Platform Biotech: Alloy Therapeutics • Errik Anderson
Open Source Biotech
Building Symbiosis in the Biotech Ecosystem. In this season finale, Nic sits down with Errik Anderson, founder and CEO of Alloy Therapeutics, for a deep dive into how collaboration—not competition—is redefining the future of drug discovery.
Alloy isn’t a traditional biotech company chasing its own therapies. It’s building the plumbing—the shared infrastructure and ecosystem upon which others develop life-saving drugs. Much like Linux transformed software through open collaboration, Alloy is reimagining the business of innovation itself by making the tools of discovery accessible to all.
Errik’s approach to strategy and innovation is a masterclass. He seamlessly pulls on the full spectrum of the Doblin Group’s Ten Types of Innovation—from product and experience to networks, structure, and business models—creating a moat that’s not only unique, but dizzying to potential competitors.
Together, Nic and Errik unpack the principles of culture, incentive alignment, and systems design that allow openness to scale without losing coherence. This conversation goes beyond Alloy—it’s about how to think differently, build collaboratively, and redefine what it means to innovate in one of the world’s most complex industries.
A perfect close to Season One of unNatural Selection, before Nic’s upcoming Season Synthesis episode that will connect the dots across all 45 interviews to reveal the broader patterns of innovation and survival.
-
(Auto-generated by Spotify. Errors may exist.)
Errik B. Anderson is the CEO and Founder of Alloy Therapeutics, a global biotech infrastructure company discovering, manufacturing, and developing therapeutic pharmaceuticals.
He started his career at Lehman Brothers Venture Capital and continues his venture work as the GP at 82 VS, Alloy’s affiliated Venture Studio, and is the CEO of his single-family office, Ulysses Diversified Holdings. Errik has been the founder or co-founder of a number of successful private and public biotech companies with over $10 billion in market capitalization, including Alloy, Adimab, Compass Therapeutics, Elector, Avatite, and Arsonis. Errik’s companies are responsible for discovering over 90 therapeutic antibodies currently under review or approved by the FDA. Errik received his AB from Dartmouth, an MBA from Tuck School of Business, and studied bioengineering at the Thayer School of Engineering. He is a co-founder and owner of the three-time national champion New England Free Jacks, part of Major League Rugby. Errik is on a number of nonprofit and for-profit boards, including the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.
Host: Long bio, Errik. It’s when you put it all out like that. I was just kind of laughing a few times, like, “Oh yeah,” I mean, there’s been a lot of stuff going on in the last 25 years. You know, for someone—and I’ve known you for over 20 years—you’re one of the most humble people I know. So I’m sure you’re blushing over there hearing all this stuff. But it’s such an honor to have you here. It’s been way too long since we spoke, but it’s great to have you on Unnatural Selection. Thanks for being here.
Errik: Oh my gosh, incredible to be on this and just congratulations on everything with Unnatural Selection. Just the quality of your interviews... this is just amazing to be on it. So I’m really honored to be here as part of that group.
Host: I appreciate it. Who knew? For somebody I was winging it. It’s amazing! It’s incredible what you’re doing here. Yeah, I love it. Well, I’m eager to jump into this because this is the closing episode of the season, and I’m looking forward to talking to you because you and I realize that... Nic. Yeah. Should have brought my A-game today. Yeah, I didn’t want to tell you ’cause I didn’t want to add the pressure, but it’s been an incredible season with some luminaries, and just really reflecting on my history with you. Obviously, we worked in companies together and we go way back, and just really thinking strategically in a number of different things. You think on so many different vectors when it comes to innovation that I’m really looking forward to, in the context of Alloy, picking at your brain a little bit and how you think about innovation strategy, from everything from the science and the technology all the way to the networks and the business models, and all the different types of innovations that go into this. More than anything, I think I’ve learned a lot from you on these different domains. It’s going to be great kind of unpacking some of that.
Errik: It’s amazing to be on this with you. And yeah, as you said, we’ve known each other for so long, but we’ve also had the pleasure of working together, both as your customer and partner back at one of your software companies, and being on the board and whatnot. We’ve done software, we’ve done biotech, nonprofit work—this is just incredible. So yeah, it’s been great knowing you for sure.
Host: So before we get started, I always start with a signature question that level sets and gives an apples-to-apples comparison for people listening. It also allows the guest, you, to tell us at a very high level what mission drives you. So can you please tell us what need or impact drives your work?
[05:00]
Errik: For me personally, there’s a few different answers to that question. I could say I’m kind of primed with my Alloy hat on today, and so maybe I’d start there. So for Alloy Therapeutics and all the work I do in biotech, it is really about making medicine that works. It’s pretty simple. So our mission at Alloy is to collaboratively cure all disease and to make medicine accessible and affordable to everyone on the planet. And that’s clearly a crazy mission, but what I love about it is it’s also clear that we can’t do it on our own. And that’s why we’re called Alloy Therapeutics, because we work with others.
So I’d say the thing that wakes me up in the middle of the night—because I kind of wake up every day between 3:00 and 4:00 AM and I have the discipline of just hitting the desk and starting to do work of some sort—I think the thing that gets me jumping out of bed with kind of my mind on fire of a puzzle to solve often times, is thinking about medicine and thinking about that unmet need. And I think the thing that motivates me so much is the incredible breakthroughs that are coming along. The thing that keeps me pushing every day is every day there’s something new and you’re like, "Oh my gosh, if I do something extra today, it’s going to accelerate the next thing and the next thing". Because there’s so many things that are working in the biotech field and there’s so many new medicines to discover and technologies, and how do we share and work together? So just that collaborative model of working with everyone to try to uncover new insights and turn them into drugs so that, you know, if a loved one ends up needing a drug, hopefully you’ve done everything you can to have done the work between now and then. Yeah, that’s the primary thing. I would say at our family office, Ulysses Diversified Holdings, we have a dual strategy of healthcare and entertainment. Healthcare, for obvious reasons—my background is focused on medicine. But in our family, we define entertainment as everything you have in your life that’s more than what you need to survive. So it’s trying to explicitly say, like, these things are choices. There’s only a certain number of things you need. Like, you and I both woke up in a bed this morning, we’re going to go to bed tonight, right? What happens between now and then? We’re going to eat some food, we’re going to move around. Life is actually very simple when you think about it: What happens between when you wake up and go to bed every single day? And beyond a certain level of taking care of your basic physiological needs, it’s really entertainment. It’s these choices you make. So, make good choices and be thoughtful about it. And I think also for our family, that helps—that means that you can appreciate the things that you have a little bit easier if you frame them as choices. And so, we have two big businesses that we work on: Alloy on the healthcare side, which is this big biotech infrastructure company that touches hundreds of different companies: big companies, small companies, academic, sovereign entities now. And on the entertainment side is mainly the New England Free Jacks, which you highlighted in the opener. But the through-line between them is both of them are about building communities and about bringing people together in a shared purpose. And yeah, it’s very much—I mean, it sounds kind of cheesy—but that’s how I think about it. The through-line is you just want people to come together around a shared mission and then also around shared values. And I would say Alloy and the Free Jacks very much have shared values, in part because we helped to create both entities.
Host: Yeah, I think you said a bunch of things in there that I want to highlight. And creating community is so important too, because I find that—I think a lot of people find that—modern technology has isolated us more. And so here you are saying, "No, no, no, no, let’s reverse that". We can actually build community and we can build partnership around everything from drug discovery all the way to entertainment. And so, number one, I commend you for that because I think that’s really important just for the fabric of our society. The other thing that I want to highlight there, because I think you glossed over it, but for people out there, there are two minds here, right? So you said collaborative drug discovery, and I just want to draw that out because I think anybody that’s listening to this that’s from the life sciences, drug discovery world, their Spidey-sense just lit up and they’re like, "Oh, wow, that’s interesting". But I think for anybody not in that field, they’re like, "Oh, I don’t get it". And so I think it’s important—I want to highlight drug discovery is not historically a very collaborative space. I mean, pharma companies, their IP are their golden jewels. And once they discover something, every patent goes into it, and you protect them fiercely because that’s really where you’re going to make your next blockbuster. What you’re saying is, "No, no, no, we can actually do this in a social way".
Errik: I believe something else that’s crazy: We truly don’t compete with anyone. We are all just in a collaboration to defeat disease. And you’re like, "That’s not true because I got my company, you got your company, you got these things. Pfizer doesn’t want to see Novartis be successful or Eli Lilly". And, like, actually, you put the CEOs of those companies in a small room with a patient. They’re both thinking the same thing, right? They’re like, "What’s the best drug for this patient"? But somewhere between that bedside of having total clarity in that moment to the role that they have and the responsibility they have as the CEO of a multinational global pharmaceutical company, and the diverging interest that happened from your shareholders and your employees and everyone else...
[10:00]
Host: You’ve got mouths to feed and people to take care of. You have obligations that you have committed to as the CEO in that role. And there’s a divergence between those two things. But at the heart, in all of our hearts, as scientists and as people in the industry, everybody just wants to defeat disease. And we’re just trying to figure out a way to make it work.
Errik: So we tried to create a business model with Alloy where the way that we think about technologies and services, we can be as collaborative as possible, and that there’s always a way to make money somewhere in that value chain from having an idea through a commercialization. And if somebody else can do a better job, oh my gosh, thank you. We’ll let you do a better job, and that way that will accelerate the timelines, it will reduce the cost, it will increase the probability of success of the drug. If you do one of those three things, you’ve got a service. Great. But the thing that sometimes happens is the counterparty is like, "Well, I’m not going to do my service for you. I only do it for myself". Like, "Okay, well then we agree. We’re not competing still because you don’t offer that service". So I’m not taking business away from you here, but I’m going to do what you’re doing, and probably not as good as you, but at least I can make it available to like 50 other people. So I wish you would just make that service available because we wouldn’t have to go do it. But if that’s where we’re at, we’ll go do that service as well if that’s what’s needed.
Host: Yeah, it’s interesting. And you said something there that—I being a tennis player, I recently read this quote, I think it was by Roger Federer, where he said—and it goes back to what you said, "The pharma companies are your competitors, it’s the disease". And I recently read he said, "It’s not the player across the net that’s your competitor, it’s the ball". And when you think about it from that perspective, it really—I mean, when that ball is coming to you at a different angle and speed and spin and all that kind of stuff, your main challenge is to be able to control that and put that ball where you want it. So you need to focus on the ball, less on the person across the net in that moment. And it’s not a perfect analogy, but it made me think of it because I just read it like two days ago.
Errik: It’s good. I mean, that’s really helpful to think about. We personalize competition so much. Look, I’m an owner of a sports team, right? We have, as you mentioned, three national championships. That feels really good. So you can’t help but see that as a zero-sum competitive game on the pitch. But I think it really helps your psychology. That Federer quote is actually really amazing because it takes you away from hating the person or trying to ascribe so much to the actual person you’re playing against as opposed to focusing on the object. I think there’s a beautiful analogy there in pharma that I would unpack after this as I think about that. But that’ll stick in my brain because I think there’s a lot of analogies that really work for biotech.
Host: Well, especially you have no control over that player across the net, but you do have control over that ball that’s coming your way at 100 miles an hour. You have no control over your competitors, but you do over that disease.
Errik: Yes, yes, yes, completely. And I like you say control because that’s one of the things that—having the hope and the belief... having a lot of what we do starts with, "What do you believe?" One of our values at Alloy—we have nine values—one of our values is "to learn to live in the dark". And it comes down to this idea that you have to—you have to have a system by which you can operate. Like, when you come into a dark room, there’s a whole bunch of things that you might know about rooms, you might know that light switches are on walls and stuff. But you have a system by which you operate in the dark so that you can find your way to the light. And the other reason why that’s one of our values, and I feel really strongly about it, is it also comes down to the lie that we’ve all been told, and especially as co-founders, as founders, you’ve been told, which is, "There’s a light at the end of the tunnel". And that’s a total lie. The person that’s telling you usually has no idea if there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. And more importantly, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel unless you create it, right? As the small team, as the innovator, as the scientist, as the artist, whoever that is. The act of creation is something that happens in the minds and of the hands of the people who do the creation, not by some mystical external event. It’s people doing great things together. And people tell you that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. But the truth is, you have to be comfortable with the fact that everything you’re doing, you may never actually ever see the light at the end of the tunnel. And you need to have the emotional and the mental fortitude and the systems in place to live in that place and to still have hope when there is no light, because that’s the only way you get to the place that, maybe there will be something. And so, when you say that, like, you talk about the inevitability of us treating and curing disease, that’s what we need more of. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s because, by the way, it’s going to work. We’re breaking down this problem. There’s miracles of science that become miracles of medicine. Every day, like, I can’t keep up and it’s all I do. And you’re like, "Oh my gosh, that worked!" You’re sending papers around to the team. And I have a huge team, four countries and three continents, and there’s like, "Oh my gosh, did you guys see this"? And sometimes we get to be working on some of these things.
Host: Yeah. Now I love those pillars that you’re talking about, kind of guidelines that you have because, yeah, the innovation process is inherently dirty. And for people that are in it and you’ve done it successfully, you realize that there are a lot of things you have to build and part of it is a culture.
[15:00]
Host: You know, you have to be comfortable in the dark because that’s one of the things—how you make decisions in your organization, how people self-select to be a part of your organization. It takes a certain mentality to be comfortable in the dark. It takes a certain mentality to be vulnerable and come up with ideas that are imperfect at first and you have to shape them into something that’s interesting. You need the psychological safety to be able to do that. You need the adaptability in people to be able to say like, "You’ve got to live in chaos and make some magic out of that". And so there’s so many different elements that are popping up in this conversation alone.
Errik: I like you say the psychological safety. You know, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I think about the equivalent of that for business, and it’s exactly what you just said. The psychological safety in a small company, even in a big company, at the base of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is safety. But in your business context, with your job, it’s the safety of the confidence that your paycheck will come in. Is the company funded? You can work at Lilly. You know that Lilly’s going to have more money next week. You work at a lot of biotech companies. You’re like, "I think we’re good," but maybe it’s not that, right? So the more you can deal with the base of that, it actually frees people up to deliver their potential at the highest part of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The way that I think about that for innovation is you can’t actually buy innovation. Money can take care of stuff from the bottom up because you’re taking care of needs and you’re paying for people’s healthcare and all of these things. But really what you’re going for at the top of the pyramid is people’s shower time. It’s like, what do they think about in the shower when you’re clearly not paying them for it? It’s clearly their personal and their private time. But if in that moment they’re like wondering about, "How do we cure disease? How do we have a breakthrough in discovery in this antibody, or this specifically, this genetic medicine we’re working on"? And if you can get them in their shower mode, that means you have all of their creativity. And money can’t buy that. I think what people miss about innovation is you can set up some of the circumstances that will foster innovation, but you can’t scale innovation with more capital in the same way that you can’t go to an artist and say, "Oh my gosh, can you paint me the best picture you could ever paint, like best painter ever"? And you’re like, "Here’s $1,000,000," and you’re like, "Oh, that’s good. You know, that’s a three out of 10". And if you’re like, "For $2,000,000, can I get a six out of 10"? And I’m like, "Well, then I tried really hard. Like that’s what I got, I guess". And for $4 million, "Can I make it even twice as good"? And for $8 million, "Can we just keep going"? That’s not how innovation works. There’s a temporal component to innovation of things that just have to percolate. And some power of collaboration is you’re kind of you almost you’re time-hacking with collaboration. It’s like whatever everything you worked on today and in your whole life. And as you said, we’ve known each other for like 20 years. The whole sum of that we can have in this conversation. And so your whole temporal being, we can have like a single conversation like, "Okay, what do you know about this? Hold on, what do you"? And then I can be like, "Oh, well, hey, actually what I know about that is this". And together, we could make something so much more efficiently because the two of us have a trust in relationship and willing to share that you’re not trying to screw me. I’m not trying to screw you. We’re just trying to make like a drug baby together. Oh, yeah. Here’s what—this is great.
Host: Yeah, no, absolutely. And, like you said, it’s almost like what happens outside the strict lines of creating an organization, right? Because, like you said, you can have tons of money and you can recruit the smartest people, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re creating the environment for collaboration, for innovation, for imagination—all the things that—it’s like that X-factor that you start putting people together and things are bubbling.
Errik: You just have to know how to take a small spark and build it into a fire and maintain it through the storm and keep building it and building it. And unless you know how to do that, it doesn’t just take, you know, sticks and wood and a match, and maybe gas. But nonetheless, it takes a lot to build a fire and maintain it. And so there’s a lot of—I wouldn’t say intangibles because I think there is some science to it—but it’s for all the big companies out there that want to stimulate innovation, it’s really not just throwing more money at it. You need a certain mentality and a culture.
Host: There was a really good—I like that metaphor with the fire as well. It’s like, who predicted the hurricane that was going to sweep through? 120 mile an hour winds.
Errik: You’re like, "No, no, I totally prepared for 80 mile an hour winds". Like I did a good job here. Yeah, you can totally take that, especially life as a startup. There’s a woman who’s a—she’s a journalist I would consider a friend. I think she’s very good at her job, and she’s been writing about our industry for a long time. And she’s written about some of the things that we’ve done for a long time. And she was writing a piece on Alloy a while back and she was like, "Okay." It was the launch of our Venture Studio 82. VS, which stands for Venture Studio. 82 is the molecular weight of lead because our venture studio wants to be the most boring component of an alloy. We want to be behind the scenes, like small and behind the scenes, supporting other folks.
[20:00]
Errik: The plumbing. We just want to be the plumbing for everyone else’s innovation, right? Do anything we can to make you successful. But she’s right about this. And by the way, she totally understands our business. She’s a good journalist. I really like her and she’s a really good person. And she’s unpacking the business model a little bit and whatever I’m telling her and how I’m communicating it, and she starts to talk about it. It’s like, "Okay, okay, I get it". You give a Venture Studio, you give the money to do the drug discovery, and you’ve paid the money for people to have their salary, and you’ve paid the money for their lab bench and for their office. And then she’s describing all these components of like an incubator and accelerator. And she just keeps saying—I must have been having a long day, right? And she just said like money like one too many times. And I was like, "Hold on, hold on, hold on". I was like, "Stop. I think you’re really good at your job and I and I really like you as a person". So Patricia, that is not her name. Tell me, if I bought you a lake house with a typewriter, and I paid for all your food, and I paid for the house, and I paid for this beautiful view, and I paid for the paper, and then I paid for your healthcare and I paid for it, could you give me Great Expectations? Like, and by the way, "I think you’re good at what you do and I think you’re a great author. Could you give me Great Expectations?"
Host: Like, "I don’t know if I could".
Errik: I was like, "Okay, wait, hold on. But what if I paid for it"? And I just kept saying, "Could you give me Great Expectations?" She’s like, "No". And I was like, "Wait, hold on". I think I kind of drilled her down for like three minutes on this. I’m just making the point of like, "And what if I found 1,000 lake houses and 1,000 of you and I pay for all of those things? Do you think then we will get Great Expectations? And she’s like, 'I don’t know,' like it’s kind of idiosyncratic. It’s not like, you know, cracking atoms. It’s just doing something beautiful that is a bit artistic and idiosyncratic. Money, and even that scale with money, you can create the environment, but you don’t necessarily get inside that person’s head and in their moment with all of the emotions coming together of like that 'Aha!' moment of creation, where like, 'Oh my gosh, this makes sense. Here’s the drug that works.' We can industrialize part of it, but the act of creation cannot be industrialized".
Host: Yeah, totally. And, you know, to take that analogy to the end, if we think about AI, you know, because I think a lot about this and I think about AI in terms of like, "What is it so advanced that it’s blowing our mind because of these incredible things that can do? Or is it that we as humans don’t really do things that are that sophisticated and incredible to begin with, and we’re replicating it?" And so to your analogy, I’m thinking, "Well, if you took a bunch of monkeys and gave us some typewriters and you had endless time, could they recreate Great Expectations? And would you and would you know it?"
Errik: There’s so much of how we consume reality that has to come through a time lens. Not to get super philosophical, but like, do you know you’re experiencing Great Expectations after all the monkeys? Like, theoretically, like totally randomly, like that would theoretically in an infinite universe come out, but then how do you experience it temporarily? And we have one life to live, and it’s got to. And so where we want it to be is I want to ask it, give me an alternative theory to the creation of the cosmos that doesn’t build on The Big Bang or anything else that’s been written. And it’s not going to find that for me, right? And so I think, to me at least, that’s where we start getting into AGI. And I don’t think that the current technology of this very sophisticated autocomplete gets us there.
[25:00]
Host: That’s me. So what does it get us to you? I mean, you’re a software guy as well back in the day. Are you still a software guy? Are you always a software guy?
Errik: Yeah, I’m always writing code. Yeah, Yeah, totally. Yeah. So it’s up to date clearly like what we missed in the first Internet bubble as you well know, right? There’s all these Internet companies and what software does really well is automating process. And that, that was certainly a through line in what we’ve seen in software in 25 years. I think AI and ML for a lot of the things that is arriving in biotech and healthcare. But we see this in a lot of places. It’s doing a really good job of automating some process for us that we that we know how to do general or it’s one step removed or it’s like a kind of a relatively small person.
Host: So well, what I would say to that is like, yeah, so historically software has been great for automating process and and creating efficiencies that way. So where I see AI is still that, but at scale, because now you can take, you can factor in the cumulative knowledge of humanity in multiple dimensions.
[30:00]
Host: So it’s, you know, now it’s the multiomics. You’re not just looking at genetics, you’re not just looking at maybe monogenetic disease, you’re looking at polygenetic disease, you’re looking at polygenic risk scores. You’re maybe combining that with proteomics and metabolomics. So now you think about the scale of the data we can achieve and then the connections between those because now [AI] can actually find those patterns. So I would say it’s still process, but you’re layering on top of this almost an endless amount of compute that finds these patterns across endless amounts of data. I had, you know, that reminds me of is, you know, the concept of transactive memory, this idea, it’s about how humans like they’re a thing, like we have a long term relationship. You see this with couples, right? A friend of mine brought me this insight a little while back and it was like one of the most beautiful things. And he presented it to me as when an old couple that’s been married for like 70 years, when the partner passes away, the really hard thing is you lose a bunch of your memories. And I was like, wait, what do you mean? It’s like, oh, because actually there’s this whole branch of psychology and in cognition is called transactive memory. That is this idea that you store things in your own memory, but you also know where other things are stored. And if that, that partnership that’s gone on for decades, you...
[45:00]
Errik: So why don’t you pay me next year? Like I have something to sell. By the way, it cost me something today. This isn’t like software where it’s like something, it’s like, no, no, it’s like actually I’m accruing the cost of this, it’ll cost me like 100 bucks. I’m going to sell it to you at list price of 200. But don’t worry about paying me. Why don’t you pay me next year? Because you need like I’m still getting like the $200.00, but $200 next year is a different currency than $200 this year. Now think about if that time shifted payment was 10 or 15 years out. It’s a loan. It’s kind of a loan, but if you own a slice of the drug product. So it’s. So in Alloy’s case, we help to discover novel medicine and we...
[50:00]
Host: necessarily support it the right way. And an alternative solution is like, well, we’re starting from scratch with genomics in hand, how would we do it? And then we’re not going to have a perfect system, but then how do we retrofit that with the current system? And you’re doing that because a lot of what you described then, and for the record, I didn’t mean to call you out in the beginning that you do a poor job describing your company. You do a good job. So how you described it is how it was in my mind, what I was trying, what I was struggling with is your model of saying what Alloy does is this collaborative drug discovery infrastructure. It’s not a category. So you’re creating a category that I know of because I don’t know, it’s not CRO, it’s not services, it’s not infrastructure like software platforms. It’s not biotech. You’re like a conglomerate of all those.
[1:00:00]
Errik: What we’re looking for is people that have a shared value system. And, and sharing, by the way, doesn’t mean that you give things away for free. This is not philanthropy. It means that there’s sort of the mutual benefit that comes from trade, right? That’s just, if two parties enter into a willing transaction, right, then everybody’s benefiting. That’s just right. I don’t have to teach you that. So we want people to be able to present themselves in an honest and and a direct manner where it’s a multi game interaction. It’s like it’s a multi round interaction. And I think if you always as a philosophy, right, if in game theory, the game always breaks down in the last game, right? So because, because at that point everyone’s like, all right, well, whatever happened before, it’s all off. We know this is the last the last round of the game. So what you have to do is to create a game that goes beyond the last round. There’s always something more. So we one of our other values, we seek to be, we look to be generous when others are needy, greedy or fearful as a principal and pulling it off the old Warren Buffett quote and run training inequities. And what we mean by being generous has nothing to do with money.
[1:05:00]
Errik: I think it’s harder for a public company to take that because just there’s, there’s restrictions on a public company. So that’s where we can maybe be helpful as the company that we are because we’ve never made any promises to the contrary of our current business model. Like we funded it out of our family office and it was three other family offices that came in early. You know, we, we, we count Peter Thiel is one of the first family offices. His family office came in and I’m very proud of that interaction. And he’s, his organization has always been supportive, not necessarily agree, but has been supportive and two other family offices that are very large. And we just said, hey, here’s what we’re trying to build towards. You start to ask the question of like, do you believe that you can make medicine, you’re an export into the world? Like is the destiny of your people, do you believe the destiny of your people is exporting other things that like, do you believe you’re good enough to do this? Because by the way, and what we do, the big consulting companies will probably tell you can only do this in Boston and San Francisco. And that’s not true. Like I grew up in a farm in western Kansas. Like everyone tells me that like between the coasts, there is nothing. It’s like it’s, it’s the equivalent of where we’re standing today in the Middle East and having this conversation, but they’re totally wrong. Like they’re completely wrong that like we, we have the talent, we have the ability, you know, the training is, is there, but it’s also just the knowledge. And so the explicit knowledge transfer that we have process technology. Like if you believe that, you think the future, the destiny of your people is making medicine and exporting them to the world. I will replicate everything I have and everything I know and I will bring it here openly and willingly and honestly.
Host: Well try because since I’ve known you, you like to launch for bold and audacious things that seem and sound like, I don’t know if this is real, but like your energy and your intellect make it so it’s like, but if anybody can make it happen, it’s you. So with that, I know we’re running very short on time.
[1:10:00]
Errik: But that’s why I say like, it’s, there’s, there’s an aspect of passion there that is, it’s somewhat uncontrollable, but it comes from kind of a dark place. And so it comes from a place of regrets. And so I think, I think out to being 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100. And like you asked me that question and it’s going to be in the context of probably friends and loved ones that we’ve lost and a feeling of regret that like, did we do everything we could? Did we, did we find the thing that we could have found if we had just collaborated a little better and worked a little harder? And so that’s why the Alloy business model actually is just kind of logical. Like the best way to avoid that regret, like the demon side of that equation is to try to get medicine to everybody and collect the data and then plow it into the feedback loop of generating insights and then making new medicine to solve that, identify an unmet need and doing it again and again. And the more you collaborate, the faster you’re going to do that. So it’s like a super selfish business model at the end of the day, which involves my own psychological insecurity of the regrets of, you know, heaven forbid, my wife or one of my kids, but your parents and everyone else will. I love like working on something where we’re the clear architect of our own destiny. And like, that’s what perfection looks like, I think in like some philosophical way. And we also, it’s just hard to wrap your head around it. So, yeah, I mean, looking back on it today, I got up early and we grinded on this. I forgot this was it was on my calendar. Right. This has been a wonderful little interlude into a Friday afternoon. Yeah. It was just kind of round out the day and get back on the horse tomorrow. And there’s like, a lot of really important work to be done. And the pain of doing that work is what brings me so much joy. And if that makes sense, I think that makes sense for you.
Host: It totally makes sense. I can identify and relate to this in so many different realms. But you know, Errik, I mean, first of all, it’s been a privilege knowing you for as long as I have, and truly calling you a friend. You’re an inspiration every time we talk. The few moments that my mind isn’t spinning from all the knowledge you’re dumping on me and I can actually connect with something and connect the dots, makes me feel good about myself because you operate in so many different realms. But you know, since I’ve known you, your model for life has been so aspirational and so fundamentally good for humanity, whether you’re at Alloy or Adimab or any number of different organizations that you started, that you’re one of the few gems that, you know, you meet you once and you’re like, "Was this guy real?" And then you talk to a second time and then a 50th time and you’re like, "No, that literally is Errik". And for all those reasons, I think it’s just a reason why you’ve accomplished so much, a reason why so many people believe in you and want to work with you. And again, why I consider myself to be privileged to see you as a friend and for having you here.
[1:15:00]
Host: So for all those things, Errik, it’s so wonderful having you here. I’m, I know you’re too nice with that comment. Yeah, but I appreciate that. Thank you.
Errik: Thank you, Nic. No, of course. And similarly, it’s great to know that you’re out there in the world not only doing this, but everything else you’re doing. So it’s one of those small things, knowing there’s other good people in the world. Whereas as my son said to me, I got off a frustrating phone call and he and he looked at me and he goes, "No friends at twilight, hey, dad". And what he was quoting was Tenet, which we had watched a few weeks before. And he’s like 15. And I like, it’s almost like I’ve never been more proud in my life because he just really dialed. I was on a frustrating phone call and he knew what we do was really important to me. And I was frustrated trying to get something done. He goes, "No friends at twilight, Dad". That’s how I feel. So you are a friend at twilight, Nic. And there’s a club of folks, and you know who they are, that you know, when you’re heading into the darkness, you know who’s on your side.
