Matan Grinberg left a string theory PhD at Berkeley to start Factory, betting on full autonomous software engineering in 2023.

It started with a cold email to Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire and a three-hour walk that helped convince Matan to leave his PhD and build a company. Three years later, Factory is valued at $1.5B, with recent reports putting its newest valuation north of $3.5B.

We get into: what string theory teaches you about making decisions, the three phases every company goes through with AI adoption, how to measure ROI of AI spend, why he'd take Chinese open models over a closed-model monopoly, the sleeper-agent risk hiding in open weights, what he thinks about recent security incidents from large labs, and why he believes we're already living in a post-AGI world.

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Sabrina Halper Show is presented by Micro1. Micro1 is building the infrastructure for advancing intelligence through expert human data, real-world training environments, and contextual evaluations. Learn more: https://www.micro1.ai/.

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TIMESTAMPS:

(00:00) Intro

(02:00 Young Matan

(5:30) String Theory

(11:10) Leaving academia, the IMDb 250, and getting nerd-sniped by code generation

(16:53) Cold-emailing Shaun Maguire and founding Factory

(18:27) The desert years, and what finally made autonomous engineering work

(20:55) The new bottleneck is deciding what to do

(23:30) The three phases of enterprise AI adoption, and the end of token maxing

(28:18) Chinese open models, and the monopoly to end all monopolies

(30:30) Sleeper agents, poisoned code, and the labs cybersecurity incidents

(34:30) The White House open-weights policy and the distillation problem

(37:30) The coming billion-dollar agent incident

(42:30) "We're already post-AGI" and AI taking on math

(49:30) Building your own software

(52:20) Reflections & best advisors

I sat down with Reed Jobs to discuss one of medicine’s hardest problems: why we’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars fighting cancer, yet still don’t have a cure.

Reed explains why there may never be a cure for cancer and why that’s actually the wrong goal. Instead, the future is making cancer a disease that no one dies from.

He gives an inside look at Yosemite, the venture firm he founded to rethink how to bring breakthrough therapies to patients. We go deep on how AI is reshaping biology, why Yosemite combines grants with venture capital to fund ambitious science, how to de-risk breakthrough research, and the extraordinary biology that makes our bodies work.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Intro

00:36 Early Cancer Mission

03:41 Working at a Cancer Lab as a Teen

05:16 Immunotherapy Breakthrough

07:05 Emerson Collective

09:20 Founding Yosemite

10:17 Making Cancer Nonlethal12:28 Using Grants to De-Risk Biotech Investing

15:33 Academic vs. CEO Role

19:11 Biology Is a Miracle22:52 Next-Decade Tooling

25:22 His Dream of In Vivo CAR-T Cell Therapy

28:51 Cracking Solid Tumors

29:27 Same-Day Cell Editing

33:46 The AI Era of Biology

37:00 Cutting Clinical Trial Costs

41:43 Highest-ROI Philanthropy

45:10 Taylor Francis

47:28 Yosemite’s Long-Term Impact

50:29 San Francisco Today#CancerResearch #Biotech #AI #Medicine #ReedJobs

The secret to staying young may already be inside your cells. We just need to figure out how to unlock it.

NewLimit is one of the world's leading longevity companies, co-founded by Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong, investor Blake Byers, and stem cell biologist Jacob Kimmel. NewLimit has already shown it can take old human liver and immune cells and restore them to a younger, healthier-working state and it's now preparing its first medicine for human trials.The company has raised over $600M - including a $435M round in 2026 that valued it at $3.1B - from investors like Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Thrive Capital, and Khosla Ventures.

We hear the word "longevity" all the time. But what's actually real? And how do we meaningfully extend lifespan for our generation, our kids, and our grandkids?

Jacob Kimmel shares his world-leading expertise as we discuss everything from evolutionary tradeoffs to epigenetic reprogramming to AI biorisk.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Aging as Entropy

01:25 Why Evolution Limits Lifespan

03:13 Evolution Tradeoffs Explained

07:44 Why Women Live Longer

10:15 Lessons from Long Lived Species

16:20 Peak Intelligence and Aging

23:26 What Aging Really Is

26:23 Epigenetics and Reprogramming

27:59 Yamanaka Factors 101

32:18 New Limit's Approach

33:56 AI for Factor Discovery

37:28 Organ by Organ Longevity

40:28 Is Immortality Possible?

42:04 Lifespan Progress Curve

45:44 Testing Longevity Drugs

49:30 Placebo Mind Body Link

53:56 What longevity hacks are actually work?

57:25 Peptides And Stem Cells

01:00:34 Germline Gene Editing

01:05:10 Personalized Medicine Abundance

01:08:48 Longer Lifespans and Power Turnover

01:14:57 Living Off Earth

01:16:55 AI And Biosecurity Risks

#longevity #antiaging #biotech