Watching a Friend Build Something Historic

One of the best feelings in venture is watching a friend build something historic. Not because of the unicorn valuations, but because you remember where the story actually started.

Where Andrew Beam and I grew up, getting a PhD or building venture-backed companies was completely foreign. Our families back home still sometimes struggle to explain what we actually do for a living.

Long before he was co-founding Generate:Biomedicines or running a lab at Harvard University, Andy was just an obsessive tinkerer. In kindergarten, he was glued to the Lego station. In college at NC State, he ran a side hustle soldering mod chips onto original Xboxes so people could play Super Nintendo games.

When he was a kid, a doctor misdiagnosed him with whooping cough. That experience stayed with him for years. He realized early that even the smartest clinicians have cognitive blind spots, and that computation and algorithms could fundamentally eliminate them in medicine.

Fast forward to today.

Lila Sciences is all over the news for taking on one of the most audacious missions in tech: building scientific superintelligence.

The infrastructure they are building feels like science fiction. Dark warehouses, magnetically levitating tracks, and autonomous robots running wet-lab experiments around the clock. They are treating the lab like an automated data center, using nature as the ground-truth verifier to generate trillions of experimentally validated reasoning tokens.

Yet when I sit down with Andy, none of the Silicon Valley posturing exists.

He approaches frontier AI and biology with the exact same humble, hands-on curiosity he had soldering circuit boards in his dorm room. No ego, no buzzwords. Just a genuine obsession with solving impossible problems.

Proud of you, Andy. Keep building.

Originally posted on LinkedIn.