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

“That you did a very good job, and I can put a finer point to what was the advance. The original advance was that chromatography, which was used to separate proteins, had been developed to work on chemicals, not proteins. Proteins are much, much larger in size than chemicals. And so they move around very slowly. As a result, what used to be a technique that was meant to run for 45 minutes to an hour with proteins used to run for hours and hours, that limited the pace of advancement and research. What we invented were particles that had this interesting characteristic where you could actually force liquid to flow through them.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I could tell you it was very, very hard. There's no better way of describing it than persistent begging because at the end of the day, if you don't have something and you're proposing something that can't be shown to be either valuable or feasible, then I'm not sure what the difference is between that and begging. Ultimately, what happened is I talked to everybody and anybody I could meet, ended up getting connected to a gentleman named Gus Eslin, and he was interested in investing small amounts of money and I got introduced to him. And he said to me, my lawyers will reach out to you and I'll give you $100,000. Which was quite remarkable. It took probably more than a year to get to that point throughout this whole period. Yeah, and then in the meantime, I lived off of borrowing from my dad.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, of course, it's remarkable how every decade the amount of money you need to do roughly the same thing goes up dramatically. But back then, late 80s, even early 90s, some of the more well-known biotech companies were started with $10 million, $15 million. In my case, I only ever raised $11 million over a three-year period from venture capitalist, but that was a lot of money. So, what I needed first was the first couple of hundred thousand.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When the market crashed. And as by that time, 25 year olds, having just gotten my PhD, I had no idea why market crashing would have anything to do with startup funding. So I went literally and pitched the very, very first time to a well-known venture capitalist Ginger Moore. And she gave me great advice. She said, look, this could be a good time in a way to make sure you figure out what you want to do in the company because you're not going to have much competition. Everybody's going to run for the shore and not really venture out. And if you really contact the time to figure out what's worth doing, go work on it, get some angel money if you can. And if you persist long enough, this will come back. And ended up, you know, and I talked to a couple of other people, heard the same thing, and so that's what I ended up doing.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the very first meeting I had, and again these things all kind of in hindsight seem, I'm only telling you the things that stand on my mind, the very first meeting I had was the Tuesday after Black Monday in 1987 when the market”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Financial security, all those things. Yeah. All those things. And I would have been a very early person there, et cetera. But what was interesting about that was that that's the first time I started thinking about What would my contribution be as opposed to what was my alternative thought, which was, should I try to figure out how to do the startup thing myself? So I kind of remember talking and talking to lots of different people and getting advice. And the advice I got, which in hindsight was quite useful to me from some of my professors, was, look, if you really want to be in a startup, be in a startup where what you do matters and you can score, you can actually make the contributions. And so that led me to ultimately decide to start a company.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They reached out to my professors and they said, Look, who do you have graduating? And they said, well, this fellow's graduating. And literally, they made me an offer to be vice president of process technology at this brand new startup, which you might have thought that would have been a golden thing because it was a startup.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was not that much money indeed. So, yeah, what happened is that I came back, I started trying to learn about startups in general, not necessarily one that I would do because I was not close to graduating yet when I was a couple years out still. Then I did in fact get approached by a West Coast San Diego based brand new startup company, which went on to be a very successful, very successful, well-known biotech company called IDEC. were just starting at the time and out of, I think, sheer desperation of not having anybody who knew engineering and they needed engineers to be able to make their product.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, it definitely, I'll tell you one of the things that I've thought a lot about, and generally I realized these are fields that people don't talk about. And you only really, at least back then, used to hear about it glorified. Here was this guy who was completely grounded and normal and telling me about how he set out to do this. And the way he said it actually made me feel like, and you can do it too. And it was fascinating. That probably singularly his making it approachable, relatable was an important very. And that's why I've kind of tried to do the same to as many other people as I can.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I didn't have the oscilloscope. And he said, you know, not really because you're in such a new field, anything you do will be new and useful. So, and that stuck with me because I kind of came back with this interest in learning what I could about innovation and technology management because I figured those are at least generic things I'd have to know, but also the very first business plan I ended up writing to try to claim that we were going to do this didn't specify technology. It literally just said we're going to develop instruments that of address needs in the biotechnology field. And I quickly learned that you can't raise money on that. You have to actually have something. You just said we're going to... So that's a long story.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was older, certainly. I haven't thought back as to what his age was, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was in his 70, maybe 70s, 70s. At least that's how he looked. Me, but very kind to spend the time and one of the things I also remember asking him is I said, you know, like, do I need to have a technology? Do I need to have an invention?”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he said when he graduated, they realized they didn't know what to do with what they had learned. And so he and his friend decided that rather than joining the fray of actually doing this type of engineering, they'd make instruments that their colleagues, their friends would use in doing what they did. And they had invented the oscilloscope and decided to make some and provide it to their friends. And they started out in the garage and over time they grew that business. And I found this very interesting. So I asked him who he was. I just didn't know who he was at all. And it was David Packard from Hewlett Packard, literally. And I had like, it was really fascinating. And this is”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It would have made for a good story if that was the case, but it turns out it wasn't. I did not think of starting a company based on my upbringing. So, in 1985, I had occasion to go to Washington, D.C. to a conference that had been put on by the National Science Foundation. And by chance, I sat next to a person at lunch and asked him what he did. And he started recounting. This person was my father's age. And he started recounting how he and another friend of his, some maybe 30 years earlier, had graduated from a brand new field of engineering then called electronic engineering.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And everybody wanted to start doing this form of chemical engineering, biochemical engineering, because it was clear that a whole new industry was being born without the necessary engineering cadre of engineers and principles to apply to actually making the end product. So it was a really fortunate time to be entering the field. It took about four years. So yeah, I finished in the summer of 1987.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. I just wasn't, maybe this is, I've learned since this is all kind of the comedy of being an immigrant in that you actually don't know a lot of things because people don't tell you you're supposed to apply to five schools and maybe some in Canada, some in the States. So I just applied to one school. Thank God they took me. And it was fascinating. It was just a completely transformative experience. And ultimately ended up joining a lab and pursuing a PhD.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I grew up going to church not only. Now you're making me reveal all sorts of stuff that I've never talked about. I was a choir boy from probably. Seven, eight years old till I came to Montreal and I continued in Montreal, as did my brothers. So we did go to church. I'd like to say every Sunday, but probably it was most Sundays throughout the year. So it's most Armenians had a close interaction with the church, and we certainly did.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, so Montreal in 75 was still very much a bilingual place in the full sense of the word, meaning that you could coexist. Without speaking both languages, either language was fine. So I ended up going to And my brothers together, we ended up going to a Jesuit school, an all-boys school. It was English, Loyola High School. But in the following three years in high school took advanced French and learned the language alongside English, which was the main language of the school.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, he went back for the first time eight years later to actually liquidate what he could. But anyway, so when he came to Montreal, interestingly, he did not want to do the same thing. So he really wanted to get into the production of something. He really wanted to make things. So he explored and explored finding some small production operation to invest in or buy a year and a half of trying later, he essentially decided he couldn't wait any longer and he set up exactly the same business as he had done in Beirut and started all over again.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back and forth, you know, buildings being blown up. And this was on for months and months. And of course, after we left, it went on for years.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember a couple of events, among the most stunning one was waking up at five o'clock in the morning with a gigantic explosion, which was a building, a rather large building, maybe a block away from us that was completely leveled. And, you know, with lots of dead people, it was just like for a 12-year-old at the time that was very shocking. But then when the war actually, the civil war actually broke out, we stopped going to school. So from the beginning of 75 till probably May, June, we were at home. We would have sirens going off. We would go into the basements quite routinely. We had a ping pong table in the basement. So that was kind of a redeeming feature in that we could play ping pong while we were meant to stay in these kind of underground areas. We would watch from our vantage point probably, you know, one or two kilometers from where we were, maybe one kilometer, lots of rocket fire.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 so One of the things we learned because none of us have been in this situation before was that we were going to get criticized no matter what we did.”
2021-10-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT