01:30:53 · Vineeta Agarwala
[01:30:53] S7: Yeah. Great question. I mean, I think we're absolutely part of the agentic wave. I've never seen so much interest in the role of AI agents in transforming how science is done, how research discoveries are made, how drugs could be developed. The FDA launched an AI agent called ELSA, cute name, but, you know, potentially signaling, you know, a transformative role for AI even in the regulatory agency, which is kind of a mind blowing mind blowing thing to think about. Right? You would have thought that it would have been the innovators and the start ups kind of pushing AI first and then waiting for the regulator to say, yes, we believe these predictive tools are going to help us make drugs. So I think we are seeing a really different market pull than ever before. At the same time, the business models in health care, you know, are still similar, and the core products that drive value are still similar. So we're in the business of making new medicines, so are the startups that we back in large part, or making the practice of medicine way better and transforming the practice of medicine. And both have some really established business models around them. Drugs that work that have an impact on patients get paid for. They get paid for because they save the system money. Services, we pay for because people need services on time at you know, from the right specialist for the right disease. And so those are all, you know, great business models in which to in which to invest and in which startups can run. But certainly startups are now running in a much more capital efficient way and a much more AI powered way than they ever were before. We need good agents in the game Where in our space
01:32:33 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[01:32:33] S1: is Silicon Valley's sweet spot or like strike zone in bio? Because I I was reading the Wall Street Journal today about a company that does, they're developing robotics for lab testing equipment. So basically like pipetting, you know, famously it's like a PhD student just going like this all day long. Bunch of robots doing that. Makes a ton of sense. That feels like Silicon Valley all the way. Same [01:32:54] S0: How thing how many cursor for bio pitches have you you got? Is it is it in the hundreds? [01:32:59] S1: But that feels like more in the sweet spot. When I think about like an ERP system for for biotech companies, that feels a lot easier than saying, I'm going to take a cancer drug through the FDA trials and I'm never going to go public. I'm going to raise growth rounds at every stage. Like we haven't seen that much, but maybe we're still just early in that trend changing.
01:32:59 · John Coogan, Vineeta Agarwala, Jordi Hays
[01:32:59] S1: But that feels like more in the sweet spot. When I think about like an ERP system for for biotech companies, that feels a lot easier than saying, I'm going to take a cancer drug through the FDA trials and I'm never going to go public. I'm going to raise growth rounds at every stage. Like we haven't seen that much, but maybe we're still just early in that trend changing. [01:33:19] S7: Yeah. And I think part of that, the trend is changing in part because of the same trends we're seeing in other verticals that AI is getting paid for through labor budgets, and AI is not necessarily replacing but augmenting labor. Right? Ninety percent, ninety plus percent of all chemical screens for new drugs fail. No drug comes out of it. Ten percent of all nurse positions across the health care system are vacant. We can't find the nurses to fill the positions. Right? So we're living in a world where actually we need agentic resources to come in as labor, and that is different than the world we were living in before where we were trying to squeeze out IT budget from, you know, let's say, a large pharma company or, let's say, a hospital system to deploy the types of Silicon Valley technologies that could have been transformative for the industries. And so now that there's a lot more, you know, autonomous task completion [01:34:14] S0: Sure.
01:34:14 · Jordi Hays, Vineeta Agarwala
[01:34:14] S0: Sure. [01:34:14] S7: As well as augmentation well beyond what humans could do in those fields, I do think some of those Silicon Valley technologies, you know, obviously, yes, they are being formed. Yes. We are absolutely being pitched the cursor for bio right now, and and we think it's very credible. We think it absolutely is the case that if you have a lot of data, you you're a company that's, let's say, run clinical trials before, managed many, many drugs through development, you should have agents crawling through that data, learning what humans might have missed, learning why things failed, why things succeeded, and then bringing that knowledge to your next set of set of endeavors. And so, absolutely, you know, this kind of regime of of a fully virtual agentic lab that for every one human scientist, you know, has hundreds of agentic scientists is a really, really interesting interesting vision. At the same time, making the drug is really valuable. So we really do think that great innovation can take it all the way and can you know, great start ups can actually develop their own [01:35:20] S0: their own Yeah. How how often a company comes to you that wants to be more on the picks and shovels side kind of infrastructure, maybe more b to b. How often do you find yourself encouraging them to own, try to take it all the way and actually like use whatever innovation or or insight they have to not just make that product available to other bio or pharma companies, but, you know, actually deliver the end value?
01:35:20 · Jordi Hays, Vineeta Agarwala
[01:35:20] S0: their own Yeah. How how often a company comes to you that wants to be more on the picks and shovels side kind of infrastructure, maybe more b to b. How often do you find yourself encouraging them to own, try to take it all the way and actually like use whatever innovation or or insight they have to not just make that product available to other bio or pharma companies, but, you know, actually deliver the end value? [01:35:46] S7: I think it really depends on the founders and exactly where the innovation sits. We've backed both. We're long on both infrastructure for the industry and, you know, SaaS, forward deployed SaaS, SaaS plus agentic implementations. And, you know, I think we think a lot of that has a ton of value and will fundamentally change how every organization operates, and not every organization is going to build their own cursor like tools for research. At the same time, sometimes the innovators who are closest I'll give you a real example. You know, autoimmune disease is horrible. Ten percent of people have an autoimmune disease. And sounds like science fiction, but recently, we tried CAR T therapy. Take take my T cells out of my body, engineer them, and instead of attacking a tumor cell, attack bad autoimmune cells. Okay. Well, that's interesting. And what if I could deliver it in the same type of vaccine type format that you got your COVID jab in, an LNP and an RNA that [01:36:48] S0: I'm kind of surprised to hear you calling a vaccine I'm kind of surprised to hear you calling a vaccine a jab. Yeah. But maybe that's just a comment.
01:36:48 · Jordi Hays, Vineeta Agarwala, John Coogan, Casey Neistat
[01:36:48] S0: I'm kind of surprised to hear you calling a vaccine I'm kind of surprised to hear you calling a vaccine a jab. Yeah. But maybe that's just a comment. [01:36:56] S7: What it is. [01:36:56] S1: Yeah. It's like it's like reclaiming [01:36:58] S0: tech bro. Reclaim it. We reclaim tech tech bro, technology brothers. [01:37:02] S1: Yeah. The pharmaceutical industry definitely needs [01:37:04] S7: to replace [01:37:04] S1: the job. [01:37:05] S7: The name of this thing to tech nerds. It just [01:37:07] S0: What about [01:37:09] S7: But you know, you know [01:37:10] S0: Oh, yeah. [01:37:10] S7: So to finish that story out, to make that requires a lot of engineering and a lot of optimization and a lot of so called Silicon Valley style optimization, and so we're seeing that. A company in our portfolio called Orbital Therapeutics announced really exciting data in monkeys, you know, demonstrating that that might be possible for autoimmune disease. [01:37:29] S6: So I [01:37:30] S7: think it goes both ways. Silicon Valley tech is gonna permeate every company whether they're based here or not and whether they're making drugs or not. [01:37:37] S0: Do you think that these sort of early IPOs that drug companies have done historically is a feature or a bug? Like if if we have more developed private capital markets, do you think that like is it even right that effectively retail, uneducated retail could just be taking these like, you know, gambling in the public markets on effectively FDA trials? Or is there a better way?