Bringing freedom & autonomy to young people. Built @thielfellowship and @1517fund. First investor @lambdaAPI @loom @Mach_Industries @RainmakerCorp @positron_ai
Bay Area (Oakland!)
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- Followers 26,821
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I love getting a solid cold email or DM from founders!
No need for an intro to 1517.
Some things will make your message standout and get a response (faster than others)π§΅:
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Danielle Strachman π π π πͺ΄ πΈ π¨ π retweeted
Harsh, but true β like athletes, scientists have prime years. Not letting them begin experimenting until 40 means over all less productivity. Imagine MLB said no one can play unless 35. Career stats would decline in obvious ways
In 1980, 21% of NIH-funded principal investigators were under age 35. By 2015, this proportion was 3%.
The dramatic ageing of independent scientists is bad because old people are simply worse at science than young people.
Latest meta-scientific deep-dive from me 𧡠β¬οΈ
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Danielle Strachman π π π πͺ΄ πΈ π¨ π retweeted
This is the signal of the future. This is what you should want for your children.
Palmer Luckey on how he hires at Anduril: he looks for people who worked on projects they cared about, not ones given to them, because that's what drives you to learn the most.
"Whether it's college or the state-mandated younger educational system, don't look to them to tell you, 'Here's what electronics projects you should be working on. Here's what you should be doing to learn how to do these things.'"
"One, they're often years or even decades behind what industry and hobbyists are actually doing, so you're gonna be learning how to do things that are ancient."
"Two, when you're working on something that you're only doing for yourself, you're gonna make way better decisions in what you teach yourself, in how you do things."
"When I hire people at Anduril, I look for people who have done projects that were outside of what their work paid them to do or what their school made them do. Because that means they're the type of person who is willing to work on things with their own money and their own time, because they wanna bring something into this world that wouldn't have existed otherwise."
@PalmerLuckey w/ @ShawnRyan762 (Feb 2025)
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Permission is scalable!
today i turn 17 π
16 was the most intense, chaotic, and rewarding year of my life. a quick recap:
- built and shipped Agathon: started as an idea for an ai whiteboard that actually teaches socratically instead of doing homework for you. we got a @1517fund medici grant, pitched at startup world cup (@SWCPTV), and launched to real classrooms with my co-founders.
- started Fuime: building neobanking and financial infrastructure for teens, started with stripe and now looking into BaaS or CaaS! (join the waitlist now)
- hack club: helped run boba drops, boba bash (happening this weekend around the world!), Juice (hackathon in china), and plenty other ones!
- packed up my life in the bay area and moved to manhattan to board and go to founders school (@alpha_founders ). living and building alongside the sharpest teens i know every single day (go @HSTwiggs001 @JamesC_Alpha @CharlotteK747 @HenryKennedy737 @Declan_on_X and more!!)
- kept building youth for yoga with my sister to bring mindfulness tools to more teens. Was invited to India to teach yoga for a week at 3 schools and over 500 students!
the biggest lesson from 16: stop waiting for permission. age is completely irrelevant when you care enough to ship real things and put them in front of real users (people really do wanna help teens)
insanely grateful to my family, co-founders, friends, mentors, and everyone who took a chance on me this year (@DStrachman @nateliason @gaganbiyani @CameronSorsby and more)
17 is going to be absurd. back to building ehh!
C'est la vie
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Let's go 1517ers on TBPN!
Today, China dominates rare-earth mining and processing.
But that wasnβt always the case.
Solcoaβs @hoomanrenezhad explains how the West lost its rare-earth mojo:
"So contrary to popular belief, we do mine in the West. We have an enormous rare earth mine in Australia. Thereβs one in California."
βThe actual raw feedstock is not rare."
βThe bottleneck is what you do after it. Itβs the processing. That is something that weβre completely unable to do in the West."
βWe actually invented these processes in America."
"The technologies used to make rare earths in China today are American technologies from the Manhattan Project.β
βWe built this technology and these systems, and then we shipped it to China. China dominated. They matured it. They took over.β
Now his company is trying to bring that capability back to the U.S. with a process built for todayβs economics.
βIf we were just copying that same technology stack again, it was impossible. The economics donβt close.β
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Danielle Strachman π π π πͺ΄ πΈ π¨ π retweeted
Very excited to see Hooman's progress.
Solcoa is America's new Alcoa.
Today we're announcing $75M to build Solcoa One, our 500-tonne rare earth metallization plant in Nevada.
At Solcoa, we believe rare earths are the foundation of America's next great industrial era. An era we intend to win on the merits, with superior American technology.
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Danielle Strachman π π π πͺ΄ πΈ π¨ π retweeted
Imagine two of the toughest mf'ers on the planet who make it their life mission to pull rare earths together to bridge the supply chain gap. Wait, you don't have to. There's Hooman and Artem at Solcoa.
Today we're announcing $75M to build Solcoa One, our 500-tonne rare earth metallization plant in Nevada.
At Solcoa, we believe rare earths are the foundation of America's next great industrial era. An era we intend to win on the merits, with superior American technology.
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Hooman was in his teens when he received a 1517 grant to start some experimentation in his parents' basement.
A couple years later we were the first check ($100K) into Solcoa to give him a shot on goal to take his work further and shortly after he became a Thiel Fellow.
Today, Solcoa announces their $75M round to build their first commercial rare earth metal plant.
Be the first check, not the last!
Today we're announcing $75M to build Solcoa One, our 500-tonne rare earth metallization plant in Nevada.
At Solcoa, we believe rare earths are the foundation of America's next great industrial era. An era we intend to win on the merits, with superior American technology.
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Danielle Strachman π π π πͺ΄ πΈ π¨ π retweeted
Josie's List of Bio "Millenium" Problems
Tldr:
1. Next gen Bio manufacturing/bioreactors
2. Neurotech/neural decoding/non-invasive millions+ channel recording
3. Scalable embryo creation
4. Be able to create and modify megabases of DNA
5. Mammalian biological chassis/model
6. Non-polyploid crops/plants
7. Understand polygenic traits
8. < $1 genome sequencing at scale
9. Non-viral gene therapy that works
10. Artificial womb
Runners up
11. Cell from scratch
12. Haploid eukaryotic model organism
1. Next gen Bio manufacturing/bioreactors - right now its really expensive to produce biologics. People grow yeast that have been genetically modified in giant steel vats to try and make significant quantities of drugs and chemicals. It sucks. Building the bioreactors are expensive, the production doesn't scale. There are so many issues with it. We still can't even come close to producing the amount of meat cattle can for the time and price, the amount of thc cannabis can produce or any of the other number of cellular phenomena. Biology is good at scaling but we suck at scaling biology. We need better bio manufacturing and companies like Buzz Bio using soldier fly larva and others using mycelium and chicken eggs are probably going to be the future.
2. Neurotech/neural decoding/non-invasive millions+ channel recording - My big three in bio are probably: understanding genetics, developmental biology and the brain. We figure those out we will have a pretty amazing command of the living world. So many applications and glad lots of smart people are working on this.
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Danielle Strachman π π π πͺ΄ πΈ π¨ π retweeted
The elitism on the front end is the biggest issue: artificially scarce admissions. Inventing something, writing a book, running a marathon are also elite, but elite upon completion, not admissions
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I've worked in alt ed for 25 years. Everyone says "we're going to charge a lot, like in technology, and then be able to scale and bring the cost down." And it never happens, because elitism is never scalable.
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Danielle Strachman π π π πͺ΄ πΈ π¨ π retweeted
If you want to save money on your 2026 taxes, signup for one of our free #DAF education webinars this Thu 9/24 or Mon 9/28 β info: PracticalVC.com/DAF β
Learn how to donate #startup stock or #VC funds to your own DAF (Donor Advised Fund), and save $25K-100K or more on your taxes every yearπ°
This can be *very* useful if youβve had a big #secondary sale or #IPO in 2026, a large #capital gain, or just ordinary #income to offsetπ§Ύ
You can also use your DAF to #invest tax-free in #startups & VC funds, or give to #charitable groups #nonprofits that have positive impact on the worldππͺπ½ποΈ
DAF education webinars are hosted by @PracticalVC + @UI_Charitable
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Owner of bunnies, if you have a better litter box setup for them, they won't have yellow feet :D
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Danielle Strachman π π π πͺ΄ πΈ π¨ π retweeted
Duncan Trussell recorded this conversation with his mother while she was facing terminal cancer.
What youβre hearing isnβt scripted. It isnβt performed. Itβs a son sitting with his dying mother trying to hold onto every word before the words run out.
And she, the one facing the end, is the one doing the comforting.
That is what makes these conversations so extraordinary. Not the wisdom itself, as profound as it is. But who itβs coming from. A woman who had every reason to be consumed by her own fear choosing instead to spend what little time remained helping her son understand how to live without her.
These recordings became the heart of The Midnight Gospel. And I always go back to watch it again.
They remain some of the most honest conversations about death, love and what it means to be human ever put on screenβ¦
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Danielle Strachman π π π πͺ΄ πΈ π¨ π retweeted
Two years ago, lunch near the Rodin Museum in Paris. Missor tells me he loathes Rodinβs demoralized figures. They look like asylum patients. He told me we needed sculpture that celebrated creation. 1517 awards @AtelierMissor_ a $1k grant followed by $100k investment because, as Dostoyevsky said, beauty will save the world
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Danielle Strachman π π π πͺ΄ πΈ π¨ π retweeted
Does anybody remember what happened to optimism?
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