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

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. Under his leadership, Strand is redefining what RNA medicines can do by enabling cell-selective targeting and therapeutic payload delivery inside the body, unlocking a new class of precision genetic therapies.

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• [00:00:00] Start. • [00:06:07] What Strand does. • [00:08:19] The Boston dinner. • [00:11:05] The image of a body riddled with cancer. • [00:15:05] What stuck for the muggles in the pitch deck. • [00:17:14] A good drug vs. a good product. • [00:19:40] Tricking cancer into snitching on itself. • [00:27:38] The abscopal effect. • [00:34:04] Potency, specificity, and delivery. • [00:35:46] First principles thinking. • [00:36:38] The precipice of a revolution. • [00:41:14] The thousand people in the room. • [00:48:38] Psychedelic medicine as a cautionary tale. • [00:51:17] What actually catches a policymaker’s attention. • [00:53:42] Breakthrough vs. incremental. • [00:54:55] What’s in it for the policymakers? • [00:58:08] The 80/20 wish list. • [01:01:31] Australia’s CTN system. • [01:03:51] Sheep, psychedelics, and red-tape arbitrage. • [01:05:22] China’s clinical-trial flywheel vs. slow-motion American loss. • [01:06:53] The bicoastal biotech ethos. • [01:08:10] Can the FDA actually pull this off? • [01:12:12] The Sophie’s Choice • of pharma development. • [01:14:16] Lost arts of founder mode. • [01:15:23] Rockets for tumors, T-cells, and beyond. • [01:19:16] Viral in policy circles. • [01:23:09] The Washington Post • headline and the PickFu split test. • [01:27:56] Solution-first storytelling. • [01:33:54] RNA medicine and platform therapeutics. • [01:39:17] Moderna’s 62 days. • [01:40:33] Uber Eats and the de-risked launch. • [01:44:17] CEO blockers. • [01:45:52] Where’s biotech’s SpaceX moment? • [01:46:53] Elon Musk betting black on the wheel. • [01:51:55] AWS and the post-conviction / pre-consensus window. • [01:58:47] COVID politicization. • [01:59:46] Insulin, growth hormone, and the original platform story. • [02:01:35] Biotech as pharma’s little brother. • [02:03:29] More recent role models, Apple edition. • [02:04:50] Art Levinson, Steve Jobs, and the biotech-tech crossover. • [02:06:25] The iPhone as a delivery platform. • [02:08:25] Spotify’s problem and the future of bespoke medicine. • [02:10:07] Baby KJ and the limits of liver-only solutions. • [02:11:19] Parting thoughts.

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