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BE 008: Projekt Lightspeed - Part 2

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(disclaimer: may contain unintentionally confusing, inaccurate and/or amusing transcription errors)

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 covet vaccine by the company buying Tech in Germany and they were actually the first ones to develop it and we’re going to look at a little bit more about what that means as a leader as the top dog to be responsible for such a tremendous effort right 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 hi everyone so let’s get right into it so 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 bindeck to be so open and so vulnerable about stuff because there’s it’s just you know it’s nothing crazy but it’s like real insight into what people in these positions of power behave like and what they feel like in these precious situations and so the first situation that comes up fairly early um and just to set the stage covet has started in China right it has started to cross over into Europe in the United States but it’s not this full-blown pandemic yet right and very early on um


the the husband he has realized that something is going on there right and they are not actually into developing vaccines they are working on a cure for cancer right 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 um 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 of 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 married couple at the helm of this company and they also have a daughter right and so this might seem a little bit um 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 on on you everybody’s watching what you’re doing and even the slightest things will have an impact right if you tell all your employees well guys now it’s really time to get serious let’s 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 right so nobody’s going to take you serious 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 right 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 banker so to speak for the next two three years and then you have the responsibility for a child as well right and 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 um think about protecting yourself as the leader first right you want to make sure that you are aware of what kind of image you’re protecting 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 um imagine you’re on a flight on a commercial airliner and there’s some problem with the air supply and then the mass drop from the top right and what do they always tell you at the beginning of every flight if you 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 kit and then your oxygen Runs Out you pass out and your kid cannot save you it can’t give you the mass because it simply can’t reach it right and think about that situation first of all one of you is dead probably and then your kid can witness you dying out of uh from Suffocation right so absolute terrible scenario but yes ma 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 a year 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 of a very big invocation and actually kind of need it because it’s been trained into us and it’s a really important aspect of our culture um 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 you know 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 decision it is the right goal in that situation and um some of you told me a quote two days ago and he said a dead sheepdog is not a very good sheepdog right so if you have a dog that’s protecting the Sheep um 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 do you have any thoughts on that 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 to 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 and it’s actually interesting because we have somebody we have an office in Rwanda and um in the Roman culture it’s not very typical to take vacations right for German it’s absolutely normal actually the country would be in Revolt if they couldn’t go on vacation anymore it’s true isn’t it but in Ronda Nobody Does it right and so now because we have these two cultures in the company the Iranians have to take the vacation right 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 and yeah that’s that’s a good thing right you come back and you have a change of scenery change of perspective and you come back re-energized right and so even um 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 right 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 uh 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 he takes um 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 right and so people sometimes say I’m extreme and you can imagine like how that looks if I check into hotel and then I haven’t like 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 right but the thing is what happens if you are in a hotel somewhere and then their coffee machine is broken which happens right or the coffee is terrible and you drink one ZIP and you’re like I wanna barf I can never take it again um this is a real problem right because then you could go to Starbucks right 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 abroad um around the corner right and so I really like this idea um that they are actually making sure that they have a setup wherever they go that keeps them productive right because of course they’re working on their vacation right 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 about that in some other episode is that um one they were starting to develop the covet 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 um and because it helps you to stay lean and keep moving and don’t create too much resistance for others um to slow you down um one thing and this is a theme throughout the book there’s that was really difficult to decide for them and I think they did this very well is so now we know that it worked right they were able to create the vaccine it was very effective but back then they didn’t even know if the technology would work right 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 right 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 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 right 40 efficacy 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 uh 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 right 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 perform 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 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 covet 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 good thing and not only just to make money absolutely nothing you know the the mission right um 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 um I think they would would have been fine if the company went under and but they had made a good effort right 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 right so when he says that the only American car companies that never went bankrupt are Tesla and Ford right and so all the other ones have already went uh 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 right we often just hear of them when they have been successful right 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 right 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 right um 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 right 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 and was the whole company but there’s also the finances of the of the company because actually um they never wanted to start a company they were researchers right 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 right there was this Gap and so they reluctantly decided to go into business which I find kind of charming being a business guy myself right 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 um 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 biotech is that they were financed by the stringman twins which are billionaires German billionaires who uh whose family made a fortune in um in medicines and hacksaw a lot of Germans will know that company and they were also supporters of the mission right 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 right and this is not very common right because um 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 there return on investment was not money it was developing a cure for cancer for example right 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 lethal 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 bit the form right and you could have made the case that well if there’s a mission driven why don’t they stay on the mission of um curing cancer first right 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 covet first if we develop a vaccine for it this could be on a test project for actually our cure for cancer right 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 uh competitors just used one candidate and there’s another famous biotech startup in in Germany called curebeck who are also looking very good at that face right 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 right 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 um as it could have been as it could have but mindtec 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 right 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 right 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 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 lag 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 foreign and so the these are exactly the decisions that Chief product owed us and leaders of companies have to do and it’s not very easy


and of course you know we know now of Biotech as this hyper more than super well-managed German company right that’s kind of like defying the image of like a little bit of a state um country um 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 right 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 right 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 um and they are actually the experts right 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 right 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 on


not wanting to do that right 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 form 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 right don’t become the tyrant in that situation um 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 shahin um 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 right 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 all right


and of course the people there most of them didn’t believe them right they are buying Tech 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 I’m still support this and get everything moving because the belief will come over time right 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 right 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 right 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 right 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 uh 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 right um 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 um


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 Islam 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 right and because they just want to get out of the party but didn’t want to um take anyone off and so they they lied about it right 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 um they’re super honest super transparent and um 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 right because I’m sure they had some control over what was written in the book um 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 lives do we we’re perfect Leo


so um I want to call out one thing that um I think is really important in this whole and covet situation um we know it was first detected in China and it might originate from there and we also know that the Chinese government really um wasn’t playing very well with others in terms of you know alarming the worldwide Community um on how to on the fact that this was happening right 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 right they’re still not sharing the data as you’re actually supposed to within uh 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 John who uploaded the genetic code of covet very early and without whom none of this would have been possible right and it will probably um face some problems for doing that later on and there’s also um Dr Lee who is quite famous who was actually an an eye doctor in Wuhan and even though um he was an eye doctor he was actually so well trained that he recognized uh the covet virus as um uh as something new and published it right and unfortunately he died of covert later on um 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 covet he was actually um 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 um or um have really gotten into trouble and then in the end AP ultimate price um for dealing with covet 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 right 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 um in that things can go wrong and I want to quote something um reminiscing about this unanticipated challenge because things aren’t working out in the construction of these compounds or the business professor shine 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 gunsing 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 right and I actually have to say I don’t quite agree with him in All situations um but sometimes you have that situation where we have a team that’s doing well and suddenly it’s jinxed right 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 right 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 uh it’s it’s gonna get fixed over time maybe I can encourage them and um 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 um 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 right 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 right and it’s just this admonition this like putting a little bit of pressure behind it um 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 right are you will you act like Professor shine as he did here or will you pull out Gordon Ramsay right 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 right 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 right you need to bring out that inner Ramsay and to get them to get back in the game um 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 I think it also depends on uh 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 uh yeah choose how to deal with it in the right situation and with this kind of employees absolutely context is for Kings right so always make sure that you don’t just have one approach but can like read the situation and then react to it accordingly


absolutely 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 um 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 and so so this is something that never happens right for us


oh yeah it’s it’s it’s really interesting yeah and um yeah there’s a couple of these stories but what I think it speaks to is to um the urgency that he sees right and so um what we want to do in agile and what we do want to do in like um if you follow John Boyd’s teachings the military strategist is to always make sure that wave 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 right 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 right 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 um bought this stuff we might have saved 5 000 people um 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 right 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 um 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 um they’re removing impediments right and this is this almost seems to be one of his main tasks to remove strategic impediments so the uh kindergarten syndrome when you start shutting down what do they do they set up a kindergarten at the company right 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 right because it takes you a couple of years actually of many years um 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 right and you don’t have access to the consumers directly you can’t just put up ads on on Google AdWords for example right or have some ads run on Tick Tock 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 um funding and this is usually a really difficult situation right 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 buying Tech 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 right because they have competing interests and so they are talking very openly openly that they had a Swiss backer um 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 um other financing right and when they started to get some financing of course the Swiss Packers didn’t want to get out after all right and so you’re suddenly in this mind right 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 um I think also really taught them that um 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 instrument 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 uh like a bank looking over their shoulder and constantly creating problems for them


and of course that’s not easy to pull off right 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 um everyone’s the better for it right and because the billionaires that Finance buy and take they’re now a lot richer as well because they held a lot of the stockers still do and they have added a couple of billions to them to the war test


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 by intake and talking to the Stoneman twins to get it financed and of course what happened um Professor shine he had already hired people for the new company from his own money right and so he really got into trouble because the money was running out for the new company because it was from his uh private finances and um that’s a tricky situation but again you can see the urgency right the belief in the mission uh 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 Australian 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 right he could have told them some [ __ ] right 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 uh in the hotel uh near Frankfurt were the constitution of Germany after the second world war was developed and there was um 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 black sang by intake 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 right 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 wanna manufacture um 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 um 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 right 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 right 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 um at some point of time pretty early on the sea of Pfizer and Professor sharing got on a call and talked with each other and this is actually a little bit interesting I find because the CEO of Faizon Albert border he’s a Greek June that’s Now American right and Professor shine is a Turkish Muslim that’s not German all right so they have these histories of immigration from countries that don’t get along so well with each other right but they immediately got along right it was a Meeting of Minds um they’re both scientists and they got along well and um the fires are CEO said it was love at first sight a great meeting of Mines I established that uh 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 right 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 right we’re literally talking dozens of billions um 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 shine 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


foreign


there is a quote at the end of the book let me see if I can find it by Irish kissner the German author and it it says in German escipny scooters awesome and tutus 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 right 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 right and that doesn’t mean Mass produce but that means we need to produce something for uh 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 right and we are sitting here smiling why everyone because we’ve sent people to do that right 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 right 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 buy it and take the same thing right 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 right 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


um became available right and because they had that money from the strongman twins they were actually able to buy it right 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 right 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 um some people might remember especially in Germany that this competitor cure back that we talked about um there was a there was an article in the newspaper I mean 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 um the other companies because they realized somebody could try to could try to take it away um 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 um you know you have to make a decision you have to sometimes perform and then see how the dice roll right and so it’s really interesting that the daughter of them and she was a teenager um already um 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 right these are billionaires professors they have the um 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 right yeah that’s he’s like like everyone else I want to have elonas doing that right 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 right he’s just sitting there with his motivational book it’s like oh yeah um 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 right of course um 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 um 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 um you’ll never have a chance to be successful 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 yeah absolutely and yeah regret is not a fun thing I could have done something different should have tried right in the year 17 and you’re like yeah why didn’t I um and also I think with a failing yes it doesn’t feel good but usually it’s necessary in order to get better right 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 um the in operation Valkyrie were um some German um general staff officers tried to kill Hitler they knew that the chance of success wasn’t really highing but they said in French cost what it may um we’re gonna do it in order to send a signal to others right because yes you may fail in your Endeavor Maybe SpaceX fails to go to Mars but what a signal have they sent to everyone right they have inspired a whole generation and this has happened before in history right 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 absolutely and so they’re waiting for that result and then it finally comes back and it’s actually much better than expected right we talked about like your flu vaccine having like 40 50 um efficacy and it came back with over 90 percent right 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 month 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 month if we had not been successful and so this is something that you know you have a face 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 then that when it’s over it’s over and it rarely is because just like a boat passing you by right once the boat has passed you by the thing is not over usually there’s a weight 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 right 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 right 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 um 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 right 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 thank you really going hard into the metaphors today no and then there’s this uh and I’ve marked up a lot of these really funny things because it just shows you like how Humane they are and it means they are one of us and that means to me at least you can do it as well of course they’re super smart of course they’re super engaged but it’s not like there are some aliens and nobody can can ever reach them I think if you actually are engaged and you do it you can undo crazy things and so one thing here is they’re very reluctant to talk to the price but now they are successful right the vaccine is working and now they’re actually happy to talk to the Press because they want to communicate that it works and they want to get the message out right and so um he’s talking to journalists over zoom and then always forgets they’re still in lockdown at home and always forgets to close the door and the daughter said well I gotta I got to be an expert in Army crawling across the floor because I was always like in the background and then I always say to crawl like a soldier through through the apartment because Dad forgot to close the door right and this is so yeah so normal it’s almost fine and another note which is not funny at all is that um and and we learned of it in the news back then is that um if you do something great if you attempt something big there’s going to be detractors and not all of them are going to play fair right you might have competitors and they might be playing fair but there’s often other interests that are playing very dirty and so there were a couple of instances for example where um people try to hack um into buying Tech hack into The Regulators that actually was successful right so there were cyber attacks against Regulators to get the data of Biotech presumably from from States and at the very beginning you know when it got out that they were working on a vaccine of course all the crazies showed up at the office and started calling them writing bitter emails right and then them being Muslims and being from Turkey um played and played a role in that as well or the bigger tree came out and so this is an aspect that I think a lot of people are underestimating right because we again we just see the successful story but what app what what is actually the price you pay for that right it’s not only the stress it’s not only the Wake that comes after that it’s not only betting the farm it’s also that suddenly you have to have a bodyguard right because some crazies out there suddenly see you as a public figure and think they need to stalk you or threaten you or do some harm to you or for intelligence Services um threaten you right so think about the effect that the that the spacex’s satellite network is playing in the war in Ukraine do we think that the Russians would not take the Russian intelligence Services would not take a chance to threaten Elon Musk abductive abduct his children of course they would I’m going to have done stuff that’s way worse right and actually we know that they’ve been reacting to this because immediately after the war started on SpaceX had several Sprints where they just did cyber security hardening because suddenly they got hammered on their satellite networks at least with cyber attacks right and it’s not very difficult to uh think where they might have come from and another instance of this is that they actually found out by intake later found out and that some lobbies went to Brussels the capital of the European Union and try to um try to tarnish their reputation by saying well binetech has Allied itself with Pfizer an American company and so every Euro we pay for a vaccines of Buy in Tech of that Euro half of it is going to the United States shouldn’t we be investing that money into let’s say curvec or sanofi or another European company and I’m not saying they sent the lobbyists right but um think about that I mean those guys arrest everything they developed the vaccine um and then still people have the goals to try to make moves politically um to send the money somewhere else right and this is just really dirty and if you’re not up to that stuff right if you don’t know about um personal protection if you don’t know how to deal with the cyber security threat if you don’t know how to deal with the lobbying then you can be in real trouble and conversely that means if you’re in an exposed position like this you actually kind of have to know a little bit about it right and so what are we doing then we are increasing the demands on people on leaders to do even more it’s not enough that you’re a professor in I don’t know biotechnology whatever it’s not enough that your Gene is here that you can raise money and you can do all these things suddenly you have to deal with this [ __ ] as well and I think I think people are really underestimating how much pressure Elon Musk is under for example right because he’s getting attacked from all quarters um I’m not saying that he’s not being criticized I’m rightly in some instances what I’m saying is that he has pissed off very powerful interest you know like the oil industry the car Industries whole countries as we just talked about like Russia and so on and think about what kind of attacks they can launch against him and which they are watching against him and I think if he ever writes a biography when Army shop to what’s been going on behind the scenes I think we’re all gonna say we don’t understand how he was able to carry on under this kind of pressure because I think it’s it must be crazy foreign little episode is that I’m another kind of recognized myself there as well is that um 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 um 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 um lessons in there and it closes in 21 I want to say I’ll and they’re saying the following if the story were to end here buying tax achievements would still go down as one of the most important in medical and economic history right all the big vaccine makers weren’t successful they were too slow they didn’t get the job done but for uh and Aslam this is just the start this is just a stepping stone right 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’s I like it that’s I appreciate that to know that people that are that smart and that dedicated are actually working for the public good right 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 right 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 right 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 right um 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 Emma mRNA and can use it for other diseases and actually we’ve been talking about Rana so often they’ve opened a production facility in Rana and they want to produce a malaria vaccine there and it is a big issue the malaria um 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 um by um 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 feed 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 on slim 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 right and we always say well it’s to bureaucratic here this doesn’t work that doesn’t work and here they show us that it actually does work right 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 right 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 right they are not the tyrannic on CEOs they’re just doing their job they do it relentlessly um they of course have an extreme ambition but they go about it in a nice way they are tempered by modesty right and I think they are a great role model to everyone across the world and this is why I wanted to um 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 absolutely a big motivation for everybody all right everyone that was today’s episode thanks for listening and hope to see you soon