I attended a talk given by Sir Greg Winter and Dr. Kevin Johnson (founders of Cambridge Antibody Technology (CAT) a Cambridge biotech company that has been a big success – was bought by AstraZeneca in 2006 for £702m). This was part of the Cambridge Center for Entrepreneurial Learning (Cfel) “Enterprise Tuesday” talk series. The talk was about some of the insights from the experience of the CAT life-cycle and the development of the Humira artificial human antibody for treating rheumatoid arthritis.
Some of the key takeaways about the setting up a company and exploiting an idea:
- The work doesn’t stop with the initial idea. Lots of additional work will be needed to get it to a product stage.
- Early stages of company development are chaotic. This is not a bad thing as it allows you to try out lots of radical ideas and to break apart company and idea structures and recompose them in new ways.
- Everything is ultimately down to the people you have. (To add my interpretation of what was said – their skill, motivation, contacts, flexibility, and adaptability + who they know).
- Alignment of interest of the employees and key stakeholders is very important. Stock options tend to get people all pulling in the same direction. In this case, it does not matter who makes the breakthrough so long as someone does in the company.
- Sometimes you just have to get lucky – a key skill is surviving long enough to ‘get lucky’. In the early days, CAT lived hand to mouth with regards to funding. They actually listed on the stock market (in 1997) before Humira was released and this was more through the necessity of getting money to keep alive than perhaps the best timing for optimal valuation.
I spoke with Greg after the talk and asked him how he as the technical inventor avoided getting marginalized when the company started to grow. His points were he was a scientist and what motivated him was the research so he did not mind others doing the business side of things. This seems to tally with some considered wisdom that you should stick to your strengths in your career and align what you do with your interests if you want to be ‘happy’ and achieve excellence (ref: work by Gallup). None the less, there were some key decisions that perhaps would have benefited some more business savvy people being in the loop in the CAT story e.g. whilst the sale to AZ seems like a good deal, in fact, it was not as CAT had £200m in cash and AZ sold the rights to Humira for £400m a week after the acquisition so essentially they bought the people, the rights and the tech at CAT for £102m – which was a steal. This is probably unfair as CAT has been a great success story but it shows that business at this scale is a big boy’s game and whilst the entrepreneur may not have been marginalized per se, they may not have the skills/knowledge to make the most profitable business decision.
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