Michael Polansky is remarkably unassuming for someone operating in a corner of the world known for outsize egos. Seated at a leafy patio outside a popular bakery in Mill Valley, an affluent town about 15 miles north of San Francisco, Polansky — bespectacled, his fresh face framed by dark hair shot through with gray — has the look and the friendly demeanor of a young professor. He is, in fact, both the co-founder of a buzzy AI and biology startup called Outer Biosciences and the creative, business, and romantic partner to Stefani Germanotta — better known as Lady Gaga. It’s an unlikely double life. On the one hand, the couple invariably moves in the world that comes with celebrity; on the other, he’s running an outfit that has spent years figuring out how to keep living human tissue alive outside the body — for over a month, so far — without anyone outside the company knowing. He didn’t see any of it coming. Polansky grew up in Minnesota and went on to Harvard, where he studied applied mathematics and computer science, graduating in 2006. Afterward, he logged three years at the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates — “a very unique place,” Polansky says over coffee, and one where he had “a really good experience,” even if it wasn’t a place he was going to “wake up and be excited about … every day.” His pilgrimage from Bridgewater to Silicon Valley ran through Minnesota. By coincidence, Sean Parker’s assistant at the time had been Polansky’s neighbor growing up. At a 2009 wedding in their home state, she mentioned that Parker was looking for someone to work with him. Polansky already knew who Parker was and was looking to move west. The two had dinner in New York and “hit it off immediately.” Polansky quit Bridgewater the next day and moved to San Francisco. He first landed a role as a principal at Founders Fund when the firm was run by its four original partners — Peter Thiel, Sean Parker, Luke Nosek, and Ken Howery — with Polansky and another young principal at the time, Brian Singerman, sharing an office. “It was a really, really great experience,” Polansky says. When Parker left Founders Fund after becoming liquid in his Facebook stock and wanted to build out his own family office, he brought Polansky with him. Polansky ran that office — handling Parker’s business, investment, and philanthropic interests, including helping stand up the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (where Polansky remains executive director) until COVID, when his life “moved in a different direction.” That change had a lot to do with Germanotta. Polansky met her in late 2019 at one of Parker’s birthday parties. Charmingly, the meeting came at the urging of Germanotta’s mother, Cynthia Germanotta, president of the Born This Way Foundation, whom Polansky had come to know through his philanthropic work. “She had said, you know, for months and months, ‘I want to set you up with my daughter,’” Polansky recalls. “I was like, I think you’re making fun of me.” She wasn’t. When their own mothers later met, he says, laughing, “it all made perfect sense.” (His mother and Germanotta’s mother are now close friends.) Their relationship is a full partnership, professionally and personally. Notably, for Lady Gaga’s most recent world tour, which began in July of last year and ended in April, the couple managed a massive operation across three 747s, something Polansky compares to running “a 200-person startup that travels around the world every day.” It also includes Haus Labs, the cosmetics brand Germanotta initially built “on her kitchen floor,” Polansky says, instead of simply licensing her name to an existing company. That business, based in El Segundo, California, an operation with roughly 70 employees, is reportedly thriving. Germanotta also sits on the board of Outer Biosciences, and the two companies collaborate at the margins. For example, Outer Biosciences’ chief scientist, Kyung-Jin Jang, sits on Haus Labs’ scientific advisory board, and the companies have run some joint projects. Says Polansky, beaming as he talks about Germanotta from our sun-dappled table: “People really haven’t gotten to know a certain side of her publicly … She’s such a brilliant businessperson.” From cancer to tissue in a dish While Polansky is a businessperson, he’s not a scientist. He got into life sciences “accidentally,” he says, through more than a decade spent alongside Parker in cancer immunotherapy, a field that was “very fringe” when they entered it. Outer Biosciences, co-founded in 2022 by Polansky (CEO), Jang, Chris Hinojosa (CTO), and Stanley King (chief business officer), grew out of frustration that the pace of innovation in biology and chemistry has never matched software, in large part because there’s no ethical way to run experiments directly on people. Meanwhile, the proxies scientists rely on instead — animal models, simplified cell cultures, lab-grown organoids — are poor stand-ins for how a real human orga
