In His Spare Time, Immigrant Noubar Afeyan Has Started 38 Companies In America
In His Spare Time, Immigrant Noubar Afeyan
(Co-founder and chairman of Moderna)
Has Started 38 Companies In America
Stuart Anderson Senior Contributor
Leadership Strategy
I write about globalization, business, technology and immigration.
Starting one successful company is a fine achievement. How does one describe someone who has helped found 38 companies?
Noubar Afeyan was born to Armenian parents in Lebanon. At the age of 13, he immigrated with his family to Canada and attended college there. Noubar was accepted to a Ph.D. program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), at the time the only school with an advanced program in biochemical engineering.
After earning his Ph.D. at the age of 24, Noubar started his first company. Snip...
“Immigrants have started more than half (44 of 87) of America’s startup companies valued at $1 billion or more and are key members of management or product development teams in over 70% (62 of 87) of these companies,” according to the NFAP study. These billion dollar startups with at least one immigrant founder have created an average of more than 700 jobs per company. In 1999, Noubar evaluated the way his startups were formed – and startups in general – and thought perhaps the often disjointed, “trial and error” approach typical of startups could be reduced to something more systematic and organized. That’s when he founded Flagship Ventures, which develops new companies through its in-house division VentureLabs. It also invests in startups. Snip...
Noubar has over 100 patents to his name.
Moderna Therapeutics, which Noubar cofounded and helps lead as chairman, may be Flagship Ventures’ most successful startup. Founded in 2009, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company is already valued at $3 billion and employs over 300 people. Breakthroughs in using messenger RNA or mRNA have fueled growth and raised expectations for Moderna Therapeutics. CNBC named the company “number one” on its 2015 Disruptor 50 list. “Instead of making protein medicines in factories very far away, what we are trying to do is to inject you with messenger RNA so that your own body will make the protein” said Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s French-born president and CEO, in a 2015 CNBC interview.
In January 2016, Moderna announced it had become a clinical stage company when it launched its first human trial, a Phase I study to treat patients with infectious diseases with investigational mRNA therapeutics in Europe. Snip...Moderna Therapeutics is a company with the potential to benefit the health of millions of people. The irony is it may never have come into being if Noubar Afeyan had not been accepted to MIT. Noubar says what he liked about the atmosphere at MIT as an international student is that the school was merit-based. “Nobody felt they had an advantage over you just because they were born in the United States and you weren’t. It was a very good environment and remains so.”
Noubar believes being an immigrant and an entrepreneur are complementary. Snip...
More at the link.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2016/03/19/in-his-spare-time-immigrant-noubar-afeyan-has-started-38-companies-in-america/
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