“We’re not doing 30 bets a year”: Vijay Pande on betting small after running $4 billion at a16z

It used to be that Vijay Pande was better known in academic circles than investor circles. That changed pretty abruptly a dozen years ago, when Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz — who’d spent their firm’s first five years explicitly avoiding healthcare and life sciences — decided the category was worth betting on after all and handed the keys to Pande. At the time, he was a Stanford chemistry professor who was best known for building Folding@home, the distributed-computing project that turned millions of home PCs into a supercomputer for disease research. Over the next decade-plus, he grew a16z’s bet into a practice managing close to $4 billion.

So it was somewhat unexpected when in June of last year, Pande walked away from it all to start something much smaller. In fact, his new firm, VZVC, co-founded with longtime investor Zach Werner, is built around a handful of concentrated bets a year rather than dozens, it has no associates, and it relies heavily on AI for its day-to-day operations.

To learn more about Pande’s hard pivot, we talked with him this week about why he’s making just a handful of concentrated bets rather than spreading himself thin in the current market — and about one of the more interesting conundrums in AI-driven biotech: unlike text, biological data can’t be scraped off the internet, so nearly every company ends up building its own walled-off dataset. What does that mean for all the advances AI in medicine has promised, and who actually gets access to them?