Predicting Moderna’s success from far away | Lavina Talukdar & Juan Enriquez | TEDxBoston

🎥 Apr 11, 2022 📺 TEDxTalks ⏱ 19m

It felt like I was training for this all my life, Predicting Moderna’s success from half way around the world / A Truly Moderna Woman? Biotech, Communication, Future, Innovation, Investment, Life, Women in business Lavina Talukdar works as a Senior VP Head of Investor Relations at Moderna, which is a Manufacturing company with an estimated 2,700 employees; and founded in 2010. They are part of the Finance team within the Finance Department and their management level is VP-Level. Lavina graduated from Stony Brook University in 1995 and is currently based in Cambridge, United States. Juan Enri...

Watch on YouTube

About Lavina Talukdar

In a 2022 TEDxBoston talk, Lavina Talukdar, Senior Vice President and Head of Investor Relations at Moderna, discussed her career path and her early conviction in the company. She stated that she was tasked with making the first direct investment recommendation for a sovereign wealth fund and that Moderna was her first choice, a process she said took ten months of due diligence. Talukdar described herself as a contrarian who gravitates toward "off-the-beaten-path companies." She noted that after the fund invested in Moderna, she saw the company was looking for an investor relations representative on LinkedIn and thought, "I could do that and I could probably do it really well." During the talk, Talukdar emphasized the importance of communicating a vision to investors, stating that "capital is important because before you are successful you want to make sure that you can take this technology and keep moving it forward." She also described data as "currency," citing Moderna's use of data to expand its pipeline. Looking ahead, she said she would place her next bet on companies working on the "science of aging and longevity."

Source: AI-verified profile updated from Lavina Talukdar's recent appearances. Browse all interviews →

Transcript (29 segments)

Interviewer0:10

And I'll tell you why I said no to this. Because usually when I see somebody having an investor relations title, I say no, we're not going to talk about investor relations for a company. And then I started hearing about what it was like to be born in Bangladesh, and then to have a father and mother give up everything and move to New York City on 42nd Street, and start an Indian restaurant on 42nd Street back when 42nd Street wasn't the coolest place on the planet, and the safest place on the planet. And then she went pre-med. For an immigrant parent, having a child who becomes a distinguished doctor is a big dream. And then she got waylaid.

Lavina Talukdar1:11

Science, and in particular biology, I didn't see myself as being the bedside physician, but was really enamored by all of the science and really the digitalness at a very early age of what we can learn about ourselves in the biology. And so in eighth grade, I remember learning about the central dogma, and thought one day someone was going to figure out how to make medicines that really worked with your body and brought the body back to health. And that's back in eighth grade, a very, very long time ago, and I was on this quest to actually find...

Interviewer2:10

We're going to do this as a quick, TV-like style. So what waylays you from pre-med? You're on your way to pre-med, and then what happens?

Lavina Talukdar2:22

And then, you know, I took the MCAT, I did what you needed to do to actually get into medical school, and I thought to myself, but there's a whole world out there. Why don't I go explore? So I took some time off, and I ended up, as a first position, at a portfolio management company, which I didn't even know what portfolio management was at the time. And yet here I was working with investors, trying to understand how the craft was done at a very early age.

Working at Fiduciary Trust, doing this job as a portfolio management assistant, I learned how to actually look out for the telltale signs of companies that would potentially become successful. And so the president of the company had asked me, because he said, 'Don't you have some sort of a medical background? Why don't you try out for a small cap analyst position learning about biotechnology companies?' This is the late 90s, and in the late 90s, it was all about big pharma, the behemoths of the world, Merck and Pfizer, but there were some small companies making their...

Interviewer4:11

I was marrying everything: the love of biology and marrying everything I needed to do to get into medical school with the actual decision-making processes now of identifying those companies that were going to change medicine. So you're so successful at this that then you get hired away by another big financial institution. And you're so successful at that place that after having worked in the World Trade Center, you're hired away and you go live where? There are a few steps in between, but I go and I live in the Middle East, in Abu Dhabi.

Lavina Talukdar5:11

I thought it was actually a joke because they said, 'You know, we know so much about you. We'd love to have you come over and meet with some of the folks that you would be working with, but we can't tell you who they are.' And so, very funny. I took the call and I said, 'Is this a joke?' I really did think that one of my friends was playing a practical joke on me. But nonetheless, they were very persistent, kept calling back, and I agreed to the battery of tests that I had gone through: an IQ exam, a psychological assessment, 300 plus questions delving into my personality.

They wanted to convince you, the applicant, that that was the place you should be. And so they invited me and my family to go over and meet with the other folks I would be working with, and of course see the country and see what life would be like. So we get off the plane, my family and I, in June of 2015... 16, at this point in time. 2015, sorry. And it's hot. Very, very hot. And I was thinking, 'How am I going to work here? I hope they have air conditioning.' Thank goodness every part of the world, every part of Abu Dhabi, is air-conditioned. But I met with the people, amazing people.

It is the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi now, and they put that money into companies that would have a massive impact on the world.

Interviewer7:25

So you've got a new job, you've got new bosses, and you do the safe thing, right? You go to them and you say, 'Why don't we invest in the equivalent of Pfizer or one of the big pharmas?' Is that what you did, or what did you tell them as your first thing to do?

Lavina Talukdar7:42

Yeah. So if anyone who knows me knows that I am pretty much a contrarian, and so I gravitate toward things which would disprove what everybody else had already accepted as truth. And so I gravitated toward those types of companies. And I hadn't known about Moderna prior to actually living in Abu Dhabi because they were still a private company with tons of naysayers. No one had believed that this company would have cracked the code and actually make mRNA, which is a very fragile molecule, actually work as a medicine or a vaccine, as many of you now know. And so I was curious: what is it about this company that's going to really change the way...

The fund would make for a company. And so Moderna was my very first choice. It took me 10 months, the equivalent of having a baby basically, to do the due diligence and make sure that I first convinced myself, and then can convince the powers that be, the sheikhs of Abu Dhabi, that this is the company that they should invest in.

Interviewer9:40

And then once you're very successful at that, then you decide to give that all up and change your career once again. And what do you do then?

Lavina Talukdar9:51

So it's a funny story because obviously we invested in Moderna. I often got on LinkedIn during my mornings to kind of catch up on all of the life science happenings in the States. And I had seen, as I was getting on LinkedIn, this position pop up that Moderna was looking for this IR representative. And the first thought that went through my head is, 'I could do that, and I could probably do it really, really well. And you know what, they need me.' That was my thought, because the company is private, the company has many folks that don't yet believe in it, and yet there was this unbelievable story brewing on what they were about to accomplish.

For anyone else. And so I whipped up an email to Stéphane Bancel, who's the CEO, and I said to him in that email, 'You know, we have a great working relationship. You know that I am a massive believer in what this company is trying to accomplish. And so I only want you to think about this and make this decision on whether or not I'd make a good fit for the company only if you truly believe it to be true, because I'm super vested in this company and I want to make sure that you put the right person in this role.' And I'm sure he thought about it a few hours later because he does get up so early in the morning. I'd received an...

Move halfway across the world again, leaving my flip-flops because I lived on the beach in Abu Dhabi, for snowshoes in freezing Cambridge. And that's how I found myself there.

Interviewer12:24

And that was how many months before the pandemic?

Lavina Talukdar12:28

This is now late 2018, early 2019. So I didn't have the foresight that the pandemic was going to happen, but I did think if there was any company that would have a solution for infectious diseases, for cancer, for rare diseases, it was going to be Moderna at some future date.

Interviewer12:51

So the other person who was supposed to speak before was the Chief Medical Officer for Moderna. He said, 'Take risks to change the world.' And the first thing that the Chief Medical Officer did in his first introduction to the company is he put up a slide, black with white letters, that said, 'How Moderna is going to save the world.' And that's the kind of community we have. And it's just so important because it's not what you make, it's what you bet your career and your life and your future on. And how you can keep taking these risks time and again behind your convictions is a pretty extraordinary story. And a lot of us are here in this room without a mask because of your work.

And then let's talk about what you see on the horizon that you think is really interesting, and then we will go on to the next.

Lavina Talukdar14:19

Sure. So, you know, I'm an avid believer in the convergence of technologies. And really standing on the shoulders of giants that came before us to then use that information and technology to actually progress forward. And that's something that Moderna did phenomenally. They always have asked the question, 'Why do we have to accept what is known to be true? Why?'

For instance, in actually looking at the interaction of the mRNA molecule and the ribosome, and how making proteins would matter, because if you think about it, mRNAs are a very fundamental molecule. It is one of the molecules for the basis of life, and yet it's transient. A very important characteristic, so that if you were to use it to help human health, could you reverse it should things go wrong? Because before you know that it could be an important molecule, you wanted to make sure that you can reverse what you might not have wanted to do in the first place.

Making a brand new technology that was going to unseat other technologies that had come before it is something that has to be recognized in the management team that's taking it forward, and all of that was there. They also understood the importance of capital. So this is where the IR person in me comes out, but capital is important because before you are successful, you want to make sure that you can take this technology and keep moving it forward. So communicating where you think the future, the vision of the future is, is incredibly important so that your investors can also come along for the ride and make sure that that future does actually happen.

On is something that sometimes in the midst of it all, as you're trying to figure out the new technology and the science, people often forget, and then we all lose out because that breakthrough couldn't happen because of a lack of capital.

Interviewer17:27

So in closing, what should the next ambitious person here or watching us bet their career on?

Lavina Talukdar17:37

So again, the convergence of technologies today. One of the things that I often look for is the accumulation of data, because data is currency, if you think about it.

But it was the data and that use of data that helped them expand their pipeline. So where else are we seeing data accumulation and these network effects where you can have data help parlay new discoveries? And I think that we're seeing it everywhere, with uses of technologies like machine learning and AI amongst many, many companies across industries. One of those industries is in understanding the interactions between plant biochemicals and human biology, and what that can do to actually increase the quality of our lives.

We're on this path to the future where Moderna is part of the solution to help solve healthcare. And I know healthcare is a lot of things, but to really solve sickness, then where's the next thing that we should be looking for? I think it's the quality of life. And so any of these companies working on the science of aging, there's some labs right here in Boston that are working on the science of aging and longevity. I think that is something that I would put my next bet on.

Interviewer19:49

Thank you.