Founders: Moderna's Noubar Afeyan

**Will Bain** (0:01)
Today on Founders, we speak to the man behind Moderna, the vaccine that changed the shape of the COVID-19 pandemic. Noubar Afeyan.
Noubar, let us indulge you a tiny bit if we can. So it begins back in Lebanon and the civil war there, and takes you and your family via Canada, the United States, to build, well, one of the most influential careers in modern biotechnology, founding flagship pioneering in 2000 The venture capital firm from which more than 100 other firms, turning science into medicine, emerge, including perhaps best known to our audience, Moderna and its COVID-19 vaccine. Why don't we start right back there again? Can you kind of imagine it? You're just kind of becoming a teenager, right? At the moment, the civil war kind of breaks out in Lebanon, and now we sit chatting to you, a billionaire businessman with 100 plus companies and a million things to think about. That journey, is it still kind of hard to fathom at this moment?

**Noubar Afeyan** (0:59)
It is. I keep putting off thinking about it, and I suspect I'll do so before I can't anymore. But I was in my early teenage years in Lebanon, you know, kind of having a bit of an idyllic life. It was a beautiful place, except once in a while it was to break out into wars, usually proxy wars between other neighboring countries. But this time in 1975, civil war broke out. And so we basically were forced to stay home for months on end, saw lots of rocket fire, lots of explosions and importantly, the building about a block away from where we were is completely leveled when I was 12 years old. So we got up to a lot of dead bodies and the like. And while I could say that now, and most people relate to that as something they've seen on TV, when you see it live, if it doesn't completely depress you, it certainly causes you to think differently about the precarious position that peace represents and the opportunity to do things. I didn't think of that back then, but certainly since then, having to completely get uprooted, go to Montreal, see snow for the first time, see languages I didn't know. I mean, these are all things that I only wish upon other people, to be honest, because at the end of the day, the resilience, if you can kind of get through that, carries through to starting companies, lots of failures, lots of ups and down, and just continuing the kind of constant struggles.

**Will Bain** (2:22)
And in that time, using money for the first time and all that kind of stuff, I'm guessing as an early teenager then, who was kind of teaching you about that?

**Noubar Afeyan** (2:30)
My father growing up was in the import-export business, of all things, ironically, in plastics. He was one of the first to bring products that were based nylon, vinyl, these kinds of things into the Middle East. And I used to go to his workplace since a pretty early age, probably six, seven years old. And it was a big deal for me to go with him. I was the youngest of three.
I'd say probably less about the money part, but about the kind of seriousness of work.

**Will Bain** (2:54)
The work ethic.

**Noubar Afeyan** (2:55)
Yeah, exactly.

**Will Bain** (2:56)
So fast forward a little bit. You go to two back to back fantastic academic institutions, McGill and MIT. Was education, was learning really important in your house growing up?

**Noubar Afeyan** (3:06)
Yeah, education was super important. And I studied engineering as an undergraduate student. And engineering is really all about making things, designing things, building things, scaling up things, to using engineering in the opposite direction, which was reverse engineering, which is carefully taking things apart, putting them together and seeing what they do in fractional parts is the way we study complex biological systems. And I was drawn to that in the early stages and there were no tools to do this with. There was no information, knowledge, and all of that became available over the 40 years, 43 years since I entered this field.

**Will Bain** (3:42)
So at what point does that become a business? Does it go from being something you're interested in and you're working in it and as you say, you're right at the kind of forefront of people trying to do this stuff. When does that go? You know what, I got an idea where.

**Noubar Afeyan** (3:54)
There's a great story. I was a graduate student at MIT in the mid-80s. At the time, graduate students even now largely aim to become professors in the field. And sometimes they go to large companies. That's all that existed. And in 1985, by complete chance, I ended up being sent by the folks at MIT to a conference in DC held by the National Science Foundation of the US, which was all about competitiveness, where the US was being challenged by Japan. And I found myself being one of the few biotech people, happened to sit at lunch completely randomly next to a gentleman. He told me what he had done. It turned out he and his friend had started a company 30 years earlier in making new instruments for a new breed of engineers called electrical engineers. They had invented the oscilloscope. They had made it in their garage and built a company. And I was listening to a story thinking, well, I'm a new breed of engineer, biological, biochemical engineer. I could do this kind of thing. So I was drawn by his story. And it turned out it was David Packard. I had no idea what he was telling me the story, which company he was talking about or who he was.