Noubar Afeyan
Founder & CEO, Flagship Pioneering. On 2 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestorengineer@NoubarAfeyan ↗LinkedIn ↗flagshippioneering.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Noubar Afeyan is the founder and CEO of life sciences venture firm Flagship Pioneering. He is also the co-founder and board chairman of Moderna.
2shows
3appearances
32statements
9resolved
6supported
0contradicted
67%fully supported
Everything Noubar Afeyan said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Afeyan: Traditional cancer staging has no basis in underlying biology
“Like right now, people say stage one cancer, stage two cancer, as though there's such a thing. The medical profession has created stages every once in a while, they change them. It's a joke. That's got nothing to do with underlying science and biology. No offe…”
Afeyan: Molecular microstaging can prevent clinical trial failures using AI
“I think we now have the tools to be able to, in a very Kind of molecular way, microstage, what I call our biostage disease on a trajectory that isn't four stages, but it's 75,000 stages if you want. And the key for that is that you can then look at what mechan…”
Afeyan: Single-asset biotechs face mass extinction due to Chinese competition
“And in an environment like this, There's almost like a mass extinction event going on, unfortunately, as we speak for a lot of these single asset companies accentuated by the recent bets that China has made both centrally, governmentally, and in the form of re…”
Afeyan: The romantic 'hero founder' startup folklore is largely unnecessary
“There's a lot of folklore in the startup world, which I'd say emphasizes the role of the individual. There's a hero kind of notion that's created, you know, against all odds. And here we were claiming that conceiving, creating, growing companies could be the o…”
Afeyan: Precision in guessing what works is unimportant when pioneering new fields
“The accuracy with which you have to guess what's going to work Is not at all important. Because we get into these brand new areas, it's wide open to find where value lies, right? Imagine if we waited three, four years as people did, or 10 years in the case of …”
Afeyan: Parallel entrepreneurship forces founders to systematize reproducible venture processes
“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.”
Afeyan: Most successful entrepreneurs secretly recognize chance drove their outcomes
“Most successful entrepreneurs who've done, you know, kind of like unexpected things also secretly worship at the altar of chance, because they also realize that at the end of the day, their explanations of what happened. Do not suffice for actually what happen…”
Afeyan: Renewable fuel innovators cannot command a price premium over commodity diesel
“The price of diesel, whether it's renewable or not, is the price of diesel. The price of carbon when we started was 50 bucks a ton, when we ended it was five. And When we started, the U S was energy dependent. And when we were done, the U S was cushing with en…”
Afeyan: Science-driven adjacent innovations face an overlooked risk of commoditization
“In the science driven, technology driven space, I think adjacencies have their own problem, which is the risk of commoditization, which is a risk they usually don't take into account.”
Afeyan: When Flagship started Moderna, no other companies were developing mRNA therapeutics
“MRNA, which was our 18th company that became Moderna is a good example of this. There was no mRNA drug or vaccine before. There was nobody working on it. When we started, there were academic labs that had worked on it and given up.”
Afeyan: Generate has over 15 computationally designed antibody programs
“Generate has more than 15 different, you know, computationally designed antibody programs, some in the clinic, some advancing to the clinic.”
Afeyan: Investors undervalue platform biotech by ignoring correlated option value
“Second, investors don't properly value platforms because they don't give assigned value to the correlated option value of one program that becomes de-risked based on three other programs, and so you don't get the credit And you get the deduction because it's n…”
Afeyan: Long biotech lifecycles prevent serial entrepreneurship, forcing internal talent creation
“In biotech, these companies have a half-life or a life cycle of, say, 10 years, 15 years. So people don't do one company after another. If they do one company after 1015 years and they succeed, they stop doing it. So you have to create the talent.”
Afeyan: Nobody took mRNA research seriously as recently as 2016
“Five years ago, nobody was taking MRNA research seriously”
Afeyan: 2,000 people received Moderna mRNA before COVID-19 trials
“Before a single vaccine for coronavirus that we tested, we had already 2000 people Who had received mRNA from us.”
Afeyan: Moderna designed the mRNA-1273 vaccine sequence in two days
“And to the time when we had the computer-generated sequence of the RNA, that is essentially today mRNA-twelve-seventy-three, was two days.”
Afeyan: Moderna released early vaccine data to satisfy public disclosure obligations
“Well, we indeed, in May, we indeed did come out and say at a very high level that we had some encouraging results, and people attacked us every which way for having said that, because they basically said, well, that's doing science by press release and many ot…”
Afeyan: Early immune interventions may shield against flu, coronavirus, and HIV
“Because I think that we're learning enough about the immune system that if we intervene early enough and broadly enough, we may well create a shield, a protective shield against these hyper variable viruses like influenza, like Corona, like rhinovirus that cau…”
Afeyan: Flagship uses generative AI to generate novel proteins and products
“Generative AI is one hell of a technology for emergence, which we're using for that in pretty cool ways these days, whether it's emerging new proteins or emerging new consumer products.”
Afeyan: Flagship engineered photosynthetic bacteria to produce diesel at Joule
“One of the most advanced ways we could make carbon neutral liquid fuels was to engineer photosynthetic bacteria that usually grows in the depths of oceans. Really cool bacterium that sees a little bit of photons. We engineered these things to make diesel. It c…”
Afeyan: Warp Speed-Style Advance Market Commitments Would Work Outside Pandemics
“And by the way, a key thing that Operation Warp Speed did was to set a value outcome for people who tried. Basically the government said we will buy X many doses at this price. And so we could go to investors and say, listen, if we can, we don't know what the …”
Afeyan: All 110 Flagship Pioneering companies are platform companies
“Every single of the 110 companies we've been involved with for 25 years are a platform. Every single one. There's no exception to that.”
Afeyan: Replaced himself as CEO the day after closing $1 million
“So what I decided to do is I kept talking to people until I found a firm to invest with me as the initial CEO, which is what I had been for the whole time, the year and a half before. And the day after we closed the million dollars, I went to them and I said, …”
Afeyan: Celera sequenced the genome because the government project was too slow
“We needed to sequence the genome first, and we at first thought maybe the government can, the government's effort at the time would suffice, but it was going fairly slowly, and so we launched a, what It became a competitive effort, although it wasn't fully int…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Noubar's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Flagship Pioneering | 1 | 16 | 67% 4/6 | full record on How I Built This → |
 NO PRIORSLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Flagship Pioneering | 2 | 16 | 67% 2/3 | full record on No Priors → |