People reasonably ask why a company would tell this much of its founding story and still leave out a name. It's a fair question, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a vague one.
The honest reason is that I don't want ALKARTIS to be read as a personality-driven story. It would be easy to turn this into a narrative about one person's background, credentials, or career highlights — that's a familiar shape for a founder story, and it's tempting precisely because it's familiar. But that shape puts the person in front of the problem. I want it the other way around.
The problem — that public information is abundant and public understanding is still scarce — doesn't need a face attached to it to be true. The products either connect records and produce trustworthy answers, or they don't. The beliefs behind ALKARTIS are either sound or they aren't. None of that depends on who is saying it, and I don't want it to start depending on that.
There's also a simpler, more practical reason. Anonymity keeps the conversation about ALKARTIS focused on ALKARTIS: the products, the data, the methodology, the results. It removes the temptation — for readers and for me — to evaluate the company by proxy, through opinions about an individual, instead of by looking directly at the work.
This isn't a permanent posture, and it isn't presented as one. As the letter that opens this section says, there will be a time to share more of the story. But that time should come after the work has already earned its own credibility — not as a substitute for that credibility.
Until then, this is what I'm comfortable being specific about: what I've believed, what I've observed, and why I built ALKARTIS to answer it. That's covered in full in the next chapter.