Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies

by bob_theslob646 • 4 months ago

1404 242 4 months ago

anderber• 4 months ago

That's pretty amazing. I believe he's also a founder/investor in Kilo Code which I use and really like.

Really awesome that he was able to do this and give back, but none of this would have been possible without his unfathomable wealth and access.

yieldcrv• 4 months ago

Feeling inspired?

croes4• 4 months ago

It’s more like I hope more bad things happen to rich and powerful people so they start doing something against it. As long as it happens to ordinary people most of then hardly care.

Reminds me of the GOP who was against stem cell treatments until Reagan got Alzheimer‘s

rvz5• 4 months ago

...but none of this would have been possible without his unfathomable wealth and access.

What's that supposed to mean? Is that bad?

You can do the same thing as he did, what's stopping you?

croes4• 4 months ago

Wealth is mostly based on either luck and more often heritage.

TobTobXX• 4 months ago

wealth and access that is merely fathomable

Noumenon72• 4 months ago

That's not a "but". Because he developed wealth and access, this is possible for one person when before it wasn't possible for anyone. This is how societies developed everything from refined sugar to rockets, as they passed various thresholds where individuals could afford to try things out.

perch564• 4 months ago

According to some online sources his total wealth is under $3B. Hardly ‘unfathomable wealth’ IMO. Sure, billionaire territory but nowhere near the ultra-wealthy.

amazingamazing3• 4 months ago

3 billion is ultra wealthy, you can't be serious.

chaps2• 4 months ago

Friend, $3B is unfathomable wealth for an individual.

dudul• 4 months ago

This comment left me speechless... There are just a bit over 3000 billionaires in the world, 900 in the USA. If $3B isn't "unfathomable wealth" I don't know what is.

peyton• 4 months ago

There are grad students babying organoids right now. Saturday morning. If you can work a pipette you can do this.

esafak• 4 months ago

This is an excellent use of his wealth and skills. Much better than Steve Jobs' response.

I remember reading a similar article about a (cancer?) patient who used 3D printing for his personalized cure.

fragmede• 4 months ago

And all of a sudden, I was bestowed with the greed to acquire more money than I can spend in a single lifetime. If I get cancer, I'd rather be rich and be able to do stuff like that, rather than die quietly.

Axoncode• 4 months ago

I hope he will feel better.

ashwinnair99• 4 months ago

Most people slow down when something like this hits. Starting companies is a very specific way of refusing to.

asim• 4 months ago

Kudos to Sid for trying it and hopefully it benefits others in the long run. Not everyone has the money, will or commitment to do this. My own father died with a battle of myeloma, a blood and bone marrow cancer, after 2 years, it wasn't the disease specifically that got him, it was the secondary conditions that caused irregular heart rhythm and eventually one day it stopped and no one was there to help. 2 stem cell transplants, rounds of chemo, almost full failure of kidneys. The cancer did its job. Ultimately what I'm saying, the medicine gives us time, but no one beats death. Maybe the treatment gives us time to come to terms with that, hopefully my dad did. I was in total denial. Anyway good luck to you Sid.

All the best to all the cancer survivors out there, and to the loved ones who lost them.

grokcodec• 4 months ago

https://time.com/7213490/why-are-young-people-getting-cancer...

storus2• 4 months ago

Maybe it's time for him to give the metabolic cancer theory a go and try to bump up his mitochondrial function as much as possible? It's practically untestable due to science testing all compounds in isolation instead of a cocktail over longer period of time that can't be properly controlled even if it might be true. Every single cancer cell has a damaged mitochondria and often switching it properly on leads to cancer cell's apoptosis. He should also take desloratadine as some Swedish hospital observational study showed a significantly increased survivability on all tumor types with it. Some people had success with the combination of DCA, R-ALA, B1 HCl megadoses >2g, CoQ10 + PQQ, glucosidic astaxanthin, nattokinase/serrapeptase/lumbrokinase, low-dose aspirin, pancreatic enzymes and lactoferrin, with complete removal of fructose from the diet (as the cancer explosion can be correlated with years when fructose started getting introduced into diet in large quantities).

azinman2• 4 months ago

You said it’s untestable but then said a Swedish hospital did a study on it? I don’t see why things can’t be tested over a long term. There are many such studies.

storus2• 4 months ago

Swedish hospital study was about desloratidine:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33550204/

Metabolic theory of cancer is untestable in practice as you can't control all variables over long time.

menno-dot-ai• 4 months ago

There's a crazy story in here where Sytse invested in a click chemistry cancer research startup (Shasqi) in 2017 and ends up becoming a customer six years later.

I sincerely hope it works out for him.

bob_theslob6463• 4 months ago

It's mentioned in the slide deck on the url linked. I highly recommend clicking through all the slides. It's absolutely one of the most fascinating decks I've come across. His sheer will to want live is impressive and inspiring.

HorizonXP• 4 months ago

Also helps we were all batchmates in W15, so the serendipity is even higher.

sytse20• 4 months ago

Yes, it felt like the universe provided in this case. I invest in my batch mate. We end up becoming best friends, our wifes become best friends. Biotech VCs are afraid click chemistry isn't hot enough. I lead multiple rounds and become the biggest investor and it becomes my biggest investment. The year I get cancer click-chemistry wins a Nobel prize. And I become a patient. Unbelievable.

fumeux_fume• 4 months ago

The linked post about his treatment is basically a vanity article; low in useful information, but high in vague assertions and platitudes. There's also a link to a post griping about the red tape someone experienced while trying to self-treat their dog's cancer that's weird. I clearly live in a different world than these people.

bob_theslob6463• 4 months ago

Here is a video if you want more detail.

https://forum.openai.com/public/videos/event-replay-from-ter...

"Event Replay: From Terminal to Turnaround: How GitLab’s Co-Founder Leveraged ChatGPT in His Cancer Fight"

dekhn• 4 months ago

This is a common trope in the tech field- successful tech person who is good at tech gets disease and wants to help cure it. It's easy to generate a lot of data these days (whole genome sequencing, various tests) but the reality is that turning that data into actionable knowledge is remarkably difficult.

Much of the red tape exists to help people avoid making common mistakes that aren't obvious until you've been through the process a number of times (other red tape just exists to gatekeep unnecessarily).

inglor_cz3• 4 months ago

To be somewhat more optimistic, digging useful connections and correlations from a heap of data is something that AI is really good at.

IIRC there is a cancer lab in Vienna, Austria, where they feed genome sequence of a tumor into an AI and it sometimes recommends unexpected-but-efficient treatments.

dasil003• 4 months ago

It's wild to me to hear this being spun as vanity, like it's some influencer clickbait or linkedin slop. You could argue anyone posting anything online is driven by vanity, but in this case we're talking about someone who took agency in his own medical outcome, and essentially experimented on himself. Sure it was selfish in the sense that he didn't want to die and he bent all his effort and resources to it, so what? I don't see exercising ones will-to-live in this way being a huge moral gray area. Other commenters are saying why don't we fund more research? Well sure we should do that too, but it's important to recognize that the type of approach he took here only works because it was one individual willing to combine a significant amount of personal effort with his own moral authority to try out risky things on himself. Even with orders of magnitude more funding, you can't ethically do this kind of thing without the consent of the patients, and there's not enough data on these types of approaches to adequately describe the risks to patients if they aren't specifically motivated to lean into the details like this guy did.

113• 4 months ago

Because it's only an option if you're rich and most of us aren't rich.

goodrubyist• 4 months ago

it's basically the American mindset vs the European one (or anyone not in the US?).

dsign• 4 months ago

When it comes to cancer, there is an awful lot of legacy thinking and "way things are done" taking lives. Starting with the so called "standard of care", which makes patient lose precious treatment windows while they wait for a possible miracle from "first-line drugs" from thirty and forty years ago which frankly are not that good. But it's hard to reform because the fraction of people who ever think about cancer as a problem to be solved is quite small; and it ought to be far larger, given that cancer is the second or even first leading cause of death across much of the world. I wish Elliot Hershberg every success.

SoftTalker• 4 months ago

I'm pretty much a pessimest when it comes to fighting cancer. I think it's just one of the bugs in our genetic code that evolution didn't shake out. I say that not as a biologist or anyone who has done any work in the field. But I've seen people close to me die of cancer and it seems like the treatement is almost worse than the disease. I agree that the standard first attacks are very crude and have broad systemic side effects and the attitude seems to be "you'll die without this so that doesn't matter."

I read some stuff about mRNA treatment a while ago that seemed like it might be promising.

pavas• 4 months ago

I think it's just one of the bugs in our genetic code that evolution didn't shake out. I say that not as a biologist or anyone who has done any work in the field.

I'm just curious, do you know what the opinions about this stuff are from people that work in these fields, or that have dedicated their lives to it?

testaccount28• 4 months ago

i'm pretty much a pessimest [sic] when it comes to fighting smallpox. i think it just exploits one of the bugs in our genetic code that evolution didn't shake out.

NitpickLawyer• 4 months ago

seems like the treatement is almost worse than the disease.

I think that's what the poster above you was saying. "Oldschool" chemo is basically poison, and the hope is that it kills off the cancer before the patient. But there are newer drugs that are extremely effective with way way way less side effects out there, depending on which type of cancer one has. Things like immunotherapy are really effective if you happen to match their targeted types of cancer, and some have basically 0 side effects, leading to a QoL improvement if they happen to work. People have gotten nobel prizes for some of these discoveries, it's really insane how far we've come in the last 30-40 years.

com2kid• 4 months ago

I read a theory that we actually evolved cancer to ensure that something kills us.

Mortality is a feature when it comes to species level fitness. Sucks for the individual though.

ungovernableCat• 4 months ago

Cancer is too broad of a term. Some cancers like Hodgkin's lymphoma or testicular cancer respond extremely well to treatment. Some cancers are caused by cell damage from viruses such as HPV and can be prevented by vaccines.

I get the pessimism because "curing cancer" can essentially be interpreted as "curing aging" but progress is being made.

dennis_jeeves22• 4 months ago

it seems like the treatment is almost worse than the disease.

You seem to be indeed factually correct in most cases, judging by views of physicians who have gone against the orthodoxy.

dennis_jeeves22• 4 months ago

there is an awful lot of legacy thinking and "way things are done" taking lives.

I think one of the legacy thinking is to treat it like an infection rather than a systemic disease.

dominotw• 4 months ago

so many of these now. it is so sad and scary.

been thinking about prenuvo all the time now but not sure if thats going to help or make me more paranoid.

TaupeRanger• 4 months ago

Not really. Osteosarcoma rates have remained very stable for decades. Some young people are getting diagnosed with colon/breast cancer at increasing rates, but most of that comes down to better diagnostics and imagining, catching things at earlier ages.

moooo99• 4 months ago

But isn‘t colon cancer in young people primarily an example of rates actually increasing, because young people specifically often get easily dismissed based on their age.

arjie3• 4 months ago

Before I got my Prenuvo MRI everything online said “don’t do this, man. You’ll find all sorts of things that will worry you that you wouldn’t be worried about if you didn’t do it”. That makes no sense to me. Totally irrational. So I did the scan and saw a bunch of things which had no clinical significance - including the amusing thing that I’m missing the transverse processes on a couple of vertebrae (easily explainable from a motorcycle accident that put me in the ICU). So I moved on, scan done, and with the docs in my family reviewing.

But a friend of mine went through a different diagnostic procedure and found things of equal clinical significance and went through a large number of interventions which he didn’t really need it now turns out. And then I understood why people provide this warning.

So the first question to ask yourself is which kind of person you are.

andrewlacy• 4 months ago

There is a chicken and egg problem with advanced diagnostics like Prenuvo. I’m optimistic that if all disease were to be caught early, (1) the health system would evolve what is standard of care downstream in the working up and treatment of findings and (2) as individuals we would be less likely to overreact in chasing stuff down and feeling anxious. As CEO of Prenuvo, we do our best to contextualize and risk stratify in what is an evolving practice.

nextos3• 4 months ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47550016

appstorelottery14• 4 months ago

This is the most supremely motivating post I've seen in a long time. I know what it is to be diagnosed with cancer, being rushed to surgery - it's amazing how quickly the medical-industrial complex can move once you've got a diagnosis (at least in Australia). I had a short period of contemplating terminally, because cancer claimed the life of most of my family. Thankfully, after surgery it was gone.

To see Sid use his motivation and resources to solve his own problem is the core message (IMHO) of the hacker community.

It makes me look at my own problem (Peyronies) in a different light; a disease which has affected my life in ways which cannot be overstated. Yet, all the money in the world right now can't fix Peyronies - yet in reading his journey my mind has been changed about this.

His slide title: "I'll talk to anyone, I'll go anywhere, and I can be there anytime" is certainly the mindset!

Thanks for posting this - I'm inspired to take similar action for Peyronie's. Anything is possible.

elric• 4 months ago

I commend you for speaking openly about Peyronie's, I imagine that isn't always an easy thing to do (or to deal with). Best of luck, and I hope you manage to make progress with it. Effective treatment wouldn't get as much airtime as effectice cancer treatments, but it would certainly have a positive effect on the lives of millions of men.

appstorelottery14• 4 months ago

You are right on the mark. What triggered me was the slide in Sid's presentation: "Assessing Fibroblast Content of Tumor". Peyronie's is all about Fibroblasts. I actually typed my reply quite a few times, deleting mention of Peyronies and retyping it. It's a shameful condition for me, and I realize that I have to get over this. Peyronie's affects 1% to 20% of men, primarily because it's (if you're anything like me) - is impossible to talk about.

Again, you're completely right. Talking about the disease is the first step.

MindTwister• 4 months ago

Several years ago I was doing advertising websites, one of our customers was (Pfizer? Bayer? both were customers) they had developed a drug against Dupuytren's contracture[1] and apparently found it effective enough against Peyronie's that we were asked to create a website describing this (possibly off label) use of that drug.

Honestly I have no idea if it was effective or not, nor do I know anything about the side effects, but just in case you were unaware of that particular option I want to put it out there.

From what I can find, doing an online search along that path it might have been Xiaflex/Xiapex by Pfizer.

(Not paid by anyone in this particular business anymore, just remembered it when I read your comment).

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dupuytren%27s_contracture

appstorelottery14• 4 months ago

Thanks for your comment. I'm aware of Xiaflex, and it's been clinically proven to work against early-stage Peyronies. When the disease has reached the chronic phase (and calcified) - Xiaflex hasn't been clinically proven. Xiaflex is now on-label for treating Peyronies.

My mistake wasn't acting earlier, because I had no idea what was happening. But thank you again for your comment. Thank you!

gen_12• 4 months ago

Fellow Australian with Peyronie's here. Do you know about Dr C Love? I have just had a PIG surgery with him. It is too early to make a definite statement on the result yet, but things are looking a lot better than before.

appstorelottery14• 4 months ago

I live in the EU at present, I haven't heard of Dr C. I've seen a little Doctor Worship on Reddit, but no doctor who can deal with Chronic conditions. In the NL the only option was Tunica albuginea plication (TAP) which results in a loss of length. I've read that PIG in 44% of cases fixes this, however... ugh... surgery. From the bottom of my heart I wish you success in this, and I'd love to stay in contact and hear of your recovery - but how on HN?

sytse20• 4 months ago

Thanks for you kinds words, glad to hear you recovered from Peyronies.

appstorelottery14• 4 months ago

I have not recovered, I took the opposite path to you - when "standard care" wasn't an option - I gave up. But your post has motivated me, and shown me a roadmap of what is possible. Eternally grateful.

p.s. "I'll talk to anyone, I'll go anywhere, and I can be there anytime" - for me, unfortunately $ is the problem for going anywhere, anytime. Perhaps you can help? I've sent you an email - I'm motivated. ;-)

SilentM682• 4 months ago

"Anything is possible," is the correct mindset when it comes to chronic or incurable diseases.

idopmstuff• 4 months ago

I am watching DTF St. Louis (which is not a terrible reality show about a third tier city like the title implies, actually a Jason Bateman kind of dark comedy/whodunit), and Peyronie's features in the story. The show also has the first commercials I've ever seen for a Peyronie's treatment, and apparently it's an official ad partner of the show. I wonder if some enterprising show exec decided to go pitch the perfect sponsorship or if the company making a treatment commissioned a show...

appstorelottery14• 4 months ago

A cure for Peronies which is non invasive, works on chronic/non-chronics is worth countless billions.

dexterdog• 4 months ago

DTF STL is a fantastic show as are all of the series done by Steven Conrad.

cade2• 4 months ago

Given your personal experience, I expect you know significantly more than I do, but I just wanted to note: about 20 years ago, I was part of a small company that filmed and edited educational, medical videos for various clients. One of the main things we filmed for a while were Peyronies repair surgeries. They were using a product called Surgisis from Cook Medical as a tissue scaffold to straighten things out. It looks like, sometime in the past 20 years, Cook may have moved on to a new product called Biodesign: https://www.cookmedical.com/surgery/the-path-from-surgisis-t..., but I don't know anything about that.

You may know all of this already, and it may not be relevant to your situation at all, but in the slim hope that my experience of editing scores of Peyronies surgery videos may help nudge you in a new or helpful direction: there you have it!

appstorelottery14• 4 months ago

Thanks for your thoughtful comment! You're right - Biodesign can be used in Plaque Incision and Grafting (PIG) for Peyronies. Unfortunately PIG IMHO has (in some studies I have read) a 50/50 chance of erectile dysfunction, nerve injury, instability and so on. In essence, PIG might be rolling the dice to make a bad situation completely untenable. But again, I do thank you for your comment!

Traubenfuchs• 4 months ago

Someone who is conincidentally both rich and has cancer tries to find a cure for his cancer by… spending money and being desperate enough about it to be available 24/7.

What about this exactly is inspiring?

jchook• 4 months ago

To see Sid use his motivation and resources to solve his own problem is the core message (IMHO) of the hacker community.

Hacking is about exploration beyond the known, and iterating towards a clear understanding.

parsimo2010• 4 months ago

(slightly sarcastic) So we should give rich people diseases so they are incentivized to fund medical research?

Sid seems like a decent person. I'm glad that he's able to push cancer research forward on his own. Hopefully his work will make things better for everyone else with bone cancer. Seems like that is well under way. (and I guess I should recognize that he funded a cancer treatment company years before he knew he had cancer further reinforcing that he's not purely self-interested)

I'm a little melancholy that my aunt, who was a millionaire just not a mega-millionaire, didn't have the resources to do this before she died of cancer. She was able to pay for a high standard of care, but couldn't single-handedly fund teams of scientists to work on her case. I know she would have done so if she could, her biggest regret was not being around longer to see her grandkids grow up and she was very driven to watch over her family.

It is a little sad that the world's medical research apparatuses couldn't seem to fund this on their own. Not just the US medical system, but Europe and China also don't have better treatments until a rich guy came along. It seems that it's not for a lack of ideas, just that some of these ideas couldn't be funded. Is it that this type of bone cancer is super rare and the cost just isn't worth it? Or are we just under-funding at the level that several ideas with a likely positive ROI aren't able to get funded?

melling2• 4 months ago

Why can’t we just ask our governments to spend more on research? Want some rich person to donate $100 billion on cancer research?

The US government and European governments could find that amount of money every year.

declan_roberts• 4 months ago

The United States and world spend huge amounts of money on this, not even to mention the enormous amounts of private research.

The takeaway here is getting money into the hands of smarter and more motivated people.

BobbyJo2• 4 months ago

You can't compare the output of small teams driven by a fanatic with a single output metric with government funded research. NIH invests about 40 billion in research a year in the US as it is I believe.

VectorLock• 4 months ago

In another timeline they're doing a "Cancer Moonshot" right now.

PowerElectronix• 4 months ago

We are not the bosses of the people in the government, so asking does very little.

georgemcbay• 4 months ago

The US government [...] could find that amount of money every year.

Sorry, that money is already earmarked for killing Iranian school girls and funding a gestapo to terrorize immigrants and American citizens. Ain't got enough left over after we cover those essentials.

inglor_cz3• 4 months ago

It is a bit simplistic to assume that more money translates into better research outcomes.

Alzheimer's is a warning tale. Lots of money flowed into research of this condition, and was mostly wasted on a flawed hypothesis supported by scientific VIPs who had a face to lose in case it proved incorrect.

We don't necessarily need more money in research, but smarter ways of spending it. The current grant system rewards established players and reliable production of mediocre (or even fraudulent) papers over honest failure and actual innovation too much.

light_hue_12• 4 months ago

Not just the US medical system, but Europe and China also don't have better treatments until a rich guy came along. It seems that it's not for a lack of ideas, just that some of these ideas couldn't be funded. Is it that this type of bone cancer is super rare and the cost just isn't worth it? Or are we just under-funding at the level that several ideas with a likely positive ROI aren't able to get funded?

Cancer research, and all research in general, is massively underfunded. The US spends $7 billion dollars per year on the National Cancer Institute. The EU spends about as much as well. That's $14 billion per year for all cancer, never mind bone cancer. This just isn't a lot of money. That's like 6 days of running the US DoD. For cancer.

wyager• 4 months ago

The bottleneck isn't research funding, it's getting past the FDA

nextaccountic• 4 months ago

The bottleneck isn't research funding, it's getting past the FDA

Incidentally, that's the first point on his proposals to make the industry more healthcare first (slide 15)

He also links this https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/the-bureaucracy-blockin...

bluerooibos• 4 months ago

The bottleneck is capitalism, in which only things that turn a profit are deemed worth doing.

Fordec• 4 months ago

In individualistic societies, the cultural motivation isn't going to come in the name of collective action. In the era of how much state funding of state driven science in the US is being pulled, you're 100% correct that all that will be funded will be rich people looking to cure themselves. But just because it's factually correct, doesn't mean it's not an indictment of the society we've built.

mRNA research, first discovered in the 1960s, couldn't get much funding for years/decades and had to scrimp through what they had. And then it got a burst in funding and was publicly available in a year.

stuffn• 4 months ago

There are so many diseases that can be solved if money isn’t an issue. The problem is even if this wealthy guy cures his own cancer the treatment will never be available to us. We still do not have cheap genetic targeting and immunotherapy. The average person will be bankrupt just from the discovery.

I’m of the opinion most types of cancer can be targeted and cured. There’s just not enough money in it to produce the cure. The entire industry is locked behind a paywall.

moralestapia• 4 months ago

"maximum diagnostics"

Love this! This is the way! And he proved it correct.

I remember one time I mentioned this in a casual conversation only to get back very low IQ responses with some fatuous arguments that the tests caused the disease or something.

There was this one guy Tomas something (can't remember the last name, a weird one), doesn't matter, what I do remember is how he was desperately trying to explain how more tests led to more diagnoses and that was ... somehow bad? Lmao.

Something I've observed, I've lived in Canada/US and Latin America, in the former you have to wait months for a CT scan, in the latter you can get it the same day you need it. If the "third-world" can do it, there's no excuse.

universa1• 4 months ago

I am fully on your side, but tests are not 100%: False positives and false negatives.

The way out is obviously better tests and not less tests :-)

jwardbond• 4 months ago

Could Tomas something have been referring to some of the risks mentioned here [1]? Particularly the overdiagnosis bullet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_screening#Risks

bfbsoundetch• 4 months ago

A very motivating post. What he said “It became my own job to keep myself alive. Nobody else was going to do it for me at this point” really stayed with me. It’s powerful to see someone take that level of responsibility in such a difficult situation. I also appreciate how his ability to fund his own treatment can end up benefiting the broader community. Wishing him the best. Cancer is awful, and it just took one of my professor life just a few months ago.

kaapipo• 4 months ago

Had the pleasure of meeting him a little over a year ago. A super cool and down-to-earth dude.

I hope him all the best.

vldszn• 4 months ago

Wishing him a speed recovery

goatlove• 4 months ago

I found another story of using AI for a new vaccine the other day . https://x.com/paul_conyngham/status/2036940410363535823. Its interesting and motivating to see how people are using new technology to save lives regardless of their totally professional background and how informations are useful if you use it the right way. I wish him the best.

101008• 4 months ago

This is wonderful but I feel bad for all the people who doesnt have the resources to go through the same. For 99.9% of the population, a diagnostic like his means a really different outcome. I know he is trying to fix this with his investments and companies, but sharing this story could be seen as "boasting"... "I went through this and I survived, while your loved ones wouldn't"

necovek• 4 months ago

While that is just a natural reaction to "unfair" world where not everyone gets the same level of access to the best level of care, I'd also say that it's a reminder that money can't and won't solve all problems people are hit with in their lifetimes (or he'd not be facing cancer diagnosis in the first place).

This story is of someone with resources putting them to good use to save themselves, but also have that benefit others: medical research is expensive and for good reason restricted, and just like lots of open source was driven by individual's need, so lots of good stuff can come out of this. I suggest to see it that way.

ares6232• 4 months ago

I agree. It would've been so easy to address that too. Just acknowledge it and be vocal about supporting policies that make it better for others.

mgfist• 4 months ago

Oh c'mon. Here's what Sid's done to help others in the process

* Started 10 companies to enable access to others * Detailed policy proposals to make this easier process for others * Open sourced the entire process and all of the associated data (25TB)

and probably other things I missed.

But nah, what would reaaally help is an acknowledgement.

renewiltord2• 4 months ago

The novel part of his post is the summary of what worked. That information you cannot get except from him. You need his experience.

But this extra text you want can be obtained from LLM so if you require this “decoration” on top of information why not simply write yourself Chrome extension that reads page and adds that text to it at the bottom?

This will help you not feel bad.

allpratik• 4 months ago

Wish the best for Sid! My father was unlucky with his TP53 mutation which resulted in AEL and he passed away suddenly. 100% fit to vanishing away straight in 8 months. It was pretty rough for me especially to see how these doctors (most of them but bot all) are so non-experimental in their attitude.

Sid is right, Staying alive is our own job and definitely what he is doing will give him and his loved ones enough hope to get through this and sometimes he eventually he will get through.

manmal• 4 months ago

I guess experiments will get a doctor sued.

sytse20• 4 months ago

Certainly hospitals are in the business of minimizing liability while patients would prefer maximum survivability. Those are very different goals.

jnpnj• 4 months ago

I remember steve yegge complaining about using brain and computing so sell clicks. I wonder how many people would do the same as Sid these days.

hubrix• 4 months ago

This story and the guy curing his dogs cancer leads me to believe what's missing is a jurisdiction that allows people with money to do whatever experiments they want/need to move medicine forward.

ares6232• 4 months ago

Jesus fucking Christ we are so fucked.

nitwit005• 4 months ago

Do you really expect people to let you possibly kill people with medical experiments without even having to file some paperwork?

Countries are already trying to attract clinical trials, and that includes streamlining approvals.

renewiltord2• 4 months ago

I have met people who credibly are able to do some of this at Prospero. The downside to this siting is that the local government are not super reliable but it’s possible.

ex-aws-dude• 4 months ago

Sorry but that’s an insane statement

ArlenBales• 4 months ago

Paolo Cortazar, is that you?

sytse20• 4 months ago

Thanks for posting this. Happy to answer questions!

rvwaveren2• 4 months ago

How are you now?

sytse20• 4 months ago

Doing well. We've not seen the cancer for 10 months (not for lack of trying) and I'm enjoying an international trip for pleasure!

silentsea90• 4 months ago

How do you deal with setbacks both in work and life, and show resilience and belief you can find a solution? Is this innate or something you worked on? Also, are there things you think are impossible for you to do?

sytse20• 4 months ago

I have a stoic mindset, I try to not care about things that are outside my sphere of influence. While the cancer was unfortunate it was out of my control. Having my YCW15 batchmate step up for me during my initial set of treatments to get me Shasqi opened my eyes that I could help create and take new medicines. It was within my sphere of influence. When I reached the end of standard of care I stepped down from the CEO role of GitLab and pushed to do this for me. While it was hard it was easier than I expected and I created companies to help other patients in the same way (maximum diagnostics and single patient IND pathway).

swyx2• 4 months ago

how do you handle GitLab + Kilo + all this personal work? what system have you figured out? sorry if you've written about this somewhere, i think there's a meta lesson you have that we all can use.

sytse20• 4 months ago

All of these companies (including the Even One Ventures and Open Core Ventures ones) have CEOs who run them day to day. I try to help with positioning and setting ambitious goals. Y Combinator really opened my eyes to how helpful setting clear and hard to reach goals is.

nextos3• 4 months ago

This is very impressive, top labs doing research often don't have experimental designs that are this elaborate. Was the TCR and BCR-seq you conducted helpful to design cell therapies, neoantigen vaccines, and monitor progress?

Given that you carry the HLA-B*27:05 allele, you might have been blessed by being predisposed to a better response. But probably you want to keep an eye on future autoimmunity issues. Talking from experience...

sytse20• 4 months ago

Thanks for the warning, I hope that it wasn't a personal experience for you.

Thanks for the compliment about the elaborate design. I think that when you make something for one or a few patients it is easier to be more elaborate, even with the same knowledge and equipment.

Maybe the TCR and BCR-seq was most helpful for mRNA design and effectiveness monitoring, but hopefully someone else on my team will answer that better.

DEDLINE• 4 months ago

I have worked as an architect in HCLS technology for 10 years with Google and AWS.

Listening to you stitch all the technology and innovation together, moving from the information world to the physical world, as a patient, almost brought me to tears.

You said this will be the standard of care in 30-years, but the capability is here today. Listening to your recording is a profound moment in my life.

Thank you for sharing your journey.

sytse20• 4 months ago

Really appreciate it. I agree the capability is here today. I'm trying to get it to more people so that the learning effects and economies of scale can bring the costs down.

wvlia5• 4 months ago

Is there a way I can start using this tech for myself as a solo dev? Is there some OSS project?

appstorelottery14• 4 months ago

Thanks for the inspiration! Is there anything new you've learned about fibrosis in your journey?

sytse20• 4 months ago

I'm not knowledgable able fibrosis except that my tumor expresses a lot of FAP and it is a workable target for radio and immune drugs.

bob_theslob6463• 4 months ago

My pleasure! How does someone support someone going through cancer? I would especially like to know how to best support someone upon initial diagnosis. It seems like you have an amazing support system and I would like to be that for someone.

sytse20• 4 months ago

Of course it depends on what they need but please email cancer@sytse.com with a screenshot of this message and we can discuss.

zie1ony2• 4 months ago

Have you just "ordered the cancer vaccine" or this is not yet that easy?

sytse20• 4 months ago

Not that easy but started Echo to make it easier https://www.echoimmune.com/

agumonkey• 4 months ago

Have you run into other people doing the same ? it could be a nice new movement.

take care

sytse20• 4 months ago

Yes, I’ve met many people already. Feel free to reach out if you have questions cancer@sytse.com

d0mine• 4 months ago

related: "ChatGPT and AlphaFold Help Design Personalized Vaccine for Dog with Cancer" https://www.the-scientist.com/chatgpt-and-alphafold-help-des...

lzqqqqqq2• 4 months ago

Such an inspiring read. As a bioinformatics researcher I'm awed by the depth of the deck. How do feel about the process of learning cancer biology and bioinformatics?

Ps. I work for BillionToOne oncology and we build some of the most sensitive liquid biopsy tests (https://www.northstaronc.com/). Feel free to reach out if it pique your interest!

sytse20• 4 months ago

It wasn’t easy to learn it while dealing with the side effects of chemo. But AI helped a lot, also see the OpenAI forum talked linked on the page. Love BillionToOne, also see https://osteosarc.com/timeline/ MRD Northstar for my results with it.

jenniferpenaNP3• 4 months ago

Thanks for your interest, we use Northstar monthly to track for Sid.

jaredchung• 4 months ago

Your cancel journey is incredibly inspirational and I will share it on.

But actually, I'm writing to tell you that many of the OTHER things you have done have had a huge positive impact. Gitlab foundation, for example, has been extraordinarily impactful on our organization and many others.

This is the way!

sytse20• 4 months ago

Glad to hear that!

doctorpangloss• 4 months ago

in light of everything you've learned about the pharmaceutical industry and biotech venture, is there anything in particular about oncology that makes it well suited to venture?

like why is it people with cancer? why isn't it people with muscular diseases?

meew0• 4 months ago

Sorry if this is too specific/personal, but I've been wondering, why does the treatment timeline include antibiotics (dalbavancin)? Does dalbavancin have any suspected antitumor effects, or was it simply to treat complications of surgery / catheter infections?

(edit: actually now that I checked the treatment timeline again it seems to be gone now. It was there 2 weeks ago!)

jenniferpenaNP3• 4 months ago

Chiming in from Sid’s care team, the Dalbavancin was used to treat an infection post surgery, thanks for asking!

JakeSc• 4 months ago

Thank you for sharing—very inspiring. I'm interested in the operations of starting and managing these companies in parallel. How did you go about finding people to run the companies? How much involvement do you have in their day-to-day operations? Are they "your" companies, or do you consider yourself just Customer #1?

TiredOfLife• 4 months ago

Why does Gitlab pay employees less based on their location, but doesn't adjust price based on location?

xvector2• 4 months ago

What an incredibly tone deaf question

linohh• 4 months ago

I've met you at SHA 2017 in NL and I wish you all the Best!

devops000• 4 months ago

Have you ever found out the cause of the cancer?

They say to eat a healthy diet, exercise, get enough sleep, and avoid smoking/alcohol.

Have you discovered more specific reasons over the years?

Were you lacking in any of these?

david_shi• 4 months ago

Can't wait for the movie about this to come out.

jdcaron• 4 months ago

I wish you the best, my brother-in-law (also a close friend) lost his fight against cancer in 2019, it changed my perception of life forever. What we live is a bit like how we die, I had some of the best moments with him while he was more aware than myself about how we are all going to die, he changed my perception of caring much more about the uniqueness and the present moment. One of my favorite quotes is from Buckminster Fuller, "You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you ... (see full quote on Wikipedia)". Thank you so much for all the creation you have done in this world Sid, just for Gitlab it's plenty. I am a long time & very satisfied Gitlab customer, I switched a long time ago for its superior CI/CD integration and its super inspiring handbook. Another favorite quote is actually from you ... "My reasoning was I got to tell everyone what I do, and I want it to be a really good story." Lately I fundamentally changed my perception, the most important computer of all is the planet Earth, you seem to be aligned with this vision as well, correct me if my perception is wrong. I hope you keep going on with all those beautiful stories, we are lucky to have you with us.

konaraddi• 4 months ago

Full quote from Fuller for others

You do not have the right to eliminate yourself, you do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. The significance of you will forever remain obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all your experience to highest advantage of others. You and all men are here for the sake of other men.

clarkevans• 4 months ago

Sid, Thank you for funding Arden Bio. Rheumatology patients and their clinicians are often left to throwing darts from afar, in series and often with significant & permanent function loss with each dart. Moreover, proper care of refractory rare diseases is not something that insurance funds: my otherwise excellent coverage expressly denies "investigatory" treatments, for example. As a small fiber neuropathic vasculitus patient with secondary Sjögren's I really look forward to progress in this field, it cannot happen soon enough. Best of luck in your own care and profile. - Clark

tennysont2• 4 months ago

Love how you approached and presented this. The data vis on https://osteosarc.com/ is outstanding; such good explorability (is this some open source framework?)

I do have concerns regarding the proposals for scaling personalized medicine. They mostly boil down to "how do you scale the skill set required to operate in high-noise-low-signal domains". In my experience, these are places where poor data/incentives/critical-thinking can easily overshadow the signal; e.g., compelling stories outnumber correct stories.

There seems to be a trade-off: you can walk a bit further than others by keeping the probability distributions for low-quality results in your head, but go too far and everything starts getting overwhelmed by noise. It seems like the FDA's heavy gatekeeping is one way to solve this problem. If you forgo that gatekeeping, then you probably need to deal with the cascading quality issues that result.

Personalized treatments will probably be much harder to evaluate. At least a black-box algorithm that maps `situation → suggested treatment` can have statistics applied to it. But how do you evaluate "individuals made their own decision; here's the list of `situation × outcome`"? Or is the idea that there's currently a wealth of good-solutions, and that we should be relaxing regulations for a while?

Or perhaps we just want to push the regulator burden from "before small trials" to "before medium trials"? Then, these will be treated as case studies: good for experts to pull ideas from, but not high quality evidence for proving anything the third parties? I notice that your diagnostics were numerous, but the treatments were sparse and more sequential than parallel. If that's the norm, then maybe fairly usable data will emerge.

Or do people just have a moral right to seek out their own treatment, regardless of footguns that may be lying in wait? For myself and my loved ones battling cancer, I deeply agree with these:

Maximize survival instead of the current practice of minimizing liability to the practitioner
Parallel treatments wherever reasonable, we don't need to know what cured you

But I'm also glad that daily medical decisions are highly standardized and quality-controlled. It makes it easier to trust my doctor (or my loved ones' doctors) without independently investigating each recommendation.

markphip• 4 months ago

It was hard to tell how he is doing and whether any of these treatments are working, but I sincerely hope for a good outcome for him. He has always seen like a genuinely good person. Cancer sucks.

sytse20• 4 months ago

Thank you! I've been cancer free for 10 months now. If you're curious please see https://osteosarc.com/timeline/ > MRD > Personalis.

dangus3• 4 months ago

Sounds like some lame ass tech founder bullshit if I’ll be honest.

If I had cancer the last think I’d be thinking would be to make a slide deck about it.

Can these robot people come back down to earth and have a genuine human experience for a chance? Not everything has to be framed in the view of a startup company or a data analysis exercise.

Maybe focus on spending time with your family and friends? If they still like you after years of being an insufferable tech bro.

justin• 4 months ago

Who hurt you?

dangus3• 4 months ago

Tech bros who are taking my job with AI and trying to fuck up the world for profit?

arjie3• 4 months ago

He’s been public that he’s ten months clear now. Some prefer to accept undesirable circumstances. Others prefer to oppose them. He’s one of the latter. A little paraphrase of Dylan Thomas’ work here is something I’m fond of:

Do not go gentle into that good night

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

And if he’s successful, which hopefully now he has a much better chance of, there are all these new medical results out that are useful.

As an example, a close friend is using one of the personalized medicine companies that sytse’s “CEO of care” has invested in to diagnose a persistent debilitating condition with no specific cause.

Or to quote someone else: All progress depends on the unreasonable man.

dangus3• 4 months ago

That’s so cool.

z0r• 4 months ago

If you can cure a cancer by framing it as a data analysis exercise that doesn't seem to be a bad thing.

SilentM682• 4 months ago

He is lucky to have the resources and determination to start his own companies and tackle the problem himself. I wish the majority of tech bros would act in a similar fashion.

The sad truth is, that in most countries, health systems do not allocate sufficient resources or financial support to doctors to correctly diagnose medical conditions accurately as it is not in their economic, interest to do so.

CommenterPerson• 4 months ago

Hmmm .. where have we heard this story before? Tech bro tries alternative treatments for cancer .. somebody at Apple?

I wish him all the best and good luck. Maybe in 50, 100 years we'll have more definitive cures for cancer. Till then it's mostly slash, burn and poison, unfortunately.

plasma• 4 months ago

I think you’d find Dr. Richard Scolyer’s story really relatable. He’s an Australian cancer expert who, along with his colleague, is using himself as "patient zero" for a world-first treatment for his own brain cancer. They’re basically doing the research and the treatment in parallel to find a new way forward: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-30/dr-richard-scolyer-sp...

archon810• 4 months ago

Unfortunately, I found this from 12 days ago https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15655909/Dr-Richard.... Glioblastoma is a horrible disease.

tootie• 4 months ago

3 years is already beating the odds with a stage 4 glioblastoma. It's one of the worst

binsquare• 4 months ago

I found his story to give my mom hope when her cancer had metastasized to her brain in 2025.

Cancer cells in the brain are in a nutrition rich environment for growth and at the same time dangerous for treatment for removal and to prevent growth. The expected 5 year life expectancy is less than 5%.

Dr. Richard Scolyer had been diagnosed at 2023 and is still with us today. I hope he succeeds in his work.

JohnTHaller• 4 months ago

Love seeing Sid posting about this and taking the initiative he has. I wish I'd had the resources and time (and abilities of Sid) when my Dad got ALS considering the relatively poor state of ALS treatments.

andybak• 4 months ago

Took me a while to parse the title

dbcooper• 4 months ago

For those interested in radioligand therapy against FAP antigen expressing cancer, Ratio Therapeutics is recruiting for a Phase 1/2 Open-label Study (NCT07156565).

Eligibility requires history of relapse and refractory soft tissue sarcoma. Recruiting in US and Canada.

https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT07156565?tab=researcher#...

jacquesm• 4 months ago

Sytse is one of a kind, not a doubt about it.

greekrich92• 4 months ago

Mountainhead was a documentary.

"Bureaucracy" isn't blocking new and better treatments, privatized healthcare and research is.

hardwaresofton• 4 months ago

Incredibly badass. This is the best news I’ve read all year — world is better with Sid in it.

dschol• 4 months ago

I’m grateful to Sid for what he’s doing—his companies are helping me battle my cancer. I hope more tech entrepreneurs will tackle healthcare and medicine like he is.

replwoacause• 4 months ago

This man is incredible. I wish I was 10% as smart, resilient, resourceful and determined as he is. Truly amazing stuff.

agluszak2• 4 months ago

I'm pretty sure you already are. He's just rich.

ianm218• 4 months ago

I don't really understand this comment - most people are not this resourceful within the constraints of their own lives.

tsoukase• 4 months ago

Amazing. When motivation meets innovation this is the result. Although a doctor, I cannot follow all the mechanisms. Cancer is a hard problem from the ground up (biology until engineering). You get ill and well multiple times before you or it wins. And the known therapy modalities remain the same since 2500 years (surgery, toxin, burn). Genetics failed loudly in this field. It's all statistics, prevention and luck. Hope all well to the guy.

thumbsup-_-• 4 months ago

The article said he gathered information and that cancer is a disease of information and in next para that the cancer is in remission. How? Did I miss something?

Did cancer got scared of the massive google doc? Just share how if you have found a treatment and if you truly care about people and the world. Just Share

sungam• 4 months ago

This is fantastic and I would do something similar if I had the same resources.

Whole genome sequencing and single cell sequencing are actually surprisingly inexpensive (compared to the cost of almost any cancer treatment) and there is a good argument that we should do this by default for any type of cancer for which there are not effective treatments.

I would encourage all patients to learn as much as possible about their own diagnosis. There may be clinical trials available in another centre that your clinician is not aware of or tumour-agnostic trials that target specific mutations that are present in a range of different cancers.

There is a good argument for allowing patients to try experimental treatments once standard treatments are exhausted. The provider liability issues could easily be solved by legislation. A bigger issue is that there will always be people who want to exploit vulnerable cancer patients by charging exorbitant amounts for plausible-sounding treatments which have no evidence base.

As an individual trying multiple experimental treatments at once is the logical approach if there is no other option. However it will not be possible to know which of these is effective and which have caused side effects so to develop more effective treatments we do need structured and carefully controlled clinical trials. Unfortunately there is a huge regulatory burden for any kind of clinical trial at present and this should be massively streamlined for cancer patients where even if the treatments cause harm the alternative is death.

rurban• 4 months ago

Does the HN title make any sense? What should the "by founding companies" mean?

tennysont2• 4 months ago

He invested in one company that fights cancer. That company later helped him fight his cancer. Afterwards, he founded new companies that fight cancer. The headline refers to the new companies (but most of the comments here are about his cancer battle).

It makes sense after you understand, but I had to read the headline several times before it parsed.

agluszak2• 4 months ago

Keeping you alive should be the job of public, free healthcare and state-funded research.

cocothem• 4 months ago

Question - do you need doctors to stamp your plans, prescribe treatments or are you allowed to try anything you decide to?

coatmatter• 4 months ago

Happy to answer questions!

Are you aware that SARS-CoV-2 is oncogenic, and that repeat exposure increases risk?

seanparsons• 4 months ago

Good luck to him, fuck cancer.

pantsonfire22• 4 months ago

This guy is a liar. He doesn’t have “cancer”

pantsonfire22• 4 months ago

Who does a cancer AMA?? Insufferable idiots. Gofundme coming next

jenniferpenaNP3• 4 months ago

Sid, it’s truly a privilege to work alongside you on this cancer journey. Your innovation and transparency around all things helps pave the way for others in a way like I’ve never seen in 25+ years of healthcare.

looneysquash• 4 months ago

I've only interacted with him a couple of times, years ago, but he was very helpful and accepted my MR.

nunez• 4 months ago

This is one of the most punk rock things humanly possible. "F** the doctors; I'll fix the cancer myself!" Gigantic respect, and massive congrats to being right!

Good on you, Mr. GitLab!

gaia888• 4 months ago

Thanks for posting this <3

lofaszvanitt• 4 months ago

I have a conspiracy theory that people who are overachievers and/or somehow thorns in the side of certain interests get these hard to or borderline incurable illnessess to move them out of the way. Hope I'm wrong...

Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies

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