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AC Andrew Chan On My Food Job Rocks!

“Late-stage venture firms tend to underwrite biotech and a lot of the deeper science plays as if the risk has been written off, when it often has not. You see these massive rounds and valuations for things that still contain a fair bit of risk. Because no one's doing technical diligence past 'could this theoretically work', not 'does this work in practice and does it scale', they'll get funding until the day that they don't. And by then, most of your early investors have sold out.”

My Food Job Rocks! · Alternative Proteins · November 2026

“Late-stage venture firms tend to underwrite biotech and a lot of the deeper science plays as if the risk has been written off, when it often has not. You see these massive rounds and valuations for things that still contain a fair bit of risk. Because no one's doing technical diligence past 'could this theoretically work', not 'does this work in practice and does it scale', they'll get funding until the day that they don't. And by then, most of your early investors have sold out.” — Andrew Chan, My Food Job Rocks!

Context

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.

Transcript

My Food Job Rocks! Around 10:59 into the episode
Andrew Chan

Yeah.

Adam Yee

Let's start with that statement first.

Andrew Chan

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…

Adam Yee

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…

Andrew Chan

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.

Adam Yee

So to hard tech, what does that mean? Is it just applied robotics? Complex AI, anything

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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