E2: Omri Amirav-Drory: Investing at NFX, TechBio and Race To 160

I got to sit down in San Francisco with Omri Amirav-Drory, General Partner at NFX, a $1.4B AUM pre-seed and seed stage venture capital firm that invests in tech startups across various sectors, focusing on fostering network effects and defensible competitive advantages. They seek out companies in fields like AI, biotech, fintech, SaaS, marketplaces, and crypto.

He started out conducting research in Israel’s intelligence corps to pipetting at Stanford labs. Exited Genome Compiler to Twist Bioscience ($2B market cap, NASDAQ: TWST). Launching a pre-seed venture fund called TechBio which lead him to his role at NFX.

Worth reading, Omri’s “Race to 160” blog. This actually makes sense as the human lifespan has double in the last few centuries from ~40 to ~80 and up from ~20 from about 5,000 years ago - Omri discusses this in the pod.

Timestamps:

(00:00) - Introduction

(00:55) - Early Life, Military, PhD

(04:00) - Learnings from the Army

(07:10) - Life at Stanford and Entrepreneurship

(11:56) - Recruiting friends to start a company

(13:30) - Race to 160

(18:05) - ABCD plan for aging

(26:59) - Companies actively working towards solving aging

(31:22) - Singularity and Ray Kurzweil

(33:12) - What it takes to be a founder

(40:12) - People investing vs Technology investing

(45:00) - DNA of a founder

(48:11) - The initial spark to become an entrepreneur

(51:37) - Agency, Risk Appetite and Perseverance

(55:21) - Network Effects

(1:04:47) - Breakthrough Innovation

(1:09:41) - Storytelling and authenticity

(1:14:58) - Role Models

(1:18:11) - Rapid fire and closing thoughts

Watch On YouTube:

Happy Tuesday y’all! Our next feature drops Friday. We have an incredible line-up. Tune in on X, Spotify, Apple, YouTube.

Best,Suffiyan Malik

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