The hottest running app has nothing to do with speed | E2303

Summary

Jason and Lon interview INTVL founder Louis Phillips about his gamified running app that turns jogging into a territory-claiming game, covering organic social growth, paid ads, and subscription economics. In the second segment, Alex interviews Verge Labs CEO Alice Zhang on the company's pivot from drug discovery to an AI platform using proprietary brain tissue data to help pharma companies predict drug targets and patient responses, with partnerships including Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca.

• INTVL is a gamified running app with a global turf-war mechanic, grown to over 1M downloads without paid ads initially.
• Founder Louis Phillips shares tactics like explainer videos and Meta ad library for user acquisition, with $12 cost per trial start and $60/year subscription.
• Verge Labs rebranded from Verge Genomics after building a large brain tissue dataset and realizing its AI platform could better serve other pharma companies.
• Alice Zhang explains how transformer-based world models fuse multimodal patient data (brain tissue, blood, imaging) to predict drug response.
• The platform enables virtual brain biopsies from a blood draw, aiming to improve clinical trial patient selection and reduce drug failure rates.
• Verge has major partnerships with Eli Lilly (ALS) and AstraZeneca Alexion; 83% of AI-derived targets validated in labs, surpassing expectations.
• The discussion highlights AI's potential to lower drug development costs from billions to tens of millions through better target prediction.