Latest / What's Your Problem? / Building a Company that Builds Companies
Transcript
- 0:15Speaker 1: Pushkin. One of the most interesting, most important companies in
- 0:23Speaker 1: the world right now is Maderna, this little biotech company
- 0:28Speaker 1: that almost nobody had ever heard of until a couple
- 0:30Speaker 1: of years ago. This company built on the wild idea
- 0:33Speaker 1: of making mRNA and putting it into people's cells. This
- 0:37Speaker 1: company has suddenly delivered COVID vaccines to hundreds of millions
- 0:41Speaker 1: of people, including full disclosure to me. And maybe the
- 0:46Speaker 1: most interesting thing about the story of Maderna is that
- 0:50Speaker 1: it doesn't start with the founding of the company back
- 0:52Speaker 1: in twenty ten. It starts ten years earlier with the
- 0:56Speaker 1: founding of another company, a company called Flagship Pioneering. Flagship
- 1:01Speaker 1: Pioneering is a company that makes companies. Flagship has created
- 1:05Speaker 1: dozens of companies, several of which have gone public. Pretty
- 1:09Speaker 1: much all of them have something to do with biology,
- 1:12Speaker 1: and they tend to be pretty out there. Companies using
- 1:16Speaker 1: bacteria as medicine, Companies trying to figure out how farms
- 1:20Speaker 1: can do more to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,
- 1:24Speaker 1: and of course, companies trying to figure out all the
- 1:26Speaker 1: things you can do with RNA, companies like Maderna. I'm
- 1:34Speaker 1: Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, the show
- 1:37Speaker 1: where I talk to entrepreneurs and engineers about how they're
- 1:39Speaker 1: going to change the world once they've solved a few problems.
- 1:44Speaker 1: My guest today is Nubar Afaan. He is the founder
- 1:47Speaker 1: of Flagship Pioneering and the co founder of Maderna. And
- 1:51Speaker 1: the problem I wanted to talk with Nubar about is
- 1:54Speaker 1: the problem he started Flagship to solve. How do you
- 1:58Speaker 1: turn the unstructured, chaotic way that most entrepreneurs start companies
- 2:02Speaker 1: into a repeatable, systematic process and what can we learn
- 2:07Speaker 1: about that From the story of Maderna, the origins of
- 2:13Speaker 1: Flagship Pioneering new Bar's company, the company that started Maderna.
- 2:16Speaker 1: They go back to the beginning of his career as
- 2:19Speaker 1: an entrepreneur. He saw at the time that venture capitalists
- 2:23Speaker 1: had a sort of unfair advantage over entrepreneurs like him
- 2:27Speaker 1: because they got to see into so many different companies
- 2:29Speaker 1: all getting built at the same time. I was interested
- 2:33Speaker 1: in the model that venture capitalists used, and what I
- 2:37Speaker 1: observed in the early phase of my career is just
- 2:40Speaker 1: how smart all these people seemed. And yet after a
- 2:44Speaker 1: while I realized, well, they're two they can't all be
- 2:46Speaker 1: that smart. And it occurred to me that they had
- 2:50Speaker 1: seen so many attempts at this, with so many different
- 2:54Speaker 1: people of different backgrounds, compositions of teams that were only experienced,
- 2:58Speaker 1: only inexperienced the science the IP strategy in the markets.
- 3:02Speaker 1: So when you take it all together, they were learning
- 3:05Speaker 1: at a massive, massive rate that which entrepreneur need to
- 3:09Speaker 1: learn but never can learn in one go round. And
- 3:14Speaker 1: so I thought, why can't the knowledge assembly practice, experimenting
- 3:20Speaker 1: and failing and learning be available to an entrepreneur. So
- 3:24Speaker 1: all of those things kind of combined in getting me
- 3:27Speaker 1: interested in this notion that what if there was a
- 3:30Speaker 1: structure where entrepreneurs such as myself could take experience they
- 3:35Speaker 1: had gotten, let's say, in one in one instance, but
- 3:38Speaker 1: then started diversifying it and learning in parallel, and then
- 3:42Speaker 1: got really good at it. And those are the things
- 3:44Speaker 1: that led to the conception of Flagship in two thousand.
- 3:48Speaker 1: Starting a company that starts companies almost seems like cheating
- 3:52Speaker 1: in a weird way, Like when you get the genie
- 3:54Speaker 1: in the bottle and you get three wishes, it's like
- 3:57Speaker 1: wishing for more wishes, right, you know, I've never seen
- 4:00Speaker 1: a story which starts with you know, some Genie offered
- 4:02Speaker 1: somebody three wishes, and the first wish was another Genie bottle. Yeah,
- 4:07Speaker 1: it's a little poll have been a smart answer, Yeah, yeah,
- 4:11Speaker 1: that would have been a smart answer. So it really
- 4:13Speaker 1: is a kind of a curious thing as to why
- 4:16Speaker 1: people don't do it. And I can trace it back,
- 4:19Speaker 1: especially back in the twenty five years ago, to the
- 4:22Speaker 1: fact that the field of entrepreneurship was a relatively young field.
- 4:26Speaker 1: Early on, it was this kind of mystical activity, and
- 4:30Speaker 1: you had certain personalities that kind of were able to
- 4:34Speaker 1: raise money and govern, you know, create teams. There's a
- 4:37Speaker 1: whole mythology, right, It's like the like Hero's journey, right
- 4:41Speaker 1: where there's this one person who has a vision that
- 4:44Speaker 1: nobody else believes in and only they can build the company.
- 4:47Speaker 1: I mean, I feel like what you're building is sort
- 4:48Speaker 1: of the antithesis of that. Well exactly, entrepreneurship as an
- 4:52Speaker 1: activity today is today used to be and hasn't changed
- 4:57Speaker 1: so much. Is very much improvisational. There's a lot of
- 5:02Speaker 1: kind of almost a romantic side to it. There is chaos,
- 5:06Speaker 1: and there is this struggle to survive. And while all
- 5:11Speaker 1: of those things are really good, kind of spices in
- 5:15Speaker 1: a meal. It is the meal in entrepreneurship. There is
- 5:18Speaker 1: nothing else you don't point to, and we're developing products
- 5:21Speaker 1: and we're solving on meth needs. Those things almost become
- 5:24Speaker 1: kind of the boring part of the story that people
- 5:26Speaker 1: want to fast forward through that part of the episode.
- 5:29Speaker 1: So it did occur to me, in thinking of parallelyzing this,
- 5:32Speaker 1: that actually all those parts can benefit from being more efficient,
- 5:38Speaker 1: more effective, more predictable, and more planful. If there's this
- 5:42Speaker 1: idea that you can build a system to create companies
- 5:46Speaker 1: and that the system maybe ultimately can work better at
- 5:51Speaker 1: least better in some settings, let's say, than the sort
- 5:53Speaker 1: of visionary entrepreneur. What does that say about you in particular?
- 5:58Speaker 1: Like can you build such a good system that you
- 6:00Speaker 1: personally become replaceable? Oh? Yeah, that's my goal. So you
- 6:09Speaker 1: are set up this company, Flagship Pioneering to solve the
- 6:12Speaker 1: entrepreneurship problem. But how does it actually work and how
- 6:16Speaker 1: did it lead to the creation of Maderna? That is
- 6:19Speaker 1: after the break. Now we're going back to the show.
- 6:28Speaker 1: So in the first part of the conversation, Nubar and
- 6:31Speaker 1: I were talking abstractly about this problem he set out
- 6:34Speaker 1: to solve how do you shift entrepreneurship starting companies from
- 6:38Speaker 1: this mythological hero's journey into a repeatable, systematic process. In
- 6:43Speaker 1: the next part of the conversation, Nubar gave me an answer.
- 6:45Speaker 1: He told me the story of Maderna as a case
- 6:48Speaker 1: study for how flagship pioneering his company has started to
- 6:51Speaker 1: solve this problem, has started to create a system for
- 6:55Speaker 1: creating new companies. The story of Maderna starts in twenty
- 6:58Speaker 1: ten when Nubar had a meeting with a Harvard scientist
- 7:01Speaker 1: who was studying m RNA. mRNA, by the way, is
- 7:04Speaker 1: a molecule that basically tells cells in the body what
- 7:07Speaker 1: protein to make. I could researchers had been experimenting with
- 7:11Speaker 1: mRNA for a while by this point, but they kept
- 7:14Speaker 1: hitting problems when they tried to find clinical applications. And
- 7:17Speaker 1: in the middle of this meeting with the Harvard scientist,
- 7:20Speaker 1: Newbar thinks if we could make mRNA in the lab
- 7:24Speaker 1: and inject it into the body, the results could be incredible.
- 7:29Speaker 1: We could use mRNA to tele a patient cells what
- 7:32Speaker 1: to make. So I come back from the meeting and
- 7:36Speaker 1: I talked to some of the team here and we say, hey,
- 7:38Speaker 1: let's launch an exploration, and it starts as an act
- 7:42Speaker 1: of imagination. It is not an active reason. And in fact,
- 7:46Speaker 1: one of my side i'd say, kind of, I won't
- 7:50Speaker 1: call it ran. Yeah. A side rant would be the
- 7:54Speaker 1: degree to which our education systematically discourages the use of
- 7:59Speaker 1: imagination in creating the world we want to create, versus
- 8:04Speaker 1: relying overly on analysis and reason as the only way
- 8:09Speaker 1: to make progress. You want to try and be unreasonable
- 8:12Speaker 1: to some extent. We need to be unreasonable in order
- 8:16Speaker 1: to come up with leaps that eventually seem reasonable. So,
- 8:21Speaker 1: in the case of what will become maderna, you have
- 8:24Speaker 1: this unreasonable idea, let's use mRNA to get the body
- 8:29Speaker 1: to make drugs inside the body. You start this first step,
- 8:32Speaker 1: this thing you call an exploration, which means which means
- 8:36Speaker 1: what you have this small team studying the state of
- 8:38Speaker 1: the art, going out and talking to experts about this idea,
- 8:41Speaker 1: and what kind of reactions are you getting from the experts.
- 8:44Speaker 1: So the way that you react is to say, the
- 8:47Speaker 1: RNA will be washed out of the body in ten minutes,
- 8:49Speaker 1: How are you going to make proteins for weeks? How
- 8:51Speaker 1: are you going to get into the right cell types
- 8:53Speaker 1: by the way, there's all sorts of other immune reactions
- 8:55Speaker 1: you're gonna have to deal with, how are you going
- 8:57Speaker 1: to make it? Nobody ever designed and made Arnie, And
- 9:00Speaker 1: so all those selection pressures causes you, causes us very
- 9:04Speaker 1: specifically to go back and try to come up with
- 9:06Speaker 1: ways to overcome those let's say, dogumatic objections to based
- 9:12Speaker 1: on the present state of the art. And so because
- 9:14Speaker 1: you might say, we why don't you just ignore them
- 9:16Speaker 1: and just go into lab and do it. And the
- 9:17Speaker 1: reason it turns out for us anyways, that we find
- 9:20Speaker 1: that these initial hypotheses become refined and refined and refined
- 9:25Speaker 1: before we want to go in and spend the money
- 9:27Speaker 1: building a company. That's a really important thing. We don't
- 9:30Speaker 1: build just any company. We build companies that have gone
- 9:33Speaker 1: through a significant upfront set of iterative refinements. That's a
- 9:40Speaker 1: process of a couple of months. It's a handful of people,
- 9:43Speaker 1: three four people, and it's a couple of months, and
- 9:46Speaker 1: we iterate, iterate, iterated internally until we get to a
- 9:49Speaker 1: point by the fall where we say, you know what,
- 9:51Speaker 1: we're going to make a go of this, because that
- 9:53Speaker 1: we think we have a good sense of the range
- 9:55Speaker 1: of things that have to be right for this to work.
- 9:57Speaker 1: We can test for them, and we don't start the company.
- 10:00Speaker 1: We actually start what we call a protocompany. Okay, that's
- 10:03Speaker 1: the first phase. Okay, what is a proto company? So
- 10:06Speaker 1: a product company is a prototype of a company, just
- 10:10Speaker 1: like you make prototypes of every product that you make.
- 10:12Speaker 1: But remarkably, there is no such thing as a prototype
- 10:15Speaker 1: of a company. People just make companies. And a product
- 10:18Speaker 1: type of a company is where, just like in a
- 10:21Speaker 1: regular product, you get to beat it up and try
- 10:23Speaker 1: to kill it. And that's exactly what we do. And
- 10:25Speaker 1: so is it called Maderna Yet you have this idea
- 10:28Speaker 1: and it's like proto Maderna. No, it's ls eighteen is
- 10:30Speaker 1: the product company? Say it again. LSA teen is the
- 10:34Speaker 1: name of the entity that got incorporated to become eventually
- 10:39Speaker 1: if things went forward, Maderna. Why light, Oh, it's the
- 10:42Speaker 1: eighteenth such thing we did. Okay, it's the eighteenth proto
- 10:46Speaker 1: company you had ever made, exactly and today we're at
- 10:49Speaker 1: number ninety as an example, why do you do that?
- 10:52Speaker 1: Why do you give it just a number at that stage? Oh,
- 10:56Speaker 1: you know, when you're trying to create an institution instead
- 10:59Speaker 1: of behaviors. One of the things that I knew literally
- 11:02Speaker 1: on day one going into creating this whole thing in
- 11:04Speaker 1: two thousand was that people hang on to their ideas
- 11:09Speaker 1: and emotionally almost romantically connected them and they never can
- 11:12Speaker 1: kill them. And I wanted to create a safe zone
- 11:15Speaker 1: during which the question was, what is the falsifying experiment
- 11:20Speaker 1: that will kill the hypothesis so that we don't go forward. Well,
- 11:22Speaker 1: guess what if you give something a name, worse yet,
- 11:26Speaker 1: a name you really like, your pet, dog's name, some
- 11:29Speaker 1: Greek god's name, whatever, Well you try to kill it.
- 11:32Speaker 1: So you give it a number instead of a name
- 11:33Speaker 1: to make it easier to kill. Disposable exactly. But anyway,
- 11:37Speaker 1: I should say put our companies for us are like
- 11:39Speaker 1: a one to two million dollars six months to twelve
- 11:43Speaker 1: months plus minus process. It is not a license to
- 11:48Speaker 1: hunt for the next three years and ten million dollars.
- 11:51Speaker 1: That's a very important discipline. So a key part of
- 11:54Speaker 1: doing that is to decide what are the key experiments
- 11:58Speaker 1: that you want to do first in order to try
- 12:00Speaker 1: to kill it. We needed to convince ourselves that we
- 12:02Speaker 1: can actually make things and try them in animals and
- 12:06Speaker 1: have them make a protein. There's notion that. Now we
- 12:09Speaker 1: go around saying m RNA is the code of life,
- 12:11Speaker 1: and we can put it in and we can make
- 12:13Speaker 1: any protein we want. Yeah, two billion dollars later we
- 12:16Speaker 1: could do that. But on the early days, nobody had
- 12:20Speaker 1: shown that you can actually make the correct protein folded
- 12:23Speaker 1: the correct way in animal models, not to humans yet,
- 12:26Speaker 1: and so we need to convince ourselves of that. We
- 12:28Speaker 1: did work on that in small animals mice, and then
- 12:31Speaker 1: we had to believe is that we could actually somehow
- 12:34Speaker 1: formulate these things so they can get into cells. A
- 12:37Speaker 1: year or so nine months, a year of experimental work
- 12:41Speaker 1: that we engaged with within the context of LSA teen,
- 12:44Speaker 1: which was renamed a couple of months later Maderna. As
- 12:48Speaker 1: we started getting ourselves up and running, I just want
- 12:51Speaker 1: to I just want to pause. So ls eighteen, I
- 12:53Speaker 1: have the number, right, remember number, that's the point, right,
- 12:56Speaker 1: LSA teen becomes maderna. But at that time you're not
- 13:00Speaker 1: even thinking of vaccines yet, is that right? Well, let
- 13:03Speaker 1: me say this thing. We thought of every possible use
- 13:05Speaker 1: you could make of every kind of molecule, so vaccines
- 13:08Speaker 1: was definitely on tables of things we could do. But
- 13:12Speaker 1: by no means did our preliminary analysis suggest that we
- 13:15Speaker 1: should do vaccines, let alone only vaccines. And the reason
- 13:19Speaker 1: was because our dream, our imagination had us making any
- 13:23Speaker 1: protein in the body, and a relatively small subset of
- 13:27Speaker 1: the proteins that are made in the body is actually
- 13:30Speaker 1: for vaccines, and so we were working on cancer and
- 13:33Speaker 1: we were dreaming of cardiovascular disease. So the vaccine part
- 13:37Speaker 1: was a transition that started happening three to four years
- 13:41Speaker 1: into the development of the company, A long time. A
- 13:43Speaker 1: long time into the company, oh for sure, and probably
- 13:47Speaker 1: a good billion dollars of capital having gone into it
- 13:50Speaker 1: before now. Back in twenty fourteen thirteen, when we started
- 13:54Speaker 1: going down this path, of course, it was a pretty crappy,
- 13:57Speaker 1: for lack of a better word, marketplace because vaccines were
- 14:00Speaker 1: the domain of two or three pharma companies that had
- 14:03Speaker 1: a complete monopoly over the space. The development and regulatory
- 14:07Speaker 1: approval of them was extremely slow, very very costly, and
- 14:11Speaker 1: at the end you couldn't charge much for them. So
- 14:14Speaker 1: the reason the biotech industry, I think it'd be hard
- 14:16Speaker 1: pressed to find biotech companies that worked on vaccines was that,
- 14:20Speaker 1: And so investors, capital providers simply didn't want to go
- 14:24Speaker 1: there because it was generally written off as an area
- 14:27Speaker 1: for major innovation, but we weren't. We didn't really care
- 14:31Speaker 1: as much about that because all we wanted was the
- 14:33Speaker 1: proof of principle in humans that this could even be done.
- 14:37Speaker 1: You wanted that would work, yeah, in humans, yea. And
- 14:40Speaker 1: so in twenty fourteen, going into fifteen, we entered our
- 14:44Speaker 1: first clinical trial with two quite ironic people haven't quite
- 14:48Speaker 1: realized this yet, ironic in what I would say, two
- 14:51Speaker 1: strains of influenza that had not previously been in humans,
- 14:55Speaker 1: for which we wanted to make a prophylactic vaccine in
- 14:59Speaker 1: case someday they jump from birds or swine into humans. Basically, yeah, exactly.
- 15:09Speaker 1: So we just took a very safe road, tried it,
- 15:11Speaker 1: and sure enough we showed in the first instance that
- 15:14Speaker 1: that first attempt to humans could make neutralizing anybody's to
- 15:18Speaker 1: both of those trains, and we felt like, Okay, at
- 15:20Speaker 1: least we know we can make proteins and that they
- 15:22Speaker 1: do what we say, David, that's five years into it. Great. So,
- 15:26Speaker 1: because of all of this, because of the decade you'd
- 15:31Speaker 1: spent figuring out how to build a company that builds companies,
- 15:34Speaker 1: and then the years after that turning an idea into
- 15:38Speaker 1: LS eighteen, into Maderna into a company that makes vaccines.
- 15:42Speaker 1: Because of that whole twenty year arc, you're ready, essentially
- 15:47Speaker 1: when this new virus emerges at the end of twenty
- 15:52Speaker 1: nineteen to very quickly make a COVID vaccine exactly that
- 15:58Speaker 1: we worked for many, many years to put this platform
- 16:02Speaker 1: into existence. In a minute, the Lightning Round, including new bars,
- 16:07Speaker 1: tips for solving hard problems, and one weird trick for
- 16:11Speaker 1: knowing when to shut down a company or a proto company. Okay,
- 16:22Speaker 1: let's get back to the show. We're going to close
- 16:25Speaker 1: with the Lightning Round. What's one piece of advice you'd
- 16:27Speaker 1: give to someone who's working on a hard problem. Work
- 16:31Speaker 1: both from the present forward, that is, from what you
- 16:34Speaker 1: know to solve something, and also work future backwards, which is,
- 16:38Speaker 1: imagine the problem already solved and see if you can
- 16:41Speaker 1: back trace how you got there. Good. Okay, Two more,
- 16:45Speaker 1: do you have any rules of thumb for knowing when
- 16:49Speaker 1: to shut down a project? Not uniform rules, but I
- 16:54Speaker 1: think that you have to keep the resistance up resistance
- 16:58Speaker 1: meaning pressure in order for the team to conclude that
- 17:02Speaker 1: they're going through more and more complicated rationalizations using longer
- 17:08Speaker 1: and longer sentence is to justify whether its state life
- 17:11Speaker 1: sentence length is a good is a good heuristic? I
- 17:13Speaker 1: like that. And by the way, that's one of the
- 17:15Speaker 1: biggest misunderstood things in the startup world is that more
- 17:18Speaker 1: money leads to better companies. Lower money can just as
- 17:22Speaker 1: easily lead to worst companies because it causes persistence of
- 17:26Speaker 1: companies that don't feel that pressure. And so I think
- 17:30Speaker 1: one of the key things is the pressure that comes
- 17:32Speaker 1: from raising capital, the pressure that comes from being challenging.
- 17:36Speaker 1: I think these are all really really important to produce
- 17:39Speaker 1: the end result of deciding not to go forward. I
- 17:42Speaker 1: got to add one question, because you talked about money
- 17:44Speaker 1: being a problem. You just raised billions of dollars, which,
- 17:47Speaker 1: on the one hand, congratulations. On the other hand, is
- 17:50Speaker 1: that going to make it harder to do what you do?
- 17:52Speaker 1: I mean, there's scale, there's As you've said, having more
- 17:55Speaker 1: money can make it harder to keep the pressure on.
- 17:57Speaker 1: Is that hard having all that money? Because it took
- 18:00Speaker 1: us a long long time to get too larger pools
- 18:02Speaker 1: of capital. The process and the discipline and the culture
- 18:05Speaker 1: proceeds the capital and all of those are ways to
- 18:09Speaker 1: find the capital availability and keep the pressure on. Okay,
- 18:13Speaker 1: last one, if everything goes well, what problem will you
- 18:17Speaker 1: be working on in say ten years? Honestly unfathomable. I
- 18:21Speaker 1: could tell you what problem would be working on today
- 18:24Speaker 1: ten years ago. Let me answer it in this way.
- 18:26Speaker 1: We don't start with either problem or solution. We try
- 18:29Speaker 1: to invent both, make them up, and then we try
- 18:32Speaker 1: to match them in that regard. What problems will be
- 18:35Speaker 1: visible even at the horizon and what solutions will be
- 18:38Speaker 1: imaginable will dictate what we work on. So really the
- 18:42Speaker 1: answer to the what problem are you going to be
- 18:44Speaker 1: working on in ten years question is like you don't
- 18:46Speaker 1: even know the problem yet, And that's sort of the point, Like,
- 18:48Speaker 1: on some level your job is to add and discover problems,
- 18:52Speaker 1: both problems and imaginable solutions. Number of Fan is founder
- 18:59Speaker 1: and CEO of Flagship Pioneering and co founder of Maderna.
- 19:04Speaker 1: Today's show was produced by Edith Russelo, edited by Robert Smith,
- 19:08Speaker 1: and engine neared by Amanda ka Wong. I'm Jacob Goldstein.
- 19:12Speaker 1: We'll be back next week with another episode of What's
- 19:15Speaker 1: Your Problem