“We’re not doing 30 bets a year”: Vijay Pande on betting small after running $4 billion at a16z

"Were not doing 30 bets a year": Vijay Pande on betting small after running $4 billion at a16z | TechCrunch

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Were not doing 30 bets a year: Vijay Pande on betting small after running $4 billion at a16z

It used to be that Vijay Pande was better known in academic circles than investor circles. That changed pretty abruptly a dozen years ago, when Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz — whod spent their firms first five years explicitly avoiding healthcare and life sciences — decided the category was worth betting on after all and handed the keys to Pande. At the time, he was a Stanford chemistry professor who was best known for building Folding@home, the distributed-computing project that turned millions of home PCs into a supercomputer for disease research. Over the next decade-plus, he grew a16zs bet into a practice managing close to $4 billion.

So it was somewhat unexpected when in June of last year, Pande walked away from it all to start something much smaller. In fact, his new firm, VZVC, co-founded with longtime investor Zach Werner, is built around a handful of concentrated bets a year rather than dozens, it has no associates, and it relies heavily on AI for its day-to-day operations.

To learn more about Pandes hard pivot, we talked with him this week about why hes making just a handful of concentrated bets rather than spreading himself thin in the current market — and about one of the more interesting conundrums in AI-driven biotech: unlike text, biological data cant be scraped off the internet, so nearly every company ends up building its own walled-off dataset. What does that mean for all the advances AI in medicine has promised, and who actually gets access to them?

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can also listen to the fuller conversation (below).

Youve said biology is moving from a science of discovery to something you can engineer. What does that mean?

For a lot of the way drugs have been developed, there was very much a fortuitous aspect to it. I think whats shifted is that AI and machine learning allow computers to wrap their type of understanding around something very, very complicated… to try to figure out what targets you want your drugs to hit, for specific diseases, to be able to make those drugs, and now even to help in the clinical trials — which are the most expensive part of the process.

I thought clinical trials were getting cheaper because drug developers are using more synthetic data, so not as many people are needed for these trials.

Thats, I think, very much an aspiration.

The cost and time to get to clinical trials has been shrinking, especially with AI, but it could still cost hundreds of millions of dollars to run a trial, which is why drugs are very expensive. The probability of a drug going successfully from the first trial to the end of the third trial is just 20%. If 8 out of 10 fail, and these things cost hundreds of millions of dollars, the amortized cost gets really high. The reason they fail typically is not that the biologist did something wrong; its that all the experiments these drugs were designed on were on animal models like mice, and in the end, animal models are just not very predictive of humans. The AI model is not going to be perfect, but its going to be way better than any animal model would be, and once it crosses that bar, thats where it gets really exciting.

[The phase after that is]: Is the drug the right drug for me?

You mean personalized medicine. . .

The jargon here is so-called precision medicine. If you go to a doctor with something not trivial, they have to guess whats going on, because theres only so much they can tell. Then they give you a drug — and if that doesnt work, they give you another drug, then another drug. This happens in cancer, it happens in lots of different areas. We would all be much better off if the first drug was the right one. Typically, your blood test values are compared to population averages. But really, they should be compared to: is this [result] weird for you? What were starting to do also on the medicine side is [the ability] to just understand what would be right for the individual.

Would you say the path to this moment has been slow and steady, or did it spike more recently?

I think its lots of different things [coming together]. So for instance, precision medicine for the longest time was based on genomics. But the reality is your genome is kind of like the blueprint for your house on day one, but your house is fairly different now compared with the moment it was built. So there are many other things that people can now measure in proteomics and so on that are much more relevant for understanding disease and where your body is now. There has also been [a lot of] automation in robotic measurements that is naturally tied into AI, and those two go hand in hand really well.

Over the last decade, theres been this steady clip fforin both AI for biology and AI for chemistry. The biology part is like, how can we treat this disease? And then the chemistry part is, how can we come up with a drug to go after that specific protein? There have actually been very significant advances over those 10 years.

You mentioned that biology is one of the few places AI cant just scrape data off the internet. What does that mean for how the field develops?

Its a place where you dont have any of this data that people can just all train the same thing, and your data cant be distilled from one model to another. Its a really interesting play from just the pure AI sense.

Doesnt that echo a familiar problem in medicine, though — doctors operating in [territorial, often competitive] silos?

Youre onto something really big here. Lets say [someone] has some type of cancer, and its both an issue in oncology and endocrinology — those two doctors really dont sync together very well. What is really intriguing about AI is that it can, in principle, be a specialist in everything, and it can start to see things that really any single human being couldnt. It would be equivalent to having a team of the very best doctors all clamoring together in that moment.

But is there enough data sharing for that vision to actually be realized? I understand why founders and investors want to protect their [respective findings], but . . .

I think one of the bigger trends is that were starting to see a shift toward building these atlases of biological information — which, from a technology standpoint, are typically foundation models. And as they become more common, I think well see the same thing thats happened with open-source LLMs, which do very well against the corporate ones: open-source foundation models in biology having a very broad impact.

Youre involved with Genesis Therapeutics, which came out of your lab at Stanford, and Insitro, the drug-discovery company launched by Daphne Koller, a former colleague at Stanford. You say youre also incubating a company with a founder youve known for 20 years. What are you looking for in founders, and in what areas?

There are two areas that Ive been spending most of my time on. One is AI for healthcare delivery, which I did a ton at a16z as well, and then AI for clinical trials.

One of the things thats most important to me [about founders] is that we can really trust each other — founders that have high integrity, that do what they say theyre gonna do… Im expecting this relationship to be 5, 10 years plus into, ideally, their next company. I want to work with people who are thinking long term like that. Ideally, these are people who are not just trying to win and beat other people, but really thinking about the question: how do we win together?

What have you gotten right and wrong in your investing career so far?

When I started talking about AI and machine learning and technology and medicine and bio 10 plus years ago, there was a lot of resistance and a lot of people saying, Oh