I cannot emphasize enough how much US management overstates the Chinese work ethic, 996 etc. I worked in Shanghai and HK for 4 years with the top semiconductor, biotech and tech cos and maybe true to some degree at the Foxconn, factory, fill finish facility - level, but China also has very strict labor protections that exceed even CA. On the flip side, we understate how lazy AF middle management and upper management is in the US.

Beam Therapeutics $BEAM sues Chinese biotech, VC-backed startup, alleging theft of intellectual property statnews.com/2026/09/29/beam… via @ADeAngelis_bio @Jasonmmast

After 15 years of investing, we realised that truly exceptional founders have something impossible to fake; deeply unconventional lives. We analysed 15,000 founders using five binary signals to measure this: quirky hobbies, early-life signs of exceptionalism, extreme life pivots, unusual geographies, non-linear careers. These sum to give a 0-5 score per founder. Whether someone started coding at age 10, speaks five languages, climbed Everest or quit a safe job to live in Chile, the signal we wanted was deviation from the mean. Rather than focusing on IQ or EQ, we call this metric the Outlier Quotient, or “OQ”. When forecasting founder success, it turns out that OQ was the single most predictive variable in our entire classification model, trained on ~70 different factors. Our OQ score had zero correlation with having worked at a top-tier company or attending an elite university. The signals most VCs rely on are noise without signal. The best founders don’t signal like everyone else, don’t think like everyone else and certainly don’t build like everyone else.

Two things early founders often get wrong, and should remember: 1) Building culture can feel like it's just fluff at the start. Until you start to raise capital or hire teams, and then you see how it shapes everything you do moving forward. 2) You should build a team so talented that it makes you slightly uncomfortable to be with them, because you know you are going to have to raise your game to keep up.

Roche does its second China licensing deal in five days, this time going to Simcere Zaiming for a trispecific T cell engager for $75M upfront Simcere has now teamed w/AbbVie, Ipsen, Boehringer Ingelheim and others endpoints.news/roche-taps-si…

Excited for the new release of #HuggingFace durant.ly/huggingface - proud investor! durant.ly/hfrelease