“We’re not doing 30 bets a year”: Vijay Pande on betting small after running $4 billion at a16z
It used to be that Vijay Pande was better known in academic circles than investor circles. That changed pretty abruptly a dozen years ago, when Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz — who’d spent their firm’s first five years explicitly avoiding healthcare and life sciences — decided the category was worth betting on after all and handed the keys to Pande.
Why It Matters
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Key Facts
- Fact 1: Over the next decade-plus, he grew a16z’s bet into a practice managing close to $4 billion.
- Fact 2: The probability of a drug going successfully from the first trial to the end of the third trial is just 20%.
- Fact 3: If 8 out of 10 fail, and these things cost hundreds of millions of dollars, the amortized cost gets really high.
- Fact 4: There have actually been very significant advances over those 10 years.
It used to be that Vijay Pande was better known in academic circles than investor circles. That changed pretty abruptly a dozen years ago, when Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz — who’d spent their firm’s first five years explicitly avoiding healthcare and life sciences — decided the category was worth betting on after all and handed the keys to Pande.
At the time, he was a Stanford chemistry professor who was best known for building Folding@home, the distributed-computing project that turned millions of home PCs into a supercomputer for disease research. Over the next decade-plus, he grew a16z’s bet into a practice managing close to $4 billion. So it was somewhat unexpected when in June of last year, Pande walked away from it all to start something much smaller.
(Original synthesis pending human/AI review — generated by the stub provider by selecting real sentences from the source material, not by writing new analysis or commentary.)
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