Gereon Hermkes: Welcome back everyone. This is Behendigkeit podcast episode 8, and today we’re gonna talk more about the project that was started to develop a COVID vaccine by the company BioNTech in Germany. They were actually the first ones to develop it, and we’re going to look a little bit more about what that means as a leader, as the top dog, to be responsible for such a tremendous effort. What decisions do you have to make? What impact does it have? How do you deal with the responsibility? We are coming straight to you from Berlin. My name is Gereon, I’m here with Pauline.

Pauline Rummel: Hi everyone.

Gereon Hermkes: So let’s get right into it. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this book, and actually I really appreciate the author Joe Miller and of course also the leadership team at BioNTech to be so open and so vulnerable about stuff, because it’s just real insight into what people in these positions of power behave like and what they feel like in these precarious situations.
So the first situation that comes up fairly early—and just to set the stage—COVID has started in China. It has started to cross over into Europe and the United States, but it’s not this full-blown pandemic yet. And very early on, the husband, Uğur Şahin, has realized that something is going on there. And they are not actually into developing vaccines, they are working on a cure for cancer. And he’s noticing this and he’s saying, „Well, something is happening here and it’s not going to end well, and if we don’t do something against it, it’ll actually set us back, because then all people will get sick, and we’re not going to be able to make progress on our vaccine development efforts.“
And because they know this is coming, and most of the world is still unaware at this point in time, they’re actually thinking, „Should we go on vacation before this happens?“ because they know this is going to take two years, three years of absolute hell. And they haven’t been on vacation for a while. They are a married couple at the helm of this company, and they also have a daughter.
And so this might seem a little bit frivolous maybe, but this is actually a typical leadership situation that you will encounter if you’re the leader of an organization, because all eyes are on you, everybody’s watching what you’re doing, and even the slightest things will have an impact. If you tell all your employees, „Well, guys, now it’s really time to get serious, let’s do some overtime, and so on, we really got to get this done,“ and you want to go on vacation, you already know what’s going to happen. So nobody’s going to take you seriously anymore. So you really have to be coherent in what you say and what you do. On the other hand, what do you do if you’re already yourself almost burned out? And you know something that most people at this point of time don’t know, which is a crisis is coming, and you’re not going to leave, not going to be able to leave the bunker, so to speak, for the next two, three years, and then you have the responsibility for a child as well.
So it’s really interesting to see how they try to work through this and actually have this discussion, and I want to share my opinion on this. So this is actually a very tricky situation that depends on the context. However, I have lately more and more come to the conclusion that it’s actually really helpful to think about protecting yourself as the leader first. You want to make sure that you are aware of what kind of image you’re projecting and if what you’re saying and doing is coherent, because telling everyone to work more and then going on vacation or working less doesn’t make a lot of sense.
There’s also this aspect—and I think a lot of leaders don’t pay enough attention to that—in that you have to protect yourself. And the best image that I’ve heard about this is, imagine you’re on a flight, on a commercial airliner, and there’s some problem with the air supply and then the masks drop from the top. And what do they always tell you at the beginning of every flight? If you’re there with a child or an elderly person that cannot handle this situation, you have to put the mask on yourself first, because if you don’t do that, what might happen is you put the mask on the kid and then your oxygen runs out, you pass out, and your kid cannot save you, it can’t give you the mask because it simply can’t reach it. And think about that situation. First of all, one of you is dead probably, and then your kid can witness you dying from suffocation. So absolute terrible scenario. But yet, most people will instinctively try to save the child first because it’s so ingrained in us, but it’s not the right call in that situation. That’s why the airlines keep repeating it.
And so here is a similar situation. If you come to the conclusion that, „Okay, I didn’t have vacation for three years, I won’t have it for another three years,“ and you’re not a vacation person, you don’t need it, then obviously don’t go. But given that they are German, and Germans are very big on vacation, and actually kind of need it because it’s been trained into us and it’s a really important aspect of our culture, you got to make sure that you’re actually able to lead the group. You’re not helping anyone if you’re projecting this image of coherence and of being true to your word and everything, and then after six weeks you get a burnout and you can’t lead the organization anymore. You’re not helping your employees, you’re not helping the millions of people that are waiting for the vaccine. And so they actually took the decision to take the vacation, which I think is the right call in that situation. It is the right call in that situation, and some of you told me a quote two days ago, and he said, „A dead sheepdog is not a very good sheepdog.“ So if you have a dog that’s protecting the sheep, of course, the job of that dog is to fight and protect the sheep and maybe even die in that process, but if it does it so in a way that it happens too easily, then it’s not really helpful, because we need the dog to be around to lead the pack. And if you need vacation to actually be able to do that, I would say context is very important, but absolutely do it. Make sure that you’re protected yourself, because you cannot help anyone else.
Pauline Rummel: No, I totally agree with that, because I think sometimes it happens that you’re so stressed or whatever, maybe you have some things going on in your family, whatever, so you have not a clear mindset to lead your team, and then you have to take a step back, focus on yourself, and take a deep breath in and out, and then come back with a clear mindset. And I think this is very necessary for yourself and also for your work and the team.

Gereon Hermkes: And it’s actually interesting because we have somebody, we have an office in Rwanda, and in the Rwandan culture, it’s not very typical to take vacations. For Germans, it’s absolutely normal. Actually, the country would be in revolt if they couldn’t go on vacation anymore. But in Rwanda, nobody does it. And so now, because we have these two cultures in the company, the Rwandans have to take the vacation. And if they don’t take it, they all get some nudging to do it. And what was the reaction of one of the developers when you have to take the vacation? You say, „Well, I never took one, I didn’t want to take it, but now I feel so refreshed and have new ideas.“ Yeah, that’s that’s a good thing. You come back and you have a change of scenery, change of perspective, and you come back re-energized. And so, even if we didn’t have laws here that gave people a lot of vacation days, as a boss, as an investment decision, I would still opt to do it. I’m losing the days that people aren’t there, but when they come back recharged with new ideas, with new energy, that’s actually much more valuable than the couple of days that you have lost of working time.
And so the next one—and this is just a quirk, but I had to smile so much and it actually happened a couple of times throughout the book, because I somehow recognized myself on that—is that when they go on vacation, they actually take a lot of stuff with them from the office. So he takes two monitors with him so he has like his setup of an office, and he replicates it when he’s on vacation. So they go on a plane and they pay for extra luggage, and he pays for extra two monitors and some equipment so he can have the same setup, which I think is really smart. And what they also do—and this is something I do as well—is they bring their own coffee machine with them. And so people sometimes say, „I’m extreme,“ and you can imagine like how that looks if I check into hotel and then I have an extra one of these blue Ikea bags and there’s like a coffee maker in it and the hotel stuff just looks at me like, „What is he doing? It’s a crazy ways of reading all the stuff.“ But the thing is, what happens if you are in a hotel somewhere and then their coffee machine is broken, which happens, or the coffee is terrible, and you drink one sip and you’re like, „I want to barf, I can never take it again.“ This is a real problem. Because then you could go to Starbucks, but then you’re already missing like 20 minutes out of the day. And then what if you’re in a country where you don’t have Starbucks around the corner? And so I really like this idea that they are actually making sure that they have a setup wherever they go that keeps them productive. Because, of course, they’re working on their vacation. And so basically what they’re doing on vacation is yes, they’re resting, yes, they’re catching some sun rays, but they’re working, they’re researching, and they’re doing a lot of sports to stay fit.
Another thing that I found really interesting—and I think we’ve talked about that in some other episode—is that one, they were starting to develop the COVID vaccine, they actually kept it a secret from everyone. And we’ve talked about it that there’s actually a smart thing, because you don’t want to have too many people to have an input, and because it helps you to stay lean and keep moving and don’t create too much resistance for others to slow you down.
One thing—and this is a theme throughout the book—that was really difficult to decide for them, and I think they did this very well, is so now we know that it worked. They were able to create the vaccine, it was very effective, but back then they didn’t even know if the technology would work. They were making a bet. They were having a company to work with their technology, but they didn’t actually know if the vaccine that they were developing would ever work, and most vaccines don’t work. If you develop them, the ones that we get in doctor’s office, this is just a small number of all the tries that were undertaken, and a lot of them simply don’t work. And even the ones that do work, in the projects that end up working, often don’t work very well. So if you get a flu vaccine every year, you might have a chance of like a 40% protection, because it’s always changing, how the virus is always changing, and so there’s always a catch up. And so even when it’s only happening in like 50, 40, 50% of the cases, this can still be a good vaccine. And back then they didn’t even know if they would be able to develop one.
And so if you’re the CEO of a company, if you’re the leader of a big project, how do you deal with that? Because they are working on cancer, they are seeing this, they want to react to that, but then they also know that most vaccine development projects fail. And I think this is a really, really difficult decision. Do I bet the farm on it? Do I put the whole company on it, say, „Well, we might have a chance of 30% of creating a successful vaccine,“ and what do you do then? Do you actually invest all that money, all the time, all the bandwidth, or do you say, „Well, 30% is good, but why don’t we take something more conservative,“ and then, you know, try a project with 80% that might be later, it might not save the world and so on, but at least it’ll keep us safe?

Pauline Rummel: I think it’s kind of a different situation because it depends a lot on the owners of the company, and because it’s been those kind of people who achieve like saving people and do something good for the population, they hadn’t had like the big business, the big money in mind, so like the goal was to fight COVID and to find something that’s really helpful what like protects the people, and I think because of that they took the risk, and they were like willing to, yeah, risk the whole company, because in their mind was like a good thing and not only just to make money.

Gereon Hermkes: Absolutely. You know, the mission. This is why it’s so important. And you know, as I was reading through it, I would always have these parallels to Elon Musk. I think they would have been fine if the company went under, and but they had made a good effort, they had put the best foot forward, they tried everything, and it didn’t work out, but they gave it a really good try. I think they would have been okay with it in the end because they’re so driven by the mission. And I think this is actually the right mindset to have, and I think this is something that we can often see in Elon Musk statements. So when he says that the only American car companies that never went bankrupt are Tesla and Ford, and so all the other ones have already went have already gone bankrupt. You can kind of see it in that statement that there is actually an existential a tremendous risk to these kind of endeavors. We often just hear of them when they have been successful. And now everyone’s saying, „Oh, these guys are multi-billionaires,“ and so on. Yes, of course, but it could have gone totally different, and they still took that risk. And I think in the end, this is what entrepreneurship is all about, and this is what everyone that has achieved something great—it doesn’t have to be in the realm of entrepreneurship—has done it. They have decided to write that novel, to spend five years or five years on it, and spent the last money on it, and they didn’t know what would come out at the end. It could have been the Great American, the great drama novel, or it could have been one of 20 million books that no one ever reads. And so I just have to applaud that, and I think you’re absolutely right, it’s it’s because they had this mission in the background. They didn’t care, they wanted to help people.
And one thing that is really important to know here is that, of course, it wasn’t just them, it was the whole company, but there’s also the finances of the company. Because actually, they never wanted to start a company, they were researchers. But they just figured out at some point of time, „Well, we have all this good research, but we can never bring it to market.“ There was this gap, and so they reluctantly decided to go into business, which I find kind of charming being a business guy myself. And they just, they didn’t want to do it, but then they did it because they had to. And they had some companies before that were successful, but I had some problems with financing that we’re gonna get into a little bit later on. But the big advantage that they had here with BioNTech is that they were financed by the Strüngmann twins, which are billionaires, German billionaires, who, whose family made a fortune in in medicines and Hacksaw. A lot of Germans will know that company. And they were also supporters of the mission. They said from beginning, „We don’t care if you don’t bring us anything in five years, 10 years, we’ll give you all the money because we can see that you guys are really motivated, that you guys are really smart, and we want to change the world too.“ And this is not very common, because people that give you money, like banks or Venture capitalists and so on, they’re always nervous, they always have their own interests, they always, you know, want to make sure that they get a return on investment. But these guys were also mission-driven. Their return on investment was not money, it was developing a cure for cancer, for example. Having an impact. And so this always gave the couple the freedom to make decisions in a totally different way than if they had to look at investors that wanted to get their money back out of their investment. And so they were able to take that leap of faith, and this is in my opinion why they were the first to develop a vaccine.
And then they did something else that is really interesting from a leadership perspective. So first of all, the bet the farm. And you could have made the case that, „Well, if there’s a mission driven, why don’t they stay on the mission of curing cancer first?“ But you know, if you look at like where can you have more impact, I think both of them have a lot of impact, and but then they were arranging it in their mind that if we cure cancer—excuse me—if we cure COVID first, if we develop a vaccine for it, this could be on a test project for actually our cure for cancer. And so that it makes a lot of sense, because that helped them to build up production capacity, advance their research, and so on. But then they had to make the decision: Do we just use one vaccine candidate or do we actually test a lot of them in parallel? And to my knowledge, all of the competitors just used one candidate. And there’s another famous biotech startup in in Germany called CureVac who are also looking very good at that face. And everybody thought, „Well, they are really smart, they really will find and they’re going to be successful in this.“ And they just chose the wrong compound. So they decided on one, and in the end it turned out not to be a good choice, and they made that leap of faith and it didn’t work out as it could have been, as it could have. But BioNTech did something else. They didn’t just take one compound, they actually took a lot of components at the same time, even though it was way too much for the company to handle. And so this is, you know, if you look at edit from the outside, this might not be the most pressing or most interesting problem. There’s always like more dramatic stuff that’s more interesting, but if you put yourself in the shoes of the leader, what do you do? Do you stop with your mission of developing a cure for cancer and start developing vaccines? And if so, do you do what everyone else is doing? Do you stay within your capacity, which is, „Well, we have never developed a vaccine before, just developing one is really difficult,“ or do you actually go big and say, „We don’t know which compound is going to work. Let’s try out two dozens. Let’s say it’s gonna cost us an arm and a leg, it’s gonna be very taxing on us, but then we can let reality play, we can use empiricism and see which one of those are actually working out and then pick the winner“? And so the these are exactly the decisions that chief product owners and leaders of companies have to do, and it’s not very easy.
And of course, you know, we know now of BioNTech as this hyper, more than super well-managed German company. That’s kind of like defying the image of like a little bit of a state country. But of course there were these situations. And just reading and cut my blood volume, or you know, they have this urgency, they have seen this thing coming up before a lot of other people, they are they try to be fast, they try to get this stuff done. And then the people from the company, the managers, come back and say, „It’s impossible to do it on the timeline. We can’t do it.“ And this is a very typical situation for leaders where they embark on an ambitious journey. Speed is of the essence. They decompose the work. They say, „This is the mission, that that’s what we want to achieve.“ They decompose it into parts: „This is what has to be done, this has to be done, this has to be done.“ And then they let their departments work on it, and the department has come back and say, „It’s not possible.“ And now you have a choice as a leader. You can accept that and say, „Well, I have good people, I trust the judgment, and they are actually the experts.“ The world has gotten so complex that I cannot understand everything, or you can push back. And we know what Elon would do in that situation. And I think pushing back is the only thing that you can do, and this is actually what you have to do. And sometimes I see leaders are not wanting to do that. They want to trust their people, they want to be seen as the fair-minded leader, on the benevolent leader, and that is all good. And of course, he should be the benevolent leader, but at some points of time, you really have to drive stuff, because if you do not drive it, nobody will. There’s only one entrepreneur in the organization, you know, maybe you’re lucky, you have a couple of people who are entrepreneurially minded, but if you’re the boss, it’s your job to drive stuff. Think about Steve Jobs, think about Jeff Bezos, think about Elon Musk, think about all these luminaries of entrepreneurship, and they’re all drivers. Because they, at this situation, were speed is of the essence, they have bet the company, they have bet the farm, and the employees come back and say, „It’s not possible,“ they can say, „Oh, okay, then let’s pack in our bags and let’s just go on vacation everyone.“ No, you have to push back, and you have to push back in a good manner. Don’t become the tyrant in that situation. Use questions and make make sure that you communicate that that is not an option and that people need to get Innovative and try to find solutions to still get these things done. Maybe they need more Capital, maybe they need more help, and maybe just some creativity is necessary, but you have to be adamant as a lead in that situation to not back down, to not let them say that it’s not going to get done. Of course you can speed up everything, but don’t in that situation, please, please, please don’t accept that and keep pushing.
And I think on Professor Şahin, he did something very smart, which is something we do in Agile all the time. He communicated the urgency to them, and then said, „First the fastest, later the best.“ And telling them, „Okay, we don’t need to be perfect in the beginning, let’s just validate our assumptions as quickly as possible, and once we’ve done that, then we can like build it out and improve the quality over time.“ And of course, the people there, most of them didn’t believe them. They are BioNTech employees, they’re really good employees, and they didn’t believe that it would be possible, but this is the moment for you to shine as the leader. This is actually why you’re there. It’s not to hold like, you know, the the speeches and give tell us with champagne and so on. This is in my opinion as a leader, we need to step up and push it through in a nicely mannered way, but make sure that all the non-believers still support this and get everything moving, because the belief will come over time. As we progress, more people will believe in it. You know, the Apollo program, the mission to land on the moon and then return somebody from there safely in one piece. Do we really think that everybody believed that it was going to succeed at the beginning? Even the people working there? No. Probably very few people actually believed it. How many people actually believe that we can go to Mars? Not that many. And I’m sure even at SpaceX there are a lot of people who have their doubts, but you’re just gonna keep moving, and then one step after another, people will believe more in the mission.
Another little quirk that I found interesting is that when they got back from their vacation, you know, things were heating up, and he was like shopping for emergency supplies on Amazon, getting all the gloves and the mask, and then they went to the supermarket and stocked up on groceries. And it’s really heartwarming to see that, you know, this guy, you know, he’s an immigrant and he’s still managed to become a professor in Germany, which is very highly regarded and very very difficult. Mind, he is a self-made billionaire, he holds tons of patents, he publishes in Nature, so he’s this genius. But he’s still very human, and like a like a typical dad, I would say, and you know, still stocking up on the staff and buying the stuff on Amazon to make sure that everyone is in is safe. And there is like a ton of these little anecdotes in here. So for example, they were at an outing, like a like a dinner party or something like that, and they were just really getting nervous about getting infected. And so the wife, Özlem, she calls on she called to their daughter and said, „Well, sweetie, we’re so sorry to hear you’re sick.“ And the dog was like, „What? I’m not sick. What are you talking about?“ And she said, „Yeah, do you want us to come home? Yeah, of course, we’ll come home, we’re we’re gonna leave right now and make sure that you’ll get better soon.“ And because they just want to get out of the party, but didn’t want to take anyone off. And so they they lied about it. And acted as if the daughter was sick just to get out of it. And and you know, this couple, like if you read about them, they’re super honest, super transparent, and just these really great people, but of course sometimes you have to use these little white lies. And I find it so so heartwarming that they actually allow this to be in the book. Because I’m sure they had some control over what was written in the book, but they’re so open that they actually, you know, don’t mind this being known. And I find this to be super cool. Of course, we don’t ever use white lies, do we? We’re perfect, Leo.
So, I want to call out one thing that I think is really important in this whole and COVID situation. We know it was first detected in China, and it might originate from there. And we also know that the Chinese government really wasn’t playing very well with others in terms of, you know, alarming the worldwide community on how to on the fact that this was happening. We also know that they didn’t share a lot of data, as far as, you know, how many infections do they have in their country, even up till now. They’re still not sharing the data as you’re actually supposed to within the World Health Organization. And but it has to be said that there’s actually two researchers in China who have really helped us out a lot. And one is Professor Zhang, who uploaded the genetic code of COVID very early, and without whom none of this would have been possible. And it will probably face some problems for doing that later on. And there’s also Dr. Li, who is quite famous, who was actually an an eye doctor in Wuhan. And even though he was an eye doctor, he was actually so well trained that he recognized the COVID virus as as something new and published it. And unfortunately, he died of COVID later on. But without him ringing the alarm, we would have lost so much time, and probably millions more people would have died. And before he he died of COVID, he was actually punished by the Chinese government trying for spilling some secrets and helping foreign governments and all that nonsense. And so I just want to take a moment to appreciate appreciate these guys. You know, even though the Chinese government has been really bad with this, there’s like really good people who have actually paid with their lives for or have really gotten into trouble and then in the end pay ultimate price for dealing with COVID and for alerting us.
So there’s another level of management leadership situation that comes up pretty soon after they have like started working on the candidates in that all this work is hyper complex. So they have to take like 80 different chemical compounds, and they have to mix them together, and then they have to do a lot of processes. This is not like a little piece of metal that has to be found, this is hyper complex stuff, a lot of steps, a lot of risk in that things can go wrong. And I want to quote something reminiscing about this unanticipated challenge, because things aren’t working out in the construction of these compounds. „Or the business, Professor Şahin is philosophical. Sometimes he muses a lab feels like it’s jinxed. Out of the blue, tried and tested daily procedures cease to work. And error screening, you start troubleshooting, you doubt everything, you change reagents, repeat every step, and still everything fails. You feel like a football team that is unable to complete simple passes because the ball keeps bouncing away. It gnaws at your self-confidence. In these situations, you can put pressure on a team, you can criticize them. You have to encourage them and build up their self-belief, and then all of a sudden the ball starts rolling again, and everyone plays like world champions.“ And you know, you can really see his philosophy in in management. And I actually have to say I don’t quite agree with him in all situations. But sometimes you have that situation where we have a team that’s doing well and suddenly it’s jinxed. It happens in professional sports like you were saying, and that you know that they are top players and you know they gel well with each other, and then suddenly nothing works. And we can see that in like Soccer World Championships, for example. Best players are used to playing together, they win, win, and then suddenly everything falls apart. And I really like his attitude to say, „Well, if I know I have these good players on the team, I’ll just leave them alone and it’s gonna fix, it’s it’s gonna get fixed over time. Maybe I can encourage them, and that will help.“ I actually think that sometimes you have to create a little bit of positive stress in that situation. It kind of depends on what the situation is. So if I see that the team is aware of a problem and is working the problem and they’re competent to do it, then I totally support this approach. Sometimes, however, I think teams can get kind of lost in the situation even if they are very professional otherwise. And sometimes it really helps to to wake them up. Like Gordon Ramsay always comes to my mind—and I’m not saying be like on Ramsay—but for those who don’t know, Gordon Ramsay is a very famous cook, and he also has some TV shows, and he’s known for really going off on the on the other chefs, like his sous chefs, and he’s overdoing it, of course, but what I like sometimes is his energy that he brings to it, because he’s really saying like, „Oh my God, can you please stop it now, get your hat in the game and start doing it correctly.“ And it’s just this admonition, this like putting a little bit of pressure behind it that then gets people out of their funk and get and gets them moving again. And so this is a very fine line to move. Are you will you act like Professor Şahin as he did here, or will you pull out Gordon Ramsay? And I think it’s very helpful to have those kind of reactions ready as a leader and then pull them out when the situation demands it. Because you could do what he did, and it could happen that the team never gets out of funk and you just need to rally them. You need to bring out that inner Ramsay and to get them to get back in the game. But you could also overdo it and then just frustrate everyone more, because already the situation isn’t going well, and then the boss is yelling at you, and then it’s not going to get better.

Pauline Rummel: I think it also depends on the personality of the employees, because some people are like a little bit softer and yeah, can’t handle stress very well. So I think if you put even more pressure on them, and now not so nice way, it can affect the complete the opposite. So like you said, I think it’s good to have both in mind, and yeah, choose how to deal with it in the right situation and with this kind of employees.

Gereon Hermkes: Absolutely, context is for kings. So always make sure that you don’t just have one approach but can like read the situation and then react to it accordingly.
So another thing that I recognized myself a little bit in it is that, you know, there were often situations where employees had problems sourcing some stuff, like supplies, compounds, and so on. And you know, they they came to him and said, „Well, we can’t have access, we can’t get access to this, it’s got to be costly, and I’m trying to find out where to get it.“ And he would just say, „I already ordered it with my private credit card.“ Yeah, so so this is something that never happens, right? For us, oh yeah, it’s it’s it’s really interesting. And yeah, there’s a couple of these stories, but what I think it speaks to is to the urgency that he sees. And so what we want to do in Agile and what we do want to do in like, if you follow John Boyd’s teachings, the military strategist, is to always make sure that we have a focus on time, that we look at what what’s happening with time, because here obviously time is running out and we don’t have the time to wait for stuff. So there’s this sense of urgency, and I think a lot of business leaders they’re lacking bad, and because they don’t see the immediate result. It’s not like they open the the newspaper or the news website every day and it says, „Well, 5,000 people have died,“ and they’re like, „Oh, damn, had I bought this stuff, we might have saved 5,000 people.“ They don’t sense that urgency as directly, but especially if you have a competitor who is acting with that sense of urgency, you can be in real trouble. Imagine Amazon is your competitor and they’re just building building and iterating very quickly, then you don’t have the time to fuss around. And this is, I think he shows this very nicely, and and I like the term „violence of action“ for it. If you decide to do something, then do it as quickly and as violently as you can, like execute on it, don’t talk about it, execute on it and get it done. And then, you know, we see more Agile behavior in there. They’re removing impediments. And this is this almost seems to be one of his main tasks: to remove strategic impediments. So the kindergarten syndrome, when you start shutting down, what do they do? They set up a kindergarten at the company. And I mean, they are all researchers, they don’t want to be in charge of a kindergarten, but what are you going to do? You remove the impediment and you create a kindergarten.
We already talked about the fact that they never wanted to start their own firm. And when they did, you have to understand that in in biotechnology, this is actually a very tricky business. Because it takes you a couple of years, actually of many years, to develop a product. And then usually once you have a good product, you don’t have enough firepower to bring it to market, because then you would have to build up a marketing and sales department all across the world. You have to talk to regulators, and so on. So it’s not like a like an internet startup where you can have customers quickly show that you can make some money. You don’t even know if your if your product is going to work for five years, 10 years. And you don’t have access to the consumers directly. You can’t just put up ads on on Google AdWords, for example. Or have some ads run on TikTok, and because you actually need to build up that infrastructure to sell to hospitals and and doctors and so on. And because of that, you absolutely need financing, which comes from Venture capitalists or which comes from state funding. And this is usually a really difficult situation. Especially if you’re a researcher, then you have to go into this finance sphere and get and get some of that money. And we’re talking millions, usually dozens of millions, if not like in the three-digit million range, in order to just develop one met. And so they talk about like the situation with their company that they had before BioNTech, and it’s so interesting to see, because it dovetails with some experience that I have had and that the financiers are actually very difficult to deal with. Because they have competing interests. And so they are talking very openly openly that they had a Swiss backer, and you know, they wanted to get out of the company. They had finance the first round, they didn’t want to continue, they wanted their money out. And this caused a lot of problems for the couple, because now they had to find other financing. And when they started to get some financing, of course, the Swiss backers didn’t want to get out after all. And so you’re suddenly in this mind, where your money is running out, and the people that were financing you before said, „Well, we don’t want to do it anymore.“ And then you find someone else, and they say, „Well, we want to continue doing it.“ And you’re like, „Oh, so can we get back to work? Like what are we supposed to do here?“ And so this created a lot of mess, and I think also really taught them that they need to be careful in like who they take in as investors and how important it is to structure the investments. And I think they get really lucky in in meeting the Strüngmann twins, the finances, and I think both sides got really lucky. And I think they handled it very smart in setting some conditions so that they would be left alone and could actually try out their science and actually work on the products without like a bank looking over their shoulder and constantly creating problems for them. And of course, that’s not easy to pull off. If you’re a beginner founder, you don’t have the track record, you’re not super successful already, nobody’s going to give you these cut these conditions, these deal terms. But they were lucky to insist on them, and I think everyone’s the better for it. And because the billionaires that finance BioNTech, they’re now a lot richer as well, because they held a lot of the stock as still do, and they have added a couple of billions to them to the war chest.
What’s really cool, in as far as the violence of action again, is that while there were like slowing the work with the old company where they had these financing problems, they were already starting BioNTech and talking to the Strüngmann twins to get it financed. And of course what happened, Professor Şahin, he had already hired people for the new company from his own money. And so he really got into trouble, because the money was running out for the new company, because it was from his private finances. And that’s a tricky situation. But again, you can see the urgency, the belief in the mission. They are winding down the older company or slowing it down at least, and they want to try something new, and there’s no money. So what does he do? He just spent the my his own money on it. And what’s really cool is that it was actually open to it and open about it to the to the Strüngmann twins and just said, „Guys, I’m starting to run out of money.“ You know, he wasn’t hiding it, he was very open and vulnerable, and I think this is really important if you want to create a relation of trust. He could have told them some bullshit. He could have made up some stories, he could have hidden it, he could have fired the employees, but instead he was open and honest. And I think there and they had real meeting of minds where they saw, „Okay, we’re both very motivated to get this stuff done, we’re open, we can trust each other, and now let’s pull our forces and do it together.“ And the negotiations actually took place in the in the hotel near Frankfurt where the Constitution of Germany after the Second World War was developed. And there was, there’s actually like a plaque saying, „The German Constitution was developed here.“ And they were like, in that moment, all of them were hoping, „Okay, maybe if we do it right, someday there will be a plaque saying BioNTech was haunted here.“ And yeah, that’s I think this is pretty cool history in the making.
Another instance of this vulnerability—and this has become kind of famous—is when so they are still the small company. They are building a vaccine, they have never been seen before, they have this financing, but that’s not the end of the story, because if you want to manufacture millions, hundreds millions, hundreds of millions of doses of a vaccine, you actually need the infrastructure to do that. And they cannot just build it up. It’s a highly complex product. And also for the phase three trials, when you want to test all the stuff, you have to have a leveler testing procedures across the world. And so at some point of time they figured out we don’t like working with bigger partners, but we have to do it. And here we can see the leadership decisions again. The whole history was bad experience with bigger partners, with financiers and so on, but at the end they still realized the facts. As scientists, they look at the data and they say, „Well, we don’t want to do it, but we need to get a part none.“ And there’s actually just a handful of companies in the world that can do it. What’s really interesting is they are already had a relationship with Pfizer, and at some point of time pretty early on the CEO of Pfizer and Professor Şahin got on a call and talked with each other. And this is actually a little bit interesting, I find, because the CEO of Pfizer, Albert Bourla, he’s a Greek Jew that’s now American. And Professor Şahin is a Turkish Muslim that’s now German. So they have these histories of immigration from countries that don’t get along so well with each other. But they immediately got along. It was a meeting of minds, they’re both scientists and they got along well, and the Pfizer CEO said it was „love at first sight, a great meeting of minds, I established that was very honest, inspiring men and inspiring man. The element of trust was unusually high.“ And so this is where you can see, and you know, Horton knows businessmen will say, „Yeah, don’t give up, and don’t give up too much information, be tough, and be this, and be that.“ But you can actually see that being vulnerable without like overdoing it is actually a really good strategy in a lot of situations. It has helped them get the financing and is it has helped them to create the trust with Pfizer with Pfizer CEO even though it could have gone very differently. And it’s quite famous today that they started the partnership without any paperwork. If you think about how much money is involved. We’re literally talking dozens of billions, and both sides have tons of lawyers. They basically did a handshake over Zoom and said, „Okay, we’re gonna split it 50/50, and let’s roll.“ And I think this was only possible because of this trade of Professor Şahin to be this vulnerable, to be this open, to be this fact-minded person that makes it easy for other people to actually build trust to him, build trust with him.
There is a quote at the end of the book. Let me see if I can find it by Erich Kästner, the German author. And it it says in German, „Es gibt nichts Gutes, außer man tut es,“ which is rhyming as well. And in English, it it goes, „Nothing good happens if one doesn’t make it happen.“ And I think this is also something that you can see throughout the book. And you know, it really annoys me often when when I see people like always dithering and saying, „Yeah, but what can we do? Something in, should we do something in? But how would we do it? And is there something that’s really possible?“ and so on, instead of just doing it. So very early on, they were still researching the stuff, and they they had an implement that at some point of time they would need to manufacture some of their compounds. And that doesn’t mean mass produce, but that means we need to produce something for the clinical trials, for example. And so they they hired somebody that was like kind of interested in that, but that wasn’t apparently really trained in that, and they sent him to a two or three-day course in good manufacturing practices in pharmaceuticals, GMP. And we are sitting here smiling, why everyone? Because we’ve sent people to do that. Because we’re interested in getting some business in the industry. And so sitting there and saying, „Well, we don’t know what to do about it,“ we send somebody to these trainings. You just go online, you research it, you buy the course, you go there, and then you find out if it was a good idea or a bad idea. And think about it: BioNTech the same thing. They just, you know, look it up on the Internet and send somebody there, and then you start building from that. And this is the way to do it. Why would you do it any other way? If you think this is the way to go, then just start and then do it. And then over time you can see if it worked out or not, and then you adjust to it. And what they did is they started at this low level. At like at zero, and they build it up over time. And actually just a couple months later, the production site that was certified in this GMP framework became available. And because they had that money from the Strüngmann twins, they were actually able to buy it. And suddenly they had that person, they had that beginning knowledge, and then they could buy the site, which they probably wouldn’t have really understood or been aware of had they not taken their training. They bought it and built up the nucleus of their own production facility, and then they would buy more and more and more and more. But it always starts with that first little rock. The first little rock that you carry away is the reason why you were able to move the mountain. But if you don’t start moving that rock, you’re never going to do it.
So there’s of course a lot of political stuff that’s that’s interesting. Some people might remember, especially in Germany, that this competitor CureVac that we talked about, there was a there was an article in the newspaper one day that Trump tried to buy it away from Germany and tried to move it to the United States, which got everyone really ticked off. I remember I was like really ticked, and suddenly and the government was like very supportive the other companies because they realized somebody could try to could try to take it away. And so at some point of time, you know, they’ve tried all these compounds, and they have narrowed it down to one. And so now this is being tested everywhere. And I want to go back to this, you know, you have to make a decision, you have to sometimes perform, and then see how the dice roll. And so it’s really interesting that the daughter of them—and she was a teenager already—she was saying at this stage where they were waiting for the results of the of the tests, and there was really nothing so much more that they could do, they just had to wait, she said, „My parents were tense the whole time, and we didn’t really talk. Her father was uncharacteristically struggling to concentrate on anything, started flipping through his favorite motivational quotes, such as, ‚Stop counting the days, that make the days count.'“ And I just find the status to be so Humane. These are billionaires, professors, they have the Order of Merit of Germany, they have basically achieved everything, and this guy is sitting there, super nervous, and starting to get out his motivational growth book. Right, yeah, that’s he’s like like everyone else. I want to have Elon Musk doing that. Because he always build up this this image in your mind of like what people have achieved and so on, and they’re just humans. He’s just sitting there with his motivational book, it’s like, „Oh, yeah.“ And then his wife said to him—and this is a quote—“My dear, we have done everything human—excuse me—he said it to his wife: ‚My dear, we have done everything humanly possible to build this vaccine. Now we are at the mercy of biological reality. Whatever we hear later, what counts is that we made an effort.'“ And I think this is just beautiful. This is exactly what it is about. You can, you know, if you’re shooting an arrow, of course, you want it you want to aim well. Of course, you want to be capable in shooting an arrow, but at some point of time, the arrow has to leave the bow. It’s gonna be sent, and it’s going to take some time for it to land, and you don’t really know where it’ll land. And this is what doing something great, building a company, starting movement, and so on is all about. You don’t know what’s going to happen, but you have to take that risk, and then it’s gonna be a little bit tough to wait to see if it hits or not, but you have to to make the effort. If you don’t do it, you’ll never have a chance to be successful.

Pauline Rummel: I think even if you fail, like it’s hard, and it’s really disappointing, but when you know it like from your heart that you did everything possible, you tried everything, and you did the maximum of effort, it’s not that bad, because you know, „Okay, you tried everything to make it happen,“ even though it’s not working at the end. But because imagine if you didn’t do everything possible, and then it fails, you always have the thoughts on your head that if you could have done more, or if you, yeah, would have did that or that, this maybe would have changed the outcome, you know? So yeah, it’s just a waiting game, but but the best thoughts in your mind.

Gereon Hermkes: Absolutely. And yeah, regret is not a fun thing. „I could have done something different, should have tried.“ In the year ’17, and you’re like, „Yeah, why didn’t I?“ And also I think with a failing, yes, it doesn’t feel good, but usually it’s necessary in order to get better. Whenever you try it in something new, you’re gonna fail, and this is what helps you get better. And then there’s also another aspect that got triggered when I read this and and it just collects it connects a little bit, but the in Operation Valkyrie, where some German general staff officers tried to kill Hitler, they knew that the chance of success wasn’t really high, and but they said in French, „Cost what it may,“ we’re gonna do it in order to send a signal to others. Because yes, you may fail in your endeavor. Maybe SpaceX fails to go to Mars, but what a signal have they sent to everyone? They have inspired a whole generation, and this has happened before in history. You try something big, you fail, but at least you have sent a signal. And one generation down, two generations down, they want to say, „Well, you know, there was the Apollo program and then there were SpaceX, and now we’re gonna do it.“
And so they’re waiting for that result, and then it finally comes back, and it’s actually much better than expected. We talked about like your flu vaccine having like 40, 50% efficacy, and it came back with over 90%. And none of them had expected that. And now something happens, and this is something that most people that want to move something, that try something, that really give it their all, have experienced. And I’m quoting: „We had been traveling at the speed of light for months, and now suddenly it was as if time stood still. We allowed ourselves to be emotional and to think about what it would have meant to us and the team that had worked day and night for months if we had not been successful.“ And so this is something that, you know, you have a phase of intense work, you want to accomplish something. Maybe you face a hardship, maybe for a couple of years, and then, at least that’s my observation, a lot of people think then that when it’s over, it’s over. And it rarely is, because just like a boat passing you by, once the boat has passed you by, the thing is not over. Usually there’s a wake behind it, like some turbulence in the water, some some waves coming in. And so I often noticed that that people, you know, they’ll say, „Okay, the war is over,“ or „Our mission has ended,“ or „Something has ended,“ and they think it’s ended, but this is just the beginning of the aftermath. And so I think it’s really important to have this phase of reflection and also to brace yourself against what will what will come, because especially if you’ve had this phase of like really focusing and you’re not almost being in a survival mode, which they surely were, they had the whole the same situation that we all had with lockdowns and so on, but then had all of this responsibility to brace yourself for the emotion on fallout that is surely going to come. And I think a lot of people, especially in go-getters that are undertaking these kind of things, they are not as aware of it. They’re focused on this on this episode of high intensity, and then when it ends, they think it’s over, often start the new thing, and then the way comes and just crashes into them and pulls them underwater.
Little episode is that, I’m another kind of recognized myself there as well, is that a day the couple are both from Turkey originally, but they don’t speak Turkish that well, but they use it as a secret language so that their daughter doesn’t understand, though, which my wife and I did with English as well. But unfortunately, Elsa is a little bit too smart for us and like started learning English at a very early age so that wasn’t possible anymore. But yeah, I guess that’s the trick of a lot of parents to hide some stuff from their kids. But yeah, it’s interesting that they’re doing this as well and I’m using Turkish to do it.
So we’re coming to the end of the book, and I think there’s a lot of good lessons in there. It closes in ’21, I want to say, and they’re saying the following: „If the story were to end here, BioNTech’s achievements would still go down as one of the most important in medical and economic history.“ All the big vaccine makers weren’t successful, they were too slow, they didn’t get the job done. But for Özlem and Uğur Şahin, this is just the start, this is just a stepping stone. They’re still on their mission as we’re speaking right now. They’re sitting somewhere in our lab, somewhere in an office, and they’re grinding. Now it remember it, that’s I appreciate that to know that people that are that smart and that dedicated are actually working for the public good. And they are multi-billionaires, they don’t need to do this stuff, they can buy their own island and live on it, but they’re not, they’re out there grinding. And what’s so humble is that there’s still lecturing university. They’re still mentoring PhD students, still don’t have a car, still don’t have a TV, still haven’t sold any of their stocks. And so this really shows like what kind of persons they are. And they’re still on the mission, and the mission is to cure malaria, the mission is to cure tuberculosis, and I shouldn’t say cure, they want to build the vaccines for it. They want to build the vaccine for HIV, they want to build the vaccine for cancer and multiple sclerosis. And now we have this toolkit of mRNA and can use it for other diseases. And actually, we’ve been talking about Rwanda so often, they’ve opened a production facility in Rwanda, and they want to produce a malaria vaccine there. And it is a big issue, the malaria, because I think 200 million people a year get infected by it, and it’s really not fun. It’s not that present for us in the West, I would say, because we used to have it, but then we eradicated it by it by like changing our environment, but it’s still a huge issue. And if they were able to achieve just one of them, it would have it would be a great feat, you know? And they are saying, „Well, mRNA, it’s just a start for us because there’s actually technologies behind it, like self-amplifying mRNA or trans-amplifying mRNA, and they are much more powerful,“ and so Özlem ends: „If I’m almost getting emotionally here, she said, ‚This was just the beginning.'“ And there you have it, people. Geniuses, billionaires, that I’m moving things, shaking things, and they’re from Germany. And we always say, „Well, it’s too bureaucratic here, this doesn’t work, that doesn’t work,“ and here they show us that it actually does work. And I think what really makes them different, of course, they’re smart, of course, they engage this division and their foresight and their faith in trying these things out. They don’t know if this works. None of what I just talked about might work, but they’re still on the path. And what really strikes me is like how measured, how how nice they are. They are not the tyrannic on CEOs, they’re just doing their job, they do it relentlessly, they of course have an extreme ambition, but they go about it in a nice way. They are tempered by modesty. And I think they are a great role model to everyone across the world. And this is why I wanted to talk to you about them a little bit, because this is a couple made in Germany that made it in Germany, and I think there are a role model for everyone around.

Pauline Rummel: Absolutely, a big motivation for everybody.

Gereon Hermkes: All right, everyone, that was today’s episode. Thanks for listening and hope to see you soon.