Oliver Thylmann

Co-Founder & Co-CEO Giant Swarm · NeoNephos Governing Board · Nerd Show Co-Host · Serial Entrepreneur · Agentic & Cloud Native

[Professor Oak @Prof_Oak_]

Surprise 1: Anthropic acquired a one-person biotech
.
.
.
Surprise 2: that person is me
Surprise 3: I’m here to tell you all about it

Yes, this is what you think it is; after 6 yrs of increasingly loose anonymity: the Professor Oak reveal post

…and yes, it has gotten so boring around here that I’m literally doxxing myself to spice up the timeline

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Ok, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cody Tranbarger. I mostly tweet, but occasionally find time to dabble in drug dev & starting/building biotechs. My past lives span the VC, crossover, startup continuum; Prof Oak has been my way of keeping a digital foot in those worlds, despite having my physical feet planted elsewhere.

The past 18 mo, ‘elsewhere’ was Mithril Medicine, a co. I founded to develop bsAbs for LAMA2-CMD & other ECM-related genetic diseases.

Mithril was born out of hands-on building with @MikeNGladstone, @JasonPaulRhodes, @LifeSciVC, & team @atlasventure. Somehow, I made enough half-decent calls along the way (even a broken clock is right twice a day, eh?) to convince them Mithril/I warranted a small seed. While I can hardly rationalize such an outrageously cavalier bet, I’m grateful for it, & I'd partner with Atlas again in a heartbeat.

In typical AV fashion, Mithril’s primordial form was virtual, decentralized, & ultra-lean. This stage tends to be short-lived, but for Mithril, it worked surprisingly well, for surprisingly long, thanks in part to the rapid maturation of the AI tools I used liberally.

Eventually, Mithril became a bit of an experiment itself - to find the upper bound of how far it could scale as a single operator + a bunch of Claude (+ a stellar bench of part-time consultants).

In parallel, I started spending time with @nc_frey, @an1lam, & @CoefficientBio team; and promptly experienced, for the 1st time, AI at the frontier. Soon thereafter, Mithril stopped looking like an experiment, & started looking like a preview of an entirely new operating model.

From that spark came “Pipeline-in-a-Person.” The idea immediately resonated when we shared it here back in April; and it was central to the shared vision that led to Anthropic’s acquisition of Mithril, & my joining the team.

Why join Anthropic? Three reasons.
(1) For Mithril, the programs continue, with more resources & infrastructure behind them, and as much Claude as I can put to work.

(2) For me, the chance to start several more programs, & find out how many one person can actually run in parallel - an almost unprecedented luxury for a curious drug hunter.

(3) For our mission, a path to institutionalize & scale this new way of working, then put it in the hands of all of biopharma, all over the world - which, candidly, I find the most energizing.

Will AI x Bio cure diseases? Unequivocally yes, imo… but not by the route that gets the most airtime. Rather than timeline acceleration & compression, I see orchestration & parallelization as today's low-hanging fruit.

Most drug hunters see a handful of go/no-go calls in a career, & spend entirely too much of the rest trading emails (my inbox can attest).

Give them the bandwidth to run several programs at once, and the time to focus on scientific judgment, and I’m willing to bet they’ll make better calls. And at scale, better calls translate to more drugs, higher hit rates, broader patient impact, & likely, a disease or 10 or 100 cured. I couldn't be more excited to build toward that future @AnthropicAI.

Finally, a heartfelt thank you to BioTwitter/X. The end of anonymity is bittersweet, but if anyone’s earned a proper introduction, you all have.

It’s difficult to overstate how much this app has done for me: a decade of education, plenty of friends, many job opportunities, several mentors, a few investors, even a co-founder (fmr). It was the generosity of this community that inspired me to start posting 6 years ago, after just as many years lurking. I hope I’ve been able to pay it forward, in my own small way.

But, to be clear, Prof Oak isn’t going anywhere. Same beat, same themes, and now, a front-row seat to drug development at the frontier. Stay tuned for dispatches from the trenches; and remember...

Gotta Cure 'Em All

[Oliver Thylmann @othylmann]

Very good internal about how software dev roles change or rather how they don’t … well put

[Rhommel Lamas @rhoml]

Interesting Amazon putting this out https://t.co/OwnA3eFHaZ

[Oliver Thylmann @othylmann]

Real emotions to think about

[News to Remember @allchronology]

I believe this will be considered one of the most important videos in US history from this time.

[stacey brotzel @staceybrotzel]

“If you are not angry…you are not listening.”
This woman is America’s future.

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

If this doesn't inspire you to get off your ass and save our democracy, nothing will. In this moment in history, as Trump is systematically destroying the republic, this is the most consequential video y'all are going to see.

[Brent Toderian @BrentToderian]

I’ve never seen a video like this be absolutely EVERYWHERE on social media.

VERY impressive. And important.

[Martin Shkreli @MartinShkreli]

Welcome to hell 😈

[Linus ✦ Ekenstam @LinusEkenstam]

Time to invest in a small GPU cluster and setup my own completely sovereign compute. Completely isolated in a Tailscale environment, with a cloudflare tunnel.

This is nuts, Fable 5.1 capable open model, weights will ship on November 4th.

Mark your calendars, take a sick day

[Oliver Thylmann @othylmann]

ok this is seriously amazing. I want to interact like that.

[LayoffHedge @LayoffAI]

What in the black mirror has Jack Dorsey done?

[Jason D. Clinton 🔸 @JasonDClinton]

as bad as things have gotten in the past 4 days, they are going to get a lot worse before they get better. security leaders, never let a crisis go to waste: please go to your boards and ask for help right now. not for ai, for the basics. (we need to hold on for ~18 months.)

[Oliver Thylmann @othylmann]

Maybe we just need to go to sleep for 12-24 months and come back when AI just does stuff.

[Matthew Prince 🌥 @eastdakota]

Some stats on #php2shell. In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the @Cloudflare network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it. That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.

[⁵⁄₉ @fiveoutofnine]

So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and https://t.co/QlOXb3COq3 went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.

[Soenke Martens 🤙 @SoenkeMartens]

Same.

[Oliver Thylmann @othylmann]

@dhh Just make sure who you cite. He is publicly known to have talked at a meeting of forbidden Organizations in Austria to do blood tests on people and to take away German citizenship if you don’t follow the law. Remigration is fine. Citizenship first and second class is not

[Oliver Thylmann @othylmann]

ripped a mudwater pack 🦍
10 cards out the swamp. rate my pull @BoredApeYC
https://t.co/Q27X1HZESl

[Quit @0xQuit]

Today Yuga Labs launches Mudwater, Physical BAYC trading cards with onchain twins. Every digital item is a Solana NFT backed by a real sealed pack in a vault.

1/🧵

[Oliver Thylmann @othylmann]

I just claimed 12 Mudwater packs!
That's 120 cards waiting to be revealed. Let's see what I pull. @BoredApeYC

[Oliver Thylmann @othylmann]

But now it is 11 years late instead of 8. but it can do shit that it will never be able to do outside private property.

[Marques Brownlee @MKBHD]

They really just got on stage and said this newly designed 4000+ pound car can do flips and go half the speed of sound (380+mph) and will ship in 2028. This is a prank, right?

[Oliver Thylmann @othylmann]

Sehr gut geschrieben … bester marketing Stunt seit langem

[Guille G. Alfonsín @GuilleAlfonsin]

Solo voy a decir un par (o tres) de cosas sobre el Tesla Roadster que vimos ayer.

Primero: aquello ha sido un stunt publicitario. Y uno absolutamente magistral.

Así que, cuando volváis a leer que Tesla no gasta en publicidad, acordaos de anoche. Como ejercicio de imagen de marca, demostración de capacidades técnicas y generación de atención mediática, probablemente sea más potente que tener un equipo oficial de carreras en prácticamente cualquier campeonato del mundo.

Y eso tiene un mérito indudable.

Segundo: si en 2017 pagaste una reserva por un deportivo eléctrico 2+2 descapotable, prometido inicialmente para 2020, nueve años después te anuncian que tienes que esperar otros dos (¡ONCE AÑOS!) y la gran estrella de la presentación es un monoplaza que salta, gira en el aire y aterriza mediante propulsores.

Que no es precisamente lo que habías reservado.

Es como ir a un restaurante, pedir muslo de pollo, esperar tres días y que el cocinero aparezca con una nueva carta para anunciarte que va a servirte sardinas... Las quieras... O no.

Eso sí, unas sardinas que vuelan.

Y mientras los teslabros aplauden la audacia de su mesías, hay un par de cuestiones técnicas que conviene recordar.

Una cosa es hacer saltar un coche en una exhibición y otra muy distinta comercializar un vehículo capaz de realizar vuelos controlados. En ese segundo escenario entramos en el complejo territorio de la certificación aeronáutica: FAA en Estados Unidos, EASA en Europa, requisitos de aeronavegabilidad, autorizaciones operativas y licencias o habilitaciones de vuelo según corresponda, que ya están afrontando las decenas de start UPS que andan intentando vender "drones personales de vuelo".

Un follón monumental que no se resuelve simplemente homologando el coche para circular por carretera.

Y luego tenemos los ventiladores que succionan aire bajo el vehículo para generar carga aerodinámica incluso estando parado.

Una tecnología fascinante que ya hemos visto en otros deportivos experimentales (McMurtry), pero cuya aplicación a carreteras abiertas plantea problemas bastante evidentes: polvo, gravilla, piedras y todo tipo de porquería que puede terminar siendo expulsada hacia otros usuarios, hacia tu propio parabrisas... Resolverlo no es trivial.

Dicho todo esto, como ingeniero, lo que vimos ayer me parece una genialidad. El despliegue tecnológico, la capacidad para resolver desafíos de física aplicada y el factor molonidad son indudables.

Y, como herramienta publicitaria para demostrar de lo que son capaces sus ingenieros, me parece sencillamente extraordinario. Seguramente más eficaz que gastarse una fortuna compitiendo en carreras.

Pero como analista de esta industria, y conociendo el historial del personaje, me parece un mal chiste para quienes llevan casi una década esperando el coche por el que pagaron una reserva.

Musk sigue prometiendo y prometiendo, entregando una fracción de lo anunciado, y ahora nos presenta como gran revolución un producto cuyo valor diferencial comercial, más allá del factor WOW y del ejercicio de demostración tecnológica, es cuanto menos discutible.

Porque una cosa es ser capaz de hacer algo técnicamente extraordinario y otra muy distinta que tenga sentido convertirlo en un producto comercial.

Y no conviene confundir ambas cosas.

Hablaremos de todo ello, con bastante más profundidad técnica, en el videocast de PowerArt y en próximos shorts (y si queréis, hasta un largo). Porque hay mucha ingeniería interesante que desgranar detrás de lo que vimos ayer.