Extraordinary leaps need solid foundations, part 1, w/Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel

The very best founders I know are brilliant at building systems. They connect teams, they remove bottlenecks, and they eliminate single points of failure. And yet When it comes to their own wealth. Most are running a disconnected stack. A tax accountant here and a state attorney there, a wealth manager who doesn't talk to either one of them.

Creative planning was built to fix exactly that. One integrated team of tax professionals, state planners, investment specialists, all coordinated by a dedicated wealth manager who sees your full financial picture and keeps every piece working together. Proactive tax efficiency, state strategy, investments all under one roof. Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale.

Global hiring is such a headache when you're building fast, but companies like Eleven Labs are scaling effortlessly with deal. They quadrupled their workforce in twenty twenty five. Without hiring an HR team. Build your global team with deal. Visit deal.com slash MOS and start expanding your business today. That's D E L

dot com. Slash M O S. Hey, folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more.

Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too. Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscot com slash apply. twenty six.

It's like going to Vegas, you know. If you're lucky, you you win the lottery. If you're not then you have zero. And so because I'm not a gambler personally. I'm like, yeah, no thank you, no thank you. It has five percent chance of working. But if it changes, it's gonna change the world forever. For every human being on the planet, forever. Not in five or ten years, it's forever. And in business forever is a pretty good time frame.

That's Stefan Bonsell. CO Moderna. And he's talking about a much bigger gamble than throwing a few dollars at the craps tables in Vegas. The risk he's describing. Is the one he took when he accepted his current job.

and agreed to try against the odds to develop a vaccine. Based on M R and A. He was recruited to Moderna. by Newbar of the In. From V C firm

Flagship pioneering. He approached Stefan with his tantalizing possibility in twenty eleven. Here's How he pulled Stephon in. Yeah.

And Uba contacted him, is like Come over, I have something crazy to show you. So I go to flagship's office one night. And he has one piece of paper, you know, on his desk as I walk in. Exactly look.

And so I look at it and I told him it's impossible. Stefan's disbelief was well founded. On that paper were indications. that messenger RNA could be artificially inserted into human cells and instruct them to create a protein. We asked Newbar himself.

to explain why this was an astounding proposition. So it turns out if you put mRNA into cells It was known. That you get the severe immun reaction inside the cell. Not of the good kind, which is what we want nowadays in vaccines, but of a bad kind.

That is the cell's just a little bit. Freak out. 'Cause they think they're being invaded by viruses. And so I I kind of told him what the idea was. And the notion that you could come up with a new code

For any drug you want and put it in the body. And yeah, I think his initial reaction was Rightly skeptical. Nubar was now showing Stefan that there might be a way to avoid the cells freaking out.

Instead, they would let the MRNA in. and then happily use the instructions it contained to synthesize a protein. Making it work in a consistent and scalable way was more than a long shot. It was a moonshot. And Nubar wanted to convince Stefan it was a moonshot worth taking.

And Nuba was very good, he's a charmer. And then of course he flipped me like a pancake. I said to him, Listen. It may not work. But if it works, this will be as big or bigger than Genentech, which was the Iconic

the Google of biotech or the Amazon of biotech. And I said, You're gonna regret not being the person who builds that company. Through the lens of this astounding new technology, Stefan saw a world in which new drugs take hours rather than decades to develop at a fraction of the cost. with fewer unpredictable side effects. And far higher rates of success.

And this technology came from a small biotech startup that Nubar had founded and now wanted Stefan to lead. So you're telling me if this is true We're gonna be able to do an incredible number of medicine, helping so many people. That nobody else can with a higher chance of getting to launch. And it's gonna be faster.

And isn't a bit cheaper? He's like, Yep. That company. Of course. would become Moderna.

Which, thanks to its pioneering technology, played a central role in the unprecedented global fight against Covet nineteen. It was a historic risk, which we now know was more than worth taking. New York convinced Stefan. to take the gamble, because he knew Stefan was the right leader for the risk that was ahead. We leap much further. And when we land, some of the time we land on quicksand and some of the time we land on things that end up

Becoming solid enough territory. That we can continue to iterate, iterate, iterate until we find value and so That's the nature of the kind of platform businesses we create. Both Stefan and Nubar were certain of one other thing.

The best chance of success was to build Moderna from the ground up. With a singular focus on this extraordinary possibility. And that's why I believe you need to prepare to make extraordinary leaps in extraordinary times. And to do this, double down on the right mindset and platform to take risk. Head on. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? And then you go back to this is totally gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right.

It just seems absolutely nutball. Ten years later I'm like, well that's just how you do it. We haven't made it. Just how you do it. This is masters of scale. I'm Reed Hoffman.

Co-founder of LinkedIn. Partner at Greylock and your host. And I believe. You need to prepare to make extraordinary leaps in extraordinary times. And to do this, double down on the right mindset and platform to take risk.

Head on. In nineteen sixty one, President John F. Kennedy announced to the world That the US would land astronauts on the moon within the decade. At the time.

America was lagging badly behind the Soviet Union in the space race. and the country was fractured by social injustice and civil unrest. Then there's the fact that much of the technology needed to reach the moon, land, and return safely. Didn't even exist yet. The plan was so audacious, it coined the term.

Moonshot. They had to build rockets, landers, space suits, computers, and procedures. And the entire time, they weren't even certain that the moon's surface could support the weight of an astronaut. Let alone the Lunar Lander. It could effectively have been a moonshot into quicksand.

But just eight years later. American boots stepped onto the lunar surface. And they didn't sink. This literal moonshot was a success because NASA cultivated a risk mindset tailored to their mission. And then built out a solid platform to support it.

That's why the first Apollo mission to land on the moon was Apollo eleven. Not because all previous missions had failed. But because each previous mission's purpose was to help test and build the platform that would give the moonshot the best possible chance of success. When we talk about taking a monumental risk for huge gains. It's easy to forget how important it is to assess the risk clearly and build a strategy around it.

Based on both. Your goals and your company's culture. It's also easy to overlook how the success of your moonshot doesn't rest in simply taking the risk. But in how solid your platform is. I wanted to talk to Stefan Bonsell about this because as the first CEO of Moderna, he built the company from the ground up with a singular of making the moonshot technology of MRNA medicines work.

He built a culture at Moderna that embraced risk while also taking counterintuitive moves to make sure that the foundation for their moonshot was as solid as possible. A moonshot that saved millions of lives with a technology that could be even more impactful in years to come. Because of its incredible achievement and the remarkable lessons to be learned, we split this episode of Master of Scale into two parts. And part one we'll focus on how Stefan helped Moderna define norms and deliver life saving science by creating a technology platform. Part two

We'll dig into how Moderna scaled its impact under the most dire of situations and what that may mean. For future transformative breakthroughs. As we heard at the top of the show, before he took the helmet Moderna. Stephon was CEO of French biotech firm BioMerio. He took over at Bio Mario in two thousand and seven after over a decade working management and executive positions in the pharmaceuticals industry.

However, despite his impressive resume, Bio Mario's choice of Stefan for CO was an unexpected move. The chairman of Biomeria contacted me one day and is like, Hey, we're looking for a new CEO. You're way too young, so most probably you have you're not gonna get the job. But I was advised by somebody I trust to really put a a broad list of all the people I could think of that could potentially do it. And you came on that list, so would you be interested? So Stefan put his name forward without expecting much.

Two quest to my surprise they gave me up a job. Vomer at the time when I became CO was around six thousand people It had commercial presence with people on the ground in forty countries. And so I got in there and what I do is first I'm totally freaked out because I'm like sh I don't know if I can do this job. Stefan's solution was to set off on a listening tour.

I spent the first Sixty days going around the world. talking to literally maybe hundred and fifty to two hundred of the leaders of a company. And I will ask them the same questions. I ask them, Okay, talk to me about you and your life and your family, and then talk to me about your department and what you do, or your country, or your lab. And then I will always ask them, Hey, if you have the CO tomorrow.

What other two or three things you could do? A listening tour is an approach I've seen from other great leaders when they're first joining a company. In fact, I would argue it's an essential practice. For any new leader. It gives you an immersive and nuanced introduction to the culture, morale, concerns, and mindset of your team.

And from this. You can build a strong launch pad. For positive collaborative change. I saw this firsthand when Jeff Wiener took over from me as LinkedIn CEO. Jeff talked about this in his Master of Scale episode titled

How to set the drum beat. So I took the time to meet with literally every person at the company at three hundred and thirty eight employees, it was still Manageable. That would be a lot more time consuming today. And so before I decided on any plans going forward, I wanted to make sure I understood what was happening. And I wanted to learn as much as possible from the people who had developed the company up until that point.

After that extensive listening tour, Jeff identified what LinkedIn needed to build was a launch pad for its next leap in scale. He then set about communicating it. Not just once, but again and again. At every opportunity. It became

A steady drum beat that reverberated through the company. I think all effective leaders understand uh the importance and power of repetition and it's it's counterintuitive because once you say it just a second time. You start getting bored of it and then you just project that boredom on to the audience. You just assume that people have heard it before. They don't want to hear it again. But they've got their own priorities, you know, they're focused on other things.

And so that repetition is actually really important. In Jeff's case, his listening to her set the time signature for a steady drum beat focused on building a shared culture. Even since Jeff stepped down from a CO role in twenty twenty, the drum beat he set still resounds throughout the company. For Stefan, the listening tour helped him gauge his team's risk mindset. In order to establish the right risk mindset in your team, you need to be intimately acquainted with your business and all its exposure points to risk.

Now. the right risk mindset for one company may be vastly different from another. It depends on your goals, your time frame. Your competitors. Whatever the right risk framework.

You decide for your company. You need to make sure everyone on your team leans into it. Now that Stefan had synthesized his fresh viewpoint with what his leaders saw on the ground, he could put together a bold plan of action. I went to a bar, they had sort of them

Which would stop investing in those part of a business where We don't have scale. We are naive because we have two people in France and there's three company in the US with the two hundred million dollar and fifty people and that's all they do. We have no chance to ever compete with those guys. So let's stop wasting money and focus on what we're really good at. It's not that these sideline operations had no upside. But rather, there was no way of realizing those upsides without pouring in vastly more resources.

And doing this would take resources away. from the risk that had the best chance of paying off. Take all risks. And you're more likely to lose. Even

If it seems like diversifying helps. Focus. Is what's required. It's as important as choosing the right risk. It often takes an outsider to piece this kind of picture together.

Having those non-scale outliers in the business might feel like a way to hedge against risk. But what Stefan saw with fresh eyes was that these outliers were increasing the risk To be O'Mario's core business. Through that listening tour, Stefan had identified what needed to be changed in Bio Mario's collective risk mindset. And he could use his findings to pitch a convincing case of why.

These changes were needed. Not just to the board, but to everyone at BioMerio. I'm of a belief that as a leader you need to spend a lot of time on the ground with people, so town halls. lunches with twenty, thirty people, dinners with a leadership team, so a lot of time with people.

And I think as a leader just keep repeating the plan. Recall how Jeff Wiener did a similar thing at LinkedIn with a steady drum beat to cement the company's culture. Stefan's steady drumbeat aimed at instilling a new risk mindset at Bio Mario. And he framed it.

To be as clear as possible. The plan was pretty simple. I'm a very disciplined guy, so there was priority one, priority two, priority three, priority four, not fifty and they had numbers. And we started executing we brought around ten companies to strengthen our core business. We close a few factory. And the company did fantastic. We double the growth rate in the five years I was there compared to The five years before

We improve margin, the stock did very well. That was until VC Newbar Uffian approached Stefan about heading up a very small company he had co founded. That company's name was Moderna. When you build substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious.

Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity. When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years building. Creative planning where wealth works together. learn more at creative plating dot com slash masters of scale The Wired Newsroom is known for award-winning reporting on how technology shapes our world.

On Wired's Uncanny Valley, we take that curiosity even further. Each week, journalists from Wired break down the biggest stories in tech while speaking directly with the people building, challenging, and reshaping the future. Is the AI boom sustainable? How do you protect your privacy in an age of constant surveillance? Uncanny Valley tackles the questions driving today's tech debates and lighting up your group chats.

Listen to new episodes every Thursday. Wherever you get your podcasts. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies. Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future?

That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi. On my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in.

We're back. With Stefan Bonsell, C of Moderna. And if you want to hear the entire uncut version of this interview, you can do so by becoming a Masters Scale member. Members get to hear new episodes before anyone else and get exclusive access to the uncut versions of our interviews, master's scale courses, and a range of other exciting benefits. To join.

Visit masterscale dot com slash members. Where we left off before the break, Stefan was approached by VC Nubar Uffian. But becoming CO of a small biotech company he'd co founded that would become Moderna. It specialized in a niche unproven technology.

M R and A. At the very beginning of this episode, we heard the story of how Stefan was bowled over. But the huge potential of M R and A. And accepted Nubar's offer. Even though he estimated it had just a

Five percent chance of success. So this is a good place to briefly recap what MRNA vaccines are and what makes them so revolutionary. And to do that, we ask science communicator and geneticist. Alex Danis to help out. MRA vaccines are really cool because in essence they're pretty simple. They have two main parts.

Mm. There's a piece of RNA, so this is a nucleic acid molecule that gives your cells some information. and then there's a little fatty bubble around it. Your cells are able to read the instructions that are coded in that piece of RNA. and turn them into a protein.

So what producers and manufacturers have been able to do is to take The sequence of one specific protein. Mm. from the SARS CoV two virus that causes Covid nineteen.

And put it into these vaccines. So that your body can read that sequence, make just this one protein from the COVID-19 virus, and display it to your immune system. So that your immune system can learn what that looks like and if it sees it again, it can mount an immune response against that virus. The theory behind MRNA vaccines had been around for decades.

But it is only recently. that companies like Moderna figured out how to make it work in practice. And the potential is staggering. RA vaccines are really revolutionary because They outsource

part of the vaccine production to your own cell. So many vaccines that we've used in the past, you have to make a lot of the virus itself in the lab and then package that into a vaccine that you're actually giving to people. And that can take a lot of time. It can be very expensive. And it means that sometimes our vaccines aren't quite as effective as we want them to be. With RNA vaccines, because we're sort of outsourcing a part of that production to the cells in your own body, you can really truncate the amount of time it takes to make one of these vaccines.

Newbar opened Stefan's eyes to mRNA's potential to reconfigure the risk-reward calculus of drug development. and new or wanted stuff on to join Moderna as it attempted this moonshot. And he's like I wanna build this company, so You're a big company guy, you know, you spend your time saying no to bad ideas.

Nubar wanted someone who would know when to put the brakes on certain risks in order to make sure the moonshot had maximum chance of being achieved. This is how Nubar puts it, in his own words. The one thing I had seen in him. That I think has served him well since And it's a skill or balancing act that has evolved considerably and strengthened.

Is what I call generally this notion of paranoid optimism. And so my mindset definition of a high growth entrepreneurial leader Is that you need to be both paranoid and optimistic. And he was both of those things. He was able to

See the possibility. Even though he could foresee the challenges. But He also could constantly bring to the table all the assumptions that we might be getting wrong, so that we're constantly iterating and testing our assumptions. And so this combination

You know what I call gas pedal, brake pedal. That's also defined our relationship because for all the years since then I've served as a brake pedal when he was pushing hard on the gas pedal, and some other times I wanted to push on gas pedal and he would be brake pedal. But he himself internally has both of those characteristics in spades and he looks for people around him to help

Amplify so that the balance is always there. I think that's a huge advantage. All leaders and strategists, whether a startup or a large company have to say no.

That is, unless you have so few ideas that you're not generating enough to say no to. And that's A whole problem in itself. So finding the right balance between the gas and the break. is key.

But note how Nubar doesn't restrict Stefan's role to that of the breakman. He knew that the relationship would be far more nuanced than that. Sometimes Stefan would be the one gunning the engine, and it would be up to Nubar to shave off the speed. No one's role was set in stone. Indeed, it was that dynamic between the two of them that would be important.

As we heard part of the story earlier in the show. For Stefan, the problem right now. was deciding if he should say yes to Nubar's proposition. And so I left his office I woke home, my head was spinning in many directions.

And so I talk to my wife like I've done for every big decision in my career. She's like you have to do it. And I look at her a bit puzzled because I thought she would be the conservative one. I say why?

And she's like If this works. This gonna help kids that have rare genetic disease that their families have no hope to there. you're gonna be able to potentially work in cancer and other things. And you're gonna impact so many lives and so many families.

And if this Could work if this MI technology could work. You might be one of the few people who might make it work. You're so stubborn. You are threentless.

And if it works It will change the world forever. That's a peace read that was very clear in my mind at the beginning, which was it was this things that you encounter very few times in your life where it has five percent chance of working. But if it changes, it's gonna change the world forever.

for every human being on the planet forever. Not in five or ten years forever. And in business forever is a pretty good time frame. I said, Okay, I'll do it. Stefan saw two key things he needed to do. The first was to make sure Moderna was built from the ground up with the right risk mindset. The second was to build out a platform for this revolutionary technology, so that when the time came, Moderna could scale its moonshot technology at maximum speed.

To achieve these goals, Stefan needed Nubar to agree to two red lines. I said I'll do it, but I have just two things that are really important to me that I need your support on and say tell me. One is I don't want to go public too early. Because it's a platform. If he works, it's a platform company. We're gonna have to invest a lot to build the platform. There's never been really a platform company in biotech. It's in the tech world that we have amazing platform companies.

Like the one y you built and many you helped. Until now, a platform approach had been impossible in the pharma industry. Each new drug needed to be built from scratch. Its active ingredients combined and tested. It was like making a one of a kind handcrafted. Artisanal toy.

But MRNA allowed for a different approach. It was more like a Mr. Potato Head. With the Potato Body as the platform, you could come up with any number of new characters in an instant. It was something I reflected on with my producers after I spoke with Stefan. Well, to some degree, every business is a platform that makes

certain kinds of business activities much more efficient and simple. and other ones much more expensive for that particular organization. So Levi's once launch jackets. Very easy to do. They have factories, they have direct and retail relationships, they understand fabrics.

You know et cetera, et cetera. Levi's wants to launch milkshakes. Not so much. Weird impedance with the customers, totally different supply chain, totally different kind of market, probably different logistics and all the rest. And so all businesses are kind of setting themselves up to is what is the platform of your business about which kinds of

Products and services can you offer? How do you dynamically evolve them? et cetera. And so part of that when you're a startup is what's the risk that you're setting up for how much of a platform. Because typically you worry that you put all this tooling in a platform and you don't get a specific application right.

Namely, this is what's gonna be sold. When it came to Moderna in tech terms, it was like building an OS rather than an individual app. Once you have that OS in place, you can then quickly build out. individual apps using it. But this approach had its own inherent risks that Stefan needed to mitigate.

And so I'm like і We go public too early, the capital market do not know how to understand such a company. They're gonna ask me what's the first drug with the first drug? And

We gonna defocus investments in the platform and we will minimize where this could be on the next ten to twenty to thirty years for the world. And I will not do that, so I just want you aware that until I say we go public, we're not going public. Exact okay. This is one of the dangers of building a platform.

You may be able to see all the potential. But your stakeholders may not. Then there was that second red line Stefan needed Nubar to agree to before he said yes to Moderna. And my second ask is I don't want another VC. When everything goes well, the V Cs are probably aligned.

When but things don't go well, Julie are not so aligned. different time frame, different philosophy, different risk profile. I just want to have You backing us up. I'll find the money. I'll raise the money. Yeah, see, and I have to be honest, I've never raised a penny, so I hope I'll raise the money.

No doubt Stefan was taking on a huge risk in terms of funding to mitigate what he saw as a bigger risk. that having VC investors would make it difficult to do the preparations he needed in order to build out the platform. An impressive counterintuitive risk. And Stefan was fortunate to have the open minded Nubar backing him up on this. I think Stefan's complete rejection of any VC funding was on the extreme side.

But I can also relate to where he was coming from. I think it's one of the reasons you need to proactively construct your board and take differences in risk tolerance into account. If you have VCs that share your risk mindset, You'll have their experience and network on your side, greatly boosting your chance of success. But

If you take investment from VCs who have a different mindset, you will decrease your chances. And this is key. Avoiding a risk doesn't mean avoiding all risk. It's a calculus. Stefan was exchanging one risk for another.

Not many people would have even seen this as a move they could take. Who says no to funding opportunities? And very few would have seen just how aggressively they'd need to defend the time frame for building that platform. Now Stephon needed to build out a company called Trip Moderna that embraced risk and scaling at speed.

This is one of the key things that from my software technology platform company experience. Is both Amazingly parallel and amazingly different. Cause you're generating and ability to code as a platform across a number of different applications. Parallel.

But you're solving science problems. on well, how does this actually work in these complex biological systems? I think I heard that you went to a Silicon Valley tour and was curious like why did you do that? What did you learn? And what did you learn that was parallel and what did you learn that was different for building this New kind of company. Yeah, so the the thing that was a very good model for us with the tech platform

was this notion of Invest in the platform As much as you can. Don't think about the apps at the beginning, just build we have to build the operating system of Mani. And so we just build the systems and more and more so we can have people coding apps, which is developing

Drugs. For us Covid nineteen vaccine it was one Up. That the team build out of Moderna M R O S. En so

A lot of those analogies in terms of How do you think about investments? How do you think about time frame? How do you think about compounding? How do you think about learning? How do you invest in digital infrastructure so that You build

The tool so that your teams Can really go Very quickly and scale. And there was nobody in biotech that has grown so fast, or pharma, because those are big companies. So I'm like I need to go to California.

The Vaughn visited companies, including Netflix, Google, and Facebook. He told me about the many things he learned about scaling culture, hiring at speed, onboarding. And defining your mission. All of which Master Scale members can hear in the uncut version of this interview. That tour also gave Stefan ideas about how Moderna's risk mindset.

Could differentiate it. from the rest of the pharma industry. What we needed is what's the tool set. that we need to give people or have and make decision. And some of them are very

not intuitive for people coming from pharma. This is not an industry where you have the most Let's see risk taking people, for example, because As you know, most drug fail in the clinic in pharma. And so when a drug works, the key motto is don't break anything. Because the NPV of that drug the day of launch could be twenty, fifty, hundred billion dollar in one drug.

So imagine the brand manager of that drug doesn't have a lot of room for freedom. It doesn't want to take any risk because There's so much at stake. And then if there's a regulatory side of it where you build a process once and then you have to go back to V FDA, and most people say, I don't want to do that, so I don't change the process. So you have a lot of constraint in the industry that makes that this is not an industry where people take a lot of risk. And so And one of our mindset that we articulate very clearly to people is

You cannot have impact without taking risk. And we're all about impact to patients. And one of the reason we already you know, when the virus happened and we were able to get one of the best vaccine in the world. is we have been spending ten years taking a lot of calculated risk, and taking risk is not doing things that are unlawful or unethical. He's doing something that might fail.

And how do you build a portfolio, how do you build optionalities? Building optionality is important. But one thing to remember is there can be different dangers around having too much Optionality.

Maybe. It's analysis process or decision process. Being unwilling to commit to one specific thing because it's right for the company and the market. But on the other hand. A big part of a business.

is having an established platform to iterate. Which gives you a lot of value. with a mindset for risk. That set it apart from the rest of the pharma industry. Moderna worked at building out its tech platform. But while progress was encouraging, acceptance of the new technology in the wider industry was slow.

It made getting funding. From institutional investors difficult, and it also made attracting highly qualified scientists hard. But then. in two thousand sixteen Moderna partnered with another pharma company whose name will be familiar to you.

AstraZeneca and its CO, Pascal Sorrio. He's one of the few CO in pharma who really understands science deeply. And he's like, Look, it's crazy, but if he works it's gonna change medicine forever. So they gave us two hundred forty million dollar upfront payment. to get access to forty drugs options. And that was a big moment because we moved from

Literally twenty minutes off cash left on the balance sheet. to two hundred sixty million dollar the next day when we got the payment. So it's a big change into what we could do science wise. Stefan had found a like minded investor that also gave a huge boost to industry confidence in MRA. This made it easier for the company to secure talent and build out its platform. By two thousand eighteen.

Stefan had built an 800 strong. risk embracing team and a platform that was geared for explosive scale when the time came. That year. The company made the biggest ever. Biotech IPO

In terms of rays. and valuation. It was set to be a vindication of Stefan's vision and the team's hard work and dedication. But then. The stock started trading.

Uh, one of maybe of the most embarrassing moments of my life was the day we started trading, I think went down eighteen percent. Well, I forgot the number but you was bad. So I didn't feel really really good that I spent a lot of time on weekend calling a lot of investors. I went really upset. For the next year, the stock's performance was middling. And money tight.

And as we go into twenty twenty, we need to raise money. And We are very careful on where we're gonna spend And our goal is not to increase our spend in twenty twenty versus nineteen, we're gonna spend a half a billion dollar and that's gonna be it. So there's a lot of things we want to do science wise and drug wise, that we say, guys, we don't have any money, we're not doing it. So it was a very frustrating fall of twenty nineteen for the budget process.

But very soon Stefan's worries about the company's finances were to be eclipsed. In fact, soon the entire planet. would have a very different concern on its mind. And then during Christmas and New Year, I'm in the south of France with my family And as every morning of my life or

Ninety nine percent of the more things on my life, I get up. I go for and I come back. I turn on my iPad. And I read the Wall Street Journal. And

There's a one page, you know, on the iPad article, very small article on the Wall Street Journal that There's A new Virus or bacteria. At the time they call it an infectious disease agent.

Yeah. That is causing pneumonia like symptom in woman. This was, of course, the start of a planet wide pandemic that would put humanity to the test. It would also be The ultimate test for the moonshot that Safon and Moderna had spent over a decade preparing for.

And we'll hear all about that in part two of this episode. I'm Reed Hoffman. Thank you for listening. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show. Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada.

It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. Masters of Scale is a Wakewater original. Our executive producers are June Cohen, Darren Triff, and Jordan Cloud. Our head of content and production is Lori Hoffman. Our producers are Adam Skuse, Catherine Clark Gray, Marie McCoy Thompson, Alex Morris, Tucker Legurski, and Holly Bondi.

Our editor at large is Bob Safia. Our music director is Ryan Holliday. Original Music and Sound Design by Eduardo Rivera. Audio Editing by Keith J. Nelson, Steven Davies, Andrew Naught, and Mike Gallagher. Mixing and Mastering by Brian Pugh. Special thanks to Chris Shay, Elisa Schreiber, Arya Finger.

Say it's up yeba, Greg Biato. Adam Heiner. Colin Howard. Willem Crowells, Pim Cronin. Healthy Capitano.

Sammy Aputta. Anna Pisano. Sarah Tarter, Lear Sarametis, Charlie Meneses, Chiname Ezequena, Emily Banganas, and Mina Curosawa. Become a member of Masters of Scale to get access to a year's worth of courses and content on the Masters of Scale Courses app. Find out more at masterscale dot com slash membership.

What you see above is a preview of the first minutes. One unlock costs 3 credits and covers this episode forever: full segment and word-level timestamps on this page, plus .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like.