which we joke, that's how, that's how seriously we take the law at the family offices. Our GC used to be the GC of the onion. But Logan would tell stories in the writers room, like, like they put out so many ideas in a day and you could only pitch, like everybody would pitch an idea, but you could never pitch it a second time. And it was this like forcing function of like coming, like just creative, coming up with ideas. And then they get lost the next morning, more and more and more. And it just, it sharpens that. Sharpen's that ability to just like do it really, really well with that almost.
48:43 David Weisburd? Since we last chatted, I changed my religion to quality is downstream of quantity. It's one of the things, one of my central.
48:50 Speaker 01 Since last time we saw each other, like you got married.
48:52 David Weisburd? I got married and I changed my religion to quantity is upstream of quality or quality is downstream of quantity. I believe it on such a deep level, we all embrace it. I made everybody convert.
49:03 Speaker 01 Quality is downstream of quantity.
49:05 David Weisburd? Yes. If you want to do more, we now do five episodes a week. Everything on the entire stock has gotten better from editing to podcast booking to social media, everything. Quantity forces quality.
49:14 Speaker 01 So what do you think is going on there? And maybe what's the lesson for a biotech executive?
49:19 David Weisburd? The way that you distill that is in the negative, which is people could only improve so much each single at bat. Meaning if you gave me here, the 12 ways to do a podcast better today. One of two things would happen. One is I would ignore it. My ego would come up. Or even if I wanted to, if I'm like, oh, Eric's giving me the best advice, I just couldn't do it. My brain's just not able to process 12 pieces of feedback at once. But if I now do six podcasts this week and you tell me two things, I will process that in the same week. Versus one podcast a week. So there's some finite ability for the brain to process information. I think that's one thing. There's, there's many layers of that. There's the ego. I think the ego and the self could only change so much on an attempt.
50:04 David Weisburd? You can't see how far away you are from being good.
50:06 Speaker 01 That makes sense as an agency person because you, you got here because you're good at a bunch of things. And if you can't throw out everything at once and still be decent at what you do.
50:13 David Weisburd? You can't. And look, watching videos of yourself constantly failing and constantly improving is itself like hard to do. But I force myself on it, but I do it now five times a week. And that's just one example, and it's a bit paradoxical. And people don't necessarily embrace it. It's hard to internalize.
50:28 Speaker 01 Do you re-watch like this whole episode or as an editor editing and just pulling out the good stuff? You watch it yourself?
50:35 David Weisburd? I do the first edit on every episode for other reasons, but partially it forces me to watch it. I will never put something out to somebody else I want myself watch. It also, it makes me empathize with the listener better as well. So there's other, but this idea of quantity being. Upstream of quality is very important. And I think it's one of those, you know, this Peter Thielism, which is like, what is something that you believe that other really smart people don't believe?
50:56 Speaker 01 Sure.
50:56 David Weisburd? That's kind of my answer these days.
50:57 Speaker 01 That's, okay, I like that. Well, what's paired with that somewhat in here, you describe it, it is, it's not quantity, this sacrifice of quality, right? Some people just don't, massive quantity, but you're embedding in your quantity.
51:08 David Weisburd? There's processes to it. There's still taste to it. There's still high standards. But at the same time, it's the quantity that's pushing the quality.
51:19 Speaker 01 Trying to bring that into the pharmaceutical. So some of the things, it resonates though, which is you,
51:26 Speaker 01 some experiments we design could take years, right? So it's a little bit like, let's come back to SpaceX, right? So NASA can do a phenomenal job overthinking and over engineering and sort of coming up with the perfect way that we might build a rocket. Or you can go out and make a whole bunch of incremental changes and improvements quickly and realize what works and doesn't work. The biopharmaceutical industry tends to look more like, let's measure 12 times and cut once. Long time horizons, lots of money, patients' lives, dealing with regulators. There's like, it comes all from a place of strength and great care to be, to like, really overthink it. And the outcomes are uncertain. So I think that also kind of just feeds into almost the mentality that maybe we should take great care.
52:09 Speaker 01 One of our values at Alloy is that we plan carefully and act urgently. That's like one value, plan carefully, act urgently. But that started as like, act urgently, like have a bias towards action, sort of like, the patient is waiting, like, we need to do this. And it didn't quite work for us on the balance of how we think about science and how we think about medicine. Because just to have a bias towards action, like, are we empowering people is one of our values. So you use your values when you're not sure exactly what you should do. And so you rely on them. You're like, oh, my gosh, just move fast. But that's actually not usually the thing. It's this implicit, by planning carefully, you have to do the pre-work. You have to be sharpening your axe every single day. So then when it comes in the moment to swing that axe, it's like really sharp.
52:47 David Weisburd? You could distill it to going in every day and just doing a bunch of attempts of improving your study, improving all these things. It doesn't mean literally submit 100 FDA studies per month or per year, but it's upstream of that before you even submit, like do all the.
53:02 Speaker 01 But I would like a system where the FDA would give us feedback on like an A B test of like, what about this? What about that? That's a question they can't do it. Although in some of these, you know, some of the great innovations today happening at the FDA, I think are largely happening behind the scenes of how does the agency power the reviewers with AI tools, sort of the large language model, perhaps internally, that is all of the private knowledge that the FDA knows that can't, they can't share with the rest of us. And to bring all of that to the reviewer and say, based on everything we've known, like, how do you think you would respond to this? Like, those tools are sort of being built and used today. And so maybe there is a world where we could ask that L L M some questions. We could A B test a little bit based on your infinite knowledge of the FDA and all the private data you have. If I ran my experiment this way versus this way, like,
53:47 Speaker 01 which way do you think will be better? I'm very optimistic that we're gonna, we're gonna be able to recognize the patterns in the historical data to make better decisions, to shorten timeframes, to like, be more efficient with the agency, which will save us a lot of money and a lot of time. I mean, change the calculus of drug discovery and development.
54:04 David Weisburd? Well, Eric, as always, this has been unpredictable and intellectually stimulating. Thanks so much for jumping on.
54:10 Speaker 01 Great. Thanks for having me. This was awesome. Anytime.
Previous E359: What Charlie Munger Taught Me About Venture Capital Next E361: Why Venture Capital is Not an Asset Class Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated