Medium rare
A large part of my job is to come up with and evaluate ideas for building new medicines and molecules. These could take years to build out, and tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of someone's capital. I'm trying to get better at this, and have some notes on friends who do an excellent job of building up versions of ideas that earn conviction. My last year of high school, Soham emailed me off a Hacker News post I made about a side project, trying to recruit me for his manufacturing automation company. I didn't have the bandwidth to take up the gig, but we stayed in touch. Every so often he'd call me and just go on monologues about his ideas — a new medical school in the Caribbean, a research institute in India, a new mRNA vaccine platform with thermostable lipid nanoparticles — almost all of which I had nothing interesting to say about. I'd spend those hours on the phone in awe of how generative he was. The ideas didn't stop with this guy. Over the years I started to have more to s