Hello and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Lauren Richardson. Today's episode

celebrates the 20th anniversary of Folding at home, the Distributed

Computing Project for Simulating protein dynamics.

Today, folding at home is run on millions of devices,

is the world's largest supercomputer,

and tackle some of biology's toughest problems,

including COVID-19.

A16Z General Partner, Vijay Ponde,

who founded Folding at home in his lab at Stanford,

joins this episode along with its current director,

Greg Bowman, an associate professor at Washington University in

St Louis.

In this conversation, we discuss the origins of the Folding At Home Project, along with its connection

to SETI at home and Napster.

Also, the scientific and technical advances needed to solve the complex protein folding

and distributed computing problems.

And importantly, what does understanding protein dynamics actually achieve?

First, some context into what protein folding is and why it matters.

Proteins are the main structural and functional molecules in a cell and are produced as a

linear string of amino acids. But to do their work, this string must first fold into a

complex three-dimensional structure, aka the folding. As proteins carry out their

various jobs, they must also change their shape. Folding at home simulates

...