Tal Zaks
speaker
203 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Tal Zaks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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It's called Voltaire's Bastards, and the subtitle is The Tyranny of Reason in Western Civilization. And he made a point in... that ever since quote-unquote the age of reason, we have mistakenly assumed that science in itself and reason will be an ethical force for good, which of course it isn't.
Science and reason are science and reason, but it's the humanistic moral compass that needs to frame how we deploy them. But the other point he makes is that in this age of reason, the way that experts have survived and grown is in silos. And that silo is enshrined in language. And so every discipline changes. develops its own language over time, and it becomes a barrier to common understanding.
And if you're trying to solve a multidisciplinary problem, you very quickly realize that one of your greatest barriers is language. The finance world knows this very well. We coined the term FedSpeak. That's clearly an example of language as a barrier constructed, so on purpose. But we all fall into the trap.
And what I realized early on is that physicians are probably as guilty or guiltier than anybody else in doing that. And I'll give you an example. So
Back in the day, if a patient came to me and his platelet counts, these are the blood clotting elements we have in our blood, were low for reasons that the physician didn't know, but it would lead to a skin rash because when blood doesn't clot, it will accumulate under the skin.
So people would show up with this skin rash and you'd go, the patient would come to the physician and the physician would look at him and say, hey, yeah, you have idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura. Oh, God, that sounds scary. Now, what did I just say? Well, all I said is in Latin, you've got low platelets and a skin rash, and I don't know why.
Idiopathic, I don't know why, purpurized skin rash, and thrombocytopenia is low platelets. So just by using Latin, we made ourselves sound smart, but the physician had no clue actually what it comes. Now, today we learned a little bit about the biology, so it's not as bad as I make it out to be, but you get the picture. And so when I came into the industry,
I was super curious always to understand what is the language of the other functions that have to come together to solve this problem. And yes, I'm the physician in the room, but the guys doing the biology and the guys doing the chemistry and the manufacturing, they're just as important.
And by the way, one of the reasons I'm now in the investor seat is because I realized from my time in Moderna how critical it is to understand the language of investors and the expectations that they have in order to align across this mission to be successful. So it is a multidisciplinary challenge and that's not gonna change. We'll be able to make it more efficient.
Yes, these tools are already making an impact in drug discovery. And as we integrate and have better and better ways of looking at human data, I think it will also make a dent in development. But it's interesting to sit back and figure out, well, how can we actually radically change it? And I don't know that I have a good answer, although I'm trying.
And this is especially, I think, germane given the experience we had at COVID.
So I joined one of the best VC firms I could find, Orbimed, because they have a track record of actually being successful. And I wanted to learn the answer to that question. And luck certainly plays a role. But here's a few thoughts. that I think are not as obvious. We all recognize the importance of learning from failure.
And I listened to your podcast with Jared Kushner the other day, his version of what is God trying to teach me, and I thought that was extremely well put. For many, many years, my favorite quote of all times was Nelson Mandela's who said, in life, I've either succeeded or I've learned. And coming out of the COVID success, it actually made me realize
That's a misguided quote because it suggests that you haven't learned from your successes as much. And I would argue that the best investors actually learn more from the successes than the failures. And that's not trivial. When you fail, there's a whole bunch of things you can point at as causal elements. But when you succeed, as you say, What was it? Was it luck? Was it talent?
Was it getting the right people around the table? It's a combination of factors. And I think the good investors develop this sense of pattern recognition of what works. And as I've tried to uncover it for myself, frankly, out of my own curiosity, I think in the domain in which I function, which is venture capital, and it's very different from private equity or some other corners of investors, but
For venture capital and specifically for what I call collaborative venture capital, which is the type of venture capital we have, which is to say that, yeah, we will often seed companies, but we very quickly look to syndicate deals. We look to work with other investors. We look to broaden the investor base, but also broaden the competencies we have around the board.
For me, the answer has been really a combination of talent of people and the content that we believe has a leg to stand on. And What it means, and when I call ourselves collaborative venture capitalists, it's because, at least for me, it's always critical to look at the talent that comes together as much as it is the content.
Yes, I get excited by the science of what they're trying to solve, but I have to get excited about the people who have the experience and the wisdom to navigate and understand what it takes. Because as that book points out, and you correctly point out, it's almost never a straight line.
And if it's not a straight line, it means that you need people around the table who have the experience and ability to look around corners. And it means that you need enough of a capital and strategy structure to give you some degrees of freedom of movement. I can tell you early on in my career as an investor, I made an investment in a small company. It was a very rational thought.
It was for a certain idea of a drug that would have a certain effect against cancer. And it was a small team and it was very linear. And it didn't pan out.
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