The Armenian businessman was in Singapore in November 2023 to attend the Bloomberg New Economy Forum. He also announced that Flagship Pioneering was setting up a Singapore office.
We are meeting for breakfast at W Singapore – Sentosa Cove. The hotel has given us a quiet spot at the Woobar for the interview.
The biotech billionaire – Forbes puts his fortune at US$1.2 billion (S$1.6 billion) – is pleasant, with a warm, soothing voice. His down-to-earth manner bears no hint of the fact that his businesses are at the cutting edge of science.
“It’s always fun for me to see names like Woobar since my name is Noubar,” he jokes as we settle in our seats.
He opts for granola with sliced banana on the side, while I have French toast. His granola comes without a spoon. “I’m being tested to see if I can eat this with a fork,” he smiles, teasing the waitress.
He is fairly familiar with Singapore, having been here three or four times over the years.
In fact, in an interview with the Financial Times (FT) in 2022, he named Singapore’s late founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew as his leadership hero.
Mr Lee “embodied the notion of thinking future backwards as opposed to present forwards. He had to paint a vision and insist it was reachable”, he told the FT.
He shares that he met Mr Lee when the latter visited Armenia in 2009 and learnt a lot about long-term strategy and leadership from the “entrepreneurial leader”.
Dr Afeyan could be viewed as a visionary himself.
Flagship Pioneering, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the United States, has founded more than 100 companies since it was started in 2000, and 30 have gone public.
It creates what are known as “platform” companies. These delve deeply into a particular technology – for example, gene therapy or mRNA technology – then figure out how to make many different drugs from it in a fast and scalable manner.
It currently has 40 platform companies with more than 9,000 employees working in areas such as anthromolecule therapies and drugs based on biomimicry.
The companies are at various stages of growth.
“Moderna has 7,000 people; our smallest company, which was formed several days ago, has three,” says Dr Afeyan, who has a PhD in biochemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
“The pace is different, but each one of them is its own story.”