From White House to $1B Fund: Reversing 300 Million Cases

Most venture capitalists will tell you they're looking for the next unicorn. Andrew Beebe has a different obsession: finding founders who want to reverse type 2 diabetes in 300 million people.

As Managing Director at Obvious Ventures—the $1 billion fund co-founded by Twitter's Ev Williams—Beebe has spent a decade investing in companies that tackle planetary health, human health, and economic health. With over 125 investments, six IPOs, and nearly 20 acquisitions, his track record speaks for itself.

But what makes this interview fascinating isn't just his success—it's his unconventional journey from White House staffer to ponytailed dot-com founder to solar entrepreneur to VC. In this conversation, you'll discover why he believes culture drives business more than salary, how to spot the difference between seed and Series A opportunities, and why the best entrepreneurs choose their problems as carefully as they choose their people.

Andrew Beebe: I definitely didn't think about being a venture capitalist back then in my youth. I created some businesses very early on as a kid, and I remember one of them, I was buying candy bars in bulk and then selling them retail at school, and I realized a couple of things—it was whoever is closest to the customer always wins. You have a lot of margin opportunity and you also have real control over what's happening.

At the same time, I just realized that it's just much more exciting and rewarding and I think more impactful for the world to actually build things. I mean, I knew in college I had a lot of friends going down very traditional paths in banking and consulting. I knew I was going to do something different. I actually thought I was going to work in politics in Washington because I was always in my mind looking for ways to affect substantial positive change for humanity.

I went to Washington even though I was working in the White House and doing very interesting things at the sort of center of power, and I saw something changing with the internet, and I had always been a little bit of a computer nerd and really into technology as an agent of change. I just didn't know how to implement it. And when the internet was really becoming emergent and the web in particular, this will be a more powerful tool for change and most definitely outside of the hands of government than anything I can do politically, at least at my age.

I left Washington and I went to California and I was helping a couple of friends build an internet development company. We were making websites for people, but then I joined forces with 4 other really close friends, and we built a company called Big Step in 1998 that was like a Shopify. It was like a very, very early version of Shopify at a time when very few small businesses were using the internet, so it was hard to find the customers, but it was the same concept.

Andrew Beebe: So in 2002, we had gone through the internet ups and downs. At that point I was young and I had very, very long hair, like down to my shoulders. I had big bushy ponytail and I rode a motorcycle and I was sort of like a cool internet founder.

Harvard Business School had me come speak and the first year students at HBS were so frustrated that they weren't in San Francisco right now because it was the coolest thing and like guys with ponytails and motorcycles are running companies. And so they basically very politely but in a frustrated way asked me over and over again different versions of like how can we be like you kind of thing and I thought this was very funny. Because I would have never gotten into Harvard Business School, and I said to them, you should all resign from school and come to San Francisco, and the world is waiting for you. And this, of course, drove them insane because they didn't want to leave Harvard Business School and they were frustrated.

And then a year later, the world had changed. My company was not doing well at all. We had to do layoffs, dot com bubble bursting, so Harvard Business School being very smart, they had me come back. And it was the second year, they were now second year students. They also were a little bit nervous because the bubble had burst. And so they kept asking a different question the second year, which was, how can we avoid being like you? So I said to them, it's really, really easy. You guys all should stay in school as long as possible, go back to another graduate school or whatever. And of course, it was funny because they couldn't do that either.

Andrew Beebe: In 2002, we made it through. We survived and then we sold the business and I took a year to think about what had just happened and one of my reflections was that all of the things that changed about the world in a very short period of time I was thirsting for what was the next version of that and I ultimately chose solar as the most likely to be near term impacted by radical cost reduction.

I just kept looking and eventually I found people who had some shared belief. We ended up partnering together to build a solar technology company, but the markets weren't as ready in certain conditions. A lot of the costs were still extremely expensive, so we were very heavily dependent on subsidies. The corporate mindset around climate was nonexistent. No one was thinking about it at all, so all of those conditions conspired to make it pretty tough.

And so in 2008 we sold the company and then become part of a multinational company based in China, Suntec, that allowed us to continue our work really radically expanding the availability of solar and the cost and radically reducing the cost of every solar panel made, and that was an extremely exciting time. And it was after doing that for a while that the obvious team came to me and said, let's do this and you can be a key part of it.

Andrew Beebe: A couple of things I mean, I think the human side of entrepreneurship matters more than anything—the teams that you build and the people that you partner with, it's one of the greatest gifts founders have. If you go work at a big company, you might get handed a team or you might be stuffed into a team and suddenly you're surrounded by people that you may or may not want to be surrounded with for years. When you're building your own company, you get to choose. You get to choose who you're working with. You get to choose who you partner with, who works for you.

We took that very, very seriously and we spent a lot of time thinking hard about the people we wanted to assemble, their talents for sure, but also their integrity and their passion, and those things came together to create culture and the culture really drove the business. I think people would show up to work for a salary. They would stay late for equity, but they would work weekends and would build relationships and have barbecues and all of this because of the culture, because of the people around you, not because of me or their boss or whatever, but because of the fabric that we created.

Andrew Beebe: So our definition of seed versus Series A, at a seed, I would say we're generally not sure exactly what the product will be, what the unique customer profile is, or what the product market fit really looks like. We also acknowledge it might, they might pivot along the way. You know, we built this artificial intelligence engine that was very general purpose, but then power developers just love it, so we're changing it to just suit them at first, and that's our go to market.

Series A, we're typically looking for true product market fit, meaning there are customers who are buying the product who like it and who want to recommend it to others, and that customer, if we expand it to the addressable market, that customer size looks very, very big or a smaller part of a bigger market that we could imagine we could dream that it could expand to.

So the difference for us is Seed is a team and a dream, but just a really, really strong, even kernel, the beginning of a team, and ideas that we share a vision for with the founders. And then at Series A we're really looking for clear evidence of customer traction.

Andrew Beebe: We have a great founder, Sami Inkkinen, who started a company in the healthcare reversing type 2 diabetes without the use of insulin, which is a very hard thing to do. We thought maybe impossible, but when he was starting it, incubating it in our office, he very clearly said, I want to reverse type 2 diabetes in 300 million people. That was a big, hairy, audacious goal. It's also very specific, I think.

Famously, Elon and others have done this in their companies where they have like a very clear master plan. A long term plan, but it has multiple phases along the way. Those phases could be huge businesses and can be financially independent. So it's not just, hey, I'll start here, but it's going to be a money losing business and then I have to move on to the more profitable thing. It's I'll start here. This could be a really powerful business. It's going to be not nearly as big as this next thing. So let's go on this journey together.

I think that kind of clarity of vision, even if it turns out it twists a little bit over time, I think that that's very attractive to investors.

Andrew Beebe: When Obvious was created, we were looking for things that would stand the test of time, things that would offer big opportunities in perpetuity, and we do that across three big pillars planetary health, human health, and economic health. So climate is a very big domain. There are areas like industrialized decarbonization like steel and concrete and others. So we just have to be venture capitalists. We don't have to be like religious zealots about, oh, if it says climate, we must invest.

We are able to offer a superior future, not just a different one, but a superior one that I think is going to prove itself to be more resilient, lower cost, and more available globally than anything before. 20 years ago, if the cost of solar was going to go down 2 orders of magnitude, you'd never believe me. And yet now we are cranking out gigawatts and gigawatts, like 100 gigawatts. The world is changing. Businesses are changing. Governments are adapting.

You know, we call our type of venture capital world positive venture capital, and that's because while we're mainly investing in the United States, we believe that companies there and companies everywhere have an opportunity more than not to just do something locally, but to do something globally and if you do something globally, your market is bigger, your market cap should be bigger, your company should be bigger, but you also have more of an opportunity to leave a lasting impact on society.