What I did right with Artemis
Part 1/2 on what went right. Part 2 will be what didn’t work about Artemis.
In 2024 I started a project that became Artemis, a $35M Focused Research Organization focused on developing better non-mouse animal models for biomedical research. In December 2025, I shut it down to make room for new adventures.
Along the way, I learned a few things that may be helpful if you’re considering a similar journey. So here they are…
1. Found a real, epistemic problem
Lab mice in research do not get neurodegenerative symptoms like us, age like us, nor menstruate. This is a fundamental bottleneck in our ability to create better drugs, and the reason we still use these mice today is not as intentional as you might think.
The state of organs-on-a-chip and many in vitro technologies are still far from what we were promised a decade ago, while new animal species are critically under-explored. Ozempic (GLP1s) came from the Gila Monster, ACE inhibitors came from snake venom, and polio would have killed millions more if we hadn’t studied it in monkeys.
Though all models are bad and many in vitro models are useful, few holistically capture the nuances of human biology like animal models. Though this is frustratingly becoming less accepted in the zeitgeist, I hope a new appreciation of animal models will be formed in the coming years. Humans are far from being physiologically perfect, and it’s a failure of human imagination to believe we’re at the peak of our capabilities as a species.
There’s still much more to learn from nature. We don’t know what we don’t know, after all.
2. Built the ship
All advanced research programs are difficult to start, but FROs especially so. This is because FROs need a starting team somewhat committed for an undefined period of time until funding comes in. I was able to create a team and advisors who were true pioneers in their work. I had a thesis, exit plan, and stage-gated metrics. The ship was built and ready to set sail.
Beyond the challenge of finding $30M in philanthropic funding, it’s also fundamentally difficult to keep so many people committed and excited for an extended period of time. I’m sure there are many FROs that shut down before a single philanthropist even takes a look, since it’s so difficult to keep the team together. I believe in the FRO model, but I do not think it’s in its final form. For example, the recent FROST program, formed from a UK partnership between Convergent Research and ARIA, likely had a different structure, from founding team composition to fundraising methodology.
3. Listened to the community
At its core, FROs are a community infrastructure project. FROs should not be built on hand-wavey or personal beliefs on what should exist. The shape of Artemis in the earliest days changed a lot, and took several dozen interviews with graduate students, postdocs, and industry scientists over hundreds of hours to find the correct set of things to build. If you think of building FROs yourself, I suggest you do the same.
Don’t be lazy and ask the most famous people that Grok finds or that your friends all know in the valley or in Cambridge. Go take that flight to Kentucky and Edinburgh. Send hundreds and hundreds of cold emails. Really listen to what people need, not what you think they need.
4. Found the right people
I was fortunate to be supported by a small team, friends, and advisors, who I brought on through countless meetings, calls, and notes exchanged. I’m incredibly grateful for them joining such an early, ambitious project and believing in me when all I had was, in essence, just an idea. Find great people who understand the hurdles and pain you’re about to go through and have them on your side. This isn’t something you can accomplish alone.
I’m especially grateful for Tom Kalil and Adam Marblestone who, still to this day, are the most catalytic individuals in the world of impact philanthropy. They are incredibly generous and kind, albeit very busy. Seek a genuine connection with people like them and nurture it over time.
5. Embodied the FRO founder archetype
Firstly, there is no clear archetype of a FRO founder. One because there aren’t that many FROs, but also because they’re all quite bespoke. e11’s CEO was a grad student, Cultivarium’s CEO was previously a startup founder after a long academic career, [C]Worthy’s CEO had a ten-year career at a federal atmospheric research lab. But if I had to suggest a specific phenotype—one that I believe I embodied— it would be the deeptech startup founder with a holistic understanding of technical risk, execution risk, and operational risk.
Businesses should generally have no more than one type of these three risks. Otherwise, not only is that business difficult to invest in/buy, but is now difficult to succeed. FROs are hard because they come with obvious technical risk, but they are also operationally risky because it’s a completely new modality. To navigate all these risks, I believe you need to be an ex-founder or simply cracked to understand these risks, see the multitude of paths through, and execute at breakneck speed. That’s usually not a career academic, but a technologist that’s read the startup and innovation playbook many times over and ideally lived it. Being early and leading teams at startups gave me perspective and helped me sit with massive uncertainty, though it was never easy.
6. Studied the playbook
Philanthropy is built on trust, relationships, and emotion, with no clear repeatable playbook that I’ve read or been able to personally write. I read and listened probably more than I spoke, and I think you ought to do the same. Find champions. Make friends. Don’t be too excited. Be patient. Be calculative, while keeping your latency incredibly, incredibly low.
7. Quit the day job
Unlike other FRO founders, Artemis was not a culmination of my PhD and post-doc work, but rather an idea that was inspired from nearly a decade of drug discovery experience. Though this gave me a unique background, it also meant that I was working two jobs. Quitting the day job was a necessary step, and gamble, to see if it was possible for me to raise large amounts of philanthropic capital with little to no experience.
Though I was not successful with Artemis, impact philanthropy fundraising is a niche skill that can only be gained through practice. Having now worked across academia, startups, and philanthropy, the paths forward have never been clearer.
8. Knew when to quit
Thanks to the support of great friends, colleagues, and advisors, I was able to recognize when it was no longer worth chipping away. Time is precious and life isn’t a dress rehearsal. As far as we know, this is it. If you truly believe that you’re a smart, capable, agentic person, you will eventually find the problem that you should uniquely work on.
Just because your first idea wasn’t perfect, that doesn’t mean you’re not able to come up with better ones. Drop what doesn’t work and move on to the next thing.
9. Launched and failed in public
I’ve been a big fan of learning in public for ages. Artemis FRO was an experiment to see if it’s possible to launch and execute a FRO independent of Convergent in a very limited <1yr timescale. Ultimately, we were not successful for several reasons that I’ll write about in part 2.
I hope this failure encourages more people to take bigger risks. This world needs more people working on big, ambitious ideas out of the mainstream, especially if there’s not a home for it yet. There’s something transformative about jumping in without knowing how deep the water is.
Launching in public seems to have inspired and raised the level of ambition for some, many of whom I get to meet once in a while. This is something that I’m immensely proud of. Failing in public is also an attempt to tell the world what worked, since even for Artemis, as we were getting started, learning what did and didn’t work about previous FRO-like efforts was invaluable.
10. You never fail. Never really.
You fail when you give up and walk away. Intelligible failures are necessary, and though the buildup is long, success is instant. Artemis was an experiment to test what I’m capable of, and has led me to new places that I would’ve never arrived to if I didn’t take that leap of faith.
A new adventure is within reach, and I think it’s the most exciting one yet.
Great write-up. Looking forward to part 2.