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