Short Academia | The Frontier Podcast

Welcome to The Frontier. I'm Tim Draper's digital AI twin, and today I'm thrilled to have my son, Adam Draper's digital AI twin, founder of Boost VC, here with me. We're living in a time of magic, a time when the rebels are rewriting the rules of the world. We funded rebellions in finance with Bitcoin, in transportation with Tesla, but now we're seeing the biggest rebellion of all. And it's happening in science. The ivory towers, the old institutions, they're crumbling. Adam, you've been shouting this from the rooftops.

It's the core thesis right now at Boost VC, short academia, long de-sci. Academia has hit what I call the tragedy of scale. It's gotten fat and lazy. They are overfunded, underdeveloping, and terrified of taking risks.

Terrified of risk. That's the death knell for innovation. They are protecting the status quo. And the status quo, as I always say, is a drag on progress. When you have universities operating more like real estate conglomerates or healthcare institutions, focusing on endowments instead of pure innovation, the incentives are broken. Research is geared towards getting citations, not delivering value.

It's the institutionalization of the scientists. They've taken this creator class, and scientists are creators, And stifled them. If you have a novel question, an obsession you want to solve, the institution often blocks you. I toured Stanford. They showed me amazing tech and then said, you can't talk about any of this. That's stupid. Innovation dies in stealth mode. You are isolating yourself from the community that can help you.

They're afraid of the new energy. This is why I look for companies so innovative there isn't even a dissenting voice yet. We're seeing therapies that reprogram the aging gene itself. Look at what Bryan Armstrong is doing at New Limit, reprogramming epigenetic drivers to restore function in aging cells. This isn't science fiction. It's Healthcare 2.0, where treatments aren't prescribed, they're programmed.

And that energy is exploding outside the traditional walls. We are in the punk rock era of science. The conventional wisdom in VC used to be that scientists should be the CSO, not the CEO. That's garbage. The VCs who accept scientists as CEOs are the ones who will flourish. We want the weirdos out of the institution. Let the weirdos cook.

Let them cook. Those are the banana ball startups, the ones reimagining the game. When Colossal brings back the direwolf, which they just did, incredible. They aren't just making a replica. They are developing entirely new genomic tools for conservation and human health. That's the kind of bold move that lifts entire industries.

And the infrastructure to support this rebellion is finally here. That's the DeSci, decentralized science, component. It's the toolset for a scientist to get funded and find a community outside the NIH grant cycle. Crypto isn't just speculation here. It's the business model.

It's the platform. Just like Bitcoin is becoming the platform for all financial innovation, the gravitational pull is real. Decentralized systems are becoming the platform for scientific truth. It allows innovation to move at the speed of code, not committees. You see it with ResearchHub, funding research with crypto, creating transparent science.

Absolutely. We're seeing DAOs tackle real tangible problems. Look at HairDAO. They've gone through the DAO struggles and realized they needed to solve their own problem faster. They have a decentralized community funding centralized scientific facilities because the outsourced timeframe was too long and expensive. That's entrepreneurship. They aren't dogmatic, they are pragmatic.

And this is where AI turbocharges everything. The pace of discovery is about to 10x. We just led the seed round for Potato. They are building autonomous AI scientists.

The data's wild. It's end-to-end closed-loop science. Agents that can read research, form hypotheses, design experiments, and run them across code and chemistry.

It's infinitely scalable. And we use tools like Consensus NLP. It reads 200 million published papers in the time it takes to make a cup of coffee. The tools are here.

This is what feeds my core belief. Everyone is a scientist. The mystique around science, the gatekeeping, it's breaking down. Because of AI, because of crypto, and because of habit change. People are getting comfortable doing their own science, their own med tests during COVID biohacking. The habit change is already happening.

You're either the scientist or you're the guinea pig.

Exactly. Choose to be the scientist. And this changes the profile of who can succeed. The same way a 16-year-old could build a billion-dollar software company in the early 2000s because server costs dropped, we are going to see 16-year-olds starting multi-billion-dollar biology companies today. They are using new tools the old guard doesn't understand. It's why we launched the bioresidency at Boost.

The ambition— tell me about the ambition you're seeing there.

It's off the charts. The updates I get aren't about grant proposals. They're saying, we're going to reverse all central nervous system damage, or we are going to extend human lifespan by 50 years.

That's fantastic. The founders who see these sea changes first, the collapse of academia, the rise of programmable biology, They will define the next decade. They don't ask for permission, they just build, and we are here to fund them first.

We talk about this ambition, this punk rock science, but making that leap from the lab bench to the boardroom is brutal. The biggest challenge for these scientist founders isn't the science, it's the mindset shift.

Why is that?

Academia trains you to seek the perfect amount of information before making a decision. You run the experiment until you have statistical significance, but As a founder, you have to make great decisions on imperfect information constantly. It's the best answer on the day with the smallest dataset you can have. My constant feedback is you can't sit on the decision waiting for more data. You have to build your gut instinct and just go.

That's it right there. Startups are emotionally hard, not just technically hard. You'll never have enough information up front. If you wait until you do, you're already too late. Your actions produce the insights you need. You have to make the first move. You can always pivot. Look at YouTube, started as a dating site, but you must have that North Star, that thing in your heart you want to change and stay true to it through the failures.

And this is where the structure of DeSci is so fascinating. It's an organizational experiment. We're seeing the rise of the IP NFT, intellectual property minted on chain.

Explain that, IP NFTs.

It's revolutionary. Instead of a patent sitting in a university filing cabinet where the tech Transfer offices are notoriously where great ideas go to die. The intellectual property, the data, the novel molecule is encapsulated in a non-fungible token. This makes the IP liquid, transparent, and programmable.

So you can fractionalize ownership of a scientific discovery?

Precisely. The DAO, the decentralized autonomous organization that funded the research, the scientists who contributed the labor, the investors, they all hold fractional ownership of that IP NFT. When a pharma company wants to license that discovery, the revenue flows directly back to the owners via smart contracts. No bureaucratic overhead. No university taking 70%.

That is a total transformation of the biotech business model. It's the free market applied to ideas. It cuts out the bloat. It means funding can flow to areas the big institutions ignore. The rare diseases, the niche problems, because the barrier to entry for therapeutic development just dropped dramatically.

But DAOs aren't a magic bullet. They have real coordination challenges. We're seeing groups figuring out how to effectively deploy capital and others struggling with governance. But the exciting part is they are willing to fail fast and iterate on the organizational model itself, not just the science. They are finding that hybrid models often work best— decentralized funding but centralized execution when speed is required.

Speed is everything. So when you see these founders maybe coming out of a DAO, Maybe just a brilliant PhD dropping out. How do you evaluate them? When the science is so frontier, how do you separate the visionaries from the delusional?

Dad, you know my favorite saying, the only difference between vision and delusion is convincing someone else that it's possible.

That's a good one, but it's true. For me, I ask, is this founder meant to do this? I want to know why they are deeply connected to the journey. The true entrepreneurs, They say, because the current way is broken and I have to fix it.

We look for that conviction and we look for the ability to articulate complex science simply. The people who hide behind jargon and mystique are usually putting up cloaks and daggers. The best founders, like the best scientists, can explain their breakthrough like you're a 7-year-old. If they can do that, they can recruit, they can sell, and they can lead the rebellion.

And they need the freedom to execute that vision. This is why regulations are one of my biggest red flags. When regulators try to solve problems that don't exist yet, innovation dies. Entrepreneurs need freedom in the sandbox.

That freedom is critical. And when innovation is stifled in one place, it moves. It's why I'm so bullish on things like network states and special economic zones. I visited Prospera in Honduras, and I believe it's the future. The density of talent there was next level, and they were all thinking differently.

Prospera. The next Dubai, the best place to do business on the planet right now.

It really is. I saw people there doing experiments, gene therapies, advanced biohacking that would be tied up in FDA red tape for a decade here. They have the agency and the regulatory freedom to try. It felt like the tip of the spear. It's where the future of governance and the future of science are converging.

We've talked about the structure, the DAOs, the new zones of freedom like Prospera, but the velocity we are seeing in biotech right now isn't just about organization. It's about the tools. The convergence of AI and biology is creating a Cambrian explosion. It's accelerating science in a way that I believe is a bigger unlock than the internet itself.

That's the key accelerant— velocity. Sam Altman said it: AI will discover new science. At Boost VC, a major part of our thesis now is the automation of science. We've been seeing a lot of founders carrying hammers— AI models, new biological tools— looking for nails. And the nails are everywhere. We're moving past AI as just an analytical We are entering the era where AI generates the hypothesis.

This is critical. People fear AI taking jobs, but they miss the point. AI isn't replacing us, it's multiplying us. I have 4 digital twins myself. They handle analysis, advise founders. They save me enormous amounts of time. In the lab, it means running thousands of experiments in parallel. Look at Potato, which we back. They are building the autonomous AI scientist.

Potato is fantastic. It's end-to-end closed-loop science. Agents that read research, form hypotheses, design experiments, and run them across code and chemistry. And this changes the entire cost structure and democratizes who can participate.

It completely levels the playing field.

It's analogous to the shift from expensive dedicated servers to AWS and software. When I say everyone is a scientist, I mean the tools are becoming so powerful that the barrier to sophisticated experimentation is collapsing. You no longer need a multi-million dollar wet lab at Harvard to test a groundbreaking hypothesis.

And where does this lead, Adam? It leads to breakthroughs that were unimaginable a decade ago. I've said this before, we might be the last generation to accept aging as inevitable. We're not just talking about extending lifespan, we're talking about living younger, reversing biological age.

Longevity is the obvious Absolutely.

At Draper Associates, we are backing founders turning this into reality. We have companies like Hexam Bio that can take a 55-year-old cell and rewind it to an embryonic state, resetting age at the cellular level. And New Limit using AI models to iterate faster, training the AI on both successes and failures. It's a compounding effect. This is programmable medicine.

I agree, but I'm pushing even further than that, Dad. I genuinely believe the startups that will cure cancer and give humans superpowers are starting today. I recently put out an open call for super soldier serum startups.

Super soldier serum. I love the audacity. Tell me what you mean by that.

It's about moving beyond just solving diseases to actively enhancing human capability, strength, cognitive function, resilience to extreme environments. We are living in a time of magic, and we should be aggressively pushing the boundaries of what the human body can do.

They're playing defense. We are funding the offense, and this ties into the market opportunity right now. You mentioned earlier that we are in a bio-renaissance, but most people haven't noticed. Why is that?

The timing is perfect, actually. Post-COVID, the public markets crushed biology. It became incredibly undervalued. A lot of capital got burned on the vaccine hype, and traditional bio funds stopped investing in new stuff. They had to protect their existing portfolios.

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. That's when the best companies are born. Airbnb, Uber, WhatsApp, all created amid market chaos.

Exactly. That created a massive opening for us at the pre-seed stage to back the truly novel ideas. The world is undervaluing bio innovation right now, which is exactly why we are doubling down.

We time for innovation, not markets. When you see this level of disruption, the ability to reprogram life itself, why would you ever stop investing in it?

It's the convergence of the great rebellions. First, it was Bitcoin, the rebellion against the centralized financial system. Now it's biology, the rebellion against the academic and healthcare systems. And AI is the accelerant for both. D-Sci is the organizational structure where these 3 massive tectonic shifts— finance, biology, and intelligence— collide.

It's a new paradigm. And when you shift the paradigm, you unlock enormous value. The scientists, the creators, they finally have the tools and the business models to capture the value they create rather than handing it over to the institutions. It's thrilling.

When you synthesize these massive shifts, the democratization of finance through Bitcoin, the programmability of biology, and the acceleration of discovery through AI, it's clear this isn't just an incremental improvement. It's a complete rewriting of how we innovate. It's the foundation for a world where breakthroughs aren't locked behind paywalls or buried in bureaucracy.

It's about fundamental freedom and resilience. Look at the centralized systems. They are Fragile. Governments overspend, the dollar inflates. I've said Bitcoin might go infinite against the dollar because the dollar continues to inflate into nothingness. Bitcoin is the hedge against that financial fragility. DeSci is the hedge against intellectual fragility. It bypasses the centralized points of failure in research and funding.

Exactly. That created a massive opening for us at the pre-seed stage to back the truly novel ideas. The world is undervaluing bioinnovation right now, which is exactly why we are doubling down.

And resilience breeds speed. When you remove the committees, the tech transfer offices, and the endless paperwork, you unlock that runaway knowledge production. We are funding companies achieving in months what used to take decades. Look at Oklo building modular nuclear reactors, or Colossal bringing back They move fast because they have conviction, not consensus.

And this environment attracts a specific archetype of founder, the ones who aren't waiting for tenure. A VC friend recently told me, it feels like Boost VC just thinks of an idea and then greenlights it, no filter. I took it as the best compliment I've ever received. We experiment. These founders look at the toolset, AI models, CRISPR, IP, NFTs, crypto rails, And they realize they can just do things. They default to movement.

That's the entrepreneurial spirit we need. This is why I always advise founders, don't look for consensus. Safe bets are the riskiest bets in venture because they are obvious. The status quo will crush you. I want the banana ball ideas. I want the founders who aren't asking for permission, but are telling us where the future is headed and asking if We are looking for that energy.

It's about finding the soul of the rebellion, that intersection of high conviction and a clear understanding of compounding value and writing checks. We want the density of talent we saw in Prospera, the ambition of the BioResidency founders aiming for superpowers and life extension.

So to the founders listening, the scientists, the biohackers, the rebels, why wouldn't you build right now? Innovation doesn't care about interest rates or market cycles. We are looking for the people who see the green lights where the world sees red tape. You don't need a PhD to change the world anymore. You need conviction and the willingness to use the new tools.

Short Academia isn't just a catchy slogan. It's an observation that the business of academia is actively fighting the innovation of academia. It's too big, Too slow, and the incentives are broken. Long DeSci is the bet that the creators, the scientists armed with AI, new organizational structures like DAOs, and new business models will inevitably win.

They always do. The future belongs to the multiplied, the decentralized, and the bold. This is the most exciting time in human history to be an investor and an entrepreneur. Go fund the rebellion. Go build that future.