It used to be that Vijay Pande was better known in academic circles than investor circles. That changed pretty abruptly a dozen years ago, when Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz ' who'd spent their firm's first five years explicitly avoiding healthcare and life sciences ' decided the category was worth betting on after all and handed the keys to Pande. At the time, he was a Stanford chemistry professor who was best known for building Folding@home, the distributed-computing project that turned millions of home PCs into a supercomputer for disease research. Over the next decade-plus, he grew a16z's bet into a practice managing close to $4 billion. So it was somewhat unexpected when in June of last year, Pande walked away from it all to start something much smaller. In fact, his new firm, VZVC, co-founded with longtime investor Zach Werner, is built around a handful of concentrated bets a year rather than dozens, it has no associates, and it relies heavily on AI for its day-to-day...
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