“We’re not doing 30 bets a year”: Vijay Pande on betting small after running $4 billion at a16z

It used to be that Vijay Pande was better known in academic circles than investor circles. That changed pretty abruptly a dozen years ago, when Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz — who’d spent their firm’s first five years explicitly avoiding healthcare and life sciences — decided the category was worth betting on after all and handed the keys to Pande. At the time, he was a Stanford chemistry professor who was best known for building Folding@home, the distributed-computing project that turned millions of home PCs into a supercomputer for disease research. Over the next decade-plus, he grew a16z’s bet into a practice managing close to $4 billion.