(Re)Share | #21 - Fundraising 101
AI Drug Discovery | Carbon Capture | AI Content | Robotic Controls | China Tensions
Ha za! A mere week since my last issue, which in no way demonstrates how slow things are in EU tech right now.
In personal win news, I’m writing this in a Brooklyn coffee shop and who should walk in but John Turturro! (The Big Lebowski, Severance) The win was that I did not lose my cool and freak out, which I have a history of doing as my wife regularly reminds me.
Shameless plug
Europe may be collectively on holiday right now but September is right around the corner and with it comes funding season! If you’re a first time founder, or less than battle tested, you might find my Fundraising 101 series helpful. This collection was based on a training course I developed while at Entrepreneur First, but it still holds up (IMO). The series is broken into six separate posts: Preparation, Refinement, Execution, Negotiation, Allocation and Term Sheets. Enjoy!
Stuff worth sharing
In silico scuttlebutt - A comprehensive overview of the current state generative design for drug discovery and refinement, as presented by Leo Wossnig of LabGenius. Super interesting for practitioners or the simply curious, though the piece does skew quite scientific at times. I’m particularly interested in the engineering and optimization of binding affinity and toxicity reduction, which has driven some of my more recent investment deep dives.
I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday… - A Business Breakdown conversation with Nan Ransohoff, the Head of Climate at Stripe and lead at Frontier. The bulk of the conversation centered the efforts Frontier is making with their $1 billion “advanced market commitment” effort. We’ve mentioned Frontier in the past in my coverage of Charm Industrial, but as a reminder it’s a fund for early commercial agreements. The model was inspired by vaccine development, which too faced a chicken vs. egg dilemma. Providing the commercial market with positive revenue signaling would embolden the capital markets to fund initial development. Ransohoff cites a 2050 emissions reduction target of 50 billion tons per annum of which ~10% might have to be captured. Personally I feel this is quite understated. As I’ve said before, I have next to zero confidence that we will achieve the required emissions reductions, so while out of favor now I predict carbon capture and offsets more broadly will come roaring back into the zeitgeist.
DIY Vibranium - Last week we discussed the highly debated LK-99 paper, which claimed a room-temperature superconductor. Since then, academics and hobbyists alike have attempted to replicate the experiment and validate the claim. This Wired article covers the story of Andrew McCalip, a Varda Space engineer, in that very pursuit. A really enjoyable read, not just for the scientific ingenuity but also the heartwarming example of Twitter / X community support.
Related: A much snarkier take from CNET on the LK-99 research:
Michael Norman, a physicist at Argonne National Laboratory, was blunt. He said the South Korean team "come off as real amateurs."
Oh my God! They killed writers! - In an extremely poorly timed generative AI launch, the team at Fable Studios released their work on generating high quality content using large language models (Show-1). To do that the team created a novel episode of a personal favorite, South Park. This makes sense given the tenure of the show (i.e. training data) and simplistic animation. You can find the full paper here and an multiple examples of the output content here. Surprisingly the most obvious miss was the voice generation of the title’s most infamous character, Cartman. Personal favorite is found at 16:48, which shows you the level of sophistication I operate at.
RMBNGMI? - The current state of affairs of China’s efforts to launch a digital currency. Despite the current crypto winter, digital central bank currency remains (to me) one of the most interesting applications of Web3 technology. The article covers the relative stillborn status of the project, which could be driven by the technology, execution, market distribution or the unique concerns presented by an authoritarian state. Over 130 countries across the globe are in some form of exploration with their own digital currency. These nations represent over 98% GDP, so this is not the last we’ll hear of said efforts.
Simon Says - More Deepmind research was released and it’s rekindled my interest in robots. Robotic Transformer 2 (RT-2) is a novel vision-language-action (VLA) model that learns from both web and robotics data, and translates this knowledge into generalized instructions for robotic control. In other words a basic gripper robotic arm was able to complete a series of prompt-based tasks in spite of novel objects and environments.
When [geopolitical] Doves Cry - The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) heard testimony from Lux Capital founder and my VC man-crush, Josh Wolfe. At over two hours, this requires a bit of devotion and like all Congressional hearings, the political grand standing can be a bit cringe at times. Nevertheless, I highly recommend. The discussion is equal parts inspiring and concerning. On the former, Wolfe presents an uplifting example of the venture ethos - financing the future through exceptional technical talent in order to advance a democratic vision. On the latter, I was struck by how unabashedly adversarial the hearing was. Regardless of your political leanings, this discussion has it all: nuclear energy, biotech, the moral abuses of AI, CFIUS and capital controls, the role of government funding and failures the failures of IP law.
Well endowedment fund - OK this is not news at all as the article is from 2019. But I didn’t know this surgery was possible and, well, I came up with two many puns to not include it. This is a story of a penis transplant. A veteran who survived a roadside bomb attack while serving in Afghanistan. The attack lost him his legs and organ in question. Penis transplantation is a radical frontier of modern medicine: extremely rare, expensive, and difficult to perform, requiring a chaotic amalgamation that entails stitching millimeters-wide blood vessels and nerves with minuscule sutures. This was a really fascinating article of medical triumph. I think both the doctors and patient deserve arouse of applause.
Portfolio Flex
Fly portfolio company, Carbmee, was featured in this Forbes article on the complexity and importance of carbon accounting at the Scope 3 level. For those unfamiliar, “Scope 3” refers to the carbon impact of a given company’s supply chain, which are notoriously hard to evaluate given the natural data gaps that take place when dealing with third parties. The vast majority of Scope 3 assessment today is performed by consultants pushing highly questionable proxy evaluations. As a former consultant myself, I can absolutely attest to the shittiness of those reports.
Job Drop
Quick reminder that every week I share new roles from the Fly portfolio here.