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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This episode is an experiment. I'm trying out a new format — half interview, half live jam session. I've started a new series, working title "Tim's Founder Kitchen," built around actual brainstorming sessions with founders willing to share the audio. This first installment is with Jake Becraft of Strand Therapeutics—one of the companies I'm most excited about—and it's a two-part conversation that lets you track a positioning and comms discussion from a raw early-stage session all the way through to the real-world results it produced a couple months later. It's a rare before-and-after, and I genuinely want your feedback: let me know on X @tferriss what you think and how I can make it better.
[00:00] Preview.
[00:48] What Strand does.
[02:58] The Boston dinner.
[05:56] The image of a body riddled with cancer.
[09:58] What stuck for the muggles in the pitch deck.
[12:03] A good drug vs. a good product.
[14:38] Tricking cancer into snitching on itself.
[20:10] The abscopal effect.
[26:57] Potency, specificity, and delivery.
[28:40] First principles thinking.
[29:32] The precipice of a revolution.
[34:10] The thousand people in the room.
[41:55] Psychedelic medicine as a cautionary tale.
[44:39] What actually catches a policymaker's attention.
[47:08] Breakthrough vs. incremental.
[48:24] What's in it for the policymakers?
[51:40] The 80/20 wish list.
[55:04] Australia's CTN system.
[57:22] Sheep, psychedelics, and red-tape arbitrage.
[58:54] China's clinical-trial flywheel vs. slow-motion American loss.
[1:00:28] The bicoastal biotech ethos.
[1:01:41] Can the FDA actually pull this off?
[1:05:46] The Sophie's Choice of pharma development.
[1:07:48] Lost arts of founder mode.
[1:09:03] Rockets for tumors, T-cells, and beyond.
[1:12:45] Viral in policy circles.
[1:16:55] The Washington Post headline and the PickFu split test.
[1:21:53] Solution-first storytelling.
[1:28:01] RNA Medicine and Platform Therapeutics.
[1:33:41] Moderna's 62 days.
[1:35:08] Uber Eats and the de-risked launch.
[1:38:39] CEO blockers.
[1:40:14] Where's biotech's SpaceX moment?
[1:41:14] Elon Musk betting black on the wheel.
[1:46:21] AWS and the post-conviction/pre-consensus window.
[1:53:20] COVID politicization.
[1:54:20] Insulin, growth hormone, and the original platform story.
[1:56:10] Biotech as pharma's little brother.
[1:58:04] More recent role models, Apple edition.
[1:59:22] Art Levinson, Steve Jobs, and the biotech-tech crossover.
[2:00:58] The iPhone as a delivery platform.
[2:03:00] Spotify's problem and the future of bespoke medicine.
[2:04:41] Baby KJ and the limits of liver-only solutions.
[2:05:56] Parting thoughts.
https://x.com/tferriss
Tim Ferriss is one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People” and an early-stage tech investor/advisor in Uber, Facebook, Twitter, Shopify, Duolingo, Alibaba, and 50+ other companies. He is also the author of five #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers: The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors. The Observer and other media have named him “the Oprah of audio” due to the influence of his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, which has exceeded one billion downloads and been selected for “Best of Apple Podcasts” three years running.
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