Views my own, not my employers.
I first learned about Arcadia from https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/ blog as a "evolutionary biology" startup. When I looked they only had their fungal capsid negative result published.
I'm quite optimistic about the potential for data mining from phylogenomic inference, but I wouldn't have described any of their current projects as "blue-sky" or "high variance" like mentioned in the post. I'm not sure that generating data, competing with large government-funded research hubs, is effective. Maybe there's scope away from human health research areas which are overrepresented, but that's also probably the most directly marketable area.
Does Altos Labs come under this umbrella? They seem successful and/or very good at marketing.
There's an implied assumption that when you lose parts of society through a bottleneck that you can always recreate them with high fidelity. It seems plausible that some bottleneck events could "limit humanity's potential", since choices may rely on those lost values, and not all choices are exchangeable in time. (This has connections both to the long reflection and to the rich shaping the world in their own image).
As an aside, the bottleneck paper you're referring to is pretty contentious. I personally find it unlikely that no other demographic model detects a bottleneck of >0.99 in the real data, but all of them can do it on simulated data. If such an event did occur in the modern day, the effects would be profound and serious.
My understanding was the typical explanation was antagonistic pleiotropy, but I don't know whether that's the consensus view.
This seems to have the name 'pathogen control hypothesis' in the literature - see review. I think it has all the hallmarks of a good predictive hypothesis, but I'd really want to see some simulations of which parameter scenarios induce selection this way.