Heroes, Lifelong Learning & Inventor Dean Kamen

Here’s the thing: education matters. That’s no zinger. Who doesn’t agree on that? But what do you do after tiring from nodding hypnotically to politicians’ pandering platitudes of “improving our schools”. I fell upon a shrine of serendipity—“randomness” and “optionality”, the twin pillars supporting the lectern of luck. And I met Jacob Mnookin. Jacob was starting the first ever charter school in Coney Island, Brooklyn—where I was raised and my family resides. We teamed up (I became Chairman), got chartered and open this August after a three-times oversubscribed lottery filled our founding 5th grade class. 80 incoming 5th grade students won the lottery. But most of the community has lost the proverbial ‘ovarian lottery’: born into poverty, out of wedlock and onto a uneven playing field they’re ill equipped for. Our mission is to right this.

I believe the two most important things that kids (especially inner-city kids) require for a successful education are (1) picking the right heroes and (2) developing a deep desire to learn. The first fosters the second. As a society, culturally we get what we celebrate. Celebrate celebrities, kids will seek to be socialites. Celebrate sports stars, kids will be aspirant “persperants”. Weekly gossip rags display celebrities riding bikes and eating ice cream, declaring “they’re just like us”. No. If we want to inspire greatness, it is not likeness, but distinction and achievement we should display. Besides: most great entrepreneurs that mint a fortune inventing the future don’t even know what they’re worth. The fellow who does things that count, doesn't usually stop to count them. One such fellow, similarly espousing the importance of education and doing a lot about it, is Dean Kamen.

Dean Kamen is an inventor, entrepreneur, and a tireless advocate for science and technology. As founder of DEKA Research & Development Corporation, he develops internally generated inventions and provides research and development for major corporate clients. Dean holds over 440 U.S. and foreign patents for innovative devices that have expanded the frontiers of health care worldwide. Some of his notable inventions include the first wearable insulin pump for diabetics, the HomeChoice™ portable peritoneal dialysis machine, the INDEPENDENCE® IBOT® Mobility System, and the Segway® Human Transporter. Among Dean’s proudest accomplishments is founding FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), an organization dedicated to motivating the next generation to understand, use, and enjoy science and technology. Mr. Kamen was awarded the National Medal of Technology in 2000, the Lemelson-MIT Prize in 2002, is a member of the National Academy of Engineers and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in May 2005.

WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO BECOME AN INVENTOR?
The alternative seemed so grim! I couldn’t imagine ever working for anybody, and I knew nobody was going to pay me to sit around and think of big ideas, so I decided to develop the skills to produce things that people would want. That way, people might be willing to part with their hard earned cash to let me do the things I really enjoy doing, like solving problems.

WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST INVENTION THAT CAUSED PEOPLE TO PAY ATTENTION TO YOU?
I built audiovisual systems in the early days of power electronics. At the time, these new power devices were revolutionary, allowing for thousands of times more power than you could get out of a little single transistor. I realized that I could take these high power devices and apply them in relatively simple engineered systems to quickly create things like light shows or control systems for big audiovisual displays. The new technologies allowed for very reliable, high performance shows, without the need for an enormous amount of equipment. I started building these when I was in high school and turned it into a whole business.
I personally think the entire horrible age of disco is a result of the achievements of the power semiconductor industry. An unintended, but very real consequence!

HOW DID YOU LEARN TO BECOME AN INVENTOR? WERE YOU SELF-TRAINED?
I was always fascinated by math and physics. I liked the pure idea of looking at the world around you and trying to figure out the rules that make it comprehensible. We take the properties of our natural world for granted in many ways, but it is so repeatable and so consistent! Where do those properties come from? As a kid, I used to think about these things all the time.
Frankly, going to school and answering some trivial question in a textbook didn’t seem like learning or knowledge to me. So I spent a lot of time on my own trying to understand the laws of physics in the world around me. I learned that from the laws of physics, societies have developed the rules of engineering, and as long as those rules don’t violate those laws, you can achieve some pretty powerful results. That’s when I became fascinated with engineering, and I determined I would develop a skill set to become capable of producing things that everybody wants.

BRING ANY FAMOUS INVENTORS BACK TO LIFE – WHO WOULD YOU SPEND THE DAY WITH?
That’s an easy question. Archimedes and Galileo. Archimedes lived almost 2300 years ago, yet he had a better insight into the beautifully intricate and self-consistent rules of nature than most people do to this day. He was able to literally do what we now call calculus - figuring out the volume of solids like cylinders, cones, and spheres – without any prior knowledge. It took about 1,500 years for another great mind like his to come along in Galileo of Galilei. You look at what Galileo was able to do through just pure logic in understanding essentially the laws of motion, acoustics, mechanics, and optics- it is nothing less than astounding!
It’s almost inconceivable to me that these guys were able to have the clarity of thought and expression that they had, without the benefit of standing on the shoulders of giants that we take for granted today.

View my complete interview with Dean Kamen at Forbes.com.

Mensch on a Mission with Kleiner Perkins' Komisar

When my Lux Capital partner Peter Hebert recommended we interview our co-investor from Kleiner Perkins, Randy Komisar I jumped—not because of Kleiner’s long-standing track record of investing early in companies like Amazon, Google and Genentech, but because Randy, like our partner Larry Bock, is a rare breed of VC: “a mensch on a mission.”. When VCs invest with other VCs they’re really investing with partners at firms—not the firms themselves. VC investing is a relationship, access and entrepreneurial-mentorship business. We work for two customers who we tirelessly serve--and the day we make the decision to manage money for someone or invest it with someone is the day we start working for our investors and working for our entrepreneurs. Randy Komisar is a great embodiment of this principle. Feed you brain or miss this exclusive interview at your own intellectual peril.

Randy Komisar is serial entrepreneur and a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Prior to his current role, he was a co-founder of Claris Corporation, served as CEO for LucasArts Entertainment and Crystal Dynamics, and acted as a "virtual CEO" for such companies as WebTV, Mirra, and MondoMedia. He was a founding director of TiVo [TIVO] where he is currently chairman of the Nominating and Governance Committee. Earlier, Randy served as CFO of GO Corporation and Senior Counsel for Apple Computer [AAPL], following a private practice in Technology Law.

Randy also works with social ventures to translate the strengths of for-profit entrepreneurship to for-benefit organizations. He has been an advisor to GlobalGiving from its inception and helped to launch Ignite Innovations. He serves on the International Advisor Boards for the UCSB Engineering School, the UCSB Institute for Energy Efficiency, and the National Entrepreneurship Network in India.

Randy holds a BA in Economics from Brown University and a JD from Harvard Law School. He is a Consulting Professor of Entrepreneurship at Stanford University and author of the best-selling book The Monk and the Riddle, as well as several articles on leadership and entrepreneurship. He is co-author of an upcoming Harvard Business School Press book on planning innovation. Randy frequently speaks in the U.S. and abroad on such topics.

What was the career path that led you to become a venture capitalist?
I never set out to become a venture capitalist. I’m actually a serial entrepreneur! I started my career as a rock promoter and as a director of a community development program in the city of Providence. Once I realized that everyone I was negotiating and doing businesses with was a lawyer, I decided to go to law school. After graduating and practicing for a short period of time, I did my first entrepreneurial stint spinning out a company from Apple called Claris Corporation.

Claris was a great success and a terrific experience. I was young, I was hungry, and I worked with some amazing people. I caught the startup bug and began doing more companies after that. I went off and worked as the CFO at GO Corporation, one of the early hand computing companies. I then ran LucasArts Entertainment for George Lucas, and then another game company backed by Kleiner Perkins called Crystal Dynamics. Around the end of the boom, I created a new type of position called “Virtual CEO,” where I would help to run a portfolio of early-stage companies. I wouldn’t take the formal CEO role, but would act as a senior leader, decision-maker and mentor. Through that role I did a whole series of companies including WebTV, TiVo, Mondo Media, and some not-for-profits like GlobalGiving.

Around 2000 I started teaching at Stanford, did a few for-profit and some social ventures, and was then invited by John Doerr to come join Kleiner Perkins in 2005. That was the first time I ever thought about venture capital!

When you have the choice between investing in a great technology or a great person, which takes priority?
My priority is always the person, and the reason why is pretty simple: I generally believe that plan A, the business plan that I’m investing in, is not the plan that will ultimately succeed. The path from plan A to plan B or whatever plan is ultimately successful is going to take some zigging and sagging—and it requires a great team to navigate that path. So first and foremost, I’m investing in the team. Secondarily, I’m investing in the team’s existing hypothesis about their market and their product. It needs to be compelling, but I’m not foolish enough to believe that it’s simply a matter of execution.

What are 3 attributes of both good and bad entrepreneurs?
A good entrepreneur is highly creative. They are slightly deaf and slightly dumb- meaning they are not oblivious to the market, but they are tenacious to their core beliefs—and they are capable of sufficiently communicating their vision and purpose to be able to recruit their constituencies: the employees, investors, and partners necessary for success.

Bad CEOs are fairly analytic and fairly rote. They might be very smart analytic types, but they are fundamentally not the creative types. They are people who are incapable of articulating or persuading the constituencies necessary for success, and by-and-large they are people who are completely dogmatic about their view of the product or the service that is going to deliver the ultimate success to their company.

In good markets and bad markets, people are always quoted saying: “it’s a great time to be an entrepreneur.” Is there ever a bad time?
I was just having this conversation with some students from North Carolina State, who came on an annual trip to get a sense of the Valley. One of the students asked: “What the heck are we ‘gonna do now?” I looked at him and I asked: “Do you have any debt?” (Not much, some student loans). “Do you have any dependents?” (No, I’m single). “Do you have any assets that just got devalued in this last crash?” (No). And so I said: “You’re in great shape!”

There’s probably no better time to go off and start something new. My general sense is that the passionate entrepreneurs are almost irrepressible, and there’s never a bad time for that personality type. The reality is that in the market we have right now, it is difficult to get traction, it is difficult to acquire capital, and it is difficult to convince constituents. That’s largely because of the uncertainty that each one of those constituents face in their own businesses. So I wouldn’t want to be Pollyannaish about what’s going on today, but we’ve seen some of the best companies built out of these types of circumstances. Google [GOOG], for example, was basically born out of the bubble-bust of 2000-2003.

Do you have a preference for first-time vs. repeat entrepreneurs?
I love the repeats, and in particular I love the repeats who have had at least one failure in their history, because I think you learn so much more in failure. I would be cautious with the 23-year-old who came out with a good idea, caught the wind of the market, found a liquidity event, claimed victory and then tried to repeat the performance at 28 or 29. That individual probably isn’t humble enough to have learned what they needed to learn during that first experience, and so they’re set up for a fall when that wind slows down. That’s why I particularly like to find someone who may have actually failed before.

How do you distinguish between innovation and entrepreneurship?
I think innovation is well distributed on a global basis wherever there are smart people. Entrepreneurship, however, is not. Entrepreneurship is a profession, though we may treat it more like a rogue characteristic or personality trait. The reality is that in our economy today, the innovation industry, which is driven by entrepreneurship, is the equivalent of an industry sector. In a way, it has become the R&D for many different industries ranging from pharmaceuticals to telecommunications to entertainment, and now we’re even seeing it in industries like the automobile industry.

You’ve mentioned a whole slew of industries. What areas are you bullish on, and conversely what are some areas that you wouldn’t want to be funding today?
I am excited about alternatives and energy, because I think there’s a big problem to be solved. My attention focuses on where there are large problems that businesses can help solve in the next 4-10 years, and energy is an area that is clearly going to need many new solutions over the course of the next decade. The problem, of course, is the near-term pressures from the commodities markets and elsewhere that make it very difficult to rationalize investments in today’s markets. The good news is that policy will be highly supportive and give a helping hand to this industry to get through what could be a very difficult time – the sort of time that killed the first alternative energy industry that sprang up at the end of the Carter administration and died with $20 per barrel oil in the 1980s. While I like the energy sector because it solves a big problem, I’m nervous about that sector in the near-term, and I think you have to be careful about how you invest in it.
I’m very excited about what’s going on in mobile digital communications, entertainment and applications, and I think the revolution we saw around the PC in the 80s is extending itself today into mobile. It’s a global phenomenon. It’s difficult to figure out where the winners are going to be, but it’s a significant market trend.

I’m not that excited about investing in areas that surround retail. I’m not very interested in many new retail ideas, and even e-commerce to some extent is suffering in that I don’t think there are big problems to be solved. We have very good online solutions and we’ve got good physical solutions, so areas like retail are very uninteresting to me.

When you think about venture capital as an asset class or industry? It’s been almost a decade without having hugely receptive capital markets for IPOs. Big companies are struggling with potential M&A, and stock currency has been obliterated. How do you think about the venture industry and what may need to change or evolve?
I do think the venture industry is in the process of changing and needs to change. I don’t think we’re living in the world that existed in the mid-1990s, when VCs with small funds and no leverage were able to make small bets and reap huge returns. I think that structural era has changed. Venture capital is now global, and as a result if you’re going to be in the VC business at scale you have to think about how you want to participate in those global phenomena, and at least make very clear decisions about where you are not going to participate. I think as we look at industries like green energy and alternatives, if you believe in those industries and want to invest in them, you’ve got the difficulty of having to invest huge amounts of capital over the course of building those companies to reach a cash-flow positive state. As a result, you’ve got to have a different model about how you deal with leverage, how you remove risk with early capital, how much you invest in later stages of those companies, and where the ecosystem is for continuing investments. I think the notion of building businesses with very little capital that are going to have outsized returns - the Googles of the world - are going to be far and few between. I think where we see small capital invested, like in the Internet, we are going to see generally relatively small returns, because these days there are very few barriers to entry.
I do think VC is changing. It’s becoming more of a scale buisness, more of a global business. It takes more financial engineering than it did before because of the amounts of capital necessary to take some of these companies to fruition, and timeframes are also going to be longer as a result.

What is your contrarian view about the world?
I think that the issues we’re seeing today that we ascribe to markets, to politicians, and to global politics are all human issues, and that the human psychology and the human character are really where we need to focus our attention as individuals and as a society if we want to resolve any of these larger dilemmas.

What’s your favorite book and favorite movie?
I have so many favorite books, but on I go to over and over is Moon in a Dew Drop by Eihei Dogen. Timeless wisdom.

Same with movies, again, so many favorites, but my pick in the last year was Man on Wire about Philippe Petit, that extraordinary man who walked a tightrope between the Twin Towers. He epitomizes great entrepreneurship. This movie elevates one's soul.

Lucid Lamentations & Larry Bock

Here’s my Lux Capital partner Larry Bock lucid lamentations on the woeful state of science in the US, what it means for competition, entrepreneurship and venture capital. Larry has been the founder and initial chief executive officer of MetraBiosystems, Inc., Neurocrine Biosciences, Inc. [NBIX], Pharmacopeia, Inc. [PCOP], Argonaut Technologies, Inc. [AGNT], and Caliper Technologies Corp. [CALP]. Mr. Bock was also a co-founder of ARIAD Pharmaceuticals, Inc. [ARIA], Athena Neurosciences (acquired by Elan Pharmaceuticals [ELN] for $700 million), GenPharm International (acquired by MedaRx), Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Inc. [VRTX], Onyx Pharmaceuticals, Inc. [ONXX] and Illumina, Inc. [ILMN]. Most recently, Larry organized the San Diego Science Festival, a month-long celebration of science and the impact of science and innovation on our lives. The festival culminated in a day-long expo in San Diego, and was the West Coast’s largest science event. Larry holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Bowdoin College and an M.B.A. from the Anderson School at the University of California, Los Angeles.

What was the inspiration for the San Diego Science Festival?
As a serial entrepreneur in the life sciences, I found that I could no longer hire Americans to fill positions in the companies I was putting together, because they weren’t going into those scientific fields. Then, when I took my family abroad, I saw these wonderful international science festivals—in particular the Cambridge, UK festival, the Edinburgh festival, and the Italian and Indian festivals—that have been going on for years. These festivals had not yet come to the U.S. (two were in formation on the East Coast), so I though, “OK, I want to create the largest science festival on the West Coast.”

Tell me more about the sad state of science in America – can you cite any anecdotes or quick statistics?
Nobel laureate Richard Smalley once said, “By the year 2010, 90% of the world’s scientists and engineers will live in India and Asia.” And right now, 85% of the people taking degrees in the advanced physical sciences in the United States are from abroad. It’s sort of a perfect storm of events. Americans are not going into these areas, and the foreigners who are pursuing these fields are not being retained here because of visa issues, and more importantly because the opportunities are now greater abroad. Right now we’ve probably got the largest brain drain of scientists in the history of the United States ever.

Another report that just blew me away came from the government. It’s called “The Rising Tide” and it’s filled with facts and figures. For instance, South Korea produces more engineers than the United States. There is another statistic that rates the quality of engineers, and there are more high quality engineers in India than in the United States.

What do you think got us into this situation?
Well I think it comes down to that Dean Kamen quote, “We get what we celebrate.”
We celebrate sports stars and Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, and sure enough that’s what young people want to become.

Is the media partially to blame?
Yes. The media is also really deceiving in making the public believe that the United States is at the forefront of technology. My awakening occurred when an individual I had hired to work for a company in the U.S. went back to China and formed a company 10 times the size for a fraction of the cost doing the same thing overseas.

Now just to play devil’s advocate – even though that company is now in China creating jobs there, isn’t it also benefitting the U.S. biotech companies that can inexpensively outsource?
Yes, companies can outsource, but I fundamentally believe that jobs will ultimately co-localize where science and innovation is taking place. My best example of that is Genentech [DNA]. Genentech didn’t put its manufacturing facilities in Singapore, they put them in Vacaville, CA because with any new science, the manufacturing jobs need to co-localize with where the technology takes place, because there is still so much research involved in the manufacturing process. As a result of that geographic decision, the United States has had a 30-year exclusive hold on biotechnology, and it’s not until just recently that some of that work is being outsourced overseas. That’s my argument for why we need to keep the innovation happening here.

To that point of co-localization, how do we create the next great innovation hub like Silicon Valley? What are the ingredients necessary for a region to attract and retain top scientists?
Well I think it’s clear that you need leading research in the area, so these regions typically cluster around major nucleuses of academic labs. You also need to have the capital within proximity, because venture capitalists don’t like to get on an airplane. And finally you need to have a success story to rally around. If you look at San Diego as an example, it’s probably one of the three leading centers of biotech in the world. It’s because we had a company called Hybritech, which pretty much kick-started the whole revolution. Most people dismiss that point, but most major biotech companies evolved from Hybritech and that entrepreneurial spirit. Another example of this is in the middle of nowhere in Warsaw, Indiana, where you have some of the largest orthopedic companies and dozens of startups. They are all there because one of them got started there and its success spawned all the rest.

So what was your expectation when you were launching the San Diego Science Festival?
Some of these international festivals have been going on for 15 years. The Cambridge festival in England drew about 50,000 people to it, and the Italian science festival (called the Genoa Festival) draws about 150,000 people. I didn’t think I could attract those numbers, but that was our long-term goal.

How did reality match up with your expectations?
Everybody told me I couldn’t count on more than 10,000 people showing up to a first-year event. Yet we attracted so many people that the police had to shut down Balboa Park, and at one point there was an 8-mile backup on the 163 Freeway! We easily had 50,000 people at the expo.

How did so many people hear about the Festival?
The way the festival worked was that we brought programs to the schools first, with the quid-pro-quo that the schools needed to broadcast information about the expo to their student bodies and networks. So it was more of a grassroots marketing effort.There is nothing as motivating as a teacher giving extra credit for students to go to the expo.

Who were some of the exhibitors at the expo?
They were everybody you can imagine in the science community: universities, community colleges, professional science societies, high school student clubs, community organizations, the military, and the leading high-tech and life science companies. We had 300 different exhibitors, with all degrees of sophistication. Lockheed Martin [LMT] brought flight simulators and virtual reality environments and immersive display screens straight out of Minority Report. The UCSD supercomputer center was making viruses out of marshmallows and toothpicks. Some community environmental organizations were even doing finger painting with algae.

What are some of the lessons that the teachers who attended the festival could take away about teaching science?
The problem with teaching is that the average teacher has been out of the scientific community for about 10 years. In today’s world, where the amount of information doubles every couple of years, the teachers can’t get access to what’s interesting. What we offered was some insight into what are the hottest topics. We are not teaching the fundamentals to the students, but we are giving them a sense of where science is important based on those fundamentals.

What’s the biggest problem with science education today, and what message do you hope attendees walked away with?
Our most pressing issue with science education is that we basically drum science interest out of our students. The way we teach science in the United States, our students learn a lot about facts and figures, but then at the end of the day they have no clue why that science is important in their lives and why they should be interested in it.
Whether it’s renewable energy, global energy, global warming, worldwide starvation, or disease—I don’t think there isa single national challenge we face today where science isn’t the potential apex for solving it, and we will need the next generation of scientists to solve these problems. I hope the Festival got people excited about science again.

Christoph Westphal: Live Forever or Die Trying

Just published in our premium issue, my Forbes Interview with Christoph Westphal (who co-founded Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, Inc. in 2004 and has since served as CEO).

Sirtris has become a recognized pioneer in the research and development of small molecule drugs that target the sirtuins, a family of enzymes that control the aging process. In 2007, Dr. Westphal successfully led the company through its initial public offering. In June 2008, GlaxoSmithKline [GSK] acquired Sirtris for $720 million. Dr. Westphal is a co-founder of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. [ALNY], Momenta Pharmaceuticals, Inc. [MNTA], CoNCERT Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Acceleron Pharma, Inc. Prior to establishing Sirtris, Dr. Westphal was a general partner at a venture fund and a consultant with McKinsey & Company. Dr. Westphal earned his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and Ph.D. in genetics from Harvard University; and he graduated with a B.A. summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University. Dr. Westphal currently serves on the Board of Directors for Alnara Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and he serves on the Board of Fellows of Harvard Medical School. Dr. Westphal has been the lead or senior author on several patent applications and scientific papers in journals including Cell, Nature and Nature Genetics. Dr. Westphal enjoys traveling (he has visited over 130 countries) and playing the cello. He is also fluent in English, German, Spanish and French. Dr. Westphal is married with three young children.

You’ve spanned the gamut as a scientist, venture capitalist, and entrepreneur. Obviously pattern recognition is a key skill in all of these endeavors. Tell me about the founding of Sirtris and the things you saw that led you to believe it was a great opportunity.
Let me take a 30 second step back. Yes, I’ve done a bunch of things, and probably failed at most of them! I started as a medical student getting an MD, but I wasn’t very good at it because I wasn’t passionate about it. For the scientist part, I did the MD with my Ph.D. at Harvard, and then went to work for McKinsey. That was an interesting experience because I learned about the business world and how business folks dress and act and think, but I’m not really someone who is great at problem solving. I like thinking more creatively, and so I got into venture. But as a venture guy, I really became more of a serial entrepreneur. I was founder and CEO Momenta, then Alnylam, then Acceleron, and then Sirtris. Each of those situations was pretty similar—I tried to find really cool science out of Harvard or MIT with great IP protection, and gather other folks around the technology who could help me tell the story. I think a big part of trying to create any new technology based company is the ability to communicate the message to the key potential “buyers” or stakeholders.

With Sirtris in 2003, David Sinclair reminded me a lot of some of the past founding scientists I’ve worked with—a visionary scientist who really wanted to translate his scientific insights into products that could help people. When I read David’s 2003 paper in Nature, saying he could extend lifespan in yeast, I said “that’s interesting.” But in 2004, when it became clear that a number of other labs had made a similar fundamental link, and there was evidence that these genes control not only aging, but may also be targets to control key diseases such as Type II diabetes, I got excited.

So for me, the key shift to start a company around the aging area was the ability to move it into a practical space of drug discovery and development focused on diseases of aging, where we could have a reasonable timeframe and a reasonable chance to capture large pharma interest, because the markets would be huge. The story was attractive, so we decided to raise a lot of money and try and discover new and important drugs.

You’ve worked with a host of luminaries with whom you’ve helped build companies. Are you more often betting on a scientist and not the science?
Often I am betting on the people. I am definitely a people person. Whether it’s a scientist or the venture folks and corporate lawyers and accountants around a deal, I always bet on the people much more than on the science. I like to think of it as a 3-legged stool: good money, good science & IP, and good people. The most important leg of that stool is the people, by far. The “B-science with an A-team” is always preferable to me than the converse.

Talk to me about your approach to picking investment areas and how that differs from others.
Because of my technical background, I have always been interested in this world of really cool science at great universities. And because I also went to medical school, I think I’ve been constrained in the things that I get excited and passionate about. That combination leads me to think about really cool science, that could ultimately turn into drugs that could help people. Many people are constantly trying to “innovate” in this space. There have been many different models and many different attempts to improve the odds of generating a good return to the investor. Overall, I think it’s a very, very tough business, and many people don’t fully understand how difficult it is to generate good returns. Maximizing my own financial situation hasn’t really driven my personal passion and interest. Instead I have been absolutely focused on what is really cool science that I think could improve healthcare and change the world. I don’t want to sound too idealistic, but it just so happens that’s totally what floats my boat.

I’ve been doing this for 12 years. I’ve watched things go up and down, I’ve heard venture guys say a 100 different things, and throughout that time I have always said, “Hey, I just want to do what I enjoy doing.” Sometimes people respect that, but every time I’ve started one of these companies, nine out of 10 people think it’s just the dumbest idea and it will never work. With Alnylam, it was “Wow, that sounds just like antisense, what a dumb idea.” And with Momenta, it was like “Oh, glycobiology has been tried forever and has never worked.” With Sirtris, I distinctly remember everyone saying you can’t start an aging company.

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