How unfair is the coin?

I’m reviving my blog after some time away — it’s been an eventful 12 months. In February 2024, Reverie Labs, the startup I co-founded in 2017, was acquired by Ginkgo Bioworks. I’m now on leave from Ginkgo and I’ve joined Y Combinator as a Visiting Partner, giving me the chance to work with the next generation of companies. Especially in this new role, I’ve been thinking a bit about what worked, what didn’t work, and what lessons I can take forward.

We had quite the journey – 6+ years of building at the intersection of AI and drug discovery. We began as a machine learning driven software company selling SaaS tools and consulting services to pharma companies, and at acquisition we were a pharmaceutical company, developing our own in-house pipeline of drug assets and advancing them rapidly using our machine learning technology.

Reverie’s story parallels many other AI driven drug discovery companies from the 2015-2022 (i.e. pre GPT) era. Many of these companies probably started as software companies by computer scientists. My co-founder Jonah and I entered this field because we saw the incredible advancements in machine learning in computer vision and natural language from AlexNet and LSTMs, and wanted to see those advancements applied to human health. With essentially no exceptions, we all became pharmaceutical companies. In other words, the product of the company wasn’t a software suite being sold to a pharma company, but a drug to be licensed or marketed directly to patients. Many companies had (and some still have) intermediate business models where they developed partnerships with pharmaceutical companies in which they advanced the pharma’s programs and took on milestone-based payments. But essentially all of them eventually launched their own wholly owned programs and advanced them.

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