Timing is perfect on this. We are fortunate enough to be witnessing Year One in the Age of Crispr ;) For those brainstorming startup ideas some relatively recently funded companies include: eGenesis - Dr. George Church's company that uses edited porcine stem lines for human xenotransplantation Twist Bio - synthetic bio for applications ranging from novel materials to data storage Denali - focus on age related neurode…
And here’s my take on how this will play out... Tech investors are almost totally unequiped to do the necessary DD. They either therefore go for plays that are easy to understand, largely computational exercises or in the rare cases they do go for something higher risk, they back something crazy (e.g. Theranos) because they don’t do good DD. Getting an “expert” to vet the play rarely works. Because tech VCs don’t kno…
My observation during this dot-com boom is that a lot of the people who did well last round are now part of the VC infrastructure, like our own Paul Graham. My impression is that this time around, money is a lot more competent because of this.
Because this made such a huge impact on my life, I kinda want to extend it: perhaps the first round of any new technology is going to be littered with bad ideas. Perhaps that is necessary. Then perhaps those with experience can look backwards and do better next time.
I personally still think we are headed towards a second dot-com bust, but I've been saying that so long that at this point, I'm just wrong. Unquestionably, the business and money people did their jobs much more skillfully this time around than they did in the '90s.