Danielle Strachman 💗 🐈 💃 🪴 🎸 🎨 🐕

Bringing freedom & autonomy to young people. Built @thielfellowship and @1517fund. First investor @lambdaAPI @loom @Mach_Industries @RainmakerCorp @positron_ai

[Danielle Strachman 💗 🐈 💃 🪴 🎸 🎨 🐕 @DStrachman]

I love getting a solid cold email or DM from founders!

No need for an intro to 1517.

Some things will make your message standout and get a response (faster than others)🧵:

[Danielle Strachman 💗 🐈 💃 🪴 🎸 🎨 🐕 @DStrachman]

@eastbay_e Welcome to my world!

[Danielle Strachman 💗 🐈 💃 🪴 🎸 🎨 🐕 @DStrachman]

If you want to stay hip to the lingo, while making incredible returns, all while making a dent in the universe, become an LP in 1517.

[1517 Fund @1517fund]

michael has spent years betting on young people.

understanding what they’re saying is apparently a separate skill.

[Danielle Strachman 💗 🐈 💃 🪴 🎸 🎨 🐕 @DStrachman]

@noor_siddiqui_ <3<3<3

[Danielle Strachman 💗 🐈 💃 🪴 🎸 🎨 🐕 @DStrachman]

Noor is an OG Thiel Fellow doing incredible work!

[Noor Siddiqui @noor_siddiqui_]

I went to TED to talk about the biggest injustice in the world nobody takes seriously.

The genetic lottery is wildly unfair. Why should a dice roll decide your life?

It robs babies of the ability to walk. To talk. To make it to her first birthday. One wrong letter out of 3 billion. And we shrug and call it bad luck.

It blinded my mother. After years of testing, the answer was: there’s nothing we can do.

She’s not alone. 400 million people live with a rare genetic disease. Half are children. 95% have no approved treatment.

I’m done pretending it’s fate. It’s a typo. And for the first time in history, we can read all 3 billion bases before a pregnancy begins.

[Danielle Strachman 💗 🐈 💃 🪴 🎸 🎨 🐕 @DStrachman]

@PJKinsella @Tri_Stanisaurus THIS! Plus nasal saline rinse before you're sick.

[Danielle Strachman 💗 🐈 💃 🪴 🎸 🎨 🐕 @DStrachman]

@BlackPebInvest By investing in 1517

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

We're reaching the point In the singularity where we unlock literal alchemy in the tech tree

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

A San Francisco startup says it just turned mercury into real gold, and their own math says gold is one of the cheapest things their machine can make. Aim it at a different metal and it makes a cancer drug ingredient worth tens of billions of dollars a gram.

Here's how it works. When you fuse two kinds of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, every single reaction kicks out a neutron moving at 14.1 MeV, which is absurdly fast. Fire one into mercury-198 and it knocks another neutron loose on the way through, so two come out and you're left with mercury-197. Give that a few days and it decays into gold-197, the only stable kind of gold there is. The whole trick needs neutrons above about 6 MeV, and regular nuclear reactors barely make those, while fusion makes one every time it fires.

Now swap the mercury for radium-226. Same reaction, one neutron in and two out, and you end up with radium-225, which decays into actinium-225. Novartis is building its next prostate cancer drug around actinium-225, and it's so scarce it sells by the millicurie, roughly $1,200 to $2,500 apiece. Price it by the gram and you're into the tens of billions of dollars, for a material so radioactive nobody could safely hold a gram of it anyway.

Marathon's team actually put a dollar value on a single fusion neutron in a paper this year. Use it to make electricity and it's worth about $3 × 10⁻²⁰. Gold comes in at $2.6 × 10⁻²⁰, basically a wash. Molybdenum-99, which goes into about 80% of nuclear medicine scans, is worth $2.6 × 10⁻¹⁷ a neutron. Actinium-225 is worth about $10⁻¹⁰, around 3 billion times what the electricity's worth.

That's why fusion people should care. Every fusion company you've heard of is chasing electricity, and selling electricity only pays once the plasma puts out something like 10 to 22 times the energy you pump in to heat it. The best result so far, at JET in England, was about a third. Add gold on the side and Marathon's math says you break even around 3x. For molybdenum-99, the number is 0.001x.

So a machine that gives back one-thousandth of the energy you feed it can still make money, as long as the neutrons hit the right metal.

By their numbers, a 3 megawatt machine running way below breakeven could cover the whole world's supply of molybdenum-99, which today comes from splitting uranium in a handful of research reactors. Today's experimental fusion machines already beat the gain that job needs.

Their second post basically says this out loud. Marathon now describes itself as an isotope company for radiopharma. Their chart shows roughly 390 targeted radiotherapy trials. Pluvicto, the prostate cancer drug Novartis launched at $42,500 a dose, did $1.9 billion in sales last year.

Gold still matters to them, just later. It's about a $700 billion a year market, and Marathon's paper figures it could soak up around 2 terawatts of fusion capacity, which is roughly the scale where fusion actually moves the grid. So the plan is to sell cancer isotopes out of small machines now and use gold to pay for the giant ones, years before electricity can pay for itself.

[Palmer Luckey @PalmerLuckey]

Nothing can replace the millennia-enduring allure of alchemy. What an incredible time to be alive.

[will depue @willdepue]

i honestly think kyle schiller & team are building a generational company, i haven’t been more bullish on a company since cursor or atomic semi

[Morgan Barrett @MorganBarrettX]

Danielle gave a masterclass on how to identify world class talent at the earliest stages

Shoutout to @ADoricko and @RainmakerCorp

[Danielle Strachman 💗 🐈 💃 🪴 🎸 🎨 🐕 @DStrachman]

1517 is in space!

[Brian Manning @FoundTheSpace]

What better way to announce a $250m funding round at a $2.45b valuation than with a picture from orbit of the signatures who made it happen.

[Ja’dan Johnson @jdanjohnson]

AI made building software easier than ever. Getting it to actually work inside a business? That's a different story.

Today we're launching @terminalio AI.

A forward deployed engineering team that builds, deploys, and scales AI systems inside real businesses.

More is possible. 🚀

[Danielle Strachman 💗 🐈 💃 🪴 🎸 🎨 🐕 @DStrachman]

Huge congrats to Xona! Up, up, and away!!

Had the pleasure of meeting Brian very early in the Xona journey and insisted that he needed to talk to Nick @naarnett, our resident space nerd and partner at 1517.

Nick came back excited about the prospects for GPS built for an autonomous world. We wrote the first check into the company of $250K during Fund II. With further progress, we followed on with $495K out of the fund.

In 2022 we put together a $2.5M special purpose vehicle for @XonaSpace in two weeks (the average time our SPVs are open) during their Series A.

Not only are we the first check writer, but we raise special purpose vehicles between $2M - $25M for our founders going the distance to bring additional trusted capital into the company.

We're here for a good time and a long time.

[Payload 🚀 @payloadspace]

Today, @XonaSpace announced a $250M Series D to accelerate production of its Pulsar commercial GPS constellation, which is aiming to begin service in 2027.

Xona’s long-term plan is to build a ~258-sat constellation to offer an upgraded commercial alternative to government GPS networks. Xona’s pitch: GPS is a critical capability underpinning much of the modern economy, but publicly funded GPS networks are costly, complex, and too exposed to spoofing and jamming.

In today's piece, Payload reporter @Douglas__Gorman dives into Xona's plans for the new funds. Link below.

[Josie Zayner @josiezayner]

Thanks for the continued donations $UNICORN ! We are going to use it for making more genetically modified horse embryos on a quest to make real unicorns

[Michael P Gibson @William_Blake]

Some say a book is only successful if it’s bought by the 10,000s. But sometimes it only takes one

[Augustus Doricko @ADoricko]

Thank you guys. I’d like to repost but this is so kind that it would seem vain of me, so I’ll write something separately.

For those that see this reply: 1517 not only wrote rainmaker’s first VC check, but Rainmaker plausibly wouldn’t exist hadn’t it been for @William_Blake ‘s book. The spark of inspiration that paper belt on fire gave me was instrumental in my initial research and eventual conviction to found @RainmakerCorp .

@DStrachman michael and @zslayback are the best

[Michael P Gibson @William_Blake]

In the Parable of the Talents, Jesus basically says there is no store of value. There is wealth creation or wealth destruction and nothing in between.

[Freesia Gaul @Freesiagaul]

for all the laws in the world, the only real currency is trust

[Danielle Strachman 💗 🐈 💃 🪴 🎸 🎨 🐕 @DStrachman]

@Tri_Stanisaurus always!

[Danielle Strachman 💗 🐈 💃 🪴 🎸 🎨 🐕 @DStrachman]

Record setting 1517 founders, now building a fusion reactor in SF!

[Marathon Fusion @MarathonFusion]

Last month, we demonstrated high-rate alchemy: turning mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN’s record by a factor of 10.

Last week, we enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years.

Now, we’re building a fusion reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density.