Sandy Kory

Sandy found BillionToOne through the short-lived YC Fellowship and backed it pre-seed, then doubled down and made it his largest angel investment, including at a $4 million valuation. He was impressed by three brilliant PhD founders who were raw, honest, not bullshitters, and able to explain highly technical biology to a non-expert. They were intellectually honest about risks, overachieved repeatedly, and built a profitable diagnostics business with NIPT and liquid biopsy, reaching roughly a $400 million revenue run rate with 100% growth.

Sandy invested in Palantir's 2009 bridge round after his friend and Palantir CTO Sham Sankaran raved about the talent density and mission. He valued the team's extreme first-principles thinking, ambition, dedication, and radically contrarian culture even though the company could not clearly explain its business model or GAAP revenue at the time. He put a large portion of his net worth in because he believed this could be the smartest, most ambitious group in Silicon Valley.