“We’re not doing 30 bets a year”: Vijay Pande on betting small

Vijay Pande — who left a16z's roughly $4 billion biotech practice last year to start the much smaller, AI-native VZVC — talks about why biology is finally shifting from a "discovery" science to an "engineering" one, why clinical trials are still brutally expensive, and why he thinks open, shared datasets (not walled-off ones) are what will actually let AI transform medicine. “We’re not doing 30 bets a year”: Vijay Pande on betting small after running $4 billion at a16z. 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?

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Medical Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult with qualified healthcare professionals for medical decisions and treatment options.