Running Through Walls

Hosted by Venrock, a venture capital firm

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100

Latest episode

Aug 2026

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About the show

Running Through Walls is a Venrock podcast featuring candid conversations between investors and entrepreneurs. Each episode, we offer a behind-the-scenes look at the breakthroughs, challenges and nuttiness associated with building and growing companies. Venture capital firm Venrock has been investing in entrepreneurs across technology and healthcare since 1969.

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August 17, 202624 min

Primary Care's Win-Win-Win

Siobhan Nolan Mangini and Bob Kocher sit down with Patrick Nelli, founder and CEO of Aligned Marketplace, to discuss how rebuilding how we access advanced primary care can improve outcomes, lower costs, and better serve employees. Patrick shares his path from Health Catalyst executive to healthcare founder, why employer-sponsored primary care is ready for transformation, and how Aligned is building a national marketplace for high-quality, accessible care.

June 30, 202614 min

Healthcare Prognosis 2026

The results of Venrock's 10th annual Healthcare Prognosis are in. This year's survey covers some of the biggest questions in healthcare, from AI in medical care and the future of GLP-1s to consumer peptides, IPOs, M&A, and what's ahead for healthcare policy. In this episode, Bryan Roberts, Bob Kocher, and Siobhan Nolan Mangini sit down to discuss the most interesting findings, share their perspectives on what surprised them, and offer a pulse check on where the industry may be headed next.

June 25, 202621 min

Arca's AI-First Vision for Human-First Wealth Management

As Arca launches with $64 million in funding and more than $1 billion in assets under management, founder and CEO Rron Rexha joins Nick Beim to share his vision for AI-native wealth management built around human-first advice. Rron reflects on his journey from Kosovo to fintech, his year as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Venrock, and why he believes the next era of wealth management will be more proactive, personalized, and accessible.

June 23, 202624 min

Building a Differentiated Obesity Biotech

Metsera CEO Whit Bernard joins Venrock's Nimish Shah to discuss how the company's ultra-long acting GLP-1 program helped position it as a strategic standout in the obesity market. The conversation covers the bidding war between major pharma players, lessons in first-principles company building, and why the next decade of biotech could reward high-volume, accessible innovation.

June 2, 202626 min

The Long Game of Building Breakthrough Biotech

Nimish Shah sits down with Andy Robbins, CEO of Cogent Biosciences, for a candid conversation about building a targeted therapy company in oncology. Andy shares how Cogent made high-stakes decisions around bezuclastinib, why speed matters in biotech, and what it takes to build conviction years before clinical answers arrive. They also dig into what's overhyped, what's undervalued, and why the best biotech leaders stay humble, fast-moving, and relentlessly focused on patients.

May 6, 202627 min

SmithRx's Mission to Break the Drug Pricing Black Box

SmithRx CEO and co-founder Jake Frenz joins Venrock's Siobhan Nolan Mangini to talk about the company's mission to fix the opaque and broken US drug ecosystem. SmithRx started by tearing down the existing misaligned model of PBMs with a per member model that is incentivized to deliver the lowest possible cost for patients. The two get into how his personal challenges with the US healthcare system and his grit and tenacity as a Marine have informed where SmithRx is today and why it's unrelenting in capitalizing on the tidal wave of enterprises and policymakers who are ready for a better drug solution.

April 9, 202626 min

Pursuit over Podium: Rethinking Excellence with Brad Stulberg

Bob Kocher speaks with Brad Stulberg, on the many lessons in his newly-published book The Way of Excellence , including why we find excellence on the side of the mountain, not at its peak. Drawing on the ancient Greek concept of Arete, Brad argues that you find true success in pursuit itself: the bidirectional process where chasing a goal, whether writing a book, building a company, or competing in sport, shapes your character as much as you shape the outcome. They go deeper on the optimistic lessons from his book, including why joy is life's true renewable energy source.

April 1, 202628 min

AI: Smart/Stupid

Leading AI researcher and Professor at the Santa Fe Institute Melanie Mitchell joins Ethan Batraski for a conversation on how our current generation of AI is powerful, promising, and still badly in need of transparency about how it actually "thinks." She gives advice on how to redesign our benchmarks as true measures instead of targets, and how we can incorporate dynamic testing and deeper interpretability to close the gap between today's AI systems and true intelligence.

March 18, 202626 min

A Giant Leap: Bob Wachter on AI's Inflection Point in Healthcare

Siobhan Nolan Mangini sat down with author and UCSF physician Bob Wachter for a fireside chat about his new book on AI in healthcare, A Giant Leap. In this special live-recorded episode, he reflects on what he learned from interviewing top leaders across healthcare and technology about the coming wave of AI in healthcare. The discussion unpacks how AI could ease clinician burnout and expand access to care, while raising deeper questions about incentives, cost, and what role humans should ultimately play in the delivery of healthcare.

February 25, 202634 min

Empowering Data Engineers

Ethan Batraski speaks with Astronomer CEO Pete DeJoy several months into taking the helm at the company he cofounded over 8 years ago. They discuss the company's journey from their earliest days stewarding the Apache Airflow open-source project to how they're driving the renaissance of the data engineer in the age of AI today, and the team's remarkable authenticity and resilience when the Coldplay kiss cam put the company on the the national stage.