If you had a choice, Nobel Prize or billionaire, which would you take?
We've been all over the world. We have found these entrepreneurs to be in the semifinals.
Looking at the hands of the robot. Out of the blue, he goes like, I wasn't expecting that at all.
The semi-finals. This is a big bet on your career.
It's going to be extremely tough. So, I'm going to have to bring money again.
I'm Tim Draper. I'm traveling the globe to find game-changing entrepreneurs with world-transforming ideas. Thousands apply, but only top entrepreneurs have made the cut for a chance to win an investment of $1 million US. It's a journey packed with unforgettable moments.
Welcome everybody to Meet the Drapers. This is our second semifinals. It is a really special one because the first semifinals competed with a second group. Three of these five will be moving on to the semifinals. To my immediate right, this woman's extraordinary. This is Crypto Megan. Megan is a leading web 3 strategic advisor and the host of Crypto Megan podcast. Welcome to the show.
Since we're bringing three of these forward to the finale, I brought in two of my partners. On my left, we have Andy Tang, 30 years in the venture capital business. And James, tell them a little bit about yourself.
James Walker. I've been with Tim for 5 years. I am a reformed attorney. That's reformed and informed.
Megan was here for the first episode of our semi-finals. And tell us what you're going to be looking forward to.
The bar is high. That's all I can say. And I'm so impressed at the caliber of these companies and the problems that they're solving, the impact they're going to have on the world.
My team had a competition between today's semi-finals and the other semi-finals. So, just keep that in mind. Let's bring on our first entrepreneur. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes.
Welcome everyone to the robot expo. I'm Zenia. So at UFB, we're building a humanoid robot fighting league. Ta will demonstrate us behind the riot shield. It's a human punching bag. So the goal will be to get three hits. And so whoever goes to the obstacle course and makes three punches first, that person wins, right? And you come to put it in boxing mode. So now let's do it. Starter.
1 minute 33 seconds.
I hadn't controlled a robot since I was in high school. And my robotics team, I told that to my team and they were like, 'All right, you control the robot, Ken. You got this.' Hey, there you go.
It's like looking at the hands of the robot. Out of the blue, he goes like, I wasn't expecting that at all.
I knew it.
And I think all of us at first were like, 'Oh my gosh, is he okay?' And then he was okay. And it was just really funny.
Sorry about that. That was hilarious.
I had no idea the robot could kick, but the buttons are right next to each other, and I accidentally held the wrong button on the controller. So, that was a happy accident.
That was great.
It's only 2 minutes and so there's only so much information that I can kind of relay across. I'm Juliet. And when I was 23, I was immobilized by a severe spine injury. For years, I was in constant pain. I could barely get out of bed. I even had to walk with a cane and I was given only one option, and that was aggressive surgery every 5 years for the rest of my life. Can you imagine? I had to find a better option. And I found one that could bypass all of those surgeries, stem cell therapy. The catch was that it was $250,000. And then I learned that there were stem cells in menstrual blood. And women are releasing millions of these cells every month. And they're actually superior to our current sources of stem cells. Our tech captures these stem cells non-invasively in the privacy of your own home. And we're aiming to reduce the cost of cells from $100,000 to just $1,000. Since last I saw you, we have raised $1.1 million. We've set up our collection sites. We've built our lab and stem cell bank. We've built our community of muses, our donors, and we have commercial traction now with our first buyers for a product we're launching this month.
So, you get the menstrual blood. Can you store it indefinitely? You freeze it or what do you do?
Yeah. The cryopreservation allows us to store it pretty much indefinitely.
How do I get that menstrual blood into my bloodstream? Do I just shoot it in?
There are many ways that that's administered and how that's applied and it's depending on the process and the need. Right.
So your process is different from the other kinds of stem cell therapy where they take your blood and then they run it through centrifuge and then they do whatever.
It's a similar process but some back of the napkin math is indicating it's somewhere between 300 and 600,000 times more stem cells in menstrual blood. Ours is non-invasive. You don't have to go through any of that pain. You don't have to go through the procurement costs, hospital stays, surgeons, any of that.
How do they get it to you?
Right now, they're coming into Frontier Tower where we will...
Oh, we're doing it right here in San Francisco, but eventually you're going to want to have them send it through the mail, right?
Yes. And we have those in hand.
Now, how do you market this to the donors?
So, we have a reimbursement process. So, we want to be able to give to our donors for the value that they're giving to us.
I mean, it's brilliant. It seems genius to me. I mean, you're going to have your menstrual session every month. A lot of them already use menstrual cups.
One period collection can yield over 500 million cells every day. There are approximately 800 million women menstruating.
Your parents are backstage. Do you want to bring them out? Here they are. Her parents are here all the way from Napa.
Are you proud of her? Well, we're incredibly proud.
There weren't TV shows around entrepreneurship when they were starting their business.
What is that first sort of killer app, that big market for stem cell therapy?
The core biology and the infrastructure engine all feeds into the therapeutic applications.
So, what is the problem you're going to solve first?
We're bringing it full circle and this next year I am going to be treating myself with my stem cells, treating my spine.
As much as it seems like, oh my god, this has never been done before, it's really not. It's just that I don't know if anyone's given it the right platform yet. The woman who discovered those cells struggled to get funding to continue her research.
Thank you very much for the Drapers. Gosh, I want some of that.
That's impressive. She said they could even get it from pads and tampons. That makes her target audience much bigger.
I liked it. I mean, it's novel. I want to know more about what the products are going to be.
If you think about it, like what's more resilient than the human reproductive system themselves and like that makes a lot of sense to me.
It's the beginning of life.
I think the price is right. Single-digit valuation. So, you are trying things. So, it's just at the right stage. Terrific. Well, let's bring on our next entrepreneur. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the eyebrows.
Welcome to the fourth challenge. We are now on the longevity floor. You have a combination of practical and theoretical challenges ahead of you. The air squat phase of the challenge. You go down. And you jump. I love it. Each team will do as many air squats as it can do in one minute.
Well, I'm still feeling the squat challenge, you know. I tried to do perfect squats. I said like, 'Okay, 60 seconds of squats. When I got to 30, okay, Victoria, you're on TV. Don't die. Let's go.'
I'm so sore still. I'm really sore.
And the main part of the challenge, a billionaire wants to maximally extend the longevity. You need to pitch this billionaire for health now, for biohacking, and for longevity for the future.
Your money. The squats got me all messed up. I'm not a biomedical hacker thing. So, I was operating out of pure ignorance.
Aging is what brings more suffering and death than any other thing on earth.
The best solutions already live within us. So, our strategy is to go for something that has been proven.
In order to get strong, live longer, you need to sleep well, you need to gain muscle. A slightly riskier route because we think you need to take risks to get high reward.
Thanks for the great pitches. We disagreed a bit but ultimately we put together our scores so which Adam will present.
Team one 24 and team two 23 points. However, we still have the results of the air squat challenge. We recounted the jumps on the camera. Team 1 reported 296 and team 261. But upon recount, team one was found to have done 234 and team 238. Congratulations.
Which means team two is the winner. 27 points. Congratulations.
The judges, they saw this just a game. They didn't know the stake. So, we didn't specifically ask for a recount.
I think what happened was people just didn't keep track in their mind.
We did give it our all and we were honest, by the way, about how many we actually did.
I can't believe I get the chance to keep on speaking about this on TV to lower stigma, to push people to speak more about mental health. Today more people die from suicide than war, terrorism and natural disasters combined. For 30 years we haven't seen improvements in mental health treatments. 40% of the people are treatment resistant and 75% quit. Luckily effective treatments like psychedelic assisted therapy with psilocybin are changing people's lives in just one or two sessions enhancing their brain's neuroplasticity. The FDA designated this therapy for depression to be a breakthrough therapy and just a month ago they announced a fast track for approval 12 months from now. The science is ready but the supply is not. Today no one can combine pharma grade IP, scale, precision and access all together. But with biotechnology we can do this. From Latin America to the world, we engineered our own microorganisms with biosynthesis and bioinformatics to produce psilocybin, DMT and 5-MeO-DMT at scale. Since our investment, we have done amazing progress. Thank you Tim. We did a 20x on our psilocybin yield.
Will you be able to sell your psilocybin 12 months from now in the US?
Wow, that's exciting. If we raise one more million, will it be doctor prescribed or will it be on the shelf?
It will be doctor prescribed and directly to clinics or distributors depending on the state.
How are you going to focus on your market?
We are designing a software right now that is a tool for psychiatrists and psychologists.
What gives us the confidence that psilocybin will solve this problem?
Regular anti-depressants act on curating the symptoms. What people feel under a psilocybin dose is more avenues of solutions for their problems. This is why this is used not just for depression but also for alcohol addiction, eating disorders.
What are the side effects of psilocybin versus I know the traditional side effects of anti-depressants could be feeling numb or like you're not yourself.
Psilocybin does not hit the reward system. So you don't get addicted. In fact, when you do a macro dose of psilocybin, it's not like you want to do it again like in the next week. Your brain is working a lot and you can feel a little headache.
Have you used it yourself? What's kind of how did you get into this?
I did use it myself. And I've seen amazing progress in terms of anxiety, in terms of creativity, and in terms of being grateful for the little things in life. Well, my mother suffered from depression many years. She's here. She felt better, but she also quit smoking. One day, she suddenly woke up and said, 'I don't want to smoke anymore. My body doesn't need this.'
Hey, your mother's here. Fantastic. What do you think of your daughter doing all this?
Fantastic. I love seeing supportive parents out here because entrepreneurs need as much support as they possibly can get.
She was part of the first episode. She's now like kind of a lucky charm.
Do you grow it in the lab or do you synthesize it?
Yeah. We biosynthesize it in our 2 liter bioreactor.
Do you need a brand or is this just all the same?
Our strategy is to go vertical. We are going to do this software. As I mentioned, this software is going to give us the data to make better drug discovery in the future. The idea is to go directly to the clinic or to the distributors.
Terrific. Victoria, great to see you. Thank you so much. James, you got a skeptical look on.
No, not skeptical. I know people who've been using it without depression. I think a lot of our questions are around the tailwinds of the market. Generally, the commodification thing that Andy asked at the end is my concern. You know, no one wants to be even when medical cannabis became a thing. Terrible business to be in. Just race to the bottom.
I think the marijuana it was the wrong time because we didn't have the right regulations. There's a lot of hurdles. I envisioned her being kind of like the MedMen of marijuana where people are comfortable trying it. They feel like it's this nice place where they could be safe and that's what MedMen tried to do. I think the timing was wrong.
Let's bring on our next entrepreneur. But before we do, what do we do? Before we do, we see what's going on behind the scenes or behind the eye.
Viewers, usually I'm pretty easy to reach. I mean, there are only 300 million of you. I'm making it a lot easier for you to contact me. I have downloaded my brain into this digital twin. And you can scan this QR code. You can pitch me your idea. You can talk about your business, anything, and I'll answer it 24/7. Enjoy it. It's great. It's a new feature of Meet the Drapers and Draper TV. I think you're going to have some fun.
The stage itself went super quickly. I felt like I was out there for like a minute. Today, it costs around $2 billion US to bring a single drug to the market. On top of that, scientists spend around 5 years or so to iterate ever so slightly over individual drug ideas before even dosing the first patient. And once you dose the first patient, 90% of these drug ideas ultimately fail. Over the last decade, many companies have used AI for designing novel drug ideas. You basically run experiments on the computer instead of running them in the lab, which is obviously cheaper. You can select more effectively the most important experiment and that help these companies, we're talking not years anymore, but now we're talking months. The more you optimize these drugs before putting them in the first patient, the more likely you also have clinical success. However, there's a big problem here, which is that most companies do not have enough data to build powerful AI models, nor do they have the expertise. What we built is a collaboration platform on which AI model builders have access to curated data on drug properties and can build powerful AI models by mixing that data with their own in-house data. And on top of that, something we started also very recently is to pool their data across different organizations. It's because one company doesn't have enough data, right? But 10, 20, 100, if they work together, can build really powerful AI models.
So, you're helping pharma get FDA approval faster. That's your sort of goal.
It's primarily about getting to the clinical trials faster and having higher success rate in phase one.
A big idea of yours is to share data by helping your competitors speed up their process. Isn't that kind of hurting you?
The most sensitive element of this data is the structure of the drug, right? So that's the thing that is patented that cannot enter the public domain.
Does that become your library or theirs?
It is never. We never own that data. We just have the rights to deploy models to other users.
What incentive do they have to opt in?
Right. Yeah. Like what is the business model exactly on all fronts? If they contribute that they know other people might contribute similar stuff and then everybody gets better predictions, right? It's like open source for bio drug discovery.
I feel like it was a lot of excitement about the concept but the judges didn't feel like we're actually doing what they thought we were doing if that makes sense.
Yeah and it's actually something that is really new like I think 5 years ago people would have thought you're crazy. Even pharma doesn't have that much data internally right? I have seen some of these data sets maybe 100,000 measurements or so that's not like on the scale of like ChatGPT's training data, right? So, you still have to pool your data.
Are you going to potentially ask for a royalty on any of these discoveries?
The closest you would come to that is by having a milestone payment if you go towards like hit the clinical trial, right? Again, I don't want to go into the royalty regime. Then I would have to read a lot about that company, try to understand if I put my bet on them, which made me more like venture capitalist almost, which I don't want to go down.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Overrated. If you had a choice, Nobel Prize or billionaire, which would you take?
I'm a scientist originally, right? So, and I left science because science is quite a solitary endeavor and in the end that doesn't feel very fulfilling. Whereas having a company, having a team, all kind of working together on the same thing to build something big, it's much more fulfilling. So, let's go for the billionaire.
Terrific, Max. Thanks for being on the show.
My answer would be billionaire so fast.
