Executive Summary; June Recap
From a look inside Substack to ByteDance's geopolitical risks, hours of research condensed into a 8-minute read.
I know that for many of you, the most valuable resource is your time. If you don’t have 25 minutes weekly to pore over in depth research, or if you flagged one of my posts as “need to read” and never had the time, this post is for you.
This post is going to be short, and include summaries of every company that I have covered in June. Hours of research on Isomorphic Labs, ByteDance, Substack and our podcast have been condensed into one brief article. Each one of the recaps should take about 2-3 minutes to read, the whole post will be under ten minutes. For anyone interested in the full posts, they are all linked down below. At the end of the post there is a poll, would appreciate if all those who are reading can vote on it.
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June 4th: Isomorphic Labs.
The Core Thesis:
Drug discovery is an extremely messy and complicated problem. Each drug takes billions of dollars to develop and years to pass the necessary tests. Isomorphic Labs is an AI company that is focused on making drug discovery more effective, less expensive and significantly faster. A spin-off of Google’s DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs is run by some of the brightest minds in the world including Demis Hassabis, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry. Isomorphic Labs uses AlphaFold and its subsequent models in order to spearhead the research that they do. Isomorphic Labs recently completed deals with Eli Lilly and Novartis that turned them into customers, rather than investors. With huge funding from Thrive Capital, Google and two sovereign funds in the U.K and Singapore, Isomorphic Labs has a massive cash runway that will be hugely beneficial in an expensive industry.
The Eye-Opening Numbers:
The average drug costs $3 Billion, takes 10 years from start to finish and has a 90% failure rate.
$2.7 billion in funding.
200,000,000 Proteins - The total amount of proteins mapped by AlphaFold and subsequent models. Compared to 150,000 proteins by all humans ever.
Global pharmaceutical R&D TAM is $306 Billion in 2024. Roughly one-third of which is spent entirely on the preclinical discovery phase.
Structure deals worth up to $1.7 billion and $1.2 billion with Eli Lilly and Novartis.
$1.6 trillion in 2025 - entire global therapeutics TAM.
0 Patients. The amount of patients Isomorphic Labs has actually dosed.
The Bear Thesis:
Despite billions raised across multiple years Isomorphic Labs has still not dosed a single patient. Human trials, originally scheduled for the end of 2025 were pushed off to the end of 2026. Until Isomorphic Labs proves that their technology actually works, this might just be a biology problem that is being wrongly approached from a computational solving mindset. “The concern is that biology is being over-simplified and treated as a pure data analysis problem.” In the meantime, Isomorphic Labs competitors have raced ahead and are now already dosing human volunteer patients. Finally, a celebrity founder has caused the valuation to shoot up to a level that it doesn’t deserve.
The Verdict:
Isomorphic Labs has a lot of confidence in the statements that they have made. But the idea of “solving all disease” is likely still decades away, with massive investments from Google, Thrive Capital and others, the true test will be the human trials which are still some months away. If the human tests go well, it is very possible that this company becomes one of the pharmaceutical giants in a market worth trillions. For those looking into investing in a company with profits and cash flow, stay away. For those interested in a lottery ticket whose goal is helping society better itself, Isomorphic Labs could be the right choice for you.
June 11th: ByteDance.
The Core Thesis:
ByteDance was founded in China in 2012 with the goal of creating an app that uses a machine learning algorithm to bring easily digestible content tailored specifically to each user. Within a few years, their apps were some of the biggest apps in China and abroad and today, four billion users use one of ByteDance’s apps monthly. Their revenue has grown extremely quickly and they nearly caught up to Meta’s revenue in 2025.
The Eye-Opening Numbers:
ByteDance's staggering total revenue in 2025, was reported at $186 billion, representing a 20% year-over-year increase.
4 Billion MAU across all of ByteDance’s apps.
$15.8 Billion - 2025 U.S. sales figure reached by TikTok Shop - a 400% + surge.
ByteDance decided to cut profits by 70% in order to invest into AI.
ByteDance’s CapEx spend in 2026 is $23 billion.
345 Million - Doubao monthly active user count - China’s largest chatbot.
ByteDance currently holds a $180 Billion cash pile, second only to Berkshire Hathaway.
A valuation of
The Bear Thesis:
The main bear thesis with ByteDance has more to do with location and geopolitical risks than the balance sheet. A private company based in China is extremely risky to invest in both for its lack of liquidity and geopolitical risks involved. There are other bear cases that could possibly happen, AI spend not materializing, social media getting banned for youth etc, the main bear case however is the geopolitical risks. Today, almost two billion people are banned from using TikTok, if western countries decide to increasingly ban TikTok and other ByteDance apps, the company will suffer major hits to revenue and profitability.
The Verdict:
ByteDance is one of the fastest growing large companies, both in terms of revenue and user numbers. That being said, in my discussion with a Chinese lawyer, they mentioned that it is impossible for a Chinese company to say no to the Chinese government. When the government itself is unethical, and the company itself has to adhere to the governments whims, I want to stay far away from the company, both in terms of use and in terms of investment.
June 19th: Podcast #1 with Learning.Investing.Thriving.
Key Topics/Takeaways
Why I began writing about the private market, how to invest in private companies and why venture capital firms use a completely different strategy than the average retail investor.
SpaceX going public and what the first few weeks of the largest IPO in history will look like.
Different ways to invest into the private market, a brief look at SKM - an Anthropic proxy.
Crypto, a brief history and why Bitcoin may or may not be a good investment today.
Why stocks stay flat for a long time post IPO featuring Amazon and why Amazon might be one of the best long term plays going forward.
Polymarket and the negative effects of gambling. Why the masses should stay away from prediction markets and how it is essentially a wealth transfer from the average population to the wealthy.
World Cup! How could we not cover it. Our picks for who will win the World Cup and some dark horse predictions that could make a run.
June 19th: Substack.
The Core Thesis:
Substack is a social media platform that makes you feel better after using it rather than worse. With thousands of different writers writing from their unique perspective, Substack is full knowledge for those willing to look. Substack was founded with the goal to “build a new economic engine for culture” and so far they have succeeded. Substack generates revenue by taking a 10% cut on creator revenue. This caused them to generate $45 million in revenue helping push it up to a $1.1 billion valuation, officially reaching unicorn status.1 Substack also allows creators to own their own audience, something fundamentally different from other social media platforms. This is a double edged sword as writers can leave the platform at any point and migrate to one of Substack’s competitors. On the other hand, as more creators move to Substack in order to monetize their audiences, Substack turns into one of the main ways for content creators from all platforms to monetize their platforms, bringing over their audiences.
The Eye-Opening Numbers:
$0 needed to begin writing and monetizing on Substack.
50 million users now actively read on Substack.
Substack now has 5 million paid subscriptions. Readers are willing to pay for quality writing.
The top 10 authors in 2025 made more than $100 million in 2025. For those on top, Substack can be a huge money making machine.
Over 100,000 writers are earning money through Substack.
50% of Growth comes from Recommendations. 25% of paid subscriptions come from monetization.
Substack’s data breach included 697,313 users.
Substack is now worth $1.1 billion, officially entering unicorn status with its most recent funding round.
The Bear Thesis:
Despite being founded almost a decade ago, Substack is still not profitable and its revenue growth slowed down in 2025. Top creators are often incentivized to leave the platform due to high fees, something they can do relatively easily. This often causes Substack to lose out on their most valuable writers and potentially millions of dollars a year. Additionally, Substack is built around long form content and the general loss of attention span means that the TAM for Substack is constantly shrinking. Finally, Substack for a long time believed that the best way to argue against extremist ideology was open discourse. This was a strategy that alienated many mainstream writers, some of whom decided to leave the platform, due to viewing Substack as directly benefiting from extreme ideologies. Today, Substack is constantly in a moderation battle where no matter what, they lose users.
The Verdict:
Substack is a platform I have a vested interest in as I have invested hundreds of hours into the platform. Substack’s TAM is also significantly larger than it is right now with NYT being valued at $12 billion and Reddit at $31 billion. Currently, despite the platform not being profitable, I truly think the platform might be undervalued today at $1.1 billion. Financials often lag in companies that are still in their growth stages. Twitter took 12 years to report its first profitable quarter. I see this as the growth stage that Substack is currently going through before turning profitable. In order for this to happen, they need to turn from a “niche social media for intellectuals” to a mainstream source of knowledge. If they do, they could easily grow to one of the biggest media companies in the world.
Disclaimer: For those of you reading this, remember I’m sharing my personal thoughts, not professional investment picks. My predictions are based on assumptions that could be wrong, please do your own research before investing.
https://sacra.com/c/substack/