coder / founder / investor. Founder @FirstStarVC Interests: AI/ML, bio, bots, energy, Bitcoin, decentralization, and coffee. @Harvard @MIT
Cambridge, MA
Joined November 2008
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This Wed (Oct 28), for Tough Tech Week, we're hosting founders working on reading and writing the planet:
* growing islands ( @CoastalAssembly )
* long-range weather forecasting (Salient / Google)
* seeing from space ( Extellis )
Join us!
luma.com/3no8ptrn
Drew Volpe retweeted
Reminder to stop by our event next week (in Cambridge) to meet three very cool founders on the frontier of earth sensing + making money with said sensing luma.com/3no8ptrn
Drew Volpe retweeted
Excited to announce the launch of the @ThroneScience podcast “Dying of Embarrassment.” We’re bringing awareness to health areas often overlooked or socially taboo. We have a great lineup of experts to start us out. Follow us on Spotify and YouTube: youtube.com/@thronescience
Drug prices and availability being wildly different in China vs the US is why need new industrial policy on it.
For patients and for the future of biopharma in the US.
In January 2025 my mom’s lung cancer spread to her brain. The drug with the best chance of helping her was approved in China but not here.
A doctor told me, almost as an aside, that if she were Chinese she could buy it at a pharmacy.
So I flew to Shanghai and came home with 26 boxes in my luggage. That was 19 months ago. My mom is still here, still working, and in her words has had an amazing three years.
The drug was approved in China in 2023. The FDA approved it in July 2025. It still is not for sale here. I know of at least 30 Americans who have made the same trip.
I have been scared to tell this story because I worried it could cost my mom access to the medicine keeping her alive. But the problem matters more than my silence. These drugs need to be developed and available here, and that means FDA reform.
Art Allen at KFF Health News told our story this week. It also ran in The Washington Post.
kffhealthnews.org/health-ind…
Unprecedented announcement from the NSA.
PHP runs a huge % of the web. This could be very bad.
Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database. If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommend that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated. NSA will follow up shortly with more specific guidance.
“We all switched to Chinese models when Trump closed Fable off to non-Americans.”
My current base case is open models generate >80% of tokens within 2 years.
Christina Cacioppo on why French software companies have stopped building on American models:
"I was very surprised to learn a lot of the French software companies are using Chinese models predominantly.
I was with our customers in France...and someone said, 'We all switched to Chinese models when Trump closed Fable off to non-Americans.
We just realized there's a huge business continuity risk.
We can't trust that if we build a business on one of these American models, it'll always be available, so we stopped doing that.'"
I built a location startup during the "SoLoMo" tech wave when Foursquare was viewed as the breakout success. It anchored NYC's rise as a startup ecosystem.
A decade later, it's a $0.
"Foursquare played a defining role in the grand story that is NYC Tech, and the startup ecosystem that thrives here today will always be a core part of that FSQ legacy."
👆agree w/ this 100%
@dens on the end of @Foursquare
teendrama.substack.com/p/som…
Drew Volpe retweeted
Public preview of BioEmu2! @MSFTResearch AI for Science’s new foundation model for biomolecular structure, dynamics and function. Open weights, MIT license.
github.com/microsoft/bioemu2
Movie: BioEmu2-simulated binding of intrinsically disordered peptide PUMA to MCL-1 receptor. 🧵⬇️
Drew Volpe retweeted
Nobody picks their chip. Somebody hands it to you.
The day I quit PTC after 10 years, my manager said: “You’ll be nothing without me. I made you.”
Thank you very much.
Watched the Roadster video w/ my 10 yo and loved seeing his wonder.
His take: “why would anyone buy a Lamborghini now? It’s just fast but this is fast and can also fly.”
Fascinating and a delight to read.
interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had
with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works
already-clean.goodfire.com/
Drew Volpe retweeted
In partnership with Vinod Khosla (@vkhosla), I’m proud to introduce Reservoir.
Billionaires have owned their cells for years. Starting today, you can too.
Sign up today: withreservoir.com
YC really needs to change what they'll telling startups. Hype videos of what you hope to build is fine for a SaaS app. Bad idea for medical devices.
This product does not diagnose Alzheimer's and it's wrong to imply it does.
You can have Alzheimer's for 15 years and not know it.
We can finally slow it down. But only if we catch it early.
So we built the earliest test for it. Saccade (YC F26)
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Under FDA rules (21 CFR 812.7), promotion of an investigational device as safe or effective is prohibited. This post violates FDA rules.
ecfr.gov/current/title-…
Pro rata rights are a free call option on future rounds. Has any startup ever priced them separately?
If a VC wants them, charge x% extra instead of bundling it in.
Drew Volpe retweeted
So many people have DM’d me about this trailer and I’ll be honest, watching it made me physically throw up.
I was COO from before FTX even had a name, it was my baby, and I was the last one out of the Bahamas after Sam got extradited. I lost everything I had on it and it took me a long time to get over, so I have zero interest in defending the people who caused this.
The media loves the story that FTX blew up because we were all partying in the Bahamas, but the place I worked looked nothing like that.
We had under 200 people in the core company at its peak, not counting subsidiaries, when other exchanges our size had thousands, so a lot of us were doing 16 to 18 hour days for over three years and barely had time to sleep, and whenever we walked in, day or night, Sam was at his desk.
I worked with Caroline and never once saw her get aggressive like she does in this trailer. She’s quiet and mild, and often lost in her own thoughts.
Most of us didn’t even know she and Sam were dating until we read about it after the bankruptcy, and I never saw him so much as put an arm around anyone.
FTX’s collapse ruined so many people’s lives, including ours, and Netflix decided to make it a love story.
Shame on you @netflix.
