Jorge Marques
108 posts
Today's Varda news is that we're making space drugs with United Therapeutics ($25b in market cap)
First time a public company has dedicated their balance sheet to making a physical product in space
Ba-boom
delian@zebulgar
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Varda president and Founders Fund partner @zebulgar hops on the show.
Varda revenue: "Last year was about an 80-20 split in terms of the top line. 80% on the federal side. 20% on pharma."
We chat:
- Varda manufacturing
- Investor/entrepreneur
- SpaceX IPO
- xAI + Cusor + ODCs
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Been investing in startups for ~9 years now
Occasionally convinced friends to co-invest alongside me
Today I helped one of them get real liquidity from one of those bets
I like building & investing, but seeing someone I really care about benefit from the outcome hits different
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@brian_armstrong Glycosphingolipids namely gangliosides. Present in the entire body. Carbocode in Portugal scaled it to industrial level
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Some of the most underinvested areas in frontier biology that could accelerate civilizational progress:
- Cheap, large-scale DNA synthesis (writing entire chromosomes or full organisms)
- Real-time, non-destructive RNA sequencing in living cells
- Highly accurate AI-powered polygenic scores for complex traits (disease risk, cognition, longevity) → enabling full genome design
- Ultra-precise, multiplex genome editing (far beyond CRISPR) with minimal off-target effects, scalable across millions of cells
- Safe, efficient, tissue-specific in vivo delivery systems
- Safe and effective human germline engineering
- Accelerated clinical trials via testing on decedents (with consent)
- Next-gen human enhancement: muscle, cognition, mood — beyond GLP-1s
- Ectogenesis / artificial wombs
Who’s actually building in these areas? Drop names, companies, or researchers below 👇
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@vkhosla Appreciate the fact that you write about it now. People tend to forget easily. Everyone should appreciate what bold leaders do. They quietly step in and sort things out, not letting anyone behind.
The industry should appreciate your quick action and lead on this.
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Crisis removes marketing. In March 2023, "value-add" VCs sent sympathy tweets while founders begged for payroll. A few wired cash, no terms, no leverage. The rest were vultures in venture clothing.
khoslaventures.com/posts/march-10…
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@vkhosla Appreciate the fact that you write about now. People tend to forget easily. Everyone should appreciate what bold leaders do. They quietly step in and sort things out, not letting anyone behind.
The industry should appreciate your quick action and lead on this.
English
Three years ago, SVB exposed who VCs really are. Not the ones who tweeted sympathy. The ones who wired money -- no docs, no terms, no theater -- before the government stepped in. Very few did. That's the test most failed.
khoslaventures.com/posts/march-10…
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@elonmusk Yes but Americans living abroad, faraway from consulates, should also be allowed to vote by mail.
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New Uncapped with two of the greats, @vkhosla and @rabois. I don't think I've seen them on a podcast together so I was especially excited about this.
I asked them about how they work together, how they see the world, what's changed in tech, and of course a little bit about their politics. Enjoy.
(0:00) Intro
(0:58) The working relationship
(4:26) Pie chart on what’s discussed
(7:11) Ethos of investors today vs the past
(10:42) Comparing FF and KV
(12:46) What makes a great founder
(22:56) Alpha in today’s market
(30:05) Themes in AI
(38:23) How AI companies are built
(46:23) Interests outside of AI
(53:12) Their politics on X
(58:24) Evolution of political leanings
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We changed the rules 8 years ago. Today, we’re rewriting them entirely.
Eight years ago, we took a stand. We decided that EOR fees shouldn't be a percentage of a salary. We fought for fixed, transparent pricing—and the industry followed.
But we aren't done.
Today, we are officially reinventing the Contractor space.
Introducing: Unlimited Contractors of Record (COR).
We are combining our new AI-driven management with a payment infrastructure that finally puts the user first. This is a model that seems impossible until you see it:
✅ UNLIMITED Contractors: a fix transparent plan that met your scale needs
✅ Best-in-Class Compliance: The most comprehensive liability and compliance coverage in the market.
✅ Fixed Transaction Fees: No percentages, no hidden costs.
✅ Zero Correspondence Fees: No intermediary deductions. The amount you send is the exact amount they receive.
✅ Same-Day Payments: Funds land instantly in their bank account or our Banco wallet.
✅ One Fixed Annual Plan: Total predictability.
The Math: If your organization runs 30+ contractors, moving to this fixed model will save you upwards of $500,000 annually.
This isn't a Black Friday promotion. This isn't a limited-time offer. This is a fundamental shift in how businesses should budget for talent.
If you are finalizing your budget and want to maximize efficiency while slashing costs- this is the only decision you need to make today.
The new standard is here. Papaya Global
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Welcome to the Artemis Accords, Portugal! 🇵🇹
One of America's oldest allies has joined this growing coalition of nations committed to safe, transparent, and peaceful exploration of space.
This 60th signing strengthens the Artemis alliance, ignites more opportunities for transatlantic collaboration, and helps build the orbital and lunar economy.
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@LMontenegro_PT Muito obrigado Sr. Primeiro Ministro 🙏
Português
Recebi com pesar a notícia da morte da cidadã de nacionalidade portuguesa, Fany Pinheiro Magalhães, que estava desaparecida na sequência da tragédia ocorrida em Crans Montana, na Suíça. Deixo à família, amigos e a toda a comunidade portuguesa na Suíça um abraço de profunda solidariedade e as nossas condolências.
Português
🐸🕺🏻🔫Ciganos aos tiros na rua à noite?! E depois? Afinal, os ciganos NÃO têm de cumprir a Lei.👩🏻⚖️
Português
@zebulgar Wow 🤩 that’s definitely a great way to finish the year and start with the right foot 🚀
Happy new year!
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@DrJimFan That is why I agree with Elon Musk’s policy on video driving instead of Lidar
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Everyone's freaking out about vibe coding. In the holiday spirit, allow me to share my anxiety on the wild west of robotics. 3 lessons I learned in 2025.
1. Hardware is ahead of software, but hardware reliability severely limits software iteration speed.
We've seen exquisite engineering arts like Optimus, e-Atlas, Figure, Neo, G1, etc. Our best AI has not squeezed all the juice out of these frontier hardware. The body is more capable than what the brain can command. Yet babysitting these robots demands an entire operation team. Unlike humans, robots don't heal from bruises. Overheating, broken motors, bizarre firmware issues haunt us daily. Mistakes are irreversible and unforgiving.
My patience was the only thing that scaled.
2. Benchmarking is still an epic disaster in robotics.
LLM normies thought MMLU & SWE-Bench are common sense. Hold your 🍺 for robotics. No one agrees on anything: hardware platform, task definition, scoring rubrics, simulator, or real world setups. Everyone is SOTA, by definition, on the benchmark they define on the fly for each news announcement. Everyone cherry-picks the nicest looking demo out of 100 retries.
We gotta do better as a field in 2026 and stop treating reproducibility and scientific discipline as second-class citizens.
3. VLM-based VLA feels wrong.
VLA stands for "vision-language-action" model and has been the dominant approach for robot brains. Recipe is simple: take a pretrained VLM checkpoint and graft an action module on top. But if you think about it, VLMs are hyper-optimized to hill-climb benchmarks like visual question answering. This implies two problems: (1) most parameters in VLMs are for language & knowledge, not for physics; (2) visual encoders are actively tuned to *discard* low-level details, because Q&A only requires high-level understanding. But minute details matter a lot for dexterity.
There's no reason for VLA's performance to scale as VLM parameters scale. Pretraining is misaligned. Video world model seems to be a much better pretraining objective for robot policy. I'm betting big on it.
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@BillAckman Eventually those loans have to be paid over time; and at that time one needs to sell stock for each repayment instalment. Every stock sold pay taxes. So I don’t see why to hurt the people that are borrowing just because a handful of people abuse on such option.
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On the topic of billionaires and wealth taxes in California, I am opposed to wealth taxes because they effectively represent an expropriation of private property and have many unintended and negative consequences that have occurred in every country that has launched such a tax.
I am however strongly in favor of a fairer tax system. To that end, it doesn’t seem fair that someone can build a valuable business, create a billion or more in wealth and pay no personal income taxes by living off loans secured by stock in the company, (and even if the loans are unsecured).
Apparently, this approach is used by many super wealthy people. A small change in the tax code would address this unfairness. In short, personal loans taken in excess of one’s basis in the stock of a company should be taxable as if you sold the same dollar amount of stock as the loan amount.
One shouldn’t be able to live and spend like a billionaire and pay no tax.
I welcome arguments to the contrary as to why this is somehow unfair to the billionaire or even the hundred millionaire, but I don’t think there is a good one. The favorable current tax treatment of this approach also encourages the use of leverage which is not good for society.
And with respect to California’s budget problem, the issue is not a lack of tax revenues. The problem is how the money is being spent.
I have a bunch more ideas on other changes to the tax code that are hard to argue with if anyone cares.
Bill Ackman@BillAckman
The way to fix this problem is to make borrowing an amount in excess of your basis in a stock taxable. In other words, if you have $10 billion of stock in a company you founded with zero basis, loans secured by the stock should be taxable as if you sold a like amount of stock. So, for example, if you borrowed $1 billion you would have a capital gain of $1 billion. This would be both fair and practical to implement.
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