This Week in Startups - Next Unicorns: Developing drugs to extend dog lifespans with Loyal CEO Celine Halioua | E1799

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Fount. Do you want access to the performance protocols that pro athletes and special ops use? With Fount, an elite military operator supercharges your focus, sleep, recovery, and longevity, all powered by your unique data. Want a true edge in work and life? Go to fount.bio/TWIST for $500 off. LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people, and every hire matters. Go to http://linkedin.com/unicorn to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Catalog. Stop wasting time and money with expensive design firms and unreliable freelancers! Get fast, 3-day turnarounds for a flat monthly fee with Catalog! Get $1200 off right now at https://trycatalog.com/twist * Today’s show: Loyal CEO and Founder Celine Halioua joins Jason to discuss developing drugs that delay dog aging (10:19), lessons learned as a solo founder (49:34), and much more! * Time stamps: (0:00) Loyal CEO Celine Halioua joins Jason (1:43) The human dream of achieving life extension (4:37) Celine’s background (8:48) Fount - Get $500 off at https://fount.bio/twist (10:19) Why Celine decided to start with a focus on dogs (16:43) Wegovy, Ozempic, and the category of drugs that Loyal is developing (20:44) Breaking down how the drugs work and the consequences of selective breeding (24:21) LinkedIn Jobs - Post your first job for free at https://linkedin.com/unicorn (25:36) Stem cell therapy and the placebo effect (33:29) Environmental factors to consider in drug development (37:05) The path to commercialization (39:27) Catalog - Get $1200 off right now at https://trycatalog.com/twist (40:56) Staying intellectually curious and the path to commercialization continued (46:11) Hitting Series A milestones with less than $500K of the original $5M raised in seed round (49:34) Lessons learned as a solo founder * Follow Celine: https://twitter.com/celinehalioua Check out Loyal: https://loyalfordogs.com/ * Read LAUNCH Fund 4 Deal Memo: https://www.launch.co/four Apply for Funding: https://www.launch.co/apply Buy ANGEL: https://www.angelthebook.com Great recent interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland, PrayingForExits, Jenny Lefcourt Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow Jason: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jason Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

There's something about being a solo act. I tell people like, I'm Bob Dylan. I don't play well in a band. And now I'm forced to be in a band with the All In podcast. And I can tell you, it is not my natural state of being. Like, you know, I am obviously the front guy. I'm the lead singer. I just want to play the songs.

And I want to play the songs the way I want to play them correctly. And then when, you know, somebody wants to do it somewhat different and then they want to be the lead singer, it's like, it can't be two lead singers, you know, like you can sing a verse, but like you're the guitar player. You're the bass player. You're the drummer. Like, do your job. And I agree with you.

Like I think for certain people, you got to be the solo founder and you can go faster. But it's very rare. And then at the early stage, having multiple ones, you know why actually this whole thing got started with the co-founders? It's, that's it. You nailed it. It's in the interest of the investors. This weekend startups is brought to you by Fount. Do you want access to the performance protocols that pro athletes and special ops use?

With Fount, an elite military operator. supercharges your focus, sleep, recovery, and longevity, all powered by your unique data. Want a true edge and work in life? Go to fount.com slash twist for $500 off. LinkedIn jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Post your first job for free at LinkedIn.com slash unicorn. And catalog. Stop wasting time and money with expensive design firms and unreliable freelancers. Get fast, three-day turnarounds for a flat monthly fee with catalog. Get $1,200 off right now at trycatalog.com slash twist. Hey, everybody, welcome to this weekend startups. And we all want to live longer, right? Life

Extension has been the dream of technologists, alchemists, religious people, and humans since we existed. We all want to get a couple of extra years. And I remember Altus Labs raising 3 billion from Jeff Bezos, Sherry Milner, a bunch of folks. Startups are starting to use biotech solutions, AI, big data to look at diseases and try to fight aging. Well, today on the program, we got a slightly different take on life extension. They're working a bit backwards. The plan is to start with my favorite creatures on planet Earth, dogs, and eventually

use the learnings there to develop life extension treatments for humans. And I think this makes the most sense to me because dogs are. so much better than humans. So why the strategy, well, FDA approval for life extension drugs in dogs, about 50 times less expensive than for humans. And you can tell if it works much faster because dogs have such a shorter lifespan than humans do. So Celine Haliwa is the founder and CEO of Loyal. Celine, I love dogs.

Thanks for starting this company. Absolutely. I'm glad you're not a cat person. Cat people are the worst. I think we all agree on that. And once you get to two or more cats, specifically three, you know something's going very, very long in your life. Now, owning multiple dogs like I do too, that's completely permissible. And when I retire, my wife and I plan to start a bulldog rescue.

That is our retirement plan. So in 20 years off. So sweet. Yeah. Dogs, almost by definition, if you get one, you're signing that contract that they're going to bury them. and they're not going to bury you. That's just the law of big numbers, right? Humans live to their 70s.

Dogs live to maybe 9 to 12 years on average. Is that the average lifespan of a dog? Yeah, well, interestingly, the bigger a dog is, which is what their lifespan is. So if you really like Great Danes, they're looking at six, seven, eight years. If you like chihuahuas, you know, who knows why,

you're looking at 16, 17 years. Yeah. This is very true. I looked at getting my dream dog is a dog de Bordeaux or like a Spanish Mastiff. Italian massive. I love these big bull breeds. But when I found out they lived six or seven years,

that got me bummed out. And my bulldogs tend to live. I had one live eight and a half years. One live 10 and a half 11. And then my last bulldog, fondue, love of my life, lasted 15 plus years. The longest you can get out of a bulldog.

It never happens that bulldogs live that long. So I feel very blessed. So tell me, you guys have raised 65 million for solo. I'm sorry. You've raised 65 million for Loyal so far. What is the plan here and what's your background? How did you come to this idea? Yeah.

I'll sort of the background. So I actually go in college for art school. But then at the very last minute, I decided to switch to neuroscience because I had this, I had this realization that in my perception, we don't really have free will because you can get diagnosed was many diseases, often age-related diseases, that if they happen, there's not much anybody can do for you, no matter how much money you have, how much effort you put into it, how much thought

you put into it. If you get certain forms of brain cancer, if you get Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, generally speaking, your life is going to be shorter and significantly much shorter than you want it to be. And to me at 18, when you kind of think adults are heroes and they can fix everything, realizing they can't, was extremely scarring, candidly. So I switched from art school to neuroscience. I spent four years in the lab. I then started a PhD at Oxford in the economics of preventative medicine. And as I'm sure we'll talk about the way I really see aging drugs is as a preventative medicine for multiple age-related diseases at the same time. I was just laughing because I usually use statin, you know, a drug to reduce risk cardiovascular disease. But now it's like

like Ozempic might actually be a better metaphor for that, right? A drug that, positively impacts multiple things that might be not classically defined as the same disease. And then I dropped out of Oxford to join Laura Deming at the Longevity Fund, where I was her first employee, chief of staff, venture partner, EIR, kind of every title there, where we were investing in companies of building drugs for human aging and lifespan extension. And I got kind of frustrated

while I was working at Longevity Fund because every aging company, including Altos, who you just mentioned, that's about $3 billion, has kind of the same narrative. Like, oh, you know, we want to work on aging and lifespan extension. We have this drug where it is a mechanism that works, but FDA's evil, aging is in a disease, so we're going to develop our aging drugs for cancer. We're going to develop our aging drugs for Alzheimer's or osteoarthritis or whatever it is. And it just didn't makes sense to me that literally every shot on goal for an aging drug was not actually being tested for what I think a drug should be tested for, which is a drug that keeps you healthier and longer. That is fundamentally what we are developing these drugs to do.

Long story short, I'll share this because it's very Silicon Valley. I had found that this, we were talking about the big dog short lifespan. That was an aha moment for me because you look at the genetics to control dog size. it's actually around a very well-known aging pathway, actually the OG aging pathway that Laura worked on, and she was like 12 years old because she's a savant. And it turns out that it seems like big dogs have an accelerated aging disorder. That's an unattended consequence of historical and breeding for size. So I went to a camping trip with a bunch of Silicon Valley founders like three weeks after I moved to the valley and didn't know anybody, got drunk, and was like, you know, telling these people that I knew how to make their dog. dogs live longer. And there was a VC there who ran into another VC who ran into Greg Rosen at YC Demo Day and told him about me. And he was like, oh my God, dogs are an amazing market. So he found me and kind of helped me realize that this was not only like an interesting scientific insight, but actually potentially a significant business and significant company. And they gave me after three months of really understanding the thesis, scientific consumer otherwise.

gave me a term sheet. It was $5 million for me and a shitty pitch check and literally nothing else back in 2020. And since then, as you mentioned, raised 65, we're 55 people. But much more importantly, we are about a year and a half away from hopefully launching the first ever drug FDA approved for lifespan extension for any species. But of course, our drugs will be approved if approved for dogs. You see these blue light glasses I'm wearing. I'm not wearing it for style, although they are very stylish. They've totally changed my life. Why? I started having headaches, right, and had eye strain. So I got these blue light blocking glasses that do a little magnification because I need readers. Yeah, I look nuts. But my eye strain's gone down. My headaches have gone away and I'm sleeping better.

Do you know how I got on this? I got on it because I now have a health coach. Who is my health coach? It's found. F-O-U-N-T. It's a health company that's created custom health and performance programs that are tailored to your body, obviously, also your goals, and they take into account your lifestyle. My coach is incredible. I text with them all the time. They did a blood work for me. They check out my wearable data, and we do weekly calls to see if I'm on track and getting results I want. They also told me about some supplements I should be taking based on the blood work, and they do it at a fraction of the cost. We upgraded my diet. I'm doing a little more protein. We've optimized my sleep. That's great. I got the supplement packs. I feel great. I feel like I'm in

control of my destiny. If you want to be like me and you're, you're concerned about your health and you want to just try to do better, have some experts on your team. Build your own program. Go to found.com.com.com. That's fow-u-unt-b-o-slash-twist. Get your free consultation. Mention Twist. You get $500 off your first month and get your own personal health coach. Health is well. And if you're running a startup, if you're a CEO, if you're a capital allocator, take it seriously. I love this service. found. Dot bio slash twist. Now, most of the time when people do testing, they use a chimpanzee, right?

I think that's the closest living relative to a human. And there are many other animals in the world that are close to humans, I believe. Dogs, I think, are not as close to humans, but they do have a number of things that they share with humans. I think the primary one is environment, right? because they've, for hundreds of years, with the exception of the ones that are behind me in the mountains here, coyotes,

domesticated dogs, they live with us. So they have the same exact air. They get the same exact, not the same exact food, but similar food, I think, actually, because they're eating scraps.

So tell me why dogs and not chimpanzees or another breed. Yeah, absolutely. So it's twofold. If we only ever develop dog aging drugs, we're going to be a multi-billion-dollar, business. Dog drugs make a ton of money. Heart guard, which is one of the many heartware preventatives, makes about half a billion a year. The leading flea and tick makes a billion a year,

and this is very high margin, very sticky revenue. Dogs are prescribed these drugs for the rest of their lives, and dog owners are very loyal to the brands that they stay with. But as you're correctly interpreting, there is a bigger vision here. If we can show a drug slows the rate of aging and extends lifespan in dogs, that is just about the best translational model for showing what might work in people too. And the reason being is one exactly what you just mentioned, environment. Environment is huge in aging,

both for the individual but also generational environmental impact, but also dogs about the same age-related diseases we do at approximately the same time in our lifespan. Dogs get cancer and they get chemo for cancer. Dogs get osteoarthritis. Dogs get dementia. Cognition is actually something I'm super, super interested. in dogs get very quantifiable forms of dementia.

Dogs get are thought to get diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's like we do, which very few other animals do. Theoretically, there are other animals that are genetically closer, opposite to chimpanzees are nically closer, even mice, are on the phylogenetic tree closer to us. But dogs, because they represent the wide variety of diseases and environmental factors are actually a better model of how we age over time. time. Also, functioning with chimpanzees, you know, one of the hacks of loyal is that we're able to gather this big data because we're going to, if this drug gets approved, potentially put it in

millions of dogs. We've already done hundreds of dog studies, right? You can't do that much. Yeah, I mean, that is the incredible, I think, insight here, the same way Elon did the Tesla Roadster for, you know, technological enthusiasts and only need to sell a couple of thousand of them. I think they I wound up selling 3,000 or so for 150K each. It was an impractical car at a ridiculous price and was, you know, a Gen 1 product. And so you have this incredible, you know, place where you can land that's even bigger, which is there's 65 million, I think, homes that have dogs. And like you're saying, the dogs have the same environment.

Okay, that's really interesting. and if but 10% of people decide to give their dogs a life extension drug, they're already spending like $1,000 a year on their dog easily, I think. I spend much more with bulldogs. So they could afford, if you told me, I could spend $500 a year to my dog to live longer, and I got one more year, two more years, that's a no-brainer for me. That's an instant purchase. And now I might be the top 10% in terms of my thinking on that.

But it's interesting, the four horsemen of chronic disease, as Peter Attila calls them. You got the neurodegenerative. I didn't know really dogs got that Alzheimer's and stuff like that. Obviously, they get cancer. That happens all the time. And tragically, people have to put their dogs down because, I guess, cancer treatments are not. A lot of people can't make that decision to spend $10,000 or $5,000 on cancer treatment.

Then you got, but what about like cardiovascular disease? I don't hear about dogs having, like, plaque in their hearts and stuff like that. They don't get that. That's the only one where there's a strong deac correlation between incidents of humans and incidents and dogs. That's because that disease has a lot of environmental factors to it. And dogs do eat similarly to us, but they don't get to go through McDonald's drive-thrus. Or smoke cigarettes, right? Or smoke cigarettes, yeah.

The cardiovascular stuff, I think cigarettes had a big impact on that. But the insulin-related stuff and diabetes, did dogs get that? do they have? So actually, so they don't, they can develop diabetes, but met of what you're hitting on, metabolic fitness is actually the poor mechanism

by which we're targeting aging. It's one of the reasons, again, to go back to Zempec, I was so interested in all of that because it's the exact, it's a very similar mechanism. So actually the only lifespan extension study

that's been run to completion in dogs, as far as I'm aware, is a chloric restriction study. So Perianan in the 90s ran a, Chloricprosite study was Labradors, they showed a two-year lifespan extension and a two-year delayal and osteoarthritis and cancer development in those dogs. Nothing came from it. Pyrina's a dog food company. The not exactly economic fincet advice tell you to clerically restrict your dog, but it's a beautiful validation of what we've seen already in mice and primates and other model

organisms that improving metabolic fitness, which is how chloroac restriction is thought to work, extends lifespan. It extends healthy lifespan. Yeah, this is the great thing. I just encourage everybody to get a dog and go for walks. Number one killer of men, I believe in the Western world at least is stress. And so dogs reduce stress massively. All founders should have a dog. And the dog should be on their lap, in their office.

That is a must. Yeah, of course. Aw, you boopi. Is that a Rottweiler? What is it? Roddy, yeah. Roddy, the Rottweller. You know, they look intimidating.

but they're big sweethearts. She's like a toddler. They think they're lap dogs. Those dogs are 100 pounds and they think they should be on your lap, like a little poodle or something like that. They're deranged. That specific breed I'm calling out. Let's talk about Wagovi and Osempic for a second.

I've been on Osepikovic for the last two years, lost 21 pounds on it, feel amazing, changed my relationship with food. And now all these reports are coming out. at it's going to help with heart disease, it looks like. So this generalized medicine that we're discovering could have a dramatic impact. So watch as you're working on this with dogs, what path are you going down in terms of thinking about which drugs to use? And does Ozambic and Wagovi and what do they call these, are they GL-G-P-1s or something? Yeah, G-B-1.

what impact does this have on your thinking? And then what route are you taking in terms of thinking about life extension and dogs? Yeah. So one of the interesting things about dog drugs. So actually, there was a weight loss drug that worked in a similar mechanism. So appetence reduction in dogs. And it actually was a pretty big commercial failure. And that's because people's food, like food-giving relationship with their dog is a kind of

proxy for love, right? So the dog being excited to see you when I come home, like, excited to see see you or is they excited for dinner? Is excited for a treat or is they excited for pets, right? It's kind of all mixed in. So people would actually stop giving the drug because they felt like their dog cared about them less. So one of the things we look at in our studies explicitly is making sure that the dogs on our drugs are not losing weight and that's not why we're seeing the health span benefit, which is kind of non-intuitive, but just one of the things I did when I started loyal is I wanted to be very, I mean, I'm, I started loyal when I was 24. I'm 28 now. I obviously have a very experienced team, but I myself, I'm not brought a pharmaceutical product to market

previously. And so I wanted to make sure I was kind of humble and learning as much from the priors. And that was a really interesting one. As far as what we're targeting, so the aging field is very interesting in that there is decades of very strong research on various ways of extending lifespan, but because there's no commercial path for a drug to be approved for lifespan extension, and there's no, you know, Pfizer and Regeneron and whatnot. Nobody is developing a drug for lifespan extension. I'm pretty sure we're the only company, perhaps there's actually just a loyal copycat founded. There's two companies that are saying that they want to develop a drug for explicitly for lifespan extension

and their tiny startups, relatively speaking, right? There's nobody else actually developing drugs for this explicit use case. And so we wanted to keep everything as simple as possible except for this one idea which is that a drug can be targeted for a generalized quality of life and

health span extension and not for a classical disease. So we went with things that we knew were very well-valuated biology. So our drugs are in two categories. One is around big dog short lifespan. So actually the very first drug I was working on was Loy 1 is his big dog short lifespan

drug to slip what the company got funded around. And it's this idea of, as I talked about earlier, that big dogs, when we selectively bred dogs for size, we created these really awesome giant breed dogs, but these big breed dogs, once they're fully grown, continue metabolically aging at a faster rate. A big dog is literally aging at a 2x paster rate. they're developing age-ally diseases faster. I mean, Great Danes will often go gray at age four or earlier, start getting age-ally diseases earlier, and then they die sooner.

They have a much shorter median lifespan. And that's a, our hypothesis is that that's a unintended consequence of historical breeding and therefore genetic and therefore targetable with a drug. So we have two drugs that are targeting that to give big dogs a longer lifespan. And then we are first drug. Just so I'm clear and I reflect back to you. You're talking about, hey, the genetic engineering we did, breeding, made the dogs big, increased the velocity of their growth.

So they get to full size, but hey, that growth has now, whatever is in the DNA, I guess, that's driving that growth or in their genes, the genetics. You could take a pill to reverse that maybe. Or I guess you could breed them. Another way to do would be to breed them to not, I guess, get as big. but that doesn't solve the problem. So there's something in the DNA you could actually change or in the genetics, you think? So we're not doing any change to the genetics.

What we're doing is a drug that compensates for the genetic changes that these dogs have. I mean, you have, you said bulldogs, right? English bulldogs, yeah. Yeah, so you're very aware, I'm sure, of, you know, historical inbreeding has caused genetic issues in certain breeds. Bulldog most of all. I mean, the controversy of bulldogs is that we shouldn't even have them. They were bred to be first bred as warriors in arenas for bull baiting, was a sport bull baiting. Then they got saved and they were bred to be kind to each other, nice for humans.

Then they were bred to look cute with smashed faces and big barrel chest and short legs, which then created, they called them the break go breeds, created breathing problems that cause heart attacks all the time. Poor Adam Sandler had both meatball and matzabal diet like three and four years old. It's horrific. Yeah. No, and most dog breeds have some genetic associated disease. Goldens are another one. They develop two forms of cancer that can be very rapidly terminal and are very hard to diagnose beforehand.

German shepherds get their hips fall out over time. And so our idea is that the short lifespan of big dogs is not inherent. If you look at a wolf, wolves are massive. They're larger than any dog breed. And they live in captivity into their teens easily. But it's a disease like anything else. And therefore, it's targetable with the medicine. And that was really kind of the drug that we first went to the FDA with,

but also first went to the scientific community in the world with. They try to connect something that people think is inherent and say, hey, you know, maybe it's not. Maybe we should question what we think is normal. Yeah. It's really weird that the boxers and the German shepherds and all them, golden retrievers, I think were in there. With the hip dysplasia, how did that become, you know, something in the breeding that got caused? It's so weird. Great Danes in there as well. It's short-term minded, right? So, like, if you think about it with the big dogs, they were the people who were breeding and trying to create, let's say, a Great Dane, they did this very quickly, like over a period of like a couple hundred years or less. And so they would breed a dog. The dog would grow, like, large in puberty, then it'd be one years old, and they'd probably breed it to, you know, a sibling or a cousin, because people were inbreeding themselves back then, right? They didn't know anything about genetic diversity.

And they're doing that over and over and over again. And they don't understand, you know, evolution only works up until the point, generally speaking, that that individual's genes are passed on to when they're bred. So if there's some negative consequence of the gene that makes a dog grow really big, would have very effectively makes the dog grow very big, it's going to stay. because the person isn't waiting to see if there's anything bad happening on the back half. They're like, oh, big dog, breed it. And then because they're in breeding, it's causing a lot of these genetic issues on top of it.

All right, listen, you're listening to the next unicorns, right? That's table stakes. Well, if you want to start on the path to becoming a unicorn yourself, you're going to need to find and hire great candidates. And how do you do that? LinkedIn. Of course, you're on LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn.

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I know that VC. Well, they're hiring. Let me click and check it out. And then all of a sudden you start getting this great inbound, right? We love LinkedIn. I mean, I've gotten some of the most amazing people. In fact, I just got a new personal assistant because things are going so well. And I've got the new accelerator that we have coming.

in San Mateo, and I need somebody help me run that and set it all up. And I said, you know what? I need to have an executive assistant again. So we found somebody amazing on LinkedIn, of course. And so here's your call to action. LinkedIn jobs helps you find qualified candidates you want to talk to fast. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash unicorn. That's right. LinkedIn.com slash unicorn to post your first job for free.

Terms and conditions apply because LinkedIn is so generous. What are your thoughts on stem cells and therapy? keeps coming up with my rich friends and I've heard it come up with dogs, actually. I don't know if anybody's actually done it in dogs. But people I know go to like Mexico, Costa Rica and they do or Germany, they do this platelet spinning like Kobe Bryant did for his knees, you know, and then their stem cell stuff. What is your general thought on this? Because there seems to be a huge gray market. But then I hear from people who've had it done on their knees or their elbows like, oh my God, I can play tennis again. Oh my God. I can run marathon.

Again, I can sprint. This has been amazing. Did you look at that as a possible pathway? And then what are your thoughts just generally on it? So one of the things, so a similar avenue to that is supplements. And that's something a lot of people ask me, right? Like, why am I going, you know, I've been running loyal for four years almost. You know, we haven't made a drop of revenue.

We just burn money, a lot of money every month. And that's basically it. Deep tech, right? We could have been selling supplements. We could have been selling stem cell therapies since day one. But fundamentally a big part of what I want to do is I want to show that aging drugs are boring, right? That a drug can be approved for a healthy lifespan extension. And even if there was a supplement that, you know, theoretically extended the lifespan of dogs five years,

I would tell somebody else that they could go work on it. But I wouldn't actually feel it's in the scope of loyal because I think we need to create the regulatory path and almost be like impenetrable to controversy, right? The FDA is the highest quality bar in the world, and that's the only way to do it, in my opinion. Yeah. So do you think there is a stem cell therapies or a legitimate pathway in the world, or is it generally speaking? I'm not super educated on this facet. So we, my group at Oxford actually looked at it a bit, at least at the time, and that was a few years ago. There was a lot of issue with these kind of, as you were saying, being a regulatory gray area.

where efficacy doesn't have to be proven. I think in general, when you're putting something in your body, especially potentially permanently, it's good to have, you know, understand the side effects. But also the other thing I'd caution as placebo effect is very real, very, very real.

Let's talk more about the, this is a very interesting discussion. I was talking to somebody who's in the medical field and they said my entire life is trying to beat the placebo. Explain what... Yeah. Explain the absolutely underappreciated power of placebo's.

So placebo is basically... So when you do a scientific study, you... And you're trying to say, like, does my drug extend the quality of life and the number of years of life of a dog? You will have a placebo group. So it's somebody who the vet thinks they're getting a drug,

The dog owner thinks to getting the drug. I guess maybe the dog thinks they're getting a drug, but they're actually not. It's basically like a fake sugar pill that's made the smell look exactly like the actual pill. And then the other group gets the actual drug. And the goal is to show that, you know, in the people who get the actual drug,

that they're having a longer healthier life or their dogs having a longer healthier life. Placepo will mess with everything in the weirdest ways, and it's actually even harder. and it's even harder in dogs. Because one of the things that we're asking dog owners to do is fill out these surveys where they tell us about how they like how active is their dogs seem, how comfortable does their dog seem.

And it's all subjective. It's all perception, right? And so if somebody thinks like, oh, I'm certain my dogs on the active drug, even if they're not, they might subconsciously rate their dog as healthier for longer. Another interesting thing was dogs is that, you know, our ultimate endpoint, unfortunately, is mortality. It's reduction of mortality risk.

And with dogs, you have euthanasia. And that is inevitably a human decision of when to euthanize a dog. So will somebody wait to euthanize longer than they otherwise would have because they think the dog is on the drug? And it's dangerous because what it can do is mask the actual real benefit of the drug. and if you can't show that there's a statistical difference between the dogs on your drug and the dogs on placebo, the drug fails.

Even if it worked, the drug fails. Oh, that's a fascinating. That's a fascinating point. So if the placebo effect was, you know, 20% reduction, if the actual effect was 20% reduction, you get a placebo effect of 19 or 21 or whatever, I think they tip placebo effect typically is in the low teens, is my understanding for a lot of drugs.

And so then you don't get approved. because you're like, hey, it's just doing as well as a sugar pill. But I thought your answer was going to be placebo effect doesn't exist in dogs because they don't know they're taking medicine. It turns out the humans' interaction with the dogs could lead them to not make a different decision at end of life. And so when you're going to just take end of life out of your statistics or do two runs of your statistics, ultimately ones with the euthanized data and then the, the one without it and then try to make sense of it. Is that the ultimate goal? No, I mean,

it's so predominantly what we're looking at is lifespan and then health span as measured by the vet and the pet parent. And the way you deal with this is you just do a really large study. As far as I know, we are running the largest pivotal animal health study that's ever been run or one of the largest. Normally, there are like 50 to 100 hours of the 1,000, which is going to be very operationally complex.

not to mention it's long because it's a lifespan extension study but we do that exactly for that reason you want to be able to the bigger a study is the more signal you can derive from the noise right

how many people are going to be in this study with it and do we have different qualifiers for dogs like you know giving dogs medicine maybe it's like you know less of an issue this has been such an interesting question actually because

So it's going to be about a thousand dogs across 55 vets all over the U.S. You have to represent, you know, rich New York City dogs and, you know, working dogs, Iowa and everything in between. That's extremely important both for us, but also the FDA. And one of the things we're trying to figure out is, like, where do we put these study sites? Because it's not us. We actually work with independent veterinarians who are enrolled in the study, and they bring dogs in.

It's a scientific, it's like an ethics thing, right? Because we're biased. We want the drug to get approved. And we actually have been mapping the immigration, emigration paths within the U.S., like people in California moving to Texas and Florida and people in Florida moving to New York or whatever. And also where do people move over five years of their lifetime? Because what we don't want, like a fail mode for the study is the drug works, but a bunch of people drop out of the study

because in year two, on average, people move from New York City to Iowa. And that connection, or maybe Salt Lake City would be more accurate. That becomes challenging. So we're trying to load balance, having sites wherever we think people might be

without also adding so much complexity but then the study is too difficult to run or I need too many employees to run the study. So there's all these like bets you have to make. It's so operationally, complex. Yeah. And I'm wondering if there's some core, I think there should be some meta study that you could team up on where you're giving the dogs these drugs and then you're looking at the lifespan of the human and the impact that dogs have on humans and the longer the lifespan. So if you could

correlate as we get into this big data pools of giant data and then AI, you look at owners and then start to think like, hey, owners who put dogs on this drug, and I wonder if the lifespan is different for younger owners versus older owners or if older owners spend more time and do more walks with the dog or what the correlations are. I bet you the...

Yeah. Are you tracking environmental issues around the dog or you mentioned qualitatively health span? That seems like a waste of time to me because does anybody give good qualitative information on their dogs? You know, that... So that is a huge problem in the aging field.

What the hell is? quality of life. How do you quantify how healthy you are? How do I quantify your rate of aging? There is no agreed upon norm. And the problem is if you go to the FDA, you can't be like, hey, here's this new drug and here's this new measure, right? You have to kind of keep it boring, except for, you know, what you're trying to do. But to your big data point, one of the things we're working on is developing exactly that, like a quantitative measure of at least quality of life and health span and the dog. And so when we're running this study, for four more years.

We're banking saliva samples, photos of the dogs, videos of the dog, blood, stool, everything. Wait, I'm sure. Wait, of course. And then we also just announced a collaboration with Banfield Pet Hospital, which is one of the largest pet chains in the U.S. And they're actually very interested in working with us on these big data problems, too, because they have 20 plus years of longitudinal records of people going to the vet and the dog getting diagnosed in year three with this. and you're five with that and what's the outcome of the dog and any control for all the other things. And that's a thing, a huge translation, right?

If you can understand that in a dog and if you can objectively quantify if a drug's having a rate of aging benefit in six months in a dog instead of having to wait five years, that's the best screening platform you're ever going to get for human aging drugs. Because fundamentally, humans always are going to live like decades, right? We can't change that.

So we need a better way to measure how we age to tell the drugs working. Yeah, and just thinking about the environmental factors, the positivity versus how cynical or just negative a human being is must have an impact on a dog. And the exercise, well, I mean, or it will certainly have an impact on how they would report on how healthy their dog is. Positive person, I'm, I'm always looking for the, you know, silver lining. I'd be like, oh, my dogs are so healthy. They're incredible. I just took them for a hike out in Tahoe.

They were great. I mean, meanwhile, they're walking 0.5 miles and they're panting and they're exhausted. But yeah, so altitude stuff and break yield breeds of stuff. But, you know, interestingly, with Bulldog, there's a movement to make them genetically more like a normal or an old English bulldog where they have longer legs, longer snouts and less short, less big chest. So, you know, you're like, oh, is that a bulldog? It's like, yeah, it's kind of like a ratty old bulldog. not the genetic like freaks that you see in cartoons with the giant barrel chest. So when you're funding a company like this,

how many years to commercialization? And how do you explain that to investors just getting to the startups part of your story? Yeah. So that's a very interesting question. So we're backed by, I'd call it standard Silicon Valley funds, right? First round, co-led, our series seed was Josh. Josh Copleman

friend of the pod I love Josh he's the best hard ass ever Is he back to working full time at first round or is he like semi-retired running some newspaper? I don't got any of the hot goss

He was like He was taking a break to run some newspaper for a while in Philly I don't remember I mean he's still on my board so if he shows up to those Josh Cobbman's awesome You know those guys made too much money

with Uber they don't come to work anymore It's a joke But here's a thing Jake Hal We have the aging drugs right right you can keep these vCs alive longer it's actually I hate to go into diversions about VCs but I had a VC who's 10 years older than me

and he said to me at some point a couple years ago he's like you know I just got to retire and I said why are you going to retire like it's the greatest job in the world you've done so much great work your social work but it's like just feels creepy to be 60 years old 62 years old and meeting with 20 year olds and like trying to invest in them and like I'm

I'm like you know it just it feels like people don't want an old guy around. I'm like, I think quite the opposite. I think they love it. I think they love having your war stories. He's like, really? I'm like, the war stories are great, honestly.

And like the, the just chillness, like they've seen everything. And there's, you have five mistakes they're going to make. And here's like why you're not going to listen to my advice. And then like six months later, I come back and I'm like,

you were right, Josh? I didn't listen to your advice. And this is it wrong. And now I'm going to listen to you. And Josh Coppulman's really old. I mean, he's ancient. I'm joking. I'm joking.

But you're much older than me. That's true. No, I mean, John Dorr, Michael Moritz, you know, just, you know, recipe's Don Valentine. When I got to spend time with those folks and ask them questions, man, Vinot Kozla is still in the game. I'm going to be like Vinod. I'm never, you have to drag me out of my firm. So sharp. That guy, I don't know how he does it.

I don't know. He does it, honestly. He's like five people in one. When I see a startup that's got bad design, it's hard for me to take it seriously in today's day and age. Why? Because having great design, having world-class design, it's kind of table stakes today with consumers, with employees, with partners, and of course, with investors. But, you know, design agencies, they're very, very expensive. And there's a lot of back and forth to figure out what you want. It's not for startups. You know, you can't spend a quarter million dollars, a half million dollars. getting some design agency to do your look and feel. And it's hard for you to hire somebody full-time because that's a full-time staff position. So let me tell you about an amazing service. It's called Catalog, a full-service design studio tailor-made for startups. And Catalog does all of your branding.

They do UI and U.S. They'll do landing pages, pitch decks. They'll do it all. It's half the price of a typical design agency, but they offer a full team, including a dedicated project manager and a design director. They've worked with hundreds of startups. So, if you have a problem, chances are they've already solved it.

You can stop and start back at any time. It's a monthly subscription. And Catalog will never waste your time. They do three-day turnaround, okay? That's more than enough. Stop wasting time. Stop wasting money with all these expensive design firms and unreliable freelancers who disappear.

What you want is fast. Three-day turnarounds for a flat monthly fee with catalog. And you're going to get $1,200 off right now at trycadlog.com slash twist. That's $1,200 off at tri-cadlock. catalog.com slash twist. Well, on an aging basis, this is your wheelhouse and your expertise, and we'll get back to the funding question, we've got to go down this path here, staying intellectually curious in addition to moving around your diet, calorie restriction, but really cognitively

staying in the game and having purpose, is this like a, is it true that there's a correlation with health and longevity or no? It's, so it's so hard decorrelate these things, right? because if somebody's not intellectually curious, are they getting less physical activity? You know, are they having depression? Are they less curious because they're trying to get dementia?

It's really, like, with all these things, it's so hard to detangle. Everything changes this time. That said, my favorite study we ran at Loyal was a cognitive decline study in dogs. So we were able to show that one of our drugs improved pretty objective and to your earlier point, quantitative measures of cognition in dogs.

that had canine cognitive dysfunction. And one of the tests that you do is their ability to relearn something, right? So they'll learn that a certain toy, if they touch it like three times as their nose, that it's associated with a treat. They're like taught this over weeks. That's like really like drilled into their heads.

And then they, this is reversed. And it turns out that a different toy and now they have to touch three times to get the treat. And the dogs that weren't on our drug would just keep on touching the original toy over and over again, and then they would just abdicate from the study. They just become too frustrated versus some more of the dogs on our drug relearned. They learned that, oh, actually, I'm just going to go to this toy.

And so there's an interesting parallel here. And, you know, what will be the impact on society if people are able to learn new things faster or more plastic, so to speak, for a longer period of time? I think you could have a massive social benefit. No, that's why I started playing tennis. I'd never done it before. I started skiing again, like much more actively, skiing in deep powder, traveling, I think, going around the world. Yeah.

Playing chess. I think just playing video games. I started playing a video game again to just try to challenge my mind to be like in that flow state. I think it's very important. So back to the funding question, you got all traditional VCs in there. But traditional VC funds go for 10 years. So first round is in year four, five, six of the investment. How long does commercialization take?

And then, you know, is there another set of investors or a way for investors to clear their position in year 10 to get, you know, their LPs and then have other people like drug companies buy out their position? How does it all work towards that 10 year window in which venture funds need to return capital? Yeah, absolutely. So it's a couple of things. First is that in tech startups from what I understand, generally speaking, the value is determined by in rational. times, a revenue multiple and maybe some growth factored into that too. You are still creating value

in a biotech company over time but it's around your probability of success. So it's kind of the risks are inverted. There's a risk, you know, if I'm like building some note-taking app, there is almost zero tech risk, right? I can do that. But then the question is, am I going to find product of my fit? How big some tam? Da-da-da-da, right?

For us, you know, if we get this drug to market, it's, or you get a drug to market, it's really, to be able to certain. There's a very large market. And one of the interesting things about drugs is that the mo is impenetrable. You don't get copycats.

You don't get a race to the bottom. Cogs are actually extremely good for drugs. We're projecting at a very reasonable price that pet parents, let's say like mid double digits, a 75 to 85% gross margin on the product. What are you saying? Double digits per month or per year? per month. So somewhere

500 bucks a year, maybe is what I'm thinking. Yeah. So somewhere between like 40 to 60 a month. We haven't done the final pricing. We're trying to optimize all that right now. But regardless, the margins are going to be high, which is great because that's how we reinvest into the company and reinvest in R&D. But the risk that, you know, Josh underwrote and Finode underwrote and the rest of my investors underwrote were, could we find something that works? And there's no really way to hack that. Like either a drug works or it doesn't work. And it's kind of a bet on the team. And it's kind of a bet on the team. and the biology and the thesis to figure out what works. So even if we're not making a drop of revenue, we're still accruing value as an organization as the probability of getting that drug to market becomes higher and higher. And the other nice thing about dog drugs is it's only about four years to bring the product to market.

And then once it's on market, that REM scale is much faster. So we're projecting post-approval. We think we can hit company profitability and let's call it like a year, year and a half and 100 million ARR probably six months after that. And that's on very conservative estimates that are like derivatives of what's standard in animal health. So assuming we're significantly worse than what standard in animal health, we're still able to hit that rev acceleration that quickly.

But it's just a different appetence. And you have to educate people because they don't have these mental models in their head because I'm everybody's first dog longevity investment. And usually their first drug investment. you wrote a blog post that was pretty fascinating about how you hit your series A milestones with less than 500K of the original

5 million you raised in the seed and you lamented how frustrated you were about selling so much of loyal at the seed valuation. You sold half the company or something a third. A third. So you got a 15 million post

and you think you could have done it for just selling 5% of the company or so or even less 3, 4, 5% of the company. So maybe talk a little bit about that because you could have, did you make it up in the next couple of rounds by raising too much money in the beginning? So it's, it's hard, right? The way I've always thought about Loyal is it is, there is absolutely a pharmaceutical out there. I can extend a dog's lifespan and I think we have a lot of data that people will want a drug to extend our dog's life.

So then really the core question was, can we find something that works? and can we find something that works in time for what you're mentioning earlier, is venture timelines and the fundraising timelines. And so when I started off, I didn't want a false fail. And raising that amount of money ended up not being necessary because my early team was good and we found basically the first thing we tried was great. But if it hadn't, and we only had that 500K, then we would have been, I mean, nobody was going to give us another 500K or another million.

The other interesting difference was building deep tech and biotech companies is that the talent you hire is much different. You know, my second employee was a father of two kids. He had a mortgage. He was saving for college. They, you know, they are coming from these companies where, A, equity is not that valued. I still gave them a lot of equity, but equity was not that valued. And cash comp is extremely important. and in the executive levels, it's very high in biotech.

And so you're not going to be able to convince somebody's family to let him take a swing on this weird dog longevity company run by a 24-year-old if you're also offering him 100K a year salary. Like you have to give, and you have to show the runway. So that was actually quite important in the end. It makes total sense because you have a family. You got kids in private school. You got a mortgage payment.

you know, they're going to need to make 250, 300, 400, whatever. And they got an offer from Pfizer or somebody or Merck for that amount. So you're not operating in a vacuum. And these folks, they need to have a couple of decades experience in order to qualify to work for you. It's different than making an app or, in fact, some people say it's a young person's game to do software and stuff like that because, you know, you're putting in 60 hours a week, 70 hours a week,

having a family, all that stuff, that I want to get into it. It makes people very uncomfortable. But that's the thing. It's in, it's in different disciplines, right? For us, having the right brain will save literally six months of time, right? It's just the right context, but it's almost an apprenticeship model where you have to have been there to see that. There's a book you can read. Nope. That will teach you how to build a drug. It's just, it's experience. It's actually very artisanal, which I think freaks people out, but it is. And so we invest in good people. But it does change the scope of how. you build the company.

Yeah. You're a solo founder. A lot of talk about solo founders being a huge risk factor, yada, yada. You and I saw Esther were getting into it back and forth on the Twitter or the X. You were posting on X about it. It's going to take me a little while to right there. You know, there's upside and downside to each. Are you lonely as a solo founder?

Is it harder? Do you wish you had a co-founder? Or are you glad you're a solo founder? I'm definitely glad I'm a solo founder. I think one of the things I've learned over the last four years around this company is the growth rate necessary to build and scale the startup is absolutely insane. And you can't underwrite anybody's growth rate but yourself. I've had amazing team members who just hit a wall. And I don't know how you would predict that, honestly.

And honestly, to put somebody in a position where you're either forced out, you have to grow, it's distracting to the business. I always say Loyal is a benevolent matriarchy, right? Like there's no place where decisions get stuck. I come in and I just cut it and I'm like, let's do it. And to be clear, the majority of decisions that Loyal are made by my executive team, right? I'm not a manufacturing exact. I'm not an R&D exact. I'm not a supply team exact.

But I'm there to drive the clarity and kind of keep them all working together. For us, it's been extremely efficient. I am, however, also like an only child and kind of like a solo person. So you lose to being right. I mean, I tell, I think you have to know yourself. You know, I had a great co-founder, Brian Alvey. We had a wonderful relationship, my best friend for many years, still consider him my best friend. And I would immediately jump at the chance to co-found another company with him.

However, you know, he's got other things he wants to do, I have things I'm doing. And there's something about being a solo act. I tell people like, I'm Bob Dylan. I don't play well in a band. And now I'm forced to be in a band with the All In podcast. And I can tell you, it is not my natural state. being. Like, you know, I am the obviously the front guy. I'm the lead singer. Like, I, I just want to play the songs. And I want to play the songs the way I want to play them. I want to play them correctly.

And then when, you know, somebody wants to do it something different and then they want to be the lead singer, it's like, it can't be two lead singers, you know, like, you can sing a verse, but like, you're a guitar player. You're the bass player. You're the drummer. Like, do your job. Like, and I agree with you. Like, I think for certain people, you got to be the solo founder, and you can go faster. But it's very rare. And then at the early, age having multiple ones. You know why actually this whole thing got started with the co-founders? It's,

that's it. You nailed it. It's in the interest of the investors. So why Combinator realized having three founders meant you didn't need as much money because you had, and they only hired developers, which is why it was very predominantly male at the start. It's since they've corrected that,

but it was three dudes, two dudes making Reddit, drop, whatever, you know, you know, Airbnb. No, No, just any of those companies, I'm friends with everybody. They all been on the pod.

They're amazing. But they went all developers, all product designers, because they were only giving them 16K or 25K in those early days. That meant the company was de-risk. You lose one. And they did lose one at a lot of these companies. You lose one. They lost one at YouTube.

I think you still have the other two. So it's just de-risking. I think one of the most important things Fathers have to learn is that you should be humble and listen to advice and understand why people have certain positions. but you also are responsible for the outcome in the end. And you have to make a decision off of the data that you have independently. If I had gone and gotten us co-founder because YC and Twitter or whatever says, I should have a co-founder.

Maybe Loyal would have made it, but I don't think so. I think it would have been much more difficult for us to have succeeded. You just got to do what you think is right. And you have to be comfortable with that. Understanding when people are talking their book is, I think, one of the hardest things for startup founders to understand. Every year at this time when YC has a demo day, a bunch of investors come out and say, why are people raising a 20 to 30 million they have a product in market for three weeks?

This makes no sense. And it's like, well, they went to Y Combinator because Y Combinator creates a demo day with a bunch of dentists and, you know, newbie investors and they just create this FOMO and you got to invest in the next two days or else you're going to lose your spot and the evaluation is going up $1 million every week, all these tricks to create FOMO. and you think about, you know, YC's position, they're like,

well, we have the best companies. That could be true. They very well might have the best selection of companies of any accelerator. I would say ours was just as good, but putting that aside, they're investing at $1.7 million.

So of course, you know, 12 weeks after their program, if somebody's raising at $25 million, they're thrilled with that. Talk about derisking. They de-risk by having three people as co-founders,

but then they de-risk by having the valuation go 20 times or 10 times or 15 times what they invested at. Of course they love the situation. And less dilution at the most dilution. You got it. And so everybody's talking their own book. Everybody. I'm talking my own book right now. Everybody's talking about a competing accelerator, right? And so as an founder, always ask people like, can you, can you steal me on the other side of that? And I would just ask people blatantly, like, are you talking your book? And what is your incentive to give me this advice? And,

you know, people will be honest about it, I think. And people always advise you to do what they did. I mean, even I am, right? I'm saying solo founder is great. You know, if you talk to somebody's a good co-founder relationships, they're going to say being a co-founder is great. It's like, that's, I think, the hardest thing to realize is you'll have to hit really challenging questions and problems and nobody out there knows the answer because you're at the forefront and you just got to figure it out.

Confirmation bias is real. You know, hey, this plane made it back. Got to be something about this pilot or this plane or something with a design or the mission something. This must be the greatest pilot ever. Patter matching founders. That's another example. Patter matching founders.

I mean, you experienced that as a female founder. I'm sure people brought up Elizabeth Holmes 10 times to you. And if they didn't, they must. Yeah, go ahead. I, one time, perhaps not as wisely given the marketing conditions now, but a few years ago, there was an investor who wanted to invest five million in the company and then they made some like extremely offensive Elizabeth Holmes joke at me. And I just nuked it.

I was like, I can't. I can't with this. because it's actually really dangerous, right, to have people who, like, think that, even if they don't think that on your cap table. Because inevitably somebody's going to come for me at that ankle at some point. What was the joke? What was the joke?

I don't even remember now. It was just basically, like, basically made clear that. Are you going to start wearing turtlenecks? You should start wearing turtlenecks. You should deepen your voice. It's like, you can tell when people jokingly ask you, but they actually are, like, worried that you are. And it's, it's very common.

And it's, I understand why, right? Especially now with like FTCS, all the things that have happened. People are very worried about being embarrassed. It's very hard to diligence loyal. Even if you understand one aspect, you can't understand all the aspects of the company. And a lot of my fundraising strategies around like giving people chump insurance without realizing that they're getting chump insurance, right?

And like helping them with the diligence. But you still got to, you know, not be sexist, even if you're feeling insecure about your bioskills. I mean, yeah, I mean, pattern matching is a thing. there could in fact be patterns. The pattern of like people going to Stanford are great entrepreneurs, are we going to really actually argue that?

I mean, it's one of the hardest schools to get into. Yeah. And they specifically are across the street from Sandhill. They're on Sandhill Road. It's literally on Sandhill Road. If you're an entrepreneur, proximity to Sand Hill Road is going to be like a virtuous circle.

They put their offices there. They invested in folks. and now folks go to Stanford because they know the chances of getting funding go up. And if you wanted to go for business, you would have went to Harvard

or Penn or Wharton. Or maybe Wharton sits between the two in terms of entrepreneurship versus going to work at a big company. So you do have to understand signaling, but yeah, signaling like, you're a woman in health, biotech broadly,

and she was a woman in biotech broadly, but she was a scam. So are you a scammer? And it's like, diligence is your job. Like, by all, Yeah. Yeah.

Biotech moonshot in common, one was a sociopath. Doesn't mean everybody's a sociopath. Well, that's why one of the things I actually take really seriously, you know, succeeding in loyal, because I think that the only way to change a pattern match is that have positive examples, that have positive patterns and create positive patterns. And I think, I think Silicon Valley could build 10x a number of deep tech companies than it does today. I think, you know, I've built a company and we've done real, very valid science that never would have been funded by traditional biotech and never would have happened. And it only happened

because of this pool of investors and the mindset and that being applied to a problem uniquely. And God knows how many more companies there are like that that just aren't being started. So I hope I can... This is a big conversation, Kim. And that's one of the reasons I write, right? Because there's like no resources for building biotech and deep tech in this way because that culture of sharing doesn't exist in biotech as much.

Yeah, and deep tech is hard. It's got longer windows. It's actually a big discussion in the capital allocator community. Steve Jervison's doing his new fund is 15 years in terms of the life cycle, so he's structuring it that way. And I think, you know,

what do Elon do with SpaceX has inspired a lot of people that like hard things are moats. And so, you know, in Palm are lucky, and I've got his co-founder's name, nice guy from Founders Fund. Trace Stevens,

much nicer than Palmer Lucky, actually, in fact, just a much, much better human being than Pomer. I'm joking, Pomer. I'm joking. Dude hates me so much. But I'm dragging me into this.

But I don't think, that's a drug. But I think Andrew is, you know, standing on the shoulders of SpaceX, government contracts, you know, hard science,

you know, and then now you, they basically proved it. And founders, Fund was in SpaceX, a friend of Elon's. So Founders Fund gets more bold. And then you look at Deleon, who's just went on the program from Varda, like,

you know, Space Labs and stuff like that. And all this getting government contracts, they're all part of this little thread of people with some common investors, some common employees who all know how to work with the government. Boom, you know how to work in pharma. So there'll be all these great new companies, Elizabeth Holmes notwithstanding. All right, listen, you've been an incredible

guest. You've got to come on again. And just even to talk about startups is great. So you've got to promise me to come on in a year. Can we put it on the calendar? Sure. For third quarter next year, we get the update. And we talk startups. You got some great insights. Where can people find you and follow you and keep track of the company? I write on selenehh.com. I'm on Twitter, Celine Hollowah. And yeah, I mean, in a year, we're going to know if this thing is going to make it or not. So it'll be an interesting conversation. If it doesn't make it, I'm going to be scarred for life.

So I literally have a tattoo of the thesis on my arm. I want to cut off his arm. Let me see the arm. Let me see the arm. You did not need to cut it up. So it's C. Elegans, the black six mouse and the black Labrador. This is the dog that they showed the lifespan extension in the first time the study I told you about.

And in the warm, it's where they made the genetic mutation. That's the same one that we want to support dogs with. So they live a longer life, the larger dogs. I love it. Alexis O'Henney was just talking about he knew Reddit was going to be a phenomenon when somebody got the alien tattoo. If you got tattoos of the logo, and a lot of people get the Apple logo,

that's an easy one. People are doing that for a long time. I bet you there's Tesla tattoos out there in the wild as well. I'm sure there are. People are fanboys of Tesla. Yeah, listen, you've been a great guest. And yeah, whenever you know if this is going to work or not, let's pop a bottle of champagne, or we'll sit here and we'll amputate your arm or just, you know, we'll do laser removal.

You'll go through painful laser removal, and then I'll ask you questions about why you failed and it'll just be this great post-morteming the most exciting episode of this Rican starters ever. You getting laser removal. You ever see somebody get that? Yeah.

It's like a light or something and it's going bop-pap-pap-pap. This is retribution for you making stupid decisions in your youth to get tattoos. You had no intention of keeping. I hope you had a great time in Kankoon. You should not have gotten this tattoo. It's, and the people are crying.

it's so painful. I love it. They should show those videos of how painful tattoo removal is, to everybody before they get their tattoo. It should be like a requirement. I bought terminal bias to action, right? It's like really good in startups, really bad and like most other life things. Have you listened to the Second Time Founders podcast?

I have not. Shout out second time founders. I'll check that out. So they have a really, I bring it up because you're talking about postmortems. They have a really interesting postmortem of clout. And I believe a couple of other... CloudScore. Yeah. And it's the only podcast I have found that really talks at a company that failed and what happened and why.

Yeah. We've done those episodes here, but you know what? I want to formalize postmortem. Let's do postmortems once a month, Nick. I think it'd be great in the rotation. You should. We do them in total lot loyal. What do you make mistakes?

Yeah. No, we've been doing it on our investment team and looking at, hey, whether we screw up. And then after when we do like in-person events, we do, what do we learn? And so I have everybody the day after we go out to brunch or a lunch after an event, hey, what do we learn? What's top of mind? You know, and I call it lessons learned so people can be honest with, you know, language matters. So I've gotten very soft.

Oh, yeah. It's a big one, right? It's like, okay, what did you learn? And like a bad thing happening is still, it's still a learning. So it's a good. Yeah. See, the original thing, I, wrote was a shared document that says, what did you f*** up? And then somebody on my team said,

this is kind of negative, Jake, can you make it a little softer? And I said, Lessonsler. Yeah, I got in trouble for that, too. I'm known to have a point now. This is why we're solo founders. This is why solo founders, because how we treat ourselves is not how human beings want to be treated. But it's very efficient for building big things. Yes. I was talking to a very high profile founder, I wouldn't say who. And he was lamenting to me how he wants negative feedback. People don't give it to him historically. And then when he gives negative feedback, everybody gets crushed.

And he's like, please tell me how I could be better. And then I feel like I'm talking to myself. I feel like you're the more successful female biotech version of me. Are you brutal to people in feedback? I think so. I may be higher profile, but I think you're going to be more successful. Although I did have a real. really good joke that I didn't drop when you said, like, I have never taken a drug,

uh, you know, I have never got a drug approved before. And I was like, not in high school, in college? Like, give yourself a break. You're 28, kid. You got time. I think you'll be okay. I'm old for tech and, uh, a child for biotech. So, fair point. Fair point. Uh, all right. Listen, we'll see you all next time on this week's service. Bye bye. Bye.