The Pioneer
The frontier and an appetite for the unknown, goes first.
Noubar Afeyan reads as The Pioneer because his career, as Flagship Pioneering founder and Moderna co-founder, has been defined by venturing where established playbooks do not yet exist. His leadership style, evident in his appearance on The David Rubenstein Show, treats the unproven not as risk to be avoided but as territory to be systematically explored.
“Yeah, so as I was graduating from McGill, MIT was the only place I applied to. And now I know in hindsight that it was very hard to get in and I might not have gotten in. But I must say I didn't know then.”
“Well, we knew that in every other protein that we had used in humans before, we could generate neutralizing antibodies. That much we knew, whether we could make enough of it quickly enough, let alone to be able to do a 30,000 subject trial, which we'd never ever done or dreamt of before, that was the unknown.”
“A lot a lot. We didn't launch 100. We imagined 100. And so the point I'm making is the accuracy with which you have to guess what's going to work is not at all important. Because we get into these brand new areas, it's wide open to find where value lies, right?”
“It into the body and have our own cells make drugs at it. And so I asked that question in the meeting with Bob. We kind of, he said, look, I don't know why we couldn't try.”
The David Rubenstein Show: “Noubar Afeyan”
LISTEN AT THE SOURCE ↗THE RECORD IS CHECKABLE