#868: Tim’s Founder Kitchen — From Brainstorm to The President’s Office in Two Months (Featuring Jake Becraft, Strand Therapeutics)
The Tim Ferriss Show
Jun 02
#868: Tim’s Founder Kitchen — From Brainstorm to The President’s Office in Two Months (Featuring Jake Becraft, Strand Therapeutics)
#868: Tim’s Founder Kitchen — From Brainstorm to The President’s Office in Two Months (Featuring Jake Becraft, Strand Therapeutics)

The Tim Ferriss Show
Jun 02
Unprocessed episode, you can be the first!
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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Timestamps:
- [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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