Waris Hussain

Growth Marketer in Education. I also build products. Nomadic for 4 years.

[Waris Hussain @warixhussain]

Been offline for a while. And it's not because nothing was happening.
Dropped out at 18 → startup sold at 20 → now growth marketer for a company replacing college.
Living on a man-made island in Malaysia-Singapore zone.

Story's just getting started!

[Waris Hussain @warixhussain]

@levelsio my great grandfather is alive, 105+ years old, and only ate organic chicken his entire life.
If you serve him industrial chicken, he'd throw it away (angrily)

[Waris Hussain @warixhussain]

@compliantvc this has to be a joke right? UAE is giving grants in minimum six figures

[Waris Hussain @warixhussain]

@paraschopra I'm seeing ministry of AI in Kazakhstan up close, stuff like this is really needed in India
A lot of startups in BLR are already doing amazing, just imagine their output if such a ministry existed.

[Waris Hussain @warixhussain]

Many edtech homepages do this. They explain the curriculum, the platform, the AI tutor - and never say what it replaces (the bootcamp, the degree, the tutor). Fix that one line before touching anything else.

[Blake Emal @heyblake]

I've audited 600+ websites.

the headline problem I see over and over: it explains how the product works.

buyers want to know what it replaces.

[Waris Hussain @warixhussain]

One person plus Claude running a whole company is the real story here.
I'm not in biotech, I grow edtech startups, but the essence is the same: fewer people, more work in parallel, better calls.

[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

-------
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

[Waris Hussain @warixhussain]

@dickiebush absolutely. walks are one of the best "productivity hacks", esp for creative folks

[Waris Hussain @warixhussain]

@jasonlk If the product is swappable, the only loyalty left is to the people behind it. There's a reason why founder-led content is performing like crazy these days

[Waris Hussain @warixhussain]

@yongfook ahaha nice.. even though I know they mostly have people for compliance and audits and all. but it's wild to have more employees than openai.

[Waris Hussain @warixhussain]

@paraschopra The bigger story to me isn't the venture studio model, it's one person plus Claude running a whole pipeline. AI is compressing execution.

[Waris Hussain @warixhussain]

seeing way too much Grok bot on my feed.
I love it, but seeing way too much👀

[Waris Hussain @warixhussain]

@aravind as an Indian who just spent 30 days in Kazakhstan, yes I agree,. Kazakhstan is doing a lot of great things that will be fruitful in the coming future.
In 30 days, I witnessed 3 governments, and Jensen Huang visit the building I'm working at, they all are really interested in KZ.

[Waris Hussain @warixhussain]

@alijangm after spending October in Astana, I totally believe it has the potential to become the next SF, or Singapore.
Great efficiency, talent and systems here.

[Waris Hussain @warixhussain]

a good metric to judge a country

[Wesam @wesamo__]

The biggest culture shock I've experienced so far is that the Apple store in Japan doesn't lock any devices to the table

[Waris Hussain @warixhussain]

good thing I got @bot pilled a month ago

[Alex @alexmichael]

Grok Bot 0.77 looks INSANE 🔥

> Calls: your Bot can dial someone, sit on hold, press keys and get transferred while you watch a live transcript

> Messages on Mac: a setup screen under Connect Apps, still switched off

> Tailscale: Grok Bot can join your private tailnet once an admin approves it

> Payments: a screen to connect payment accounts and pick a default, on top of yesterday’s Vault

> Sharing: emails when someone shares a Bot with you, and invites need Premium or Ultra

[Waris Hussain @warixhussain]

@prasann_pandya you need to register as a dev with meta. have tried it, its a painful process

[Waris Hussain @warixhussain]

@aboodman I believe our time has always been there

[Waris Hussain @warixhussain]

If connection is the scarce thing, school should be built around it. This is why alternative education feels like where learning is going.

[Paras Chopra @paraschopra]

Imagine 5 years from now when we have AIs that are superhuman at all tasks that we humans care about.

At that point, the only thing we will seek from other humans is social connection to satisfy our inborn craving for exchanging stories and gossip around campfire.

For all other activities where efficiency and outcomes matter, there will be an AI that does it better, cheaper and faster which will push us to finding humans a bottleneck in getting what we want.

Right now, functions and social connection comes in a bundle. At a company, you not only get work done but also exchange gossip and practice politics. Similar with conferences, you learn a little and you connect a little. Same with universities.

Soon, these functions will get unbundled. For work, education, governance, advice, AIs will be far superior; while schools, conferences and workplaces will all morph into kinds of playgrounds that we haven’t yet invented.

[Waris Hussain @warixhussain]

No university teaches this, and I'd know, I dropped out at 18. Everything I know about startups came from working inside one and building my own. @ns is that idea at scale: learn by being around people who ship.

[The Startup CA @mehulshahca]

No university will teach you this, but here's how my family of 4 lived, learned & built for 20 days at Balaji Srinivasan's Network School in Malaysia – all-inclusive for USD 2,250

A thread ( 1/n )

[Waris Hussain @warixhussain]

Joke list, but founding GTM intern is real. I was once a startup's first hire with no degree, and it sold within a year. Show proof of work and these roles open up.

[shydev @shydev69]

fresher j*bs in the post agi era –

robotics instructor intern
claude code operator intern
founding gtm intern
spacexai human annotator
compute/data broker

[Waris Hussain @warixhussain]

@CoderYouDie this is taking it to first principles. Incentives drive everything. The reason govt employees aren't as productive is they will get the same salary regardless of their output, and if they f up big time, they'll get suspended for a while then back to usual