Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Interesting. No, I didn't look at this at all. Yeah. They are forced to think on a different time horizon than if your compensation came primarily in the form of stock options, and you wanted to make the stock go up in a three to five-year window. Executives and board members are not given stock options as a part of their compensation. When you talk with folks in the industry, the employees reportedly have lower compensation than their counterparts at other companies. I couldn't figure out if that was a Danish versus American thing, or if they intentionally try to repel the idea of mercenary employees and attract missionaries. It would seem that their excellence in pioneering Diabetes medicine is really mission driven. There's what they call their remuneration policy, which requires all board directors to hold stock. You're not getting it as your comp, but you're required to hold it, which I think is a similar idea to what Berkshire Hathaway has, of, hey, we should have sticks, not carrots. In Berkshire's case, there's no D&O insurance for board members. You actually have to own the liability of the company's actions yourself to be on the board, so they take it seriously. But in Novo's case, it's, hey, you don't get the carrot of big piles of free equity in our company. Yeah, you got to go buy the stock.…

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