#868: Tim’s Founder Kitchen — From Brainstorm to The President’s Office in Two Months (Featuring Jake Becraft, Strand Therapeutics)

The Tim Ferriss Show

Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig

Tools Of Titans, Lifestyle Design, Business, Tim Ferriss, Timothy Ferriss Show, Startups, Longform Interviews, Productivity, The 4-hour Workweek, Timothy Ferriss, Tim Ferris, The Tim Ferriss Show, Entrepreneurship

4.6 • 17.7K Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2026

⏱️ 135 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jake Becraft is the CEO and co-founder of Strand Therapeutics, a company building one of the most advanced programmable genetic medicine platforms in biotechnology. Under his leadership, Strand is redefining what RNA medicines can do by enabling cell-selective targeting and therapeutic payload delivery inside the body, unlocking a new class of precision genetic therapies.

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Timestamps:

[00:00:00] Start.
[00:06:07] What Strand does.
[00:08:19] The Boston dinner.
[00:11:05] The image of a body riddled with cancer.
[00:15:05] What stuck for the muggles in the pitch deck.
[00:17:14] A good drug vs. a good product.
[00:19:40] Tricking cancer into snitching on itself.
[00:27:38] The abscopal effect.
[00:34:04] Potency, specificity, and delivery.
[00:35:46] First principles thinking.
[00:36:38] The precipice of a revolution.
[00:41:14] The thousand people in the room.
[00:48:38] Psychedelic medicine as a cautionary tale.
[00:51:17] What actually catches a policymaker’s attention.
[00:53:42] Breakthrough vs. incremental.
[00:54:55] What’s in it for the policymakers?
[00:58:08] The 80/20 wish list.
[01:01:31] Australia’s CTN system.
[01:03:51] Sheep, psychedelics, and red-tape arbitrage.
[01:05:22] China’s clinical-trial flywheel vs. slow-motion American loss.
[01:06:53] The bicoastal biotech ethos.
[01:08:10] Can the FDA actually pull this off?
[01:12:12] The Sophie’s Choice of pharma development.
[01:14:16] Lost arts of founder mode.
[01:15:23] Rockets for tumors, T-cells, and beyond.
[01:19:16] Viral in policy circles.
[01:23:09] The Washington Post headline and the PickFu split test.
[01:27:56] Solution-first storytelling.
[01:33:54] RNA medicine and platform therapeutics.
[01:39:17] Moderna’s 62 days.
[01:40:33] Uber Eats and the de-risked launch.
[01:44:17] CEO blockers.
[01:45:52] Where’s biotech’s SpaceX moment?
[01:46:53] Elon Musk betting black on the wheel.
[01:51:55] AWS and the post-conviction / pre-consensus window.
[01:58:47] COVID politicization.
[01:59:46] Insulin, growth hormone, and the original platform story.
[02:01:35] Biotech as pharma’s little brother.
[02:03:29] More recent role models, Apple edition.
[02:04:50] Art Levinson, Steve Jobs, and the biotech-tech crossover.
[02:06:25] The iPhone as a delivery platform.
[02:08:25] Spotify’s problem and the future of bespoke medicine.
[02:10:07] Baby KJ and the limits of liver-only solutions.
[02:11:19] Parting thoughts.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	In genetic medicine, I would call it the Holy Grail for the last 30 years, has been thinking about
0:05.6	how do we administer intravenous, which means into the bloodstream, genetic medicines, that can
0:12.9	get to places throughout the body. We've been trapped in one organ for the past 30 years, and that's the
0:19.5	liver. We's the liver.
0:28.8	We are the first company that I'm aware of to show this extent of abyscopal response in visceral deep organ metastases in a multitude of patients.
0:36.6	And really right off the bat.
0:38.3	What I want the world to understand is that we are standing right now on the precipice of a revolution
0:46.3	in genetic medicine.
0:48.3	We're going to be able to get to a point in the not too distant future where I think a lot of types of cancers are at the very least chronic diseases
0:56.0	instead of death sentences.
1:00.7	Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode
1:04.5	of the Tim Ferriss show where it's my job to deconstruct world-class performers. Has been my
1:08.9	job for more than a decade. This episode's going to be an
1:11.7	experimental format. It's going to be half-interview, half-live jam session, because many of the
1:18.0	most fascinating conversations that I have, I cannot record. They're often involving startup founders,
1:26.0	because for close to 20 years, I've been an angel investor
1:28.3	that started in 2008 in the Bay Area.
1:32.0	And some of those companies include Shopify.
1:34.0	I was the first advisor when they had something like 10 or 12 employees, Uber, pre-seed round advisor.
1:39.2	Then you got Facebook, now known as meta, Twitter, Alibaba, Duolingo, Clear.
1:42.8	It goes on and on.
1:43.8	And certainly plenty of fatalities. But when things are interesting, they are so interesting. And I've wanted to share some of these conversations, but when they're about fundraising or something really confidential, I can't do that. So I wanted to think up how I could create a series. In this case, we're calling it as a placeholder Tim's founder, Kitchen. I'm sure there's a
	...

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