Noubar Afeyan: recommendation

Transcript context

…How is creating a company as a co-creator a different skill than being either a VC who picks winners or doing all the work yourself in building the company? How would you best describe the nature of that skill that you and Flagship have? Well, I should say that Flagship is itself an experiment in a new breed of company that conceives and creates and launches and develops companies. A company that develops companies is not a traditional way one fathoms what a company does. Our products are effectively platforms that are embodied within companies. In that regard, if you think of the traditional startup methodology, what one needs to do is to take a scientific breakthrough or an innovation — typically in the life sciences — that comes from academia; managerial skills to both initiate and then grow and manage the growth of; and then capital. If all three of those things come in together and coexist harmoniously, and the product works, and the pricing is right, and the execution is right, then you get a gigantic overnight success. The likelihood of that happening before we get to the product and the pricing and the execution is very low because the sources of innovation, the sources of talent, and the sources of capital have a lot of, let’s say, friction among them as to what they think should be done. Contrast that to what Flagship set out to do, which is to have the innovation capacity, the human capacity to lead, and the capital — all as part of one entity, one organization, such that they are co-deployed in pursuit of something that is therefore slightly more risky in the eyes of others, because we can persist and we can cooperate because we all share one common objective, and that is the success of that thing that we’re creating. Creating a company having all three of those elements coming from the same source is a very different act than collecting and optimizing the pieces, has been my experience. I’ve done both, obviously. For the first 13 years of my life — before 2000 — of my professional life, I did it the traditional way, and since then we’ve been doing it this way. Which part of entrepreneurship — biotech entrepreneurship in particular — is hardest to scale? You don’t have 792 companies, right? Something is stopping there from being more companies. What’s that scarce factor?…

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