2025-11-14 21:43:21
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday!
Pope Leo XIV, the American Pope, the Villanova University graduate, the White Sox fan, blessed the timeline with a number of tech-related tweets this week, including this one, which asks entrepreneurs to ask, “How are we making the world a better place?”
That phrase - “making the world a better place” - has become a trope, often used ironically in association with gambling apps and infinite scroll feeds. But there are a ton of entrepreneurs and scientists doing just that, and our job here at the Weekly Dose is to be the communicators who spread that good word. This week, for example, we have a startup trying to save cities from floods, a new lab to fund ambitious research, funding for cheap, safe, abundant energy, factories for batteries and rockets that might transport humans to other worlds, a Blue Origin booster landing, and solar in Africa.
We need to get Pope Leo subscribed to the Dose.
Let’s get to it.
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(1) Altman And Masa Back a 27-Year-Old’s Plan to Build a New Bell Labs Ultra
From Ashlee Vance for Core Memory
“It’s a broad range of disciplines,” said Priyamvada Natarajan, the chair of the Department of Astronomy at Yale and an advisor to Episteme. “It’s AI, energy, materials, novel battery systems and new kinds of superconductors. It’s inspired by Bell Labs or Xerox PARC but adapted for today’s scientific milieu. I think that’s what makes it a new kind of accelerator.”
One of the things that people in tech call for most often, second only to Manhattan Projects for X, is a modern version of Bell Labs or Xerox PARC, those talent-dense corporate research labs that invented the transistor, Unix, solar panels, the C programming language, Information Theory, the laser, the graphical user interface, ethernet, laser printing, object-oriented programming, and much much more.
Part of the challenge, though, is that doing it really well requires an infinite cash machine, like a telephone or printer monopoly, and at least some commercial incentive. Google is probably the closest thing we have today.
There are other infinite cash machines, though, two of the most famous of which are SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son and OpenAI founder Sam Altman, both of whom have backed Episteme.
Episteme, a newly founded research organization led by 27-year-old CEO Louis Andre, aims to create a modern-day Bell Labs or Xerox PARC for breakthrough scientific research. Based in San Francisco, Episteme addresses a fundamental problem that science. “Many of the world’s brightest minds in academia spend most of their time writing grants, managing bureaucratic overhead and publishing papers instead of pursuing their real work,” Ashlee Vance writes. “Meanwhile, venture-backed start-ups often come with near-term financial pressures that do not give the biggest, riskiest ideas the needed runway to flourish.”
The company’s model provides selected scientists with competitive salaries, equity ownership in Episteme, and full lab resources to eliminate fundraising pressures. Starting with 15 scientists in energy, computation, and neuroscience disciplines, the organization has identified 2,400 researchers it wants to recruit globally. One early recruit is Ben Angulo from Harvard’s Church Lab, who will focus on gene and cell therapies.
Episteme plans to help its researchers productize whatever they come up with in the lab, with support services on IP, hiring, tax issues, and more: “the hope is that products produced by the scientists make Episteme self-sustaining.”
I love the markets. The current system for doing science is cracking, which opens up an opportunity for people to try to come in and do it better. We hope to cover the many inventions and companies that come out of Episteme in the coming decades right here in the Dose.
(2) Terranova Raises $7M to Build Terraforming Robots for Flood Defense
Laurence Allen, CEO of Terranova
We are lifting cities out of flood zones using underground injection. Flooding is a multi-trillion dollar U.S. national security problem and this funding will get us to market with the first solution.
For as long as humans have walked the earth, we have been at the mercy of the water. Even with improved warning systems and flood defenses, flooding causes nearly $100 billion in economic damage, takes thousands of lives, and displaces millions more each year.
Now, humanity has a new way to rise above the floods.
Terranova, founded by Laurence Allen, has raised $7 million led by Congruent Ventures and Outlander VC to develop autonomous terraforming robots that combat flooding by lifting cities out of flood zones using underground injection technology.
The company’s approach injects a wood slurry deep underground, gradually raising the surface to offset subsidence or create elevation, with no surface disturbance and permanent protection for infrastructure and wetlands. Using shipping-container-sized pumping units and tracked robotic injectors, Terranova’s AI-powered software combines geological data to determine precise injection points and volumes with a SimCity-like interface allowing city planners to simulate projects before deployment.
The company claims it can lift 240 acres by four feet for approximately $92 million, a fraction of traditional solutions like seawalls (which can cost up to $900 million), making it viable for areas experiencing gradual subsidence, such as San Rafael, California, where some neighborhoods have dropped nearly a meter.
Check it out on their very cool website.
(3) Nuclear Startup Backed by Luckey, Lockheed Director Raises $130 Million
From Lizette Chapman for Bloomberg
The Hawthorne, California-based startup began construction in September in Utah on its first reactor and says it’s on track to demonstrate it can produce 100 kilowatts of thermal energy by July 4. Eventually, the company plans to mass manufacture small modular reactors and cluster them at so-called gigasites, where they will help power artificial intelligence data centers, industrial manufacturers and other customers.
We are big fans of Valar Atomics and its founder Isaiah Taylor here at Not Boring. Isaiah was one of the most thoughtful guests Julia and I hosted on Age of Miracles and I kicked off The Electric Slide with his insight that “There are only really three pillars to anything around us, as far as consumable goods. We’ve got energy, intelligence, and dexterity.”
Doubted throughout his journey because he didn’t have a conventional nuclear engineering background, was building Valar in the Gundo, and because he set ridiculously ambitious timelines and goals, Isaiah has remained focused on the task at hand. Now, he has an extra $130 million to put towards the task.
This week, Valar announced a new round of funding from Snowpoint Ventures, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, and others, and reconfirmed its goal of going critical with a 100 kilowatt reactor in Utah by America’s 250th birthday on July 4, 2026.
And you know what, I think they just might pull it off.
(4) Elon Builds Two New Factories (and the Factories are the Product)
From Tesla and Dima Zeniuk
That’s our GigaBay. So we’re expanding integration to produce 1,000 Starships per year. Well, yeah, that hasn’t been built yet but we’re building it. That is a truly enormous structure. That will be one of the biggest structures—I think by some measures, the biggest structure in the world—and it’s designed for 1,000 Starships a year.
In The Electric Slide, we talked about the fact that China is dominating America in battery manufacturing. That is still true - “CATL produces a stunning 37.9% of the world’s EV batteries, followed by BYD at 17.8%” - but Elon Musk is trying to close the gap.
Tesla has begun hiring for its third Megafactory, a $200 million facility in Brookshire, Texas (near Houston), to produce utility-scale Megapack batteries for grid energy storage. The facility mirrors Tesla’s successful Lathrop, California operation and Shanghai Megafactory (which began production in February 2025), each producing up to 10,000 Megapacks annually (40 gigawatt hours capacity). The Houston facility involves $150 million in advanced robotics and manufacturing equipment, including automated welding cells and assembly lines across 1.6 million square feet.
China still dominates in cells. The new Megafactory, like the first two, will take battery cells from suppliers and assembling them into complete Megapack units, which include the battery modules, bi-directional inverters, thermal management systems, AC main breaker, and controls. But Tesla is trying there, too, with a little help from CATL. The company is separately building an LFP cell production facility in Sparks, Nevada using equipment from CATL. That Nevada cell plant will supply cells for Megapacks, but it’s a standalone battery cell manufacturing facility, not part of the Texas Megafactory itself.
One area where America does have an advantage over China, though, is in the design and manufacturing of enormous rockets whose boosters can fly back to earth and get caught by giant chopsticks, and SpaceX is looking to extend that lead.
According to Muskonomy on X, SpaceX has begun construction on its “massive $250M GigaBay at Starbase, Texas,” which Elon announced back in May. The facility will be 700,000 square feet and aims to produce 1,000 Starships per year, or three per day, by the end of the decade. Which is insane, because Starship 2.0 is supposed to be as tall as the Woolworth Building in New York City, but unlike the Woolworth Building, will also be able to escape Earth’s gravity well and fly to outer space.
If that wasn’t enough, Digitimes reported (via @jukanlosreve) that Elon is also building a full-stack semiconductor supply chain. “After negotiations with TSMC over supply terms faltered, Musk doubled down on in-house production capabilities to reduce dependence on external suppliers.”
Say what you want about Elon, this man is working hard for his trillions.
(5) Bezos’ Blue Origin Lofts NASA Craft, Nails Booster Landing
Sana Pashankar and Loren Grush for Bloomberg
Elon might be America’s best builder, but his SpaceX is no longer the only company that can land an orbital-class rocket.
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin successfully reached space and landed its New Glenn first-stage booster on its sea-based platform “Jacklyn” yesterday.
Watch that video. Landing a booster is obviously awesome, but just listen to how PUMPED the Blue Origin people are at their accomplishment. Humans rock.
Reusable rockets are critical for affordable launch, but for launch to get truly affordable, there’s nothing like a little competition. Blue Origin aims to fly each New Glenn booster 25 times, which could mean cheaper access to orbit for everyone from NASA to startups.
The second stage of NG-2 is pretty cool, too. It’s sending RocketLab’s ESCAPADE satellites to Mars to study the history of its climate, which we discussed last week.
Love to see someone make hundreds of billions and roll it into a Machine for Doing Stuff.
BONUS: Why Solarpunk is Already Happening in Africa
By Skander Garroum in Climate Drift
Battery costs also collapsed 90%. Inverters got cheap. LED bulbs got efficient. Manufacturing in China got insanely good. Logistics in Africa got insanely better.
All of these trends converged around 2018-2020, and suddenly the economics of off-grid solar just... flipped. The hardware became a solved problem.
“Here’s a stat that should make you angry: 600 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa lack reliable electricity. Not because the technology doesn’t exist. Not because they don’t want it. But because the unit economics of grid extension to rural areas are completely, utterly, irredeemably f*cked.” Strong start to a great piece on how Africa is leapfrogging the grid with solar.
We all know that solar panels are getting cheaper and cheaper. What Garroum’s article shows is that those famous hardware costs were just one piece of the puzzle that unlocked decentralized solar in Africa, which is seeing 400,000 new solar installations every month. The other big ones are credit scoring, distribution, mobile money, financing, carbon markets… as he writes, “Why is the market concentrated? Because the full-stack is really f*cking hard.” But… “This creates massive barriers to entry and long-term moats. New entrants can’t just show up with cheaper panels. The moat is the full-stack execution.”
We love to see Vertical Integration electrify a continent.
BONUS 2: Just look at this
Speaking of the sun…
Have a great weekend y’all.
Thanks to Aman and Sehaj for finding so much good stuff, and to WorkOS for supporting the optimism. If you have some time this weekend, protect yourself against bots, fraud, and abuse.
We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
2025-11-11 21:42:31
Welcome to the 499 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join 254,224 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Tuesday! Short one for you today, about something I’ve been thinking about.
On a recent episode of Jack Altman’s Uncapped podcast, now-former Sequoia Steward Roelof Boetha said that there are too many startups: “There’s a lot more talent than really interesting companies to be built. And I think we’re spreading a lot of that talent thin right now.”
Another way of putting this is that a lot of people are starting startups because they can, not because they can’t not; building startups to win the lottery instead of building the thing they would build if they’d already won it.
This essay is on something I’ve noticed about the really interesting ones.
Let’s get to it.
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A couple of months ago, I was down in Medellín, Colombia visiting Forrest Heath and his company, Somos Internet, in which Not Boring Capital invested last year and about which you’ll learn much more soon.
We were sitting on a couch on the third floor of Somos’ new office. As often happens when I spend time with Forrest, the conversation turned to how he would build certain things better, cheaper, and faster.
He could mine uranium from Colombia’s mountains and shovel it pretty much right into imported Canadian CANDU reactors to create tremendous amounts of power cheaply, with no enrichment required, for example. If Colombia was going to take advantage of flying cars, he’d need to build landing pads for them. Medellín is mountainous; he had a plan for building more metro cables throughout the city to unlock more land value.
At one point in the conversation, I said something like, “I hope you make billions and billions of dollars from Somos, because you would make a great billionaire.”
He looked at me kind of confused, like I’d missed the whole point of what he was doing down there, and said something like, “Why would I take money out of Somos? This is the machine I’m building to do all of that stuff.”
Forrest loves building infrastructure. It is the thing that he would do if he could retire tomorrow. But if he retired tomorrow, he would have to start over from scratch; he would be less able to do the things he wants to do. He is building the company to do those things, bigger than he could alone, with other people who want to do them, too.
This is rare.
I think when people get frustrated with the modern instantiation of Y Combinator, and with Silicon Valley more broadly, it’s because they know that there are not dozens of 19-year-olds so obsessed with automating away customer service jobs that they would do it in retirement. Most startups are vehicles for status and wealth, vehicles to accumulate the resources people think they need to do what they actually want to do or work on the thing they actually want to work on, if they even have any idea what that thing might be.
But it’s magical when you find it.
Last week, Brie Wolfson published an essay about her two months working inside of the AI coding startup Cursor, which she concluded with:
Perhaps my best evidence that the prize is the mission is that during my fall at Cursor, I overheard zero chatter from employees about getting rich. At Stripe and Figma (and most other startups), this was a favorite lunch table topic among the first few hundred employees at a decacorn. Yet at Cursor, as the valuation goes up and up, I haven’t heard a peep about the second homes people will buy, the great-great-grandchildren that will be put through college, or the time they’ll take off traversing the world. If people have dollar signs in their eyes, they’re not talking about it much. And I think it’s because the thing most of them would do if they could retire tomorrow would be whatever they’re doing now at Cursor.
There are many ways that people evaluate which startups might turn into really big and important companies, but to me, this is the most important one. It’s a version of a question I like to ask myself and founders: the Lottery Test.
If you won a billion dollars in the lottery tomorrow, would you fuck off to a beach, do something else you actually want to be doing, or roll the billion dollars into doing the thing you’re already doing bigger, faster, and better?
In Brie’s phrasing, would the people working at a company be working there if they could retire tomorrow?
Elon Musk is the canonical example here. He rolled his Zip2 and PayPal winnings into Tesla and SpaceX, at the risk of personal bankruptcy, because work was more important than the financial rewards. The money was useful in bringing together other people who also wanted to do the work.
This is an obvious thing to note, but worth noting: Elon Musk didn’t take his money, buy a big garage and a bunch of parts, and start tinkering away on electric cars and rockets by himself. He started companies, and hired people with the skills necessary to do the work at the scale required, many of whom would do what they did at Tesla and SpaceX if they could retire tomorrow. He wants to take humanity to Mars. He can’t do that alone.
At their best, companies are machines for doing the stuff a founder really wants to do, but bigger, with other people who want to do it too.
The longer I spend investing in and writing about startups, the more I think my job should just be to find the small handful of people who view their companies like Forrest does, and then put as much money and effort as I can behind them to help them build their machines.
Pretty much all Astro Mechanica founder Ian Brooke has ever wanted to do is build and fly fast planes. He’s built or owned like eighteen of them, on his own dime. But to build a supersonic plane, which takes a lot of very smart people, billions of dollars, and many years, he started a company.
Anil and Sunil Varanasi at Meter fit this archetype, too. For my Deep Dive on Meter, I asked Anil what made building the company fun for him: The word he used was “expansiveness.”
Sam Hinkie, who invested in Meter and has spent a lot of time with the Varanasis, said something that really summarizes my whole argument, “These are not people looking to turn their insights into dollars in their pockets soon. Their interest in being acquired or getting to IPO to put money in the bank or go do another thing would really stun people if they realized how low that is.”
The thing that you’re trying to use your company vehicle to accomplish doesn’t have to be a lifelong passion like infrastructure has been for Forrest, planes have been for Ian, or networking has been for Anil and Sunil. Elon didn’t dream of electric cars as a young boy in South Africa.
But it does have to be big enough to remain endlessly fascinating and continue to expand for the decades it takes to build something truly important.
In his interview with Base Power Company co-founder and CEO Zach Dell for the company’s Series C, Terrain’s Willem Van Lancker observed that “The best entrepreneurs become their category, become their product.”
Zach’s explanation of what he learned from his dad’s obsession and how energy similarly captivated him is the best three minutes you can watch on what I’m talking about:
The other day, after reading Brie’s essay and while thinking about this one, I went on a walk with Aishwarya Khanduja, who said at one point “You have the right to work only but never to its fruits,” and then shared an essay she’d written a couple years ago. In it, she called Chapter 2, Verse 47 of the Bhagavad Gita her favorite Sanskrit verse:
कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन।
मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि॥ २-४७
In English:
You have the right to work only but never to its fruits.
Let not the fruits of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction.
Most people work for the fruits. It is rare to find people who work for the work itself. Rarer still is to find the situation Brie found at Cursor: a group of people working for the work itself, together, in order to do greater work together than they could alone.
I’m starting to think those groups are the only kind worth backing.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox Friday with a Weekly Dose. In the meantime, if there’s a thing you’ve been putting off that you would do if you retired tomorrow, go build it a website.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
2025-11-07 21:34:04
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday! Tough week for capitalism in my home city of NYC, but, undeterred, capitalism decided to deliver a week jam-packed with technological and economic miracles. Go humans.
Let’s get to it.
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As I wrote in my original Deep Dive, Stripe’s strategy from the earliest days has been to make it as easy as possible for startups to begin accepting payments, and then grow with them as they get really big. Little companies become big companies become public companies.
With Stripe Startups, they’re making it even easier.
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You’re going to use Stripe anyway. Get the white-glove experience.
(1) AN ASTRONOMICALLY BIG WEEK IN SPACE
On Halloween, Casey Handmer wrote a takedown of NASA and Lockheed Martin’s Orion Space Capsule that was so spicy he felt the need to include the following:
Lockheed isn’t Boeing but even so, I am not and have never been suicidal, I have 3 (soon to be 4!) children, and I intend to live a long and productive life.
He also wrote, “My purpose here is to entertain, inform, and motivate.” And while we can’t give Casey all of the credit, the week since he hit publish has seen the most space news since July 1969… we’ll just do it all here.
Jared Isaacman is BACK after President Trump renominated the entrepreneur, pilot, and two-time SpaceX flight self-financer to serve as NASA Administrator. Given his SpaceX flights, Isaacman is closely associated with Elon, and he’s beloved by startups in the industry. If confirmed, he would replace acting administrator Sean Duffy, who Casey depicted as the dog-in-burning-NASA-room in that picture above.
Google is Exploring Data Centers in Space through Project Suncatcher in order to “more of the sun’s power (which emits more power than 100 trillion times humanity’s total electricity production).” In partnership with Planet, they’ll send up their TPU AI chips on prototype satellites by early 2027.
This is particularly interesting given the debate around whether space data centers make any sense sparked by Starcloud’s announcement of a partnership with NVIDIA, and successful launch of its own prototype. Varda’s Andrew McCalip has the funniest breakdown here.
Elon Musk joined the space DC party, saying that SpaceX will also be doing them.
In more traditional satellite news, the WSJ reports that Elon Musk’s SpaceX is Set to Win $2 Billion Pentagon Satellite Deal as part of the Golden Dome project.
And Astranis announced a new product for warfighters and first responders: Astranis Vanguard. Per CEO John Gedmark, “Astranis Vanguard offers both defense and commercial customers the ability to quickly and easily spin up a resilient, self‑forming network capable of voice, video, and broadband data.”
Meanwhile, Vast Space, Jed McCaleb’s next-gen space station company which we’ve covered in a previous Dose, successfully launched its Haven Demo and deployed the solar array. Haven-1, Vast’s first crewed single-module space station, is scheduled for launch by May 2026. The 45-cubic-meter module features crew quarters with zero-G beds, a 1.1-meter domed window, deployable communal table, Starlink 24/7 communications, and capacity for microgravity research via Haven Lab.
Speaking of solar power in space, Star Catcher announced that it “just broke DARPA’s world record for optical power beaming,” by delivering 1.1 kilowatts of electrical power to standard satellite solar panels. For more, check Bloomberg.
Further afield, RocketLab is launching its ESCAPADE mission to study the history of Mars’ climate, which will be important if we want to reshape it in the future. Scientists believe Mars once possessed liquid water and thick atmospheres supporting potential habitability, but magnetic field shutdown approximately 3.5-4.1 billion years ago exposed the planet to continuous solar wind bombardment, progressively ejecting atmospheric gases into space. ESCAPADE plans to crack the case.
Finally, Inversion Space released a new video showing off its ARC spacecraft.
And all of this for less than the $30 billion that NASA has spent on Orion…
(2) Poseidon Aerospace Raises $11M to Build Autonomous Cargo Planes
Seagull is the beginning of the Poseidon adventure. In two years, the team hopes to have a 50-foot version of Seagull operational—capable of carrying two tons across 1,500 miles. If they succeed in making an economically-viable product, it’d unlock the next phase: a full-scale factory for mass production. From there, the vision only expands, and 50-feet starts to look small. — Zaitoon Zafar for Arena
Space may be the final frontier, but we’re still improving how we fly things down here, too.
On Wednesday, Poseidon Aerospace announced that they raised $11 million from our friends at Tamarack Global to build autonomous ground-effect vehicles. Part boat, part plane, “Riding on a cushion of air just above the water’s surface, these vehicles harness the aerodynamic phenomenon known as ground effect,” Zaitoon Zafar writes in a profile of the company for Arena.
With the money, Poseidon plans to build Seagull, a 13-foot craft with a 120-mile range capable of carrying a 45-pound payload, before scaling up to the 50-foot version, which will carry two tons over 1,500 miles.
According to the Arena profile, the company will target cargo - where it can carry heavier payloads than drones, faster than cargo ships - and military applications, like coastal surveillance and anti-submarine warfare.
You can learn more about Poseidon in Ti Morse’s conversation with CEO David Zagaynov above, or just spend a second imagining a future in which these big chonky guys are skimming around our waters, delivering goods, food, and medicines.
(3) Vulcan Elements Secures $1.4B Partnership with the United States Government
Vulcan Elements and ReElement Technologies will scale their 100% vertically-integrated, domestic magnet supply chain, which is already operating today, to enable 10,000 tonnes of annual magnet production—with a focus on recycling end-of-life magnets and electronic waste.
The rare earth magnets are coming home.
In The Electric Slide, Sam D’Amico and I went deep on the importance of rare earth magnets to everything electric, their history (“So on the same day that Sagawa presented Sumitomo’s Nd₂Fe₁₄B compound, Croat presented GM’s exact same Nd₂Fe₁₄B compound!”), and America’s epic fumble of rare earth magnets leadership (GM sold Magnequench to Deng Xiaoping’s sons-in-law). We pointed out that China now controls 90% of rare earth magnets production, a capability that has proven useful in trade negotiations with the US. And we mentioned one company that was working to fix the problem: Vulcan Elements.
Vulcan Elements recently announced a $65 million Series A to build fully decoupled neodymium magnet manufacturing in Durham, North Carolina, less than 30 minutes away from NC State, where Baliga is still the Progress Energy Distinguished University Emeritus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. They have a roadmap to producing cheaper neo magnets than China with better chemistry, modern manufacturing, and yes, a little AI.
I’ve gotten to travel down to Durham to spend time with John Maslin and the Vulcan team in the first magnet facility. The plan, as we’d discussed it, was to scale that up to 2,000 tonnes of capacity in the next facility, and then up to 10,000 tonnes after that.
Now, thanks to a $1.4 billion partnership between the USG and Vulcan and ReElement technologies (which provides rare earth oxides from recycled materials) to scale right up to 10,000 tonnes of fully decoupled neodymium magnets.
The world produces about 385,000 tonnes of rare earth magnets a year, so 10,000 tonnes is not going to make America the world’s magnet powerhouse overnight, but dominating magnets isn’t the goal. This is a critical step to producing enough of them locally that we aren’t entirely at the mercy of China and global supply chains.
The Vulcan expansion will be financed by a $620 million loan from the Department of War’s Office of Strategic Capital, $50 million of federal incentives from the CHIPS Act, and $550 million of private capital, in addition to an $80 million loan and matching private capital for ReElement. In exchange, the DoW will get warrants in Vulcan and ReElement, and the Department of Commerce will get $50 million of equity in Vulcan.
Now that’s an… attractive … deal.
(4) Atomically accurate de novo design of antibodies with RFdiffusion
From Nature
Our approach establishes a framework for the computational design, screening and characterization of fully de novo antibodies with atomic-level precision in both structure and epitope targeting.
A research team led by Nathaniel Bennett and David Baker from the Institute for Protein Design at University of Washington developed RFdiffusion, an diffusion-based AI model capable of designing full-length antibodies de novo (directly in silico (in the computer)) tailored to bind specified epitopes (the specific part of an antigen that an antibody or T-cell receptor binds to during an immune response) with atomic accuracy.
Published in Nature, the study demonstrates that RFdiffusion can generate antibodies with accurately constructed binding loops (CDRs), long known as the most challenging and variable region for antibody design due to their flexibility and crucial role in target recognition. It’s a big step in rational antibody drug engineering.
In the study, the team showed precise binding to a wide range of targets including influenza virus hemagglutinin, bacterial toxins, and cancer-associated peptides.
If antibodies are keys and epitopes are locks, the way we do antibody discovery today is like trying a box full of keys on the lock until something works, but also, the lock is inside of an animal. Scientists had to inject animals with a target (like a virus piece), wait for their immune system to make antibodies, then test hundreds of them to find one that worked. It took months or years.
RFDiffusion can just look at the lock and design the right key, with each of its teeth (the CDRs in this now-tortured analogy) exactly the right shape.
This could unlock (ok, I’m done) drug development in weeks instead of years, targeting currently undruggable diseases, and more stable and effective antibodies.
Will it work? Capitalism thinks so, or at least that the prize is big enough to give it the ol’ college try. A company called Xaira, led by Baker and Nobel laureates, was founded with a healthy $1 billion is advancing this technology towards scalable virtual cell modeling and practical biologics development.
It remains the worst time in human history to be a disease.
(5) China Achieves First-Ever Thorium-to-Uranium Nuclear Fuel Conversion
From Nick Touran
China has successfully achieved the first-ever thorium-to-uranium nuclear fuel conversion in a Thorium Molten Salt Reactor (TMSR). The US ran a MSR on Uranium-233 derived from Thorium in the late 1960s, but we never did the conversion in a MSR itself (we made it in solid-fueled thorium reactors).
If you spend enough time writing and podcasting about nuclear, you’ll inevitably get hit with, “But what about Thorium?!” from internet commentors. I’ve gotten that a lot. Thorium Molten Salt Reactors (TMSR) have a bunch of advantages, including:
Thorium is 4x more abundant than uranium
It can’t easily be weaponized
It produces much less waste because it burns ~95% of fuel compared to ~5%
It cools without water and runs at atmospheric pressure
It’s walk-away safe - if everything broke, physics would shut the reactor down
The answer has been: it’s a cool idea, but no one has actually done the thorium-to-uranium conversion in an MSR… until now!
The Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (SINAP) announced on Saturday that it “has successfully achieved the first-ever thorium to uranium nuclear fuel conversion in a Thorium Molten Salt Reactor (TMSR), and obtained valid experimental data following thorium fuel loading, confirming the technical feasibility of thorium utilization in a molten-salt reactor nuclear energy system.”
SINAP has been working on its TMSR program since 2011, and with this proof point, according to Xinhua, “it will work with leading energy companies to consolidate the TMSR industrial and supply chains, and accelerate technology iteration and engineering application.”
If we’ve learned anything from rare earth magnets, they’ll probably do it, despite the fact that, as with rare earth magnets, America first invented the technology at Oak Ridge in the 1960s. This is the Electric Slide playbook — the West invents, China scales — playing out again.
China’s goal is to construct a 100-megawatt demonstration project by 2035, so it will be a while before TMSRs make a dent in the power supply picture. By then, I hope we have dozens of gigawatts of new nuclear power online.
Bonus: The Aquarius Economy
By Aubrie Pagano & Josh Jagota at Alpaca
I operate by a bit of a code: if someone is an investor in Earth AI, I like them. Ian at Cantos, John & Jamie at Tamarack Global. Great people. Great taste. So when I met Aubrie Pagano, who invested in Earth AI at her firm Alpaca, I knew off the bat that I’d like her, too.
Then she shared an essay that she was working on describing what she calls The Aquarius Economy, a post-AGI “emergent, higher-order future filled with the possibility of maximizing the human spirit.”
As both an Aquarius myself, and someone who agrees strongly with the premise that AI will bring and equal and opposite focus on enhancing what makes humans so great, I thought it was one of the weirder papers a VC has written recently.
BONUS 2: Space DJ
From Google DeepMind
OK OK one more space thing, kind of. Google DeepMind, which … is really the only major AI Lab doing weird, interesting stuff that I resonate with, released Space DJ, which lets you fly a little spaceship around to different genres of music and generate songs that mashup those genres. It’s fun, play with it.
On the same day, yesterday, GDM also dropped a paper with Terence Tao on using AlphaEvolve for mathematical exploration at scale and AI tools that can “monitor endangered species, protect forests, and listen to birds.”
Google’s got its groove back.
TRIPLE BONUS: Three Things I Enjoyed
Brie Wolfson on her time Inside Cursor
Tom Morgan on bioelectricity x consciousness
Chris Sacca on Dialectic with Jackson Dahl
Have a great weekend y’all.
Thanks to Aman and Sehaj for uncovering so many great stories, and for Stripe Startups for sponsoring. Go get the white glove startup treatment.
We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
2025-10-31 20:57:24
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday and Happy Halloween! There’s going to be a lot of scary stuff happening on the streets tonight, but here in the Weekly Dose, it’s all treats.
We’ve got new American chip technology, new power generation, a little biodefense, a $20k robot you can actually buy right now, and a whole lot of bonus content.
Looks like the good guys decided to dress up as incredibly productive for Halloween.
Let’s get to it.
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(1) Substrate Unstealths Next-Generation Foundry to Compete with ASML & TSMC
From Semianalysis
Substrate is a recently out-of-stealth Bay Area startup inventing “technology to power next-generation foundries” with the mission to substantially reduce the cost of advanced logic wafers. The first major step towards this mission is a new X-ray lithography (XRL) tool that the company has invented.
Substrate, a startup using x-ray lithography to build a new semiconductor foundry in America, came out of stealth on Wednesday with $100 million from Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Long Journey Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, In-Q-Tel, and Allen & Co, and a launch fit for a Lulu & Gaby client. There was a Semianalysis analysis, a Ben Thompson interview, a TBPN appearance, a Cyan tattoo, and of course, a sick video.
This is one of the more ambitious startups to come out in a while. Its plan is to take on two of the giants in the chip supply chain, ASML and TSMC, which have a combined market cap north of $1.7 trillion. ASML’s EUV lithography machine is perhaps the most impressive in the world; there’s some stat like its mirrors are so smooth that if they were blown up to the size of Mars, the biggest imperfection would be a credit card’s height tall.
Unlike ASML’s extreme ultraviolet (EUV) systems, which rely on complex plasma-based light sources operating at 13.5 nm wavelengths and costing over $400 million per machine, Substrate’s technology harnesses compact particle accelerators to generate X-ray beams with significantly shorter wavelengths that are billions of times brighter than the sun. That would mean superior resolution for etching microscopic patterns on silicon wafers, achieving critical dimensions as small as 12 nm and via pitches of 30 nm, matching or exceeding the capabilities of 2 nm process nodes while offering greater depth of focus and reduced need for multi-patterning. The result is a more precise, efficient process with lower operational complexity, fewer consumables, and drastically reduced costs.
They hope to slash leading-edge wafer prices from $100,000 to around $10,000 by the end of the decade. As importantly, it would mean that America would control two key steps in the supply chain for which it currently relies on Dutch and Taiwanese partners. Substrate could make America a vertically integrated chipmaking nation, and is deeply vertically integrated itself: in addition to lithography hardware, it’s making specialized chemistry, resists, and full front-end manufacturing lines to build a network of American fabs.
God Bless America, and God Bless Vertical Integrators.
(2) Extropic Unveils XTR-0 Thermo Chip and Open Source THRML Library
From Extropic
While we vertically integrate our ability to produce GPUs, Not Boring Capital portfolio company Extropic rolled out a prototype of its new Thermodynamic Sampling Units, or TSUs.
As I wrote yesterday in Take Weird Ideas Seriously, Extropic’s goal is to make AI much more energy efficient by taking advantage of the natural wiggle of electrons to generate free probability distributions. While this won’t achieve the 10,000x energy efficiency improvement on current AI workloads, not all of which are probabilistic, the company also released an open source THRML library for developers to start playing with, and hopes that new types of non-transformer models will be build on top of its hardware.
It’s great to see Beff, Trevor, and the team turn their weird idea into a real, working product. While victory isn’t guaranteed, this increases the … probability … that they make a dent in how humans produce digital intelligence.
(3) Mazama Energy Unveils the World’s Hottest Enhanced Geothermal System
From Vinod Khosla
Mazama Energy…today announced a technologically significant leap for clean energy: the creation of the world’s hottest Enhanced Geothermal System (EGS) at its pilot site in Newberry, Oregon – at an unprecedented bottomhole temperature of 629 °F (331 °C). They expect to reach 750 °F (400 °C) in 2026 which could produce many GWs of clean electricity from this one location. Harnessing these superhot resources will allow Mazama to extract up to 10x more power density, use 75% less water, and drill 80% fewer wells than current approaches.
Geothermal, so hot right now, geothermal.
Whether Extropic succeeds in making inference more energy efficient, we’re going to need lots and lots of energy to power our electric future. Solar and nuclear are on the way to producing a lot of cheap, clean energy, and geothermal has shown a lot of promise, but the challenge has been it’s just not cheap enough. As Eli Dourado told us on Age of Miracles, super hot geothermal is roughly 400° C at the surface.
Super hot is important because energy extraction potential from geothermal wells increases exponentially with temperature. Mazama’s superhot temperatures enable 10x more power density per well compared to conventional geothermal. This is because the enthalpy (energy content) of steam increases dramatically at higher temperatures, and you can generate far more electricity from the same flow rate of fluid.
Practically, this means cheaper, more cost competitive geothermal. Drilling is the major capital expense in geothermal; if you can get 10x the power from each well, your cost per megawatt plummets. Mazama is targeting under 5 cents/kWh, which makes it competitive with natural gas without subsidies.
Geothermal has the potential to bring clean, baseload power on fast. We here at Not Boring want all of the clean, safe, reliable power we can get. Let’s get steamy.
The thing about geothermal, though, is that you can’t take it with you. The well is where the well is. But what if you could make an “ultra compact power box that can generate energy for years without refueling”?
That’s what Mersenne, announced earlier this week, is attempting to do.
As co-founder Kevin Sekniqi writes, “Humans have never before built power that can last for years or decades and that can be used anywhere it is needed. Current choices are either long-duration and stationary (grid) or short-duration and mobile (fossil fuels / chemical batteries). This is a false, self-inflicted dichotomy.”
Mersenne is building STARFALL V1, a terrestrial power system that produces 40 kWe energy continuously for years. That’s enough to power a house. Ultimately, it wants to take future versions off terra to power electrical propulsion for things like orbital transfer and on-orbit repositioning, life support systems, scientific instruments, and communication equipment for a lunar or Martian habitat.
Potentia ad astra.
(4) Valthos Raises $30 million for Next-Generation Biodefense
Of all AI applications, biotechnology has the highest upside and most catastrophic downside.
The only thing that can stop a bad guy with an AI bioweapon is a good guy with an AI biodefense tech stack.
Fortunately for us all, then, a new startup called Valthos has raised $30 million from OpenAI, Lux Capital, Founders Fund, and others to build just that.
Valthos was founded by Kathleen McMahon, previously the head of life sciences at Palantir Technologies, and Tess van Stekelenburg, a computational neuroscience researcher from the University of Oxford, established the company in November 2024. The details are forthcoming, but the company says its team, which comes from Palantir, Oxford, DeepMind, the Broad Institute, and the Arc Institute, will “develop frontier AI systems that identify biological threats and design medical countermeasures in real time.”
There is an extreme group of doomers who thinks AI will kill us all by itself. A more rational group is worried, reasonably, that bad people will use AI to develop novel bioweapons more quickly than they could have otherwise. None of us wants that, and there’s really no good way to stop them from trying.
The best biodefense is a good biodefense. I’m going to sleep a little better tonight knowing that Valthos is on the case.
(5) 1X Begins Selling NEO: The Home Robot for $20k
Robotics company 1X dominated the internet this week by announcing that it would start selling its NEO Home Robot for just $20k, or $499 per month. And then the internet took over; NEO is the robot that launched a million memes, including this banger.
First things first, this is incredibly cool. A soft, non-threatening robot, available to start doing your chores next year, for less than the price of a shitty car. The launch video was cool and different, too. People who got to interact with it at the launch event said it felt like the future.
At the same time, there’s a long way to go until this guy is actually autonomously useful. For now, NEO will largely be teleoperated, and in part because of that, its moves are slow and clunky. There are a lot of things that NEO will kind of be able to do but much more slowly than you could do it yourself.
That’s all part of the plan, though. The idea with any of these is to get as many of them out into the field, trying things and collecting data, as possible, in order to learn so that one day, we’ll be able to leave home to a mess and come home to a nice, clean house, sit down in a comfortable chair, and have NEO bring us a beer.
BONUS: We Used To Dream of Flying Cars
J. Storrs Hall for Abundance Institute via Jason Carman
The question of Where’s my flying car is emblematic of the supposed failure of modern technology to match futuristic visions that were promoted in earlier decades.
We have our in-home robots, now where is my flying car?
This one is self-recommending. Hero of techno-optimism J. Storrs Hall. Jason Carman. Abundance Institute. Best five minutes you’ll spend on the internet this weekend.
BONUS 2: X-59 Soars: A New Era in Supersonic Flight Begins
Lockheed Martin Skunk Works® (NYSE: LMT), in partnership with NASA, successfully completed the first flight of the X-59, a revolutionary, quiet supersonic aircraft designed to pave the way for faster commercial air travel.
What an incredibly cool looking if entirely impractical and overly expensive aircraft.
This is in the bonus section, and not the main section, because while it’s always awesome to see the test flight of a new Skunk Works plane, Lockheed and NASA have taken 7 years and $518 million to get to this point, a longer and more expensive process than private companies like Boom Supersonic, and because this was just a test flight to make sure everything was working. While the plane is designed to go quieter at supersonic speeds - a thump, not a boom - it only reached 230 mph on this flight.
That said, it’s a good first step towards its core goal: flying supersonic (up to Mach 1.4 at 55,000 feet) while reducing the sonic boom to a quiet “thump” (75 EPNdB), potentially enabling commercial overland supersonic travel banned in the U.S. since 1973 due to noise.
Very cool, but it’s no Astro Mechanica.
Not Boring Capital portfolio company Ambrook (see CEO Mackenzie Burnett in Not Boring here & here) is hiring for Strategic Finance in SF, Denver, NYC, or Remote. Your mission will be to productize and scale Ambrook’s CFO-as-a-service offerings. And you get to work with Mack. Apply here.
Scripps Research-led team gets $14.2M to map the body’s “hidden sixth sense”
Yoshua Bengio is first researcher to pass 1 million citations on Google Scholar
California invests big in battery energy storage & leaves rolling blackouts behind
Obvious wavenumber-5 mesovortex pattern within Hurricane Melissa’s eyewall
8VC partners with Apollo to accelerate America’s Industrial Renaissance
Westinghouse, US Gov sign $80B pact to build nuclear reactors
Teaching AI to Predict What Cells Will Look Like Before Experiments
Have a great weekend y’all.
Thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring. Go get your app enterprise ready.
We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
2025-10-30 23:06:34
Welcome to the 1,763 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join 253,725 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:
We are living through of one of the most interesting periods in startup history. Revenue is growing faster, rounds are bigger, funds are bigger, and companies are burning billions. Some categories are red hot and others can’t buy a bucket.
That’s why I found SVB’s new State of the Markets H2 2025 report so fascinating. It highlights a complex and uneven recovery across tech. While some sectors are experiencing renewed growth, others face persistent challenges with stagnant deal activity, depressed valuations, and limited exits.
50% of VC-backed tech companies having less than a year of cash remaining. Series A companies burn $5 to generate every $1 of revenue. One-third of US VC investment has come from deals involving the six largest funds. Things are changing fast.
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Thursday!
We haven’t done a weird essay (or a short one) in a little while, so with Halloween mere hours away…
Let’s get weird.
Jeova Sanctus Unus was an alchemist.
Before his death in 1727, he spent thirty years attempting to discover the vegetative spirit that made things grow and transform. He built furnaces, repeatedly mixed and heated various substances, and carefully recorded observations on color changes, crystallization patterns, and reactions between metals and acids. Over the course of those three decades, he would fill his notebooks with over one million words on the subject.
His family was so embarrassed by the work that when he died, they hid the notebooks. They didn’t want Jeova Sanctus Unus to destroy the reputation of the man who wrote under that pseudonym. His real name was Isaac Newton.
I love this story, because alchemy is a weird idea, wrong in hindsight, without which Newton probably never would have made the discoveries he did in mathematics and physics.
Those ideas were weird, too, at the time.
The idea that gravity could act through empty space was considered absurd and occult by contemporaries like Leibniz. Newton was comfortable with it because alchemy assumed sympathies and antipathies between substances acting on each other invisibly across space.
The idea that atoms were mostly void with small solid cores was controversial at the time, and ultimately right. But it was logical to someone who believed in the subtilization of matter and the need for space for spirits to operate.
Newton believed that matter wasn’t inert, that it contained active principles, an idea lifted directly from alchemy. He proposed that particles had forces between them, laying the groundwork for chemical affinity theory and ultimately for atomic forces.
Calculus, which he discovered around the same time as Leibniz, is the mathematics of change, as alchemy was meant to be the science of transformation. Newton’s fluxions described continuous change in a way that mirrored alchemical processes.
His belief in the universal spirit, a subtle medium permeating space, presaged field theory. His attempts to multiply gold, and therefore understand how small amounts of matter could catalyze larger changes, preceded catalysis. His obsession with the sacred geometry in the proportions of Solomon’s Temple influenced his mathematical work on harmonic series.
Perhaps Newton’s greatest contribution was the pursuit of unified principles – explaining all motion with Three Laws, and all gravity with one equation - which rhymed with the alchemists’ quest for the Philosopher’s Stone, the one thing that explained all transformation.
Newton was the physicist he was because he took weird ideas seriously.
The people who change the world are the ones who take weird ideas seriously. Even if you don’t plan to change the world, taking weird ideas seriously is a more interesting way to live.
Notice that I didn’t write “believe all weird ideas” – that’s just gullibility – or “accept weird ideas because others don’t” – that’s blind contrarianism.
Taking weird ideas seriously means that when you encounter an idea – from others, or from insight – that others would dismiss or may never have thought of in the first place, you study it with the same rigor you’d apply to more standard ones. It means not dismissing ideas simply because they’re weird.
Of course, there are a lot of weird ideas out there. Most of them are wrong. You will probably waste your life if you chase every weird idea that comes across your desk.
But sometimes a weird idea grabs you, feels particularly true and especially important.
When that happens, you should follow that weird idea as far as it leads you. You should take it as seriously as you’d take a conventional idea, and probably more so.
On an individual level, weird ideas are alpha.
I am a true believer in differentiation, for people and for companies. Weird ideas are a source of differentiation. “If you only read the books that everybody else is reading,” wrote Haruki Murakami, “you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” This is particularly true as more people turn their thinking over to AI.
One of the best ways to be different is to feed your brain different ideas, and let it really chew on them. Go deep. Read books no one else is reading. Speak with people no one else is speaking to. Give yourself time and space offline, disconnected, to let your ideas take their own shape. Make connections between your new weird ideas and normal ideas.
Personally, I have been going deep down the non-local consciousness rabbit hole. The last book I read was LSD and the Mind of the Universe. I’m not the only person interested in these ideas – religions have been on them for millennia - but they make an interesting pairing with tech and Vertical Integrators. As a direct result of this intersection, I’ve written essays like The Return of Magic and Means and Meaning. I’m also probably much more bearish than a typical VC on the idea that scaling data and compute will somehow lead to an intelligence equal, or even superior, to ours. I also think there will be tremendous opportunities in figuring out how to enhance our innate human superpowers. Mostly, I’m just continually fascinated by how magical the universe is.
On the individual level, though, there’s a risk. Because most weird ideas are wrong, chances are that the weird idea that grabs you is wrong, too. You might spend months, years, or decades chasing something that turns out to be a dead end.
You should take that risk anyway. Not because you’ll necessarily be vindicated, but because pursuing an idea that grabs you transforms how you think about everything else. Newton’s alchemy was incorrect, but it made him Newton.
What’s more, humanity needs you to pursue your weird ideas, even if they’re wrong.
On the societal level, weird ideas are how we avoid getting trapped in locally stable but globally suboptimal equilibria.
For how readily we dismiss new ideas and those who nurture them, there is a surprising amount of theory backing up this claim.
Every complex adaptive system faces a choice: explore or exploit. Do you optimize the thing that’s already working (exploit) or seek altogether better alternatives (explore)? Even when exploitation is currently more rewarding, the math suggests that optimal strategies always maintain some exploration. Exploration comes from individuals taking weird ideas seriously.
Take, for example, the AI race. We are largely in the exploit phase: make tweaks around the transformer architecture, add a lot more energy, and a lot more GPUs. The algorithms and GPUs keep getting better, on the same track.
While many believe this is the path to ASI, to me, it feels like a climb to a local maximum.
In 1989, Stuart Kauffman released a paper examining The NK model of rugged fitness landscapes. You can think of a rugged fitness landscape like a mountain range with peaks of different heights. If you’re climbing a smaller hill, improvements can get you to the top of that hill, the local maxima, where you get stuck. Any move you make takes you back down the hill; you’re trapped.
Kauffman is a theoretical biologist, so the work in that paper applied to biology, specifically evolution. He showed computationally that to escape local maxima and reach global maxima, two things are needed: sexual reproduction and modularity. Sexual reproduction means taking half a solution from one peak, half from another, and seeing what happens. Because DNA is modular, can be broken into chunks, different traits can be separately optimized, and then mixed and matched to form new traits. Mutations play a role, too. Most fail, but they create variation, and over enough attempts – enough new combinations with some mutant spice mixed in – variation increases the probability of reaching global maxima.
To jump to higher peaks, we need both the raw material of weird ideas and the willingness to combine them with traditional ideas in new ways.
Two recent examples come to mind.
Just yesterday, a Not Boring Capital portfolio company called Extropic announced a new prototype x0 chip that uses Thermodynamic Sampling Units (TSUs) instead of GPUs with a goal of ultimately decreasing the energy required to run new thermodynamic models by 10,000x. The idea is to use naturally occurring thermal noise to get probability distributions for free. That the announcement came on the day that NVIDIA became the world’s first $5 trillion company is beautifully poetic.
This is a weird idea, an attempt to explore instead of exploit, and to combine insights from two fields to come up with something new and potentially better. Having worked in quantum computing at Google, Extropic co-founder Guillaume Verdon, better known as Based Beff Jezos, struggled alongside the rest of the quantum field to eliminate thermal noise (random electron fluctuations). What if, instead, you use those fluctuations? Instead of fighting the natural randomness in circuits, Extropic treats it as a feature. The electrons generate probability distributions for free, making probabilistic computing, which is a large part of what AI is, vastly more energy-efficient. Extropic takes ideas from both quantum and classical computing, and combines them in a way that looks weird.
Pursuing weird ideas isn’t easy. People reject weird ideas. Beff has caught endless heat from internet anons. Now, he’s shipping. The team is on a path towards converting energy into intelligence much more efficiently, and enabling new sorts of models altogether. It is one potential way out of AI’s local maximum.
It’s too early to tell exactly which types of models and capabilities thermodynamic computing will open up, but this is one of the benefits of weird ideas: they open up what Stuart Kauffman calls the Adjacent Possible.
The Adjacent Possible says that you can only discover what’s adjacent to where you already are. Alchemy opened possibilities in physics that pure mechanics never would have. You need weird leaps to open up new adjacencies. The weird idea makes other ideas thinkable. It expands the search space.
Often, innovation comes from connecting distant domains. Weird ideas are often imports from different fields. Newton brought alchemy into physics. Jobs brought calligraphy into computing. Extropic is bringing quantum into classical. Weird ideas have high betweenness centrality. They connect previously disconnected parts of the knowledge graph, expanding the Adjacent Possible and enabling novel recombinations. This is what is meant by “ideas having sex.”
What’s funny is that while Kauffman wrote The NK model of rugged fitness landscapes to describe biological systems, he could just as easily have been explaining the field of biology.
In 1953, Watson & Crick published the structure of DNA. That discovery established the “central dogma” of biology: DNA → RNA → Protein. Biology essentially became molecular biology. Genes encode information. Development is genetic program execution. Evolution is changes in DNA sequences. If you want to understand something, sequence it. More generally, biology became biochemistry. The past 70 years in biology, including much of the work in AI for Bio, has been spent climbing to the top of this hill.
To suggest anything different is at play would be weird. If biochemistry can’t explain something yet, we just need better tools for understanding biochemistry.
But what if…
Since the 2000s, Michael Levin at Tufts University has been pursuing a weird idea: that bioelectric patterns are a higher-level control system. What if organisms are less like machines executing genetic programs and more like collective intelligences solving problems?
From near the molecular biology peak, this looks like a step backwards. Bioelectricity looks like “vitalism,” the old and thoroughly debunked idea that there was a vital force driving living things. A superstition no longer needed thanks to modern biochemistry.
Levin’s work, however, has worked.
He makes flatworms grow heads in the wrong places by manipulating ion channels instead of genes. He creates xenobots, frog cells that self-organize into novel forms that can’t exist in nature. He induces eye formation in tadpoles in places eyes never grow, just by tweaking voltage gradients. He causes tumors to form in frog embryos by disrupting their bioelectric patterns and prevents them from forming by normalizing bioelectric signals. A couple of weeks ago, he even proposed that aging is the result of loss of goal-directedness.
Two-Headed Flatworm, Levin Lab
It seems that there is something very important to bioelectricity. By jumping off of one hill, Levin has been able to both open up new frontiers in biology and mine that frontier for a stunning amount of new, adjacent ideas.
Now, thanks to Levin Lab’s results, bioelectricity is emerging from the weird shadows into the mainstream. I met a founder this week building bioelectric tools to heal humans. While biochemistry clearly plays an enormous role in how living things operate, understanding that it might not play the only role will expand our understanding of our bodies, and our ability to improve them.
I think Levin will win a Nobel Prize for this work one day. If he does, he will join a long list of Laureates whose work was initially dismissed as too weird.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Barbara McClintock discovered that genes could move within chromosomes. She called them jumping genes. Jumping genes were so ridiculed that she stopped publishing for decades. Then she won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983 at age 81.
In the 1980s, Barry Marshall proposed that bacteria (H. pylori) caused stomach ulcers, not stress or spicy food. The medical establishment rejected the idea. He drank a beaker of bacteria to prove it, gave himself ulcers, then cured them with antibiotics. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2005.
In 1982, Dan Shechtman discovered crystals with “impossible” five-fold symmetries, called quasicrystals. An eminence no less than Linus Pauling rejected the idea. “There are no quasicrystals,” he quipped. “Only quasi-scientists.” Shechtman was asked to leave his research group. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011.
Pauling may have been scarred by his experience with his own weird ideas. In the 1970s, Pauling, the only human to ever win two unshared Nobel Prizes, became obsessed with vitamin C curing everything from colds to cancer. He was largely wrong. Vitamin C couldn’t do everything he expected, but perhaps because he believed the prize was so large, he took it seriously enough that he sparked serious research into antioxidants, nutrition’s role in disease, and orthomolecular medicine. Something like one-third of all American adults report taking Vitamin C at least occasionally today.
I realize that I have mostly provided examples of history’s great scientists, which isn’t particularly aspirational for people like me, who are not history’s great scientists, but that is mainly to show that even the greats can have correct weird ideas that are rejected in the moment, and that even the greats can have incorrect ideas that still nonetheless nudge humanity forward. Important weird ideas, though, are not limited to science.
My favorite contemporary example of how to take weird ideas seriously is Jesse Michels, who runs the popular YouTube channel, American Alchemy.
Jesse operates in a different mode than the scientists we’ve discussed so far. The weird ideas he takes seriously aren’t his. Instead, he serves as a credibility bridge between people making claims that others would dismiss as too weird – like alien abductions and anti-gravity - and the mainstream. A couple of weeks ago, he hosted Dan Sherman, who claimed that the NSA trained him to communicate with aliens.
What I love about Jesse’s work is that had I heard this story anywhere else, I might have dismissed it. But since I’ve seen how seriously Jesse takes weird ideas – doing deep research on the ones he sees as credible, debunking unsubstantiated claims, and making connections among seemingly disparate, independently-crazy-sounding but mutually-substantiating ones – I’m willing to suspend disbelief and take anything he shares seriously.
And because Jesse has approached these ideas with a seriousness that few others in the mainstream have, he’s been able to build a very large platform (individual alpha) and contributed, I think, to pushing humanity off of a comfortable local maximum and towards a higher one.
My thinking is richer for taking it seriously, too, even if it may seem a little bit offbeat. One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about is how disconnected the ideas that I’m taking most seriously seem.
Complex, vertically integrated startups and non-local consciousness don’t seem to have much to do with each other on the surface. It’s a weird combination, and may not be a combination at all. But both feel very important to me. They’re pulling me. One says that we can improve the means available to humanity if we’re willing to build new solutions from the ground up, and the other says that improving the human condition has meaning, that there is a point and a direction to all of this.
In my mind, it forms the beginnings of a worldview that is almost the exact opposite of the one taking hold in Silicon Valley. That humans are miraculous, and that far from spelling the end of human supremacy, climbing to AI’s local maximum will signal the endpoint of the left-brain materialist era by demonstrating that there’s magic beyond the reach of even the smartest machines. There is a big universe out there, and many more hills for humanity to climb.
I don’t know. It’s a weird idea.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox tomorrow with a Weekly Dose. If you’re looking for something to read in the interim, check out SVB’s State of the Markets H2 2025 report.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
2025-10-24 20:42:47
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday!
Even AWS breaking the internet couldn’t stop another ridiculously packed week. The doc that Aman and Sehaj prepared had a whopping twenty-one stories competing for just five spots (and a bonus or two).
The winners were blindness cures, quantum leaps, bio models, and a new state capacity fund. I’ve included some of the ones that we left on the cutting room floor at the end of the email.
Let’s get to it.
Every venture-backed company — yes, you — should work with Stripe Startups.
Stripe’s mission is to increase the GDP of the internet, and it’s working. Last year, 1.3% of global GDP flowed through Stripe, over $1.4 trillion and growing. 78% of the Forbes AI 50 use Stripe’s financial infrastructure to monetize faster, experiment with pricing, and grow revenue.
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(1) People with blindness can read again after retinal implant
Nature re: Science Corp’s PRIMA; Video from Abundance Institute
The clinical trial, which is described today in The New England Journal of Medicine1, involved 38 people with advanced AMD whose retinas had degenerated severely. One year after device implantation, 80% of participants had gained a clinically meaningful improvement in their vision.
Restoring sight to the blind is Bible-level miracle stuff, and this week, humans did just that.
A team of researchers published results of a study using Science Corporation’s PRIMA Visual Prosthesis to attempt to restore sight in legally blind adults. The PRIMA system, detailed in a recent New England Journal of Medicine study, involves a tiny wireless retinal implant, thinner than a human hair and surgically placed under the retina, paired with camera-equipped smart glasses.
The technology targets patients with advanced age-related macular degeneration (AMD), specifically geographic atrophy, which causes central vision loss leading to legal blindness. The glasses capture and process visual information, projecting it as near-infrared light patterns onto the implant, which then stimulates remaining healthy retinal cells to relay signals to the brain, effectively bypassing damaged areas. It’s like fixing a hardware problem with better software.
In a one-year clinical trial involving 38 patients, 80% showed meaningful visual acuity improvements, with many regaining the ability to read sentences, recognize faces, and perform tasks like crossword puzzles, all of which were previously impossible for them.
In the video he did with Abundance Institute, Science Corp CEO (and Duke grad) Max Hodak, said that this is just the visual prosthesis is the technology that’s furthest along in the company’s portfolio, but the brain is a big place with big responsibilities, and Science has a lot more to come.
I really like this framing Max gave on BCIs:
All engineering, in some sense, is about manipulating reality.
We’re building things. We’re making the world different than it was before. Whether this is with controlling electrons in electronics or optics or building cars or planes. This is all about kind of changing the world as it exists out there.
But you can imagine inverting this and changing the world as it exists in here.
And that is a very different way of thinking about the future.
There is nothing in the universe (that we know of) more wondrous than the human brain. I’m personally very excited to see how much more it has to offer than we realize.
(2) Google Makes Quantum Leap with First-Ever Verifiable Quantum Advantage
Hartmut Neven and Vadim Smelyanskiy for Google
What are they putting in the water in Mountain View?!
As we’ve covered, Google DeepMind is putting out the most fascinating and real-world-useful models of any of the big labs (see: last week’s model that does novel cancer science) and now, its Quantum Echoes algorithm achieved verifiable quantum advantage.
The “advantage” is that it performs the same calculations 13,000x faster than a classical supercomputer can. The “verifiable” means that other quantum computers can independently verify the results. Results were published in Nature.
In a proof-of-principle experiment, in partnership with researchers at UC Berkeley, Google “showed how our new technique — a ‘molecular ruler’ — can measure longer distances than today’s methods, using data from Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) to gain more information about chemical structure.”
This is the first of many such experiments the company will run. In its blog post, it mentions drug target binding and materials science for polymers, batteries, and “even the materials that comprise our quantum bits (qubits).”
To be clear, this is quantum, so we’re talking years away from anything useful, but this was apparently impressive enough for Elon to reply to Sundar, “Congrats. Looks like quantum computing is becoming relevant.”
When Google said its mission was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” it meant all of it, even the stuff in the physical world, and even the stuff in the physical world for which we don’t currently have information.
Hilariously, on the same day, the WSJ reported that non-Google Quantum companies are trying to give the government equity in exchange for federal funding.
(3) Big Week for Bio Models: Nucleus’ Origin & Anthrogen’s Odyssey
Origin predicts human longevity from embryo DNA more accurately than any model ever built. And it’s open-weighted. - Kian Sadeghi, Nucleus Genomics
Odyssey enables scientists and researchers to generate and edit proteins, the workhorses of all life on this planet, towards specific functional ends—scaled to over 102 billion parameters. - Ankit Singhal, Anthrogen Bio
One thing DeepMind seems to understand better than the other frontier labs is that AI seems to be particularly useful for handling biology’s complexity and scale in a way that humans can’t, really. Startups understand that, too, and two announced the results from very useful bio models this week.
Anthrogen, an “AI-research lab building a complete network for biologics discovery and development,” released Odyssey, a multi-modal protein generation engine.
According to the company, it is the most powerful biological model ever created, which is a statement I don’t know how to evaluate (although 102 billion parameters sounds like a lot), but what I find particularly cool in the announcement post (which is well-written, clear, and worth reading) is that “it allows us to rationally design and optimize proteins toward multi-objective goals--for example, ‘binds the target,’ and ‘low side effects,’ and ‘manufacturable at scale.’” Type some words, get proteins that do what you need them to do.
Ultimately, the company wants to design molecular machines with the precision that we can design regular machines today, similar to the vision that Elliot Hershberg laid out in Atoms Are Local, and having bought into that vision from the second I read his essay, I am pumped that we’re one snall step (and giant model) closer.
Very cool stuff. Now let’s see it win the 2025 Protein Design Competition and defeat Nipah Virus.
Meanwhile, Not Boring Capital portfolio company Nucleus Genomics released (and open-sourced) Origin, “disease models trained on 1.5M genomes combining 7M genetic markers.” The model predicts human longevity from embryo DNA by predicting age-related diseases like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, across ancestries.
Using these models, families going through IVF will be able to select embryos that have a lower likelihood of contracting age-related diseases and a higher likelihood of living longer. Obviously, none of that is guaranteed, but Nucleus’ are the most accurate predictors developed to date and give parents one more tool in the toolkit they bring to bear to give their kids healthier, happier lives.
(4) Apex Unveils Project Shadow
Today, we unveil Project Shadow — Apex’s on-orbit Space-Based Interceptor (SBI) technology demonstration, launching NET June 2026.
It would be an unbelievable shame if humanity were to come this far - blindness cures, the ability to design proteins with words, healthier babies, maybe even quantum computers - only for us to blow each other up with nuclear weapons.
Fortunately, Los Angeles startup Apex is putting up its own cash to develop and demonstrate space-based interceptors, which would identify missiles and shoot them down before they could do any real damage. The plan is to show that they work, on a commercial budget and timeline, in order to get selected to be a part of President Trump’s Golden Dome.
What’s interesting about this is that Apex’s typical model is to develop satellite buses on top of which others can build whatever capabilities they need. In this case, Apex is taking it a step further and proving out that their buses work for interceptors. The plan, according to SpaceNews, seems to be to show that it works, and then partner with the Pentagon’s current missile defense contractors to do the ultimate intercepting.
This is very sci-fi stuff, which I love, but I hope that we end up spending billions of dollars on a bunch of interceptor satellites that never need to be used. Having read Anni Jacobsen’s terrifying Nuclear War: A Scenario last year, I’ll just sleep a little better at night knowing that someone is watching over us.
(5) Recoding America Announces $120 million Fund for State Capacity
Jen Pahlka via Santi Ruiz
Whether your priority is national security, economic and technological dynamism, protecting the vulnerable, or simply getting basic services to work, none of it is possible without a government capable of executing on its goals. The time for incremental fixes has passed. Let’s build the government our future demands.
For any of the stuff we write about to happen, we need either no rules (risky!) or strong state capacity.
This past weekend, at the Progress Conference, I got a chance to see Jen Pahlka speak about what the government can do, what gets in the way, and how she was planning to fix it. A few days later, she publicly announced her $120 million Recoding America Fund to help rebuild state capacity to match modern challenges and opportunities.
Jen is awesome. In 2010, she founded Code For America to help the government harness technology, served as U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer under Obama in 2013-2014, and helped found the United States Digital Service after leaving that role. In 2023, she wrote a book, Recoding America, and now, she has $120 million to fund activities to turn the book’s recommendations into action.
Some people think the best thing we can do if we want progress is to get the government out of the way. Pahlka, on the other hand, advocates for state capacity and thinks the government can be a force for good if it can clear out the kludge. Tie policy choices to how they’ll be implemented. Procurement reform. Civil service and hiring reform. Rule and process simplification. Better, cleaner technological systems. She talks about the thousands of pages of unread rules weighing down regulation, and the dozens of “sources of truth” underlying the IRS. Cleaning all of that up will mean that whatever policies the American people vote for, right or left, they’ll be implemented faster and less wastefully.
The fund aims to help government:
Attract + retain the right people
Task them with the right work
Via purpose-fit systems
And test-and-learn frameworks
Getting the government to function efficiently may be a bigger challenge than commercial fusion power, restoring sight to the blind, or useful quantum computers, but I’m happy Jen is on the case.
BONUS: Composer Launches AI for Trading
From Ben Rollert
Allow me to do a little proud-posting about my friend Ben and portfolio company, Composer, which launched one of the best AI products I’ve seen yesterday, one that marries what humans do well with what machines do well.
I really love Composer.
It’s been one of my favorite products for years. My portfolio there is doing really well because I don’t trade it (I’m a terrible trader). Ben is a good friend; we worked together at Breather. And it was one of the first startup investments I made.
Without understanding Composer, or having used it, I think it’s easy to dismiss this announcement as another “AI for trading” thing. I roll my eyes at most “AI for X” announcements, personally. But Composer has spent five years building infrastructure that is perfect for the moment: the ability to build, backtest, and execute strategies through if-then instructions. The idea of trading strategies instead of single names is different than anyone else does it. And I think it’s the right vector for AI trading.
Composer’s AI doesn’t try to be the best stock picker, or to replace the human. It just takes the ideas in your head, translates them into strategies, and executes trades in line with the strategies. It makes more sophisticated trading available to anyone with good ideas.
If that sounds like you, you should give it a try. It’s very cool to watch text go to backtest go to a strategy that you can trade with the push of a button.
Ben thinks about the world differently than anyone I know, and I think that this product shows that off better than anything he’s built yet. Proud of him.
DOUBLE BONUS: Atelier Missor Unveils Guardian of Liberty
Look at this beauty. Atelier Missor, who I highlighted in The Great Differentiation, shared a picture of their newest statue, Guardian of Liberty, absolutely towering over the team. This, apparently, is a scale model. The real one will be “gigantic, the tallest statue in the West.”
Les garçons plan to finish the gigantic version in a year, if they can get their visas. To me, that looks like the work of extraordinary aliens. Let’s make it happen.
Cutting Room Floor
Have a great weekend y’all.
Thanks to Stripe Startups for sponsoring. Love you, Stripe.
We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
