“We’re In. We’ve Got You.” Freeflow’s Journey with Iambic Therapeutics

On the day Iambic Therapeutics (Nasdaq: IAM) went public, Tom Miller and Fred Manby each found me separately and brought up a moment from six years earlier. Later that night, when the three of us were together, they brought it up again.

They were talking about the spring of 2020. COVID had arrived just as the company, then known as Entos, was putting together its first financing. One term sheet was pulled. Another was pulled and ultimately renegotiated. Everything was changing quickly.

Freeflow was a new firm, and this was going to be our first investment as a firm. But our message to Tom and Fred never changed:

“We’re in. We’ve got you.”

What they told me on IPO day was that I had not fully understood how much that mattered at the time. Knowing that Freeflow was standing behind its commitment gave them confidence during an extraordinarily uncertain period.

Hearing that six years later brought me back to where the relationship began. In February 2019, Eric Schmidt, former CEO and Chairman of Google, invited me to a machine learning class he was co-teaching with Caltech professor Richard Murray. I knew Eric from our time together at Google. I was spending a lot of time around Caltech at the time, thinking about technology translation and what would eventually become Freeflow.

Tom happened to sit next to me. We started talking. I saw him again at the class’s final presentation on March 18. On April 10, Tom and I sat down one-on-one for the first time. Over the following months, I got to know Tom, his work, and the company he planned to build at the intersection of computation, machine learning and drug discovery.

Freeflow formally launched later in 2019. We deliberately took our time with our first investment. We wanted it to be a company and a team in which we had real conviction. That company was Entos, now named Iambic. We completed our investment in April 2020.

I did not know how COVID would unfold. I did not know how the rest of the financing would come together. But I had spent more than a year getting to know Tom and developing conviction in what he was building. So when circumstances changed, our commitment did not.

That experience also gets at something fundamental about the kind of investing we try to do at Freeflow. We often become involved very early. Frequently, we are the first institutional check into a company.

The founders we work with begin as scientists. They may have spent years becoming world-class in a particular scientific field while only beginning the very different journey of building a company. At that stage, capital matters. But an early vote of confidence can matter too. Someone is saying: we believe this science can become a company; we believe you can build it; and we are willing to take that first step with you.

With Iambic, that first step turned into a long relationship. We continued investing from Fund One. Iambic then became the second investment from our Opportunity Fund, where we ultimately invested the maximum concentration permitted by the fund (20%). We also created several SPVs through which our investors put more than $10 million of additional capital into the company.

Our conviction grew as the company did. Entos became Iambic. The team expanded. The science advanced. The company moved into the clinic and developed partnerships with major pharmaceutical companies.

And on October 15, I joined Tom, Fred and the team in New York at the Nasdaq to take Iambic public. The IPO is obviously an important milestone. But the thing I have thought about most since returning from New York is not the bell ringing or the first few days of trading. It is what Tom and Fred said to me about 2020.

From my perspective at the time, standing behind the investment felt fairly simple. We had done the work. We had developed conviction. We had told the founders we were in. So we stayed in.

I did not appreciate that they might remember that decision six years later. It reinforced something I believe about venture investing. Identifying an exceptional company early is important. But that is only the beginning.

What matters just as much is how you show up when circumstances become difficult. A commitment means the most when it would be easiest to change your mind.

Six years after our first investment, Iambic is now a public company. We are enormously proud of Tom, Fred and the entire team, and grateful that Freeflow has had the opportunity to support them along the way.

There is still a tremendous amount of work ahead. But IPO day gave me a chance to appreciate something that is harder to put on a cap table: the trust that gets built when people stand behind their word.