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Leuchtturm.

My notebooks come from a company called Leuchtturm. Lighthouse. I switched to them for a practical reason — the fountain pen ink kept bleeding through my old ones — and only later noticed that I had been writing my thoughts into lighthouses all along.

It turns out to be the right image for almost everything we have built.

What a lighthouse is for.

A lighthouse stands at the edge of the known. It does not sail anywhere, and it does not wait for the map to be finished. Its whole job is to show that there is a way through — so that others dare to set sail.

Early thoughts do the same thing. So do anti-concepts, and half-baked ideas written down before they are safe. They point into a territory very few people dare even to think about, geschweige denn talk about, let alone explore.

The light goes on before the coastline is mapped. That is the whole point of a lighthouse.

Chapter one: the anti-structure.

When BioFund began, every piece of sensible advice pointed in the same direction. Raise a fund. Set a horizon. Plan the exit. We turned the other way at each of those crossroads.

No fund life, and no exit. Seven families, and then we closed the door. Cancer treated as one problem across species, on a clock measured in decades. Each of those choices looked, at the time, like an anti-concept — a structure easier to describe by what it declined to be than by what it was.

For years we built it quietly. The Foundations papers — One Problem, OneHealth, Two Clocks, The Flywheel, No Exit., Friends of BioFund — began as internal pieces, and more than one of them was half-baked when it was first written down.

Then something happened I did not expect. Researchers in California read them before speaking with us, and quoted the unusual parts back. The anti-concepts turned out to be the parts that opened doors.

That was the close of chapter one. What started as a collection of refusals has become, simply, what BioFund is: a family office with a shape entirely its own.

Chapter two has already begun.

The next chapter is being written in waters with no charts at all.

1. 01
   Intellectual property

   Patent to free, never to fence. Open by default, closed only by exception — so that knowledge moves as fast as the problem demands.
2. 02
   Cell therapy

   BF-CT01, where forty years of craft in Szeged and Guelph meet natural killer cells — built on the long clock.
3. 03
   Prevention through the kitchen

   RAFFINÉ and UFP500°: beginning with excellence at the table, and making the science inseparable from it.
4. 04
   A new kind of cancer funding

   A chef cooks, a few boxes appear at the end of the evening, and guests give what they feel it was worth. No price, no ask. Every cent funds cancer research. It has a name — more on that next month.
5. 05
   And more to come.

   Some of it is still only a line in a notebook.

None of these has a finished map yet. That is exactly why they are worth writing about now.

Why I share half-baked ideas.

A finished idea is safe, and safe ideas rarely move anyone. A half-baked idea is an invitation. It leaves room for someone else to add the part you could not see — a scientist in California, a chef in Oberlech, a founding family around a dinner table.

Most of the collaborators who matter to us today found us through unfinished thoughts. So these notes are thinking in progress, deliberately. They are lights switched on at the edge of what we know, in the hope that someone sees them and sets sail.

Different, on purpose.

My very first company was called Different. It still exists, and its slogan is still the same two words: simply different. It has turned out to be less a slogan than a promise — one I am still keeping, and one BioFund keeps every day.

We write our own future. The lighthouse is simply our belief that daring to do things differently is the way through.

Somewhere past the edge of the chart is a world where cancer is prevented far more often than it is treated, and cured when it is not. We intend to keep the light on until we get there.