My first websites went up in 1995, when you still had to explain to people what a website was. I built them by hand, one tag at a time, and I loved it in a way I have never quite managed to explain to anyone who was not there.
Then, for a long time, I stopped. Life filled up with other things — companies, partners, and eventually the slow, quiet work of building BioFund, which for years was more conversation than content. There was a great deal to do and very little that was ready to be said out loud.
The silence, and the end of it.
This summer the silence ended. Jess gave me admin access to our servers — with some private amusement, I suspect — and a feeling I had not had in years came back almost immediately: the pleasure of making a thing in the evening and seeing it live a few minutes later.
In a matter of weeks we had sixteen websites. biofund.org and biofundventures.com. ufp500.com and ufp500.org. biodeep.ai and micronutri.ai. The m-Institute, Animal Health, RAFFINÉ, the team hub. And at the center of all of them, universe.biofund.org — which began life as "the ecosystem," until one evening it became obvious that it had been a universe all along. Ecosystems are finite. Universes grow.
Sixteen doors, one house.
Every site shares the same bones. Spectral for the voice, IBM Plex for the facts, a deep void background, and one amber signal color that always means the same thing: this is the part that matters. Every page has the small sun and moon in the corner, and every page remembers which one you chose.
It sounds like a detail. It is actually the whole idea. A visitor can walk from the science to the kitchen to the family office and never once feel they have left home.
Some of my favorite moments were happy accidents. The UFP500° logo more or less designed itself, out of the dotted zeros in IBM Plex Mono. The degree symbol, which now feels inevitable, arrived as a suggestion that began with the words "hear me out." I heard it out. It stayed.
What changed since 1995.
In 1995, the hard part was the machine. You fought the browser, the modem, the server, the tables nested inside tables. The ideas had to wait patiently while you wrestled with the plumbing.
In 2026, the plumbing has nearly disappeared. What remains is the part I always cared about most: what are we trying to say, to whom, and in what voice? The work became editorial again. I spent my evenings debating a single word — "statement" instead of "claim," "cold-process" instead of "low-heat" — and almost none of them debugging a layout.
Thirty years later, the tools are unrecognizable. The feeling is exactly the same.
How that happened deserves its own page, and it has one: the next note is about the collaborator who made it possible.
Why it matters.
A website is a small public promise: we exist, and we intend to keep existing. For years BioFund made that promise privately, one handshake at a time. Now, when a researcher in California hears our name for the first time, there is somewhere to go — and what they find there looks and sounds like us.
It has also done something I never planned. The Foundations papers began as internal pieces. Today researchers in California read them before we speak — and quote the unusual parts back to us. For someone who spent years keeping his crazy concepts to himself, that is a remarkable thing to hear.
For me, personally, it was something simpler. It was the joy of building again — and of discovering that it had been waiting for me the whole time.