This Machine Kills Cancer

At SF Beta, Inc., we do a lot of things. Sometimes we promote our own events. Sometimes we feature the work of our partners. Sometimes we launch new media ventures. Sometimes we host groundbreaking conferences. Sometimes we reach out to entrepreneurs one-on-one to help them along their journey.

And sometimes – perhaps not as often as often as we should, but we're changing that at least a little bit right now – we simply strive to share with the world some of our favorite new innovations and technological breakthroughs.

Tonight is a big night for us. We're putting together an event in San Francisco, focused on HealthTech. It's part of our signature SF Beta brand – "the Bay Area's premier startup mixer" – and we're expecting an amazing crowd to join us. You can learn more about that event here – and you can also join our community on Meetup.

SF Beta believes in the power of entrepreneurs to change the world. That's why we work so hard to help them succeed. That's also why we stand up for the ethos of Silicon Valley. We're a big fan of venture capital, and we look forward to the dawn of the trillion-dollar "ultracorn" in light of Apple's recent $800 billion valuation, the first of its kind in modern history. 

But Silicon Valley has always been about more than just the money. It's the one place in the world where you can raise millions of dollars to attract billions of users (or vice-versa) without ever minting a nickel in revenue. While metrics matter more than ever – and this is probably something that we should reconsider – this is still the place where a small team with a big idea has the power to change the world.

That's why we want to draw your attention to an amazing project at Stanford that needs your help.

If you were into computing in the 90's, you may remember the popularity of Seti@Home, a Berkeley-based endeavor leveraging distributed computing to analyze vast sets of data in search for intelligent life in the universe. With three million users, they're still going strong, and their mission is both inspiring and noble, in kind of an old-school Star Trek sort of way.

It turns out that there's a similar endeavor taking place in Silicon Valley, and – not to stoke more of a rivalry between the two schools than exists already – we feel like the competing project at Stanford deserves a closer look.

Tying into tonight's focus on HealthTech, we encourage you to take a look at Folding@Home, a massively multiplayer protein-folding simulator, researching groundbreaking cures across a range of mission-critical health epidemics.

The mission of the project is to enlist one million "folders," who can participate individually or in teams, to dedicate their extra computing power towards advanced protein-folding simulations.

With more than 11,000 members, our own SF Beta community has a lot of spare computing power, and if even 1% of our users sign up, we can make a difference in helping research the cures that will save lives and create a better future for us all.

Folding@Home is easy to join and free to use. You can dedicate as much or as little of your computing cycles as you please, and the system runs natively on Mac, Windows, and the web.

Whether you're attending tonight's event, or cheering us on from afar, we encourage you to take part in one of the greatest scientific projects of the 21st century.

Sign up for Folding@Home