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Sat, 16 Jun 2012 06:27:04 -0400

tamaratumbls: Biggest take away is about not being a failure....

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 07:21:39 -0400

Biggest take away is about not being a failure. ha

Prof Deepak Malhotra - HBS - 2012 Speech to Graduating Harvard MBA Students (by Deepak Malhotra)

Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 16 - Decoding Ourselves

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 06:40:20 -0400

blakemasters:

He is an essay version of my class notes from Class 16 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are mine.

Three guests joined the class for a conversation after Peter’s remarks:

Brian Slingerland. Co-Founder, President & COO at Stem CentRx;

Balaji S. Srinivasan, CTO of Counsyl; and

Brian Frezza, Co-founder, Emerald Therapeutics

Credit for good stuff goes to them and Peter. I have tried to be accurate. But note that this is not a transcript of the conversation.

Class 16 Notes Essay—Decoding Ourselves

I. The Longevity Project

How much longer can people actually live? It’s a very open ended question. It may not be very easy to answer at all. But there is a sense that biotech may be well positioned to try. Biotech, on the wake of the computer revolution, seems quite exciting if we think that a whole series of problems—e.g. cancer, aging, dying—is close to being solved.

Even without the biotech revolution, life expectancy has been rising impressively. The rate has been something like 2.5% decade over decade. In the mid to late 19^th century, expected lifespans were going up at a rate of 2.3 to 2.5 years with each passing decade. If you plot the data points corresponding to each country’s single demographic (typically women) with the longest life expectancy, you get a very straight line on a scattershot basis. This isn’t quite equivalent to Moore’s law, but it’s analogous. In 1840, life expectancy was just 45 or 46 years. For century and a half now, keeping people alive longer has been an exponentially harder problem.

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Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:31:24 -0500

Herve76

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tamaratumbls: Biggest take away is about not being a failure....

Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 16 - Decoding Ourselves

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