Next Unicorns: Developing drugs to extend dog lifespans with Loyal CEO Celine Halioua | E1799

there's something about being a solo act. I tell people like, I'm Bob Dylan, I don't play well in a band, and now I'm forced to be in a band with the All In podcast. And I can tell you, it is not my natural state of being. Like, you know, I am obviously the front guy. I'm the lead singer. I just want to play the songs and I want to play the songs the way I want to play them. I want to play them correctly. And then when, you know, somebody wants to do it somewhat different and then they want to be the lead singer, it's like, well, there can't be two lead singers, you know, like you can sing a verse, but like you're the guitar player, you're the bass player. You're the drummer, like, do your job. Like, and I agree with you. Like, I think for certain people you got to be the solo founder and you can go faster, but it's very rare. And then at the early stage, having multiple ones, you know why actually this whole thing got started with co-founders? It's— that's it. You nailed it. It's in the interest of the investors.

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Hey everybody, welcome to This Week in Startups. And we all want to live longer, right? Life extension has been the dream of technologists, alchemists, religious people and humans since, uh, we existed. We all want to get a couple of extra years. And you might remember Altos Labs raising $3 billion from Jeff Bezos, Sherry Milner, a bunch of folks. Startups are starting to use biotech solutions, AI, big data to look at diseases and try to fight aging. Well, today on the program, we got a slightly different take on life extension. They're working a bit backwards. The plan is to start with My favorite creatures on planet Earth, dogs, and eventually use the learnings there to develop life extension treatments for humans. And I think this makes the most sense to me because dogs are so much better than humans. So why the strategy? Well, FDA approval for life extension drugs in dogs, about 50 times less expensive than for humans. And you can tell if it works much faster because dogs have such a shorter lifespan than humans do. So Celine Halioua is the founder and CEO of Loyal. Celine, I love dogs. Thanks for starting this company.

Absolutely. I'm glad you're not a cat person.

Cat people are the worst. I think we all agree on that. And once you get to 2 or more cats, specifically 3, you know something's going very, very wrong in your life. Now, owning multiple dogs like I do too, that's completely permissible. And when I retire, My wife and I plan to start a bulldog rescue. That is our retirement plan. So in 20 years—

so sweet.

Yeah. Um, dogs, uh, almost by definition, if you get one, you're signing that contract that they're gonna— you're gonna bury them and they're not going to bury you. And that's just the law of big numbers, right? Humans live to their 70s, dogs live to maybe 9 to 12 years on average. Is that the average lifespan of a dog?

Yeah, well, interestingly, the bigger a dog is, the shorter their lifespan is. So if you really like Great Danes, you're looking at 6, 7, 8 years. If you like Chihuahuas, you know, who knows why, you're looking at 16, 17 years.

Yeah, uh, this is very true. I looked at getting my, my dream dog is a Dogue de Bordeaux, or like a Spanish Mastiff, Italian Mastiff. I love these big bull breeds, but when I found out they live 6 or 7 years, that got me bummed out. And my bulldogs tend to live Uh, I had one live 8 and a half years, one live 10 and a half, 11, and then my last bulldog, Fondue, love of my life, lasted 15-plus years. The longest, uh, you can get out of a bulldog. It never happens that bulldogs live that long. Uh, so I feel very blessed. So, so tell me, um, you guys have raised $65 million for Solo— I'm sorry, you've raised $65 million for Loyal so far. Um, what is the plan here and what's your background? How did you come to this idea?

Yeah, um, I'll start with the background. So I actually got into college for art school, but then at the very last minute I decided to switch to neuroscience because I had this, um, I had this realization that in my perception we don't really have free will because you can get diagnosed with many diseases, often age-related diseases, that if they happen, there's not much anybody can do for you, no matter how much money you have, how much effort you put into it, how much thought you put into it. If you get certain forms of brain cancer, if you get Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, generally speaking, your life is going to be shorter and significantly much shorter than you want it to be. And to me at 18, when you kind of think adults are heroes and they can fix everything, realizing they can't was extremely scarring, candidly. So I switched from art school to neuroscience. I spent 4 years in the lab. I then started a PhD at Oxford in the economics of preventative medicine. And as I'm sure we'll talk about, the way I really see aging drugs is as a preventative medicine for multiple age-related diseases at the same time. Think— I was just laughing because I usually use statin, you know, a drug to reduce risk of cardiovascular disease. But now it's looking like Ozempic might actually be a better metaphor for that, right? A drug that positively impacts multiple things that might be not classically defined as the same disease. Um, and then I dropped out of Oxford to join Laura Deming at the Longevity Fund, um, where I was her first employee, chief of staff, venture partner, EIR, kind of every title there, uh, where we were investing in companies developing drugs for human aging and lifespan extension. And I got kind of frustrated while I was working at Longevity Fund because every aging company, including Altos, who you just mentioned, adds about $3 billion has kind of the same narrative like, oh, you know, we want to work on aging and lifespan extension. We have this drug or this mechanism that works, but FDA is evil. Aging isn't a disease. So we're going to develop our aging drugs for cancer or we're going to develop our aging drugs for Alzheimer's or osteoarthritis or whatever it is. And it just didn't make sense to me that literally every shot on goal for an aging drug was not actually being tested for what I think the drug should be tested for, which is a drug that keeps you healthier and longer. That is fundamentally what we are developing these drugs to do. Long story short, I, I'll share this because it's very Silicon Valley. I had found that this, we were talking about the big dog short lifespan. That was an aha moment for me because you look at the genetics that control dog size, it's actually around a very well-known aging pathway, actually the OG aging pathway that Laura worked on when she was like 12 years old, 'cause she's a savant. And it turns out that it seems like big dogs have an accelerated aging disorder. That's an unintended consequence of historical inbreeding for size. So I went to a camping trip with a bunch of Silicon Valley founders like 3 weeks after I moved to the Valley and didn't know anybody, got drunk and was like, you know, telling these people I knew how to make their dogs live longer. And there was a VC there who ran into another VC who ran into Greg Rosen at YC Demo Day and told him about me. And he was like, oh my God, dogs are an amazing market. So he found me and kind of helped me realize that this was not only like an interesting scientific insight, but actually potentially a significant business and significant company. And they gave me, after 3 months of really understanding the thesis, scientific, consumer, otherwise, gave me a term sheet. It was $5 million for me and a shitty pitch deck and literally nothing else back in 2020. And since then, we've, yeah, as you mentioned, raised $65 million. We're 55 people. But much more importantly, we are about a year and a half away from hopefully launching the first ever drug FDA approved for lifespan extension for any species. But of course, our drugs will be approved, if approved, for dogs.

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Yeah.

Um, so, so tell me why dogs and not chimpanzees or another breed.

Yeah, absolutely. So it's twofold. If we only ever develop dog aging drugs, we're gonna be a multi-billion dollar business. Dog drugs. Make a ton of money. Heartgard, which is one of the many heartworm preventatives, makes about half a billion a year. The leading flea and tick makes a billion a year. And this is very high margin, very sticky revenue. Dogs are prescribed these drugs for the rest of their lives, and dog owners are very loyal to the brands that they stay with. But as you're correctly interpreting, there is a bigger vision here. If we can show that a drug slows the rate of aging, and extends lifespan in dogs, that is just about the best translational model for showing what might work in people too. And the reason being is one, exactly what you just mentioned, environment. Environment is huge in aging, both for the individual but also generational environmental impact. But also dogs develop the same age-related diseases we do at approximately the same time in their lifespan. Dogs get cancer and they get chemo for cancer. Dogs get osteoarthritis. Dogs get dementia. Cognition is actually something I'm super, super interested in. Dogs get very quantifiable forms of dementia. Dogs get, are thought to get diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's like we do, which very few other animals do. Theoretically, there are other animals that are genetically closer, obviously chimpanzees are genetically closer, even mice are on the phylogenetic tree closer to us. But dogs, because they represent the wide variety of diseases and environmental factors, are actually a better model of how we age over time. Also functioning with chimpanzees, you know, one of the hacks of Loyal is that we're able to gather this big data because we're gonna, if this drug gets approved, potentially put it in millions of dogs.

Yeah.

We've already done hundreds of dog studies, right? You can't do that with chimps.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, that, that is the incredible, I think, insight here. The same way Elon did the Tesla Roadster for, you know, technological enthusiasts and only needed to sell a couple of thousand of them. I think they wound up selling 3,000 or so. For $150K each. It was an impractical car at a ridiculous price, uh, and was, you know, a Gen 1 product. And so you have this incredible, uh, you know, place where you could land that's even bigger, which is there's 65 million, I think, uh, homes that have dogs. And like you're saying, the dogs have the same environment. Okay, that's really interesting. And if but 10% of people decide to give their dogs a life extension drug, they're already spending like $1,000 a year on their dog easily, I think. I spend much more with bulldogs. So they could afford— if you told me I could spend $500 a year to my dog to live longer and I got one more year, two more years, that's a no-brainer for me. That's an instant purchase. I know I might be the top 10% in terms of my thinking on that, um, But it's interesting, the Four Horsemen of Chronic Disease, as Peter Attila calls them. You got the neurodegenerative. I didn't know really dogs got that, Alzheimer's and stuff like that. Obviously they get cancer, that happens all the time. Um, and tragically people have to put their dogs down because I guess cancer treatments are not— a lot of people can't make that decision to spend $10,000 or $5,000 on cancer treatment. Then you got— but what about like, um, Cardiovascular disease. I don't hear about dogs having like plaque in their hearts and stuff like that. They don't get that.

So that's, that's the only one where there's a strong de-correlation between incidence in humans and incidence in dogs. Um, it's because that disease has a lot of environmental factors to it. And dogs do eat similarly to us, but they don't get to go through McDonald's drive-throughs.

Or smoke cigarettes. Right. Didn't do that. A lot of, uh, like the cardiovascular stuff. I think cigarettes had a big impact on that. But the insulin-related stuff in diabetes, do dogs get that? Do they have—

So actually, so they don't, they can develop diabetes, but meta, what you're hitting on, metabolic fitness is actually the core mechanism by which we're targeting aging. It's one of the reasons, again, to go back to Ozempic, I was so interested in all of that because it's the exact, it's a very similar, mechanism. So actually the only lifespan extension study that's been run to completion in dogs, as far as I'm aware, is a caloric restriction study. So Purina in the '90s ran a caloric restriction study with Labradors. They showed a 2-year lifespan extension and a 2-year delay on osteoarthritis and cancer development in those dogs. Nothing came from it. Purina is a dog food company, they're not exactly economically incentivized to tell you to calorically restrict your dog. But it's a beautiful validation of what we've seen already in mice and primates and other model organisms that improving metabolic fitness, which is how caloric restriction is thought to work, extends lifespan. It extends healthy lifespan.

Yeah, this is the great thing. I, I just encourage everybody to get a dog and go for walks. The number one killer of men, uh, I believe in the Western world at least, is stress. And so dogs reduce stress massively. Found— all founders should have a dog, and the dog should be on their lap, in their office. That is, that is a must. Yeah, of course. Oh, hey, puppy! Is it a— is that a Rottweiler? What is that?

Roddy?

Yeah, Roddy the Rottweiler. I love— they're, you know, they look intimidating, but they're big sweethearts. Uh, they are like a toddler. They think they're lap dogs. Those dogs are 100 pounds and they think they should be on your lap, uh, like a little poodle or something like that. They're deranged. Uh, that's, that specific breed I'm calling out. Let's talk about Wegovy and Ozempic for a second. Uh, I had a— I've been on Ozempic or Wegovy for the last 2 years, lost 21 pounds on it, feel amazing, changed my relationship with food. And now, uh, all these reports are coming out that, um, it's going to help with heart disease, uh, it looks like. So this generalized medicine that we're discovering could have a dramatic impact. So watch it as you're working on this with dogs. What path are you going down in terms of thinking about which drugs to use? And does Ozempic and Wegovy and what do they call these? Are they GL— GP-1s or something?

Yeah.

GP-1. What impact does this have on your thinking? And then, and then what route are you taking in terms of thinking about life extension in dogs?

Yeah, so, so one of the interesting things about dog drugs, so actually one, there was a weight loss drug that worked in a similar mechanism. So appetite reduction in dogs, and it actually was a pretty big commercial failure. And that's because people's food relate, like food giving relationship with their dog is a kind of a proxy for love, right? So the dog being excited to see you when I come home, like excited to see you, or is he excited for dinner? Is he excited for a treat or is he excited for pets, right? It's kind of all mixed in. So people would actually stop giving the drug 'cause they felt like their dog cared about them less. So one of the things we look at in our studies explicitly is making sure that the dogs on our drugs are not losing weight and that's not why we're seeing the healthspan benefit. Uh, which is kind of non-intuitive, but just one of the things I did when I started Loyal is I wanted to be very, I mean, I'm— I started Loyal when I was 24. I'm 28 now. I obviously have a very experienced team, but I myself have not brought a pharmaceutical product to market previously. And so I wanted to make sure I was kind of humble and learning as much from the priors. And that was a really interesting one. As far as what we're targeting, so the aging field is very interesting in that there is decades of very strong research on various ways of extending lifespan. But because there's no commercial path for a drug to be approved for lifespan extension, there's no, you know, Pfizer and Regeneron and whatnot. Nobody is developing a drug for lifespan extension. I'm pretty sure we're the only company, perhaps there's actually, there was just a loyal copycat founded. There's two companies that are saying that they want to develop a drug for explicitly for lifespan extension, and they're tiny startups, relatively speaking, right? There's nobody else actually developing drugs for this explicit use case. And so we wanted to keep everything as simple as possible except for this one idea, which is that a drug can be targeted for generalized quality of life and healthspan extension and not for a classical disease. So we went with things that we knew were very well validated biology. So our drugs are in two categories. One is around big dog short lifespan. So actually the very first drug I was working on was LOY-1, is this big dog short lifespan drug. That's what the company got funded around. And it's this idea of, as I talked about earlier, that big dogs, when we selectively bred dogs for size, we created these really awesome giant breed dogs, but these big breed dogs, once they're fully grown, continue metabolically aging at a faster rate. A big dog is literally aging at a 2x faster rate. They're developing age-related diseases faster. I mean, Great Danes will often go gray at age 4, um, or earlier, start getting age-related diseases earlier, and then they die sooner. They have a much shorter median lifespan. Um, and that's a, our hypothesis is that that's a, uh, um, unintended consequence of historical breeding and therefore genetic and therefore targetable with a drug. Um, so we have 2 drugs that are targeting that to give big dogs a longer lifespan. And then we are—

so, so I'm clear and I reflect that back to you. You're talking about, hey, the genetic engineering we did, breeding, made the dogs big, increased the velocity of their growth, um, so they get to full size. But hey, that growth, uh, has now— whatever, whatever is in the DNA, I guess, that's driving that growth, or in their genes, the genetics, um, you could take a pill to reverse that maybe. Or I guess you could breed them. Another way to do it would be to breed them to not, I guess, get as big, but that, that doesn't solve the problem. So there, there's something in the DNA you could actually change or in the genetics, you think?

So we're not doing any change to the genetics. What we're doing is a drug that compensates for the genetic changes that these dogs have. I mean, you have, you have, You said Bulldogs, right?

English Bulldogs. Yeah.

Yeah. So you're very aware, I'm sure, of, you know, historical inbreeding has caused genetic issues in certain breeds.

Bulldog most of all. I mean, the controversy with Bulldogs is that we shouldn't even have them. They were bred to be, uh, first bred as warriors in arenas for bull baiting, was a sport, bull baiting. Then they were, they got saved and they were bred to be kind to each other and nice for humans. Then they were bred to look cute with smashed faces and, and big barrel chests and short legs, which then created— they call them the brachycephalic breeds, um, created breathing problems that cause heart attacks all the time. Poor Adam Sandler had both Meatball and Matzo Ball die at like 3 and 4 years old. It's horrific.

Yeah, no, and most dog breeds have some genetic associated disease. Goldens are another one. They develop two forms of cancer that are can be very rapidly terminal and are very hard to diagnose beforehand. German Shepherds get, their hips fall out over time. And so our idea is that the short lifespan of big dogs is not inherent. If you look at a wolf, wolves are massive, they're larger than any dog breed and they live in captivity into their teens easily. Yeah. But it's a disease like anything else and therefore it's targetable with a, with the medicine. And that was really kind of the drug that we first went to the FDA with, but also first went to the, the scientific community in the world with. They try to connect something that people think is inherent and say, hey, you know, maybe it's not. Maybe we should question what we think is normal.

Yeah. I mean, the, it's really weird that the Boxers and the German Shepherds and all them, Golden Retrievers I think were in there, with the hip dysplasia. How, how did that become, you know, something in the breeding that got lost. It's so weird. Great Danes in general—

It's 'cause they're short-term minded, right? So like if you think about it with the big dogs, they were the people who were breeding and trying to create, let's say a Great Dane, they did this very quickly, like over a period of like a couple hundred years or less. And so they would breed a dog, the dog would grow large in puberty, then it'd be 1 year old and they'd probably breed it to, you know, a sibling or a cousin because people were inbreeding themselves back then, right? They didn't know anything about genetic diversity. And they're doing that over and over and over again. And they don't understand, you know, evolution only works up until the point, generally speaking, that that individual's genes are passed on to when they're bred. So if there's some negative consequence of the gene that makes the dog grow really big, but it very effectively makes the dog grow very big, it, it's gonna stay because the person isn't waiting to see if there's anything bad happening on the back half. They're like, oh, big dog, breed it. And then because they're inbreeding, it's causing all these genetic issues on top of it.

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So one of the things— so a similar avenue to that is supplements. And that's something a lot of people ask me, right? Like, why am I going— you know, I've been running Loyal for 4 years almost. You know, we haven't made a dollar of revenue. We just burn money, a lot of money every month. And that's basically it.

Deep tech.

Deep tech, right? We could have been selling supplements. We could have been selling stem cell therapies since day one. But fundamentally, a big part of what I wanna do is I want to, I want to show that aging drugs are boring, right? That a drug can be approved for a healthy lifespan extension. And even if there was a supplement that, you know, theoretically extended the lifespan of dogs 5 years, I would tell somebody else that they could go work on it, but I wouldn't actually feel it's in the scope of Loyal. Because I think we need to create the regulatory path and almost be like impenetrable to controversy. Right. And the FDA is the highest quality bar in the world, and that's the only way to do it, in my opinion.

Yeah. So do you think there is a stem cell therapies or a legitimate pathway in the world, or is it—

I'm generally speaking super educated on this facet. I— so we— my group at Oxford actually looked at it a bit, and at least at the time, and that was a few years ago, there was a lot of issue with these kind of, as you were saying, being a regulatory gray gray area where efficacy doesn't have to be proven. Um, I think in general, when you're putting something in your body, especially potentially permanently, it's good to have, you know, understand the side effects. Um, but also the other thing I'd caution is placebo effect is very real, very, very real.

Let's talk more about the— this is a very interesting, um, discussion, I was talking to somebody who's in the medical field and they said, my entire life is trying to beat the placebo. Uh, explain what—

Yeah.

The pla— explain the, the, the absolutely underappreciated power of placebos.

So placebo is basically, so when you do a scientific study, you, and you're trying to say like, does my drug extend the quality of life and the number of years of life of a dog? You will have a placebo group, so it's somebody who the vet thinks they're getting the drug, the dog owner thinks they're getting the drug, I guess maybe the dog thinks they're getting the drug, but they're actually not. It's basically like a fake sugar pill that's made to smell, look ex— exactly like the actual pill. And then the other group gets the actual drug. And the goal is to show that, you know, in the people who get the actual drug, that they're having a longer, healthier life, or their dog's having a longer, healthier life. Placebo will mess with everything in the weirdest ways, and it's actually even harder in, um, it's even harder in dogs. 'Cause one of the things that we are asking dog owners to do is fill out these surveys where they tell us about how they, like, how active does their dog seem, how comfortable does their dog seem. And it's all subjective, it's all perception, right? And so if somebody thinks like, oh, I'm certain my dog's on the active drug, Even if they're not, they might subconsciously rate their dog as healthier for longer. Um, another interesting thing was dogs is that, you know, our ultimate endpoint unfortunately is mortality. It's reduction of mortality risk. And with dogs, you have euthanasia. And that is inevitably a human decision of when to euthanize your dog. So will somebody wait to euthanize longer than they otherwise would have because they think the dog is on the drug?

Mm-hmm.

Um, and this is dangerous because what it can do is mask the actual real benefit of the drug. And if you can't show that there's a statistical difference between the dogs on your drug and the dogs on placebo, the drug fails. Even if it worked, the drug fails. Yeah.

Oh, that's a fascinating— that's a fascinating point. So if the placebo effect was, you know, 20% reduction, if the actual effect was 20% reduction, you get a placebo effect of 19 or 21 or whatever. I think the placebo effect typically is in the low teens, is my understanding for a lot of drugs. And so then you don't get approved because you're like, hey, it's just doing as well as a sugar pill. But I thought your answer was going to be placebo effect doesn't exist in dogs because they don't know they're taking medicine. It turns out the human's interaction with the dogs could lead them to, uh, not make a different decision at end of life. And so when you're gonna just take end of life out of the, your statistics or do two runs of your statistics ultimately, one's with the euthanized, uh, data and then the one without it and then try to make sense of it. Is that, is that the ultimate goal?

No, I mean, not, it's so predominantly what we're looking at is lifespan and then healthspan as measured by the vet and the pet parent. And the way you deal with this is you just do a really large study. Uh, as far as I know, we are running the largest pivotal animal health study that's ever been run, or one of the largest. Normally there are like 50 to 100. Ours is 1,000, which is gonna be very operationally complex. Not to mention it's long 'cause it's a lifespan extension study. But we do that exactly for that reason. You wanna be able to, the bigger a study is, the more signal you can derive from the noise.

Right. Where, how many people are gonna be in this study with a, 'cause, and do we have different qualifiers for dogs? Like, you know, giving dogs medicine, maybe it's like, you know, less of an issue.

This has been such an interesting question actually, because, so it's gonna be about 1,000 dogs across 55 vets all over the US. You have to represent, you know, rich New York City dogs and, you know, working dogs in Iowa and everything in between. That's extremely important both for us, but also to the FDA. And one of the things we're trying to figure out is like, where do we put these study sites? Because it's not us, we actually work with independent veterinarians who are enrolled in the study and then they bring dogs in. It's a scientific, it's like an ethics thing, right? 'Cause we're biased, we want the drug to get approved. And we actually have been mapping the, the immigration, emigration paths, like within the US, like people in California moving to Texas and Florida and people in Florida moving to New York or whatever. And also, where do people move over 5 years of their lifetime? Because what we don't want, like a fail mode for the study is the drug works, but a bunch of people drop out of the study because in year 2, on average, people move from New York City to Iowa. And that connection, or maybe Salt Lake City would be more accurate. And that becomes challenging. So we're trying to load balance having sites wherever we think people might be without also adding so much complexity that then the study is too difficult to run or I need too many employees to run the study. So there's all these like bets you have to make. It's so operationally complex.

Yeah. And I'm wondering if there's some core, I think there should be some meta study that you could team up on where you're giving the, the dogs these drugs and then you're looking at the lifespan of the human and the impact that dogs have on humans and the longer the lifespan. So if you could correlate as we get into this big data pools of giant data and then AI, you look at owners and then start to think like, hey, owners who put themselves, put dogs on this drug. And I wonder if the lifespan is different for younger owners versus older owners, or if older owners spend more time and do more walks with the dog, or what the correlations are. I bet you the— yeah, are you tracking environmental issues around the dog? Or you see, you mentioned qualitatively healthspan. That seems like a waste of time to me because does anybody give good qualitative information on their dogs?

You know that, um, so That is a huge problem in the aging field. What the hell is quality of life? How do you quantify how healthy you are? How do I quantify your rate of aging? There is no agreed-upon norm. And the problem is, if you go to the FDA, you can't be like, hey, here's this new drug and here's this new measure, right? You have to kind of keep it boring except for, you know, what you're trying to do. But to your big data point, one of the things we're working on is developing exactly that, like a quantitative measure of at least quality of life and healthspan in the dog. And so when we're running this study for 4 or more years, we're banking saliva samples, photos of the dog, videos of the dog, blood, stool, everything. And then we actually—

Weight, I'm sure.

Weight, of course. And then we also just announced a collaboration with Banfield Pet Hospital, which is one of the largest pet chains in the US. And they're actually very interested in working with us on these big data problems too, 'cause they have 20+ years of longitudinal records of people going to the vet and the dog getting diagnosed in year 3 with this and year 5 with that. And what's the outcome of the dog? And I need control for all the other things. And that's, I think, a huge translation, right? If you can understand that in a dog and if you can objectively quantify if a drug's having a rate of aging benefit in 6 months, in a dog instead of having to wait 5 years, that's the best screening platform you're ever gonna get for human aging drugs. Because fundamentally humans always are gonna live de— like decades, right? We can't change that. So we need a better way to measure how we age to tell if a drug's working.

Yeah. And just thinking about the environmental factors, the positivity, um, versus how cynical or just negative a human being is. Must have an impact on a dog, uh, and the exercise— well, I mean, or it will certainly have an impact on how they would report, um, on how healthy their dog is. Positive person, I'm, I'm always looking for the, you know, silver lining. I'd be like, oh, my dogs are so healthy, they're incredible, I just took them for a hike out in Tahoe, they were great. I mean, meanwhile, they're walking 0.5 miles and they're panting and they're exhausted. Um, but yeah, altitude stuff and, and brachial breeds and stuff, but Uh, you know, interestingly, with Bulldogs, there's, uh, a movement to make them genetically more, uh, like a normal or an Old English Bulldog, where they have longer legs, longer snouts, and less short— less big chest. So, you know, you're like, oh, is that a Bulldog? Or it's like, yeah, it's kind of like a ratty old Bulldog, not the genetic, like, freaks that you see in cartoons with the giant barrel chest. Um, So when you're funding a company like this, uh, how many years to commercialization and how do you explain that to investors? Just getting to the startups part of your story.

Yeah, so that's a very interesting question. So we are backed by, I'd call it, Silicon, standard Silicon Valley funds, right? First round co-led our Series Seed with Josh.

Josh Koppelman, fan of the, friend of the pod.

Yeah, I love Josh. He's the best hard-ass ever.

Is he back to working full-time at First Round, or is he like semi-retired running some newspaper?

The hot goss.

He was taking a break to run some newspaper for a while in Philly. I don't remember.

I mean, he's still on my board, so if he shows up to those—

Josh Kaufman's awesome. You know, those guys made too much money with Uber, they don't come to work anymore.

No, but here's the thing, J-Cal, we have the aging drugs.

Right, right. You can keep these VCs alive longer.

It's actually— we'll do that.

I hate to go into diversions about VCs, but I had a VC who's 10 years older than me, and he said to me at some point a couple years ago, he's like, you know, I just got to retire. And I said, why do you gotta retire? Like, it's the greatest job in the world. You've done so much great work. You're so supportive. It's like, just feels creepy to be 60 years old, 62 years old, and, uh, meeting with 20-year-olds and like trying to invest in them. And like, I'm, I'm hanging— I'm like, you know, it just, it feels like people don't want an old guy around. I'm I'm like, I think quite the opposite. I think they love it. I think they love having your war stories. He's like, really?

I'm like, the war stories are great, honestly. And like, the, the just chillness, like, they've seen everything and they're like, yes, you're gonna make, and here's like why you're not going to listen to my advice. And then like 6 months later I come back and I'm like, you're, you were right, Josh, I didn't listen to your advice and I saw it wrong, and now I'm gonna listen to you.

And Josh Kopelman's really old. I mean, he's ancient. I'm joking, I'm joking, Josh, I'm joking. But you're much older than me, that's true. No, I mean, John Doerr, Michael Moritz, you know, uh, just, uh, you know, rest in peace Don Valentine. That when I got to spend time with those folks and ask them questions, uh, man, Vinod Khosla still in the game. I, I'm gonna be like Vinod. I'm never— you have to drag me out of my firm.

So sharp, that guy.

Yeah.

I don't know how he does it. I don't know how he does it. Honestly, he's like 5 people in one.

When I see a startup that's got bad design, it's hard for me to take it seriously in today's day and age. Why? Because having great design, having world-class design, it's kind of table stakes today with consumers, with employees, with partners, and of course, uh, with investors. But, you know, design agencies, they're very, very expensive and there's a lot of back and forth to figure out what you want. It's not for startups. You know, you can't spend a quarter million dollars, a half million dollars getting some design agency to do your look and feel. And it's hard for you to hire somebody full-time because that's a full-time staff position. So let me tell you about an amazing service. It's called Catalog, a full-service design studio tailor-made for startups. And Catalog does all of your branding. They do UI and UX. They'll do landing pages, pitch decks. They'll do it all. It's half the price of a typical design agency, but they offer a full team, including a dedicated project manager and a design director. They've worked with hundreds of startups, so if you have a problem, chances are they've already solved it. You can stop and start back at any time. It's a monthly subscription and Catalog will never waste your time. They do 3-day turnaround. Okay, that's more than enough. Stop wasting time. Stop wasting money. With all these expensive design firms and unreliable freelancers who disappear. What you want is fast 3-day turnarounds for a flat monthly fee with Catalog, and you're going to get $1,200 off right now at trycatalog.com/twist. That's $1,200 off at trycatalog.com/twist. Well, on an aging basis, this is your— this is your wheelhouse and your expertise, and we'll get back to the funding question. We got to go down this path here. Staying intellectually curious in addition to moving around your diet, calorie restriction, But, but really cognitively staying in the game and having purpose. Is this like a, is it true that you, you, there's a correlation with health and, and longevity or no?

It's so, it's so hard to correlate these things, right? Because if somebody's not intellectually curious, are they getting less physical activity? You know, are they having depression? Is, are they less curious because they're trying to get dementia? It's really like with all these things, it's so hard to detangle. Everything changes with time. That said, The, my favorite study we ran at Loyal was a cognitive decline study in dogs. So we were able to show that one of our drugs improved pretty objective, and to your earlier point, quantitative measures of cognition in dogs that had canine cognitive dysfunction. And one of the tests that you do is their ability to relearn something, right? So they'll learn that a certain toy, if they touch it like 3 times with their nose, that it's associated with a treat. They're like taught this over weeks. It's like really like drilled in. Into their heads, and then they, this is reversed, and it turns out that a different toy, um, and now they have to touch 3 times to get the treat. And the dogs that weren't on our drug would just keep on touching the original toy over and over again. And then they would just abdicate from the study. They would just become too frustrated versus some more of the dogs on our drug relearned. They learned that, oh, actually I'm just gonna go to this toy. And so there's an interesting parallel here and, you know, what will be the impact on society if people are able to learn new things faster or more, more plastic, so to speak, for a longer period of time? Um, I think it could have a massive social benefit.

No, that's why I started playing tennis. I'd never done it before. I started skiing again, like, much more actively, skiing in deep powder, traveling, I think going around the world. Yeah, playing chess. I think just playing, playing video games. I started playing, playing a video game again to just try to challenge my mind to be like in that flow state. I think it's very important. So back to the funding question, you got all traditional VCs in there, but traditional VC funds go for 10 years. So first round is in year 4, 5, 6 of the investment. How long does commercialization take? And then, you know, is there another set of investors or a way for investors to clear their position in year 10 to get, you know, their LPs that then have other people like drug companies buy out their position? How does it all work? Towards that 10-year window of in which venture funds need to return capital?

Yeah, absolutely. So it's a couple of things. First is that in tech startups, from what I understand, generally speaking, the value is determined by, in rational times, a revenue multiple and maybe some growth factored into that too. You are still creating value in a biotech company over time, but it's around your probability of success. So it's kind of the risks are inverted. The— there's a risk, you know, if I'm like building some note-taking app, there is almost zero tech risk, right? I can do that. But then the question is, am I going to find product-market fit? How big is the TAM? Da da da da, right? For us, you know, if we can get this drug to market, it's— or you get a drug to market, it's relatively certain there's a very large market. And one of the interesting things about drugs is that the moat is impenetrable. You don't get copycats, you don't get a race to the bottom. COGS are actually extremely good for drugs. We're projecting at a very reasonable price that pet parents, let's say like mid-double digits, a 75 to 85% gross margin on the product.

Double digits per month or per year?

Per month. So somewhere between $500 a year maybe is what I'm thinking. Yeah. So somewhere between like $40 to $60 a month. We haven't done the final pricing, we're trying to optimize all that right now. But regardless, the margins are going to be high, which is great because that's how we reinvest into the company and reinvest in R&D. But the risk that, you know, Josh underwrote and Vinod underwrote and the rest of my investors underwrote were, could we find something that works? And there's no really way to hack that. Like either a drug works or it doesn't work. And it's kind of a bet on the team and the biology and the thesis to figure out what works. So even if we're not making a drop of revenue, we're still accruing value as an organization as the probability of getting that drug to market becomes higher and higher. And the other nice thing about dog drugs is it's only about 4 years to bring a product to market. And then once it's on market, that rev scale is much faster. So we're projecting, uh, post-approval, uh, we think we can hit company profitability in, let's call it, like a year, year and a half, and $100 million ARR probably 6 months after that. And that's on, like, very conservative estimates. That are like derivatives of what's standard in animal health. So assuming we're significantly worse than what's standard in animal health, we're still able to hit that rev acceleration that quickly. But it's just a different appetite. And you have to educate people because they don't have these mental models in their head. Because I'm, I'm everybody's first dog longevity investment and usually their first drug investment.

You wrote a blog post, so that was pretty fascinating about how you hit your Series A milestones with less than $500K of the original $5 million you raised in the seed. and you lamented how frustrated you were about selling so much of Loyal at the seed valuation. You sold half the company or something, uh, or a third, a third. So you got a $15 million post and you think you could have done it for just selling 5% of the company or so, or even less, 3, 4, 5% of the company. Um, so maybe talk a little bit about that because you could have, you, you, did you make it up in the, in the next couple of rounds, uh, by raising too much money in the beginning? Like it—

So it's, it's hard, right? It's the way I've always thought about Loyal is it is, there is absolutely a pharmaceutical out there that can extend a dog's lifespan. And I think we have a lot of data that people will want a drug to extend our dog's life. So then really the core question was, can we find something that works and can we find something that works in time for what you're mentioning earlier, these venture timelines and the fundraising timelines? And so when I started off, I didn't want a false fail. And raising that amount of money ended up not being necessary because my early team was good and we found that basically the first thing we tried was great. But if it hadn't and we only had that $500K, then we would have been— I mean, nobody was going to give us another $500K or another million. And the other interesting difference with building deep tech and biotech companies is that the, the talent you hire is much different. You know, my second employee was a father of two kids. He had a mortgage. He was saving for college. They, you know, they are coming from these companies where equity is not that valued. I still gave them a lot of equity, but equity was not that valued. And cash comp is extremely important. And in the executive levels, it's very high. In biotech.

Yeah.

And so you're not gonna be able to convince somebody's family to let him take a swing on this weird dog longevity company run by a 24-year-old if you're also offering him $100K a year salary. Like, you have to give, like, you have to show the runway. So that was actually quite important in the end.

It makes total sense because you have a family, you got kids in private school, you got a mortgage payment, you know, they're gonna need to make $250, $300, $400, whatever. And they got an offer from Pfizer or somebody. Or Merck for that amount. So you're not operating in a vacuum. And these folks, uh, they need to have a couple of decades experience in order to qualify to work for you. It's different than making an app, or in fact, some people say it's a young person's game, um, to do software and stuff like that because, you know, you, you're putting in 60 hours a week, 70 hours a week, having a family, all that stuff. Listen, I want to get into it. It makes people very uncomfortable But, but that's the thing.

It's in, it's in different disciplines, right? For us, having the right brain will save literally 6 months of time, right? It's just the right context, but it's almost an apprenticeship model where you have to have been there to see that. There's no book you can read.

Nope.

That will teach you how to build a drug. It's just, it's experience. It's actually very artisanal, which I think freaks people out, but it is. And so we invest in good people. Um, but it does change the scope of how you build the company.

Yeah, you're a solo founder. A lot of talk about solo founders being a huge risk factor, yada yada. You and I saw Esther were getting into it back and forth on the Twitter, or the X. Uh, you were posting on X about it. It's gonna take me a little while to— right there. You're, you know, there's upside and downside to each. Are you lonely as a solo founder? Is it harder? Do you wish you had a co-founder? Um, or you're glad you're a solo founder?

I'm definitely glad I'm a solo founder. I think one of the things I've learned over the last 4 years of running this company is the growth rate necessary to build and scale with a startup is absolutely insane, and you can't underwrite anybody's growth rate but yourself. I've had amazing team members who just hit a wall, um, and I don't know how you would predict that, honestly. And honestly, to put somebody in a position where you're either forced out, you have to grow. It's distracting to the business. I always say Loyal's a benevolent matriarchy, right? Like there's no place where decisions get stuck. I come in and I just cut it and I'm like, let's do it. And to be clear, the majority of decisions at Loyal are made by my executive team, right? I'm not a manufacturing exec, I'm not an R&D exec, I'm not a supply chain exec, but I'm there to drive the clarity and kind of keep them all working together. For us it's been extremely efficient. I am, however, also like an only child and kind of like a solo.

So you're used to being— I mean, yeah, I tell— I, I think you have to know yourself. You know, I had a great co-founder, Brian Alvey. We had a wonderful relationship, my best friend for many years, still consider him my best friend. Uh, and I would immediately jump at the chance to, to co-found another company with him. However, you know, he's got other things he wants to do. I have things I'm doing. And there's something about being a solo act. I tell people like, I'm Bob Dylan. I, I don't play well in a band. And now I'm forced to be in a band with the All In podcast. And I can tell you, it is not my natural state of being like, you know, I am the, obviously the front guy. I'm the lead singer. Like, I, I just wanna play the songs and I wanna play the songs the way I wanna play them. I wanna play them correctly. And then when, you know, somebody wants to do it somewhat different and then they wanna be the lead singer, it's like, well, there can't be two lead singers, you know, like you can sing a verse, but like you're the guitar player, you're the bass player. You're the drummer, like do, do your job. Like, and, and I agree with you. Like, I think for certain people you gotta be the solo founder and you can go faster, but it's very rare. And then at the early stage, having multiple ones, you know why actually this whole thing got started with co-founders? It's, that's it. You nailed it. It's in the interest of the investors. So Y Combinator realized having 3 founders meant you didn't need as much money. And they only hired developers, which is why it was very predominantly male at the start. Since they've corrected that, but it was 3 dudes, 2 dudes making Reddit, Dropbox, whatever, Airbnb. No diss to any of those companies. I'm friends with everybody. They've all been on the pod. They're amazing. But they went all developers, all product designers because they were only giving them $16K or $25K in those early days.

Yep.

That meant the company was de-risked. If you lose one, and they did lose one at a lot of these companies, you lose one, they lost one at YouTube, I think. Um, you still have the other two.

Yeah.

So it's just de-risking.

I, I think one of the most important things founders have to learn is that you should be humble and listen to advice and understand why people have certain positions, but you also are responsible for the outcome in the end, and you have to make a decision off of the data that you have independently. Right? If I had gone and gotten a co-founder because YC and Twitter or whatever says I should have a co-founder, I maybe Loyal would've made it, but I, I don't think so. Or I think it would've been much more difficult for us to have succeeded. You just gotta do what you think is right and you have to be comfortable with that.

Yeah. Understanding when people are talking their book is I think one of the hardest things for startup founders to understand. Every, every year at this time when YC has a demo day, a bunch of investors come out and say, why are people raising $20 to $30 million? They have a product in market for 3 weeks. This makes no sense. And it's like, well, they went to Y Combinator because Y Combinator creates a demo day with a bunch of dentists and, you know, newbie investors and they just create this FOMO and you gotta invest in the next 2 days or else you're gonna lose your spot. And the valuation's going up $1 million every week. All these tricks to create FOMO. And you think about, you know, YC's position, they're like, well, we have the best companies. That could be true. They very well might have the best selection of companies of any accelerator. I would say ours is just as good. But putting that aside, they're investing at $1.7 million. So of course, you know, 12 weeks after the program, if somebody's raising at $25 million, they're thrilled with that. Talk about de-risking. They de-risk by having 3 people as co-founders, but then they de-risk by having the valuation go 20 times or 10 times or 15 times what they invested at. Of course they love the situation.

And less dilution at the most dilution round.

You got it. And so everybody's talking their own book. Everybody. I'm talking my own book right now. Uh, everybody's talking—

you have a competing accelerator, right?

You have a competing accelerator. And so as a founder, always ask people like, can you, can you steal me on the other side of that? And, and I would just ask people blatantly like, are you talking your book? And what is your incentive to give me this advice? And you know, people will be honest about it, I think.

Um, and people will always advise you to do what they did. I mean, even I am, right? I'm saying solo founder is great. You know, if you talk to somebody who's got co-founding relationships, they're saying, gonna say being a co-founder is great. It's like, that's, I think the hardest thing to realize is you'll have to hit really challenging questions and problems and nobody out there knows the answer cuz you're at the forefront and you just gotta figure it out.

Um, confirmation bias is real. Um, you know, hey, this, this plane made it back. Gotta be something about this pilot or this plane or something with the design or the mission, something. This must be the greatest pilot ever.

Founders, that's another example.

Pattern matching founders. I mean, you experienced that as a female founder. Uh, I'm sure people brought up Elizabeth Holmes 10 times to you, and if they didn't, they must. Yeah, good.

I, uh, one time, uh, perhaps not as wisely given the market conditions now, but a few years ago there was an investor who wanted to invest $5 million in the company, and then they made some like extremely offensive Elizabeth Holmes joke at me, and I just nuked it. I was like, I can't, I can't with this, because it's actually really dangerous, right, to have people who like think that, even if they don't think that, on your cap table, because inevitably somebody's gonna come for me. What was the joke?

What was the joke?

I don't even remember now. It was just basically like, basically, are you gonna start wearing turtlenecks?

You should start wearing turtlenecks. You shouldn't deepen your voice.

It's like you can tell when people jokingly ask you, but they actually are like worried. That you are. Um, and it's, it's very common and it's, I understand why, right? Especially now with like FTX, all the things that have happened, people are very worried about being embarrassed. It's very hard to diligence loyal. Even if you understand one aspect, you can't understand all the aspects of the company. And I, a lot of my fundraising strategy is around like giving people chump insurance without realizing that they're getting chump insurance, right? And like helping them with the diligence. But you still gotta, you know, not be sexist even if you're feeling insecure about your bio skills.

I mean, yeah, I mean, pattern matching's a thing. There could in fact be patterns. The pattern of like people going to Stanford are great entrepreneurs. Are, are we gonna really actually argue that? I mean, it's one of the hardest schools to get into.

Yeah.

And they specifically are across the street from Sandhill. They're on Sandhill Road. It's literally on Sand Hill Road. If you're an entrepreneur, proximity to Sand Hill Road is going to be like a virtuous circle. They put the— they put their offices there, they invested in folks, and now folks go to Stanford because they know the chances of getting funding go up. And if you wanted to go for business, you would have went to Harvard or Penn or Wharton, or maybe Wharton sits between the two in terms of entrepreneurship versus going to work at a big company. So you do have to understand signaling, but Yeah, signaling like, you're a woman in health biotech broadly, and she was a woman in biotech broadly, but she was a scam, so are you a scammer? And it's like, diligence is your job. Like, by all— yeah, yeah, biotech moonshot in common. One was a sociopath, doesn't mean everybody's a sociopath.

Well, that's probably one of the things I actually take really seriously you know, succeeding in Loyal, because I think that the only way to change a pattern match is to have positive examples, to have positive patterns and create positive patterns. And I think, I think Silicon Valley could build 10x the number of deep tech companies than it does today. Um, I think, you know, I've built a company and we've done real, very valid science that never would've been funded by traditional biotech. It never would've happened. And it only happened because of this pool of investors and the mindset and that being applied to a problem uniquely. And God knows how many more companies there are like that that just aren't being started. So I hope—

this is a big conversation.

And that's one of the reasons I write, right? Because there's like no resources for building biotech and deep tech in this way because that culture of sharing doesn't exist in biotech as much.

Yeah, and deep tech is hard. It's got longer windows. It's actually a big discussion in the capital allocator community. Steve Jurvetson's doing it. His new fund is 15 years in terms of the life cycle, so he's structuring it that way. And I think, you know, what do you want to do with SpaceX has inspired a lot of people that like hard things or moats. And so, you know, when Palmer Luckey and, um, I've got his co-founder's name, nice guy from Founders Fund, Trey Stevens, um, much nicer than Palmer Luckey actually. In fact, just a much much better human being than— I'm joking, Palmer, I'm joking. That dude hates me so much. Um, but don't drag me into this. But I don't think that's a drug. There's— here, but I think Anduril is, you know, standing on the shoulders of SpaceX. Government contracts, you know, hard science, you know. And then now you— they, they basically proved it, and Founders Fund was in SpaceX. Friend of Elon's. So Founders Fund gets more bold. And then you look at Deleon, who's just been on the program, uh, from Varda, like, you know, space labs and stuff like that. And all this getting government contracts, they're, they're all part of this little thread of people with some common investors, some common employees, uh, who all know how to work with the government. Boom. You know how to work in pharma. So there'll be all these great new companies, uh, Elizabeth Holmes notwithstanding. All right, listen, you've been an incredible guest. You gotta come on again. Uh, and just even to talk about startups is great. So you gotta promise me to come on in a year. Can we put it on the calendar? Uh, sure. For, uh, third quarter next year we get the update and we talk startups. Uh, you, you got some great insights. Uh, where can people find you and follow you and, and, and keep track of the company?

Um, I write on celinehh.com. I'm on Twitter, Celine Halioua. Um, and yeah, I mean, in a year we're, we're gonna know if this thing is gonna make it or not. So it'll be an interesting conversation. If it doesn't make it, I'm gonna be scarred for life. So I literally have a tattoo of the thesis on my arm. 'Cause I wanna cut off this arm.

Let me see the arm. Let me see the arm. You do not need to cut it off.

So it's C. elegans, the black six mouse, and the black Labrador. This is the dog that they showed the lifespan extension in the first time, the study I told you about.

Mm-hmm.

And then in the worm, it's where they, they made the genetic mutation. That's the same one that we wanna support dogs with so they live a longer life. The larger dogs.

Um, I love it. Alexis Ohanian was just talking about he knew Reddit was going to be a phenomenon when somebody got the alien tattoo. If you, if you got tattoos of the logo, and a lot of people get the Apple logo, that, that's an easy one. People doing that for a long time. I bet you there's Tesla tattoos out there in the wild as well.

I'm sure there are. People are fanboys of Tesla.

Yeah. Listen, you've been a great guest. And, uh, yeah, whenever you know if this is going to work or not, let's have, let's pop a bottle of champagne. Or we'll sit here and we'll amputate your arm. Or just, you know, we'll do, we'll do laser removal. You'll go through painful laser removal and then I'll ask you questions about why you failed. And it'll just be this great postmortem. It'll be the most exciting episode of This Week in Startups ever. You getting laser remover. You ever see somebody get that?

Yeah.

It's, it's like, it's like a light or something. It's going pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. This is retribution for you making stupid decisions in your youth to get tattoos that you had no intention of keeping. I hope you had a great time in Cancún. You should not have gotten this tattoo. It's— and the people are crying, it's so painful. I love it. They should show that. They should show those videos of how painful tattoo removal is to everybody before they get their tattoo. It should be like a requirement.

I'm a— it's about terminal bias to action, right? It's like really good in startups, really bad in like most other life things. Have you listened to the Second Time Founders podcast?

I have not. Shout out Second Time Founders. I'll check that out.

So they have a really— I bring it up because you're talking about postmortems. They have a really interesting postmortem of Cloud. Um, and I think it's K-O-L-O-U-T.

Cloud Score.

Yeah. Um, and it's, I, it's the only podcast I have found that really talks about a company that failed and what happened and why.

Um, so we've done those episodes here, but you know what, I, I wanna formalize postmortem. Let's do postmortems once a month, Nick. I think it'd be great in the rotation.

You should. We do it in the internal at Loyal when we make mistakes.

Yeah, no, I've been, we've been doing it on our investment team and looking at, hey, where did we screw up? And then after, when we do like in-person events, we do, um, what did we learn? And so I have everybody the day after we go out to brunch or a lunch after an event, hey, what did we learn? What's top of mind? Um, you know, and, uh, I call it lessons learned so people can be honest with, you know, language matters. So I've got to learn by doing.

Ah, um, it's a big one, right? It's like, okay, what, what did you learn? And like, a bad thing happening is still, um, still a learning, so it's a good—

yeah. See, the original thing I wrote was a shared document that says, what did you fuck up? And then somebody on my team said, this is kind of negative, J-Cal, can you make it a little softer? And I said, lessons learned.

Yeah, I got in trouble for that too. I'm not—

this is why we're solo founders. This is why solo founders, because how we treat ourselves is not how human beings wanna be treated.

But it's very efficient for building big things.

Yes. I was talking to a, a very high-profile founder. I won't say who, and he was lamenting to me how he wants negative feedback. People don't give it to him.

No.

Historically. And then when he gives negative feedback, everybody gets crushed. And he's like, uh-huh, please tell me how I could be better. And then I feel like I'm talking to myself. I feel like, uh, you're the more successful female biotech version of me. You're— are you brutal to people? I think so. Yeah, maybe higher profile, but I think you're going to be more successful. Although I did have a really good joke that I didn't drop when you said, like, I have never taken a drug, uh, you know, I've never got a drug approved before. And I was like, when, in high school? In college? Like, give yourself a break, you're 28, kid. You got time. I think you'll be okay.

I'm old for tech and, uh, a child for biotech, so—

fair point, fair point. Uh, all right, listen, we'll see you all next time on This Week in Science. Bye-bye!