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Start free trial →My Food Job Rocks! · Alternative Proteins · November 2026
The host, who worked at a plant-based meat startup that raised heavily during the boom, said scientists get punished for mistakes at venture-backed companies. Andrew explains how late-stage money misprices science risk.
Yeah.
Let's start with that statement first.
Yeah. I mean, look, I think venture is a high-risk asset class. And especially when you get into biotech, the outcomes tend towards binary. And for better or for worse, late-stage venture firms tend to underwrite biotech in a lot of the deeper science plays as if the risk has been written off when it often has not. And so you'll see these massive rounds and massive valuations for things that still contain a fair bit of risk. I'd look at, you know, Motif is a great example of that. Another one, like Relativity Space, for example, is a perfect look at saying, okay, look, there's promising technology. There's great science here, but it doesn't quite have the same stability. And venture at a growth stage, your investors are optimizing for something a little bit different. They still want that high upside. But if you're taking these massive bets, you know, you have to have a portfolio that you can construct around it. Oftentimes, people don't manage the portfolio construction game very well, which means that there's not cash available to keep things afloat when things go wrong. And if you manage that poorly or you don't underwrite it well to start, and there are technologies, I mean, I'm not going to say that on the podcast. There are one or two businesses which have…
Yeah, that's what I know. I think the time horizons, which I won't go into a lot more detail, I have a hunch about time horizons in this current state. Well, obviously they expanded, but I'd like to still talk about diligence. I guess you have a thesis on kind of deep tech, for lack of a better…
hard tech, not deep tech. I talk about science. Science risk. I tend to take a lot of engineering risk. I don't invest in quantum. I don't invest in fusion.
So to hard tech, what does that mean? Is it just applied robotics? Complex AI, anything