Advice from Jeff Bezos

A couple years ago, we had a 20th anniversary celebration for Madrona, and one of the events was a fireside chat between Jeff Bezos and Tom Alberg, one of Madrona’s founders and the first outside investor in Amazon.

One of the questions that someone asked Jeff right at the end of the session was, “If you weren’t working on Amazon and starting a new company today, what would you do?” Unfortunately he didn’t have a lot of time to elaborate, but his answer was “biotech.”

Watching the Adaptive Biotechnologies IPO this week, it’s hard not to think about Jeff Bezos’s advice. Adaptive Biotech is worth ~$6B today and has traded up almost 200% since their IPO.

And… I’d bet you that most people buying this stock have absolutely no idea what this company does. Check out some of these descriptions from their website:

Our team has created a powerful platform to make the elegant complexity of the immune system accessible to researchers and clinicians around the world to allow each and every person’s immune system tell its own story

The massive amount of data generated by our immune medicine platform is stored in our dynamic clinical immunomics database of over 30 billion immune receptors.

If this sounds remotely interesting to you, you should spend more time digging in because the intersection of life sciences and computer science is going to be one of the most exciting trends of the next decade - both because there is a tremendous amount of potential at the intersection of these two markets and also because very few people understand both.