Stéphane Bancel: The 5% Bet That Built Moderna

In 2011, Stéphane Bancel walked away from the security of leading a 6,000-person diagnostics company to join a startup of about 50 people, built on an idea most scientists had dismissed: that messenger RNA could become medicine. Almost everyone told him not to do it. He gave the bet roughly a five percent chance. Nine years later, that same bet helped the world face a pandemic in 63 days.

Stéphane Bancel is the Chief Executive Officer of Moderna. Under his leadership the company designed a COVID-19 vaccine on a computer within days of the genetic sequence being posted, delivered the first dose to a human just 63 days later, and scaled from zero manufacturing to a billion doses in twelve months. Today Moderna is building personalized cancer vaccines and using AI to reinvent how medicines are discovered and made.

This conversation sits right at the heart of what I believe about leadership. That the chief executive is really the chief energy officer. That the boldest decisions are rarely about appetite for risk, they are about the asymmetry between what you could give the world and what you could actually lose. Stéphane lives both, and he is refreshingly honest about the storms, the doubts and the mistakes along the way.

In our conversation, we explore: 
→ The five percent bet: how he weighed an enormous upside against a manageable downside, and why his wife was the only one who said yes 
→ What sailing without GPS taught him about staying calm when the storm hits, and why a storm always passes 
→ The 63-day sprint, and the Sunday phone call that saved the manufacturing of a billion doses 
→ Why he slowed a trial down so it would be a vaccine for the world, not a vaccine for white people 
→ The future he sees: personalized cancer vaccines, the human body mapped in silico, and why he calls chemotherapy tomorrow’s barbaric history

“I still believe that we have not invented yet our best drug.” Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna

If you have ever faced a decision that everyone around you called too risky, this one is about how to think, and how to stay calm, when you choose to leap anyway.

🎧 Related Episodes: 

• Pascal Soriot on the purpose-led culture that transformed AstraZeneca, and the assume-good-intent principle Stéphane says he shares: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/18782083
• Satya Nadella on mission, mindset, and why the CEO has to own the technology shift: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/8966432
• Bertrand Piccard on exploration and staying comfortable in the unknown: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/14487275

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