Toured @Ginkgo's autonomous lab today, and even more bullish on where drug discovery is headed.
Rows of robotic workcells running around the clock, with scientists designing the work instead of pipetting it. This is what R&D is going to look like, and it's closer than most people think.
The bottleneck has never been ideas. It's been the time and cost of testing them.
When you can run more experiments in a week than a traditional lab does in a quarter, the whole math of drug development changes.
Big thanks to @jrkelly for the tour and pushing the industry forward.
Zachary Rapp retweeted
I interviewed Billy, Elizabeth’s partner, following a private screening last night.
I can’t say what we talked about because it was off the record.
But I will say the doc is a masterpiece.
Billy was magnanimous in conversation. I gave him every opportunity to defend himself and strike back because Fielder
roughed him up, and yet, he demurred.
The immediate reactions of those present were scattered. Every conversation I had went in a surprising direction. Most entered the evening unequivocally believing Holmes is guilty and many left unsure what just happened.
Felder pulled off a piece that only opens the next chapter in what will surely become a continued saga.
Zachary Rapp retweeted
Pedigree is overrated. Grit isn't.
Bloomberg on who he'd hire: "the person whose father never was there, whose mother was in a drug treatment program. And he had to go and work three shifts at McDonald's to take care of his siblings."
"No matter how bad things are — looks on the bright side, takes the bull by the horns, puts in the sweat capital. That's where the results are."
Zachary Rapp retweeted
bill ackman on why large, boring companies now drop 25% in a day, something he says almost never happened when he started:
"a quarter of every american business, plus or minus, is owned by some combination of vanguard, state street and northern trust. when you shrink the float of a public company, the marginal buyer and seller is going to have more impact on the stock price."
"the marginal buyer and seller today is a citadel or a millennium. they operate with a large amount of leverage, very large gross books, and they're increasingly short-term."
"most investors are very short-term focused because they're compensated that way. they won't invest in a company unless they're confident the price is going to be higher on december 31st."
passive owns the float, pods set the price, and both are structurally unable to hold through a bad quarter. that inability is the opportunity.
Zachary Rapp retweeted
Translation: our gross margins are getting competed down to 0 by open source models and our capex burn rate is too high.
Let’s maintain our margins with regulatory capture, ban open source models, and slow down the capex arms race. All with a virtue signaling cherry on top.
We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.
Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training.
You can read the full post here: darioamodei.com/post/we-must…
Zachary Rapp retweeted
Doug Leone says 30% of VCs are incompetent, 40% do nothing, and less than 30% know what they’re doing
"I’ve said this before and I’ve taken sh*t for it, out of 10 venture folks, maybe 30% are incompetent. They don't know what they're doing.”
“Another 40%, I call them no-ops. No damage, no anything. They nod with the group."
"Maybe fewer than 30%, maybe 20% know what they're doing.”
“The other overlay is managing their status in the firm. I need a win, I need an exit, what's my partner going to say? So you don't really have the board member there. You have the shadow, you have the interpreter of what they think the board wants.”
"If you take a combination of lack of experience, duplicated domain, covers your ass with the partnership and incompetence, that's the worst of all kind. Completely f*cking clueless. To a damaging stage."
My conversation with @dougleone, partner at @sequoia.
0:00 How to Dominate for Decades
3:17 Turning Fear Into a Tailwind
5:40 Immigrant Drive, Hard Work & the Beach Club
12:19 Simplifying Life & Choosing Discomfort
14:37 The Homeless Sequoia Partner With No Plan B
16:49 Stepping Down, Coming Back & Starting Over
20:04 Why AI Is Different From Every Previous Technology Shift
22:13 Doug's Three Investment Heuristics
23:52 The Cost of Selling Great Companies Too Early
25:39 Helping Founders Turn Products Into Businesses
28:28 David Vélez, Nubank & the Psychology of Founder Support
32:25 Why Founders Must Remain the Soul of the Company
36:13 Torturing Yourself Into Greatness
39:57 Don Valentine, Succession & the Sequoia School of Hard Knocks
44:28 Staying Grounded & Developing a Sniffer for People
47:46 Hypercompetitive With a Heart of Gold
50:13 Fred Luddy, Israeli Founders & Radical Directness
52:28 Trust Is the Accelerant of Business
59:57 Starting From Zero & Hunting for the Next Great Founder
1:05:59 Architect Your Board Like Your Product
1:10:24 Truth, Disagreement & the Art of Difficult Feedback
1:13:43 Humanity, Introversion & the Value of Relationships
1:18:18 What Doug Learned From Michael Moritz
Includes paid partnerships.
Zachary Rapp retweeted
One note on the China discourse from me…I had pretty much every “blue-chip” fund pass on CrossBridge, including ones in the current debate, and one often cited reason was because there’s hundred of the same thing in China…
Epic - can’t wait for this @GavinSBaker
Retail, Substack, Reddit and most of all @X accounts are increasingly the most important forces in the stock market and yet there is no way for them to connect directly with the management teams of the companies they are writing about and investing in. And they have almost no visibility into the late-stage private companies that are ever more important.
The @TomorrowXSummit aims to change this. Hosted by @antoniogracias and Valor Equity Partners, @iconnections_io and @rbiscardi and @atreidesmgmt, we are going to have our own version of the superb Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs TMT conference with an epic line-up of both public and private companies. Instead of having sell-side analysts interview management teams, we are going to have X accounts like @citrini and buysiders do the fireside chats. We expect thousands of attendees at the Moody Center in Austin, November 17-18 and please note that security will be extremely tight given some of the CEOs that are going to speak.
Attendance will be free for X accounts that contribute positively to the discourse and affordable for retail accounts. Happy that this means friends like @DanielSLoeb1 , @altcap , @plaffont , @patrick_oshag and the @theallinpod crew will be able to afford the price of admittance should their schedules permit. And perhaps we can even get them on a panel or have them interview some management teams. I am sad to say there will be a different price for institutional investors who are not on X unless they are willing to reveal their anonymous handle, but I think this is going to be awesome for all. And everything will eventually be posted here on X for all to see. Open source for the win.
Link to the website to sign up in the next post:
Zachary Rapp retweeted
Back-of-envelope numbers for 1 gigawatt data center:
All-in Capex: ~$50 bn
Enterprise revenue generated: ~$25-30 bn/year
Electricity cost: $1-2 bn/year
~2 year payback.
The boom is real.
Zachary Rapp retweeted
1/ On Feb 21 I told my boss aka my wife @LTwolfe that I had my third conviction call not yet appreciated + to buy a basket
*In 2016 it was NVDA, pitched publicly at Invest For Kids in Chicago (80x+) when Lux portfolio company Zoox was using NVDA chips and I predicted the narrative would change from gaming consoles PS4/Xbox to simulation and AI…
Zachary Rapp retweeted
"your mortgage basically pays for itself" 1,2
1) mortgage may be 20%-40% higher
2) homeowner's job will migrate to collocated data center
Zachary Rapp retweeted
Salk Institute scientist Shrek Chalasani has been awarded up to $41.3 million from ARPA-H to advance a breakthrough technology he pioneered, sonogenetics, which uses ultrasound to precisely control cells within the body.
This funding will help transform the Chalasani lab’s discovery into a potential noninvasive therapy for a range of conditions, including peripheral neuropathies. By enabling targeted control of mammalian cells without surgery, sonogenetics could redefine how we treat disease.
Learn more: salk.edu/news-release/salk-i…
#SalkInstitute #ARPAH #Sonogenetics #Neuroscience #BiomedicalInnovation
Zachary Rapp retweeted
What are the most exciting things happening in biotech right now?
@zachweinberg: "Wait till people see these triple-G drugs. Muscle-sparing, no GI side effects — you get the weight loss but you keep your muscle. The pipeline is incredible."
@ToddYoungIN: "Sequence every flora, fauna — every living, non-human thing in our national parks and our public lands. The genetic traits of these animals and plants can be used to create new products that can improve human flourishing in the future. It's Lewis and Clark brought to the 21st century."
@DrAliciaJackson: "Being able to engineer neocortical tissue that we can use to repair brains with. Whether you've had a stroke or neurodegeneration — we're now at that point."
@friedberg: "Epigenetic reprogramming. There was a paper published out of China last week where they put these reprogramming factors on skin cells and reduced the age of the skin cells by 30 years after 12 days. It's pretty incredible."
The Hill & Valley Forum 2026
@HillValleyForum @ARPA_H @ARPA_HDirector
Zachary Rapp retweeted
** Internship Opportunity **
We’re looking for a summer intern at @redglassvc. Past interns who worked with me have gone on to become VC partners, founders, executives at top companies, even yoga teachers! To be blunt, I want someone looking for real mentorship and learning via this opportunity, vs a job
You:
• Technical (software, AI, deeptech) - especially AI × the physical world
• Understand business, not just tech
• High hustle. You find exceptional founders and earn their trust
• Build real relationships with builders (not VC-to-VC noise)
• Understand the value of diligence in investment decision making, and using trust-but-verify techniques
• Actually want to help founders win
• Already use AI as a core part of how you network, think and work
If this is you, reach out. Email is best.
Let’s build. 🦾🚀
Zachary Rapp retweeted
A kilo of tirzepatide costs between $70,000 - $100,000 wholesale
Retail is $44,000,000
And that’s why the grey market exists.
Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
