🧭 Greetings from San Francisco! ☀️

Hey {{first_name|default:there}}, it’s Vadim 👋

As promised, today is a VERY short dispatch from the front lines here at JPM.

We’ll talk about all the AI and the deals but first - this weather?!

Do y’all have this sunshine like this on the REGULAR? In January?

I asked my uber driver this, and all I got back was a shrug - yea, just another winter Monday in January, with 60-degree breeze and the car windows rolled down.

I won’t belabor this point more, but to my SF friends: if the sunshine ever gets a little too dull for you here and you’d like to do a house swap - you know where to find me 🙂

Seriously.

Now that we got that crucial piece of investigative reporting out of the way.

Let's dive in.

Day 1 of JPM wasn’t as much about sessions for me as it was about catching up with old friends and making new ones.

Here were a three themes that kept coming up in conversations:

Longevity, biotech, pharma, health & wellness - these categories, which so far have lived in their own separate worlds, are starting to converge at an accelerating pace. In my view, what we refer to as a “biotech” company will look very different by the end of the decade. Probably sooner.

If that will be the case, it raises interesting questions. What will the downstream effects mean for pharma incumbents? Will they need to reinvent themselves? What about payers? Something to think about.

Anthropic launched Claude for healthcare. OpenAI launched ChatGPT for health. The immediate question on everyone's mind: how many software startups just got disrupted overnight?

On one hand, investors are feeling FOMO. On the other, they are becoming more and more hesitant about funding software plays when they don't know if (or when) those ideas will get eaten by foundation models.

Will this be the classic “winner takes all model” where venture keeps funding the 2-3 incumbents as they seek to dominate the world, or will there be room for differentiation within healthcare and bio?

On the flip side, hard-tech is having a moment. Drug discovery, tools, manufacturing, production infrastructure - in these cases, AI becomes an enabler, not a threat. You can't ChatGPT your way into a novel small molecule or a scaled-up cell therapy.

For investors feeling burned by the "will this get eaten by OpenAI?" question, hard-tech offers something software can't: defensibility through atoms, not just bits. This is a space that I’m starting to follow more closely.

Speaking of hard-tech and anti-AI bets..

Today I took my first Waymo ride. You know, the driverless cars? Those ones.

At first, I really did feel catapulted into the future. No driver, the wheel magically turning, steering clear of pedestrians and cyclists. Truly amazing.

Until it dropped me off in a back alley a few blocks away from my destination.

A small price to pay for progress? Perhaps.

But for today, my bet is still on the humans :)

See you tomorrow!

- Vadim

PS: Are you attending JPM? Let me know what themes you’re picking up on - would love to include them!

PPS: If you have someone on your team helping with fundraising or know another founder who could benefit from being in this community - I’d love to include them. They can join us here: [Join the Community]