In Conversation with Noubar Afeyan

Sure. Well, first thanks for having me. It's a pretty serious podcast and it's called Gravity. I imagine at Cambridge it must be Newtonian gravity, not just seriousness, but I'll try to not be too serious. So I was born in Lebanon. I was the youngest of three brothers, which is a big advantage because you get to watch the mistakes that your older brothers make and you try to benefit from them. So I had a lot of learning early in life from their experiences as well. We were a close family. You know, Lebanon was an interesting place because it's very cosmopolitan and people in school you basically, you know, learn four languages and you were pushed pretty hard. It was not a specific school. It was just every school and I realized later in life just how hard it was and how nobody knew about how hard it was. So, people just did whatever they kind of got away with, which was, you know, make sure that you learn a lot of things. So, at 13 years old, I went through a pretty big life-changing event. Civil war broke out in Beirut and my family after a few months of that war essentially chose to, to my father's late father's credit and mother's, to escape basically. So we literally sought refugee status in Canada which was kind enough to take our family. At the time they weren't taking people living in Lebanon, civil war it was not something that had really gotten to a dire situation but they accepted us. So we moved to Montreal which was a big life change in the sense that for, well first seeing many many months of rocket fire and buildings blow up etc at those years is kind of only fun for a short period of time and after a while you start realizing what humans can do but you know I wasn't old enough to really reflect on it at the time so I went to Montreal which was this incredible gift not because of just being in Canada and Montreal but because it was a displacement and much of the rest of my life has been kind of seeking such displacements and being comfortable with dislocation which is something everybody wants to avoid but actually turns out to be a huge advantage and we'll come back to that. So there I kind of got to experience the new snow, you know, minus 28 degrees centigrade weeks not days, and you know different cultures different behaviors but adapting and kind of trying to figure out how to do the best I could caused me to eventually end up at MIT. And so, you know, I would say in thinking back, much of my upbringing has influenced what I do, what I learned. And yeah, I think probably the biggest one being just having a sense of the singular role education plays. You know, I think sometimes people think it's nature or nurture. I think in my case it was a lot of nurture. I do think that I kind of got myself to define happiness early in life with doing well in school and then eventually doing well in whatever I was doing. And if I didn't, I think I would have probably not put in that effort and so it was an interesting upbringing.

I don't think I thought about what led me to do what I do now till probably I was in my 40s. Now 62 years old. Until then it just felt like I was trying to climb and climb and climb and not climb socially but climb scientifically or technologically or entrepreneurially. And it's not clear to me why I was doing that other than there was a mountain there and I kind of just kept climbing and I never really looked down. At some point people forced me to say what I'm doing and why I'm doing it and I actually had to think about it. And truth be told I didn't think a lot about it. You kind of while I was doing it I was barely hanging on. One of the great experiences I had which I think is important for your audience if they're young graduate students postdocs is to realize what an advantage it is to early in your life expose yourself to otherwise things that much older people do because by the time you get older it'll be old hat to you and if you wait till then it actually you have no advantage. So at 24 years old when I finished my PhD I started a company which was completely not what people did at the time. Today, lots of young people start companies. In 1987, you know, the average prototypical startup was a 55-year-old male having worked 30 years in a large company, very American, several generations at that. So, there was no immigrants, no women, and no young people. It's like that was equal discrimination kind of in that regard. But by trying that out and making mistakes and you know when you're young you also should care less about the mistakes you make than when you get older. Most young people think their mistakes are really grave. Talk about gravity. They're actually pale in comparison to if you make that same mistake much later. So the sooner you make peace with the fact that out of mistakes come successes the better. But unfortunately most people think they're supposed to kind of get a lot of experience before they are allowed to make mistakes. Quite the opposite, if you don't have a lot of experience people chalk up the mistakes to learning and if you could take advantage of that one thing I learned it's a very big benefit. So I don't know that I look at those things kind of as consciously now to propel what I'm doing because it's become part of who I am and my journey but I certainly have tried to understand what about and this notion I mentioned earlier about dislocation is an important one. So you know I give a lot of talks about immigrants because in the US immigration has kind of become quite a controversial issue and being an immigrant myself and recognizing just how fundamental immigrants are to what it is to be American. You know I gave a talk very recently two weeks ago and I was invited to address a group of 250 people who got naturalized at the event that I was invited to speak at at the Kennedy Library in Boston. And what I said to people, my Islam experience, I believe very strongly that the US is not called any kind of a land, England, Finland, Ireland, Scotland, all these lands, Switzerland, the US is not called, it's not even called Greenland even though it wants to, but in fact if it was called the land it would probably be immigrant land because there's really nothing other than immigrants there. It's just a question of when. And yet it's amazing how generation after generation people want to shut down immigration even though that's all they are. So that immigrant notion for me is important to understand also if you want to innovate because I've come to view innovation as just intellectual immigration. It's all it is. And if you've gone through physical immigration, if you've exposed yourself to uncomfortable situations, school abroad, internships abroad, forcing yourself to live two years in a totally foreign place or move there, it's an incredible advantage because you realize it's not so bad. You realize that your innate advantages of being in your home place are more than is needed. In fact, they might hold you back from doing things that might seem unconventional. And if you get comfortable by adapting to the unconventional, you have a huge advantage over people who are not in innovation because innovation is just the creation of the unconventional of the new. And so that is a super important thing. I don't know that I'd be doing these things if I not just if I stayed in Lebanon, but had I not immigrated physically. So if I was born in the US, I don't think I'd be doing this.

I mean, look, I'm again, it's hard to self-diagnose and I don't let other people diagnose me either. So, it's kind of a, you know, it's going to be figured out in hindsight, I guess. But I would say that in my personal life, I'm more affected by my family's circumstances and I've talked a lot about that. So I'm a descendant of survivors of the Armenian genocide 100 years ago or so. I happen to live in the room of a person whose brothers were taken away to be killed not once but twice in the 1915-18 era. And she was my great aunt. So my grandfather's sister and then 3 days after I was born I'm told I was moved into her room and I lived in her room till I was 21 years old. So being living with somebody when you're born who's 72 and when you leave the room at 92 it's an incredible feeling. And in particular she spoke five languages. She read a book a day. She was an incredible human being. Really unbelievable. Really kind of the idol of my life. And what I kind of realized from her in the stories that I heard is just what a kind of a gift just being given a second chance to exist is for people who almost get wiped out. This is not a unique feeling to Armenians, Jews, Rwandans, many others have gone through this. And that did affect me quite a bit later in my life because I realized that much of what I do I could kind of channel to be expressions of gratitude. So we founded 10 years ago among many other projects but one global project called the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative. You might say what does a biochemical engineer turn entrepreneur turn whatever executive have to do with philanthropy let alone humanitarian philanthropy and the answer is I kind of felt this debt of gratitude which instead of paying back because the people to whom I feel gratitude are long gone and their grandchildren don't even know what their grandparents did but rather pay forward. So what we decided is to create a project where we enable across the world people who are saving people's lives who are facing atrocities as a tribute to the people who saved my grandparents' lives. So that's kind of that has affected my life and what's interesting is even there, you know, adversity, surviving, gratitude, all these themes also merge into what we do for a living at work. I mean most of our companies are surviving at any given time and I've learned the whole narrative in my life has been survive, revive, strive, and thrive. That journey which people don't usually think about, there's a lot written about dying, you know, there's a whole set of five steps of accepting death, nothing is written about living. So kind of like what happens when you almost die, what happens when you're almost kind of in work, what if your company almost dies, what do you do then, how do you revive, how do you strive and all that. So these things like my life emerges between our experience, my upbringing and then the experiences in my professional life.

Most proud of, I would say I will be proud eventually when I stop hopefully by having created an institution that has a lasting aspect to it which is Flagship and that is again this is the ideal state a perpetual source of novelty and impact on important problems to the world. So that's usually done by individual startups. It's contributed to by academia and many other things. We've tried to create a new kind of business life form at Flagship and I'd say that's probably the culmination of what I've been most driven by because Moderna is an instance of that although Moderna had fantastic success and continues to, there's another 110 companies that are various embodiments and outputs of that and I had started companies before, I've been involved in the startup of five other companies but they were all individual instances of what became more a fascination of mine which is can we make what people consider entrepreneurship a profession instead of an avocation? Can we make the act of conceiving and creating companies an institutional act as opposed to kind of an individual kind of sometimes celebrated improvisational chaotic romantic activity. I think those things are kind of interesting but not necessary for company creation. And so that is a very contrarian journey because we're living in a time where society loves the kind of the lottery almost aspect of startups where you can't tell which one's going to work and it's a struggle and most don't make it but the ones that make it then are converted to movies and I just feel like at some point people have to take this more as a profession especially since just like medicine where people kind of take a Hippocratic oath, here you're taking unsuspecting people's money and worse yet their careers and you're betting in on some, you know, low probability success activity. I'd rather people do that really seriously, gravity. I don't want it to be a game. And so I'm, you know, I'm kind of getting old now, but I, you know, 38 years into my journey, I just don't want to think of what I've done the last 38 years as some kind of a game. And there's too much gamification still in the startup world. During the internet it had to be because there were no young people starting companies and by definition young people are going to be more playful but now you know with AI with all these things the notion that we still start companies in this kind of hit or miss, you know, it's all who do you know and you know social influence that I don't know, I'm, that's a long answer to your question. I would like it if someday people look back and we would have had a small role in the professionalization of what it is to be an entrepreneur.

Yeah, I mean look, all I can do is kind of within my means. So I taught at MIT for 16 years in their entrepreneurship program within the management school for 16 years. I taught a full-on course both MBAs and engineers to try to learn how to make that point. I then taught for three years at Harvard Business School. Same thing. I've also taught a full course on innovation. So one is through kind of getting at people early on. Of course I think they heard some of it not others because the academic world quite likes the mystical part of entrepreneurship as well as a social science. Second, and maybe at least one of your listeners will remember this and if they do great I will have infected them mentally, but I for a long long time basically have put forward a notion that the problem starts with the word entrepreneurship. Now there's a couple of ways to think about it. First I think it's good to remember where the word comes from. The root of the word entrepreneur is a French word. Any French word in the English language is pretty expensive. It's kind of like a lofty thing. So, but it sadly comes from the word entre which means to undertake. So, the literal translation of an entrepreneur is an undertaker which unfortunately is very often kind of like what happens in entrepreneurship. But that's not the problem I have with it. The problem I have with it is the ending of the word. So the ending of the word in English that is ship, leadership, craftsmanship, sportsmanship, friendship, means the act of being something. So it's the state of being something. So if I'm a leader I'm doing leadership. If I'm a friend, I'm doing friendship. Now, I'm an engineer. I don't do engineers. Why is that? Because there's another ending of a word which means doing something which is engineering. So, you can learn and get better at engineering. I don't know how you get better at entrepreneurship. I don't know how to get better at engineership. It just means being an engineer. So I think at the root and this is a bit exaggerated but for effect, I don't think entrepreneurship will be a profession, I think entrepreneuring might be because if people go and learn how to do it, commit themselves to get better at it. The other thing people tell me is look not everybody kind of can be you know Bill Gates and Steve Jobs etc. That's true and not everybody can be the top three brain surgeons in the world but there's a lot of brain surgeons. Every country needs them and they rely on them. They're just not the top three brain surgeons in the world. So the notion that the definition of an entrepreneur is these kind of like the top three, four, five practitioners, you know, very few people win the 100 meter dash in the world. Very very few runners. There's millions of runners and just that doesn't mean to be a runner you have to win 100 million. So I just think people have a weird attitude towards, you know, they idolize to me the wrong people. I mean they should idolize people who have worked hard and become what they've become by getting better at what they're doing not somehow born into it having this, you know, Chopin composed at some age and Mozart at 12 years, that's not the definition of a composer that's just the definition of them. So anyway I can go on and on but this is, I do think eventually there's a book that will come out quite soon which is called Bayesian Entrepreneurship, I couldn't get them to change the name, in which I've co-written the foreword and there is kind of an effort in academia now which makes me very hopeful of thinking about entrepreneurship as a set of decisions which have a Bayesian kind of conditional logic to them in that the probabilities of what you are going to do are informed by the priors which is kind of this Bayesian logic approach and so how to be more thoughtful, planful, consequential to what you're doing instead of the proverbial winging it, in the US we use the word winging it a lot, improvising. So I think the more those things happen the more people will start thinking, you know, if you really want to think about all the decisions entrepreneurs make and you should run Monte Carlo simulations and all the ways in which you can go, drug discovery, drug development, nobody does that, people think oh no it's unknowable too many variables, that's true and if you play chess as an amateur you also think there's an infinite number of probabilities therefore just do it one move at a time, the expert chess players kind of don't go one move at a time and that's why they beat you all the time, same will be the case in entrepreneurship. So anyway, long way to go but I hope that will happen someday.

I mean I first of all I don't think there's an end state. I think it's a lifelong commitment. Second, I think you have to become much more focused on the output of what you do than the beauty of how you're doing it. And so, you know, again, if I was a painter, I wouldn't really care much exactly how I'm holding the paintbrush and stroking it this and that. I just look at the painting. And so at the end of the day, entrepreneurs should be thinking a lot about the value that they're bringing to the people, unsuspecting people who they want to buy their output, service, product. Where value comes from is a super important thing to understand because it's one thing to estimate the value of things that already exist. It's another thing to value things that don't exist. And so you need to kind of get yourself more and more, you know, struggling with these types of issues. So, you know, taking finance, marketing, sales, all these courses that people do is not relevant in and of itself. It's good to know, but entrepreneurial finance and entrepreneurial marketing is a totally different thing because you're creating new spaces. You're not just competing with an existing one as often. So, I think those are all things that you need to develop. I think there's mindsets that you want to also see if you can embody. And I get asked all the time, long ago I kind of thought if there was one word, if there was one word that I would define as important as a mindset is really balance because I think that when you're entrepreneuring you really need to have balance of extremes. You have to recognize that real experience in an area and complete amateur status together is a good outcome. Being super patient and being very urgency driven, super outcome. Being very humble and being narcissistic at the same time meaning thinking you can do things that you know you've been sent to the world to do which pretty much all entrepreneurs feel because they think you know they've got a mission. This whole notion of mission is a bit of a psychological kind of capability of humans but if you don't match that with humility so there's all these balances. The other thing I would say which is a play on an old kind of Russian joke but basically it's kind of you ask if you ask me what one word would be required it would be optimism and if you said what two words are required it would be paranoid optimism which is you know what I've talked a lot about which is I've kind of founded this duality of being, you have the right to be optimistic if you can match it with paranoia and you have the obligation to be paranoid if you match with the parallel of optimism because if you're just paranoid you're just a pessimist you might as well just be an investor and if you're just optimistic which is what entrepreneurs end up being you got to be reckless you shouldn't take other people's money but if you can be both and you can find other people who embody that and train for that just kind of say how is this a good balance and just in discussion. So there's a lot of things one can pick out. I mean I, you know, people are interested, there's a lot given how old I now am, there's a lot of materials that we've put out over time about these and these are not kind of like theoretical considerations. These are lived experiences that we forced ourselves to put into pithy kind of statements that could hopefully influence how people think about it.

I think a lot of it was developed over the years but if my personality didn't allow for it. So if I had a physical or psychological reaction to the stress of the unknown, you know, so there's turns out a lot, the other area that we think a lot about and also talk a lot about is this notion of uncertainty and how different it is to risk. You know most people think about uncertainty as just extreme risk. If in fact it's not. Uncertainty means inestimable probabilities of success. So if you have no idea what's going to happen next, that's not risk. It's just unknown. And unknown is really debilitating. I mean, humans evolutionarily, most animals hate ambiguity because if they are, this kind of fight or flight instinct is very much amplified when you're dealing with something you've never experienced before, right? Risk, you can kind of say, well, I've seen this animal. I'm okay with it. I can take it on. I'll move on. There's still some risk but so I think these are things that you need to have some ability to kind of cope with even find interesting which most people don't but I do but I don't know how much of that, so I'd say that I've probably had a permissive character to be able to develop these things within but I don't know that this was kind of how I would have been, I don't think most people who knew me when I was young felt that I had some level of drive and ambition but I certainly didn't have this level of kind of notion of optimism and paranoia or any of these things. I was pretty down the middle kind of human.

Well, look, I mean, I think I've convinced myself based on the experiences I've lived through that, you know, I have utter fear of risk. I don't have the same fear of uncertainty because I feel like uncertainty is worth the effort. See, if you're dealing with risk, which is usually found in adjacencies to what exists or what's known already, the advantage is your cognitive skills, your experience can help you. The disadvantage is that everybody else is doing the same thing, which is chasing the exact. So, you know, if you ever go fishing, you know, if you're on a pier where there's a thousand people fishing from the same pier, you could catch some fish. Statistically, somebody will catch fish. The notion that it's you, you know, you could put green bait instead of blue and this that, but it's a bit of a joke. You just kind of it's guesswork to me. So, I fear in that regard the competitive nature of undifferentiated exploration of risk. On the other hand that's why you know the whole notion of risk-reward and efficient frontiers exists in adjacencies. And if you get to the limit of where you can estimate risk, then you enter the zone of uncertainty where one thing I'm convinced of is that it is totally uncharted territory. Therefore, this notion of low-hanging fruit, if you want to find low-hanging fruit, you go to uncertainty because nobody's picked those trees before. In fact, some of the fruits are in the ground. It's the same thing as explorers thought of when they went to new lands, new continents, right? There was no real estate laws. There was nothing. You just like whatever existed you could kind of claim. And so, you know, if you're willing to chart uncertain futures and bring them to reality, you can own it intellectual property wise. You can choose the terminology, you can figure out where some of the easy wins are. So I've come to view then, I feel very strongly, we've got tons of data to support this, that uncertainty because of

The unknown, it's just not done. The nature of it has some kind of a Gaussian distribution of probability, and therefore there will be some easy things and some hard things if only you could do any of them. If you're the first to enable something, you get to choose the easy things to do. So if you want, as illogical as this seems and as much as economists would kind of take issue with it, if you want to work on high-reward, low-risk things, you first have to fight the uncertainty dragon. And that you just, it's some combination of bravery, focus on the end result. So that's, you know, is the journey worth it? And then also mindsets, including realizing that you can't hedge uncertainty, you can't mitigate uncertainty. What you can do is just operate through lots of optionality, meaning you do multiple things at the same time because you know some of them won't work. So there's just all sorts of nuances. It may sound like kind of gobbledegook to people listening to this, but I think over time as they start doing this, if they ask themselves, am I really kind of introducing enough uncertainty that it gives me an advantage to what I'm doing? Now you might realize as an entrepreneur it's really hard raising money for uncertainty because investors hate bad ideas, but they really hate uncertain ideas much, much more because it just kind of doesn't allow them to get an advantage, a cognitive advantage. Or asking experts, like if you ask an expert whether something that's uncertain will work, they cannot tell you. What they're telling you is not expert advice, it's just speculation, just reality, because their expertise ends with the distance to which they extrapolate, which is the edge of risk. After that, everybody is a level playing field.

Well, I hope so. It's been a 25-year journey, but I can tell you that's not my, these words are not my ideas. So it turns out after many, many years of struggling with trying to explain all this and trying to put it in some context that people can connect to what makes people afraid of this and uncomfortable with it, etc., turns out that about a hundred years ago there was an economist named Frank Knight who basically did a thesis and put forward the same idea, which is that uncertainty is about unknown probabilities and risk was about known probabilities. And he was using it to describe why robber barons, what were called the very ultra-rich in the US back in the day, were getting that rich compared to other people given they weren't doing it in a monopolistic kind of way. And the answer was they were actually embracing uncertainty, is what he put forward. The Rockefellers, the Carnegies, and this and that. Well, the notion that 100 years later, kind of my last 25 years, at Flagship is really just an embodiment of that was kind of quite revealing. So I give his initial kind of writings a lot of credit because when I found it, I thought this is what I'm talking about. So I've amplified it.