Jorge Conde knows what CAR-T cancer therapy is.
Conde is a biotech partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, meaning he makes his living investing in new medicines. Why it’s worth pointing out that he has heard of perhaps the biggest advance in oncology in recent years is, well, a long and extremely online story.
A couple of weeks ago, Conde and his firm had just finalized an investment in the cancer immunotherapy company Tmunity Therapeutics and he wanted to tell the world about it.
I think the issue here is not necessarily just Conde’s credentials but how he is hyping a technology that was “new” in 2013, as if it just got discovered. It’s a form of appropriation – taking the innovation someone else has done (and like more than half a decade ago) and claiming as if you are involved in or responsible for it somehow. Conde is not funding the pioneering work of CAR-T, but rather the follow-on work (still important, for sure), and yet his Tweet suggests he’s doing the former, instead of the latter.
This just makes me think Conde is a poser, like many Silicon Valley VCs are. You have to look no further than the Silicon Valley VCs who funded Theranos.