Building the Platform for Scientific Breakthrough, with Noubar Afeyan of Moderna and Flagship Pioneering

**Sarah** (0:05)
Hi, listeners, and welcome to No Priors. Today, we're joined by Noubar Afeyan, founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, the firm behind Moderna, and over 100 other biotech companies. We'll talk about his approach to building biotech startups, how AI is reshaping drug development, and his theory of polyintelligence. Welcome, Noubar.

**Noubar Afeyan** (0:24)
Thanks again for doing this, and I look forward to the discussion.

**Sarah** (0:27)
Noubar, let's start with the roots. You've had this incredible journey personally. You arrived as a teenager after your family fled war-torn Beirut. You earned MIT's first PhD in biochemical engineering, and over the past three decades, you've created a force with Flagship that's changed the trajectory of global health with many important biotech companies and more than $100 billion of value. Can you just talk a little bit about your motivation to start Flagship originally, and what you thought it might become?

**Noubar Afeyan** (0:53)
I will work hard to fit the description you just gave of what I've done or what I'm trying to do. The motivation for Flagship stems from what I was doing before, which was that I started a company in 1987 when 24-year-old immigrants didn't start companies in this country. But instead, it was kind of like former Merck senior executives or IBM senior executives were the only ones who were entrusted with the massive amounts of venture capital, namely $2-3 million per round used to go into venture capital. So this was very early days. And I had the kind of chance opportunity to start a company right out of my graduate school and ended up raising quite a bit of venture money and eventually kind of went down a path of entrepreneurship. Along the way, one of the things that interested me was why it is that kind of the entrepreneurial process was supposed to be random, improvisational, kind of idiosyncratic, almost emotional, gamey. All of those things I kind of thought was a bit of a put-off when it comes to actually doing things in a serious professional way. And I kind of used to go around in the very early 90s saying, why isn't entrepreneurship a profession? And if it was going to be a profession, how could it be a profession? And at the time, you know, there were a lot largely one or two competitions, you know, giving prizes, which of course reinforces the gamey nature of it. And so I started thinking about that. I then started thinking, well, one way to know you're doing it as a professional is if you can do many of them in parallel. And my motivation for that was investing, because of course, venture capital is a parallel investing activity. If it was the case that you could only do one of these at a time, you would have serial venture capital, it's not parallel venture capital. And yet people think entrepreneurs are supposed to be serial, but investors or lawyers or everybody else can operate in parallel. The learning cycles of doing things at same time is completely different than if you actually force yourself to think about the essence of what you're doing and what's reproducible, what has to be different in each case. And so I got interested in that and parallel entrepreneurship led me to say, well, how do you do that even? So I spent the late 90s alongside running my first company, getting involved in the co-founding of several other companies where I kind of tried this out individually. And then I realized that it's pretty hard to do as a solo player. And so then I created the first company creation company, it used to be called Nucogen when it started. It stood for New Company Generation. And that's the name we operated under for three years until people told me it sounds like a disease. And then I kind of changed it to Flagship. By the way, that's exactly what happened. But from then, we've been on a journey to figure out not only how to do professional entrepreneurial activity, but institutional, which means act just like investing became institutional, act as teams with company kind of objectives, et cetera. So that's a complicated way to describe the motivation. But maybe I'll simplify it to say, I thought that the activity, the most value creating activity that I know of in the current human endeavor is starting companies. I used to teach entrepreneurship at MIT for 16 years and then at Harvard Business School, taught for three years on innovation. And I always ask people, what's the single most value creating activity? What's the biggest invention that humans have made in that regard? And they start telling me internet and satellites and this, that and the other. And I'll tell them, it's just a startup. The human invention and the value created from the startup includes Google and Tesla and Facebook and Genentech and every single one of those companies. And I thought, why are we outsourcing that to some random gamey activity? And that's what motivated me to start Flagship.