What’s Possible: 1st October, 2021

We hope you enjoy this week's hand-picked selection of important and interesting stories from the frontiers of tech.

Psychedelic biotech Psylo raises first funds

The latest biotech to get funded is Sydney-based pre-clinical company Psylo, which is aiming to develop a shorter acting version of psilocybin (the active molecule in magic mushrooms) and commercialise it as a treatment for severe mental illness.

The round was led by Chris Hitchen’s global micro-VC fund Possible Ventures, and had participation from a range of angel investors including AirTree chairman and philanthropist Daniel Petre and an unnamed strategic investor believed to be one of the big players in the psychedelic space.

Biotech ⇨ Marine scientist and M&A lawyer team up to replace plastic with seaweed (AFR, Uluu)

An ambitious plan hatched by an expat Brazilian marine scientist and a Perth-based former M&A lawyer, to replace plastic with a new material being made out of seaweed, has picked up early stage funding from backers including the CSIRO’s venture capital fund Main Sequence.

‘No code’ tool maker, Heyflow, nabs $6M to fix your customer conversions

Heyflow says its special sauce is that it’s a true ‘no code’ play — which it argues makes it best suited to the target user-base of marketers, product managers and business owners while also allowing for engineers to build custom code atop its so-called ‘clickflows’.

Popular TikTok videos will be issued as NFT collectibles on Immutable X, a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum

Social video sharing network TikTok, which now counts more than one billion global monthly active users, will release a series of NFT collectibles with celebrity partners like Lil Nas X and Gary Vaynerchuk, the firm announced today.

Meat no longer requires animal slaughter

Demand for meat and fish is soaring, particularly among the rapidly growing middle classes in parts of the developing world. Making that meat the old-fashioned way uses a lot of land and produces gigatonnes of greenhouse gas. Much of the fish people want is not caught sustainably, and some comes from endangered or threatened species. Plant-based substitutes can meet some of the increased demand, but currently they only really compete with processed products such as those based on mince. Growing meat directly from animal cells offers a way of squaring the circle, while also satisfying the moral demands of consumers uneasy about factory farming and animal slaughter. But it is a hugely ambitious undertaking.

The Rise of RNA Therapeutics

Researchers think that RNA has huge untapped therapeutic potential. Traditionally, when developing new meds, pharmaceutical companies target malfunctioning proteins that cause the disease. But targeting the RNA allows the problem to be corrected one step earlier, before the proteins are made.

Twitter Tips, NFTs, and The Twitterverse

While Twitter Tips will hopefully enable more creators to directly monetize their social capital, I’m skeptical the U.S will fully adopt the Twitter Tip feature. Ironically, while tipping is ingrained in the U.S. service culture (servers, drivers, etc), it is absent in our digital services. Conversely, China has a robust tipping culture for online services and streamers.

AI ⇨ Gathering Strength, Gathering Storms: The One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100) 2021 Study Panel Report (Thread, Report)

Five years ago, the Stanford One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (#ai100) concluded that AI did not pose "an imminent threat to humankind".

5 years in, it finds "The field’s successes have led to an inflection point: It is now urgent to think seriously about the downsides and risks that the broad application of AI is revealing."

Blockchain Gaming and On-Ramps to Mass Adoption

Gaming is social and social is gaming; the lines are blurring, and people who would never have considered themselves “gamers” are now regular participants in vibrant and immersive virtual worlds. If you’re looking for an on-ramp to new consumer technologies, look to gaming: more often than not, it’s at the cutting edge of technology adoption.

A gene-editing experiment let these patients with vision loss see color again

LCA is caused by a genetic mutation that disables crucial cells in the retina. Patients experience a progressive loss of vision starting at birth that usually renders them legally blind. The treatment is far from curing the patients in the trial, but the changes some experienced are significant enough to have a meaningful impact on their daily lives.

Aussie’s investment in soccer star NFTs could be the best seed deal ever

For Chris Hitchen, though, the future potential is just cream. Sorare is now worth 2200 times more than when he first invested. His Sorare investment is almost certainly the highest return achieved by an Australian investor in a European start-up.

If Sorare continues its stellar run, this seed investment may become the best early stage deal ever made by an Australian.

Interesting adjacencies

• Why we invested in Psylo (link)
• Management has changed the way it measures productivity (link)
• Remote and hybrid work statistics 2021 (link)
• Ben Thompson on Cloudflare’s Disruption (link)
• How fashion is being brought to the metaverse (link)
• How “mini-programs” took over Chinese platforms (link)
• SMBs are being run on a TikTok + Shopify stack (thread)

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