#6 - Frontier Tech
Wearable continuous ultrasound patches, a link between hormonal contraception & autoimmunity, ML code-completion at Google, material sciences innovation, inventing demand, & telehealth lobbying.
Frontier Tech Investment Theses
Biology *special edition*: “Top Entrepreneurial Bio Labs in the UK” by Shelby Newsad (3.2.22)
A list of 80+ translational labs that have spun-out at least one company in the UK and their focus of research.
Compound, the frontier-tech focused firm I invest at, has just welcomed a very exciting new member to our team to double down on our healthcare & biology investments.
Her research experience spans neuroscience, drug discovery, & her recent PhD in microalgae symbioses, as well work at Merck and other VC funds! If any of these areas are of interest to you please reach out to her via twitter or at shelby@compound.vc.
Some running theses Compound has across healthcare and biology
Materials: “A New Materials Paradigm Is Overdue” by Tsung Xu (8.11.22)
A beautiful history of materials innovation, notes on Allbirds and On and their DTC use of new materials, and notes on how “startups largely no longer think of new materials as a key factor in building better products. We just have not had many new materials that have seen enough demand to come down the cost curve to produce at substantial volume.”
The rise of synthetic polymers led to the commercialization of one of the most successful original products ever.
“The materials that scale to millions of tons of production tend to be coupled to the cheapest energy inputs available at their time. Coked coal heated steel furnaces, electricity powered aluminum smelting and oil and gas powered polymers.”
“For the first time since the age of synthetic polymers, there are now a rising number of new inputs to produce new materials at scale. Synthetic biology will likely be one of the most important enabling new technologies. It opens up the potential for a huge range of cost-effective processes for producing new materials that we simply could not have had access to with fossil fuels.”
Research Developments in the Frontier Space
Medical Devices: A wearable ultrasound patch for continuous, on the go, high-quality imaging of most parts the human body (7.28.22)
Developer Tools / Machine Learning: “ML-Enhanced Code Completion Improves Developer Productivity” by Google Research (7.26.22)
Google is increasing their code completion tooling by using ML + a rule-based semantic engine trained on their internal code repository, and see a 6% reduction in coding iteration time. 3% of new code (measured in characters) is now generated from accepting ML completion suggestions.
Commentary from Jack Clark’s Import AI Newsletter: “This is another example of an ‘AI flywheel’ – Google is using its own code to train models to help its engineers more efficiently write better code, and it is using a (human-run, for now) acceptance process to maintain the quality of the underlying monorepo, so it can avoid pathological degradations due to garbage in/garbage out dynamics. This is also an area where ‘economy of code scale’ seems to matter – since Google famously has a single, gigantic internal monorepo, it’s easier for the company to train a single model on it.”
Endocrinology / Women’s Health: “Hormonal contraception and the development of autoimmunity: A review of the literature” by William V. Williams (8.18.17)
“Based on this review, substantial evidence exists linking the use of combined oral contraceptives to a lower incidence of hyperthyroidism, an increase in multiple sclerosis, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, Systemic Lupus Erythematosus, and interstitial cystitis.
Progesterone only contraceptives are linked to progesterone dermatitis and in one large developing world concurrent cohort study are associated with increases in arthropathies and related disorders, eczema and contact dermatitis, pruritis and related conditions, alopecia, acne, and urticaria. Hormonal contraceptives modulate the immune system and may influence the susceptibility to autoimmune diseases with significant increases in risk for several autoimmune diseases.”'
Of course many things are likely causing the massive uptick in auto-immune disorders that I’ve been digging into for a while (Some believe the conditions are rising between 3-9% per year, and nearly 50M Americans are living with an auto-immune disease and women specifically are at least 2 times more likely to be affected than men) but this literature review provides an interesting angle on the how hormonal birth control could be affecting these conditions. (If you have any updated literature you recommend please share in the comments!)
Fashion + AI: Finesse, a company predicting fashion trends with AI by scraping Tiktok Data (7/27/21)
The company is scraping tiktok comments for popular products (as more and more clothing purchasing and recommendation moves to tiktok) to decide what products to manufacture. They’re able to get products to production in 25 days.
Market Commentary in Frontier Tech Space
Cryptocurrency: “Bitcoin’s longest-serving Lead Maintainer calls it quits, names no successor” (8.15.22)
“Van der Laan is the second successor to Satoshi Nakamoto and is one of the few people in the world with final commit access to Bitcoin Core’s GitHub. Nakamoto held this administrative key, which was passed to Gavin Andresen, and then to van der Laan. Van der Laan took the reins eight years ago when Andresen, who learned how to maintain Bitcoin’s code directly from Nakamoto, stopped working on the project”
Frontier Tech: “Inventing Demand” by Byrne Hobart (8.15.22)
“In 1962, NASA had plenty of here-and-now problems, but, being an unusually effective organization, it found time to think about hypothetical future problems, too. For example: they had found a supplier for a particular component of their navigation system, and while that supplier made exactly what they needed—and, in fact, was the only company in the world that could make these components with sufficiently low weight and high reliability for spaceflight—it was a fairly new company, and a kind of faddy product. What if NASA built a computer, and found that after a few years it couldn't be replaced because the supplier had left the market or gone out of business entirely?
They hit on a fairly simple solution: they bought more than they needed, and used some of these tools for ground-based systems where they had wildly better specs than necessary, but where steady demand would keep their supplier in business.”
Telehealth: “Telehealth: A deep dive on the latest trends in federal lobbying activity and legislative reform in the US” by Marissa Moore at OMERS Ventures (8.17.22)
On the state of lobbying in telehealth, online prescribing, and what different strategies that healthcare companies – particularly startups – can take to influence policy.
Bonus Round:
Infrastructure: A Dive into NYC’s incredible water supply infrastructure
Frontier tech jobs:
Infrastructure/Fintech/Agriculture: https://ambrook.com/careers
Chemical Engineering / Biology: Helaina, synthetic breast milk
Neuroscience / BCI: Science.Xyz (Neuralink spinout): https://science.xyz/careers/
See details on what the team is working on here
Biology / (CV/ Embedded Systems) Engineering: Spaero, lab automation
Biology: Culture Biosciences, cloud-based bioreactors
Psychedelics / Manufacturing: Psygen
Biology / Mechanical Engineering: Bionaut, precision medicine delivery through remote controlled nanobots
Healthcare: ARPA-H, Project Lead, help spin up the newest Advanced Research Projects Agency focused on healthcare and scaled biomedical research.
Biology: Convergent FROs, small agile organizations that aim to fill a gap in the translational science landscape.
Focused Research Organizations (FROs) undertake projects too big for an academic lab but not directly profitable enough to be a venture-backed startup or industrial R&D project. Think "Series-A-sized org whose product is a public good to revolutionize a scientific field".
Crypto: Volt Labs, work on crypto projects for the research arms of crypto-focused Volt Capital.
Request for frontier tech help.
Looking to bounce around ideas about technology in the space? Looking for a cofounder or team member, or what to submit a job description to be featured in my newsletter? Trying to join a new frontier tech startup? Fill out the form below and let me know what’s on your mind. I’ll do my best do respond with an answer, suggestion, company, or meeting time!
Great newsletter! Thanks for all the links.
Sent in google form and would love to chat!