Noubar Afeyan: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now, when it comes to the Boston-Cambridge area as an innovation center, what is both its greatest underappreciated strength and its least recognized drawback? Boy, you’ve thought about the questions a lot more than I’ve thought about the answers because you’re asking me — kudos to you — asking me a lot of questions that I don’t typically answer. I think that Boston has its own culture. It’s beautifully filled with immigrants that constantly reconstitute that culture. But at the same time, it has roots. It has a history that gives it, I’d say, a rootedness. You can’t live in Boston for a long period of time and not feel like you’re part of something that has been there. The beauty is there are institutions that are world class, and I think that all of those conditions helped the biotech ecosystem take hold. Frankly, there was no biotech or ecosystem when I started. I remember in 1987, I started my first company, and I was quite young. I was 24 years old. At the time, young people didn’t start any companies, and I was interviewed by Inc. Magazine. I remember it distinctly. They pointed out that the office I was in was previously the office of a company that had failed, and how did I feel about that? My response was that I did not think about whose office I was occupying. I thought about the office of then the most notable iconic — a non-biotech — but startup success in Boston, which was Lotus. Lotus was just across the street from where I was. I said, “I choose to look at that office as opposed to looking at who might’ve had a business card in my desk.” That kind of forward-looking culture has developed, at least in Boston, because Boston, I think, is a place where you definitely can feel like anything’s possible. You have world-class institutions that educate people and enable them to believe that. Then, I think, what’s happened over the last 30 years — what’s really not appreciated — is that ecosystems aren’t designed or constructed. They emerge. They are a highly ecological concept, and in nature, you’ve really got to realize that many, many forces that apply to things through iterative cycles — it causes an emergent form. Either way, it’s a life form or a community form, and I think that’s the best way to understand Boston’s ecosystem. So when people talk about reproducing the Boston ecosystem or, for that matter, Silicon Valley — more dispersed but similar kind of things — I think that’s very, very difficult because you’d have to reproduce the emergent trajectory. That’s my view. There’s people who publish books that say the opposite but . . . What’s less understood, maybe, is in the category of just how a product of the sequence of events an emerging ecosystem is. And I think what is appreciated is that this is a special moment for Boston-Cambridge and, really, the biomedical enterprise, the hospitals, the large pharma companies, the human talent that’s been attracted. The key is going to be not how to necessarily preserve it in the way it is today, but how to make sure you don’t mess with the evolutionary experiment through policy. Here come the easy questions. We have the segment called overrated versus underrated. I toss out a word or an idea. You tell me if it’s overrated or underrated.…

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