Please enjoy this transcript of my conversation with Jake Becraft, the CEO and co-founder of Strand Therapeutics, a company building one of the most advanced programmable genetic medicine platforms in biotechnology. Under his leadership, Strand is redefining what RNA medicines can do by enabling cell-selective targeting and therapeutic payload delivery inside the body, unlocking a new class of precision genetic therapies.
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Tim Ferriss: What does Strand do?
Jacob Becraft: So Strand designs what we call next-generation genetic medicines. You have DNA inside of your cells, the DNA makes RNA copies of itself, and then that RNA makes proteins. And actually life is all proteins. Your skin, your hair, your organs, every cell is basically just proteins stacked together. That is everything that we are. You don’t really see the DNA and the RNA. It’s very small. The protein is what we think of as our being, right? And so the way to actually intervene in disease, the way to get to its core is to create the correct proteins.
If you have a deficiency, everything from an enzyme problem, to a rare disease, to cystic fibrosis, it’s usually a problem with a protein that is being incorrectly made by a cell. And so what we have figured out over decades and decades is what’s gone wrong with that protein, and what would need to go right to fix that protein or how you would replace that protein correctly. What we have not figured out is how to make the cells do that, right? And that’s because it’s a very complicated problem to tell certain cells in the body to do various different things. And so what we are really focused on building, we know what proteins need to be made. We know where they need to be made. What we need to do is get the message of what type of protein to the place in your body where they need to be made, and we need to do that effectively and safely.
And so what we have essentially figured out a way to do is take that message, which is in the form of a molecule called RNA. A lot of people are familiar with it from the COVID vaccines, but those are very small examples of what RNA could actually be utilized to do. And then we have found a way to send those messages into the body, into diseased areas where they can access the cells and essentially return the cells to a state of homeostasis, which either corrects the problem or in the case of cancer, removes the problem, any of those pieces. And so that’s the base case of what we’re trying to accomplish.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. So let me back up and give people a little bit of context. So the first time we met was in Boston at a dinner. Do you want to describe, I don’t think they’ll mind, who else was there? Who else was at the dinner?
Jacob Becraft: Another biotech CEO, Phil Strandwitz, and a — I don’t know how to classify Jamie’s job.
Tim Ferriss: Bit of a polymath.
Jacob Becraft: — professor at the MIT. Yeah, polymath, MIT Media Lab, professor, healthcare entrepreneur, advisor to anyone who wants to know fancy things.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. Great guy. Yeah, so I’m already an investor in Holobiome, Phil’s company, love what Jamie’s up to and very interested in what he’s building as well. We can put that in the show notes. We’ll put all that in the show notes. And then we met and part of the reason I became very interested in Strand, there were a lot of reasons. So one is the technology, the results, the photograph, or I should say, images that you showed me, which we’ll get to in a second. The second is founder, builder who is technical, but for whom also this company, this is going to be a strongly worded statement, but is existential, right? You’re not a hired gun CEO who has been brought in, right?
This is very much entwined with your identity and personal mission, which I find very attractive. And quite interrelated with that is the fact that I found you to be a very good communicator over that dinner, right? I learned a lot. You recommended a number of books to me at the dinner and then afterwards. I’d say chief among which was the Genentech —
Jacob Becraft: Fantastic book.
Tim Ferriss: — origin story, which is one of the best, I would say, business books I’ve ever read. Just unbelievably good because it also, and I can’t believe it made it past all the Genentech censors, but it’s actual contracts, screenshots of contracts, negotiations, mistakes, all of the serendipitous, lucky moments and unforced errors by universities and so on, that had to coalesce for Genentech to even survive. It’s just an incredible story. And I also, just again, this is more for people listening than for you, but I’ll continue to fluff a little longer, which is also that you seem to me to be very aggressive without being haphazard, right?
So you were just furious at this dinner when I started to try to get an idea of the general biotech scene in Boston, and asking questions about various startups, and figures, and companies, at how conservative and dogmatic, maybe would be a very generous way to put it, you view a lot of folks, not all, but the default, right? The status quo. And in contrast how you’re going, you’re taking big swings, right? You are taking big swings. So all of those things were attractive.
When it comes to Strand, let’s talk about the image for a second. What was the image that you showed me, or images?
Jacob Becraft: Yeah, so I happened to show you a photo of one of our patients, one of the very first patients that entered our trial, the way that these early-stage trials work in oncology, so then a patient with stage 4 melanoma, in early-stage trials, you end up with patients who have been through every, exhausted every option by the time they end up in your trial. And they often have pretty progressed disease, right? And so you hope you can offer something to these patients.
They had melanoma, so that’s a skin cancer, but they had not only aggressive, what we call cutaneous metastasis, which is across their surface of their body in the skin, but they had what’s called visceral metastasis. That’s actually what kills you in melanoma is the metastasis to the organs of your body and it was in their lungs. It was in other sorts of areas, so I think muscle deposits and bone deposits. And in addition to that, this patient had had multiple other therapies that historically actually respond very well to, melanoma responds very well to.
What’s unfortunate about the current state of affairs in melanoma and in some cancers is we have these immunotherapy drugs. What the biggest blockbuster of the last few years is a drug called KEYTRUDA from Merck. Incredible miracle drug, won a Nobel Prize a few years ago. In melanoma, if you respond to that drug, a lot of patients do. That’s great. If you don’t, the likelihood of survival begins to diminish very quickly. And this patient had had KEYTRUDA. They had had a whole number of other drugs through many, what they call, lines of therapy. You’d get a drug, your cancer responds or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t respond, you go to the next and the doctor, the oncologist cycles you through a number of drugs. And this patient was at a fairly advanced hospital that not only had given them the, what they call the standard of care and then the second line standard of care, they had given them actually a number of other, just like, maybe this will work, maybe this will work.
You’re trying to help the patient stay alive. And the picture that we have, and this is in, if someone, if you Google our ASCO poster, which is a big clinical oncology conference.
Tim Ferriss: Can you spell ASCO?
Jacob Becraft: A-S-C-O.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Jacob Becraft: It’s an abbreviation for the American Society of Clinical Oncology. It’s a meeting every summer in Chicago that is the big breakthroughs in clinical medicine for oncology, right? It’s the top of the top in a lot of ways for people. Big results, small results. We had presented this photo there, and I had met you a little bit afterwards to show — the photo itself is quite striking, and it’s in that poster, right? Which is this —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s basically a body riddled with cancers, right? They’re everywhere.
Jacob Becraft: You don’t have to be an oncologist to look at that scan and understand the extent of which this patient responded, just riddled and then no more. And one of the things, as a scientist, right, Tim, you mentioned something earlier, which was that this is more than a company for me, and actually a company is only about one third to one half of the time that I’ve spent on this mission to make genetic medicine work correctly for patients. One of the greatest accomplishments in that career that I’ve had thus far is being able to say that you did help a person. If that was just one person, one patient, I’d say, “Wow, what a career.”
We dream of more. We have big ambitions here at Strand. I have ambitions for what we’re going to, how many people in the scale at which we’re going to be able to help people. However, that was the first time that I really felt like our science went out into the world, and it took someone’s grandmother and not only kept them alive, but we’re a year and a half in, and they still have no detectable lesions.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, it’s wild. So in the investor deck, right, the pitch deck that I initially read and had, I apologize for that, but 1,500,000 questions about, what, for the non-technical folks, right, the muggles. They can look things up and are curious, what are things that stuck for them? Particular slides or phrases, certainly the images, but is there anything else that comes to mind that really resonated with people from that deck?
Jacob Becraft:I think there’s one other bigger generalist investor who had come into the round personally, and I had been having a conversation with them about something in oncology that we call the Kaplan-Meier curve. Kaplan-Meier curve, if you’re looking at oncology results, is a survival graph. So you maybe look at two years, and you look at, from 100 percent where you start the study, and then it looks like a step ladder going down. The standard of care line has some amount of people, steps down, and you want to have your drug be significantly above that, right? Either having more people alive longer or you have, what they call, the long tail where you, everything goes to zero in standard of care at a certain time point, but you have an amount of patients that just look cured. They continue on for many years.
In drug development, we get very used to looking at those graphs, and making very statistical calls, and saying, “Oh, this doesn’t look like it’s active,” or, “This drug’s there or isn’t that great.” But I think one of the things that I’ve spoken to some generalists, some of our larger investors who maybe aren’t from the biotech world, and I’ve tried to zero in on some of those survival graphs with, is to say, “When we look at these steps, these are lives, right?” The lines that go down on this, that the vertical part of the step is someone’s loved one dying. But the ones that go horizontal, and every time you see something go further along, right, that is someone who got to, even if it’s just three months, right, you have no idea what that means within that person’s life.
When we take that Kaplan-Meier curve, and those steps, and we zero in on each patient, we start to look at them and we start to say, “This is a patient that didn’t think they would see Christmas in 2024 and they just celebrated the new year of 2026,” that I think is meaningful in what we’re doing. Now, whether or not that will be a good product, right, there’s a difference between a good drug and a good product, right?
Jacob Becraft: I’d say the good drug is, can someone take this and it does something. Injecting a therapy into someone in a way that is very hard to replicate but did a great thing for that individual person is a good drug fundamentally. It is a good drug. It helped that person. And a good product is much more — this is where the idea of how we get medicines to people come into play. I’ll give you a different example. There’s something else that we’re working on called in vivo cell therapy. Essentially, there’s an entire type of science that we have discovered how to take the immune cells out of a patient, take their immune cells out, reprogram them so that they learn how to attack cancerous blood cells, and then put them back into a patient.
They are phenomenal drugs. There are people who are about to die of myeloma and then they get this drug. But the drug costs, not making money, the drug costs $750,000 to make, just to manufacture. It costs three months of time to manufacture. It’s very hard to see a world in which that drug has a large impact on the patient population because of the fundamental cost, the COGS, the cost of goods sold. Not biotech, just straight business. The cost of doing it and the time it takes to get it to people, that’s a bad product.
And so if you could, say, instead of taking the cells out of the body, if you could reprogram them while they’re still in the patient, now you have a good product. If you can make the cells recognize the cancer, the immune cells programmed to activate against the cancer in the same way, but make it an outpatient procedure where a patient just gets hooked up to an IV bag for two hours and then goes home, that is a phenomenal product.
Tim Ferriss: I have to look at this from the perspective of a non-specialist because that’s what I am.
Jacob Becraft: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: But if you were giving a TED Talk on this and had to get across at least part of what you’re doing, I feel like what you just said hits the nail on the head within the first few minutes.
You’d have to talk about the central dogma, so to speak, of DNA as master copy, so to speak, mRNA, and then protein. But just in brief, could you describe the treatment? What the treatment actually looked like for the patient in those photographs, the before and after? Like dots everywhere representing tumors, and then holy shit. I think everyone, whether they’re technical or not, that looks at that deck, probably had the same response to those images.
Jacob Becraft: So in cancer, you have chemotherapy. I think people are fairly familiar with. You also have immunotherapy, which is the ability to activate the immune system to attack the cancer directly. And that’s what some of the biggest blockbuster drugs of all time are currently Merck’s Keytruda, Bristol Myers Squibb’s Opdivo. And then there’s a number of other types of immunotherapies which are classified as checkpoint blockades. So what that is, is your cells essentially have a way to tell the immune system that they are your cells. So you don’t want your immune system to attack your own body, obviously.
And so one of the mechanisms that you have is this “I am you” signal that you can send to the immune system, your cells can send to the immune system. Cancers hijack that mechanism to protect themselves from being attacked by the immune system. And what we figured out was a way to block those signals. And that’s the entire field of immunotherapy. Not the entire field, but I would say a vast majority of the field of immunotherapy. And the successes of the last decade of treating cancer and also commercial success for a lot of these companies has been based on further refining better checkpoints.
The problem with that is that they’re all very similar mechanistically. And so if one doesn’t work, if you have cancer and I give you Keytruda and it doesn’t work, the chances that the next types of therapies will work, since all of them are very similar mechanistically, the chances diminish quite drastically. And there’s some nuance here. And I’m sure if there’s oncologists listening to me, they’re like, “No, but you don’t know. And double negative this cancer if you combine with these.” It doesn’t matter. In general, these mechanisms become degenerative and we don’t have good additional options to excite the immune system.
A second theory for going back to the ’90s was, if instead of just blocking the cancer’s ability to hide from the immune system, if that’s not enough, what we actually need to do is we need to activate the immune system directly. And it would be best if you could send that activation signal from the tumor itself. So now you have a tumor. Instead of just blocking the tumor’s ability to hide, you actually have a tumor that’s screaming like, “I am a foreign object, please come and eat me.” That’s how immune systems kill things. They eat the other cells.
And so the issue. This is not new. This is basic science from immunology from the ’90s. The problem is, we haven’t had a good way to get the tumors to send those signals. We’ve tried to make the signals in the lab and then inject them into the tumors. And the problem is the signal just goes away immediately and then it’s circulating in the body and the immune system doesn’t know what’s sending the signal. We’ve tried everything we can to make this signal artificial and get it into the tumors. And every single time we do it, it’s either not enough in terms of no efficacy, or it activates the immune system in all sorts of places we don’t want it and it causes all sorts of toxicities.
And so what we are doing with our medicine is delivering the instructions into the cancer cells in a way that causes the cancer to basically send its own signal out. So it’s artificial in that we have made it in a lab. But instead of making the signal, we’re making a message that tricks the cancer into sending the signal. And so that is drastically different. It makes a huge difference in both safety and efficacy. Because now you are recapitulating how the signal works naturally. If the cancers weren’t cancerous, if they were just deregulated and cells were starting to grow out of control, your cell would naturally send the signal and be like, “Oh no, something’s wrong.” And your body would take care of it.
You actually generate cancer all the time in your body in terms of dysregulated cells. Your immune system just comes in and takes care of it before it becomes like a — when it becomes a real problem, that’s when you get tumors, that’s when you get the disease we call cancer.
And so what we’re doing is we’re resetting that system. We’re having the tumors resend the signal out. And so what we created in that first drug was a very simple administration procedure. You take our genetic medicine and you inject it into the tumor directly. And what that does is the immune system comes into the tumor and it kills it. But then it gets activated by that killing process and it learns what the tumors look like and it can better identify the other tumors that have been hiding throughout the body.
Tim Ferriss: That’s the point that I was hoping to get to. It’s basically like, in the case of this patient, not to belabor this point, but it’s like you injected, if I’m remembering correctly, into cutaneous, meaning just under the skin, I’m not sure what the right term is, nodules, like instances of cancer. So my follow-up question is going to be like, well then how do you suddenly get to the visceral instances, right?
Jacob Becraft: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I think that’s what you’re describing, right? And within the world of oncology, is that a novel observation? Is that something that is new in terms of being able to do that?
Jacob Becraft: So it’s something called the abscopal response or the abscopal effect, which means that one tumor is what you’ve put the activating drug into, and that’s where the immune system will attack first. But now the immune system is activated and educated to go and kill the other tumors. It’s not new in the fact that I didn’t come up with that name. It has been observed in limited other settings of a few other drugs that people have gone out with. I guess the problem has been that it’s been very, very limited in terms of the abscopal response that other people have seen.
So for instance, you would have a patient with a tumor, maybe melanoma patient, so they’d have a cutaneous lesion, a skin lesion on their chest. And then they’d have another one on their shoulder. And you would inject the one on the chest and the shoulder one would also shrink. And they’re in the same region, right? The immune system is fighting the cancer in the same region. But you wouldn’t necessarily see that happen in the lungs. And so, one of the big pushbacks on a drug, like the one that we took to the clinic two years ago was, you don’t die from having tumors all over your skin. You die from when they metastasize into your lungs and into your liver and impact the organ functioning, right? That’s how patients die of melanoma.
So if you are only able to address the tumors that you can either inject or that are near the injected tumors, you won’t have an effective drug if a patient already is further along. We are, to my knowledge, one of the first companies, if not the first company, to demonstrate that a direct injectable drug into the tumor in a large number of patients — this isn’t a one-off. It wasn’t one miracle patient that had… That is a beautiful photo of that patient. And I’m so happy that they’re still on the trial and still doing great and it’s amazing. But this is about being broadly applicable because that’s how you actually impact population level lives.
And so we are the first company that I’m aware of to show this extent of abscopal response in visceral, deep organ metastases in a multitude of patients. And really right off the bat. I mean, this is from the very first patients we put on this trial, at the very beginning of it, began responding. That is very uncommon. It’s very uncommon to have patients on a phase one trial on the drug six months later. And of our first three patients that ever entered this trial in the summer of 2024, two of those three are still on the trial 18 months later. That is something that, I think, is fairly shocking.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Jacob Becraft: And if we were a traditional biotech company, we’d be really happy with all of this data and we’d say, “Wow, let’s take this forward.” However,I think the real message of Strand and what we can accomplish in genetic medicine is, we don’t have to stop it just injecting into the tumors. There are a number of concerns with injecting tumors from a product perspective. Not a drug perspective, but a product perspective. The difference between, a drug is all about does this work, and a product is about how will these patients get these drugs? And injecting directly into a tumor is doable and most oncologists can handle it, especially for skin cancer patients. But as you go to rural health communities, it gets harder and harder to have doctors that have that training. And as you get to other sorts of tumors beyond skin cancer patients, some of their skin lesions have been removed by a surgeon. And then you go beyond skin cancer. How are you going to inject a patient with non-small cell lung cancer?
Like you start to get this idea of there’s a limited amount of patients you can access, right? And so you have a product, maybe limitation. In cancer, the way that we actually treat cancer patients is that there’s an infusion clinic. You go to the infusion clinic. The oncologists and the nurse practitioners and everyone, technicians hook you up to some sort of an infusion, and then the oncologist can monitor multiple patients at a time. And that’s what our infrastructure looks like right now of how we treat patients. And if you want to have the largest impact in medicine, you need to make medicines that plug into existing infrastructure.
As much as you want to tell everyone, “Hey, change everything about how you think about treating patients,” the way to have a near term impact is to build drug solutions that can plug into existing infrastructures. If we become a giant biotechnology company that has all sorts of resources, maybe we can talk about changing how everyone gives drugs. But for right now, if we want to be able to help the most amount of patients in the near term, we need to plug into that infrastructure. We need to find ways that we can access organs.
I’d say, in addition, the bloodstream is also a really good way to get around the body, believe it or not. I mean, the bloodstream carries oxygen to everywhere in your body. And so if your drugs can travel through the bloodstream and get where they’re going, very effective. In genetic medicine, I would call it the holy grail. For the last 30 years has been thinking about how do we IV administer intravenous, which means into the bloodstream, administer genetic medicines that can get to places throughout the body. We’ve been trapped in one organ for the past 30 years, and that’s the liver. The liver naturally filters your blood and thus it picks up a lot of these genetic medicines that we put into the bloodstream.
And so what we’ve done for the last 30 years is figure out how we can treat diseases in the liver with this old internet meme, which is like, step one, blank. Step two, question mark. Step three, profit. I remember the old days of FRedit. People used to use that structure. Step one, do this. Step two, question mark. Step three, profit. In biotech, in genetic medicine, the joke is like, step one, prove it works in the liver. Step two, question mark. Step three, we’ll treat all these diseases. And after 30 years, we’ve really nailed step one. And step two has remained this big question mark.
And so when we started Strand, our number one goal actually was not even to get to this first drug, as amazing as it’s been for these patients and as happy as I am that we have been able to help those people in their lives and as impressive as it is. Our main goal was to solve this step two question mark that’s been sitting there in plain sight. And I guess the big piece here is that everyone who thinks they know what they’re talking about in genetic medicine will say, “Well, the issue is delivery.” And it’s like, you need to be able to deliver. And I’m like, “That’s a very hand wavy.” Again, it’s just a cheap answer, which is not wrong, but it is incomplete. And I believe that it’s actually three problems at once. It’s three children in their father’s trench coat pretending to be an adult.
It’s like, “We’re delivery.” And then you open it up and it’s like potency, specificity, and delivery are all here inside. And no one wants to hear that because people want simple solutions, right? They want like, “Oh, it’s delivery, so we’ll just fix delivery.” I mean, just 30 years in, no one has a good idea about this piece, right? And I’d say that the thing at Strand that when I started the company that I just could not understand why everyone didn’t see what I was trying to tell them. And I was very bad at pitching. You think I’m too much of a scientist. Now perhaps. Or maybe your audience does, if they’re listening. But like, man, you should have seen my very technical zero market insight pitch deck of 2018 that is complete dog shit. It is an awful — I can’t believe someone funded us.
I’m a huge fan of Elon Musk’s first principles-based thinking. I don’t know if Elon is the one who invented first principles-based thinking, but I think he’s probably the main evangelist and popularizer of this thinking modality, where if you take SpaceX, for example, his idea was, what is the thing preventing commercial space flight? And it’s dollars per kilogram of launch. It’s just like, dollars per kilogram. That’s it. How do you get it down?
And you start to like, “Well, where’s the cost centers in a launch?” And you go, “Okay. Well, the cost center in a launch is in these rockets, these fuselages —
Tim Ferriss: Trashing rockets.
Jacob Becraft: They were trashing — we’re trashing 80 percent of it. And you go, “Well, why don’t we just reuse them?” And people are like, “Well, they do this, they do that. They’re hard to retrieve. They’re in the ocean. They’re floating. They can’t…” And he goes, “What if they land themselves?” And it’s like, that’s an insane person thing to say.
What I want the world to understand is that we are standing right now on the precipice of a revolution in genetic medicine. And that’s important for a number of reasons. One, it’s important because there are near-term diseases that we’re going to be able to solve. We’re going to be able to get to a point in the not-too-distant future where I think a lot of types of cancers are, at the very least, chronic diseases instead of death sentences. We all want to get to cures. I want to get to cures. But we are getting at least to a point where it’s a manageable disease, right? That’s, I think, a near-term piece.
There’s multiple lines of technology that are coming together that I think people are not fully appreciating what they’re going to mean for the future of medicine. And so, there’s a lot of focus right now on AI-based drug discovery. And people, they’re building proteins and antibodies and all sorts of stuff with AI models that are doing incredible things. We have decades of work on designing exquisite proteins that do all sorts of stuff, from edit genomes, to cure whatever in some sort of mouse model.
What we don’t have is the infrastructure, the biomedicine infrastructure that gets any of these things, these discoveries, whether they’re made by a human with Microsoft Word stitching amino acids together, whether they’re made by an LLM that knows exactly all the pieces that are going to make this, whether it’s made by high-throughput screen of 14 different robots in concert. It doesn’t matter. What matters is how we’re going to get those into patients, how we’re going to get them into the places they need. And I think about this as this infrastructure of medicine comes forward and what this will actually mean for the future of healthcare.
Anyone in any sort of a place of power throughout the world, I think, needs to understand where, in the next 10 to 20 years, we very well may be headed with medicine. Which is smaller indications, niche indications.
So what’s important for folks to understand, and what I want people to see is, we are moving in a way where, I think, medicine becomes, maybe not completely bespoke, but much more refined. And the way that we get there, we’re going to get there technologically and we’re going to get there from a design perspective much quicker than we’re going to have the infrastructure to actually deliver those medicines to people safely, effectively, at scale.
And so our goal at Strand, and our challenge, is building drugs today that impact patients’ lives. We’re not a research institute. Our goal is not to do really cool research on mice and join the ranks of people who have cured mice of cancer. There’s millions of them. There could be a Nobel Prize every five minutes for someone who’s cured a mouse of cancer. Our goal is to cure human beings of human-being cancer. Our goal is to cure human beings of human-being diseases, and do so in a safe, effective, scalable way that impacts a person’s life as little as possible. And that is what we’re building. We’re building as a commercial organization. We’re building drugs today, but what we’re doing is we’re laying the groundwork for this infrastructure to where when we’re successful in tumors with the new trial that we’re running this year, when we’re successful with being able to IV deliver, infuse a genetic medicine that goes to the tumors, we have an instruction manual, what we call a payload, the protein that we’re tricking the cancer into making. We have one that we’ve chosen. But success there actually means that I could now, in six weeks, design a completely new protein to be delivered to the tumors. And I could just go over and over and over again. I’m only going to be gated by the infrastructure I have to build, like new ones of those, and the FDA’s ability to move quickly with us as we try to test new and newer things, but we know the general high level safety of this.
That’s coming, right? That’s coming in a lot of other areas of the body where we’re designing things to get into T-cells, so we can help temporarily influence the immune system so you could take out things like autoimmune disease and allow patients to revert back to their pretreated state without doing any sort of genetic modification. We’re trying to get all sorts of these therapies forward. And every time we have a success, we lay the groundwork for this infrastructure going forward.
I want people to understand it, one, because we have large ambitions. A lot of people have thought, first, they thought that the first principle-based approach we were taking was incorrect. They’re like, “It’s a delivery problem. You need to build a better delivery vehicle. Why don’t you focus on that?” And I’m like, “Okay, everyone’s done that.” Right?
Now, we’ve shown this complex solution actually fixes this age-old problem and we’re going to be continuing to move that forward. I’d say the biotechnology industry will be dragged kicking and screaming into the future, or it will be built up in a new way from new players. For us, I want to find the people throughout the globe who want to partner on these things, the innovators in America, right? And those are all sorts of different sorts of folks.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Let’s dig into that just for a second. For instance, with this podcast, let’s say I was like, “Well, I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news. The bad news is, I can’t put this out to my whole audience. The good news is you get to tell me which thousand people I send it to, and that gets hand-delivered to a thousand people.” And I mean, a similar way to look at it would be like, “All right, you’re giving a TED Talk, but it never gets shared online. It is only for the thousand people in that room, but you get to handpick them. Who are those people?” And it could be categories of person, but how would you think about that?
Jacob Becraft: I think there are people, policy leaders not just in the United States, but across the globe that need to think critically around how we are going to both handle, enable, and empower the future of medicine because things, incentives, things are going to look quite differently 10 years from now than they do today, in terms of the scope and the style in which we can build medicines.
Tim Ferriss: And the policy leaders are important. Sorry to hop in, but because ultimately, they’re going to determine the rules by which healthcare is played. Is that one way to put it?
Jacob Becraft: Yeah. Healthcare is very similar to the space industry and that policy leaders essentially have two major pieces, is that they are both the arbiters of what is allowed to be done. And they are a major payer, not the only payer, but they are a major payer of the purchasing of that. And so as the fundamentals of medical development change. Now, I’m not making a drug that I hope to give to two million people worldwide. I’m making 100,000 variants of a drug that I’m hoping to give to 10,000 people worldwide, or 10,000 variants of a drug that I hope to give to 100,000 people worldwide. And I get to more people, but there’s more variants. Both the regulatory and the payment systems, I think need to adapt themselves to allow for that.
It’s on us, the medical innovators and the engineers and the entrepreneurs, to build systems that are still good products. You have to think about where you’re going, and then build a system that can still be a good product. If it costs 10,000 times as much, it’s not going to work, right? It just won’t work at scale and you won’t access these patients. But if you can see a path forward and think creatively — I’m not a politics guy, but I am fascinated by policy and how incentives shape the future of highly regulated industries like biomedicine, like space, like all these things, and that is regulation, plus payment. I think that there’s incredible work to be done.
And the last big time of, I think productive collaboration between worldwide policymakers and the United States as a leader, but the last big collaboration of that came in the ’80s when biotech started to take off. In the ’90s when it really ripped, right? When we started to harness the power of recombinant proteins, the Genzyme book, you plugged it earlier, that’s phenomenal.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, the Genentech. Yeah.
Jacob Becraft: Genzyme is the Genentech of Boston. I get the two of them were like — the Genentech book really, studying the history of Genzyme, Genzyme actually had the leader, Henri Termeer, who was the actual quarterback, I’d say, of the policy innovation, worked with government officials to figure out what will this new class of medicines look like that aren’t just small molecules that you can take home. Right? Now, we have antibodies. We have all of these drugs that are amazing because of it. We have the Orphan and Rare Disease Act [Orphan Drug Act], which led to people building these rare disease drugs. I’d say we need to have more productive, collaborative conversations around what the future will look like because things are going to change very fast.
I read the AI report from the White House, for instance, and how the state of AI is. And I looked at, I read through it and I was like, “They actually need one of these for biotechnology as well, because things are changing as rapidly and it’s going to be further accelerated by AI.” And if we don’t have some productive conversations, we’re going to be stuck in one of two places. One is where only the ultra rich can get the really disruptive drugs because they’re the ones who can pay for it, because we don’t have a system set up to have these new radical changes commercial quick enough or dispersed quick enough. Or the second is the inability to pay, the inability to find ways that support an ecosystem makes an uninvestable thesis for investors. And so all of these great innovations that we have coming out of the lab right now —
Tim Ferriss: Just die on the vine.
Jacob Becraft: — get cut off at their knees because, just like space, space industry, it’s a long time cycle to read these things out and you need capital to get there.
Tim Ferriss: So a lot of what I try to do in my own meandering way is kind of answer the thousand people in a room question, right? And then to figure out, it’s like, okay, let’s just say you’re spending time in DC. You sit down, their staffer convinced them to sit down for 30 minutes, right? What do you lead with? And then that can inform potentially the website or appearances on podcasts and stuff. So just in case it’s helpful, I can obviously share this afterwards too, but it’s like, a couple of things come to mind, right? And I think in terms of like, okay, once you identify the people in the room, then it’s like, what does the TED Talk look like if you got 20 minutes on stage? And you’re good at this stuff, but sometimes you’re so close to it that it’s helpful to have a muggle who’s coming at it.
Jacob Becraft: No. I want to hear this, Tim, by the way. This is a free communication lesson from someone much more versed in the area.
Tim Ferriss: Well, yeah, thank God because I can’t do science. So the allocate responsibility as well, I don’t want me in charge of developing immunotherapy. So the Christmas story and the photos, right? So if you started with that, I’m just like, walking through my made up TED Talk, right?
Jacob Becraft: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And then you talked about, let’s just say you went from there like, “Okay, let me take a sidebar for a minute.” And you talked about SpaceX and the reusable rockets, right? And the analogy also of like, once you have this engineering platform developed from first principles, now you have something that is payload agnostic, right?
Once you’ve made it economically feasible and you have this platform, whether you’re launching superconductors into space as an alternative to propellants for a satellite reorientation — you should check out this company called Zenno. I might have to redact this, but they’re in New Zealand, Z-E-N-N-O. They’re pretty fucking amazing. But whether it’s that, whether it’s something else, is entirely up to you in terms of deliverables because you’ve done the hard work of developing this engineering platform, right?
Then talking about like, “Okay, well, what does that actually mean for biotech?” And you’ve got the holy grail, right? How do you IV administer genetic medicine? And then you could segue and tell people. Because there’s a good drug and there are lots of good drugs that die. Why do they die? Because they’re never going to actually make it into production, so to speak, at scale in healthcare.
And I’ve seen a lot of analogies with this, and I won’t digress too far, but with psychedelic medicine.
Jacob Becraft: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And it’s just like, okay, you need, like, an overnight nurse. This is going to be an eight-hour experience or six-hour experience. And sure, you could argue that you might have the rich people pay $10,000 out of pocket and that subsidizes the — it’s sort of like Uber Black subsidizing UberX. There is an application there, but if it’s fundamentally incompatible with current healthcare, you’re trying to win a race with your ankles tied together, right? It’s probably not going to happen.
And then you have people looking at like, 5-MeO-DMT instead of psilocybin and stuff, and I have my own thoughts on that. But sure, it’s like you look at the failure just real quick, of like, MDMA-assisted psychotherapy when it got in front of the FDA advisory committee, a lot of reasons for that. But then you have people coming out of the gate and they’re like, “Oh, we tried to couple…” They tried to couple psychotherapy with it. The FDA does not regulate psychotherapy.
It became a huge quagmire of just confusion and therefore, these other people are like, “Well, let’s do methylone and has a much shorter half life, you can actually fit it into like an hour hypothetically.” Right? You can decouple the therapy or just looking at drug effects and lo and behold, it’s making a ton more progress, right? But the point of saying all that is that you’ve got the SpaceX, you segue to the holy grail, and then like, what if you could reprogram cells in the body? What happens? So I do love the fired up, like hand wavy delivery thing, right? Because you’re like, what they’ve missed is — and again, I’m ad libbing here, so it might be questions like, “They’re right and they’re wrong. They’re wrong because of reasons X, Y, and Z.”
Right? And this is a lot of hand-wavy stuff and we’re still at a point where we’re defining triple negative breast cancer by what it isn’t.
It’s like, if you have trouble with your shoulder and you’re like, “Well, good news, it’s not like elephantiasis and it’s not Parkinson’s disease.” And you’re like, “How does that help me?” It doesn’t really, right?
But then you say, they are right about delivery, in the sense that if you cannot plug this into healthcare and deliver it to end patients, game over. It doesn’t matter how effective it is in an N-of-1 or an N-of-5, or whatever your small clinical is, right? So in the idea, these are not necessarily in the order, but talking about like even though it’s not the end goal, what if we could turn cancer into a chronic disease that can be managed, right? And it’s like back in fill-in-the-blank, 1980x, right? HIV was a death sentence and no longer the case. Now, you look on television and it’s like, you see ad after ad related to some preventative, but also like maintenance drugs that allow people to live with the chronic condition.
So anyway, those are a few things that kind of hop to mind.
I would be curious, for policymakers, what are the things that most catch their attention, whether from experience or hypothetically, right? What is it that actually gets their attention?
Jacob Becraft: I was in DC yesterday, and my overarching message is sort of like, there are two things we need to do better. We have to build regulations that I think are common sense that still allow us to more cheaply test drugs right now for a lot of reasons. We have sort of vestigial over many years, reasons as to why it takes us a lot of money and a lot of time to just get to a simple answer on a medicine, right? And that is creating a world in which the biotechnology industry is incentivized to do very small steps forward because the cost of failure is so high that you’re trying to reduce your risk in a way that is, let’s make a drug that’s 10 percent better, right? Because taking a truly innovative risk would be very difficult, would be very difficult to underwrite for certain investors.
I’d say at the other side, the thing that catches folks’ attention is to talk about how medicine is fundamentally changing. And we all can see that AI is changing how business is done, how people build things, how people read things, how people parse through information. It’s making highly motivated people 10X better, if not more. And it’s not just AI and biomedicine, it’s sort of multiple threads coming together of novel technologies of how we build medicines, genetic medicines, and their sort of advancements, things like what we’re bringing forward. Our ability to diagnose diseases and subcategorize diseases and change the way in which we interpret how this disease is, the sequencing technologies which allow us to do that and other sorts of computation and AI that plugs into those pieces, all of that’s going to fundamentally change medicine, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Jacob Becraft: Because if I can’t just make a decision around the drug that every breast cancer patient gets, and then I agree on the cost that that drug is, and I pay for it a number of years, and then the drug goes to generic and someone brings the next drug forward that’s 25 percent better and blah, blah, blah, and we just continue along that, that’s the non-innovative way in which we’ve been developing medicines for the past number of years. And every once in a while, we have a breakthrough. I’d say, policymakers tend to like that because it comes down to like, numbers, right? And medicine is a very interesting piece in policy.
Tim Ferriss: What do they like? Could you just say that again? They like the idea of breakthrough versus incremental.
Jacob Becraft: They like trying to learn about it. When you start to talk about medicine, it’s very interesting, because medicine, like, you think about paying for medicine, like the government or health insurer, but the government, paying for medicine is a near term cost center that should long-term reduce a larger cost center, right? Brand name medicines are eight percent of US healthcare spending, but hospitals are 26 percent, something like that, in the high 20s, I believe. And so you imagine that for eight percent of your dollar in healthcare spending, you are pulling down the amount of people that are now hospitalized. You are increasing people’s life. You’re keeping people in the workforce, you’re keeping people in their homes. You’re keeping people out of a system that both no one wants to go to the hospital and the government that pays for a lot of people’s hospitalization in the form of Medicare and Medicaid, doesn’t want to pay for people to go to the hospital.
And so you begin to talk about that system and you say, preventative healthcare, but all medicine to a certain extent, it can be thought of as preventative if it’s able to stave off hospitalization. It’s at least, at the very least hopefully, preventing you from being in the hospital. And so policymakers like those conversations.
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to try to keep this from sounding too conspiracy theory, but what I’d love to know is what’s in it for policymakers to help you? And that might sound strange, right? Because I’m not saying these are bad people and we could talk about the kind of industrial regulatory exchange programs another time, but like, that’s a thing, right? So I guess what I’m wondering is, how do you align incentives with policymakers so that they feel compelled and interested in being helpful? That’s the big question that comes to mind.
So let’s just say there are a thousand policy makers listening right now or if you’re in the room, but like what is your ask? If they’re like, “Hey, look.” Again, good news, bad news. “Bad news is I can’t meet again. I’m just too busy. Good news is, if you have a reasonable ask, I can greenlight it right now,” right?
Jacob Becraft: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: But you need to do it. What is the ask?
Jacob Becraft: My first ask right now is we need to streamline how we test new medicines in humans, in clinical trials. In fact, maybe if this ever sees the light of day, hopefully the op-ed that I wrote on accelerating first-in-human trials and becoming a more innovative powerhouse as a country comes.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, where’s that?
Jacob Becraft: I just wrote it a couple of weeks ago and submitted it to a handful of places in the last couple of days. I think that it’s the single greatest advancement in biomedicine that we’re going to be able to make. And then of course, it opens a lot of doors for us at Strand, because we have way more ideas than we have the resources, time, and money to take forward at $50 million a try. But if you start to make it more simple, and a lot of these things are common sense regulations, we’re spending way too much time and way too much money doing things that I think are quite antiquated and vestigial in our regulatory process. And so if you can reduce that time and reduce the amount of money, then you can change the economics and the incentives around building new drugs. And you can begin to generate more diverse data that allows you to train things like AI models on what actually makes a difference in a drug and a human.
We just don’t have enough data and we don’t have enough diversity of data to be able to train them nearly to the level that we want right now. And a lot of it, just at the end of the day, it comes down to like, does this do something in a human? You could do all you want in the lab, you can do all you want in mice, you can do all you want in primate studies. Whatever it is that you do, it just doesn’t matter to nearly the same level until you do it with a human. And when Genentech and Genzyme were coming up in the ’80s and ’90s, it was a comically fraction of the cost and time that it takes to bring new medicines forward today. This isn’t an impossible thing. We’ve just created a lot of weird barriers and we need to get back to a first principles way of thinking within government as well.
I’m not the only person preaching that, and I’m certainly not the only one in policy that thinks about it. I’d say in America, we want to be the headquarters of innovation, but a lot of other countries want to be innovative too, right? In Asia and in the Middle East, there are countries that are like, “We can do this. We have the technology. We can make investments into the space. We can make investments into companies earlier that we think have a high leverage point in the future health and we want to go in those directions.” The United States is able to do it too, but that’s it, right?
Tim Ferriss: If you did an 80/20 analysis on the impediments and someone is like, “Okay, we want to streamline, but if there are 10 items on your wishlist, let’s pick two or three,” what are those two or three?
Jacob Becraft: One, I think is that we should remove the FDA from a direct permission-based oversight organization on the beginning of first-in-human trials. So let me just explain this for a different sort of audience, right? Right now, in order to do a clinical trial of what we call a first-in-human, the first time you give a drug to a human, a new drug, so a phase one, in order to do that in the United States right now, you need to write an IND, which is called an initial new drug application to the FDA. It’s very long. I think ours for our first trial was 22,000 pages long. You have to have professional writers, professionalized system, all sorts of very expensive things. Just to write it, it’s millions of dollars.
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
Jacob Becraft: The studies that need to go into it are millions of dollars. The manufacturing of your drug and the associated analytics of your drug in order to be correct in the document costs millions of dollars. And this tax up and up and up and up and up. And all of a sudden this application costs you $25 million and it takes 18 months to put together. Now, in China and in Australia, two of the countries that do much faster first-in-human trials than the United States, they have a system where you go to something the hospitals called the IRB, the Investigational Review Board. In Australia, they have a lot of professional centralized IRBs that manage multiple hospitals and they work in a for-profit system to help companies get their procedures like figure out whether or not they’re going to be a fit for the hospital.
You still have to do that in the United States. After you get the IND approved by the FDA, you then have to go to the IRBs. Right now, since it costs so much money and takes so much time to get an IND from the FDA, if you have decided to do that instead of go to Australia and go directly to the IRBs in Australia or go to China, your board wants you to essentially go to the top hospitals, “Hey, if we’re spending 25 million on an IND, I want you to go to MD Anderson. I want you to go to Sloan Kettering. I don’t want you to go to pick a great but random hospital in the Midwest.” So now we have a lot of hospitals in the United States not running first-in-human clinical trials, which means we have a lot of Americans who exhaust their standard of care and can’t get the access to drugs maybe before they are fully approved and they’re just out of options unless they want to fly to Houston or New York or Philly or something like that.
And a lot of people don’t if they’re facing the end of life, or for all sorts of reasons, people don’t want to do that. So you have Americans not having access to drugs. You have companies shoved into clinical trial sites that are already overburdened. You have IRBs at those hospitals which are difficult to deal with and also overburdened in trying to process all the people who are trying to come through their site’s doors. And all of this is taking place after you’ve spent way too much money and way too much time submitting a safety document to the FDA in order for them to approve it when the FDA actually has a lot better things to do as well. So all of that reeks of an inefficient system.
Tim Ferriss: So if they said, “Got it, problem sounds terrible. You can author the solution.” What is the alternative?
Jacob Becraft: The alternative is to allow the hospitals and their IRBs to make the — they already make the decision on whether or not to run a trial and they’re assessing the data that you have on your safety, as well as your efficacy and the patients you want to go after. The IRB is going to assess that and make a call after you get the IND done. I think the transition system to transition to, Australia calls it a CTN. It’s a clinical trial notification system. You notify the regulators, “Hey, we’re going to run a trial.” It’s not a path system. There are exceptions, certain types of drugs still need to go through them for formal approval, but for the most part, you can notify them, go to the IRB, the IRB can say, “Yeah, we think this is safe enough.”
And the reason that is still a very safe option because patient safety, from a drug company perspective, from everyone’s perspective, is number one. There is nothing that will kill your company faster. There is nothing that will make me never be able to sleep again. It would be harming patients, especially harming patients because you are being sloppy. And the group that obviously cares just as much if not more than everyone else, is the hospital’s review board because the hospital does not want patients harmed or dying, God forbid, in their trials, right? The FDA isn’t magical in their oversight of safety, but you distribute this workload across the IRBs that exist throughout the United States and they get certified with the FDA to be able to approve this. You can centralize the IRB so that individual hospitals don’t have to have their own IRB.
You can have all of these systems. All of a sudden you have hospitals that have the ability to attract biotechnology companies for drug trials. It takes infrastructure to run clinical trials. So the free market sort of picks up there and builds a system that I think can accelerate clinical trial management. And you free the FDA to focus on the things that matter, which is approving drugs based on efficacy and safety, that’s how drugs get approved.
Tim Ferriss: I know you’ve got to run in a bit.
Jacob Becraft: We can try to get through. This is fun. We don’t talk about it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, this is a juicy piece, so I want to chew on it a little bit more. I’ve funded a bunch of science in mostly New Zealand, but also in a few other countries, simply because the speed of putting through red tape and the sheer amount of red tape is much less. So that’s why I would choose New Zealand and some of these very credible universities over doing research, no offense to Jamaica, but there’s psychedelic stuff going on in Jamaica, but nobody in the US gives a shit, right? They’re not going to listen. It’s not going to hold anyone’s attention.
I guess what I’m wondering is, simultaneously, I can look at New Zealand and say, “Okay, it’s mostly sheep. Yeah, you have some people, but it’s a lot easier to run New Zealand than it is to run the United States.” So I can’t just say this works in New Zealand, copy and paste into the United States. Australia is substantially larger, right? So I guess two questions. The first is, zero to 10 confidence, what is your confidence level that if policymakers got behind it, that something could be done along those lines? Not necessarily even at the federal level, maybe at a state level.
There’s all sorts of complexity there, but what’s your confidence level that something like that could be implemented in the US within the, I don’t know what the timeframe would be, the next five years, let’s just say, five to 10 years, if policymakers got behind it? And then the corollary to that is, is there any competition for scientific innovation that is attractive to a company like Strand, much like companies are moving from, say, California to Texas, right, because there are certain incentives.
Is there a competition for talent globally through which, if the UAE wants to greenlight something incredibly quickly and fund it, that Strand would be interested or is it live or die, ride or die in the United States for any host of different reasons? I know some companies who have tried to tackle the FDA first because they’re like, “Hey, once we have this data, we can copy and paste a lot of it into the EMA in Europe,” which is the sort of equivalent. I know that’s a lot that I just threw out there, but what are your thoughts?
Jacob Becraft: To answer the first question, there is a global competition for running clinical trials like this and actually, what we are in the midst of right now is the United States massively losing to China. China has built an industrialized version of clinical trial infrastructure for first-in-human trials that is so efficient and massively quick that they’re just able to go faster and cheaper into the thing that matters most, which is first-in-human trials. So the United States is actually in the process of very rapidly, as a country, falling behind China because what started as a place for American companies to come run clinical trials to get data and then take it to the FDA and then do larger trials in the United States has now created a flywheel structure within China where now just Chinese companies run their clinical trials faster than the American companies and then bring their Chinese-discovered drugs to the United States.
And what happens is the risk capital then says, “Oh, these companies are more efficient, I will fund these sorts of aspects.”
There’s always state by state like, “We want to have biotechnology here.” Every state’s always tried to have it. The best technologies remain in Boston and San Francisco, just similar to like — tech companies might have left for Miami and Texas, but where’s OpenAI in San Francisco? All due respect to Austin and Miami, I love those cities, but San Francisco, it’s hard to replicate those pieces. And biotechnology, Boston’s really dominated a lot of it for the past 30 years, though in this new age of medicine, I’d say San Francisco is really rivaling Boston because the risk capital and the openness to radical new ideas is much higher.
I think that also attracts a healthy amount of hype-no-substance companies and hype-no-substance founders and technologies. But I think that’s a low price to pay to take some big swings at what could be transformational technologies. Even though I run a company in Boston, I love Massachusetts, I personally identify with that ethos a little bit more of like, “If some bullshit hype filters into this, it’s worth it in order to take the correct swings at the truly big ideas, because one out of 10 transformations is better than seven out of 10 logical steps forward.”
Tim Ferriss: So CTN in the US, some version of that, as you described in Australia, if you were a betting man, if you were like, “Okay, I’m going to go on Polymarket and I’m going to put half my net worth on a bet,” I guess I’m asking you, how possible or impossible is the task of retrofitting the FDA and approval processes?
Jacob Becraft: This is not a comment on politics and this is also not a comment on a lot of different things that are happening at the FDA right now, but I would say in terms of the last 10 years of the FDA, the time to which they would be open to such a radical transformation, and radical in government bureaucracy’s terms, the thing about government bureaucracies is they very rarely seed their oversight. They will take new things to be oversight of, but in general, regulatory anything takes us… This is the problem with nuclear energy in America for the past 30 years.
We just tack on one more thing and one more thing and one more thing and one more thing and these cottage industries emerge to support the giant regulatory machinery. And we don’t take a step back to be like, “Why are we doing this? ” At the same time, I’d say to look at the FDA right now. This is probably the most open I’ve seen people to the idea of like, “We want the FDA to be an exceptional regulatory body. We want them to build regulatory sciences to give us ultimate confidence in the drugs that we build, but there are new technologies that we’ve been slow to implement.”
There have been markets that haven’t been able to be fully created with technology for things like clinical trial analysis because no one was sure if the FDA would embrace them. And there are things such as early-stage safety, which are already handled by hospitals themselves where it will take some time to make. But if I was a betting man, I’d give it a 50 percent likelihood that in the next two years we can get to this. And I wouldn’t be spending my time talking to policymakers about an idea. This isn’t about me just trying to have something to complain about to a senator. I believe that this is possible. I believe that we can do this.
I believe if we don’t do this, it is actually existential, we will lose a lot of our ability to develop drugs in America over the next few years to China if we don’t do it because capital has no allegiance, right? I also believe that like there’s other countries, and especially the UAE, for example, are ones that are watching it carefully and going, “Hey, we have great technology. We have a great landing place for a lot of Western values and Western companies. We have great quality of life here. We could attract folks to come do innovative work here.”
So when I hear various different leaders of countries in the Middle East talk about it, I certainly think it’s possible because they are countries at least over the last 10 years where you’ve seen be able to make aggressive bets in certain directions in order to attract innovation. So if they were able to do that, then yeah, these sorts of things could radically transform how people think about developing medicines. And at the end of the day, if we are able to develop better medicines quicker, faster, cheaper, more ambitiously, everyone wins.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’ve been so impressed with the speed at which the Department of Health in, say, Abu Dhabi or the UAE, even more broadly speaking, but it’s incredible how ambitious they are, but in addition to that, how willing they are to take big swings and accelerate things unbelievably.
Jacob Becraft: That’s the country we’ve spoken to the least in the Middle East. It’s connections and it’s spending the time trying to decide what people want to do. I’m a believer in allied countries coming together. We run our trials in the United States and Australia. I think countries that share very similar values on the future of the world need to come together to build innovative solutions to the massive problems facing us as a human species. TBD, it’s not every country though.
Tim Ferriss: No, it’s not every country.
Anything you want to talk about just in the last however many minutes we have?
Jacob Becraft: I’ve actually taken a lot away of, I don’t know, responding to how you’re responding to different pieces of the story, right? I view it as important to tell the world about this innovation and whether that means finding the large sovereign wealths of the world that are going to help us. Right now, as a company, everything is working within our technology stack. We sit here and look at these problems. To use a bad analogy, it feels like Sophie’s Choice sometimes around how we’re going to prioritize what we’re going to work on. We can’t work on everything.
The other overused analogy is robbing Peter to pay Paul, right? I wish this wasn’t zero-sum, but if we look at what our technology can do today, I look across and I’m like, “Okay, we want to work on cancer. We want to work on autoimmune disease.” But also kidney is really interesting and oh my God, we could do so much good if we applied this in the CRISPR space and all of these things. What I’ve been trying to spend the last six months of my time thinking about is like, “What is the correct model for us to make sure we are doing our diligence of advancing medicine at the fastest rate we possibly can?”
There are so many different things that we, Strand, can work on. We need to find various different partners. Sometimes that’s pharma partners that are like, “We’re interested in this disease area.” And it’s very simple because the biotech and pharma companies work together all the time on partnerships. But I’d say what’s really interesting is this global opportunity and this broader opportunity to say like, “We could do all of these different diseases. We’re fighting a resource constraint at all times. So how do we find other people who want to participate with us both intellectually and capitally with capital that can help us build various different solutions, whether that’s for diabetes, whether that’s for polycystic kidney disease, whether that’s for all sorts of other indications throughout the world.”
It’ll take novel scientific models because what we are doing is scientifically novel. So we’ll need different sorts of business models to think about this.
You said something earlier about my frustration with biotech’s ambitions sometimes. God, the Genentech and Genzyme people used to do insane things. Genzyme used to drive around Boston collecting placentas from the hospitals. They had a van called the Placentamobile. They would pick up placentas and then use them to purify a protein that they were turning into a drug for a rare disease. It was the ultimate founder mode of like, “How do we stop this disease?”
And somehow we’re now like, “Well, I don’t know. What would that look like from a TPP? And if the FDA won’t think about a proven mechanism…” It is just fucking exhausting. We’ve got to just get our entrepreneurial pants back on and try to fix disease. I’ve just taken the few minutes you gave me and diatribed in six different directions. There is so much cool stuff to do. There’s so many more interesting conversations for us to have on and off a recording. Tim, I love talking to you. You’re just fun, man.
Tim Ferriss: We’ll do more work. We didn’t even really get into the platform aspect of things. I used the SpaceX analogy of the first principles engineering payload agnostic platform, right? We didn’t even really get into the platform. Are you leaning away or leaning into the kind of programming, reprogrammable language around Strand?
Jacob Becraft: I’m leaning away from the words programmable or programming within there because they get people confused about what a platform is. In my new deck, it ends actually with this piece of what Strand is. Strand is a flywheel of various technologies, just AI models, manufacturing expertise, like talent that we have, trade secrets, all of these pieces that create a flywheel of how we build platforms for areas of the body that we want to access. That’s the platforms, right? So tumor delivery is a platform. T-cell delivery is a platform. We want to build more of those platforms over time.
We build them as drugs, like the STX-003 that’s coming to the clinic this year, six months ahead of schedule, that is a drug, but it is a platform for tumors. It’s not a platform for everything you want to do throughout the body, and that’s where people got lost. I think that’s where Moderna got lost. They thought, “Your tumor platform also worked for your liver, worked for the kidney, we could do everything with one platform.” It’s just not true. So what I’ve been trying to do is help people understand. And the SpaceX analogy kind of works well within this because SpaceX, over time, built different platforms for different use cases that were more and more complex and took more and more time and knowledge and they used the learning.
Falcon 1 was able to get single satellites up. It took them a while to figure it out, but they were able to perfect the landing and the recovery and the reusability of a rocket that was useful, but it wasn’t super useful. Then they had Falcon Heavy, right? They were like, “Now we can take multiple things up or we can take large payloads up, we can take astronauts up to the space station, we could do all of these things.” Then they have Starship, right? You can’t start with Starship. Even Elon, 20 years ago, being one of the greatest fundraisers and visionaries, couldn’t go, “We’re going to build Starship. That’s our first product.”
You’ve got to build the Tesla Roadster to get to the Model 3. You’ve got to find the first minimal viable product that does matter and helps you get your feet under yourself. And that’s what our first drug was. And now we’re building more and more ambitious things. I don’t mind talking about a platform because I can scientifically prove we have a tumor platform. I can show you the data, right? We have a T cell platform. I can show you the data of how we can swap things in for the T cell. Whatever you want to put in a T cell, we’ll put into a T cell. It doesn’t matter, but it’s for a T cell, right? And we want to build more platforms over time. That’s where I think we need the most help of finding novel business models, partners throughout the globe who are interested. I don’t mind it. I don’t mind it anymore because we can defend it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally. Getting satellites into orbit is different from getting to the moon, which is different from getting to Mars, right?
Jacob Becraft: Yeah. And injecting things into tumors is different than getting things to deliver to tumors autonomously through the bloodstream, which is different than getting to T cells, which is different than getting to your kidney, which is different than getting to your brain. Those are all different things and they will be bigger and bigger opportunities for us.
[END OF ROUND 1 CONVERSATION]
Tim Ferriss: And now we get to part two. This is the second conversation with Jake. This is roughly two months later and a lot happened between the first and second recordings. Jake’s op ed ran, we did a ton of split testing and behind the scenes work; the conversation around clinical trials in U.S. competitiveness reached new levels of traction, got in front of new audiences, and ultimately made its way—let’s just call it metaphorically—to the Oval Office, and we will get into all of it. So this next section is a follow up. What happened after the first conversation, what Jake learned from the response, and how he was thinking about the bigger story of Strand and the future of medicine. We get into a lot of fun stuff in this section. Please enjoy…
…So Jake, We first recorded brainstorming and you had a lot of well-formed different approaches to messaging, and then we stopped recording, but at that point you had a pending or hopefully pending op-ed. Could you just walk us through what transpired after that?
Jacob Becraft: Yeah. So we’re working on the message, of course, and how to frame this so that people could digest what needs to happen and sort of both what needs to happen fundamentally, but also the urgency of it. So after that, The Washington Post actually placed it in their op-ed column, and it really, I think, went viral, at least through a lot of biotech and medical policy communities. I sort of saw it spread its way across as a number of people thought either, “I never heard this idea, it’s a fantastic idea to start,” or, “I never heard that there was this sort of pressing risk to our biomedical industrial base going overseas to China, and the US is sort of contributing to it by getting in our own way.”
After that, you and I really sat down and thought about what’s working with the piece. The piece was pretty fully baked, and when you put something in The Washington Post, you don’t have all the control over the full message. There are many other professional publicists and folks involved in that endeavor, which is totally fine. I’m just a lowly scientist, but at the end of the day, you and I started sitting and talking about like, “Okay, but what grabs people’s attention? How do we drive people into the bulk of the message? How do we make people care so that they’ll pick up the message?” And that was really helpful because about a day after the op-ed ran, a member of a congressional staff had reached out and said, “We’re putting together a hearing on the Hill around the risk to the biomedical industrial supply chain and biomedical industry in the United States in relation to what’s going overseas to China and how competition is shaping up and sort of degrading our ability to develop medicines here in the United States.”
And so as we sort of talked through that idea, it really helped because we saw what was working with the piece, we saw what was confusing about the piece and we saw maybe what was maybe not bad, but what was helpful or better or caused more engagement or ABC testing and all of a sudden A is 90 percent of the click-through options. And so once we sort of saw that, and I think one of the things that surprised me the most about it was that the opportunity — maybe it shouldn’t be surprising, but the opportunistic tone of like, “This is the problem, but we can fix it.” Maybe it should be obvious, but that’s the one that sort of got us going. And so when I went down to the Hill about a week and a half after the piece ran, that’s how we reframed the whole story, which is a much more productive way to get politicians to care about something.
If you come to them and you say, “Everything’s bad and it’s burning and we’re done,” I mean, honestly, what is anyone going to do? But coming with reframing it and being upfront about bad things are happening, but we can fix them. It’s in your power, let’s go, was taken up very well. And so between the testimony and a number of meetings after that, that day around D.C., we really started to form a sort of fervor. And fast-forward to about two weeks ago, the President put out his policy objectives, his legislative objectives, and in those legislative objectives — in fact, sort of the President recommends what he thinks the budget should look like, and then Congress takes it up and then actually bakes it into it just for policy sequencing, but in the President’s recommendations, there is this exact idea of removing barriers to getting early stage experimental medicines to American patients in America through FDA reform. And that’s an incredibly quick turnaround for Washington D.C., which I think should inspire all of us to get more involved.
Tim Ferriss: All right, so let me add to the recap. Thank you for that. So we got on the phone, I was in Utah at the time, I remember a very different background. Had our first recording talking about the message, spitballing stuff around. Then you published the op-ed in The Washington Post afterwards, came out, and the piece, I pulled it up, very well baked, edited piece. The headline was “The US Can’t Afford to Offshore Clinical Trials to China: A Burdensome Regulatory Environment is Pushing Clinical Trials Overseas.” And when I saw that, I was like, “Okay, this may be the best of all possible options, but let’s test that.” And to your point, right, there are a lot of stakeholders, a lot of people involved, and also people are busy. So if they’ve got 50 stories to put out, once they’ve done the work on one, they don’t necessarily want to go back and have to fiddle and fuss with every headline that they’ve put out.
But internally grabbed it and had someone on my team go to a site called PickFu. We’re not going to get into the branding of PickFu, but pickfu.com, which is sort of human plus AI helping you to split test. It could be an image, it could be the cover of a board game in my case, or a card game, it could also be a headline. And the purpose for doing that, since people listening might think, “Well, if there’s so many stakeholders, you know they’re not going to change it. Why even bother?” It’s because we got five different options and you and I were texting. I was like, “What do you think of these six options?” And you’re like, “These are the two of the things that internally would come up with that you liked.” It’s like, okay, well let’s only split test those because otherwise what’s the point?
Because the intention behind it is not to change the headline, but to then take messaging and emphasis that you can use in-person or otherwise or on stage in terms of framing. So the fact that you had everything lined up to then have the refined story for congressional testimony and then to ultimately get to the big office, it’s pretty fun. It’s a really fun compression of things.
And I should also, I suppose, just as a recap for folks, highlight that what we ended up talking about a lot towards the end of the conversation was just not simplifying the message for people, but how do you simplify it and make it appealing for policymakers specifically, and that’s how the text conversation unfolded around — and this is also for those people who are writing nonfiction books, whenever there’s a book that’s like, why kids are all depressed and it’s only getting worse, you’re kind of like, “Do I really want to spend 200 pages reading about that problem?” But if it’s like why kids are all depressed and it’s not the only way, then you’re like, “Oh, okay.” There’s actually potentially not a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but some type of prescription or recommendation for fixing the situation, then the response rate tends to be a lot higher.
So where do things stand now? How do you feel about the messaging? And you know me, I’m like the person who likes to think of himself as smart, but nonetheless ends up asking dumb questions over and over and over again. But in terms of messaging, like how happy are you with the messaging? And we can obviously bat things around. And then are the policymakers still the sort of primary target for your personal external comms because the regulatory hurdles and the molasses on the ground when you’re trying to push things through is so slow still compared to China or Australia, let’s say?
Jacob Becraft: Yeah. So the idea itself. I mean, from our first conversation that was only, I don’t know, two months ago, not even.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, not even.
Jacob Becraft: We sort of had this conversation, this is important. Fast-forward two months, the President puts out legislative priorities to Congress that has the message inside of it. I’d say I’m pretty happy with that sort of timeline of movement. And I think that what we successfully did with the story was the bad part of it that is like, “This is happening, this is bad,” and driving urgency of this isn’t a “Let’s have 12 more hearings,” this is a, “We either fix this today or we get comfortable with only getting all of our medicines developed in China or discovered in China, and then the United States will just pay the bill.” So two months is an incredibly quick time for really any amount of legislative progress. I mean, it’s still not done, it’s still not baked, it still needs — these things need to be codified. The FDA needs to actually adapt them, but I’d say that’s a lot of positive forward progress.
And shaping the story around “Here is the solution up front,” I think, helped us really tie folks in. One of the things I learned in trips to D.C. Over the past year is a lot of people go down and are complaining. And it’s very hard. People will hear you out because that’s what you do to a constituent if you’re in public office, you’re like, “This is okay, I’m sorry that that happened.” But it’s really more like being a policy shoulder to cry on than getting anything done. And so going with, this is a problem, this is the urgency, it needs your attention, and here is a solution or part of the solution was really — and moving our narrative — between hacking it out with you, moving the narrative to bring the solution up front, I think helps people not tune out immediately from — to understand what someone’s bringing you a story with.
We’ve talked about this in stories, which is how do you bring your focus and your hook upfront. To me, as a scientist, I like to drill down to the whole piece and explain all the details to people and all the reasons why something is maybe fucked, and instead, I think it’s better to just start with like, “Hey, things aren’t going great, but there is a solution. And then if you want, now that you care a little bit and you see a light at the end of the tunnel, now we can go through the whole process. You can understand the nuance of both what’s happening, what we can do, and how we get to the other side.” It’s almost like when I talk to technologists who are building other companies like mine and try to help scientists understand how to pitch even to other technical investors, the thing I always come back to is no one will learn until they care. So your first goal is to make someone care about what you’re doing, then they’ll learn.
Scientists are very spoiled because when you sit around with a bunch of scientists and talk science, they all care. It’s a science thing. Scientists just, they’re implicitly like, “Oh, wow. You study black holes and the gravity at the center of them? That’s so interesting.” You don’t have to motivate it and there doesn’t have to be a reason, there’s just the reason is, wow, cool. And at MIT when I was there for six years, it was very spoiled environment because I’d be like, “Well, I’m working on the future of RNA medicine and how RNAs are programmable,” and they’d go, “Wow. Tell me more.”
And then you go out to an investor, have dinner with Tim Ferriss and you’ve got to wheel it back and be like, “Why does this even matter besides being a footnote on genetics?” And I think that’s always a good learning, and it’s something I’ve gotten used to with talking about my company and talking about what we’re doing, but then coming back to policy, it just helped drive it back to me that this is a fundamental truth of storytelling. If you’re trying to get something done, make someone care, explain the problem, illustrate a solution, and then help them. Then they can go a level deeper, we could talk about the specifics and the pathway there.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. And the storytelling word, and this is important because if you’re proselytizing, if you’re persuading, in almost every instance, it’s going to be some form of storytelling. So after the op-ed came out, after you were giving your congressional testimony, et cetera, et cetera, you also sent me a few different docs. There was the investor update doc, which we may not get into great detail on depending on how much needs to be redacted, but we can, we can always bleep it out or cut it. The second was sort of a primer on mRNA and programmable medicine, if that’s fair to describe it.
And one of the edit notes, which is a suggestion, I mean, I’m not right about everything, but I was like, “You know what? In the second piece, there’s this story of AlphaFold,” and I was like, “That’s a great place to start because sometimes if you begin with high concept or you begin with things that are a little abstract, it’s easy for people to get lost, even if they understand it, for it to cause them to drift.” And so it’s like, okay, maybe start with story, point, story, or sure you could start with a shocking stat and then lead into like, “Here’s the problem, here’s the solution.” There are a lot of ways to do it, but the storytelling piece, it’s easy for people to forget that selling, pitching, board meeting, you name it, a lot of it is going to revolve around your ability to tell compelling stories.
So where would you like to go next? I mean, I grabbed, of course, a whole bunch of things and before this call sent you my kind of edit notes as images that I scanned, but also as a Loom where I kind of walked through my thinking behind some of those edit notes. I wanted to actually, before we move to that, make a quick note for people mentioning PickFu. I don’t have any equity in PickFu, I just like saying it actually, which is like I could make fun of the name, but it’s like the fact of the matter is I just think it’s hilarious to say.
So the other application or value of the split testing is not just having maybe a better idea of one-liners or framing that you could use in person because even though the headline of the op-ed couldn’t be changed, when I then shared that article, I was able to use the same link, sure, but I was able to use a different headline based on the split testing and it was unambiguous. It was like one or two of the headlines tested were by far and away the winners, statistically speaking. And so it’s like, all right, just grab that because ultimately top of the funnel, you need click-through rate before people are ever going to read the piece, so let’s optimize for that. But coming back to, I guess, where to go next, you tell me, man. This is in service of whatever you think might be worthwhile to go over. So what are your thoughts?
Jacob Becraft: So when we move back to the longer piece that I’ve been just trying to organize some of my thoughts around where I think at least a piece of the future of medicine is heading.
Tim Ferriss: The working headline is “RNA Medicine and the Rise of Platform Therapeutics.” Okay.
Jacob Becraft: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Go ahead. Just wanted to give people something to hang their hat on.
Jacob Becraft: So “RNA Medicine and the Rise of Platform Therapeutics,” and thinking about even introducing to the world what a platform therapy or a therapeutic platform could be, why it changes medicine, why it changes how we think about developing medicines, deploying medicines in the near term, the medium term and the long term. Where are we going? What could be in the clinic next year because of this technology? What could be possible with medicine in five years? And then where are we on a 10 to 15 year time curve in terms of what will be possible? And I’ve been trying to organize some thoughts around this, the way that I see the future. The policy piece of this story over the top is an important aspect of it because biotechnology and space, rocket companies, I think are actually two of the most similar industries out there. You have an incredibly long time horizon in on investment, you have an incredibly high upfront investment cost and you have essentially binary outcomes. The drug works or it doesn’t, you get to orbit or you don’t, you blow up on takeoff or you fail some early stage safety readout.
Those are all very similar. What I think the rocket industry got out in front of them and Elon as sort of the flag bearer of commercial space industry going back to the early 2000s, got out in front of this message with was how to engage policymakers to enable innovation to feedback on itself in a rapid context. And so in the 2000s, it actually was just like it is today with medicine, it was very hard to rapidly launch rockets. It was very hard to fail multiple times — fail or not completely succeed or just be given the privilege to take shots. Now, I want to say, putting a medicine into a human is not the same as launching a rocket that is available to blow up over the Gulf of Mexico, and we can salvage that.
We don’t want to put people’s lives in danger, but we do need common sense regulatory reform to enable this future of medicine, and as I sort of got to the end of that story with you and got that in front of Congress and got it into the President’s legislative priorities, it turned back to this piece of where do I see medicine going? Where do I see platform therapeutics? And your feedback on what I had put together is actually helpful because one of the questions I saw in your loom was, what do you mean by platform? What do you mean by infrastructure? Are these the same things or are these different? And so maybe it’s more helpful to talk about what a platform therapeutic is to start, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Jacob Becraft: So a therapeutic platform, people have been claiming medicines are platforms for 20 years in the biotech industry and they’ve almost always been wrong.
Tim Ferriss: It sounds good.
Jacob Becraft: Well, the reason people like it is that theoretically, if you have a platform that can be multiple drugs, then someone will give you a premium over the — it’s like when Sweet Green went public and they were like, “We’re a tech company, not a salad company. We deserve a markup in our market cap,” and you’re like, “Okay. Well, I mean, prove it, maybe. I don’t know. Domino’s is a tech company and an infrastructure company.” So it is possible.
Tim Ferriss: This is like a caffeine ketone-induced interjection, but people should go back and check out the stock charts on Domino’s Pizza compared to all the fancy tech companies and everything. It’ll blow your mind. So just put that aside.
Jacob Becraft: So I think that this doesn’t happen in biotechnology enough for the record, but I try to be a student of business and innovation broadly and study how Elon has built SpaceX, how Domino’s has built Domino’s, and that also shapes my global worldview on, hey, biotechnology is having a rare earth metals moment, a rare earth minerals moment with China right now that was 10, 15 years ago for the electric vehicle industry. On the Domino’s side, you look at that and you go, “Wow, this is an incredible infrastructure tech story of pizza that’s like fine. It’s fine.” I’m from Illinois near Chicago, so their pizza is fine to me. That’s the official talking point. But to wheel it back, what is a platform in business, but I guess what is a platform therapeutic? So in medicine, going back 50 years to the beginning of biotechnology, you started with let’s design this drug and it’s a molecule, it needs to be put together in a certain way.
We do that in the lab and then we take it forward, we put it in a patient, we see how it works and we move it through clinical trials. If it’s successful, then it gets approved and then we can sell it in the marketplace and then the company finally makes some amount of money. And the problem with that, just in terms of IRR or verticalization story is that the company itself gets value because it learns how to do the process, but the technology doesn’t build on itself. So you build one drug and you get that drug approved.
The next time you start back at square one for either a different medicine or a different type. Maybe you take some learnings that you have about that medicine, but everyone has the learnings because we do science in the open. Everyone sees a lot of your FDA documents, they see your medicine that you’re bringing forward. You have to publish your clinical trial results in certain forums. So you’re not gaining any sort of peace by developing it, though as a business, you’re flexing that muscle, which is helpful, and it’s helpful to have that experience as an organization, but you’re not decreasing the risk of future medicines.
So a platform therapeutic seeks to build a common technological infrastructure that you can build multiple different medicines off of. So an example of a platform would actually be Moderna’s RNA vaccine platform. So people like to say this thing about the COVID vaccine, about how Moderna built a COVID vaccine in 62 days and got it into clinical trials, and that’s not exact — sure, that’s true. 62 days from the identification of the COVID antigen, the COVID sequence that they wanted to use, and then 62 days to create a vaccine for testing. But they spent 12 years before that developing this sort of technology, baseline technology, particles, RNA sequences, all these pieces to build a lot of other types of vaccines and therapeutics.
And so when COVID came around, they had flu vaccine and all of these different types of other vaccines that they knew how they worked and they were able to kind of plug and play in a COVID sequence where a flu sequence used to be and use that in that setting. And that’s very powerful in terms of speed. Sort of mRNA vaccines aside and what everyone’s piece on them is, I just think that’s — the story of speed and the story of rollout is really important.
Tim Ferriss: Just for folks who, like me, are like, oh, God, I’m getting maybe not lost, but I’m like, oof, this is biotech, I don’t know very much about. To come back to the Domino’s, or let’s say Uber, or SpaceX, but it’s like if Uber has built the infrastructure and everything necessary with Uber Eats to deliver hamburgers and then it’s like, can you deliver these vaccines? It’s not the best example because you’re not going to be shipping these to people’s homes necessarily. And they’re like, sure. And then the story is, in 60 days, Uber developed an entire system for delivering vaccines. It’s like, well, kind of, but they had everything else already built that enabled them to do that, which then for each additional “launch,” not to mix the SpaceX, but they are de-risking the entire endeavor and speeding it up by effectively skipping all of those steps that are already established, right?
Jacob Becraft: I would say biotechnology is like, I think, incredibly antiquated when it comes to involvement of advanced technologies that are not biological. So when I think about what we need to realize the future of medicine, there’s two different buckets. One of them are new drug technologies. So these are programmable medicines. These are different sorts of ways to think about the drug that gets injected into the person. How is that going to be more advanced, safer, more controllable, more adaptable, more personalizable?
The second piece is physical deployment infrastructure. How do we build small scale manufacturing and clinical supply chains that can deploy nationally and globally to make sure that in your neighborhood, you’re able to get this advanced medicine? And those are two different and important pieces to what I see the future of medicine becoming.
And so on the therapeutic platform side, these are new technologies. This is what we’re developing at Strand. We’re developing various different, to use a SpaceX analogy, various different types of rockets.
And so the way we’re thinking about this is, you have payloads similar to satellites that SpaceX is trying to get more and more fancy payloads, satellites, astronauts, eventually entire data centers or entire moon-based cruise into orbit in an efficient manner that’s scalable for medicine. And in the same way, what we’re trying to solve is doing that with build the technological solutions to get these different proteins into the different areas of the body, and the reason that is such a pressing problem is that right now we have a lot of low-hanging fruit that is diseases we know how to treat, proteins that we know could do something about it, but the inability to sort of get the protein to where it needs to go.
But we are accelerating our knowledge with AI. You have DeepMind and AlphaFold creating the ability to design almost any protein you can imagine to do anything. You have new AI research tools that are helping us understand disease at a higher level of complexity. We’re very soon going to reach a massive bottleneck of all of these different solutions that we know exist, like what to do, and we can’t get them where they need to go. We’re going to have a backlog of satellites and no ability to get them to orbit in a scalable manner. And so it’s great to have AI tools. It’s great to build all this new technology, but we’ve now taken the bottleneck that used to be discovery and we’re shifting it over into deployment and testing.
Tim Ferriss: What I’d love to just come back to in case it has changed, what are the blockers in the way of your most important responsibilities as CEO? Because it’s like I want to make sure that what we’re talking about is kind of in service of that.
Jacob Becraft: I think that’s a fantastic question actually, because I guess what I’m saying about what medicine needs to have a SpaceX moment, for instance, I don’t think at least that it’s a non-obvious thing to realize. The problem is how do you actually execute it? And the reality of medicine development in the United States and how biotech companies work in the United States and the capital formation ecosystem that exists to create medicine in the United States is incredibly swung to the incentivization of making minor steps forward and of doing single things at a time. And so biotechnology actually in the US is not set up from a venture capital standpoint in a lot of ways like technology is. And in tech, you have people constantly being like, “I’m going to build a generational company.”
In biotechnology, 90-plus percent of companies go, “Here’s an idea, I’m going to take it from point A to point B, which is not — point B is not commercial. It is, point A is this is the idea and I think it could work and point B is here’s some evidence that it works and at point B, I’m going to sell the asset.” It’s very similar to how people think about like real estate development, for instance. And so it’s attracted almost like a private equity asset development sort of mindset —
Tim Ferriss: Sorry to interrupt, but I try to be the muggle who’s like, “Ooh, that’s interesting, that’s very memorable,” but just current state of biotech comparable to real estate development for these following reasons, but what would it look like for us to have our SpaceX moment and why is that even relevant? That contrast is super interesting. It’s the first time I’ve heard you say that and immediately I’m like, “Oh, yeah. Okay, got it.” Yeah.
Jacob Becraft: Well, I really think it’s a capital markets problem. Let’s go back to SpaceX again because I just love talking about SpaceX. No one would debate in 2004 maybe that if you radically decreased the cost to orbit per kilogram, that would not be an incredible business. I think that’s very obvious. The question was both technologically and how could we possibly get there, and luckily we had someone who was both already extremely wealthy, he wasn’t a billionaire yet at that point, I don’t think.
Tim Ferriss: Which is fucking crazy to think about.
Jacob Becraft: Yeah, Elon being a lowly 130 millionaire in the 2000s and who then just put it all on black and was like, “Spin the wheel, Johnny. Let’s go,” and then just shot rocket, shot rocket, shot rocket, I’m going to go bankrupt, whatever. He’s like, “I’ll just go back and make another Zip2 and I’ll do another PayPal if this doesn’t work out.” By the way, I was a huge space nerd at the time and in high school following this story and listening to all of the establishment voices being like, “This guy is an idiot. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” But he had both his own capital. But the other thing about Elon that I think everyone should be able to tell at this point is he’s an incredible capital formation genius. He’s an incredible storyteller, which was one of the core keys of capital formation.
Tim Ferriss: For people listening, are we talking about fundraising? Is that what that means?
Jacob Becraft: Oh, yes. Fundraising. Yeah, it’s about getting money around the idea. The ability to pull tons of dollars together around a core, insane long-term mission is an incredible skillset that deep technology, which is sort of the umbrella that has space and quantum computing and biotechnology, anything that is a long R&D time horizon, requires. And so the capital pools, the fundraising environment that is traditional biotech, really deeply struggles with the idea of long-term bold idea investment. We have very few shots that are even allowed to be taken on goal. And so when I think about, back to your original question, what is my goal as CEO who wants to not just build a better biotech widget? I don’t want to build a better mousetrap to catch more mice for this one person and exit out of the company. We want to fundamentally change how we’re able to build medicines.
That is a long and expensive road. And even as you unlock — if we get drugs approved and we are able to get revenues, by the time we’re there, ideally our research engine is humming so much that even those drug revenues don’t pay for all of our — it’s a constant feed forward until you break through to the other side and all of a sudden you’re staring at a trillion dollar IPO. And so you have to kind of catch that. As CEO, I think about how do we find globally the people who are aligned with that idea, and that’s collaborators, it’s financial support, it’s people who want to think about — if you’re trying to get the best IRR on your dollar between here and next year, I might not be your best bet. I’m sorry, we might not be your best bet. We hope to be. We always hope to drive that original piece, but we want to be the 10, 20, 30 year time horizon massive return that people are going to see while we push medicine forward.
And so those capital partners, they exist, they exist in the United States, they exist outside the United States. We want to be able to reach those folks and tell them these stories. When I think about my role as CEO, as we try to actually build the future, I think about how do I get our story in a way that is digestible because the people who think about these things — everyone wants to cure cancer. I don’t need a story behind curing cancer. I just need a story about like how we’re going to get there and how curing cancer is actually going to be one step on the road to solving disease writ large.
Tim Ferriss: I’m just kind of looking through some of the summaries of the last stuff that we talked about. These are the things that really stick out to me, and then it’s like, okay, when I think of aerospace and I’m not educated, I was not tracking it in t he way that you were, or Steve Jurvetson, who’s been just fascinated by this stuff since day zero. But when I think of, say, NASA, and again, not to — I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I think about NASA and the government is incredibly slow moving and resistant to change because there are going to be a million different reasons. So it’s like, okay, how did not to designate Elon Musk as the paragon of all great things and archangel with capitalism, but he’s done some pretty amazing stuff. Flaws and warts aside right for now.
Jacob Becraft: He’s the greatest currently living American industrialist. I don’t know how anyone could possibly disagree with at least that piece.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, with that piece. So with you and unlocking capital markets, capital formation to support this long-term vision, there are people who have seemingly done this kind of stuff, meaning patient capital, long-term capital, vast quantities of money who have done this before. SpaceX I don’t think would be the only example, at least in terms of training Wall Street to be like, “It’s fine. Jeff is going to figure it out. He told us what he’s going to do.” Amazon is also a pretty fascinating example of sort of disciplining Wall Street to be like, “Oh, we’re the only company that analysts are going to give a pass on not being profitable for a hundred years.” And by the way, if you break even exactly every year, that’s not an accident, but pretty amazing financial planning.
So what do you feel like you most need to do? Is it getting on the road and delivering a concise message to sovereign wealth funds? In your mind, are you like, “Within three years, five years, we outgrow the vast majority of venture capital firms, and okay, maybe we step up and we get some PE firms”? I mean, you already have some patient capital on the cap table. So what do you view as the main dominoes that you need to tip over or at least conditions you need to set so that you can execute on what you’re describing?
Jacob Becraft: Let’s wheel it back to one of the other great capitalists and industrialists of the 20th and 21st century, Jeff Bezos, because he actually did things very differently than how Elon approached SpaceX in terms of building a company that is incredibly complex, incredibly long-term-minded, but he did it in the public market. And you could argue that Tesla has done that as well, and I think that there’s an argument to be had there, but looking at what Amazon did, the thing I think every entrepreneur in the world should read is the correlated first public year to last year of Bezos’ reign over Amazon investor letters.
There’s a Google Doc link online that someone just put them all into 178 page PDF and I think everyone should sit down and spend an afternoon drinking coffee and reading them, knowing what happens with Amazon, reading 1998 through the dotcom bubble burst, through the e-commerce generation, through social media, through everyone coming online in our online world today and watching how Jeff puts forward his vision of the future is that it both gives you a lot of respect, of course, the things he saw coming, but the thing that I respect about it as being a public company or going about building capital in that sort of a way is you need to say what you’re doing in a way that makes sense for your investors. And I think for Amazon, they were incredibly undervalued until they weren’t. For a very long time, Amazon was trading at a pretty low PD ratio and then all of a sudden people were like, “What is AWS, by the way?” And it was an explosion.
Tim Ferriss: It’s our side hustle, little side hustle.
Jacob Becraft: It’s 2017 or 2018, I feel like they went from $120 a share to over $1,500 a share in what seemed no amount of time as all of a sudden people were like, “Hold on. Wait. Maybe owning all levels of the infrastructure and deployment ecosystem plus the brand, plus then building your brands on top, plus also kind of owning the internet in a way, because what is AWS, by the way?” It’s a $25 billion behemoth stuck inside this company and they rocketed from like a — I don’t remember what their market cap was before that, but then to one of the largest companies in the world and that is like everything that’s great, an overnight success 20 years in the making. But if you read the letters and you see it over time, you see them making bets. Not every bet paid off because not every bet should, but I believe it’s very important —
I’m saying this, Tim, because you asked, what do I think I need to do? I think we need to say what we’re doing and we need to say it publicly. We need to say it because it will attract partners. We need to say it because it will remind people who are on this mission with us about what we are building to. I think that obviously if you invested in Amazon’s IPO, you would’ve been very happy in 2014 with the performance of your investment from then to then. But then if you invested in Amazon in 2014, you’d be very happy with the last 12 years of performance of that stock as well because they continued to make those investments. But you have to have people understanding your message and you need to say it. You say it every day. You say it like a mantra, “We are changing the pace of medicine,” because what happens is the exit ramp comes.
If you’re doing things great, the exit ramp will always come. You need to ask yourself if you should get off the highway. And understanding and reminding yourself about what you’re building every single day helps you understand whether or not you need to get off the highway. And I’m not saying every single person should keep their head down and try to build a generational company when someone comes out and offers you an outsized amount of return on your dollar. You have stakeholders, you have shareholders, you have people you have promised a piece to, and you need to be a diligent steward of their capital and be able to create value in that way, but I do think that it helps frame what is our current value that is different than our market cap, whether we’re private or public.
There’s a story about Amazon, I think, during the dotcom boom, I think this is about Bezos, where he wrote something like, “We are not our market cap across every board,” every chalkboard or whiteboard in the Amazon headquarters during the dotcom bubble burst, because obviously the tide went out on everyone who operated through the internet because no one could discern the difference between a zero revenue, let’s get the most people on our website company, and an Amazon who is actually building something real. And so it’s very important to understand your value in order to understand what would be an outsized near term value if an acquirer comes along or just how we’re going to build things because it’s not about near term perception, it’s about long term goal.
And I like to think about this investment philosophy. When I look at someone like Josh Kushner and how he’s made just like this incredible run at Thrive Capital. I think when I look at some of those great investors who have made these high conviction bets, it seems like they’re able to identify this moment in time for companies that is post-conviction, pre-consensus. The ones who know, know we’re post-conviction. We’re no longer saying, “Can we do this?” We’re like, “Oh my God, this is going to work.” But it’s pre-consensus because not everyone has caught on yet or not everyone is convinced. There’s a data set that insiders and technologists or whoever sit there and they go, “Oh my God, I think we’re there.” There’s a moment, if you go back and look at OpenAI or Anthropic, or any of these companies, there’s a moment probably in the late 2010s when OpenAI was running where folks internally telling the story, if you listen to them are like, “Oh my God, this is accelerating.”
Before we got DALL-E, before we got ChatGPT, before we had these tools, there was an internal post-conviction moment. And then of course there’s the, “Oh, wow. I think this beats the Turing test. We’re post-consensus. No one is, I think, going to be able to debate that AI is going to just completely upend the way that everyone lives their life going forward.” And that’s the consensus moment. That’s the 500 billion-plus market cap moment for all of these companies. And so we need to understand where our post-conviction moment is, and then we need to build to bring folks around to the post-consensus moment.
Tim Ferriss: One question popped into my head earlier that I wanted to ensure I didn’t forget, which is — and I don’t have a strong feeling one way or the other, but the Moderna story is so apt in so many ways and yet there’s a fly in the ointment, which is broadly speaking, but even more specifically, COVID vaccine has become so politicized that despite what any one individual might think, they may just need to fall in line with kind of party templates or whatever you might talk about, depending on who you’re talking to, and I’m wondering if that has presented any problem or if it is behind closed doors and closed session, it doesn’t really matter.
Jacob Becraft: Thinking about that analogy, there’s probably better, or maybe not better, but different sorts of analogies you could use there that are just less politically-charged because there’s no reason to wade into politically charged waters to explain these sorts of things.
Another great example could just be the original biotech story around people using technology to make insulin. We used to use pig pancreases, harvest them, grind them up, isolate the insulin, put it out, and the birth of biotechnology was around people taking the insulin gene, putting it into bacteria and getting the bacteria to actually make the insulin protein and then isolating the protein from there. But that actually became a platform because then what did people do? They created Herceptin and other sorts of medicines by taking other proteins and dropping it in.
Tim Ferriss: Growth hormone.
Jacob Becraft: Growth hormone, exactly. Right. And that’s the basis of the genesis of biotechnology. That’s a Genentech story. That is also what Genzyme did when — the sort of bicoastal war between San Francisco and Boston that’s always existed in biotechnology, which I absolutely love. I think it makes things a lot more interesting and just sort of gives a good view on the cultures that set 50 years before any of us were here. That I think is actually maybe even a more powerful story, and we built those platforms and those companies built incredible value and then we got away from it. Then we got more to like, “Okay, now biotechnology is a tool. Let’s get back to drug development.” And capital markets skated — in the ’90s when pharma companies began verticalizing and consolidating, they began pulling in even the big guys themselves, Bristol Myers Squibb, BMS, that’s a big pharma company.
Why does it have that name? Because it used to be three companies. You talk to people who worked in the ’80s and the ’90s, they’re like, “Well, I used to work for Bristol. I used to work for Myers. I worked for Myers Squibb.” They started pulling in and then once they pulled in, they realized they were so large that they couldn’t do research anymore. So they started buying small companies. And so what did our capital markets do? They started building for that acquisition.
The problem that becomes on a timeline like that though, is the whole industry begins to skate where the capital at the other end of the market is pulling. And if that capital is M&A, mergers and acquisitions, buy ups from big pharma, then everyone in the innovation industry is focusing on what pharma wants to buy.
Tim Ferriss: What kind of shoes pharma wants to wear, right?
Jacob Becraft: Yeah. Well, what’s pharma doing today? What’s the M&A situation look like today? To the point where this is an actual saying in biotechnology investing circles, it’s called “short the launch.” It means that when a biotech company like mine has gotten a drug approved and is going to launch it themselves, like actually take it commercial themselves, investors in the public market on the whole will short that because they think a biotech company will mess it up because the muscle doesn’t exist anymore because so few companies do it that they’re like, “Short it. No, they’re going to mess it up. They’re going to miss their projection and their stock’s going to dip and we’re going to win.” And that’s just the market reacting to reality. I don’t know, it’s not nefarious necessarily, but that sort of gives you a picture of how biotechnology has basically succumbed itself to be a little brother to the pharmaceutical industry, a pool of drugs that they can buy, which that’s wonderful.
Google buying your startup in the tech industry is a great exit for everyone involved. However, if the entire tech industry was reliant on Meta, Google, Netflix, whoever buying your company, then you would see a lot weirder and less ambitious dynamics at the entrepreneurial side because you’d just be trying to figure out what is Sundar going to do a year from now. You can’t build for a select group of people’s tastes, and that’s the risk I think biotechnology has found itself in.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Are there any more examples — they don’t have to be biotech, but outside of SpaceX, outside of Amazon, not going as far back as Genzyme and Genentech, although it is fun to look back at that, particularly when you read some of these books on the birth of, say, Genentech and you realize it’s like, yeah, it’s top of mind, so I’ll mention it, but it was kind of like Apple. This ragtag group of renegades in a garage really flying by the seat of their pants and doing some wild shit, and as you said, decades later, when everyone is contorting themselves into their probably inaccurate prediction of what the heads of corp dev or the CEO of big companies one, two, and three are thinking, the dynamic is just completely different. The incentives are very different. The timelines are very different.
How you think about building on success, I mean, to get back to the platform. It’s like if every drug has to individually go from A to Z, you don’t have a platform. It’s like if you’re kind of skipping A to M and you’re starting at M, okay, maybe you have a platform. I’m wondering if there are any other sort of entrepreneurs or companies that stand out to you as having parallels to what you’re trying to do.
Jacob Becraft: Before I get to that, just because you just compared Genentech and Apple, and I want to point something out to you, I don’t know if you know this. I don’t know if anyone knows this. So Art Levinson, who was the CEO of Genentech from 1995 to 2000-something, was also on the Apple board of directors and became the chairman replacing Steve Jobs in, I don’t know, 2011 or something.
Tim Ferriss: I did not know that.
Jacob Becraft: I don’t know, there’s a wonderful story about the read through and Art Levinson and his partnership and friendship with Steve Jobs, but between the two of them, they are highly, highly related companies. And I think that is actually why I spend time studying technology and why you see an increased interest, especially in the last five to 10 years among traditional tech and deep tech Silicon Valley investors like Andreessen Horowitz or Playground Global, one of my investors, moving into biotechnology, seeing a resurgence of this both technological and cultural outlook towards building big ideas around what we can do with technology applied to biology and human health. And that I think is really exciting.
I mean, there’s all sorts of examples of companies that have built things like this. I think that Tesla’s a great example. Well, maybe we should move away from an Elon analogy. I don’t mean to ride on Elon. I have spent a lot of time studying him.
But Apple is a great example of a company that sort of built a core platform that solved a delivery problem. Not looking at the early Steve Jobs first tenure at the company, but when he re-came back to the company, cut 80 — I don’t remember what year that was, ’98 maybe or something. He came back to the company, cut 80 percent of their product offerings, refined it, and then moved them, created the smartphone era, upended Blackberry in a way that was so — I mean, they were hated on. But he created the — that’s a delivery system. That’s what a smartphone is. Apple and the iPhone and the iPad, they’re delivery systems of all of the technology workplace that can work within them.
And by creating that delivery system, your iPhone and you are going to work within our ecosystem and attacking that market by partnering with Jony Ive and creating a culture around it, but also creating an ease of operability, created an ability for other companies to deliver their products to consumers, So many companies don’t build smartphones, but they build on smartphones. That’s a delivery platform that also is constantly getting better. The iPhone 1 — I actually just saw an iPhone 1 recently at a friend’s house. He still has his original iPhone 1. I was like, “God, your dad must have been rich.”
Tim Ferriss: No copy-paste.
Jacob Becraft: Yeah, no copy-paste. This thick, man. It’s this thick. It’s this thick, but it’s also the screen is so — I thought it was so big. It’s so small. But each successive one increased its capabilities, increased its form factor, increased what it could do, became a better delivery system, eventually supplanted. Over time you stopped using the earlier versions, but each one, of course, had a ton of value and Apple delivered things to you. They had the iTunes store, they sold you music, they used it to deliver their own products. They were also a platform for other people to deliver their products and that created one of the most valuable companies in the entire world, and that is — you think about what creates the most value and what changes the way that we interact with the world around us, it is delivery solutions. It is being able to launch enough satellites to put internet anywhere in the world and do that on an economical basis.
It is a place where you could design any sort of software and get it into the hands of almost every single person on this planet or at least every single person in the developed world. And I think for medicine, it is being able to reach any cell in the body and get the exact type of protein that we want there. And in the near term, it’ll be more traditional medicines. It’ll be, we need to design them and then we need to create them and then we need to test them and we need to get them to patients and you need to develop for larger patient populations, but if you want to see what that sort of technology enables on a 10 to 20 year timeline, it’s personalization, because once you have a good view or a great understanding of how these delivery solutions work, and you have the infrastructure, manufacturing, clinical, deployment, getting to patients both across the country, across the world, then you can start to be like, “Well, why aren’t we just building bespoke therapies?”
Right now, the economics don’t work, but the economics of Spotify didn’t work in 2001. If Spotify’s entire market was through your desktop computer, you could have never built Spotify, but you can when they’re smartphones, you can when people always have it in their car. And so in 2011, that’s a much better time for Spotify to exist as a company and really take off. Now, that is, I think, where the future of medicine sort of goes towards, a hyper-personalization and an ability to directly — we’re starting to see people trying to build personalized medicine right now.
There’s a story, Baby KJ, that came out last year in the New York Times. Jennifer Doudna was involved, a number of hospitals, they corrected a baby, but the reality of that baby’s genetic problem was that the change needed to be made in the liver, and that’s great for that baby.
And there’s other diseases that we could do that for in the liver, but we’re going to run out. Kidney disease is not going to be solved in the liver, neurodegeneration is not going to be solved in the liver. And so we have to find the other solutions and then build infrastructure that creates an economically viable path forward to where bespoke medicines are possible.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. We’ll put in a link to Baby KJ and —
Jacob Becraft: Sorry, I just threw in —
Tim Ferriss: No, it was great. Which I hadn’t actually —
Jacob Becraft: Threw in a whole new idea. My larger piece of where I think the future of medicine is going.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, which I guess we’re not going to get into today, but you and I have texted on why has CRISPR not delivered on the expectations that had everybody euphoric in X years in the past, right? But in this particular case, yeah, KJ became the first patient to receive a personalized systemic CRISPR-based editing therapy, saving him from a fatal liver condition so people can read more about that.
Well, this was super fun. Nice to see you, man.
Jacob Becraft: Good to see you.
Tim Ferriss: Happy to try to be helpful anytime. You know how to find me.
Jacob Becraft: It’s always fun to talk to you, Tim. All right, man. Take care, all right? We’ll talk soon.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, take care, buddy.
Jacob: Later, man. Bye.
Tim Ferriss: Bye.
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