Tar Heel Catholic in Exile 🇺🇸 🐏🌹☧ https://xitter.cf/t.co/6kx9zFvPTZ
Carolina in my mind
Joined July 2010
- Tweets52.3K
- Following4.5K
- Followers13.2K
- Likes74.8K
Tom Ciszek retweeted
Just when I thought I was done... Thanks to reader feedback, I've updated the map that appeared in Space Dirt🚀 last week.
With well over 300 companies, this is officially the 8th version of my SoCal Hard Tech Landscape Map.
If you'd like a copy...
Comment "map" below, and I'll send it over.
(DMs work, too.)
Tom Ciszek retweeted
All of the interns we have lined up for summer 2027 are coming from California - Berkeley, UCLA and Caltech.
Would love see more Texas students apply!
If you have a passion for robotics and you're studying CS/EE/MechE in TX, hit me up.
The data center is only as scalable as the least scalable part on its BOM.
Data Center Supply Chain
@snowmaker
The AI data center buildout is creating shortages far beyond GPUs and power. Transformers take years to get, while switchgear, circuit breakers, cooling systems, and specialized steel are all becoming bottlenecks.
A buildout this large creates startup opportunities throughout the supply chain, especially in the overlooked parts nobody talks about yet.
Your robot is only as scalable as the least scalable part on its BOM.
Robots Made in America
@sdianahu
Robot foundation models are starting to transfer skills from one machine to another, which means the bottleneck is shifting to hardware.
The U.S. still imports much of its robots and their critical components. We want to see founders rebuild that supply chain here, from magnets, motors, gears, and sensors to chips, batteries, and the machines that make them.
“God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another.”
– St. John Henry Newman, Meditations and Devotions, III.I.2
This one time I was on my honeymoon and missed a @Replit interview in 2021.
Replit's Amjad Masad with Gagan Biyani on how agents will reshape the way companies work: bureaucracy runs in the background, people get true autonomy, and eventually the company runs itself.
Amjad: "In Silicon Valley there's been so many experiments to try to change the nature of firms, of how companies work... But I think it was a technology problem."
"Now you can have agents kind of function as the glue within these organizations and have the bureaucracy be this invisible thing that's happening by machines in the background, and the people have true autonomy to work on the things that they find most interesting."
"I see it in our company where I've changed how I run the company, and we call it this idea of a self-driving company. Eventually the company will run itself."
Gagan: "The thing I feel very certain about is it's all gonna change. It's gonna change a lot faster than you think. And if you're not natively understanding of it, it's gonna be hard to make that shift."
Amjad: "If you're learning the ways of the past, then you're kind of locked into a way of thinking and a way of working that actually will put you at a fundamental disadvantage in the future."
@amasad @Replit @GaganBiyani
Tom Ciszek retweeted
Engineers, if you want to:
- Build and test big rugged steel machines
- Alongside smart, pleasant people
- In a breezy El Segundo warehouse
- All to secure the grist of civilization
Then DM @mchl_mthws something you made or fixed
durin.com/careers.html
Tom Ciszek retweeted
For everyone reinventing the factory, @AMRwelding is reinventing the industrial robots that go in them
important for all to note:
1 - venture returns are predicated on speed + scale
2 - reinventing a factory for speed + scale IS NOT "i need a factory to make x"
3 - venture equity is the only thing you can use to reinvent a factory
4 - reinvent it, then scale it with equity + debt
5 - scaling laws here far surpass most software companies especially on longer timelines, enormous cash flows and growth potential
Hackers demanded $51 million but @GMO_INTERNET refused to pay and told customers to unplug their computers.
The last line of cybersecurity is apparently the first lesson of IT support.
Tom Ciszek retweeted
Made a new site for @DurinMining in El Segundo, they’re building robotic exploration drill rigs to find more minerals, faster.
Sere vibes, threejs rigs, animated coring bits, typeset in Publico and New Rail Alphabet, zero rounded corners
I am longer asking: It’s Time to Mine
Tom Ciszek retweeted
In 18 months we’ve gone from an idea to doing this for real. A lot of work ahead to deliver for the mission, and we’re hiring great patriots who want to build with us: watchtowerlabs.ai
Tom Ciszek retweeted
Surprise 1: Anthropic acquired a one-person biotech
.
.
.
Surprise 2: that person is me
Surprise 3: I’m here to tell you all about it
Yes, this is what you think it is; after 6 yrs of increasingly loose anonymity: the Professor Oak reveal post
…and yes, it has gotten so boring around here that I’m literally doxxing myself to spice up the timeline
-------
Ok, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cody Tranbarger. I mostly tweet, but occasionally find time to dabble in drug dev & starting/building biotechs. My past lives span the VC, crossover, startup continuum; Prof Oak has been my way of keeping a digital foot in those worlds, despite having my physical feet planted elsewhere.
The past 18 mo, ‘elsewhere’ was Mithril Medicine, a co. I founded to develop bsAbs for LAMA2-CMD & other ECM-related genetic diseases.
Mithril was born out of hands-on building with @MikeNGladstone, @JasonPaulRhodes, @LifeSciVC, & team @atlasventure. Somehow, I made enough half-decent calls along the way (even a broken clock is right twice a day, eh?) to convince them Mithril/I warranted a small seed. While I can hardly rationalize such an outrageously cavalier bet, I’m grateful for it, & I'd partner with Atlas again in a heartbeat.
In typical AV fashion, Mithril’s primordial form was virtual, decentralized, & ultra-lean. This stage tends to be short-lived, but for Mithril, it worked surprisingly well, for surprisingly long, thanks in part to the rapid maturation of the AI tools I used liberally.
Eventually, Mithril became a bit of an experiment itself - to find the upper bound of how far it could scale as a single operator + a bunch of Claude (+ a stellar bench of part-time consultants).
In parallel, I started spending time with @nc_frey, @an1lam, & @CoefficientBio team; and promptly experienced, for the 1st time, AI at the frontier. Soon thereafter, Mithril stopped looking like an experiment, & started looking like a preview of an entirely new operating model.
From that spark came “Pipeline-in-a-Person.” The idea immediately resonated when we shared it here back in April; and it was central to the shared vision that led to Anthropic’s acquisition of Mithril, & my joining the team.
Why join Anthropic? Three reasons.
(1) For Mithril, the programs continue, with more resources & infrastructure behind them, and as much Claude as I can put to work.
(2) For me, the chance to start several more programs, & find out how many one person can actually run in parallel - an almost unprecedented luxury for a curious drug hunter.
(3) For our mission, a path to institutionalize & scale this new way of working, then put it in the hands of all of biopharma, all over the world - which, candidly, I find the most energizing.
Will AI x Bio cure diseases? Unequivocally yes, imo… but not by the route that gets the most airtime. Rather than timeline acceleration & compression, I see orchestration & parallelization as today's low-hanging fruit.
Most drug hunters see a handful of go/no-go calls in a career, & spend entirely too much of the rest trading emails (my inbox can attest).
Give them the bandwidth to run several programs at once, and the time to focus on scientific judgment, and I’m willing to bet they’ll make better calls. And at scale, better calls translate to more drugs, higher hit rates, broader patient impact, & likely, a disease or 10 or 100 cured. I couldn't be more excited to build toward that future @AnthropicAI.
Finally, a heartfelt thank you to BioTwitter/X. The end of anonymity is bittersweet, but if anyone’s earned a proper introduction, you all have.
It’s difficult to overstate how much this app has done for me: a decade of education, plenty of friends, many job opportunities, several mentors, a few investors, even a co-founder (fmr). It was the generosity of this community that inspired me to start posting 6 years ago, after just as many years lurking. I hope I’ve been able to pay it forward, in my own small way.
But, to be clear, Prof Oak isn’t going anywhere. Same beat, same themes, and now, a front-row seat to drug development at the frontier. Stay tuned for dispatches from the trenches; and remember...
Gotta Cure 'Em All
Tom Ciszek retweeted
Sam Altman's one-person company prediction is coming true. Anthropic just bought one. The founder of Mithril Medicine used Claude to take a muscular dystrophy antibody treatment from concept to proof-of-principle in mice in 18 months, with just himself, Claude, and part-time consultants. The technical report is great. I will quote:
'The week opened with the handover of two cell-based assays, cell adhesion and flow cytometry, within our team, while eleven questions remained open with the assay CRO. In two sentences, one of us asked Claude to review the latest emails between the outgoing assay lead and the assay CRO and to recommend next steps for the handover, and gave it the link to the handover folder. Claude returned a bottom line after 96s and a full plan with five drafted emails after 18 min. For the full plan it read six email threads, the handover folder, two slide decks and two reports, all in the mailbox and file store to which we had given it access. Four working days later, nine of the eleven questions had an answer in writing and the other two had been left to pilot experiments. The adhesion screen was thereby set out in writing. The CRO drew the plate map to the format that our team had requested, Claude compiled the run order and the material calculation from the production data, and one of us reviewed and approved them.
On day 4, the production CRO delivered its data package, a report of 341 pages, which one of us forwarded to Claude in two sentences, with the request to review it, share observations and recommend next steps. Claude returned a bottom line after 2 min 40s and, once it had read every page, a visual synthesis of all 113 constructs after 7 min 53s. The synthesis arranged the constructs on the grid of 14 by 8 arms. Claude marked 82 constructs for screening as is, seven for additional polishing, and the 24 constructs of three laminin-binding arms to be held back from the cell-based assays on production criteria. Each of the 113 constructs thus had a proposed next step in less than 8 min.
Claude had recommended binding kinetics for all 113 con-structs, and on day 7 one of us challenged this plan. Claude defended it within 27s, arguing that affinity would show whether the three arms merit further work. One of us overruled this recommendation and set the three arms aside on production criteria. Their material remains in storage. Four minutes later, Claude had revised its memo, the working page, the run order and three unsent drafts from 113 to 89 constructs. It had also applied the ruling to three dependent steps in the unsent drafts, each flagged for our veto. The exchange took 7 min 36s from challenge to new plan, and every affected email was still an unsent draft. After the ruling, eight emails drafted by Claude went out on the same day to three CROs and a consultant.
Over the whole week, Claude drafted 17 emails, each in answer to a request from one of us, and we sent 12 of them, each after editing. With its drafts, Claude listed 41 points, such as tube fills, shipping conditions, recipients and assay settings, for which it had found no written statement of ours, so that we could confirm, change or strike each before sending. We kept some, struck others and changed one. Among the passages that we kept were proposals for controls. One draft proposed a comparison of polished and unpolished material on one sensor chip, to size the error that impurities cause in the rest of the panel. Another requested a buffer control diluted like the most dilute sample, so that any effect of the buffer appears at its largest. These proposals concerned the measurement of constructs that had already been produced, and each reached a CRO only after one of us had reviewed and approved it.
Tom Ciszek retweeted
honestly have no idea what frontier lab equity is worth; it seems highly plausible that huge top down slowdowns are coming, which would make frontier models uncompetitive. total nationalization also seems possible. anything could happen with this technology
Southern California helped put men on the Moon and robots on Mars. Walt Disney built a monorail in a year.
Los Angeles has spent nearly eight years trying to complete 2.25 miles of airport train.
$3.3 billion. Four years late. Zero public passengers.
Eric Garcetti’s administration approved it. Karen Bass’s administration is trying to finish it. John Ackerman runs LAWA. William Dachs leads the contractor, LINXS.
We have not forgotten how to build extraordinary machines. We have forgotten how to hold anyone accountable for building them.
Tom Ciszek retweeted
Rebuilding America’s industrial capacity takes alignment. Today @ReBuildMFG announced $2.1B in funding, co-led by @generalcatalyst and @jpmorgan's Security and Resiliency Initiative. When financial institutions, technologists and builders align around resilience, capital gets deployed, talent follows, and the work gets done.
American systems need to be sovereign and durable, and so do their physical foundations. If the US wants to hold its defense posture, lead in robotics, and turn its intelligence lead into hardware, it needs manufacturing infrastructure of its own.
Much of our work at GC is about revitalizing the industries and institutions this country runs on. It’s why we’re transforming Summa, a century-old health system in Akron, OH. Re:Build is doing the same for the manufacturers that defined American towns for generations, and for those towns with them.
We first invested in 2024. Proud to deepen our partnership with Miles Arnone, @jeffawilke, Will Barker and the whole Re:Build team
The names that built American manufacturing are iconic. Slater, who brought the mill. Lowell, who integrated it. Carnegie, who scaled steel. Ford, who set the line in motion. Deming, who taught the world quality.
The forces of production that once built America are rebuilding America again. This is one of the most important economic and national security imperatives of our time.
General Catalyst has backed @ReBuildMFG since 2024, and today we are co-leading their $2.1B round alongside JPMorganChase’s Security and Resiliency Initiative.