“We’re not doing 30 bets a year”: Vijay Pande on betting small after running $4 billion at a16z

Vijay Pande, who previously led a16z’s roughly $4B biotech practice, is building VZVC as a smaller, AI-native investment firm focused on more selective bets. He argues biology is moving from discovery toward engineering, but clinical trials remain a major cost barrier and AI progress depends on open, shared datasets.

Pande’s shift reflects a broader venture trend toward concentrated investments in high-conviction AI-biology startups rather than broad portfolio spraying. His emphasis on open datasets highlights a key tension in AI medicine: defensible private data may help individual companies, but shared infrastructure could be what unlocks field-wide breakthroughs.