Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yup. The key point is long term focus. If you can do that, as we've shown time and time again on this show, you can create something great. If you do that, it's not like you will create something great. You still got to get lucky and also be doing the right things in the right areas. But if you're going to build something really, really big, you got to have that long term focused mindset. Yup. There are a few unexplored areas that I think are interesting to know about healthcare as a whole and about Novo Nordisk that I want to talk about here in playbook. One of them is a shift that Novo has done here to broad populations with relatively inexpensive drugs versus other pharma companies. I know you're going to be allergic to the idea that I just told you, $1000 is an inexpensive drug. The crazy thing here isn't just that the revenue and the focus is so concentrated. It's concentrated in an area that other companies shied away from. Pharma, over the last couple of decades, shifted away from these mass population drugs to specialty drugs. These are often to treat specific forms of cancer or rare childhood diseases with super narrow populations and huge price tags. To put numbers around that, we're talking total market size of a couple hundred thousand people or fewer, as few as 300 people in these super rare orphan diseases. Occasionally, these diseases are so rare and the treatment is so life changing or life giving that the treatment, one dose of the pill, one infusion of the therapy, or whatever it is, can be measured literally in the millions of dollars. It gets far more extreme than a thousand dollars a month. It's understandable why the other pharma companies went there for a few reasons. This is a little bit of a walkthrough history, but it's been a while since we saw a breakthrough in a mass market drug. Really, the last one that we can point to is statins, which was to treat cholesterol. Thirty years ago is really when that was the thing. HIV and Hep C are examples we can point to, but again, it's been a while. Those are small markets compared to obesity.…

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