Cam

pharma bro by day
building @irliapp by night

[Cam @IRLifounder]

been more active lately so figured i'd introduce myself

solo founder in newport beach

pharma rep by day, building @irliapp by night

the ad network for the real world

looking to connect with engineers, marketers, UGC creators, founders

drop what you're building below 👇

[Cam @IRLifounder]

@FUPodcast @ManhattanBeachB Pelican Hill

[Cam @IRLifounder]

@infoinvt worst stock ever

[Cam @IRLifounder]

@mkultraenjoyer2 @ManhattanBeachB 👍

[Cam @IRLifounder]

saturday night in SF is 30 founders at a bar debating what the bar's POS system runs on

[Cam @IRLifounder]

I ❤️ X

[Cam @IRLifounder]

@jack GG’s fellas

[Cam @IRLifounder]

excuse me, Dario

I wasn’t familiar with your game

[Binkg @dummerspast39]

I found footage of 20yo Dario Amodei speaking against the Iraq War in 2003.

18 years before Anthropic even existed

[Cam @IRLifounder]

@samongaro_ watch me

[Cam @IRLifounder]

i can sit through an entire dinner without checking slack
undefeated

[Cam @IRLifounder]

i get ahead on weekends
everyone else is busy posting that they're getting ahead

[Cam @IRLifounder]

fyi "remote-first culture" means nobody has ever seen the CEO's legs

[Cam @IRLifounder]

startups have a "head of vibes" now
we used to call him the guy who's fun at the bar

[Cam @IRLifounder]

VCs will spend 40 minutes selling you their fund to explain why AI makes sales obsolete

[Cam @IRLifounder]

SF founders go to the farmers market and call it "an analog experience"

[Cam @IRLifounder]

my competitive advantage is reading the room
most of you can't find the room

[Cam @IRLifounder]

founder retreats are $4,000 to sit in a circle and practice talking to humans
customers will teach you for free

[Cam @IRLifounder]

$8 for 23g of protein
that's not a launch, that's a dare https://t.co/5bKYQch2Dp

[Eli @elkelk]

Impressively bad product launch

> AI slop pic
> 23g of protein for $8 💀
> MAHA pander

Respect

[Cam @IRLifounder]

founders say "we're profitable"
they mean they canceled cursor

[Cam @IRLifounder]

SF startup can turn mercury into gold
still can't turn a lead into a customer https://t.co/eRZXMFORaU

[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.