Vibe Bio: Alok Tayi, CEO
"For me the most exciting thing is working side-by-side with patients and parents who have children that are affected by rare diseases."
Vibe Bio is a mission driven biotech company, building a community of dedicated patient groups, scientists, and investors to develop therapies for rare and underserved diseases. Vibe works with its community partners to identify promising treatments and fund their development through sale of a $VIBE cryptocurrency token (Vibe DAO). Funding from the DAO is used to initiate clinical trials, pre-clinical studies, manufacturing and other aspects of drug development. As these treatments for rare disease are commercialized or licensed, they return capital to the DAO and patient advocacy organizations.
Vibe’s initial partners include NF2 BioSolutions and Chelsea’s Hope. Together with these organizations, Vibe has started the biotech companies Merlin (partner: NF2 BioSolutions) and New Hope (partner: Chelsea’s Hope), which are working to develop therapies for neurofibromatosis type II and Lafora disease, respectively. In June, Vibe launched with $12M in funding; Initialized Capital led the round with participation from Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, 6th Man Ventures, Yvonne Hao, Enke Bashllari, Andy Coravos, Lerer Hippea and Andy Palmer. The $VIBE token will be launched later this year.
Alok Tayi is the co-founder and CEO of Vibe. A scientist by training, he worked with George Whitesides (Harvard), Samuel Stupp (Northwestern), and George Malliaras (Cornell). After 15 years at the bench, he caught the entrepreneurial bug—he co-founded and ran several life sciences-focused software companies, including the Life Sciences division at Egnyte, TetraScience, and PreScouter. He is also host of the popular podcast Biotech2050.
Below is an interview with Alok Tayi from July 2022:
1. What is one book that has influenced the way you think, which you would recommend to fellow scientists or entrepreneurs?
How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen. He wrote an awesome book about bringing some of the business model and critical thinking frameworks from an HBS case into one’s life. He also touched on the personal, difficult decisions he had to make around religion, life, family, integrity etc. It put into perspective that other people who are really successful have the same level of qualms, uncertainty, difficult situations that they are in, though on the outside it may look like they make the right decisions all the time.
2. What is Vibe’s origin story? Describe the moment you decided to start this company.
I am a scientist by training, and spent 15 years at the bench, including my post-doc with George Whitesides. I then started a couple software companies focusing on the biotech industry. Mid last year, my wife and I had our first child. Though the pregnancy went OK, our daughter was born very sick and spent a long time in the hospital. The day I realized I was going to start Vibe was June 2, 2021. It was the morning, like 4am, and it was two hours after the doctors burst into our hospital room and told us that our daughter’s lungs were failing. They also told us that they needed to transport her from Beth Israel via emergency transport to Children’s. I remember walking up to the NICU in Children’s, by myself as my wife was still recovering from delivery, and seeing my daughter kept alive by half a dozen machines and a dozen different types of medicines. It was at that moment I knew the next phase of my career would be focused on solving that problem. At the time I was running the life sciences division of a big software company based in California. As I reflected on going back to work after paternity leave, it became clear to me that all the stuff I was doing at work, though important from a business perspective, had life-wise zero import to me anymore. What my daughter was going through was where I was going to be spending my time.
3. How did your background in software inform your approach to founding Vibe?
Having spent time in tech, I learned a lot about ecosystems, scalability, and capital.
First off, the ecosystems of tech and biotech have evolved at very different rates. In tech, the pace at which we have developed best practices, shared learnings, and built a positive reinforcing culture for young people to go innovate has led to its ultimate success and growth—now everything is sort of tech enabled. This ecosystem is critical. I don’t think we have hit that same stride in biotech. Having spent a lot of time building & selling software to the biotech industry—I saw how software could extend across many different companies & workflows quickly. However, I also observed how one incremental improvement rarely moves the needle on drug development. It’s not about one of these individual pieces, but rather about the entire drug development ecosystem as a whole.
In the biotech industry, the challenge is not finding a potential treatment for a given disease, it’s actually funding it. When my daughter was sick, it came to my mind that the problem was not just the direct [drug] development—we understand the biology and physiology of many diseases. The solution Vibe aspires to build impacts the overall system-wide innovation. Just like anything--healthcare, finance, construction or space—the challenge is always the capital, and what the capital expects you to do. Crypto is a unique source of capital: the community backs high potential projects, the asset has liquidity, and we aim to bring this new trillion-dollar source of capital to the life sciences. Biotech has tremendous needs--for capital, and new types of thinking as well. Vibe is working to bring together the technology and scalability of crypto to biotech.
4. What excites you most about working at Vibe? Briefly, what is the magic sauce or competitive advantage? Are there any other organizations taking a similar approach?
For me the most exciting thing is working side-by-side with patients and parents who have children that are affected by rare diseases. We’ve all spent time with impressive academics, entrepreneurs and physicians; however, the one group of people who truly impress me the most, and have the greatest determination and grit, are parents who have a sick kid. Vibe has met doctors and teachers, janitors and consultants who have moved heaven and earth to find a treatment for their kid. They’ve raised millions of dollars to corral big pharma and biotech companies to work on their disease or actually advanced treatments into the clinic themselves. All through sheer determination. It’s working side-by-side with these superheroes that gives our team so much energy and motivation, but also gives us a lot of perspective. Even though day to day there may be ups and downs, you look at what these families struggle with, and you are reminded about why we do what we do. And, at the end of the day, we will find a way to be able to help them and overcome any interim bumps in the road. That, hands down, is the number one thing I look forward to every day of the week.
5. Where did the idea of a Vibe DAO originate? What are the benefits of crypto tokens over using a traditional financial structure in biotech and for Vibe’s mission?
A common misstep when starting a company is becoming too enamored with the technology. Always stay focused on the problem and the customer you are trying to serve. When my daughter was sick, my wife and I evaluated a multitude of different approaches by which we could find a potential treatment for our daughter—this included starting a traditional biotech, forming a charity, and funding an academic lab. But ultimately our ambition was to find an approach that could help, not just our daughter, but also the families sitting in the bays next to us in the NICU.
To do that, first, we needed to solve for scalability of ownership and participation. Second, since capital has historically been the constraint, we needed to access a larger pool of capital. Having raised substantial venture capital and as an angel investor, I am intimately familiar with a shortcoming of the asset class: venture capital funds are inherently illiquid, A limited partner puts money into a venture fund and is, essentially, walking away from those dollars for at least ten years. That illiquidity puts tremendous pressure on general partners allocating that capital. Those high expectations drive conservatism amongst the investors in terms of where they allocate capital. The cascade of expectations permeates every industry that relies on venture as a funding mechanism. We knew that traditional venture would not scale [for our purposes] because of illiquidity. Further, there is only 10-20 billion per year invested in early-stage biotech, which is another inherent cap. That’s why crypto became the right solution for us—not because we were dogmatic about using crypto, but because crypto obviated the constraints and allowed us to truly solve the problem. Infinite scalability of participation, and scalability of liquid capital merited us to use crypto compared to any other technology.
6. What are you currently working hardest on at Vibe following your raise? What are the upcoming milestones you are using to keep your team motivated?
My co-founder Josh and I have been fortunate to start a couple businesses in the biotech space, so we have some clarity as to our roadmap. Priority number one is opening up our community of patients, scientists and partners. This community helps us identify and vet potential treatments focused on rare. The second, as part of our $12 million round of financing, we are proud to announce two partnerships—one with NF2 BioSolutions and another with Chelsea’s Hope. We are now actively in-licensing assets for both of those indications and hope to pursue them through clinical trials. The third priority is to launch the $VIBE token. A big part of our thesis is that this new source of capital, cryptocurrency, and this new asset class, tokens, are a viable way to finance drug development. Over the coming months, we will be doing a public token sale of the $VIBE token and getting broader participation from the cryptocurrency and web3 community as a whole.
7. What is another biotech (public or private) that you think serves as a paragon of an impactful company? What are some key learnings from this case study?
One company that I have always admired is Veeva Systems. Veeva is not well known amongst everyday Americans, but, in my opinion, is one of the most successful companies in history. Veeva is software platform purpose built for the life sciences industry. Veeva is a $30 billion dollar market cap, but was built with just $7M dollars in venture capital. I think it was also the first SaaS company to be profitable at IPO. They were successful because the team was amazing and they dispatched with conventional thinking. At the time, most assumed that software companies had to go after the broadest existing market. Instead, they sought to create a software tool for a very specific industry, deliver tremendous value, and then expand their portfolio of products over time. Veeva went from 0 to a $1B in ARR in topline in a decade. They did so by starting in the area of a CRM for pharma, which was only a $200-300 million dollar market at the time. Since then, they have built out a product portfolio that ranges from quality systems and clinical trials through to the commercial organization. I think Veeva is a great example of how methodical execution and tremendous focus leads to a phenomenal outcome.
8. In today’s climate what is one short piece of advice you would give to prospective and first-time biotech entrepreneurs?
The short answer is ‘just do it.’ You will grow more personally, and your career will take a new trajectory if you are willing to take a risk to build something new. Those skills are imminently applicable in many circumstances, no matter where you take your career. Many people have often regretted not taking that leap when they had the chance. Especially if you are young, your risk [to start a company] is actually very low, but your upside is extraordinarily high. In the biotech world we tend to be rooted in the academic facets of doing science, which has some big pluses. However, it does tend to over-index on dogma and how things have historically been done. I think drawing insights and learning from adjacent spaces like tech, finance, crypto even, could be really powerful. Some of those lessons from other industries can lead to outsized impacts in the biotech world.
9. What has most impressed you about any experienced or thoughtful investors with whom you have interacted? What is one piece of advice you would give to new biotech investors?
I always ask what percentage [of investors] have worked at a biotech and have actually done drug development. For all my other companies, including Vibe, I have been committed to raising capital from fellow operators and entrepreneurs, who then became VCs. I think [being an entrepreneur] gives you a completely different perspective on what to build, whom you hire, and how you navigate roadblocks. For anyone who wants to go into VC, I will offer you fairly orthogonal advice: don’t go in to VC, go build a company first. If it doesn’t work out, that’s fine, the option to join a VC will always be there. Being a founder gives you more insight, empathy and relevance to the companies you support and invest in. This will inherently make you a better investor, and also give you access to better investment opportunities downstream.
Anything else you want to add about Vibe?
For the first time we are building a community of patients, scientists and partners to identify and vet potential treatments for rare disease and fund them in innovative ways. Vibe Bio ensures that patients, not profits or politics, are in the driver’s seat of drug development. We believe that every patient with a life-altering disease, no matter how rare, deserves to be part of a community and have the power to pursue a cure. We are just at the beginning of this journey and if you are interested in either crypto or biotech, we would love to talk to you!
Favorite Star Wars character?
Here’s two. One is Yoda because he rarely ever gives you an opinion. He is very zen about life and has a very long-term view on things. The other is Chewbacca because he is always dependable. No matter how bad the situation, he rarely complains. He just gets stuff done, and you always know what you will get with Chewbacca.