No Priors Ep. 104 | With Flagship Pioneering CEO and Co-Founder Noubar Afeyan

(music plays) 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.

Thanks again for doing this. And I look forward to the discussion.

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, you know, 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?

I will work hard to fit the description you just gave of what I've done or, or what I'm trying to do. The motivation for Flagship, uh, 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, 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, um, 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, bit of a put off, uh, 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?"

Hm.

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, the gamey nature of it. Uh, 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 capitalists, not parallel entre- venture capitalists. 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 the 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-