Thrive Capital's Bet on Neuralink, OpenAI & the Future of Medicine

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Thrive Capital has emerged as one of the most prolific venture capital firms of the past decade.

SPEAKER_2 (0:05)

Thrive has been at the center of the biggest AI deals lately.

Nworah Ayogu (0:08)

The last 10 years, we've spent about 40 trillion on healthcare. We have not moved our lives because of C&H. The life expectancy is dropping.

SPEAKER_1 (0:16)

Americans are not living as long as they used to.

Nworah Ayogu (0:19)

And if that is not an indictment of the failure of the healthcare system, I don't know what is. 40 trillion for no change. More so than maybe any other time in history. The frontier of science and the frontier of what we've accomplished is moving faster than ever. We're seeing this explosion of AI and drug discovery. And I think that is changing the way in which we're going to deliver and make drugs. It's also going to change the entire value chain. Two-thirds of physicians in America are using OpenEvidence.

SPEAKER_2 (0:46)

The company says about 40% of the doctors in the US right now are already using the chat bot. It's like a ChatGPT for doctors.

Nworah Ayogu (0:52)

OpenAI is now one of the largest healthcare providers in America. They have 300 million people asking ChatGPT questions every week about healthcare specifically. Healthcare is the key hero use case for most people. Neuralink is a more interesting company and SpaceX. As a nation, I think we need a 10X nurse a lot more than we need a 10X engineer.

Molly O'Shea (1:24)

Dr. Wara, welcome to Sourcery.

Nworah Ayogu (1:27)

Thanks for having me.

Molly O'Shea (1:27)

We have so much to cover today. I think it's like a really awesome time to go deep into Thrive and Thrive's portfolio in healthcare. There's a lot going on in biotech. You're up to 14 healthcare incubation and Oscar Health was incubated at the time of Thrive launching. So there's a long lore here to get into.

Nworah Ayogu (1:47)

Our first investment was a healthcare investment in Oscar. So it's been part of our DNA from the start.

Molly O'Shea (1:52)

I just got back from Priscilla and Mark Zuckerberg's event for Biohub where they came together with the Department of Energy and a handful of other big leaders. Isomorphic Labs was actually there on the stage too. And so it seems like we're in this complete inflection point of biology and drug discovery and AI and healthcare. And there's just a lot going on there. So I'd love to start with that and just kind of get your pulse on why now.

Nworah Ayogu (2:18)

I would say, more so than maybe any other time in history, the frontier of science and the frontier of what we've accomplished is moving faster than ever. We're seeing this explosion of AI and drug discovery. And I think that is changing the way in which we are going to deliver and make drugs. That's also going to change the entire value chain. The same way that with AI, we saw that the labs, we've seen that trade flow through the entire supply chain. Needs around compute, needs around memory, needs around kind of energy. We've seen that flow through. We're going to see the same thing with biotech, where it's not just drug discovery, it's going to be manufacturing, it's going to be sort of development. And how you do your clinical trials is going to be commercialization. We're going to see that flow all the way through. We're seeing these new trends in N of one medicine. So the ability to create actual customized treatments for an individual that can treat conditions that we could never sort of do before. We've seen that already occur and already have an effect. We're only going to see sort of more and more of that. I think the last-eyed flag would be this interesting intersection between hardware and biotech as well, that's allowing us to kind of unlock treatments we couldn't unlock before. I think of two of our companies, Neuralink and Sort of Fortel. You look at the problems that they're solving and the capabilities they let us have.

They're almost biblical in proportion, right?

The lame can walk, the mute can speak, right? It's quite amazing when you actually see what folks have been able to unlock.

Molly O'Shea (3:48)

It's incredible. And for those who don't know Thrive's portfolio in health care, I'll just name off a few companies like OpenEvidence, OpenAI, Cadence, Nourish and a handful of others. But in terms of the trillion-dollar company, of that one being more of a traditional health care company, there's obviously an explosion of companies that are now really grasping the proliferation of using and utilizing data, and how much data can be shared between one another. And whether it's with Alpha Fold or drug discovery, all these sorts of things, how do you make sense of the evolution of that and what buckets it's flowing into?