ARK Genomic Revolution ETF

Chamath oppose ×1 ▲ on 🤖 AI-designed open-source gene editors break the CRISPR patent toll E216 · 2025-02-21 ▶ 1:18:04

The biological models are different in that I think it's a much smaller population of people that will use it. I think they do have to figure out how to take these models and complement the existing pipeline they have. The pipeline they have right now I think is pretty brittle.

Friedberg support ×2 ▲ on 🤖 AI-designed open-source gene editors break the CRISPR patent toll E216 · 2025-02-21 ▶ 1:11:55

we talk a lot about the idea that you can use a computer, state the phenotype or the physical characteristics you want in a biological organism and have the software resolve the whole genome, all the DNA needed to make that physical organism real.

I don't know if you analogize Evo 2 to, I don't know whether it's GPD 2 or 3 or something, but I think we're going to see a similar Cambrian explosion of applications over the next couple of years.

Jason support ×1 ▲ on 🤖 AI-designed open-source gene editors break the CRISPR patent toll E177 · 2024-05-03 ▶ 1:07:59

And so it's fascinating to me taking nature and trying to patent nature.

Friedberg support ×3 ▲ on 🤖 AI-designed open-source gene editors break the CRISPR patent toll E177 · 2024-05-03 ▶ 1:08:25

There's a simple truth to all this, which is every single life sciences lab on Earth is using this technology today. It has absolutely revolutionized life sciences. It has changed everything. It has reset the trajectory of human health, of agriculture, and of industrial biotechnology.

Jason support ×2 ▼ on 📈 FTC merger-blocking chills early-stage biotech financing E158 · 2023-12-23 ▶ 39:29

One is if we put in more conservative, Republican, Libertarian, etc., less regulatory regime in Washington that could open up M&A as soon as 2025, perhaps.

Friedberg oppose ×2 ▼ on 📈 FTC merger-blocking chills early-stage biotech financing E158 · 2023-12-23 ▶ 42:58

I don't know if I'd take the antitrust regime as being the core driver of M&A not being on the table. ... The biggest driver of concern is just all the return on capital metrics that the big buyers are having to face. Return on invested capital is becoming more important than it's ever been

Sacks support ×3 ▼ on 📈 FTC merger-blocking chills early-stage biotech financing E158 · 2023-12-23 ▶ 40:29

the fact that regulators took 15 months to analyze the deal only to come to the conclusion that they basically weren't going to allow it, and then Adobe finally killed it, is going to have a chilling effect on M&A and Silicon Valley ... when you take half the potential exits off the table, you're absolutely making it tougher for VCs and founders to get a good return. It's that simple.

Chamath support ×3 ▼ on 📈 FTC merger-blocking chills early-stage biotech financing E158 · 2023-12-23 ▶ 36:50

there is no viable M&A path for early stage venture capital businesses. So if you can't have a 20 billion dollar merger or a 40 billion dollar merger or a 15 or 20 billion dollar M&A with a high degree of confidence, then the path to liquidity through M&A is less than 20% of the outcomes

Sacks support ×2 ▼ on 📈 FTC merger-blocking chills early-stage biotech financing E137 · 2023-07-14 ▶ 40:27

There's so few ways to have a good exit in the tech industry that when you take away M&A, it puts a damper on all risk-taking and the deployment of risk capital into the ecosystem.

Friedberg oppose ×2 ▼ on 📈 FTC merger-blocking chills early-stage biotech financing E129 · 2023-05-19 ▶ 57:02

Yeah, but Chamath, we're just not seeing a lot of the younger stuff get blocked. I don't think we've seen any attempts at blocking speculative portfolio acquisitions or speculative company acquisitions.

Sacks support ×2 ▼ on 📈 FTC merger-blocking chills early-stage biotech financing E129 · 2023-05-19 ▶ 59:31

Look, it is hard enough to make money as either a pharma investor or as a VC that there's only two good outcomes, right? There's IPOs, there's M&A, everything else basically goes, everything else is a zero, it goes bankrupt. So if you take M&A off the table, you really suppress the already challenged returns of venture capital.

Chamath support ×3 ▼ on 📈 FTC merger-blocking chills early-stage biotech financing E129 · 2023-05-19 ▶ 55:27

It is because the people that traffic in these stocks are the same ones that fund these early stage biotech companies. And I talked to a bunch of them, and they're like, if these guys block this kind of deal, we're going to get out of this game entirely. So just from the horse's mouth, what I'm telling you is you're going to see a pall come over the early stage venture financing landscape because a lot of these guys that are crossover investors, that own a lot of these public biotech stocks, that also fund the private stocks, will change their risk posture if they can't make money.

Friedberg reversal ×2 ▲ on 🤖 Synthetic biology's Netscape moment E126 · 2023-04-28 ▶ 1:03:37

Hundreds of millions of dollars, and in several cases, billions of dollars have gone into these systems, and it's very likely that these companies may need several more years and several billion dollars. We are going to get there. The technology is progressing. The rate of progress is a little slower, and it's a little more challenged, I think, than the first round of investors had hoped.

Friedberg reversal ×3 ▲ on 🤖 Synthetic biology's Netscape moment E89 · 2022-07-29 ▶ 1:12:49

But the industrialization, the amount of capital these guys raised and what they promised they would deliver on when turned out not to quite beat the economics, not to quite get there. And the market decisions they made about what products to go after, how quickly to scale up, building their own facilities. There was just a lot of strategic errors. And I think the storytelling got ahead of where the business was.

Friedberg support ×3 ▼ on 📈 Zymergen's implosion impairs the whole synthetic-biology cohort E89 · 2022-07-29 ▶ 1:10:18

Zymergen being acquired for $300 million comes off of them having raised a total of $1.5 billion of capital from many investors, including SoftBank and then their IPO since they were founded in 2013

Chamath support ×2 ▼ on 🤖 CRISPR patent chaos gets routed around by open source E71 · 2022-03-05 ▶ 1:25:59

if you are a company that wants to build a CRISPR-CAS9 gene editing thing, look, there's a lot of situations where a single point edit or a broad edit can have a meaningful change in your health. So these are businesses that should exist. You didn't know what to do because if you license the IP from the wrong person, you get sued. And many companies now are trying to license both sets of patents.

Friedberg support ×2 ▼ on 🤖 CRISPR patent chaos gets routed around by open source E71 · 2022-03-05 ▶ 1:27:55

it turns out that if this ruling is to be believed, they actually have a license to a technology that they may not actually have a license to. ... many more companies, many more businesses are embracing that open-source alternative. I don't think that we see this turning out to be any different than what we saw with the proliferation of Linux in computer software

Chamath oppose ×3 ▲ on 🤖 Synthetic biology's Netscape moment E65 · 2022-01-29 ▶ 58:02

Whenever I see these grandiose prognostications of future progress and then see these companies raise exorbitant amounts of money, I have never found a single example where it's ever worked ever. In fact, every time I see a company raise an exorbitant amount of money in a Series A, I write them off in my head. ... And in fact, I've never seen a three billion dollar venture fund do much more than return 2X of money.

Friedberg support ×2 ▲ on 🤖 Synthetic biology's Netscape moment E65 · 2022-01-29 ▶ 57:29

And I think it speaks to what I highlighted as what will be the new frontier in biotech and will completely rewrite the course of humanity is if we can take drugs and for a short period of time, completely reverse the age of ourselves. ... And this technology and this is going to be the year I think this will be the front cover of a lot of magazines this year. As people realize that this is real and that it's getting commercialized.

Friedberg support ×2 ▲ on 🤖 Synthetic biology's Netscape moment E60 · 2021-12-23 ▶ 35:33

And I think that's really a moment that will inspire a whole new realm of industrial synthetic biology work, a lot of which I hope to kind of build and participate in pretty heavily in the work that we do day to day.

Friedberg support ×3 ▼ on 📈 Zymergen's implosion impairs the whole synthetic-biology cohort E43 · 2021-08-06 ▶ 32:12

So it's a bit disappointing to see, but it's really going to impact the industry broadly because now people are going to say a lot of synthetic biology companies are smoking mirrors and they're really not there yet. So a lot of folks in the industry are really concerned right now.

Chamath support ×2 ▲ on 🤖 Synthetic biology's Netscape moment E32 · 2021-05-13 ▶ 1:09:53

This is why Ximergen and Ginkgo are two really important data points. ... And in that, you're going to have an entire generation of companies get built. It's super exciting. I spend time in and around these businesses without getting too specific.

Friedberg support ×3 ▲ on 🤖 Synthetic biology's Netscape moment E32 · 2021-05-13 ▶ 1:05:42

And I think these two IPOs happening at the valuations that they're happening at and the capital that's going in, I think these are kind of like the Netscape moments for synthetic biology and we're going to see a tremendous amount happen over the next couple of years.