Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, you can't make this stuff up. Novo is like, great, we're going to race to market. We're going to beat Eli Lilly with human Insulin. It's not going to be genetically engineered. We're just going to take our pig Insulin and modify it. It turns out to be a huge boondoggle. It works, but it's not any better than pig Insulin. It's a big flop for Novo. The timing lines up to really be a nail in the coffin for them. If this is right after everything you just described with Nordisk scaling up production, compounding at 30% per year, and massively growing share, this is not a good use of Novo's precious dollars right now. It's funny you say that. When the Genentech and Eli Lilly announcement happened in 1980, truly, this was a bombshell. It's hard to remember now. We weren't even alive, but this was one of, if not the most important announcement to come out of Silicon Valley ever still to this day. Investors went nuts. Anything that even you could squint and look like a biotech was suddenly the hottest thing in the world. Genentech goes public in the fall of 1980. This is well before Humulin, the product that they create with Eli Lilly, comes on the market. They go public, and it is, I believe, the largest venture-backed IPO ever at that time, until it eclipsed two months later when Apple goes public. But investors are just mad for biotech companies. When Novo announces that they're going to be first to market with human Insulin, and just ignore that it's actually pig Insulin that we're modifying, they use the hype on the back of that to do a US IPO with Goldman Sachs and raised a hundred million dollars.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.