Early stage biotech VC. Recovering scientist. Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of Atlas Venture.

Cambridge, MA
Bruce Booth retweeted
Reach The Beach 2026 got cancelled….  Ragnar didn’t pay its bills and NH refused the permits… but our team, Runners Drugs & Money, was ready to go.  We trained over 7000 miles since June.  We raised $128K for charity.  We were ready with plenty of booyah and cowbell.  And we did a fun run & breakfast together yesterday anyway. It just was not to be for 2026. Bummed, as it’s the best running event of the year. We’ll be ready for 2027! #RTB2026 #RunningAtlas
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Reach The Beach 2026 got cancelled….  Ragnar didn’t pay its bills and NH refused the permits… but our team, Runners Drugs & Money, was ready to go.  We trained over 7000 miles since June.  We raised $128K for charity.  We were ready with plenty of booyah and cowbell.  And we did a fun run & breakfast together yesterday anyway. It just was not to be for 2026. Bummed, as it’s the best running event of the year. We’ll be ready for 2027! #RTB2026 #RunningAtlas
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💯- “Intelligence distribution over intelligence centralization”
Wild 24 hours for AI and lots of different proposals have been made. TLDR; the only *tangible* new fact is that OpenAI and Anthropic are going to have embedded 3rd party evaluators from unknown organizations with Dario floating METR as a possibility. Having 3rd party evaluators is smart as there is no Section 230 style liability shield for model outputs and showing a “duty of care” will be important in future litigation. Several internet companies might have gone bankrupt without Section 230 so limiting liability really matters. There are minimal investment implications from this single new fact, but I do think that for anyone who wants a “smoother for longer” cycle then most constraints are good: wafers, watts, real rates and spreads. Excessive regulation is a different matter but I don’t think we are anywhere close to this even if the vector changed over the last 24 hours. To summarize the events: Dario made the most maximalist proposal of the weekend: embedded 3rd party evaluators, a national regulatory regime for models beyond a certain capability/ingredient threshold, a broad international regulatory pact between democracies, stricter limits on compute/distillation for China and then a different international regulatory regime that encompasses China. Before there is a national regulatory regime, he wants a Sherman act waiver so that Anthropic can safely coordinate with OpenAI and other frontier labs without antitrust fears. TBF, this latest proposal is much less maximalist than some of his prior proposals like “Policy on the AI Exponential,” where he advocated for an FAA for AI. I believe he is sincere in his beliefs. And despite all the protestations, all of this would also probably be good for his business over the long-term. Sam agreed that embedded 3rd party evaluators were a good idea and stated they would implement them. Again, this is smart as should help limit future liability. Elon said “Dario is right” and later specified that “Dario is right that there should be some oversight. Peer review of AI by competitors is the right way to start this off.” This would be a MPAA like self-regulatory structure for AI with regular calls between the labs plus a process where each new model is evaluated for safety by competitors for a 1-2 week period before being released. That is *wildly* different from Dario’s proposal and in-line with what David Sacks has been proposing. Elon also stated that nothing was going to slow down open-weight models. Demis said that Dario’s essay was a “step in the right direction.” Dario also said that he was also open to Demis’ idea of a FINRA like self-regulatory structure as part of his proposal. David Sacks had a thoughtful post where he said that Dario and Sam should pace unilaterally, called the antitrust waiver a cartel request and denied that METR was truly independent given their ties to Anthropic. Sriram Krishnan, former White House AI advisor, noted that it would be important to have the 3rd party evaluators come from independent organizations that are not affiliated with any lab, which is basically an indirect statement about the relationship between METR and Anthropic which Sacks was explicit about. Clem from Hugging Face said they were open to being a neutral 3rd party evaluator, which is interesting especially if Jensen was consulted before that post. Alexander Wang from Meta noted that alignment would be an increasing focus going forward. An executive order seems likely after all this and the language in this EO is going to be really important. It is possible to democratize and distribute AI broadly and safely without centralizing it in the hands of a few corporations who might each become more powerful than any single government. I do not want a few humans in control of intelligence. I want us all to have our own intelligences that reflect our own values and human variation in all of its richness. Intelligence distribution over intelligence centralization FTW.
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Biotech is booming... $XBI closed at ~$170 With today's surge, we're within striking distance of the $XBI All Time High of $174.79, reached in Feb 2021 during the pandemic-era biotech bubble. Funnily enough, $MRNA was trading at ~$175/share back then (Feb 2021) and popped back into that range with today's mRNA cancer vaccine news.
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Great discussion with @NelloMainolfi about the early days of @KymeraTx !
It was great to sit down with @KymeraTx co-founder @LifeSciVC and revisit our early days, from the science that brought us together to the early decisions that still shape how we are building the company today. Ten years later, I’m proud of how far we’ve come and even more focused on what lies ahead as we continue working to deliver a new generation of medicines to patients around the world. linkedin.com/pulse/earning-r…
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Make US INDs Great Again - What will and will not work to regain US strength in phase 1 clinical trials Great new blog post from @AlexHarding7 exploring the right solutions for US regulatory approaches to early clinical development lifescivc.com/2026/08/make-u…
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New blog: "Evolving Drug Discovery: AI, Infrastructure, and the Speed of Learning" Great perspective from @AbbasRKazimi, CEO of Nimbus Therapeutics - a company that's been at the forefront of deploying computational technologies to discover and develop new medicines for almost two decades (founded in 2009!)... lifescivc.com/2026/07/evolvi…
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Great commentary and spot-on from @docrodwong
article on biotech innovation for fortune mag's US 250th anniversary series. the next decade is going to be amazing, don't miss it. the challenge will be to navigate an affordability crisis in hospitals and services without breaking our drug innovation engine. fortune.com/2026/07/25/pancr…
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In a new blog "Two Roads Diverged" - Atlas' Aimee Raleigh explores the often "artificial chasm" that has been constructed between biotech operators and VCs... with tips for how to engage in more positive and productive ways. @AimeeRaleigh13 @atlasventure lifescivc.com/2026/06/11068/
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Excited to have Ethyreal Bio emerge from stealth today! Ethyreal Bio raises $101 Million in Financing to Advance ETHY-001, a Potentially Best-in-Class Anti-TSHR Antibody for Thyroid Eye Disease and Graves’ Disease globenewswire.com/news-relea…
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With these huge IPOs for SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI… I'm thinking about a couple possible implications for biotech investing: 1/ Many of the large AUM long-only asset management firms (Fidelity, Wellington, T Rowe, Cap Re, etc) are likely participating in a big way in these IPOs.  Given the size of these offerings, these large funds will likely be investing billions into each of these. Every large investor only has so much capital (from a risk management perspective) allocatable to primary offerings of IPOs in a given period… so will these three suck all the oxygen out of the room for long-only firms' ability to play in biotech IPOs in 2H 2026?  Will the sector be even more dependent on specialist healthcare investors for IPOs for the next few quarters?  Seems likely to me. 2/ Right now these three positions are very large private marks on many big investor’s books.  Most of these firms have limits as to what percentage of their AUM can be invested in private deals… when these three move over to the public side, it immediately changes the “ratio”  in a big way… creating significant “space” for private investing in their portfolios.  Will that bode well for their participation in late stage private deals in biotech?  Maybe... hopefully. So for the next few quarters... while biotech IPOs may be more reliant on specialists, we might see renewed interest from long-only firms in later stage private biotech deals - helping companies stay private for longer.
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Arthur Tzianabos' new blog is out... "Biotech’s Most Effective Medicine: No FDA Approval Required" @ArthurTzianabos #Biotech #NotDietCoke lifescivc.com/2026/06/biotec…
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Reflections on “in-licensing” as the nucleating substrate for NewCo’s in VC-backed Biotech. It’s not new - it's been a tried-and-true component of venture creation for decades - finding great assets and starting companies around them. ~20% of our startups (out of ~50) in the 2002-2014 window (Funds VI-IX) were nucleated with in-licensed assets from Pharma at inception. None of the assets were from Chinese pharma - mostly US/EU/JPN. ~20% of our startups (~70) in the 2018-2026 window (Funds XI-XIV) were similarly nucleated with in-licensed assets at inception. A few of those began with assets from Chinese partners, but also others in US/EU/JPN Most of what we continue to do is de novo venture creation around great science with talented entrepreneurs and founders.  I suspect other early stage VCs are similar.
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US Biotech job postings picked up as quarter progressed. 2026 Q1 Job Market Report. @biospace Interestingly, Boston open positions on their site went up nearly 50% since August. Slone Partners: the "market looks better than it did a year ago", highlighting "positive hiring discussions with clients" biospace.com/job-trends/2026…
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Bruce Booth retweeted
a nice longform writeup from bruce booth arguing why it would be a mistake to ban US-china IP licensing.
Patient-first, America-first: The Case For Global Collaboration While the rise of Chinese biopharma in the past decade has been meteoric, I’m firmly in the camp that their engagement in the global ecosystem is good for the sector – its more opportunity than threat, great for patients, and is a healthy forcing function to raise the game for everyone lifescivc.com/2026/06/patien…
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There is indeed a high vacancy rate in lab space in the Boston market. But this has zero to do with China. It's because the real estate market massively overbuilt in the pandemic bubble... then we a broad market correction. Biotechs in MA today utilize 14% MORE space than they did pre-pandemic; the sector hasn't shrunk its footprint over the long run. There's a lag between funding and building... VC funding peaked in 2021, building peaked in 2023... massive over-supply of space - even with real square footage growth in the underlying utilization by biotech
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Great analysis by @LifeSciVC! To me, it’s pretty clear that biotech exists to help bring medicines to patients. We should keep patients as our Northstar and welcome innovation from anywhere in the world!
Patient-first, America-first: The Case For Global Collaboration While the rise of Chinese biopharma in the past decade has been meteoric, I’m firmly in the camp that their engagement in the global ecosystem is good for the sector – its more opportunity than threat, great for patients, and is a healthy forcing function to raise the game for everyone lifescivc.com/2026/06/patien…
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