
How Biotech Startup Funding Will Change in the Next 10 Years - snowmaker
https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-biotech-startup-funding-will-change-in-the-next-10-years/
======
dekhn
Both of these statements are still very much in flux:

"Affordable lab robots from companies like OpenTrons mean you can do batch
experiments without hiring an army of people, and computational drug discovery
from companies like Atomwise allows some experiments to be done completely in
silico."

I work in this field and I strongly recommend being extremely cautious making
claims like this. You can't just get rid of lab techs when you use OpenTrons
(instead, they spend their time debugging the robots), and in silico discovery
of drugs is still fairly unreliable.

~~~
jonlucc
I guess I don't understand how OpenTrons will make a big difference. The
pipetting robots we have around my company are the "expensive" ones by
Hamilton and other traditional makers. I think those machines cost $40k, which
is definitely more expensive than OpenTrons, but they're hardly a limiting
cost compared to generating samples and the disposables for whatever assay
you're automating.

Also, we have a department whose job is to run high-throughput assays, and
they spend a lot of time and money validating an assay before they run the
real samples through.

~~~
entee
In grad school we bought robots because we thought they would make us faster.
With very few exceptions they didn't, I was still faster with a multipipettor
than our robots. This was because:

1.) Getting the robot to behave means it has to see the same thing every time,
that's not easy to accomplish, hence the validation people do.

2.) Even when the thing is the same as before, robots break down. Handling
solvents with robots is tricky because different solvents have different
viscosities. If the robot misses a well, how do you know?

If you have a team that knows the robot well, and it's set up well, then all
these problems are manageable. But lets not kid ourselves that it's just
trivially solved now because we have robots.

An analogy in server land, we now have AWS and GCP. Basically now it's trivial
to automate things it would take weeks/months to do by hand in the past.
However, they each have an army of sysadmins and engineers behind the scenes
servicing all the "robots" and making sure everything runs smoothly.

~~~
ericmcer
So we should have just thrown away the first computers because inputting
problems into them wasn't that much faster than doing it by hand?

~~~
entee
Robots are absolutely useful, and major companies are building out massive
robotics facilities to accelerate drug development. The point is that it's not
a magic solution. It still takes a bunch of staff to run, and (much less
appreciated) it takes a different mindset to be maximally useful.

For example, maybe instead of doing a dozen informative but slightly complex
assays, you do 1000 less useful but less complex assays. The end result might
be just as useful if not more, but you have to structure your experiment
differently.

It's unlikely that technology will play out the same way in biotech as it has
in pure tech. I'm heavily invested in the idea that it will be immensely
useful, but given the different constraints and problem space I think the
trajectory will be different.

------
DoreenMichele
I have mixed feelings about this. We are increasingly seeing "cool tech" in
the biotech area, but it often doesn't look to me like it really supports
better health per se.

Better health seems to come from "living right" and that would be better
supported by companies that help people exercise, eat right, improve the
hygiene of their homes, etc. Gyms, urban planning, worker's rights advocates
and so forth seem to do a better job of actually serving a goal of better
health.

But you don't really get to claim credit for dramatic health improvements via
those pathways. You don't get to claim "Our gym helps reduce the incidence of
cancer by preventing it!" In order to make impressive claims about curing
cancer, you have to first wait for someone to have cancer, then fix it.
Prevention isn't an exciting, drama-filled field. It's not where the big money
and the impressive headlines live.

I have concerns that getting better at the biotech approach helps create a
monster, but there's no stopping it because preaching about diet and lifestyle
will never have the same sizzle as "curing cancer."

~~~
JabavuAdams
I'm holding out for the octopus-skin tattoos. I'll get a tattoo when DOOM is
ported to skin.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Clearly, I lack vision and have some research to do.

------
boltzmannbrain
Life Sciences VCs that incubate and spin-out their own companies put serious
muscle behind the startups, in two main areas: money and leadership. The
article notes the first, going on to suggest large upfront financing is no
longer necessary, but glosses over the second. In biotech it is still very
much the status quo to have seasoned execs leading startups. Not because
younger founders are incapable, but rather this is what pharma execs want to
see, and have connections with. It's hard enough for a startup to get pilots
and deals with pharmacos, exponentially so if the founders just took CS 270
with the CEO's grandkid.

~~~
aaavl2821
I think that the phenotype of biotech founders is changing and will continue
to change. Some of the early stage biotech VCs who built their businesses
around funding ex-Genentech execs are beginning to fund younger founders
(although they are still open to replacing them with experienced execs post
Series A).

More $10B+ biotech companies have been built by younger (under 40) CEOs than
experienced CEOs. The dogmatic preference for experienced CEOs in biotech is a
relatively recent phenomenon (last 15-20 years). It is a function of 1) all
the next-gen tech of the genomic bubble of the late 1990s flaming out (gene,
cell and antisense therapy v1, genomics v1) and 2) the success of the asset-
centric build-to-buy model in biotech VC.

If your model is to fund assets carved out from big pharma, develop them to
human POC, then flip them back to big pharma, it makes sense to hire ex big
pharma managers to run the company. If your model is to build a large, lasting
startup, historical data suggest you are better off with a younger, more
technical founder. In a world where pharma is not doing as much startup M&A,
where capital is readily available from Series B to public markets, and where
you can get drugs approved relatively quickly, more startups have the option
of becoming independent companies and not just trying to sell to pharma

~~~
boltzmannbrain
> The dogmatic preference for experienced CEOs in biotech is a relatively
> recent phenomenon (last 15-20 years).

I guess it's relative, I'm not even 30 :)

FWIW the pushback I get from big pharma is less around age but rather as an AI
guy saying "look I solved that thing you've spent 20 years working on."

~~~
aaavl2821
Yeah that's fair, from ppl I know at AI drug discovery companies it seems like
selling to big pharma is tough. Potentially bc the people who assess the
technical feasibility of your product may be put out of a job by it :/

Have you tried selling to startups? From what I've heard they are better
customers for AI drug discovery services as there is less entrenched interest
in manual med chem and they value lower cost / fast iteration more

~~~
boltzmannbrain
AI drug discovery is not an ideal market -- crowded, and long horizons to
validation checkpoints. Our value prop to pharma is in clinical trials
utilities. Relative to drug discovery, better path from pilots to revenue
deals, but still cumbersome. Nonetheless your advice to target startups is
sound :)

------
duxup
I honestly don't know so that's why I'm asking:

Have the "Biotech Startup" companies changed much in biotech yet?

As the article describes there is sort of a merging of the concepts behind
tech startups and biotech startups but some of the "biotech startups" I've
seen seemed to be things like a fancy CRUD app for biotech and they just
wanted "biotech" in their name to seem cutting edge. That makes it hard to
know who "Biotech Startups" even are.

Other situations where we've heard about traditional tech startup culture
applied to biotech where the leadership did not understand how incredibly
iterative / random biology research can be and how that greatly influences the
speed you can move at. Where you can take lots of data and come up with some
results in tech as computers are predictable, biology tend to throw a lot of
curve balls making all your data wrong when you least expect it.

Have "Biotech Startup's" show enough promise to get to this next stage in the
first place?

It seems like the traditional Biotech industry is way more complex to break
into than say putting a web-application product in someone's face.

~~~
aaavl2821
The biotech startup world has changed a ton in the last 7 years. However, the
biotech startup world is a completely different one than the tech startup
world, and the tech press doesn't really talk much about biotech startups that
aren't AI/ML related or funded by traditional tech VCs.

$17B was invested in biopharma startups in 2018 [0]. Less than 10% of that
came from traditional "tech" VCs. Most of these companies are traditional drug
development companies pursuing new ways to treat cancer, rare disease,
autoimmune disease and neurodegenerative disease. If you're interested in
learning more about these companies, i maintain a database of recently funded
biotech startups with some stats on what type of companies get funded [6]

10 years ago, a biotech startup was basically an external R&D program for big
pharma. If there was an asset or area of biology that was interesting but too
risky for pharma, a VC would start a company to develop that asset until the
big risks were taken out, and then big pharma would buy the company. The VC
would hire big pharma managers and scientists to run the program, which makes
sense as it is basically a carve out of a big pharma program

Today, startups are much more ambitious. They are developing powerful
platforms that can support real companies, not just flipping assets to pharma.
They are increasingly exploring new types of drugs: gene therapy, cell
therapy, microbiome therapy, synthetic biology platforms. Pharma has no
expertise in these areas, so some startups could build very valuable
independent companies here. Many startups are now commercializing products on
their own, which was unheard of 10 years ago.

Some of these companies are working on amazing science. There is so much
exciting stuff happening in biology and bioengineering. The tech press focuses
more on stuff like AI/ML, which is definitely interesting, but IMO that stuff
is probably like the fourth or fifth coolest thing happening in biotech right
now. When you read about AI/ML in traditional biotech press, most of the
articles are about why it won't work. People are much more excited about other
stuff

If you are interested in learning more about the biotech startup world, you
can check out Endpoints News [1], FierceBiotech [2], and STAT [3]. These are
some of the more popular startup news sources in biotech

I wrote a few articles about the "old" biotech startup model [4] and how that
model is changing and will change in the future [5] if you're interested in
more on what's changing now in biotech

[0]
[https://www.baybridgebio.com/1h2019_report](https://www.baybridgebio.com/1h2019_report)

[1] [https://endpts.com/](https://endpts.com/)

[2] [https://www.fiercebiotech.com/](https://www.fiercebiotech.com/)

[3] [https://www.statnews.com/](https://www.statnews.com/)

[4]
[https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/young_founders_2.html](https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/young_founders_2.html)

[5]
[https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/young_founders_3.html](https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/young_founders_3.html)

[6]
[https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/recently_funded_biotech_st...](https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/recently_funded_biotech_startups.html)

~~~
duxup
Thank you.

------
ackbar03
As a pre finance guy, I feel like the funding landscape change has more to do
with the massive liquidity post QE just sloshing around. I feel like a lot of
the financial trends can all be traced back to this single factor. It's the
reason why we've had such a massive bull run in stocks. Come next financial
crises that could freeze up, but then rates are going to go back down to zero
again and who knows what might happen. So Paul Graham could be right again.

~~~
aaavl2821
Liquidity is definitely amping things up in biotech, but industry trends and
scientific advances are playing equal if not larger roles.

The NASDAQ biotech index starting outpacing the more tech-focused NASDAQ and
the S&P around 2012. Biotech's outperformance peaked in 2015 and has been
growing roughly at the rate of the NASDAQ since. The growth around 2012 was
driven by better than expected sales from a number of big biotech companies
like REGN, CELG, GILD, AMGN, BIIB that drove their stocks way up.

Then from 2012-2015 biotech benefited from a ton of pharma M&A. 2012 was the
"patent cliff" where a ton of blockbuster drugs went off patent. Some very big
companies lost 30%+ of their sales. 2012 was the first year ever that the
pharma industry's sales shrank. At the same time, R&D productivity in big
pharma was declining and they were laying off tons of R&D staff, so they had
no new drugs to replace the off-patent ones. So they started buying tons of
startups, and paying high prices

M&A activity dropped after 2015, and the sector's growth has been more limited
since.

There also seem to be fundamental advances in science that are decreasing the
cost and risk of drug development. Some studies suggest that the probability
of approval is actually increasing in recent years. Some of this is because
FDA is becoming more supportive of innovation, some is because of advances in
precision medicine, biology, biochemistry, etc

Interestingly very little of the current biotech boom has to do with AI/ML /
novel "tech". There are certainly advances in computation, biostatistics etc
that have enabled companies to develop drugs more efficiently, but these have
mostly come from within industry or academia, rather than from tech startups.
There are some really interesting tech startups working in bio that could
drive a new wave of innovation, but that would be on top of the innovation
coming from biologists, biochemists, biostatisticians etc

------
sethbannon
I wrote about some of the technical advancements driving these changes here:
[http://sethbannon.com/biotech-in-the-garage](http://sethbannon.com/biotech-
in-the-garage)

Note: this post is 4 years old so somewhat out of date.

------
technotony
Another big change that plays into this trend is the switch in markets.
Traditionally biotech was B2B focused (eg drugs, ingredients, biofuel
commodity plays) but as the science platforms are being developed as
articulated in this article we are seeing the beginnings of B2C biotech
companies, eg Impossible Foods. I think this shift in the market is also going
to drive very different fundraising strategies.

~~~
breck
For people interested in Consumer Biotech, here are more orgs to look into:
23andme, Ancestry, FitBit, Garmin, Apple Watch/Health, Verily, Oxford
Nanopore, czbiohub.

------
ggm
Given the huge overhang of real-world testing which vests in public health, I
still beleive the best model for biotech in medicine and agribusiness is NOT
the private sector, but I suspect I'm an outlier, if not actually a sole
believer here.

------
readhn
Thats a very One sided view.

Biotech is overly regulated today (for good reasons). Because of that the
entrance barrier is very high. It costs a lot more money today to start and
run a biotech company.

To run a clinical trial for FDA submission process will cost you from several
$ million to $ 100+million. To bring a drug to the market is ~$1B.

Only big guys with deep pockets can afford the expenses. If anything biotech
is getting consolidated and monopolized (similar to tech world where FANG own
everything) just like the rest of the industries.

My prognostication for next 20 years - big pharma and a few other biotech
giants will own everything promising in the biotech world.

------
jnurmine
About developing new pharmaceuticals: apparently something that works well
with mice might or might not eventually work with humans, and it's a slow and
costly process to notice this only at the end of phase III clinical trials.

If someone comes up with a way to do hyper-accurate and fast in silico testing
of human physiology, the duration of the clinical research would be
dramatically shortened from the 10-15 years it takes nowadays.

If this ever happens, the valuation of biotech companies creating
pharmaceuticals will explode onto absurd levels (like internet companies did
during the "IT bubble").

~~~
irq11
There is zero chance of this occurring in our lifetime. We don’t understand
even a tiny fraction of human biology, and every new drug - by definition - is
exploring a new part of chemical space that we’ve never sampled before.

This is the fundamental hard, hard thing about biology and medicine that
silicon valley thought-leaders don’t understand. There is nothing about drug
discovery that is deterministic.

------
ramraj07
Unfortunately this post does not give me much confidence that YC will
replicate its success in biotech. To illustrate why I’m just going to focus on
the first example they give, Shasqi, because coincidentally this is the type
of idea I and my colleagues would regularly propose to each other and play
“find the flaw.”

In this case, this falls into the bin of, “are you absolutely sure this is the
reason why cancer therapies fail?” Localized drug delivery sounds great in
paper, but to my knowledge and what I’ve learned talking to people who know
more than me, its not the most important issue - its actually hard to even be
absolutely sure that the effects of chemical chemotherapy are fully explained
by tumor-local effects (there’s a huge immune system component to it), so its
efficacy compared to real chemotherapy is hard to predict.

Their publication also reads like one of tens of thousands of similar papers
and approaches that often get published in the hundreds or thousands of
journals. The paper is not bad at all, its a good proof of concept of the
_chemistry_ and the fact that it does at least something inside a living
organism (as opposed to chemical methods and derivatives that are not even
biocompatible), but it does not convince me a bit that this is actually a
worthwhile method to think about.

While there are numerous issues that lead to it, the most important is the
fact that this (and virtually every other) paper that tries to show efficacy
in cancer therapy uses xenograft mouse models to show it; this is where you
take mice which have most of their immune system knocked out and inject HUMAN
cancer cells (that have been cultured in petridishes for decades) to make a
tumor and then try out various drugs to see which cures the tumor. Why do we
need to use immune-compromised mice? Because otherwise the mouse’s own immune
system will recognize any cell that did’t originate from its own body as
foreign and quickly kill it. So now, we have a system where this drug-
modification is compared to its baseline (which as I mentioned above, is
probably going to need a viable immune system to function as it does in a real
patient) in a system that inherently stifles it. So even if it shows to be
better in a wildly artificial model, it says nothing about its efficacy in a
human. I’ll go out on a limb and say that there’s actually enough evidence in
their papers that this will never be better than regular chemo in a human
(will be glad to go into detail if anyone’s interested) but even otherwise
there’s not enough info available to say that this will work in humans.

While that might have been more detailed than some might like, the point is
that I’d personally not even consider myself an “expert” in cancer therapy; I
merely did a PhD in a lab that used to do some stuff related to it. But I can
already see so many red flags in this single effort (I’ve seen similar
reflags, wherever I knew some stuff, in other YC funded companies too). So, at
least for therapeutic areas, I’m still not convinced that optimistic outlooks
towards such projects is a good thing.

Of course, just saying you shouldn’t be optimistic with biotech projects is
not enough, and I’ve struggled till now to put it in reasonable words why
biotech (especially therapeutic) is different from technology companies and
projects. But this article solidified it in my head and I boil it down to two
points:

1\. In tech, when you show a proof of concept for a product, you have
essentially created the final product in the final environment as its going to
be used by at least some users. Almost always, the main things you need to
figure out are how you can “scale” it, and how you can make it appeal to a
wider audience; but the premise of the product is proven with the prototype.
With biology however, the premise is most definitely not proven with anything
short of a phase II clinical trial. Almost all animal models (or anything in a
lab dish) are significantly different from humans in ways that are
fundamentally important for the mechanisms of action for these drugs. The only
way to be absolutely sure that a drug has a really good chance of working in a
human being is to inject it into a human with that disease and see if they
die. So no matter how fancy the xenograft model or what caliber the nature
publication might be, its still at best comparable to a deck of powerpoint
slides in the tech VC pitch analogy and not anything comparable to a real
prototype.

2\. In tech, its a reasonable assumption that you can build more or less
anything as functionality in an app/website, as long as it makes reasonable
physical sense, because many engineers can have a fully comprehensive mental
model of what is and is not physically and computationally possible inside
computers. In biology its not at all a good assumption that if it makes sense
in your head, then it will work in a human being, because no single person
(not even a mythical House MD) has a full mental model of what we currently
understand about all our biological systems. Our systems are too complicated
and intricate (and without an organized creator) to keep in head by anyone, so
its really hard to predict what will fail and cause a problem with our
hypothesis. To some extent, every biotech project we do, even as an expert, is
akin to someone who has barely used a smartphone coming up with an app idea -
of course once in a while its going to make sense and be brilliant, but most
of the time they have no idea how technology works in the backend and hence
cannot say what is and is not possible.

Given these fundamental differences between biotech and tech, I’m going to
remain skeptical until someone tells how they have figured out a solution to
them.

~~~
snowmaker
Thanks for reading the Shasqi paper and for the detailed comment!

It seems if I can paraphrase your argument that it boils down to: "Just
because your drug works in a mouse doesn't mean it will work in a human. So
even if it works in a mouse there is still a lot of technical and scientific
risk left."

I certainly agree with that. But I don't think it's incompatible with what I
wrote in the blog post. The way the economics of the pharmaceutical industry
work, it is still worth taking drugs into human trials even if the chances of
them working are small.

~~~
ramraj07
Wow thanks for going through my comment!

Definitely appreciate more people funding projects like this. Heck, hopefully
I'll be applying with an idea like this in the future too!

My worry/question is, what steps are you taking to vet the eventual scientific
feasibility of these ideas? My main thesis is that biotech ideas and projects
are fundamentally different from tech in the sense that any prototype (less
than a clinical trial) is not a real prototype so some method needs to exist
to account for that in the evaluation.

~~~
snowmaker
I think you answered this very well yourself: "In biology its not at all a
good assumption that if it makes sense in your head, then it will work in a
human being, because no single person (not even a mythical House MD) has a
full mental model of what we currently understand about all our biological
systems."

We do our best to vet the eventual scientific feasibility of these ideas, but
it's along the lines of "it makes sense in theory", not "it will definitely
work".

Because, as you said, our understanding of biology is so incomplete, I think
that is the best that is possible right now. But I think that's ok. We (as a
society) should be pursuing all the ideas that make sense. Some will work out
of the box, some will work with modifications, and some just won't work at
all. But this is the only way I know to make progress.

------
sjg007
These are YC style biotech startups which I don't think have played out yet.
The traditional approach raises a few million to get to phase 1 and then
usually gets bought if the data looks promising. Many of these have pharma
partnerships and/or investment. Sometimes they IPO earlier to get some outside
capital. What's good about that is that the public can get in on it sooner.
The bio side is very much driven by academia and spin offs.

------
petra
Will we be seeing a similar process happen to "deep tech" startups ?

And if so , what's the infrastructure behind that ?

~~~
tlb
Depends on the tech. Aerospace has gotten significantly cheaper due to
accurate simulation tools. You can design a supersonic airplane or rocket
engine in software and expect the first prototype to at least sort-of work.

The improvement of tools and slowing of silicon process improvement means that
a startup can fab a competitive special-purpose CPU. Hennessy and Patterson's
Turing lecture has an overview
[[https://iscaconf.org/isca2018/turing_lecture.html](https://iscaconf.org/isca2018/turing_lecture.html)]

Robotics has gotten easier and cheaper thanks to good off-the-shelf sensors
and actuators.

------
daemonk
The bio in biotech makes all the difference. Dismissing the unpredictable
nature of bio R&D by saying we can just outsource to a CRO is a massive
oversimplification. Time and effort is not linear to results in Biological
research.

------
aaavl2821
I completely agree that funding will change dramatically in the next few
years, and that the phenotype of founders will change. YC is doing a lot of
awesome things to lead this change.

Historically, most $10B+ biotherapeutics companies were started by young
technical founders, but most VCs today start companies in house, then hire
older, non technical execs from big pharma to run the companies. Most of these
companies are built to sell, and will never be lasting companies. I wrote
several articles on this [0], [1], [2], [3]

This model is poorly suited for companies based on innovative platform tech.
Technical founders (biologists, bioengineers) are the right people for these
companies. In this way, biotech is very much like the tech startup world pre-
YC

However, I don't necessarily agree that the world is changing because starting
a biotech company is getting cheaper. And I don't think the traditional tech
funding model is right for biotech.

The biggest risk in biotech is that stuff that works in mice doesn't work in
people. You need to filter out false positives early on to avoid spending
$200M getting a drug that wont likely work to Phase 2. It is better to spend
$2M properly vetting the science than it is to go cheap and fast and cut
corners. The reason biotech VCs have done so well the last 10 years is that
they are really good at finding bad science quickly. The mentality of "spend
as little money as possible to quickly generate positive data to raise more
money" is the mindset that leads to the reproducibility crisis in academia
and, in extreme cases, to companies like theranos

Starting a biotech company is cheaper, but it has been cheaper for a while.
The big change now is that biotech companies can get bigger because scientific
innovations are letting us develop better medicines faster with higher
probability of success. 10 years ago, it was unlikely for a biotherapeutics
startup to exit for over $500M. Now we see dozens of $1b+ exits a year

Companies are getting bigger, and they are getting big faster. Kite, Juno and
Avexis (gene and cell therapy leaders) reached $8-10B valuations faster than
SpaceX, Twitter, Pinterest and Dropbox.

It is now possible to power law invest in biotech, which was impossible 10
years ago when you had to get venture returns for a fund in a world where the
best exit you could hope for was $500M. In that world, VCs have to get
consistent singles and doubles: low risk, low valuations. Now investors can
take more risk (including management risk) and invest at higher valuations

But they need to take smart risks. Product cycles in biotech are still much
more expensive and long than tech. You need to diligence the science and be
thoughtful.

[0]
[https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/young_founders.html](https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/young_founders.html)

[1]
[https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/young_founders_1.html](https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/young_founders_1.html)

[2]
[https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/young_founders_2.html](https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/young_founders_2.html)

[3]
[https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/young_founders_3.html](https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/young_founders_3.html)

------
carapace
To me funding biotech startups seems like pouring gasoline on a fire that we
should be putting out.

Our divorce from Nature is perhaps the deepest epistemological problem facing
us today.

Biotech is more of the same.

"I and Thou" by Martin Buber talks about the difference between what he calls
"I-It" and "I-Thou".
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_and_Thou](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_and_Thou)

We treat the rest of the living world like _things_ that we can use and
dispose of as we see fit. We adopt an "I-It" stance to the living world around
us only to discover that we are lonely and fundamentally dissatisfied,
unhappy, unhealthy, plagued by disease, and rapidly destroying ourselves. It
doesn't have to be this way. We can recover our "I-Thou" relationship with
Nature.

 _You can talk to life._

It's not difficult. You don't need any technology at all to do it. You don't
need any investment money.

You can literally communicate with other living things (and your own
tissues†), exchange information, make arrangements, etc. At that point it's
really easy to e.g. grow all your food _and medicine_ in a garden.
(Economically, of course, this would be _radically_ disruptive at scale.) For
example, they have never made a big deal about it but that's how Findhorn
Garden started: they were (and still are) communicating with Nature Spirits
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Findhorn_Ecovillage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Findhorn_Ecovillage)

Folks like Dr. Levine are filling in the scientific story for this sort of
thing:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18700328](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18700328)

But the actual "protocols" or "algorithms" to learn to communicate with other
living beings are very simple and require no technology.

So, can I start a startup? Of course not, there's no money in it. In fact, if
more people would do what I do much of the economy would evaporate.

\- - - -

FWIW, I'm in San Francisco. If anyone reading this wants to meet up and learn
about bio-telepathy and accelerated healing and stuff let me know.

†The other day I burned my thumb taking a pan out of the oven. When I stopped
hopping around I communicated with the tissues in my thumb to "shape" or
"guide" the healing response, with the result that the pain went away and
didn't come back and the burn healed rapidly without leaving a scar. This is
not a surprising or unusual event in my life. (Burning myself was unusual, I'm
usually pretty careful.) Accelerated healing without pain is _trivial_ if you
know how.

