Jorge
Conde

The Guy Who Saw the Century Coming

In 2007, Jorge Conde walked into a genomics company he had helped start with one of the most cited scientists alive - Harvard geneticist George Church - and charged customers just under $100,000 to sequence their entire genome. The company was called Knome. The customers were wealthy early adopters willing to bet that their DNA contained answers worth paying for. At the time, whole-genome sequencing cost millions of dollars. Conde saw what was coming: the price was about to fall off a cliff, and whoever built the interpretation layer - the software that turns raw genetic data into something a human being can use - would be positioned at the center of a new industry.

That instinct - find the place where access is about to explode and build the tools that make access meaningful - has defined every chapter of Conde's career since.

Miami, Morgan Stanley, and a Very Different Kind of VC

Conde grew up in Miami, raised by Cuban and Peruvian parents in a city where ambition tends to arrive pre-mixed with cultural cross-pollination. He went to Johns Hopkins for biology, then took a detour into banking - biotechnology investment banking at Morgan Stanley - before landing at MedImmune for a stretch in marketing and operations. At some point in that sequence, he picked up a dual degree: an MBA from Harvard Business School and an MS from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, a program designed specifically for people who want to live at the border between science and commerce.

That dual fluency - scientist-who-understands-the-deal and banker-who-understands-the-molecule - is rarer than people think. Most biotech VCs arrive from one direction. Conde arrived from three: lab science, operating, and finance. When he joined Andreessen Horowitz in 2017, he brought a founder's scar tissue that most general partners never accumulate.

Knome: The Genome Startup That Started with George Church

The backstory of Knome is worth knowing because it tells you something about how Conde thinks. George Church had a problem: wealthy people kept calling him and asking to have their genomes sequenced. He needed a vehicle. Conde built one. The company he co-founded was the first to offer whole-genome sequencing directly to consumers - not partial SNP chips like the competitors, but the whole thing, start to finish, with a team of informatics experts and medical consultants to make sense of the result.

The insight was that genome interpretation was a software problem. The sequence was noise; the signal was downstream. Conde built the proprietary tools to rank relevance, search validated scientific databases, and surface the patterns that might actually matter for any given individual. By 2009, MIT Technology Review named him an Innovator Under 35 - at 32, already a CEO running a company that had invented a market that barely existed yet.

When Knome was acquired by Tute Genomics in 2015, Conde didn't pivot to fundraising. He joined Syros Pharmaceuticals - a company advancing a new wave of medicines that control gene expression to treat cancer - and took on three roles simultaneously: Chief Strategy Officer, Chief Financial Officer, and Chief Product Officer. It's the kind of operator's gauntlet that either breaks people or teaches them everything.

Why a16z, Why Bio

When Andreessen Horowitz brought Conde on as General Partner in 2017, TechCrunch noted it as a signal of the firm's serious push into life sciences. The framing undersells it. What a16z acquired was someone who had run a genomics company from founding through acquisition, operated at the C-suite level inside a public pharmaceutical company, and carried 20 years of direct experience with what it actually takes to move a molecule from lab to patient.

The thesis he articulates at a16z is clean and muscular: biology is becoming programmable. Not metaphorically - literally. Where previous centuries required us to discover biological processes and exploit them opportunistically, the current moment allows us to design with them. "In the future," he has said, "biology can become its own creative medium of sorts." That framing - biology as medium, not just mechanism - is what distinguishes Conde's investing perspective from a conventional life sciences fund manager.

The Portfolio and the Pattern

Conde's active board seats trace the architecture of his thesis: Dyno Therapeutics (gene therapy delivery), Octant Bio (high-throughput drug discovery), Cartography Biosciences (cancer immunotherapy), Komodo Health (real-world health data), Asimov (synthetic biology and gene circuit design), and Earli (early cancer detection). These aren't random bets. They're a map of the infrastructure layer needed to make programmable medicine real.

Three of his previous board companies were acquired by major pharma: IDRx by GSK, EQRx by Revolution Medicines, and Tmunity by Gilead's Kite. Acquisitions at that scale don't happen by accident - they happen when a platform company builds something that incumbent pharma can't build faster internally.

The Integrated Biology Environment

In early 2026, Conde co-led a $13.5M seed investment in Phylo - a startup building what he calls an "Integrated Biology Environment." The analogy is precise: Figma did for design what Phylo wants to do for biology. Before AI can meaningfully accelerate scientific discovery, the tools scientists use need to actually talk to each other. Right now, they don't. Hypothesis generation lives in one place, experimental data in another, analysis in a third, and publication in yet another. Phylo's pitch is a unified workspace - auditable, collaborative, reproducible.

"Science needs an integrated environment," Conde wrote. That sentence is doing a lot of work. It's an argument that the next breakthrough in biology won't come from a new molecule or a new target. It will come from the infrastructure that lets scientists work at the speed of the ideas they're having.

The Long Bet

The phrase Conde returns to most often is "the century of biology." He means it literally: the 20th century was shaped by physics (nuclear, semiconductor, space). The 21st will be shaped by biology. Not because it's a fashionable claim - he made the case before AI made bio fashionable - but because the underlying capability curve has crossed a threshold. We can read the genome. We're learning to write with it. The tools to engineer biological systems are compressing in cost and expanding in accessibility the same way computing did from mainframes to phones.

What makes Conde credible on this bet isn't the thesis itself - plenty of people can articulate it. It's the fact that he's lived every layer of the stack: the molecule, the regulatory path, the market, the capital structure, and the software. Very few people have. He is, by design, the person who knows what happens when you naively attack a biology problem from only one side.