Joined July 2009
- Tweets 3,584
- Following 4,164
- Followers 599
- Likes 41,256
168 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
29 Mar 2024
I am now on Farcaster permanently
warpcast.com/dfern.eth
and trying out Bluesky
bsky.app/profile/danielferna…
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Daniel Fernandes retweeted
Jun 10
China’s rise in biotech has been fast. Really, really fast. By 2024, for the first time, Chinese companies launched more novel medicines than any other country.
And by novel medicines, I mean a new active substance launched for the first time anywhere in the world. The hard part of drug development. Not generics, not a new indication for an existing drug, not a “simple me-too” molecule.
This would have been hard to imagine even a decade ago. Until recently, China was largely known for supplying the ingredients to build medicines. Not the actual novel medicines changing treatment paradigms.
That's completely changed.
We estimate China hit roughly four times the efficiency rate of the US in 2023, with ~16 novel drugs per $10B of R&D. In 2020, the two were at rough parity.
And big pharma is rushing to license what China is producing.
In 2020, China's share of big pharma licensing deals was just 2%. By 2025 that was 39%. And for 1Q26 it's tracking at 50%.
My take is there's a mounting sense of urgency for reform in the US: restoring and improving funding, incentives, and efficiency in drug discovery and development. Indeed, the competitive pressure from China could be one of the most important catalysts for reform of the American biotech industry.
Read my full take in @ARKInvest's weekly newsletter 👇
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Daniel Fernandes retweeted
Jun 3
It's nice to see that being incredibly annoying remains a bad campaign strategy
Jun 3
In CA 11, Saikrat Chakrabati's effort to join his former boss, AOC< has failed. He's getting only 13.5%, well behind 2d place Connie Chan.
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Daniel Fernandes retweeted
Jun 1
The past is a foreign country
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Daniel Fernandes retweeted
May 2
Had a Jane Street phone interview in 2016. "Price a 6-month forward on carrots."
There's no carrot futures market, so I build one from scratch: seasonal harvest cycles, USDA demand elasticity, cold storage decay rates.
One trader stops me. "Your storage cost function– you're modeling the carrot as dead inventory. Like grain in a silo." He asks me the metabolic respiration rate of a post-harvest carrot at 2°C. I estimate.
"Your forward is overpriced by exactly that shrinkage. The underlying is consuming its own sugars. It's alive." Good correction. I adjust the model. I think I've recovered.
Rejection email comes the next morning. Subject: "Ethical Review." My framework, they write, "relied on the severance of the root organism from its growth medium." The question about respiration was a test. The carrot was still alive and I'd built an entire derivatives structure on top of its death without questioning whether harvest was an acceptable act.
I pull up the recruiter's original email. It doesn't say Jane Street. It says Jain Street– a non-violent quantitative commodities fund.
The carrot was never supposed to be priced. It was supposed to be refused. I later learn the only candidate who passed that round was a former monk from Gujarat who sat in silence for eleven minutes and said, "I cannot put a price on life." He's now a partner.
Jane Street made ~$40B in 2025 with 3,500 employees, a ~2x from the year before.
At ~65-70% profit margin, that's $8M profit / employee, the highest for a 1000 ppl company. High-frequency trading continues to be the most efficient money making engine.
I want to share an old story about my Jane Street interview in 2014. Jane Street was known for hiring a lot of math, physics and CS olympiad winners from top universities and putting them through many rounds - including, for trading roles, a gauntlet of mental math. It was my 6th interview and my final round and I recall being asked "What is the next day after today in DD/MM/YYYY where all the digits are unique?" They'd toy with you and say "You can use a pencil and paper, if you want" but you knew that was an instant no. Painstakingly and as quickly as I could, I came to an answer. "How confident are you that this is correct on a 0-1 probability scale?" the interviewer said. "0.95", I blurted out, not fully knowing how to answer that. "Are you sure?" After thinking harder for a few more seconds, I realized I could've flipped the digits around to get a closer date. I gave the interviewer my answer. It was correct. "0.95 huh?" he chuckled. That's when I knew I failed.
Note: fwiw, other companies that come close in efficiency are
- Tether ($90M profit/emp)
- Hyperliquid ($80M profit/emp)
and on revenue:
- Valve ($50M/emp)
- OnlyFans ($37M/emp)
- Craigslist ($14M/emp)
- Anthropic ($12M/emp, run rate)
- OpenAI ($8M/emp, run rate)
For comparison, Nvidia is very efficient at scale and is $4.4M/emp.
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Daniel Fernandes retweeted
Apr 29
Me on Unofficial St. Patrick's Day
Apr 29
There is currently a Bull on the loose on the University of Illinois campus.
(video via my friends)
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Daniel Fernandes retweeted
Apr 29
I came back to the United States, hearing about a very sad news: Craig Venter passed away today. He is a pioneer, successfully sequenced the first Human genome, and tried to create Synthetic Cells. We lost a giant in Science. RIP.
@JCVenterInst
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Apr 25
The real party is on FB Events
it's friday in SF which means if you don't have at least 3 partifuls lined up for both tonight and tomorrow night then it's over for you and you should probably leave the city
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Daniel Fernandes retweeted
I write about the @EFF leaving X...on Farcaster
farcaster.xyz/dfern.eth/0x3f…
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Bay area ppl, come thru!
sjmusart.org/event/cadre-40-…
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Mar 19
Instant buy. Will keep on my cubicle shelf for motivation 🫡
Mar 18
I have been dreaming of this day for a long time.
Arena is now a book publisher, and our first volume, "Silicon" is open for preorders.
It's quite unlike anything you've seen: a coffee table book capturing the ecstatic beauty of silicon technology. arenamag.com/silicon
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effective altruism??
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Daniel Fernandes retweeted
Feb 16
My brother Jon passed away a year ago
I'm a midwesterner so I typically bottle up all of my emotions
But I wanted to share some thoughts on what I've learned about grief
It can be a lonely emotion but the way you work through it is with others
awealthofcommonsense.com/202…
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San Pedro St is packed!
ALT San Pedro Square Market filled with pedestrians
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Daniel Fernandes retweeted
this is how they make OFDM waveforms except the drum spins far faster
Fourier transform of a mechanical music box shows up the imprinted pattern 🎶
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Daniel Fernandes retweeted
Jan 8
Last month the Hamilton Society met to debate the ethics of gene editing with the wonderful @cremieuxrecueil.
Next week we meet to debate the motion “America needs more skilled immigration”, moved by @deedydas and opposed by @NatHalberstadt.
Join us! RSVP link below.
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California is the best piece of land on earth:
- 100% of SF can walk to a park
- weather lets you walk everyday
- unlimited nature
- waves, mountains, beaches, cities
- artists, engineers, baristas, chefs
No one wants to leave but we are approaching the limit of government incompetence that you can avoid by simply making more money (I.e. tens of millions)
All the government has to do is the bare minimum:
- three strike rule for all violent crime
- enforce current laws (incl. drugs)
- allow competition in energy
- allow more housing
Do those four things and California will be the best place to live in the world and the only bigger economy will the be US as a whole.
26 Dec 2025
California was supposed to be the place where you “lived and let live”.
How, instead then, did it become the most oppressive, over regulated and overtaxed place in America while also being the worst on crime, housing and education of our kids?
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Daniel Fernandes retweeted
22 Sep 2025
Vinay Prasad is the FDA's Gary Gensler, except 10^100 worse when you consider his goal is to let cancer patients die because cancer drug researchers might make too much money (according to him). Yes, really, you read that correctly.
Link below.
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