Today I walk with Noor Siddiqui, founder and CEO of Orchid. Noor was a Thiel Fellow at 17, studied CS at Stanford, and has raised $16.5M for Orchid from Vitalik Buterin, Brian Armstrong, Balaji Srinivasan, and Elad Gil, and now she's out to end what she calls the genetic lottery. She gets into why she thinks people won't have sex for babies anymore, and what she'd pick for her own kid if the tech existed today.
We get into:
- Why she calls the genetic lottery "super evil and unfair"
- The 5–10% chance of genetic disease if you conceive the old-fashioned way
- Her most controversial take: people aren't going to have sex for babies anymore
- Why Michael Phelps is only Michael Phelps because of a genetic lottery
- Tetrachromats, 100 million colors, and what "leveling the playing field" actually means
so much more!
Timestamps
(
00:00) Trailer
(
00:53) Noor Siddiqui, Founder and CEO, Orchid
(
01:04) The flashmob dance proposal
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11:15) Applying to the Thiel Fellowship at 17
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24:22) Founders raising $50M and losing $100M
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31:48) Taking advice from the 500 IQ nerd
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35:36) Why genetics shape everything
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51:03) What is a super baby
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54:55) Sequencing 3 billion letters and why the genetic lottery is evil
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1:01:16) People aren't going to have sex for babies
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1:02:43) Michael Phelps and the genetic lottery
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1:07:21) Escaping the code we were stuck with
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1:20:21) Upgrading all humans would make her cool
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1:22:20) Outro
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