From managing $4B at a16z to a handful of concentrated bets: Vijay Pande's new path
Former a16z biotech investment leader Vijay Pande left the firm last June, where he managed nearly $4 billion, to co-found a much smaller firm called VZVC with Zach Werner. The new outfit makes only about five investments a year and relies heavily on AI for daily operations.
More than a decade ago, Vijay Pande moved from being a Stanford chemistry professor known for the distributed-computing project Folding@home to becoming an investor, after a16z founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz asked him to lead the firm's healthcare and life sciences push. Over the following years, that practice grew to manage close to $4 billion.
Last June, however, Pande left a16z to co-found a much smaller firm, VZVC, together with longtime investor Zach Werner. Unlike large funds that close dozens of deals a year, VZVC plans to make around five concentrated investments annually, has no associates, and leans heavily on AI to run its day-to-day operations.
The data challenge in biology
In the interview, Pande explained that biology is shifting from a "science of discovery" toward something that can be engineered — AI helps identify drug targets, design drugs, and even support clinical trials, the most expensive stage of development. He noted that only about 20% of drugs successfully pass from the first to the third clinical trial phase, with failures typically stemming from animal models that poorly predict human responses.
He also highlighted a key difference from other AI fields: biological data can't simply be scraped from the internet, so nearly every company ends up building its own walled-off dataset. Pande pointed to a growing trend toward open "atlases" of biological information, essentially foundation models, which he believes could eventually have an impact similar to open-source language models.
Pande remains involved with Genesis Therapeutics and Insitro, and says he looks for founders with high integrity who think long-term. He also acknowledged that one of the biggest lessons of his investing career has been the importance of go-to-market strategy, which he says is often harder than the underlying technology itself.
