#868: Tim’s Founder Kitchen — From Brainstorm to The President’s Office in Two Months (Featuring Jake Becraft, Strand Therapeutics)

**Jake Becraft** (0:00)
In genetic medicine, I would call it the holy grail for the last 30 years, has been thinking about how do we administer intravenous, which means into the bloodstream, genetic medicines that can get to places throughout the body. We've been trapped in one organ for the past 30 years, and that's the liver.
We are the first company that I'm aware of to show this extent of ebscopal response in visceral, deep organ metastases in a multitude of patients, and really right off the bat. What I want the world to understand is that we are standing right now on the precipice of a revolution in genetic medicine. We're going to be able to get to a point in the not too distant future where I think a lot of types of cancers are at the very least chronic diseases instead of death sentences.

**Tim Ferriss** (1:01)
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show, where it's my job to deconstruct world-class performers. Has been my job for more than a decade. This episode is going to be an experimental format. It's going to be half interview, half live jam session because many of the most fascinating conversations that I have, I cannot record. They're often involving startup founders because for close to 20 years I've been an angel investor. That started in 2008 in the Bay Area.
Some of those companies include Shopify. I was the first advisor when they had something like 10 or 12 employees, Uber, Precede Round Advisor. Then you got Facebook, now known as Meta, Twitter, Alibaba, Dualingo, Clear, it goes on and on and certainly plenty of fatalities. But when things are interesting, they're so interesting. I've wanted to share some of these conversations, but when they're about fundraising or something really confidential, I can't do that. I wanted to think up how I could create a series. In this case, we're calling it as a placeholder Tim's Founder Kitchen. I'm sure there's a better name. Please let me know on X at T Ferris if you have suggestions. But these are going to be actual brainstorming slash jam sessions with founders who are willing to share the audio. In this case, we have an episode with Jake Becraft of Strand Therapeutics, which is one of the companies I am most excited about. They're very, very bold. In this conversation, you will hear an actual early stage brainstorming session that led two months later to those talking points being with the President of the United States in the Oval Office, so to speak.
You will get to track a positioning conversation and a comms conversation, and the homing in on that message that ultimately leads to hopefully some real high-level policy change involving testifying in front of Congress and all sorts of stuff. So this is a rare instance where you get a before and after, and so it's a two-part conversation with Jake. In the process of listening to this, you will also learn a lot about the future of medicine. You'll learn a lot about genetic medicine, and the whole thing I think is very, very exciting. Now, if you want to skip to part two, where we kind of find our groove and you get to hear about the results of the earlier conversation, you can do that by hopping to about one hour and 18 minutes. But you will miss the early questions and the process of refining and refining and refining that ultimately led to those results. And had one more note on that initial dinner where Jake and I met in Boston. There were two other attendees. You have Jamie, who is CEO of Alden Scientific, A-L-D-E-N, and then you have Phil, who is CEO of Holobium, H-O-L-O-B-I-O-M-E.
And both of them ended up winning ARPA-H grants for the research and work that they're doing. And ARPA-H, for people who don't know, is modeled on the defense agency DARPA, which is incredible in its own right. And ARPA-H does not operate its own laboratories. Instead, it funds or empowers visionary teams to take bold, seemingly impossible challenges in human health. And they do that by pulling from private industry, universities, and elsewhere. So this is for the high risk, high reward experiments and projects in biomedical and health breakthroughs. In any case, who is Jake in brief, but I won't spoil the party by giving you a polished description of Strand. Just yet, I will say, Jake Becraft is the CEO and co-founder of Strand Therapeutics, a company building one of the most advanced programmable genetic medicine platforms in biotechnology. You can find him on X at Dr.Synbio. That's D-R-S-Y-N-B-I-O.
And Strand, be sure to check it out, Strand, as you would expect, strandtx.com.