"Everyone has their own cause and priorities, whether it's securing economic stability, combating poverty, or spreading joy. While my story isn't universal, it reflects my perspective. In our era, diseases like tuberculosis, malaria, and cholera, once dreaded, are now challenges we can overcome through modern medicine. We don't just survive; we thrive despite these adversities, because we understand them, control them, and have treatments to manage them. My hope is that my children, as they grow, will view cancer in the same light—solvable, treatable—like any other disease we've learned to control. Imagine them living in a healthier world, with more family and extended futures. What an amazing world that would be." - Jeremy Au
"Many VC funds focus primarily on making wise investments, with the added value being a bonus when it occurs. Being part of a team that's actively building products and shaping the future is incredibly rewarding. You tackle problems head-on, solve them, and then move on to the next challenge, continuously improving the system as a collective. The day-to-day life of a successful operator involves resolving these challenges, whereas a venture capitalist's role centers on selecting the right founders. However, these roles are interconnected. Many founders evolve into VCs, and many VCs start as founders. It's just that you have to pick in your week, what is your 80% that really drives the value that you're trying to bring to the world. Building products, launching and fixing, and creating systems is good. So is using capital and leverage to spot and highlight and accelerate the right founder to the destiny that awaits them." - Jeremy Au
“In venture capital, you're often in the position of having to decline many pitches while selecting the right ones to support. The role assumes an understanding of why certain ventures may fail, how others might succeed, and how to effectively add value. However, this doesn't typically place you in the position of being the least knowledgeable in the room—an experience that's incredibly enriching. In such environments, like at Lucence, where I'm surrounded by doctors, PhDs, and data scientists, my role shifts from judge to learner. This allows me to absorb a wealth of knowledge, and in turn, I contribute my skills in slide making, whiteboarding, and financial modeling.” - Jeremy Au
Jeremy Au listed the 3 reasons for joining Lucence, a startup leveraging next-generation sequencing AI for early cancer detection with a single blood test. He reflected on his teenage years grieving over a personal loss due to lymphoma. He contrasted the builder role with the job of a VC, with a different set of “atomic” work outcomes. He appreciates being "the dumbest person in the room” and learning from experts in genetics, medicine, and data science. This role fulfills his entrepreneurial energy with a strong sense of purpose: getting revenge on cancer, improving patient treatment outcomes and saving lives globally.
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(01:54) Jeremy Au:
I've been having dinner with many friends who are curious about my recent job transition. They are curious about why I joined a Series A startup called Lucence.
Since I've been sharing this with so many people over meals and walks, I figured I might as well share this with you.
So here are three reasons why I've joined Lucence.
(02:11) Jeremy Au:
The first reason is that I really love the mission. Lucence is described as a precision oncology startup using AI to detect and identify profile cancers with a single blood draw. In layman terms, a human goes to a doctor, the doctor takes a single draw blood, which is then sent to a lab, the lab processes it, converts it into a code and uses AI to detect whether you have cancer and what type of cancer it is.
The first line of this product was used for late stage cancer patients who urgently need to identify the exact mutations of these cancer tumors and figure out a personalized treatment plan that is based on the DNA mutation profile of those cancer cells. This is, of course, much more convenient, timely, and in depth compared to a normal tissue biopsy.
The second product line is for healthy individuals who want to detect cancer early. With a single blood draw. With this simple blood test, you can now detect 50 types of cancer in their early stages. This is groundbreaking because the standard approach is for a patient to go for an ultrasound, an x-ray, blood tumor markers, blood fecal test, colonoscopy, all kinds of different things in order to triangulate and try to detect cancer.
The awkward reality is that most people delay or procrastinate on these tests, or that it's way too inconvenient in terms of time and man hours and ping-ponging across different appointment schedules. And the vast majority of people really detect cancer too late. 78 percent of lethal cancers are detected too late. However, detecting cancer early allows for much better outcomes for treatment and increases the survival odds by four times.
This is a very long way to say that fundamentally, this startup is about fighting cancer and saving lives. This is an incredible mission. Many of my friends know that I've spent many years consulting for community and health organizations on a pro bono basis.
This is a great way to increase life. By detecting cancer early, treatments become more efficacious, there's less stress on humans, on their families. Lives are saved. Families get to continue being whole. Society benefits.
(04:14) Jeremy Au:
What my old friends know from junior college slash high school is that my girlfriend passed away. At the time, I had no idea what she had died from. She passed away in a sudden bout across one week. It devastated me and I was angry and frustrated and grieved and it changed me as a person to really focus on what's important in front of me. My family, my friends, my community, in doing good work, in being purposeful.
Life is short.
It took me almost 20 years to eventually find out that she had passed away from lymphoma, which is a form of blood cancer. I remember finding out and just walking out with this stunned expression on my face because I realized that I had really wanted to know and I had been so frustrated for so many years that I didn't know. It wasn't an act of God. It wasn't bad luck. It was a named disease.
Finally, an enemy that I know. It's biology gone wrong. It's a problem that can be fixed. It's an experience shared by millions across the world. So when this opportunity came to fight cancer, it resonated with me both professionally and personally to really make a difference in people's lives. Also, get a little revenge along the way.
(05:14) Jeremy Au:
The second reason why I joined Lucence was really about being the dumbest person in the room. When I am in the meeting room discussing our product and roadmap and DNA and next generation sequencing, I'm learning so much. Yeah, I have a Harvard MBA, and yes, I have a lot of experience in consulting and finance, and management consulting and getting stuff done. Yes, I have been a founder, and yet, I'm learning so much.
This is a domain of knowledge that I had been interested in.
Back in secondary school, middle school, I had wanted to eventually become a vaccine scientist and medical researcher. I learned that that was not a pathway for me because my academics sucked back then and it wasn't a good fit for what I was interested in. Still, it's a domain of knowledge that I've always been personally curious about.
Learning about DNA and risk factors and how people can live longer really scratches that intellectual itch of mine, but also keeps me humble because there are so many people in this company who are just smarter than me and technically way better than me. That's a feeling I missed while I was in venture capital.
(06:12) Jeremy Au:
In VC, so many people are pitching you, and your job is to say no to so many people, and to say yes to the right people.
In other words, you are being paid to judge other people's projects and initiatives and their track record. That can easily lead to the feeling that you are the smartest person in the room. You're supposedly understand why they will fail and supposedly understand when they will succeed. You're supposedly understand how to add value and supposedly understand what are the core issues.
I'm not saying that most VCs are like this. I'm just saying that the lifestyle of a VC really requires you to be in a single room judging the founder on the other side. In other words, you are in many ways not getting to be a part of a room where you are the dumbest person in it. Being the dumbest person in a room really lets you learn because with the right spirit of inquiry and curiosity, you get to learn so much.
I'm learning from doctors and PhDs and data scientists. In return, I bring my slide making skills, my whiteboarding skills and my Excel model financial skills.
(07:07) Jeremy Au:
The third reason why I joined is the ability to build as a team. In venture capital, the leverage is really capital. You get to pick the right founders and invest in them the capital for them to take the lead. There continues to be a debate about how much value a VC really adds to founders that they pick. What is not in doubt is that you have to pick really well. If you pick badly, no amount of you helping them or a value add helps solve the problem. In other words, picking and judging is a must have, while adding value is an optional or bolt on strategy to your fund.
(07:36) Jeremy Au:
There are many VC funds that are out there that are primarily focused on picking well, and are direct that adding value is something that is nice when it happens. Being part of a team that's building product and figuring out the future is fascinating because you get to fix problems and then you get to fix them once. Fixing those problems helps create a system that you uncover another new problem and then you go fix it. You're doing together as a team. So the workflow, the daily atom of a successful operator and executive is fixing problems. The atom of a VC is picking the right founder. These are not mutually exclusive. There are many founders who become VCs and there are many VCs who become founders. It's just that you have to pick in your week, what is your 80% that really drives the value that you're trying to bring to the world. Building product, launching and fixing and creating systems is good. So is using capital and leverage to spot and highlight and accelerate the right founder to the destiny that awaits them.
In fact, there are synergies. Founders who have succeeded and understand what brought them success, and success across their friends and cohorts, they choose to in a later season of life, choose to become a VC to help leverage those insights. Conversely, there are many folks who are VCs in the early part of their career and use that macro understanding of how to fundraise and geography and verticals to narrow in on an idea they like and then go off to build their business in that vertical.
(08:54) Jeremy Au:
So, let's synthesize these three reasons. Imagine a room with your father, your mother, your four grandparents, and your two best friends, the eight of them. Across the eight of them. Two of them will eventually develop cancer in the course of their lifetime. It sucks. It's scary. It causes so much pain.
So why not take the risk sooner? I felt that pain very early in junior college. What I now realize is that millions of other people around the world felt exactly the way I did. They just felt it at different times. Maybe it was their parent. Maybe it was when they were older and it was a sibling that got through it. It could be their spouse. It could be a child of theirs. All of our lives have been touched by cancer.
I felt alone back then. Now I realize that I'm just one of the many people who have shared the experience of being a caregiver, of being a survivor, or feeling helpless. Can you imagine if cancer was a person? A person who walked into that room with your eight relatives and best friends and effectively stabbed two of them.
What would you do to that person? I would strangle that person. I would fight for my family and friends. No retreat. No surrender. I wouldn't run away from somebody who wanted to take away two of the lives of the people who are near to me. I would fight my hardest. You would too.
The difference is that when it's a person that's coming after your family and friends, you know that you can do something about it. When it comes to cancer, we have that sensation of helplessness that is not something that we can fix. It's something for the doctors to deal with. It's something for us to pray about.
That helplessness sucks. So I have a choice, to be helpless or to take action. The opportunity is here. So why not?
If you would fight a criminal going after your family members, then you would fight against this injustice.
(10:20) Jeremy Au:
What I'm sharing is a personal reflection. Everybody has their own cause, their own priorities, whether it's economic security, or fighting poverty, or bringing joy to people's lives. I'm not saying that my story represents all. I'm just sharing about how I think about it. In the world we live today, tuberculosis is something that we survive. We can survive malaria. We can survive cholera. All of the powers of modern medicine lets us not just survive, but thrive in spite of it. It is no longer a curse that we have to run from. We understand it. We control it. We have medicine for it. We can solve it over time. For many of us, these diseases will never really touch us. We're not scared of them.
My hope is that for my children growing up, for my two young daughters, when they become of age, they will look at cancer as something that is like malaria. Cancer is like tuberculosis. Cancer is like cholera. Cancer is solvable. Cancer is treatable. Cancer is a thing that past generations were afraid of. So they get to grow up in a world that's healthier. There's more family around. There is a future that stretches out further. What an amazing world that would be.
I would be proud to share that story when they grow up. That I played a small role. That I got my revenge. That I made the lives of my kids better. What a gift.
Life is a gift. Purpose is a gift.
On that note, stay well and stay brave.
If you like this reflection, feel free to let me know. Let's change the world together.