Beyond Biotech - the podcast from Labiotech Inside Flagship Pioneering's strategy: How this VC turns ideas into biotech giants
Flagship Pioneering doesn't go out to find the next big thing in biotech when investing their billions in fund capital - instead, they take a different route.
Flagship Pioneering has founded more than 100 companies in the life sciences worth in total an estimated $75 billion. With a proven model for biotech startup success and a culture designed to surface new and interesting ideas, Flagship offers a different approach to biotech funding that is paying off time and again.
In this episode I talk with Lovisa Afzelius, a General Partner at Flagship, uncover the ways in which Flagship is shaking up the biotech funding model, and come to understand the reasons why others will have a hard time imitating its success.
This episode is brought to you by Jubilant Biosys.
01:52 Meet Lovisa Afzelius
03:37 Learning lessons in big pharma
04:56 From top pharma to startup biotech
07:23 Two different worlds and ways of thinking
08:29 Flagship Pioneering
13:39 Finding the right people
18:13 Deploying capital to create value
21:06 Expanding into new markets
21:55 How does the Flagship model identify disruptors so well?
24:20 Why don’t others emulate the Flagship model?
25:36 Building a culture of ‘yes, and…’
27:47 Learning from the companies that don’t succeed
30:49 Artificial intelligence and biology
35:19 Lessons from business that never found market fit
37:29 The future for Flagship
39:55 The importance of diversity in biotech
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