YouSaid · the spoken record

Noubar Afeyan

lines on the record: 71
first: 2021-10-11
most recent: 2021-10-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So hard work, yes. In terms of luck, it's ironic that you asked me that because somebody had written to me something the other day that I wanted to respond to, but I didn't by saying better lucky and good in the sense that I think that to some extent counting on luck is not a strategy. But it is the case that no matter how hard you work, there's no guarantee that the opportunity will come up or that you will fail to fail long enough to succeed. And these are all things that otherwise can only be explained by chance. But I don't know what to do with that because I can't count on it. I can't summon it. If I could summon it anytime, that would be fun. But I can't. And so therefore it doesn't play any role in my actions. When it comes.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How hard I work is a function of probably the orientation that I had that as an immigrant you don't really take much for granted. You don't think much is owed to you and everything is a possibility. And you have to go get it. In my case, the motivator has been truly trying to figure out if we could innovate a new way to innovate.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Enough and broadly enough, we may well create a shield, a protective shield against these hyper-variable viruses like influenza, like corona, like rhinovirus that causes the common flu, like HIV. There's a lot of these threats that aren't just themselves threats, but they're hyperproliferating threats. And for that, our immune system is the only answer.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what I mean by that is we've learned so much about disease that we realize that disease isn't just a switch that goes on and all of a sudden now you have it and you have to fight it, but that there are long ramps kind of on ramps towards disease, that if we could intervene long before the disease is manifest and we can find it now with new techniques, then both to prevent it through vaccines, but also to delay it, slow it down, redirect it, there's many things we can do. And I think unless we do those things, if all we do is wait for diseases to be good and advanced until we start treating them, the cost of that, the human loss as a result of that is just going to be prohibitive. In the same vein, I can't imagine a time when seasonal flu is mastered and basically kept at bay. Why? Because I think that we're learning enough about the immune system that if we intervene early,”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Data cannot say, although I never want to say no to that either. Because more broadly, raising an issue which is important to me and I've worked for the last two years, and that is broadly what I would view as health security or practicing medicine in a preemptive way.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that organized skepticism is a good thing because it keeps you constantly looking for proof. I would say that there's a slightly greater reason to believe that mRNA could actually be a new drug modality. But the other thing it does, just to come back more broadly to what it is that we've been doing at flagship, is that it illustrates that yet again completely transformative things could come out of unreasonable beginnings. And that if all you do is look for reasonable beginnings, you're probably not going to find breakthroughs.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you asked me two questions in one. One was, has it proved that? The answer is no. But does it suggest that that's possible and perhaps wise to work on? The answer is yes. That's a better question. Thank you. And we are working on it. No, no. And I'm only saying it because, look, I learned long ago Thomas Kuhn and all these guys who've written on these things that the scientific process is one of organized skepticism.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first of all, all these things start with people. We had the great fortune of having a gentleman named Juan Andres, who as head of our whole technical operations, manufacturing, quality, the whole field, previously held that role at Novartis, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies, had gone through previous flu epidemic kind of scale-up of vaccines of that generation and just is a phenomenal leader of people. And he was really a godsend to us. And when it came to planning rapidly, responding, organizing, hiring people, and just not taking, that's not possible for an answer for just about anything that they did in terms of either timeframes or scale. And several months later, we started producing millions of doses. And then eventually tens of millions and hundreds of millions of doses.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and that was really the massive heroism that I think of all the things that we could not imagine that we could make a billion doses the first year of production up from probably making a thousand doses the year before of anything.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It did surprise me and it didn't surprise me scientifically. It surprised me by that time I had lowered my expectations largely by having heard so much about how difficult all this would be. If you look at how vaccines are made, they either take bits and pieces of proteins and they make them artificially and they combine them and they put adjuvants that kind of get your immune system to get angry. There's nothing molecular about the current approaches. Here we were putting in a single protein delivered in a known way to specific cells. And so we were really priming the immune system. But still, there was no basis to believe that we could do 90 anything. It's not at all typical in vaccines, let alone with a new technology, let alone out of the gates that you start at 94.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we indeed in May, we indeed did come out and say at a very high level that we had some encouraging results. And people attacked us every which way for having said that because they basically said, well, that's doing science by press release and many other things. And the reality is when you have a pandemic and you're a public company and you've got material data, our sense was that we at least needed to at a high level put that out there. So one of the things we learned, because none of us have been in this situation before, and was that we were going to get criticized no matter what we did. And so we just had to do what we thought was right, make some calls, explain ourselves. And so we did that. We ultimately published the data. NIH came out and presented their data. We were quite surprised how people were questioning the NIH's own clinical researches. We didn't do the clinical work they did.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anyway, it was quite personal to me. Let me just say that I have not lost a family member during the time of iPhones and I can tell you that being on a FaceTime with somebody close to you when they're dying is a miserable, miserable experience. It was very tough. And it certainly brought into sharp focus what this was all about. Certainly many, many people lost lives and many more are suffering yet today with the downstream effects of this disease.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was devastating because his wife and mother-in-law also got quite sick and we thought we're going to lose her as well. They were both in their early 90s. So it was very, very tough also because we were engaged in this day-to-day battle. And on the one hand, I was excited by what we were able to do. And on the other hand, when you see, you know, in his case, ultimately a life lost, you know, it's a...”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. The unknown was, can you make enough of it? And we had some questions as to what those we should choose. But essentially, there was a lot unknown and we just had to kind of decide based on the best information what to try. We tried it. And by May of 2020, we had already the first human data that showed that we could generate robust animal levels.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, a computer model of the sequence of mRNA that would essentially when introduced into a human would produce the S protein sufficient to generate an immune response.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. It looked like the right thing to do and an incremental proof point for us that we were happy to jump into. Now, I must say within days, probably a couple of weeks, the whole thing changed in its importance and significance. And we were quite happy that we had jumped in so early on because that's the only way that by already March we could enter the first humans and get data.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in the very early parts of January, we were exchanging emails and articles that were kind of appearing largely around the Wuhan situation initially was thought to be a flu-like thing, an ammonia. And it wasn't until January 23rd, which I remember quite clearly, partly because it was one of my daughter's birthdays. And so I was out at dinner with her in Cambridge, close to MIT.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's something that was completely missed because before a single vaccine for coronavirus that we tested, we had already 2,000 people who had received mRNA from us And so we were far, far advanced in actually many, many different mRNAs for different activities, vaccines, non-vaccines. And that's what allowed us to have the conviction that what we would do in this space could be quite productive.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it's not, and in fact, guy, what I can tell you, having spent the last 34 years in the biotechnology field, is that there is no biotech company that was started in 2010 with rare, rare exceptions, maybe one in a hundred, that had revenues by that time. And so it's parfords in the sense that that's not because of the failing of the technology. That's because it takes five to ten years to actually develop a product in our field. So it's a little bit like saying, you know, I want to start a new airplane company. And then I'm surprised that I don't have an airplane on the market in the first 10 years. Well, it takes 14 years.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Upon which many, many products could be developed or attached by 2010 before we even started Moderna, that is something that we had started many, many companies around that notion. And so Moderna only ever was going to be a platform that enabled a code-based molecule to make proteins in the subject, no matter what application it was. And a key discipline of that is to say, try many, many applications. Yeah. And so we had by the time this coronavirus came along, we had tested nine, maybe even ten different human vaccines in every single case showing neutralizing antibodies. And we had also another nine programs that were going after human therapeutics. So it was a fairly broad platform that had already been developed, about $2 billion of research had gone into developing the platform.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've worked from day one on any number of diseases, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and vaccines were a part of our thinking process. But indeed, what we did do is we went after everything. That's the hundred versions of Moderna that I'm referring to. We did not think for a minute that we were smart enough to anticipate what we should actually apply to platform to. And this is something else that probably is worth pointing out. We have over the years in our flagship labs kind of realized that rather than inventing technologies, we really ought to invent platforms. And a platform is a relatively rare thing in biotechnology, unlike in the tech sector, where we've seen phenomenal examples of platforms, whether it's the iOS, Apple's platform or Amazon's, that whole idea of a technological suite.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's not that you have to get it dead right where you land, you just have to be in a rough space where you now start searching for where value might be. Is it delivering it into the liver or skin? Is it delivering vaccines or cardiovascular drugs? So all of those variables, at least for me, represent alternative success versions of which I don't need everyone to succeed. I just need one to succeed.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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? Imagine if we waited three, four years, as people did, or 10 years in the case of mRNA. Now all of a sudden, they'd go into the space and there's hundreds of patents and there's tons of different things that have already been done. That's a very different competitive approach. What we tend to do is say, you know what, we'll risk the possibility that there's absolutely no value to be had.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you're asking the question again in the context, it's a very valid question, but I want to say you're asking the question in isolation. Let me also just tell you that in the exact same year that we did the foundation laying for what became Moderna, we also started four other projects that were each platforms in their own right going after different aspects. So, in fact, I've described this before, and I think it's really important to understand we didn't conceive of Moderna. We conceived of 100 different Moderna's And what's happened is, and this is very much how I look at this, that experiments and reality and execution have dictated which of those Modernos got to live and which of those Modernos got to die.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, what defines the size of that adjacency? It's how far people are willing to go before they stop thinking that something is reasonable to work on. So the question is when will we ever work beyond that adjacency? And in the ordinary course, you get there when you get there. So you wait for a while, some new things happen, and then eventually you start working on what would have been too far out before, but now it's not so far out. So our job is to see if we could work beyond the adjacencies today.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I should try to put it in context. An important thing to realize is that we are set up to make innovation leaps that are beyond adjacencies. So the notion of adjacency, if you just simply on a piece of paper said in any given field, in any given endeavor of activity, I could draw a circle and let that circle represent everything that's known. Everything that exists. And then I draw another ring around that circle that represents all sorts of things that have not yet been done, but are going to be done next. So imagine a sense of the arrow of time going outward from one circle to the next ring. And that's kind of, for me, a simplistic mental model of how innovation, science, products in the marketplace occur.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How much do they have to take up to make therapeutic doses available in your circulation? How do you know if the protein is actually the right protein, meaning will it fold correctly? Will it secrete correctly? I mean, you're basically going in and introducing a tiny new piece of software, not hardware. You're not messing with the hardware, the genome, but the software to make a particular protein in a sea of thousands of other proteins being made every nanosecond of the day. So you got to get in precisely, make the protein you want, have the effect you want. So there was a lot of as an engineer, there was a lot of unknowns, but we could list them and we could start asking a lot of people out there what makes you think it can't be done, what are the impediments, what has been tried. That's how we do much of our innovations that we kind of work backwards from an asserted destination.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the premonition was that it was ridiculous because it had never really been shown to be viable. And by asking the question, we gave ourselves the permission to go find out why it is. That either nobody had done it or nobody believed it could be done. And we quickly found out that people had tried it in the 80s and they had caused pretty significant immune response in cells. So people had this idea earlier. But it turns out it's not just the mRNA and the immunology. You then have to figure out which cells are going to take these up. Yeah.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. And so what ended up happening is we agreed that I would go back and initiate a project within flagship to start exploring whether that could be something of interest and use without any regard to whether we could technically do it or how we could do it, but rather more just explore could we think about a molecule that when introduced to the body could cause the body to make any protein we wanted. And that's how the journey started for us. That's what became a learner.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me answer that by first pointing out to you that five years ago nobody was taking MRNA research seriously. That's kind of an interesting thing. Back in 2010, May of 2010, got a call from Bob Langer one day and he said to me, hey, look, I just met with a junior faculty member at Harvard who approached me. And so I went over and met with him and met with the faculty member Derek Rossi. And he showed some of the scientific work that this lab had done. Essentially, what they had done is they'd taken mRNA and used the codes for the four what's called Yamanaka factors. Yamanaka factors are transcription factors think of these as proteins that interact with the human genome and control what genes get made and what genes don't get made. And that's what he was presenting and he was interested in that as potentially the basis of something useful in the biomedical research field. I got interested on the spot. What if we could do this to introduce”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Conceiving, creating, growing companies could be the object of a company. A very methodical, very learning oriented, responsible to certain goals or accountable, let's say, versus kind of improvisational, romantic, chaotic, all the things that come to mind when you think of startups. spent the last 20 years together with my colleagues here trying to show that most of that is unneeded. Some of that may be needed. Some of that may be how people decide to do it, but that's not like that's the only way you can do it.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a time back a decade ago when I would have been on 15 different boards and literally was kind of running around trying, I had a colleague Doug Cole who was with us now as a manager partner. So it was just early days in 2000-2007, eight. We were figuring out what can be systematized and what cannot and what is a team sport and what is not. You know, there's a lot of folklore in the startup world, which I'd say emphasizes the role of the individual. There's a hero kind of notion that's created against all odds. And here we were claiming that”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the earlier days, it was a more of experimental, if you will. I did a lot of that just because I had quite a bit of experience by this time.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I would say it took quite a while. So the first battle was hiring leadership into our companies. Because our own team size didn't have to grow very much, but the companies we were forming needed to attract leadership. And that was where we started really thinking more systematically, what kind of people could make the transition unlike the software field and for that matter these days, internet-based companies or apps, there's a lot of people who've done multiple companies. In biotech, these companies have a half-life or a life cycle of, say, 10 years, 15 years. So people don't do one company after another after another after another. If they do one company after 10, 15 years and they succeed, they stop doing it. So you have to create the talent. You had to create and cross-fertilize. And so the early leadership of our companies is all flagship teammates. And what that does is it doesn't mean that they're any better. It just means that they're more experienced and we're more familiar with them.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And all they care about is to minimize the risk. And so that's where we really found our footing is to say, can we take that advantage of having all three under one roof and apply it to propel ourselves beyond where people are comfortable going?”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's an interesting way of putting it. I'll tell you that what we set out to do is to combine the typically three separate inputs into a successful startup, that is the scientific ideas, usually comes from academia. The entrepreneurial talent and then capital, which is always multiple sources, venture capital, early stage, and then eventually some later stage, they all come from different places. They have different interests. And so you could imagine there's a lot of friction between all these different components. What we thought is what if all three of those things pre-existed? In the same entity Because if you want to propose doing something that is way out there, if you will, if you're doing it the traditional way, you have to convince other people to join you. And in any case, you have to convince investors to fund you.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That business, Nukogen is the entity that data became called flagship ventures and then flagship pioneering. We put up about $60 million. It was a company that would create companies. And that's how we started, the initial four or five projects. We already had some ideas what to pursue. But it was definitely buoyed by the excitement around the genome.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The idea was, you know, everybody was all fascinated with serial entrepreneurs and you go from one to the other. But the question that I got intrigued by, I'm not exactly sure why, is could you actually do this at the same time? Could you have multiple of these things? And I was always curious about the venture capital community, which while they weren't starting these companies, they were investing in them. And they had this parallelism down. They could be involved in therapeutic companies, some in cardiovascular, some in cancer. One didn't seem to interfere with the other. And I thought, well, why can't you do that as an entrepreneur? Why can't you do that as an innovator? And so we started an otherwise unusual entity, which was called nucogen, and it stood for new company generation, new cogen.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'd never thought of that as an activity before where you literally can have a parent entity conceive of one thing and really develop it internally and then spin it out, which is what we did. That actually was equally interesting. Of course, being in the middle of this whole kind of public storm, if you will, in many ways positive sense of the word and excitement, also pointed out the fact that we were entering a new era in molecular biology. So that was exciting, definitely.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, very much so. But in a different context than just the market opportunity, it was actually a foray into entrepreneurship, which is when a company creates a company.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because Wasn't moving fast enough. We weren't going to wait two, three more years before this information could be available. But it definitely at the time allowed both sides to do something quite spectacular, which was to complete the sequencing of the genome. In our case, as a prelude to delivering this content business, in their case as the basis for much of research going forward.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we set out to build, we needed to sequence the genome first, and we at first thought maybe the government's effort at the time would suffice, but it was going fairly slowly. And so we launched what became a competitive effort, although it wasn't fully intended to be competitive in the first instance.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so a player actually was a made up name that came after the fact, the initial company that bought Perceptive was called Pricken Elmer. Ultimately, the thing we decided to do was to become a content delivery company modeled after Bloomberg with the Bloomberg terminals, as you may remember. So Bloomberg takes public information, at least they did back then, annotates it, interconnects it, adds some proprietary layers on it, and then sells it as a subscription, essentially, through terminals. And we thought we could do the same thing with biology and the human genome project was kind of the actual sequence became our way of actually trying to get people to come to our site in order to receive all these higher level connectivities from that baseline information.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so early adopters were not a concept back then, but clearly early adopters is how you get anything to be taken up and they become your best salespeople because either they change jobs or they tell their colleagues, hey, I'm doing this thing really cool. You should look into it. And so eventually we started getting kind of slowly, slowly growing, hired our first salespeople. And eventually when the company grew up in 1997 at the end, we were about 900 people.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the first instance, there were a handful of biotechnology companies at the time who were noteworthy, biogen, Genentech, MGEN, Genzyme. And then there was a whole bunch of pharmaceutical companies, the household brands of Roche and Novartis and GSK, Pfizer, et cetera. And they all had research labs. They had huge research labs. And every one of them used to do what it is we were selling a new technology to do.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what I decided to do is I kept talking to people until I found a firm to invest with me as the initial CEO, which is what I had been for the whole time in the year and a half before. And the day after we closed the million dollars, I went to them and I said, I don't want to be CEO. Let's go hire a CEO. They were like shocked. And the only reason I felt that way was because I wanted to make sure they weren't investing in not me, but at the same time, I thought if they really think that we should really bring in somebody for a period of time who can help work with me, then let's do that. And so we found a very, very good late in his career, senior executive. I became chairman and chief technical officer. He became CEO. And for a year, we worked really closely together. He taught me a lot. He helped, he helped greatly.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the other thing is a lot of people told me, listen, you're smart, you're capable, you got a lot to learn, you should not be CEO. And it was an interesting thing because I thought to myself, I couldn't tell whether what they're saying was good for me or good for them. It was indiscernible.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So, what you have to do is you have to actually make some calculated bets. And then I also learned early on just about everything you assume may be wrong. You constantly have to figure out, okay, if I can't keep going down that path, where am I going to go next? It's too late to think of that once you're stuck now being opposed by whatever elements you're up against. So there's plenty of people who gave advice. In fact, one of the things I remember very well is in the first instance raising money, I remember many investors by the time I had the story right telling me that they thought I'd be successful, but that they didn't think my first thing would be successful. And so a whole bunch of them told me that they would want to invest in my second company.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did, I went to lots of people for help, and it's actually one of the more formative things that I've learned, which is that if you don't pretend you know a lot, people are much more prone to kind of advise you and help you. And it's not hard to pretend that when you're 25 years old. But that is the first time that helped me was back in those days. I clearly didn't know much about raising money, spending money, planning, budgeting. I did have a lot of people around me who are willing to give advice, quickly realized that a lot of that advice was quite kind of opposed to each other. That's the challenge, right?”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a result, everything went faster so that you can actually separate proteins in 10 minutes, 15 minutes. And we showed that we could do this. We showed the actual theory behind how it was working. And then finally, that led many years later to another technology breakthrough, which really made perceptive kind of much more known, which was a technology called mass spectrometry. So we worked on inventing a whole new way to cause proteins to be amenable to this type of technique. And that really opened up the protein research space significantly. And our revenues grew quite substantially as a result of that second technology.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT