Speaker 1: You're listening to Math and Magic, a production at iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: If you are in a situation where you have you know,
Speaker 2: once in a century pandemic and the economy is locked down.
Speaker 2: Peoples are dying by the thousands, even though the tens
Speaker 2: of thousands around the world kids cannot go to school anymore.
Speaker 2: He becomes a human decision to decide to throw by
Speaker 2: the window your business strategy and to do what you
Speaker 2: think is the right thing for the world, even though
Speaker 2: if you're wrong, you might actually kill the company.
Speaker 3: I am Bob Pittman. Welcome to this episode of Math
Speaker 3: and Magic. Our guest today has literally changed the world,
Speaker 3: proving that the impossible can be done, and he's a
Speaker 3: model of the CEO as someone in service to society.
Speaker 3: Is Stefan Thenselve, CEO of Majoernal. He grew up in
Speaker 3: France and always knew what he wanted to be a CEO,
Speaker 3: loved science and business, still does and is equally skilled
Speaker 3: in both. Greatly influenced by the Jesuits and bring that
Speaker 3: sense of service to business and his mission. Although it
Speaker 3: was almost a decade after its founding, Maderna popped on
Speaker 3: the scene as a savior during the pandemic, doing what
Speaker 3: the experts thought to be impossible, getting a vaccine developed
Speaker 3: and available within a year. And by the way, infectious
Speaker 3: disease vaccines weren't even on his original company plans. He
Speaker 3: loves to ski, boat and eat. Well. He's French after all,
Speaker 3: and he is a fascinating and nice guy. Stefan welcome.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you so much for having me. I thank
Speaker 2: you for this very kind description.
Speaker 3: Oh we have more to come, but before we jump
Speaker 3: into that, I want to do you in sixty seconds. Ready,
Speaker 3: good cats are dogs dogs early riser or night out,
Speaker 3: very earlier Riser Paris or Boston, Paris for fund bust.
Speaker 2: Some of our work skiing or sailing. That's a tough one.
Speaker 2: Skiing and winter sitting in the summer coffee or tea tea.
Speaker 4: Strange guy and never drinks coffee, sleep or exercise, boof
Speaker 4: cook or eat out, eat outs, call or text, text
Speaker 4: podcast or video podcast.
Speaker 3: Oh that's the right answer. Okay, it's about to get harder.
Speaker 3: All time favorite musical artist Teto Swift, first job picking asparagus.
Speaker 3: Smartest person you know, Stephen Hoogan, the President of Madonna.
Speaker 3: Childhood hero Steve Jobs. Favorite movie the gombre, the most
Speaker 3: important piece of advice you've ever had.
Speaker 2: Listen to everybody, and finally, do you have a secret
Speaker 2: talent connecting the dots?
Speaker 3: Okay, let's get started. Probably one of the most disruptive
Speaker 3: events in the world in the last hundred years was
Speaker 3: the pandemic, and in a strange way, it was the
Speaker 3: coming out party for Maderna, and from it comes one
Speaker 3: of the business world's most impressive case studies. You were
Speaker 3: employee number two in the first CEO of Maderna in
Speaker 3: twenty eleven. It was a startup built around the promise
Speaker 3: of Messenger RNA mRNA that it would change medicine. I've
Speaker 3: seen you quoted as saying it had only a ten
Speaker 3: percent chance of working, but if it did, the world
Speaker 3: would change, and by during it would be something new
Speaker 3: in biotech. You'd be a platform, much like the operating
Speaker 3: system and the traditional tech world, a platform with RNA
Speaker 3: as your operating system and broad applications writing on it.
Speaker 3: You took a pay cut, left a major CEO job
Speaker 3: just for the promise of Messenger RNA. You were making
Speaker 3: progress building a new company and suddenly COVID nineteen appears.
Speaker 3: Can you take us through what you did and how
Speaker 3: it changed all your plans.
Speaker 2: Sure, I spent all my career working in fictious disease,
Speaker 2: and so I always have an eye to new virus emerging,
Speaker 2: new bacteria emerging. And so between Christmas and New Year
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen, as I was reading the World Street Journal,
Speaker 2: I heard about new cases of pneumonia like symptoms to
Speaker 2: people in China, and so I'll reached out to be
Speaker 2: an IH, asking he this new thing in China, what
Speaker 2: is it. After a few days, we realized it was
Speaker 2: a virus. It was not through and it was not
Speaker 2: a coronavirus like SARS or MERS. There was a new
Speaker 2: one and so when they got the sequence online around
Speaker 2: mid January, we decided to go and make a vaccine
Speaker 2: to test it in a clinic. And initially we thought
Speaker 2: this was just an outbreak, but we still wanted to
Speaker 2: go to the clinic because I wanted to know how
Speaker 2: fast could we go if when they got forbid there
Speaker 2: was going to be a pandemic. And I thought we
Speaker 2: could get into a clinic in sixty days from the
Speaker 2: day the sequence is available of a virus genome. Today
Speaker 2: we could inject the first human which was a huge
Speaker 2: change versus what happened during SARS. It took the NIH
Speaker 2: twenty months to get from sequence to first human doors,
Speaker 2: and so that's why I wanted to do it. And then,
Speaker 2: of course though January of twenty twenty, as the cases accumulated,
Speaker 2: and I woke up one day at four o'clock in
Speaker 2: the morning in sweats saying, GESEZ is going to be
Speaker 2: a pandemic like nineteen eighteen. And so when he was
Speaker 2: a few weeks convincing my board, covincing my team that
Speaker 2: we had to pivot the company and really put our
Speaker 2: best started toward trying to work on this vaccine for
Speaker 2: what I thought was going to be a pandemic.
Speaker 3: So I understand though that one of the problems is
Speaker 3: no one would finance the vaccine. That the only way
Speaker 3: it got done was the US government stepped then and
Speaker 3: actually financed this.
Speaker 2: You're correct, Moderana. I had never saw the product, We
Speaker 2: had never commercialized the product, and so we had two
Speaker 2: financial challenges as we pivoted to running after this virus.
Speaker 2: One was how do you set up quickly very large
Speaker 2: It ended up being thirty thousand people tested in the
Speaker 2: face free clinical trial and this was, as you said,
Speaker 2: funded by the US government, which backed up five companies,
Speaker 2: which I think was one of the most brilliant strategy
Speaker 2: I've seen in terms of getting things done for the
Speaker 2: country and the world. But the other piece that the
Speaker 2: government did not back up, that we still had to
Speaker 2: do at incredible risk was to scale manufacturing. Because, as
Speaker 2: you can understand, if we only finance the clinical study
Speaker 2: and the vaccine works and we have no vaccine to
Speaker 2: provide people, that would be a human tragedy. And so
Speaker 2: we had to scale up manufacturing, not for ten million dozes,
Speaker 2: but for a billion doze, And so we couldn't find
Speaker 2: any foundation to help us. And so what we ended
Speaker 2: up doing in May of twenty twenty is raised equity
Speaker 2: on NASDAK as soon as we published positive phase and data,
Speaker 2: and we raised one point three billion dollar and one
Speaker 2: hundred percent of that capital was dedicated to scale up manufacturing.
Speaker 3: I mean, it sounds pretty tough. How hard was it
Speaker 3: to pivot from not only were you going to do
Speaker 3: this product, but you had really been set up and
Speaker 3: built to be a platform and suddenly you're going into
Speaker 3: the product business.
Speaker 2: Yes, if you go back and even you read the
Speaker 2: public filing. When we went public in December twenty eighteen,
Speaker 2: the S one we described a company that, as you said,
Speaker 2: is a platform company to manage a money technology risk
Speaker 2: and to manage barrows your risk, which is disease risk
Speaker 2: which exists in the industry. We actually build a portfolio
Speaker 2: of drugs. We had I think sixteen drug by the
Speaker 2: time we went to public, and that portfolio of drugs
Speaker 2: was to allow us to manage the unknown about where
Speaker 2: was the money going to work or was it not
Speaker 2: going to work? What this is was going to work for?
Speaker 2: What is it was not going to work for? At
Speaker 2: the time, no product ever approved using amount technology. And so,
Speaker 2: as you can imagine, in January twenty twenty, when we
Speaker 2: decide to pause or to slow down this portfolio approach
Speaker 2: of those sixteen drugs, to literally bet the company on
Speaker 2: one drug, that was a very complicated and heavy business decision.
Speaker 2: We believed we had the technology that could work for vaccines.
Speaker 2: We had done nine vaccine in human trials before the
Speaker 2: pandemic hit. We had done quite a lot of work
Speaker 2: on CHRONA viruses, cears, and mers. So we believed our
Speaker 2: vaccine was going to work. And if you are in
Speaker 2: a situation where you have in a once in a
Speaker 2: century pandemic and the economy is locked down. Peoples are
Speaker 2: dying by the thousands, if not the tens of thousands
Speaker 2: around the world. Kids cannot go to school anymore. It
Speaker 2: becomes a human decision to decide to throw by the
Speaker 2: window your business strategy and to do what you think
Speaker 2: is the right thing for the world, even though if
Speaker 2: you're wrong, you might actually kill the company.
Speaker 3: So speaking of killing the company and just then reading
Speaker 3: about that time, there were a lot of seasoned veterans
Speaker 3: who were saying you were irresponsible to even claim you
Speaker 3: could deliver a vaccine inside a year, which must have
Speaker 3: put another level of pressure on you to realize that
Speaker 3: you were pivoting the company. Yeah, there was hardly universal
Speaker 3: views from outside that this was the right move.
Speaker 5: That's correct.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you had told me even in the
Speaker 2: spring of twenty twenty that large companies like Sanofi was
Speaker 2: going to have massive technical setback, that the products from
Speaker 2: Astraseneka and Johnson and Johnson, while they were going to
Speaker 2: get approved, they would end up having some safety concerns that.
Speaker 5: Will led them to not being really used.
Speaker 2: And this was going to be Moderna and Pfizer left
Speaker 2: to really help fight this horrible pandem. I will hearely
Speaker 2: not have believed you. And as you said, a lot
Speaker 2: of people from those large companies, we're saying on TV
Speaker 2: that I was irresponsible to even give a hope that
Speaker 2: we could have vaccined by the end of the year.
Speaker 2: That was actually a very hard time.
Speaker 3: So let's talk about personal dimension for you as CEO
Speaker 3: of the company, as a human being, the way that
Speaker 3: the world was suddenly on your shoulders. How did you
Speaker 3: cope with that stress? What did it do to you?
Speaker 2: So it's interesting my wife would tell you this is
Speaker 2: actually the type of moment when it's really hard but
Speaker 2: also very clear of what has to be done, that
Speaker 2: I'm at my best and I don't know why. I'm
Speaker 2: able to abstract the outside noise and just to focus
Speaker 2: on the work to be done. It was not the
Speaker 2: time to think about do we go right or do
Speaker 2: we go left. There's an enemy, it's the virus. Every day,
Speaker 2: every hour matters because people are dying, and so it
Speaker 2: just allowed me to be laser focused on the job
Speaker 2: a task. The biggest challenge I think was more a
Speaker 2: mental and physical challenge because we were working seven days
Speaker 2: a week, which I'd never done before. I worked hard before,
Speaker 2: but we were working full day Saturday's, full day Sundays
Speaker 2: for a year, and so I remember starting to be
Speaker 2: pretty exhausted, you know, by end of February, early in March,
Speaker 2: and having a discussion with Steven, who is my partner
Speaker 2: at the president of the company, and I'm like, hey,
Speaker 2: how do we sustain this? Because he's a doctor, I'm not.
Speaker 2: And it's like, you know, make sure you go to
Speaker 2: bed at a reasonable time, do spot every day, eat healthy.
Speaker 2: He knows I like wine, don't drink any wine. So
Speaker 2: it was really about this discipline. And I remember because
Speaker 2: at the time, you know, we were working from home,
Speaker 2: you know, in the spring of twenty and twenty and
Speaker 2: I remember dropping, you know, so tired in my bed
Speaker 2: at night, getting up early in the morning, going for
Speaker 2: a run too fresh up my mind and get some
Speaker 2: oxygen and then go back into it. And this was
Speaker 2: this thing where sometimes the teams were even joking, you know,
Speaker 2: get on a zoom call at seven am and somebody
Speaker 2: would make the but became the more like shock what
Speaker 2: they is it today?
Speaker 5: Because we had no.
Speaker 2: Idea, but it was an amazing time because the teams
Speaker 2: internally went so beyond what is expected of them because
Speaker 2: for everybody was very personal and everybody had family members dying.
Speaker 2: Everybody was worry about their parents or all the family members,
Speaker 2: the kids not going to school. So it was a
Speaker 2: really incredible teamwork across not only the company, but companies
Speaker 2: are being us and the government. That really makes me
Speaker 2: really proud about what was achieved by this very large team.
Speaker 3: Well, you know what is so impressive to me. You
Speaker 3: know we talked on this show about leadership and management,
Speaker 3: is that you were able to get your company to
Speaker 3: rally around the course, you were able to sync that
Speaker 3: up with the government that regulates you, in this case,
Speaker 3: funding you as well. Did you do something special in
Speaker 3: your leadership? Did you just think this is how I'm
Speaker 3: going to get everybody rally around it. Was there some
Speaker 3: special sauce you used there?
Speaker 2: So a few think I think being very clear on
Speaker 2: the goals because if you think about it and you
Speaker 2: oversimplify it. I became a project manager for this very
Speaker 2: big project which was getting a vaccin out, So being
Speaker 2: very clear on what are the objectives, what a goal,
Speaker 2: what other priorities? Communicating with people in real time. So
Speaker 2: we spend a lot of time making sure that our
Speaker 2: counterparties in the governments knew what we were doing, that
Speaker 2: they were aligning what we were doing, communicating a lot
Speaker 2: to industrial partners, suppliers making raw materials and so on,
Speaker 2: because for everybody it was a kind of crazy experimental
Speaker 2: experience in a sense. I mean, just imagine the face
Speaker 2: of my supplier or CEO when I call them and
Speaker 2: I say, hey, I need ten thousand times more product
Speaker 2: than last year. Had an interesting conversay exactly, And so
Speaker 2: I think it was a lot of communication and also
Speaker 2: adapting the plan of pivoting on data, pivoting on challenges,
Speaker 2: asking for help, being very transparent, and making sure everybody
Speaker 2: in the ecosystem around all vaccine was always aware what
Speaker 2: was going well, what was not going well, what did
Speaker 2: we need help. I was never shy to ask for
Speaker 2: help because the only objective was to get a safe,
Speaker 2: effective vaccine out of the door.
Speaker 5: There was no overgold.
Speaker 3: So I want to come back to moderna and some
Speaker 3: of the lessons you've learned there, But first I want
Speaker 3: to go back in time with you. You were born in
Speaker 3: Marseille in France in the early seventies. You were a
Speaker 3: child of the seventies and eighties. Can you paint a
Speaker 3: picture of how you grew up and paint a picture
Speaker 3: of those times.
Speaker 5: So I was very lucky in many ways.
Speaker 2: I was born in Sappo, France, which for all of
Speaker 2: you that have not been, is a beautiful part of
Speaker 2: the world with a lot of history in a Marseille
Speaker 2: was a Greek part as it's a very very old city.
Speaker 5: It's a very multicultural cities.
Speaker 2: You have people from all over the Mediterranean, people from
Speaker 2: North Africa, from a Middle East, which is super cool
Speaker 2: to grow up with friends from everywhere. I was, you know,
Speaker 2: in a middle class family, but because you know in France,
Speaker 2: school is split by the state through taxes, I had
Speaker 2: access to good school. The quality of life was nice
Speaker 2: because you'll go sailing. You always find a friend who
Speaker 2: had access to a boat somewhere, even if it's a
Speaker 2: small boat.
Speaker 5: You'll be able to go skiing. Even with school. A
Speaker 5: great quality of life.
Speaker 2: I was raised by the Jesuit, as you said in
Speaker 2: your intro, which I only realized much later in life,
Speaker 2: was a blessing because this sense of serving was just
Speaker 2: put into my head and my heart since I was
Speaker 2: a kid, and I didn't even feel it because he
Speaker 2: was normal. You know, when you're a kid, you don't
Speaker 2: think about things too much. You go with a movement,
Speaker 2: you know, when you are in the school I was
Speaker 2: at and on a Wednesday afternoon when you don't have class,
Speaker 2: instead of going to do spot over things, you know,
Speaker 2: let's tell you go you know, build a shelter of
Speaker 2: your less or let's go help somebody. You just say
Speaker 2: yes because everybody else is doing it with you. Hi,
Speaker 2: the supernice childhood. It was non eventful, but I think
Speaker 2: that quietness in my life helped build strength and foundations
Speaker 2: for half the times.
Speaker 3: In addition to the jazzu, which it looks like. Another
Speaker 3: great influence on you was an otel you had who
Speaker 3: was a successful business person in tech companies in the US.
Speaker 3: Was that influence?
Speaker 2: Yes, So I've been super lucky. My mom's brother moved
Speaker 2: to the US, was in the tech world b to be.
Speaker 2: But it was interesting because I would meet him like
Speaker 2: once a year in the summer, and I had somebody
Speaker 2: to talk about business and technology and yet a lot
Speaker 2: of influence on my life.
Speaker 5: I'll be asking him questions.
Speaker 2: You're like a kid asking a mental questions, and you
Speaker 2: will be like, should I learn German or Spanish in school?
Speaker 2: Because he was composor in France to the third language,
Speaker 2: And you will answer me in this very brilliant style,
Speaker 2: this is a wrong in your generation. You should learn
Speaker 2: to speak Chinese or Japanese. Then that's altitude long Japanese.
Speaker 2: And that allowed me to end up working in Japan
Speaker 2: and as a twenty four year old, which was of
Speaker 2: course an amazing experience. But I think having access to
Speaker 2: somebody that was from a business world to allow me
Speaker 2: to pick direction and to see her around the corner
Speaker 2: and to do the right things when I had time
Speaker 2: when I was younger, I think it was a big gift.
Speaker 3: More on math and magic right after this quick break.
Speaker 3: Welcome back to math and magic. Let's hear more from
Speaker 3: my conversation with Sefon gun Sell. You were great at
Speaker 3: math and science. You had an early interesting computers. Clearly
Speaker 3: you were on a track to do something in technology.
Speaker 3: But talk a little bit about your education and why
Speaker 3: you value a liberal arts education.
Speaker 2: As you asked me my secret power, of my secret gifts,
Speaker 2: I think you might be connecting.
Speaker 5: I think that things are connected.
Speaker 2: History plays a great role, as you know, for us
Speaker 2: to understand today's world. But so where the world might
Speaker 2: be going. Psychology plays a huge role in leading teams.
Speaker 2: You know, of course science and biology. I like to
Speaker 2: learn from different fields and had to basically build a
Speaker 2: metal model or how the world works, and those different
Speaker 2: experiences and those different educations I think make the metal
Speaker 2: model that somebody can have more precise about the world.
Speaker 3: You've later got a master's and engineering in Paris and
Speaker 3: another in Minnesota. What brought you to America for your
Speaker 3: second masters?
Speaker 2: So I always wanted to find a way to learn
Speaker 2: in America, and I was lucky because the school I
Speaker 2: was at in Paris gave you the opportunity to do
Speaker 2: your last year outside France. But it was a very
Speaker 2: simple system, which is you can apply anywhere you want
Speaker 2: as long as it's one of the top three program
Speaker 2: in the discipline what you apply. And so Minnesota has
Speaker 2: an amazing chemical engineering program in grad school, which was
Speaker 2: great for me to discover America through being in Minneapolis.
Speaker 3: Had to be a lot of fun. In January that
Speaker 3: was called and here's what's interesting about your story? Thought,
Speaker 3: We've got this whole history of engineering, math, science and
Speaker 3: then your first tech company job was in sales and marketing.
Speaker 5: Why.
Speaker 2: I think it's the contrariance in me. I wanted to
Speaker 2: keep learning. As I think you mentioned the new introw Bob,
Speaker 2: I always wanted to be CEO. I don't have a
Speaker 2: big ego, so I would have been happy car Wis
Speaker 2: being a se of a ten people company. I just
Speaker 2: wanted to be in the general management role of connecting
Speaker 2: the dots and so being tan as an engineer, I
Speaker 2: thought it made sense for me to don't know about business,
Speaker 2: and because sales you are close to the customers.
Speaker 5: I thought you was good.
Speaker 2: I did to do and that's what I did and
Speaker 2: have a counterexamp. Part of me being a contrariant is
Speaker 2: after I left the business school instead of going to
Speaker 2: a small company, because I graduated in spring of two thousand,
Speaker 2: when of course we had that Pickle dot Com. Instead
Speaker 2: of going to tech, I ended up going into a
Speaker 2: large farmer company called Ili Lily, and I asked them
Speaker 2: to go work in manufacturing over places, which even the
Speaker 2: Lily recruiting team thought was a weird idea for our business.
Speaker 3: Could grad you went through that, you got your MBA
Speaker 3: harder NBA. By the way, did worked with Ili Lily
Speaker 3: and somehow you wound up as a very young CEO
Speaker 3: a Beyo Mario, which was a major company at the time.
Speaker 3: Tell me a little bit about how this young, brand
Speaker 3: new CEO figured out how to do it.
Speaker 2: It was interesting because when I got the role, as
Speaker 2: you said, I I was young. I think I was
Speaker 2: just thirty three, and so I was a bit panicked,
Speaker 2: and so I obsessed about getting the best team I
Speaker 2: could around me. So I literally the job and spend
Speaker 2: the first two months on an airplane going around the
Speaker 2: world to meet all as many people as I could,
Speaker 2: asking everybody the same question if you're a CEO, the
Speaker 2: three things you will change, and so I got very
Speaker 2: constant feedback. I think it's another big lest soon for me,
Speaker 2: which is ask people. Most humans beings will tell you
Speaker 2: what they think. And I got very constant feedback. But
Speaker 2: the strength of a company, the issues. I got a
Speaker 2: good sense of who I wanted to keep on the
Speaker 2: executive team, who I should not keep on exective team,
Speaker 2: And so I always obsessed about getting the right team
Speaker 2: around me because I had no chance to be successful
Speaker 2: in that neural As a first time you're on CEO,
Speaker 2: if I have already a great team around me, and
Speaker 2: so that's what I focused.
Speaker 3: On, you know, and sort of reading about you and
Speaker 3: studying you a little bit. In addition to listening hard,
Speaker 3: there's thingmably two other things that you really focus on,
Speaker 3: which is focus and scale. How did those three things
Speaker 3: come together? And I hope my analysis is correct? Why
Speaker 3: are they so important?
Speaker 5: I mean?
Speaker 2: The focus, I believe is the only way you get
Speaker 2: things done that are complicated and important. I think most
Speaker 2: people get distracted by trying to do too many things
Speaker 2: or too many things not good enough to have an impact.
Speaker 2: The listening piece is about getting the data. I'm an engineer.
Speaker 2: I believe in data.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 2: One of our motel at MODERNA is we period fearlessly
Speaker 2: on new data. Sometimes you shock people. I'm able to
Speaker 2: say we need to turn right and change our plan.
Speaker 2: If it's telling you you need to change your plan,
Speaker 2: then every hour you wait not changing the plan is
Speaker 2: and now you're wasting That could hurt somebody given the
Speaker 2: business line I mean, And so listening for me is
Speaker 2: key to get the right data. The focus is key
Speaker 2: to implement and execute on big important projects or task
Speaker 2: and the skill is about impact, which is the great
Speaker 2: thing about what we do making medicine is if we're
Speaker 2: right and if we do our jobs well, by focusing
Speaker 2: on the right things, we can help a lot of people.
Speaker 3: How do you think about risk? How do you size them?
Speaker 3: And how do you decide which ones to take?
Speaker 2: So risk, in my opinion, has to be balanced with
Speaker 2: upside or opportunity, which is taking a big risk for
Speaker 2: something that's not going to change the world is foolish,
Speaker 2: if not madness. A good example how I think about
Speaker 2: risk is the decision to go to Moderna, to resign
Speaker 2: from the CEO of your Maria to become employe number
Speaker 2: two of this startup, which is just an idea with
Speaker 2: no money. I think we're two million dollars to start with,
Speaker 2: which is not a lot in biotech. And all my
Speaker 2: friends tell me, don't do it. All my friends that
Speaker 2: I talked to tell me don't do it. The risk
Speaker 2: was very large. But for me, the obside was this technology.
Speaker 2: If we could find a path to make safe, it
Speaker 2: was going to change medicine forever, and so it was
Speaker 2: going to change humanity forever. And the metal mode that
Speaker 2: I had, I could take almost any risk because the
Speaker 2: obside was so important for humanity, because the true inside
Speaker 2: is I was going to potentially build a company that
Speaker 2: would go bankrupt, But what is the risk of that
Speaker 2: we just use the risk of not bringing to the
Speaker 2: world the technology would save.
Speaker 5: A lot of our lives.
Speaker 3: You've talked a lot about teams, and clearly that's part
Speaker 3: of your go to strategy. Any secrets about building a
Speaker 3: good team and how to use them.
Speaker 2: Yes, so team is my number one go to think.
Speaker 2: The most important things I learned about business school. It's
Speaker 2: not about finance or other technical things which I learned
Speaker 2: and I've forgotten a lot of it. It's about the
Speaker 2: power of having smart people with as much of a
Speaker 2: diggers background as you can, especially us from your way
Speaker 2: of thinking, because you need to understand where the blind
Speaker 2: spots are. We all have blind spots. I'm biased. I
Speaker 2: believe everybody is biased, and we are the fruit of
Speaker 2: our own life, of own experience. And so what I
Speaker 2: really was impressed when I was in business school is
Speaker 2: sometimes that will really a business case work on it.
Speaker 2: I thought I would have cracked the case and I've
Speaker 2: got to class the next day, and a lawyer or
Speaker 2: a doctor or somebody from a part of the world
Speaker 2: I don't know where come with a totally different analysis
Speaker 2: and what I had and there is stronger. And so
Speaker 2: I've seen time this time and time again, and this
Speaker 2: has really helped me to think about how do you
Speaker 2: build a team that, in my business is very mission driven,
Speaker 2: because you can do great things if people are driven
Speaker 2: about the career or about themselves. It has to be
Speaker 2: about what we're trying to achieve, and that those people
Speaker 2: have different skills and different insights or way to think
Speaker 2: about the world. And you're also together you can get
Speaker 2: a better sense for the facts so that you can
Speaker 2: have a better chance to define the right problem to
Speaker 2: work on.
Speaker 3: So if you deal with your teams, you know something
Speaker 3: that comes up when you have different people, different points
Speaker 3: of view is the scent. What place does it have
Speaker 3: in your management philosophy.
Speaker 5: I think it's key going back to the world listen.
Speaker 5: I think it's kids to listen.
Speaker 2: But at the end of the day, somebody has to
Speaker 2: make a decision, and so I think the heart of
Speaker 2: the decision, the more it's debated, the more you need
Speaker 2: to give time to a decision. I'm very impatient type
Speaker 2: of guy, but I think I have a good sense
Speaker 2: and judgment of when it's a big decision and how
Speaker 2: you need to debate it to really hear out the
Speaker 2: best ideas and also opposition to the idea. But at
Speaker 2: the end of the day, somebody needs to make a
Speaker 2: call again, do we go right or left? Sometime, as
Speaker 2: you know, making no decision is actually terrible, and I
Speaker 2: think it's a role of a leader to listen, but
Speaker 2: then to weigh with his or her model of the
Speaker 2: world the risk and be upside, and to decide I'm
Speaker 2: going to take that swing on that.
Speaker 3: You talked about this unusual moment during the pandemic. But
Speaker 3: how do you think about in ordinary terms your work
Speaker 3: life balance your work life inaeggration.
Speaker 2: Yes, so I'd like to say internalie, I don't believe
Speaker 2: in work life balance because my life is not balanced.
Speaker 2: The word I use, which is close to your integration world,
Speaker 2: is harmony. I'm trying to have harmony between my work
Speaker 2: and my life, and this in my experience requires iterations,
Speaker 2: a lot of dialogue at home for example. Or you know,
Speaker 2: when I realized if I don't do sports, I don't
Speaker 2: sleep well and I'm not as good a person at work.
Speaker 5: And at home.
Speaker 2: Then one day I realized I had to get up
Speaker 2: early to work out in the morning because if I
Speaker 2: worked out at night, I couldn't sleep well. But the
Speaker 2: change when you get up at four in the morning
Speaker 2: is you have to do bed early, which makes you
Speaker 2: a very, very boring partner. And so we talked about
Speaker 2: it with my wife and we discussed and agree that
Speaker 2: was the right thing to do. It was important for
Speaker 2: me to try to be home for dinner with the
Speaker 2: kids when they were homes so we'll go to work early.
Speaker 2: So I had to go to work out even earlier.
Speaker 2: And it's the type of things that I think you
Speaker 2: need to figure out the world system so it can
Speaker 2: be sustainable, because the key is not to have a
Speaker 2: strategy that works for a while, it has to work
Speaker 2: for years.
Speaker 3: So digitalization something that's a hot button for you. What
Speaker 3: are companies missing and why and how is it critical
Speaker 3: to every business?
Speaker 2: So at the end of the day, what we all
Speaker 2: do in most companies is we use data to make decisions.
Speaker 2: And so the quality of the data, having access to
Speaker 2: data in real time across the enterprise is what I
Speaker 2: believe differentiates people over time. Because what's interesting about business
Speaker 2: and time is that nobody can buy time, so it's
Speaker 2: a pretty nice equalizer. And the other piece is that
Speaker 2: knowledge increase exponentially with time, but the exponential thinking that
Speaker 2: we see in tech, that we see in investments in
Speaker 2: the financial world, this is not intuitive to people, and
Speaker 2: so I think digitalization is really important because that's the
Speaker 2: best way to get high quality data to make the
Speaker 2: right decision. It allows you to go fast, which again,
Speaker 2: given nobody can buy time, if you can go faster
Speaker 2: than other people, your competitors regularly well as time compounds
Speaker 2: be way ahead of the time. It allows you to scale.
Speaker 2: Scaling with paper is impossible. You get actually these economies
Speaker 2: of scale. I believe it's all about digitalization, and of
Speaker 2: course AI is just gonna accelerate that even further.
Speaker 3: Let's jump back to modern what's coming up next for
Speaker 3: you for medicine and help.
Speaker 2: Our next big mountain, which I think is going to
Speaker 2: be even more impactful and what we did for COVID
Speaker 2: is cancer. We have some very interesting clinical data in
Speaker 2: skin cancer miranoma showing that compared to the best drug
Speaker 2: available today to patients, we have two out of three
Speaker 2: people which three us after the surgery, are still this
Speaker 2: is free. Metastas is free compared to the best drug
Speaker 2: available today. I think we find a way to individualize spreetmat.
Speaker 2: Whereas if you and I get diagnosed by the same
Speaker 2: doctor on the same day of skin cancer, modern I
Speaker 2: will make a different medicine for you and for me.
Speaker 2: We can't do that in around thirty days now from
Speaker 2: start to finish, and we really customize the drug to
Speaker 2: the genetics of your cancer for your immune system to
Speaker 2: be able to go literally eat your cancer. And so
Speaker 2: I think, and I told our team when we got
Speaker 2: the data and we shut the data publicly and internally,
Speaker 2: it's all our team out of town or that five
Speaker 2: to ten years from now, most people will have forgotten
Speaker 2: what we did during the pandemic, because I believe we
Speaker 2: will be known as one of the company that made
Speaker 2: the biggest dent on cancer in the industry.
Speaker 3: So time. We usually end each episode of Math and
Speaker 3: Magic with shout outs to the grades on both sides
Speaker 3: of business, the analytical side and the creative side. But
Speaker 3: in your case, I want to give you the shout
Speaker 3: out what you and your team did at such a
Speaker 3: critical time for the entire world truly all history and
Speaker 3: we all owe you a great debt of gratitude, and
Speaker 3: although you think people will have forgotten it, I suspect
Speaker 3: you'll be in the history books forever. Congratulations of building
Speaker 3: such an impressive company, and thanks for sharing your insights
Speaker 3: with us.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much for a kind of world's bovement.
Speaker 5: Thank you for having me.
Speaker 3: Here are a few things I picked up from my
Speaker 3: conversation with Stefan. One, taking care of yourself is essential
Speaker 3: to taking care.
Speaker 1: Of your company.
Speaker 3: As CEO, you need to be in the right mental
Speaker 3: space to leave. Stefan was put to the ultimate test
Speaker 3: during the pandemic, working seven days a week for months
Speaker 3: on end, and he had to figure out how to
Speaker 3: sustain it, for instance, by making time early in the
Speaker 3: morning for exercise. We're not all racing to fight life
Speaker 3: threatening diseases, but Stefan's story is a case study in
Speaker 3: bringing your best self to work.
Speaker 5: Two.
Speaker 3: Never lose sight of the mission. Stefan has a crystal
Speaker 3: clear sense of purpose that keeps him driven. Whatever your
Speaker 3: big picture goal may be, let it keep you focused
Speaker 3: and guide your decisions big and small. It's also a
Speaker 3: great way to assess the trade off of risk and reward.
Speaker 3: Three remain open to learning, listening to diverse opinions, staying
Speaker 3: up to date with changing data, and serving in multifaceted
Speaker 3: roles all ways of educating yourself about your company and
Speaker 3: your industry at large. And that's always going to be
Speaker 3: an asset. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening
Speaker 1: to Math and Magic, a production of iHeart Podcasts. The
Speaker 1: show is created and hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks
Speaker 1: to Sydney Rosenblum for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent,
Speaker 1: which is no small feat. The Math and Magic team
Speaker 1: is Jessica Crimechitch and Baheed Fraser. Our executive producers are
Speaker 1: Ali Perry and Nikki Etour. Until next time.