Stephane Bancel of Moderna: $5B and 10 years on the path to changing humanity

We've started this company 10 years ago believing it could change the history of medicine and impact millions. Of course, we never thought we were going to be facing a virus in a pandemic ever. I hope this will serve as an example that others can take in their own field to make the world a better place.

That's the voice of Stephane Bancel, CEO of Moderna. It's a great opportunity to talk to the CEO of a startup that even transcended greatness. By impacting humanity at a time of desperate need. The thought process behind Moderna's breakthrough is one we can all learn from. This is Mike Maples Jr. of Floodgate, and it's go time with Stephane Bancel of Moderna. Welcome to Starting Greatness, a podcast dedicated to ambitious founders who want to go from nothing to awesome super fast. When you're a startup founder, you have to channel your inner James Bond. You're MacGyver. You're Wonder Woman. I'm gonna help you win by curating the lessons of the super performers, but before they were successful. So without further ado—

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Let's get started. I've never had the good fortune to invest in a company focused on harnessing our understanding of genetics to deliver a breakthrough. But when I had a chance to spend time with Stephane Bancel at Moderna, we were remarkably similar in our views about what makes a great startup. Stephane and the Moderna team show the power of taking offensive risks to seize unlikely futures with massive upside. And aside from the chance to talk about startups, it was a great highlight to get to thank Stephane in person for leading a company that helped my family get its normal life back like so many others. The fact that people could invent a vaccine on such an accelerated timeline inspires me, and not just for the case of Moderna, but for what it says about humanity's ability to design a better future when we set our mind to it. Let's catch up with him. Stephane Bancel, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me, Mike.

Yeah, this is one of the episodes I have been really excited about because of just the impact of Moderna on Not just in terms of its commercial success, but just getting us out of a major pickle at a really important time. Maybe we should start, a lot of people who listen to this show are in traditional tech fields, software, computers, stuff like that. I think it would be useful to start with just the founding circumstances of Moderna, the whole story about Flagship Pioneering and where the research came from. How is it similar or different from the origin story of most quote-unquote typical startups?

Yeah, sure. So the company was basically co-founded by Noubar Afeyan, the CEO founder of Flagship Pioneering, which is one of the best company creators in Boston, partnering with academics from Harvard and MIT on this a very profound scientific question, which is, could we use messenger RNA that we will make synthetically in a factory, that you inject in people, so people will make protein on demand? If you think about the biotech industry, just for context, since Genentech and Amgen started in California, you know, now 50 years ago, it's a long time ago. If you think about it, what they did is basically initially they took bacteria, they engineer the human gene inside the bacteria genome to have the bacteria make the protein, like human insulin, and then they will purify, extract the human insulin from the manufacturing process of a bacteria making a lot of human insulin in a tank, and they would put that in a vial and inject that into people. The notion here was instead of using a bacteria into a factory somewhere, could you make a synthetic messenger RNA? Because you have thousands of mRNA in every one of your cells that instruct your body how to make protein from your own DNA. Could you make that synthetic mRNA that will be safe and efficacious? You inject in people and they will make any protein you want. And the reason about this comment, any protein you want, is when you think about it at 30,000 feet, mRNA is code. All of life across species, from a plant to a fish to a mouse to a human, use the same 4 letters to code for every protein under the living kingdom on the planet. So software is zeros and ones, as we all know, but biology is made of 4 letters. With those 4 letters, you can code any protein you want. And so the beauty about mRNA is that if it could work safely, you will have a platform which, if you think about it, would be the first platform in the life science world because if you look across the industry, you have had for 150 years small molecules like Lipitor, Viagra, antibiotics. Those molecules, as we know, are highly toxic in general, which is why most of the drugs, 90% of the drugs in traditional big pharma fail before launch. All of those technologies, small molecule chemistry, or large molecule biotech are all analog, meaning from one drug you can take no conclusion to the next drugs. What was the really exciting thing for us 10 years ago about using messenger RNA is that if you could make one drug work safely, like we've shown now with COVID you will make a lot of drugs.

So it's almost like in a traditional software platform or operating system, you have APIs that lots of different applications can call, And if you solve the problem once, there's some object orientation, if you will, I suppose, where you can reuse the code or reuse the learning to other different therapeutics.

Yes. And to tell you how powerful it is, is that if you look at, let's say, our COVID vaccine, and now we have a flu vaccine in the clinic, which we think we're going to be able to bring to the world a high-efficacy flu vaccine. As you know, the current flu vaccines in a good year work 60%. in a bad year is like 20 to 30% efficacy, which is pretty bad. But if you think about it, the only difference between our COVID and our flu vaccine, it's the order of the letters on the messenger RNA to code or to instruct your cells to code for a different protein, a COVID protein or a flu protein. But everywhere else, technology-wise, it's the same. The molecule of mRNA is made with the same chemistry as the COVID in the flu. It's made in the same machine by the same people in the same rooms. The lipid around it, the ball, the little ball of fat, which is what lipids are, is exactly the same chemically. It's made in the same manufacturing process. So the only difference between the flu Moderna COVID vaccine and the COVID vaccine is just the order of those 4 letters of life, which is why we can go so fast and why we believe because now one vaccine has worked very well, that we're gonna have a lot of vaccines that are gonna help a lot of people over the next, you know, decades.

We now know that today, but you had to raise a fair amount of money. If my memory serves me, you raised over $5 billion over the course of 10 years before delivering a single product. How did you decide to join this thing in the first place? How do you even think about that? How do you think about $5 billion in 10 years before bringing a product to market?

I mean, the way I framed it to my wife is, I will take a 5% chance to work on the technology that could change medicines forever. It was just this kind of incredible upside for the planet in terms of what we could do through our work that was worth the risk, which was a 5% chance of working. And it was this kind of incredible upside if you think about decades, not weeks or months, which is because of this platform nature that we just talked about, which is it made no sense this will be a one-drug company or a two-drug company.

It's not worth the sacrifice if it's that.

Yeah, exactly. And it was going to be zero drug if we ran out of cash before we got one drug to market. And we were all very clear that this could be an outcome, because as you do cutting-edge science that nobody has done in the world before, you have no idea how long it's going to take you. That is very different from an engineering world when you can ballpark guess how much resources you need because you are working on things that are not unknown. The problem with science is the unknown unknown. So that was for the personal side of it. And then on the business side of it, what we spend a lot of time— because as you said, we had to raise $5 billion, and thankfully I'm done with it. I like to tell my friends, which is, if you had told me 10 years ago that I would have to raise $5 billion to build this company, I would most probably have never taken the job. Because reason number one, I've never raised a penny because I worked in cash flow positive companies before this job. And two, in the history of biotech, no team had ever raised even a couple billion dollars, so let's say it's $5 billion. And so the reason we're able to do that is because as time went by, If I take back the last 10 years of the company, what we started to demonstrate in mice and then in monkeys and then in humans that we could do kept expanding. All the biotech companies I've been associated with or that I observed in the last 25 years I've been in this industry, they start with a big idea and as the months and the quarters and the years go by, it becomes smaller and smaller and smaller what this company and this technology can do. because there's a lot of problems that the team discovers that they didn't know initially that limit the total addressable market, if you want.

Yeah.

In the case of Moderna, as we grew the company and as we pushed the boundary of science, it became bigger and bigger and bigger what we could do, what we thought we could do to help patients over time. And so we were able to find investors that shared that vision, which is— it was very risky, it might fail with a big bank. If we could find a path to make this work, it could be so profound in terms of its impact on human health, and on its way will create so much value, because if you can get great drugs, you can create a lot of value. A lot of people outside pharmaceuticals do not appreciate that the NPV, I mean the financial value of a drug the day of launch, can be in the $50-100 billion. And so to a lot of investors, spending $5 billion or investing $5 billion, not in one check, but over time, over 10 years, where the amount kept going up because the de-risking kept happening, is a bit how we made this happen. Which is why we stayed private so long, because I was very worried that being a public company— we became public in year 8 of the company, it's a 10-year-old company now— And the reason I tried to keep the company private as long as I could was I was very worried that the markets would force me to focus too early on products.

Right.

I really wanted to spend as much energy and cash as we could expanding the science to expand the platform, because our thesis has always been this could be a gigantic platform, and I was worried the market was going to limit the size of a platform over the next 20 years, because it will force us too early to focus on products, We wanted to focus on science and platform.

Well, and what I love about your example is if I talk to most founders in the world, if you said you have a choice between an 80% chance of a 5x upside and a 20% chance at 50x, most people would take the 80% chance at 5x because they think of risk as avoiding failure. And, uh, your example, I think, is such a powerful one of Risk is something that you take. And it's like taking risk is about understanding that that future that you are pursuing, even though it's very risky, it could still be underpriced because the upside is so massive. And not only that, your willingness to take that risk puts you in a very limited subset of people, maybe even a subset of one. And so, even if you learn things that are against your thesis originally, You're learning things nobody else learns because nobody else would take that risk and nobody else is equipped to take it even if they wanted to. And so, if the initial insight is correct, it turns out there's a lot of degrees of freedom. It may seem walking in like you had a 5% chance, but the odd great founding teams pursuing great upside insights by themselves, they tend to impact the odds more than you think, right? They tend to affect the outcome.

Yes, and I think that the other piece to build on your point that is very, I think, profound about this team and what we have done over the last 10 years is it has never been about financial outcome, whereas of course everybody is happy there's a good financial outcome. The reason I think this team has been so relentless, again, we believed this could be as profound, actually more profound because of the platform nature of the code-like information molecule, as what the small molecules have done over the last 150 years. If you think about where medicine and humanity was 150 years ago, where if you had a bacterial infection you would die, if you have diabetes you would die, what all those molecules that have been developed by people coming before us, the impact they've had on human life. I was speaking at a conference a couple of years ago and I told people, if the pharma industry had not existed, most probably 2/3 of you in the room, including me maybe, will not be here alive, because either us or our parents or grandparents would have died of something that we think today is ridiculous to die from, because there was not the technology at the time to get there. But once you understand molecular biology, which is the biology happening inside cells, actually the molecular level, we start to really now understand the human body like we have never in the the history of humanity. And the piece that excites me the most about this technology, which is information-based to code genes, is that almost every day there's a new scientific paper published somewhere in the world explaining the function of a new protein, of a new— or new families of proteins, because biology is a system.

Of course.

If you think about it, we have incredible tailwinds. And I like to tell our team the following, which is we cannot comprehend the drugs that are going to come out of this technology 2 years, 5 years from now because the biology of those drugs is not known yet. But we have an incredible tailwind which is sequencing and the cost of sequencing dropping faster than Moore's Law, big data and what academia is doing, and most of the proteins coded in our genome, in our DNA, we still don't know what they do. We know what the protein is because we've been able to read DNA, But we do not know what they do in your body. And the day somebody discovered that, either tomorrow or in a year or in 2 years, we can make that as a drug in 5 minutes on the computer.

I mean, obviously, in the path to raising $5 billion, you must have had some setbacks. Were there— did you, you know, did you have any major setbacks or even near-death experiences where you thought, you know, I'm not sure this is going to work?

In the early days, yes. And most people don't know or have forgotten that our Series A was $2 million.

Okay.

And our B was $7 million, and our C was $25 million. So we did not start with a check of $400 million and say, go have fun and try to see if you can make something happen. It was kind of really grinding the whole thing, which I think is very good culture-wise, because we are very careful, and we still are very careful, despite we have many more zeros in our bank accounts. It's still the same team with the same mindset of return, of managing risk, of thinking about upside. We had in the early days a lot of things not working. If you ask my wife, she will tell you that she thought I was going to become clinically bipolar in the first year or 2, because I would literally walk home at night with that great new data and I would be jumping around. I could not sleep the whole night, I was so excited. about what it meant, and like, we're going to change the world, it's going to be amazing. And literally a week after, I would walk home and something had failed miserably, and I'm like, shit, it's never going to work. And I would have this incredible yo-yo of moods that thankfully over time kind of decreased because there's more and more things working. But in the early days, I mean, this was really cutting-edge science. Nobody had done mRNA drugs before. Everything we were trying was not working, and sometimes it's just because the mRNA was not made correctly, because we used to make mRNA in a totally uncontrolled way by hand, scientists making mRNA by hand, and then later on we were able to industrialize this with robots so that there was consistency in how you make it. So there's a lot of things like this that sometimes you would have bad results, not because the science was not working, but because the mRNA we used to run that experiment was Or it's in some of these things, right?

You're building it and you don't know if you're close to almost solving it or you're at the beginning of infinity of solving it, right? You're wandering through blind alleys looking for the treasure and you don't know how many alleys there are, if there's a treasure, if it's ever going to not be dark.

Oh, no, exactly. And it's funny because we have been at this for 10 years. There are scientific ideas that we have Nobel Prize winners that are part of our ecosystem that have told us this should work still don't work after 10 years. And I have no idea if they would never work ever in the history of humans or if they're going to work later but we just have not found a way to make it work yet. And there are other things that, again, Nobel Prize winners have told us don't waste your time, it will never work, and the team have made those things work. So it has been this incredible ambiguity, which is one of the things that for me as a CEO has been one of the hardest things to manage in the last, I would say, the first 5 years of a company, is that you have to make business decisions of capital allocation, you have to raise money and convince people that they should give you more capital because of the promise you have, and you have incredible ambiguity On what is going to work, what might work, and why you have no idea if it's going to work or not or when.

It's a pretty big leap from your early rounds to raising $5 billion. Was there a particular risk that you took out or a particular uncertainty that you made much more certain that all of a sudden people started to say, wow, the odds of success have radically improved here?

Yeah, I think obviously is getting the first product in the clinic and getting the first clinical data, because, you know, in this world things can work in mice and rats and monkeys, and then you might have very bad surprises in humans, safety-wise or efficacy-wise, because a human is not a monkey and a monkey is not a rat or a mouse. And so there was clearly a big de-risking point is when we did our first vaccine in the clinic, which started in December 2015, we got the data around the spring, of 2016, and the thing that was remarkable, which I knew it was a big moment in the company history, is 100% of the people who got the vaccine, it was done in Germany, they all made more antibodies in their blood, 100% of them, than is the bar set by the FDA for this type of virus. That was a very profound moment because it meant the first time we tried, in humans, we hit a home run. It was really, really remarkable. Since then, we have improved the technology by many, many folds, but it was very profound. It's like there's another moment, it must have been year 2 or 3 of the company, and we're working on making antibodies using mRNA, so not giving you a vaccine so that your immune system makes an antibody like the COVID vaccine, where we code the mRNA to code your body to make the antibody directly. And I remember we started to do this in a monkey, and we used at the time Herceptin, which is, you know, a breast cancer drug, very successful drug, and we used it just as a proof of concept, not to make a product. We could do a lot of things, we could learn from that system. And I remember one day the team comes to show me the data that the first time they tried, they made a functional antibody in a monkey. And the piece that was remarkable for me, that really kind of hit me hard that night, and I spent a lot of time reflecting on it, was first, Herceptin does not exist in nature. So we coded in the mRNA the monkeys to do a protein that they've never made in the history of monkeys on the planet. And the first time they did it correctly, we knew it was working because we took the blood from the monkeys, you put it on the cancer cells that Herceptin is supposed to bind to, and it will bind to it and just kill the cancer cells. So that was a very profound moment. The second piece that was totally insane for me as I was thinking about the company, we use the liver of monkeys to make the antibody, the Herceptin antibody. At least my liver, as far as I know, most probably your liver too, Mike, has never made antibody. Antibody is a very special type of protein that actually is is 2 different proteins coming together. It's made usually in your B cells, and I don't know if people even knew that your liver can make antibodies. The monkey livers have just made antibodies of a protein, an antibody that did not exist in nature. So those 2 things were in my head, kind of my head was spinning. The first time we gave them that instruction, they make it. It's a protein they've never made before, and they make it in a cell that is not supposed to make it. And it was all working beautifully.

So then, you know, you mentioned a couple of things I'd like to double-click on. Hopefully I'm not reading too much into them. One is kind of when you think about the difference between Moderna and a big pharma company, and not to cast any aspersions on big pharma, but you alluded to 2 things that I want to talk a little bit about. The first is the idea of needing to have either a deterministic plan Or kind of thinking in bets. And so, if I'm somebody inside of Pfizer, I have a business plan, my career might depend on meeting the conditions of that business plan. I've promised a certain set of output and outcomes for investment in my division or my product, even though it is highly uncertain. But it's got to affect my thinking about the risk I'm willing to take and willing to lean into. Whereas what you've described so far is interactions you have with your board is less about, I assert this will happen, and it's more about, let me try to clarify the bet I think we're making. And like, what does it look like if the bet's going our way? What does it look like if the bet's not going our way? Am I making any sense here?

Yeah, you are. And I think you're 100% correct. I would just add one dimension to your analysis, which is platform versus product. In the large pharma analog world, everybody is optimizing their product.

Right.

And products have no correlation. I would be very willing to do something, including kill a product, if it was going to help the platform. Because we think about the platform as the goose, and we have a lot of golden eggs coming out of the goose, which are the drugs. But this is very different from the pharmaceutical industry, which is an analog industry. So what you will see at Moderna is this desire to invest in science, to grow the platform possibility of all the families of drugs you will do over time. And it always surprises people that join the company from Big Pharma is how every time they present something that is the optimization of that drug, we challenge them, okay, what does it mean for the rest of the portfolio and for the platform? And sometimes we ask them to not do something that would be in the best interests of that drug Because it is not in the interest of a platform over the next 20 years.

So I guess the platform buys you optionality. Every investment you make in the platform buys you optionality, which has a long-term recurring upside potential. Whereas if you do something for one product at the expense of the platform, you may get one upside hit from that product, but it's not the trade-off and the option value isn't worth it.

Exactly, and to go one step further is in a world where 90% of the things you work on fail in pharma.

Right.

The appetite in pharma to invest another, let's say, $5 million on a project that's a single analog product is very small because you have a 90% chance that that $5 million is going to go into the garbage, whereas us, our willingness to invest on very foundational science is almost infinite. Because the way we think about it is if that experiment the team is working on to get mRNA to go into a new cell type, to open a new vertical for the company— think about vaccine as just one of the verticals, rare disease as another vertical— if the team is right, the improvement in the platform feature capabilities we can use for all the drugs we're gonna do forever.

Right, right.

Doing business forever makes it very, very powerful, which is sometimes we're willing to invest amounts of money that I think a lot of pharma executives will have a little of a heartburn thinking about the amount of money going to what they will think is a single project. But for us, it's not a project, we're investing again in the goose, the platform, because if we believe it has a high chance of working, or even if there's only a 20% chance of working, you know, if it's going to increase The number of drugs we can do by 5x over the next 50 years, you can do the NPV of that very quickly. You don't have to be a math genius or finance genius to realize that it's just gigantic.

So then just fast-forwarding a bit then, it's early 2020 and COVID hits. What happens? When did you first get a call from somebody or be like, oh my gosh, this is going to be big? What was kind of the thing that ignited this crazy activities of 2020 for you guys?

Sure. So it went in phases. So I first learned about a new virus getting people hospitalized in China between Christmas 2019 and New Year. The virus had no name. We didn't even know, by the way, it was a virus. It was described as a pathogen agent. It could have been a bacteria. Like, you know, you get pneumonia, it's not because of virus, it's because of bacteria. And so goes a few days, we learn it's a virus, goes a few more days, we learn it's a coronavirus, goes a few more days, it's SARS-CoV-2. The sequence is put online, I think around January 10th, by the Chinese, and we work on it in partnership with the NIH with the idea that this is most probably like SARS or MERS, an outbreak. The word pandemic had crossed nobody's lips at the time that I'm aware of, and I talked to a lot of people at the time. But we thought, look, we might be helpful by having a vaccine that could help people, at least healthcare workers around the site of the outbreak, and it might be also a good proof test of a platform because we thought we could get into the clinic from sequence to clinic in around 60 days. Just to give you a sense, it took Dr. Fauci's team, which is one of the best vaccinology teams in the world, For SARS, a few years ago, 20 months to go from sequence to starting a clinical trial. It took us 2 months, 60 days. And then I go to Davos at the World Economic Forum in the week of January 20th, 2020, and between arriving on the Monday and the Saturday, a lot of things happened, including the Chinese closing Wuhan, I think on Wednesday or Thursday of that week, And by Saturday morning, through all the infectious disease doctors I was talking to, the data I was looking through in China, including non-public data that I was getting through friends and contacts and so on— you know, I've been in infectious disease for 25 years, that was quite helpful— January of 2020, and I woke up in sweat Saturday morning, must have been the 25th or something like this of January, at 4 AM, and I'm like, oh shit, it's gonna be a pandemic like 1918. Like, it was so limpid in my head, and so I changed my plan. I was supposed to go to Germany. I take one flight direct from Zurich to Washington, D.C., meet Tony Fauci at 8 o'clock in his office, go to see BARDA, go to see DARPA, you know, Department of Defense, and went to FDA that afternoon asking them, hey, how do we get a vaccine approved over fall? And so then I had to convince my team. Some team members on my executive committee took a nanosecond when I put the pieces together that I had in my head, and they came to the same conclusion I came to, which is it was going to be a pandemic. A couple on my team took a week or two to get there. I spent a lot of time initially to get people to get aligned, because of course without my team there was no way we could execute on this totally 90-degree, you know, right pivot of a company. Because you need to know for context, at the time we had around 20 products in development. There's no way you're going to do a pandemic-chasing virus, you know, part-time. And at the time, we had only $800 million in the bank, as you know, because it's all public information. We invested, thanks to the US government and Operation Warp Speed, which has been fantastic, we invested $1 billion just in clinical studies.

And so what was that like? I mean, that had to have been to put it in minor terms, stressful time. Like, how did you even— I mean, I could imagine there were periods of time where it felt like you had to just work 24/7, and even that's not enough. Like, what was it like inside of Moderna when you're kind of in this race against time to come up with this vaccine?

So it was crazy. We ended up working 7 days a week for most of the year with managing, you know, people's burnout, own sanity. You know, I would go run at 4 in the morning just to get some fresh oxygen in my brain and try to stay fit for the whole process. It was one of those moments in life, I guess, where the task is so big and so much rests on you giving it your very best shot, that everybody pulled together in an extraordinary way. I'm so proud of the team. Not once I had to ask people to work more or to do more. I mean, the sacrifice the team has done, because it was clear to everybody, you know, that's one of the amazing things of working in this industry that we do, which is because it was so profound, it was impacting everybody. Now, we were locked down like everybody else. Actually, we sent the company home to work remote for people who could, not in the lab, of course, not in manufacturing, of course, but just to reduce density, to protect the people that had to be in the buildings, we sent everybody home a couple weeks before Massachusetts shut down, because we're in the middle of a virus, we're seeing the data, tracking the data daily, and we're like, it's going to be so bad, we need to send people home so that we keep as many people isolated as we can, and we reduce density of those that have to come to the company because they cannot do their job from home. But the piece that was very interesting, and I guess my personality helped a little bit— my wife would tell you, under extreme stress, Stéphane is laser-focused. And the thing that was kind of easy about my job last year is that what I had to do was very clear. I had to do this COVID-19 vaccine, and it was basically 2 big components, if I oversimplify: the clinical trials, and that we move as fast as we could without taking any safety risk, because taking safety risk on people going into trial was a no-go, both for us as a company from obvious ethics reasons, and for the regulator. The FDA was very, very careful to make sure we're moving as fast as we could, and the way we were able to go so fast is, of course, the technology and the fact that we were able to work with the agency to do things as much in parallel as we could. So if it was just money risk, instead of doing things one after the other, which you would normally do in pharma because most things fail, so you go step by step so you don't waste too much money— that's why Operation Warp Speed from the government was extraordinarily enabling— money was not an issue. They gave us a billion dollars, said money is not an issue, so many lives are at stake, the economy is at stake, so How much money do you need? It doesn't happen a lot in your life where somebody says, how much money do you need? And say, can I pick any number that I can justify? Say, yes, just justify it and we'll give it to you. Wow.

It reminds me a lot of— I read a paper in the late '80s that described this notion of hot teams. And the example they used was the NASA moon landing. And they said that these teams were sometimes observed to be 1,000 times more productive than that which would've been typical. It reminds me of what you're describing. Sometimes you get a situation where the goal is super important and you can make it happen. And it's like people just do extraordinary things.

Yeah. And I have a very silly example, but speaks so loudly of this, is one day we get a piece of equipment in our factory in Massachusetts. The equipment gets into the warehouse and it cannot fit in the door to get into the room where it's supposed to be used. So there's a team that starts to think about what can we do and so on, and there's one of our old-timer engineers who literally walked to the room where they have all the tools and so on. He comes back literally with a sledgehammer and he starts taking the wall down. We're gonna get it through the wall and I'm gonna have facilities come to build a new wall. And he just decided like this, he didn't ask his boss, because again, this is why Having such a clear mission where I was very clear to the company, every hour counts. As long as it's ethical and legal, everything's on the table. If you know what to do, just do it. If you need help or if you need to brainstorm, ask for help. This is not the time to be heroes by yourself. Speed is the essence. So the key is gonna be impact and outcome. If you need help, just raise your hand and say, I need help.

Another thing that we touched on earlier that I think is worth talking about in some more depth as well, You had mentioned that a lot of the times in traditional pharma, when you'd been a CEO in that industry or other companies that are in the industry, that they have these forecasts for their drugs and their pipeline and things like that. But there's a term that we use called backcasting that feels kind of apt for what Moderna does, which is, by definition, you try to visualize a radically different future from that which would be forecasted from the present. And so, as a result, you— it's like you time travel to a different future, but then you have to connect that different future back to the present. But it's a different— it's a different thought process. Rather than projecting what's already happened and move forward, you project something radically different that could happen, and you work your way backwards and ask if that different radical future could connect to the present in any way. And then like, what's the next step to de-risk that different future? And that feels a lot like what you guys did.

Yeah, no, 100%. I mean, we like to call this play the movie backwards. So, we spend a lot of time imagining what the future could be. And we don't think about one future, we think about scenarios based on the hypotheses that you have. And then for each of those, we play backward to say, if you are intellectually honest, what needs to happen when, where this can happen. Not that it will happen, but can happen.

Mm-hmm.

And I think it's this tension between vision and execution that I think for me is really important. I call it dynamic range, because if you can only do strategy and vision, but you are not sweating the detail of execution, it will never happen. You can do execution and no strategy and vision, then it's going to be very linear, looking backward and from the past into the future, which is not going to change the world. And so I think if you look across industries, companies that have totally reinvented the world as we know it, and that has happened for literally a couple hundred years, the pace of that innovation has just accelerated exponentially lately, as we all know. I think this is a group of people that think backward and not forward, and that are obsessed about execution. Because as I like to say, vision without execution is just hallucination.

And it's funny, I like to say that time travel requires travel. You might be a futurist and just be pontificating about the future. But to me, the great founders that create these breakthrough radically different futures, It's not enough to just know that future is possible. You have to come back to the present and move people to that different future of your design. And so, it's, you know, there's 2 parts to it, right? There's discovering the secret about the future, but then there's coming back to the present and moving the early believers to that different future. And they're on the path they're on. So, they got to move to a different path because of what you do or say or persuade them to do.

Yeah. And I find that in a lot of places, because of large company structure, priorities, growth rates, and so on, I think a lot of times people lose their ability to imagine what could be. And when they do, you know, somebody sticks them on the head or whatever, you don't do that. And so we all become very kind of pre-wired for what can be and what cannot be. And I think that's really the power of entrepreneurship, and I think this country is, in my opinion, the best country on the planet to invent the future, is this ability of people to feel they can invent a different future using technology and/or science, and then convince capital to back them up on a risk-adjusted basis, and investment, and bigger and bigger investment as things are de-risked and de-risked. And that's what's really, I think is the most exciting thing for me, and you see the same around the climate, you see the same around space race, and so on and so forth, is this ability to say, what if we could do XYZ? And that's why, if you look at it, a lot of time, you know, it has to be people from the industry or who understand the technology, because if not, how can you make such a bold move? As I like to say, if I knew nothing about engineering and computers and biology, A lot of things that I've believed to be possible, I could not have believed those because if I asked people to tell me what's possible on my team, they would have all been thinking linearly, looking backward, and not inventing the future. And I think that's what is limiting a lot of time. As you think about a lot of industries, you see a lot of leaders in those big companies that do not have the technical insight of the industry. It's not, of course, always the case. Some CEOs have very deep insight in the industry, but some CEOs you see sometimes have a finance background in the industry, or they have a legal background, or whatever. Nothing wrong with that, but if you think about it, if you have to invent the future that doesn't exist today, if you don't have the ability to connect the dots on the science, the business, the customer needs, and so on, which is what the CEO is supposed to be doing a lot, you are not able to imagine a future based on the assumptions that you have that you can then pressure test and try to rally people, say, look, if this is true and this is true and this is true and this is true, then that's gonna happen.

What was it like? What, like, this thing ended up working, you know, this vaccine. And I remember, I remember my son getting the vaccine and, and, uh, you know, he's kind of got his Moderna, uh, vaccine card. And I remember getting it too and just being like, In the line and it's my turn. It's the first shot. And I'm like, hallelujah. And I've, I've never wanted to be jabbed in the arm so much in my life. And I know so many friends who had that reaction. They're just like, oh my God, we're on the other side of this. You know, it's, it's, it's not going to defeat us. We're going to defeat it. It's just a matter of time. It must have been. I mean, I'm sure that there's, you know, you're running, jogging at 4 a.m. and working like crazy 7 days a week. But were there points along the way where you're just like, whoa, this is legendary?

So I never thought it was legendary per se, but the few times that were very emotional, I can count at least 3 last year. One was when I heard about the phase 1 data that we were making a lot of antibody, way above what infected people had. in their blood in all the people in the study, including the elderly. That was already a big de-risking that, oh shit, it might be working really well. It was again a quiet moment at home. It was late at night one night, but I have to say, you know, I shed a tear or two out of, you know, relief and happiness, for it meant, you know, we still have a serious chance of helping a lot of people. The second time, when I heard on the Sunday afternoon the efficacy of a vaccine in phase 3 in the November timeframe, you know, 94% efficacy, which was totally a home run, and that was also a big moment. I remember, you know, getting my wife and my girls together, and I think we all cried together out of joy and relief, and then is when I got my shot. So I got my shot with my wife the same day. I was holding her hand, the nurse was super cool, and because the nurse got the vaccine before us, and they were super thankful, and they were cool to put 2 chairs next to each other. I was holding my wife's hand, and I was looking at her, and so on. And what was really profound and super special for me is I was thinking about all the families, you know, like yours. I was thinking about my friends, my friends' friends, that we're going to have hope to go back to a normal life, And after 10 years of sweating it and, you know, 12 months of running nonstop, this was a— at the human level, it was a very, very special moment.

So then I guess I'll just close by just saying, you know, both to you, Stephane, and the Moderna employees and team, just thanks for taking the risk.

Well, thank you so much. We've started this company 10 years ago. believing it could change the history of medicine and impact millions. Of course, we never thought we were going to be facing a virus in a pandemic ever, but for me, it just kind of sends a lot of hope that I think that we as a species, if we work together, if we align on a common enemy, we can do amazing things. And I hope this will serve as an example That others can take in their own field to make the world a better place.

Damn straight. All right. Well, thanks for taking the time, Stephane. I really appreciate it. I think it's going to be a good one.

Thank you for having me, Mike.

Thanks for listening to the Starting Greatness Podcast. If you've enjoyed this episode or you're new to the show, I hope you listen to our past interviews with legendary founders like Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, the Instagram founders, and Keith Rabois. I'd love to have you subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss an episode. And if you like the show, I'd be grateful if you leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. You can also follow me on Twitter @m2jr and subscribe to our newsletter for exclusive content and events at greatness.substack.com. Until we catch up again, I hope you'll never let go of your inner power to do great things in whatever matters to you. Thank you for listening.