Matt Ocko saw COVID-19 coming: Here’s what his venture firm is doing about it

Matt Ocko, co-founder of venture firm Data Collective (DCVC), was among a small group of VCs viewed as alarmists when they began tweeting about the coronavirus’s imminent appearance in the U.S. back in January.

In retrospect, those individuals were prescient, so we spoke with Ocko last week about why he was so certain the U.S. was about to get walloped by COVID-19, and asked how some of the startups in DCVC’s portfolio — which has long had a strong biotech focus — are trying to get us back to a state of normalcy.

This conversation has been edited for length.

TechCrunch: You were tweeting about COVID-19 back in January; I almost canceled a flight out of San Francisco because of your [expressed concern about a flight bound for SFO from Wuhan, China]. What did you see that the rest of us missed?

Matt Ocko: My family has been working with the Chinese government at a reasonably high level since the late 1970s, starting with my dad, and I kind of grew up in that environment. And at a relatively young age, as a professional [in the 1990s], I started pro bono helping my dad, who’s a Chinese legal expert, on things like constructing the laws around China’s Nasdaq equivalent, its stock markets, the joint dollar-renminbi investment legislation, advice on technology development and venture capital development.

I’m not an anti-China hawk by any means. But I do have an understanding of some of the idiosyncrasies of Chinese culture reflected in its government, the same way every country has its idiosyncrasies.

[In China’s case], it’s a focus on face and reputation and extreme sensitivity to negative perception or shame or humiliation at every level of government and culture. And so there’s [an] unfortunate trend — and not a universal one — for people to manage upwards, especially in the government, and tell their higher-ups what they want to hear to avoid shame, to avoid the loss of reputation and to kick the can down the road or hope that circumstances on the ground change favorably in the face of denial or equivocation.

And so a potentially highly contagious virus originating in an area known for its wet markets and pinpointed by a number of pandemic surveillance companies — including one of our own — as a likely source of further pandemic outbreaks was very alarming to me.

What do you think this all means for the future of global supply chains? Does this pandemic and subsequent shutdown mean the dream of a global supply chain is no longer what it once was?

I don’t think the pandemic by itself is the forcing function for changes in global supply chain. I think it has exposed a lot of fragility and a lot of vulnerability in global supply chain, and I think there will be changes in things like maintaining larger stockpiles.

I think the real shot across the bow for change was when India and China both announced that key supply chain components and/or finished goods, ranging from personal protective equipment to even finished pharmaceuticals, would be restricted from export. A supply chain isn’t very good if you can’t rely on it when you need it the most.

So I think the lesson for the U.S. and Europe is that we have to go back to making stuff, we have to be able to make stuff or to make more of it at scale. And we have to do it at a high level of quality and without the very unpleasant environmental impact that China and India [and their citizenry] have borne as part of industrialization and outsourcing.

What are your portfolio companies doing about attacking COVID-19? I know that one of them, Curative, has been working on testing kits. 

In the near term, you have to make COVID-19 a treatable disease, especially for vulnerable populations, and you need to prophylactically protect the brave healthcare workers who are fighting this, and first responders, along with the people who work in producing our food supply and delivering it. The best way to do that is likely within an antibody therapy. So essentially giving people a sort of injectable immunity against the virus.

One of our companies, AbCellera Biologics, [has identified more than 500 antibodies that could potentially be turned into medicines to treat the coronavirus] and [in partnership with] Eli Lilly is joining them in driving [these therapeutics] to the clinic in July, if not earlier. [The company was able to do] this because they’ve been working with DARPA and the U.S. Department of Defense on real-time pandemic response for years.

Another of our companies, Lucira Health, was getting ready to roll out a very fast, simple test for influenza A and B . . . and it has been able to extend its technology to detect COVID 19. I can’t comment on their commercial or regulatory plans, but I can say that, given the COVID-19 and the underlying virus, coronaviruses are likely to be around for a while and overlap with flu season, so a single, fast at-home test for influenza A and B and one or more coronavirus strains would be a very interesting thing to have.

It’s another example of a company that didn’t seem very glamorous, certainly not compared to scooter companies that are written about a lot, but was focused on a societal scale, urgent problem that turns out to to be even more important now.

Investing in this kind of thing well in advance of when it’s needed doesn’t get you invited to a lot of Hollywood parties, but it definitely enables these dedicated teams to have this technology when it is urgently needed.