Clash of the Industries

Posted on May 30, 2008
Filed Under Fit Fuelers

I had a brief debate with one of the Fit Fuel advisors this past weekend about the future of our business and where the biggest opportunities lie in health. Although money is less of a motivator to me now than it ever was (only to the extent that it allows me freedom to do what I want to do, and it frees up time), I expressed my belief that within the next 50 years, the richest man in the world will be someone involved in biotech, either in medical uses for nanotechnology or genetics. If you’ve seen the movie ‘I, Robot’, you can imagine the scale on which companies who can harness a new breed of technology can operate. The power is almost scary. People worry about Google, but Google’s encylopedia of desires only tells Google what you already know; the guys who map your genome or decode your brain’s cerebral cortex know what nobody else knows because this type of data can’t be aggregated with a web crawling bot.

We’re going to clone humans – it’s only a matter of time before some guy who’s been locked in a lab for the past 20 years fails to resist the temptation to create life (I linked to that blog b/c the guy’s profile quote is ‘A molecule is not a vector…and it never will be’, and i thought that was the most awesome quote i’ve ever heard). He’s in horrible shape, four white walls have made him delirious and he likely hasn’t been laid in a while. As more and more people experiment with stem cells and gain a better understanding of the genomes of humans and related species, there are going to be breakthroughs on an unimaginable scale. A cure for cancer or a vaccination for HIV are the tip of the iceberg. Advances in these fields are going to fundamentally change the landscape of healthcare both for practitioners and patients. Poor nations will have more effective methods of treatment and rich nations will yield tools that fuel advances in drugs, artificial intelligence, nutrition, and a plethora of other segments of the health market. This is what gets me excited, this is what keeps me coming into work busting my ass everyday. It’s the next step, the big breakthrough that I know is going to come from young, ambitious minds meeting, collaborating and thinking big beyond our wildest dreams. I’m not interested in selling you a bottle of ALRI Venom Hyperdrive so you can slave away on a treadmill in a dark corner of your gym in an attempt to lose your spare tire.

Online retail has boundaries, but we’re building the framework and network for something much, much bigger. When people ask us about the REAL vision of our company, we talk almost as much about offline things as we do online.

It will be interesting to see how the war between privately funded research and public or government funded research plays out – think Celera vs. the government in the Human Genome Project. Decoding the human genome was easy; commercialization of new technologies will be the hard part. So we’ve got all of this raw data – what to do with it? How should we interpret it? What can we use it to produce? Can we gain patents on those uses and how viable is the business model for a company that chooses to market these new commercialized technologies? Most important, who really owns this stuff anyway? After all, the genome is in the public domain. Celera threw in the towel and donated all of their research to the database when they realized they did not have a viable economic model because no drug company would pay for access to their genome data if it would be available to the public a few months later as was mandated by the federal government. Industries will spring up out of nowhere – genomics consulting, manufacturing of new technologies, a broadening of the doctors specializing in gene therapy. Old industries will expand – everything from finance (VC’s have to fund this stuff, afterall) and intellectual property lawyers will have a field day, but an interesting one to say the least.