Tim’s Founder Kitchen — From Brainstorm to the President’s Office in Two Months (Featuring Jake Becraft, Strand Therapeutics) (#868)

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Conversation with Jake Becraft of Strand Therapeutics on The Tim Ferriss Show podcast! The post Tim’s Founder Kitchen — From Brainstorm to the President’s Office in Two Months (Featuring Jake Becraft, Strand Therapeutics) (#868) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

“What I want the world to understand is that we are standing right now on the precipice of a revolution in genetic medicine.” — Jake Becraft

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. He has guided the company from its founding vision through platform development and into clinical translation, positioning Strand at the forefront of next generation RNA therapeutics.

Beyond his role at Strand, Dr. Becraft is an influential voice in the national biotechnology landscape. He engages and advises policymakers, defense leaders, and industry stakeholders on biosecurity, innovation strategy, and strengthening American competitiveness in advanced biotechnology. Trained as a synthetic biologist at MIT, he operates at the intersection of science, entrepreneurship, and policy, focused on building both the companies and the institutional frameworks required to secure the future of programmable medicine.

He received his Ph.D. in Biological Engineering and Synthetic Biology from MIT. He serves on the board of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) and the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council (MassBio).

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Tim’s Founder Kitchen — From Brainstorm to the President’s Office in Two Months (Featuring Jake Becraft, Strand Therapeutics)

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Transcripts

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

  • Connect with Jacob Becraft:

Twitter | Strand Therapeutics

Books & Recommended Reading

Movies

Companies

Institutions & Organizations

Concepts & Therapies

People

Relevant Episodes

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.

JACOB BECRAFT QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“Our goal at Strand, and our challenge, is building drugs today that impact patients’ lives. We’re not a research institute. Our goal is not to do really cool research on mice and join the ranks of people who have cured mice of cancer. There’s millions of them. There could be a Nobel Prize every five minutes for someone who’s cured a mouse of cancer. Our goal is to cure human beings of human-being cancer. Our goal is to cure human beings of human-being diseases, and do so in a safe, effective, scalable way that impacts a person’s life as little as possible. And that is what we’re building.”

— Jacob Becraft

“What I want the world to understand is that we are standing right now on the precipice of a revolution in genetic medicine.”

— Jacob Becraft

“Everyone wants to cure cancer. I don’t need a story behind curing cancer. I just need a story about how we’re going to get there and how curing cancer is actually going to be one step on the road to solving disease writ large.”

— Jacob Becraft

“No one will learn until they care.”

— Jacob Becraft

“The biotechnology industry will be dragged kicking and screaming into the future, or it will be built up in a new way from new players.”

— Jacob Becraft

“If some bullshit hype filters into this, it’s worth it in order to take the correct swings at the truly big ideas, because one out of 10 transformations is better than seven out of 10 logical steps forward.”

— Jacob Becraft

“Capital has no allegiance.”

— Jacob Becraft

“In low odds games, games where there’s a very low odds of success statistically, if you don’t go 100 percent all in, the odds will be zero.”

— Jacob Becraft

“When I look at some of those great investors who have made these high conviction bets, it seems like they’re able to identify this moment in time for companies that is post-conviction, pre-consensus. The ones who know we’re post-conviction. We’re no longer saying, ‘Can we do this?’ We’re like, ‘Oh, my God, this is going to work.’ But it’s pre-consensus because not everyone has caught on yet or not everyone is convinced.”

— Jacob Becraft

Want to hear another episode with a physician-founder building a new class of medicine? Listen to my conversation with Dr. Kevin Tracey, president and CEO of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, in which we discussed the birth of bioelectronic medicine, stimulating the vagus nerve to tame inflammation, the inflammatory reflex, treating rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease, SetPoint Medical’s FDA approval journey, alleviating depression and autoimmune disorders, building devices that replace drugs, and much more.

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