ABOUT ASTERA

Build fearlessly, learn openly

Outsized returns come from neglected ideas.

Long-term innovation happens by thinking about what is possible in the future. This process is messy and uncertain. As a result, many high potential ideas are often passed over. We believe that neglected ideas have the most potential for outsized returns.

Astera supports promising innovators during their earliest stages of exploration. We encourage rapid experimentation to inform better theories. We accept risk and partial information. Our intention is to help develop new ideas before they are attractive to most funders and nurture the promising ones towards independence.

Astera also prioritizes parallel technological or field-building efforts that can increase the impact and opportunity space for innovators. Solving hard problems requires community engagement in broad experimentation and learning.

Our Values

Stewardship

We embrace our role as mission-driven custodians of resources while recognizing the urgency and gravity of the challenges we address. This means seeking to deploy our resources wisely: efficiently, but not timidly; with attention to right-sized risk, feedback, and observable impact. This demands a low-ego, service-oriented approach in which everyone, regardless of role, takes responsibility for the success of our organization and our mission.

Experimentation

We experiment as our engine of progress, driven by a bias toward thoughtful action rather than endless deliberation and consensus-building. We believe that well-designed experiments, even when they fail, generate more value than perfect plans that never launch. Our commitment to testing hypotheses and iterating quickly means we not only tolerate failure but embrace it as an essential part of our learning process. This approach requires courage to act decisively while maintaining the humility to adapt based on results.

Transparency

We multiply our impact by ensuring that what we learn compounds beyond our organization. We are committed to leaving the ladder down by making it easy for others to observe, copy, and reuse whatever we do, and build this into our programming at a foundational level. Our dedication to transparency extends internally to direct, respectful communication and a healthy feedback culture where “I don’t know” is celebrated and mistakes are seen as opportunities for collective growth.

Institute Leadership

Jed McCaleb

Founder – Board Member

Jed McCaleb is the founder of the Astera Institute. His focus is on accelerating progress, expanding potential, and increasing net happiness. He is also co-founder and Chief Architect of the Stellar Development Foundation, the organization that maintains the open-source Stellar Network.

Seemay Chou

Board Member

Seemay is a scientist, Pew Scholar, co-founder and CEO at Arcadia Science, chairperson of The Navigation Fund, and forever-Texan at heart. She received a PhD in Molecular Cell Biology from UC Berkeley and served as a professor at UC San Francisco.

Cate Hall

Chief Executive Officer

Cate Hall is Astera’s CEO. She’s a former Supreme Court attorney and the ex-No. 1 female poker player in the world. Before joining Astera, she co-founded and served as COO and later co-CEO of Alvea, a pandemic medicine company that set the record for the fastest startup to take a drug candidate to Phase I clinical trial. She received a BS in biochemistry and BA in philosophy from the University of Arizona, and a law degree from Yale Law School.

Anika Gupta

Chief Operations Officer

Anika Gupta is Astera’s COO. Anika started as a generalist at the Boston Consulting Group and KKR before leading Strategy and Operations for R&D at Solugen. She received SB’s in Materials Science and Engineering and in Management at MIT, where she also served as class president. She received her MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

John Wilbanks

Head of Data

John Wilbanks is Astera’s Head of Data. He is a longtime advocate of informed consent, open science, and research networks and has served as Head of Data at Biogen Digital Health, Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks, VP of Science at Creative Commons, and co-founder of the Access2Research campaign for public access to publicly funded data and literature.

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