Thank you to Mark Osborn of DiaHealth for creating these notes. To contribute to the TWiST PodNotes archive email us.
Episode Date: July 29, 2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFSuaSpy1fE
Top Insights
- Sometimes with startups like Coursera you can have the right concept but be a little bit ahead of your time. To thrive in a post-COVID19 world, Universities will need to marry the best of the traditional college experience with new innovations in online learning.
"the only way that we are really going to understand the biology of who we are, and not just us but nature around us, is by collecting enough data and applying sufficiently sophisticated algorithms that can really extract some meaningful rules and insights"
- insitro is leading drug discovery away from blockbuster drugs like statins to smaller market but higher impact treatments, enabled by tools like machine learning & AI
- Big pharma culture and legacy infrastructure make it difficult for them to adapt to this new model.
- Some of the most exciting research is in the area of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, which have extraordinarily high failure rates and limited efficacy.
- Jason last interviewed Daphne in 2013 as the co-founder of Coursera, a Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) business.
- Daphne is an expert in machine learning and computational biology, and was an AI computer science professor at Stanford
- She's now the Founder and CEO of insitro
- Jason points out that in 2013 online education was not widely viewed as important, but in 2020 in the midst of COVID-19 universities are now scrambling to figure out how to operate remotely
- Daphne acknowledges that they were "definitely ahead of our time" in launching Coursera. At the time there was predominant mentality of "if it ain't broken don't fix it" in higher education
"because universities are now forced to teach differently maybe they'll realize that there is actually a better way and that will make that long overdue transition finally happen"
- It became clear that community was important in creating a sense of accountability with their peers to meet deadlines and complete the course. Relatively few people can be successful being 100% self-directed working at their own pace and timeline.