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aresant

This all feels like the Ocean's 11 version of biotech

The straight laced CEO as foil with an amazing reputation and a ticking biological clock (1)

The mad scientist known for mixing human and monkey embryos (2)

The beautiful and brilliant husband & wife whiz kid team (3)

All funded by the secretive Russian billionaire with questionable fortune originations (4)

Grabbing the popcorn

(1) https://altoslabs.com/team/executive-leadership/hal-barron/

(2) https://altoslabs.com/team/scientific-leadership/juan-carlos...

(3) https://altoslabs.com/team/principal-investigators-san-diego... & https://altoslabs.com/team/principal-investigators-san-diego...

(4) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/world/yuri-milner-faceboo...

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To be fair: there are some areas of research [0][1] which cannot but help sound like fantasy.

Even were they to be pursued with the utmost rigor. Which by definition they can't be, because the very people and institutions required to do so would shy away because it's too fantastic of an endeavor.

So here's to the dreamers! It's your (Russian oligarch) money, break a leg!

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/magazine/dead-pig-brains-...

Biosphere 2 didn't turn out very well if I'm remembering the story right.

You are forgetting the iron law of real-life business stories: the better they seem, the worse they are.

>the better they seem, the worse they are

Is this common knowledge? I've seen it empirically but I don't know how much is that a widespread feeling. (Not being snark or sarcastic).

I think it's a principle everyone knows but nobody can bring themselves to put in to practice.

I suspect the recent Elizabeth Holmes conviction of investor fraud at Theranos might contribute to the idea of flashy names propping up an unsustainable idea (e.g. with so many high-ranking names in the US military establishment previously supporting the company).

I'm not aware of other recent high-profile examples, though I would be interested in learning about them.

Every high-profile failure of the last century fits the bill, because bad business teams cannot get invested in, by definition, without looking good.

Good business teams tend to be good in the details, which leads to them struggling to find willing audiences.

Adam Neumann/WeWork, Doug Evans/Juicero; there's plenty of 'em.

A few more for real scam connoisseur's:

Stacy Spikes/MoviePass (70M+ for selling dollars at a penny; outstanding growth and metrics though, if only the "lose on every sale but make it up in volume" stance ever worked ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

Steve Newcomb/famo.us (30M+ seed funding for what was essentially a shitty JS library)

Bill Nguyen/Color (40m+ seed funding for a photo app with no extra features; you know, like the one that comes for free in your phone ..., but with ads, ... also a social network? no one really knew, not even them)

People just want shiny stories and plausible deniability. It's pretty much subconscious risk management. Then you have people who play the next-level game of exploring this risk management heuristic, hence -- pretty young people with pedigree scamming the old money.

From what I have heard the CEO is not only worse than you imagine, he is worse than you can imagine. But it's all scuttlebutt and hearsay for now. Rich aging VC got to reach for those stars...

http://www.cafepharma.com/boards/threads/hal-barron-racks-up...

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/banks-ready-34-billion-financ...

Seems legit, they just need to add the Pharma bro and Rachel Dolezal and it'll be a true shit show.

The mad scientist really looks the part

simulation esque

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