Part IThe Story
Delivered in This Manner
On Friday, January 10, 1997, the stock of a small biotechnology company in Tarrytown, New York, lost 43 percent of its value before the closing bell. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals had announced that its lead drug, a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, had failed a pivotal Phase III trial in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the disease Americans still call by the name of a dead first baseman. Shares fell $8.25 to $10.875. Over in Thousand Oaks, California, Amgen, which owned 18 percent of Regeneron and had co-developed the drug, slipped less than $3, cushioned by happier news about a blood-cell growth factor it was testing in breast cancer patients. The trade press did what the trade press does. Reijer Lenstra, an analyst at Smith Barney, told BioWorld that the failure took "all the immediate upside away from Regeneron," compared the company to Synergen, a biotech that had also suffered two product failures in quick succession, and suggested it might now be a takeover target. Amgen, he said, would be "the natural buyer."
It was the second time in three years. In 1994 a different neurotrophic factor, CNTF, had collapsed in the same disease, and Regeneron had laid off a quarter of its workforce. Investors had sued. The company's president had been named personally as a defendant.
That president, a 43-year-old neurologist named Leonard Schleifer, gave BioWorld a statement that reads, three decades later, less like crisis communications than like a diagnosis written in the margin of a chart. "The only conclusion that can be made from this trial," he said, "is that BDNF is not effective for ALS when delivered in this manner. It doesn't imply that neurotrophic factors have no role in neurodegenerative disorders."
When delivered in this manner. The sentence is a physician's sentence — narrow, conditional, refusing to generalize beyond the data, and also, if you squint, faintly defiant, the sentence of a man who has just been told by the market that his idea is dead and has replied that the market has misread the scan. He had other things to say that week. The company had nearly $100 million in the bank, several years of operating expenses. The Amgen and Procter & Gamble partnerships were intact. "We have worked for two years," he said, "to ensure that the results of any one clinical trial won't jeopardize our ability to operate. We have a rich technology pipeline to fall back on." There would be no layoffs this time.
Regeneron did not get bought. Amgen, the natural buyer, would instead become, over the following quarter century, a partner, then a rival, then a defendant: in May 2025 a federal jury in Delaware ordered it to pay Regeneron $135.6 million in compensatory damages and $271.2 million in punitive damages for anticompetitive conduct in the cholesterol-drug market. The small company in Tarrytown, which in January 1997 had no approved products and would not have one for another eleven years, ended 2025 with $14.3 billion in revenue, 15,410 employees, and a founder who had never once stopped being its chief executive.
Much of what follows is an attempt to explain how a man who was wrong, publicly and expensively, about the thing he founded his company to do — regenerate neurons — ended up right about nearly everything else. Some of it is about stubbornness. Some of it is about a father who broke codes in a war and made sweaters in peacetime. Some of it is about a promise embedded, almost as a joke, in a company's name. And some of it, inevitably, is about money, which Schleifer has spent his career both pursuing and lecturing his industry about, often in the same breath.
By the Numbers
The Regeneron Arc
$1MSeed capital, agreed over Chinese food and sketched on a napkin
26 yearsUntil Regeneron 'made more money than we spent,' per Schleifer's own chart
$14.3BRegeneron revenue in 2025
15,410Employees at year-end 2025, more than 1,800 with an MD or PhD
1,457%Total shareholder return in the 2010s, seventh best of any public company
16Approved or authorized medicines developed in-house
3M+Human exomes sequenced by the Regeneron Genetics Center
Who Are These Damn Guys
The origin story, as Schleifer tells it, begins not in a lab but in a reading habit.
In the early 1980s he had finished an MD and a PhD in pharmacology at the University of Virginia, then four years of clinical training in neurology at New York Hospital, and he was going back into research at Cornell Medical College, where he was a junior faculty member. He had been trained as a biochemist, because when he did his graduate work, molecular biology "really hadn't come to life." Now it had. He wanted to learn it. So he read. "I love to read the articles," he would recall in a company-recorded interview, "and sure enough, just a bit seemed like to me every other paper was a publication by this company, Genentech. And I said, 'who are these damn guys at Genentech.' Every other paper and it's not a university. I really never heard of it, so I did a little digging and found out they were so called biotechnology company."
There is a particular comedy in this — a credentialed young physician-scientist in the most sophisticated medical city in the country, discovering by subscription that the frontier had moved to a company in South San Francisco and nobody had told him. But the comedy holds the germ of the thesis. Genentech was cloning growth factors: insulin, human growth hormone. Amgen, in Thousand Oaks, was working on erythropoietin, a growth factor for red blood cells; Schleifer places his epiphany about a year before Amgen brought EPO to market. If the body used growth factors to sustain blood and bone and metabolism, it stood to reason, he thought, that the nervous system had its own. Only one was known — nerve growth factor — and Schleifer "assumed that there had to be many more."
He was a neurologist. He spent his clinical days with patients who had Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and ALS, diseases for which medicine offered careful observation and very little else. The company's own account of him lingers on that frustration, the gap between what a neurologist could name and what he could treat. The plan, as he later summarized it with deliberate self-mockery, was elegant to the point of absurdity: "The notion was that we could identify them, clone them, spritz them on to people's brains or where was necessary, cure a few diseases and sail off into the sunset. That was the basic notion." Decades later, speaking with John Waldron of Goldman Sachs in October 2025, he called the concept what it had been. Naive.
He took the idea to his mentor first.
Alfred Gilman had supervised Schleifer's graduate work at Virginia before moving to Texas, and he was, in Schleifer's words, "a rising star in the world of science, and it was pretty clear that he was on his way to win the Nobel prize, it was just a matter of time." (Gilman would share the 1994 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of G proteins.) Schleifer called him and laid it out — Genentech, great science inside a company, the empty field of neurology. Gilman's answer exists in at least two versions, both preserved by Schleifer himself, which tells you something about how much he enjoys repeating it. In the company transcript: "He, of course, immediately said no. It's a dumb idea. Just stick, you know, get back to the lab and stop wasting your time on this nonsense." At Cornell in April 2019, receiving the university's Entrepreneur of the Year award: "That's a stupid idea. Get back in the lab and do something good."
What is striking is not that Schleifer ignored the advice. It is that he kept the adviser. Gilman later joined Regeneron's board, one of the Nobel laureates Schleifer would stack there like evidence. In May 2017, speaking at Boston College, Schleifer counted them off — two Nobel laureates on the current board, three until recently — and then, unprompted, mentioned the one who had gone: "My friend Al passed away last year, unfortunately." The man who called the company a dumb idea died a director of it.
"I'm fairly stubborn," Schleifer said at Cornell, as though anyone in the room needed telling.
A Sweater Man's Son
He was born in 1953 and grew up in Rego Park, Queens, in a Jewish family, the son of Florence and Charles Baker Schleifer. His father manufactured sweaters. During the Second World War, his father had broken codes.
It is tempting to make too much of that second fact, and also impossible to make too little of it. A codebreaker's work is the patient conviction that a stream of apparent noise contains a message, and that the message will yield to persistence, pattern-recognition, and an almost unreasonable tolerance for being wrong on the way. Fifty years after Charles Schleifer's war, his son would build a company that sequenced the protein-coding portions of more than three million human genomes — exomes, the working text of the genetic code — and linked them to anonymized medical records in search of the variants that protect some people from disease. The family business, in a sense, stayed the family business.
The sweater factory left its own residue. Charles Schleifer had a phrase, "do well by doing good," which his son has repeated so often that it now appears on Regeneron's website as corporate philosophy and in the 2018 Westchester power rankings of City & State as a character summary. The phrase is a manufacturer's ethic, not a philanthropist's. It does not say do good instead of doing well. It says the two are supposed to be the same transaction, and it leaves unexamined what happens when they are not. That unexamined remainder would become, in time, the central argument of Leonard Schleifer's public life.
The boy had a business of his own. In Rego Park, he ran a snow-shoveling operation, and he credits it, with what appears to be only partial irony, as the place he learned to negotiate. "When you have to do a whole block's worth of shoveling," he told CNNMoney in 2014, "you get a lot of experience." The image is worth holding onto: a kid in Queens pricing driveways one at a time, learning that the neighbor at the end of the block will pay differently than the one in the middle, that a contract is a relationship before it is a number.
In 1970 he competed in the Science Talent Search, the oldest high school science competition in America. He went to Cornell, majored in biological sciences, and graduated in 1973, Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude. Then Virginia: the MD, the PhD in pharmacology, finished in 1980, under Gilman. He met and married Harriet Partel, whose path mirrored his own with almost suspicious precision — an undergraduate degree from Cornell, two graduate degrees in education from the University of Virginia — and who later earned a law degree from St. John's, practiced as an attorney, sat on the Board of Governors of the American Jewish Committee, and served as president of her synagogue. They had two sons, Adam and David.
These are the unglamorous facts of an American meritocratic ascent of a certain postwar vintage: the outer-borough son of a manufacturer, propelled through elite institutions by test scores and science fairs, landing in academic medicine in Manhattan. By the mid-1980s Schleifer had arrived exactly where that ascent was supposed to deliver him. He was an assistant professor of neurology at what is now Weill Cornell. He was on the path. And he was reading Genentech's papers and thinking, increasingly, about leaving it.
The Napkin and the Committee
"Once I had decided that this notion of building a company was what I wanted to do," Schleifer recalled, "I decided to sort of figure out how I could get my hands on some money."
A former professor connected him with George Sing, a venture capitalist at Merrill Lynch Ventures. What Schleifer remembers about Sing is not his money but his temperament: he was a "guy who actually did want to build something, who respected science, who really would let us run, who respected the fact that we had really smart people we were trying to bring around." The two men met over Chinese food. They sketched a deal on the back of a napkin — $1 million in startup capital — and closed it with a handshake. Sing, decades later, would be listed as chairman of a company called Grace Science, still in the business of betting on biology.
Regeneron was founded in 1988 in Schleifer's New York City apartment. The name was a compression of its thesis: regenerating neurons. Schleifer liked to point out that it hid another word in the middle. Re-gene-ron. At the time, the gene in the middle was a pun. It would not stay one.
Here the story takes a turn that seems administrative and is in fact foundational. Venture investors, Schleifer explained to a Boston College audience in May 2017, "like to have a lot of rules." They told him the board would need an audit committee "to check up on you." Fine. They told him, "By the way, you can't really pay yourself. We'll have to have a compensation committee to decide how much you're going to make." He was not thrilled. He went along.
"But I turned to them and I said, wait a minute. If we're going to do this, how about if we have a technology committee? There was not a single company that we could find in America at that time that had a technology committee. And here we were going to be in the technology business."
It is a small demand and an enormous one. A board committee is a statement about what an institution considers worth governing. Audit committees exist because money can be stolen; compensation committees because executives can overpay themselves. A technology committee asserts that the science itself is a fiduciary matter — that a board which cannot evaluate the science is not overseeing the company at all. Schleifer filled the board accordingly. A majority of Regeneron's directors would be physicians or scientists; at various points half of them were members of the National Academy of Sciences, among them Joseph Goldstein, the Nobel-winning geneticist from UT Southwestern. "If you look at the boards," Schleifer said, "that's a pretty good indicator" of whether a company that claims to value research actually does. "We don't just say we want to do research. The ethos of the company is research."
— Leonard Schleifer, on founding RegeneronI was determined to build the company where we've valued science and the scientists who did the science as opposed to build a company which is more traditionally built, by businesspeople who almost in some respects just want to exploit science and have some disdain and don't know how to reward and deal with it.
The sentence is ungrammatical in the way that spoken conviction often is, and its target is precise. Not business. Businesspeople. A specific kind — the kind who see scientists as a cost center with lab coats. Schleifer was a scientist who had chosen to become a businessman, and he seemed to understand from the beginning that the transition carried a risk of becoming exactly what he despised. The technology committee was, among other things, a precommitment device against himself.
Thirty-five years after the napkin, the company's own audit committee and compensation committee would have occasion to justify, to shareholders and to the New York Times, some of the largest executive pay packages in American industry. The investors' rules turned out to matter too.
Two Guys From Queens
A company built around scientists needed a scientist to build around. Schleifer was trained in the lab, but he was by temperament something else — a translator, a deal-maker, a man whose great gift was persuading brilliant people to work in his building. He needed someone better at the bench than he was. In 1989 he found him at Columbia.
George Yancopoulos was 28, an MD-PhD molecular immunologist, the son of Greek immigrants, also from Queens. He too had competed in the Science Talent Search. That makes the founding of Regeneron a reunion of a type that is only possible in New York: two boys from the same borough, a few years apart, who had sat for the same national science exam as teenagers, walked through the same gates of meritocratic sorting, and arrived in the late 1980s at the conclusion that the most interesting science in the world might be done somewhere other than a university.
Their division of labor has been remarkably stable for more than three decades. Schleifer runs the company; Yancopoulos runs the science. Schleifer is the face on CNBC; Yancopoulos is the name on the patents — a thousand of them, by the Wall Street Journal's count in 2026. In 1999 Yancopoulos was ranked the eleventh most highly cited scientist in the world for the decade. The company's first paper, published in Science in 1990, became the most-cited neurobiology paper of the year. When Forbes profiled the company in 2013, the headline was "How Two Guys From Queens Are Changing Drug Discovery," and the founders were reported to hold $1.3 billion and $900 million of company stock, respectively.
The partnership has its own grammar. Asked on CNBC in November 2021 about Regeneron's antibody data, Schleifer began, characteristically, by handing off: "Now look, we follow the science Joe as you know. Now George Yancopoulos, my Co-Founder and President of our company and his team are our scientific leaders and basically here's where the science takes us." When asked by the University of Virginia how quickly the company had pivoted to COVID, he again led with the name: "Our team of scientists, led by Dr. George D. Yancopoulos." It is a verbal tic and a management philosophy. The CEO's job, in this telling, is to point at the scientist.
And yet the arrangement is not symmetrical, and Schleifer has never pretended it is. He founded the company before Yancopoulos arrived. He was its chairman from 1990 through 1994. He has been chief executive every single day of its existence. In 2023, when Roy Vagelos retired as board chair, the two founders became co-chairs — a structure that formalized a marriage already older than most of their employees. Schleifer likes to tell visitors, CNNMoney reported, that he and Yancopoulos need to be "as excited about an experimental drug that has virtually no chance of hitting the market as they are about the latest Eylea sales figures." It is the rare corporate maxim that only makes sense if two people are saying it at once.
Spritzing the Brain
Regeneron went public on the NASDAQ in 1991. The IPO raised $91.6 million. A year later, its first neurotrophic factor entered clinical development. In 1993, the company did something that looks in retrospect like faith and at the time must have looked like vanity: it acquired space for a drug-manufacturing facility in Rensselaer, New York — years before it had any product to manufacture.
The first drug was CNTF, ciliary neurotrophic factor. On September 7, 1993, the company announced mostly positive Phase II results in ALS: at 30 micrograms per kilogram, CNTF had slowed the rate of deterioration in muscle strength by 72 percent and reduced the decline of lung function by 44 to 69 percent. The numbers were extraordinary. They were also drawn from 12 treated patients compared against 14 on placebo, and the company said the results provided "a strong basis" for the Phase III trial already underway.
Six months later the basis gave way. In March 1994, Regeneron disclosed that many patients in the Phase III trial had experienced side effects early in the study — weight loss, coughing — that contributed to poorer performance on the muscle-strength tests that were the trial's primary endpoint. "For a while they did worse than placebos," the chief financial officer, Fredric Price, told BioWorld. The company asked the FDA for permission to modify and expand the study. The stock dropped 33 percent in a day, closing at $8.75, down $4.38, and lost another dollar the next. Within days a shareholder class action was filed in the Southern District of New York, naming the company and its president, Leonard Schleifer, and alleging that the September results had been used to mislead investors. Paul Lubetkin, the general counsel, delivered the most honest corporate statement of the entire episode: "When the stock price went down, a plaintiff sued us. Lawsuits often follow stock price drops."
By June the CNTF trial had been discontinued. Regeneron laid off 25 percent of its workforce.
One detail in the 1994 record has a strange afterlife. Among CNTF's troublesome side effects was weight loss. Regeneron's next big swing — after BDNF failed in January 1997, the second ALS factor to fail in as many pivotal trials — would be a drug for obesity. That one failed too. "We fell down three times," Schleifer said at Cornell in 2019, compressing a decade of humiliation into a sentence. He showed the audience a chart of Regeneron's profits and losses over time, and gave it a title that functions as a one-line memoir: "26 years until we made more money than we spent."
He has told this part of the story many times, and the tellings converge on a few details. At Touro College's graduate commencement in June 2019, at David Geffen Hall, he described the aftermath of the failures. "Wall Street was merciless," he said. "Our stock dropped… We were running out of money. Our corporate obituary was written in the Wall Street Journal." And then, a sentence that resists the commencement-speech genre even as it fulfills it: "Failure is valuable, but it isn't fun."
— Leonard Schleifer, to CNNMoney, 2014Regeneron was at its best when it didn't know where the lifeblood of money was coming from. There were times when we thought we might run out.
The rescue, when it came, came not from a breakthrough but from an adult.
In 1995, between the CNTF debacle and the BDNF one, Schleifer persuaded P. Roy Vagelos to become chairman of Regeneron's board. Vagelos had led Merck's research division before becoming its chief executive, and in the company's official history he appears as "another businessman-scientist," which is to say: Schleifer's own type, a generation older and decades ahead. Vagelos had already done at the largest scale what Schleifer was trying to do in a converted space in Tarrytown — run a company in which science set the agenda. He would remain chairman for 28 years.
Vagelos imposed, in substance, two rules. Invest only in diseases whose biology is fully understood. And do not underestimate human testing — what works in a dish, or a mouse, must be shown to work in a person, and the sooner the better. In the company's phrasing, he encouraged Regeneron "to focus our research on disease settings where the biological profile can be fully characterized and the clinical benefit evaluated more quickly."
Read against the founding notion, these rules are a gentle demolition. The neurotrophic thesis had been almost entirely deductive: cells use growth factors, therefore neurons must have growth factors, therefore supplying them will cure neurodegeneration. It was a beautiful syllogism wrapped around a biology nobody understood, tested in a disease where the benefit — slowed decline over months in a fatal illness — was devilishly hard to measure. Vagelos was telling Schleifer, in effect, to stop spritzing the brain.
"Young entrepreneurs aren't lacking brains, enthusiasm or commitment," Schleifer told the Cornell audience in 2019, "but the one thing they're lacking is experience. It's important to recognize that you don't know everything and to find people who have that experience and are willing to work with you and teach you." He was not speaking hypothetically.
The Drug Nobody Wanted
What Regeneron did during its wilderness years is easiest to see in the company's own timeline, which reads like the diary of someone quietly building tools in a basement while the neighbors whisper.
In 2000, Arcalyst, the first product of what the company called its Trap technology — engineered proteins fusing receptor components to an antibody backbone, designed to soak up signaling molecules before they could do harm — entered clinical testing. In 2003 the company published its first paper on VelociGene, the opening move of what would become VelociSuite, a set of proprietary methods including VelocImmune, a mouse genetically engineered to produce fully human antibodies. That same year Regeneron became one of the original sponsors of the Westchester Science & Engineering Fair, a detail that seems irrelevant until you remember that both founders had once been teenagers at a science competition. In 2004, a second Trap molecule, aflibercept, began clinical development in the eye. In 2006, Bayer HealthCare took the rights to develop it outside the United States, and sarilumab, Regeneron's first fully human antibody, entered the clinic. In 2007, Sanofi signed on to develop antibodies using VelocImmune. In February 2008, twenty years after the napkin, the FDA approved Regeneron's first medicine, Arcalyst, for rare autoinflammatory conditions. In 2009 the company hired its thousandth employee.
None of this registered on Wall Street as success. "All these years, we were failures to the outside world," Schleifer told the Touro graduates, "but in our hearts, we felt we were actually making critical progress. We steadfastly were building the tools that would lead to our eventual success."
The drug that changed everything was one that a partner had tried to give back.
Regeneron had licensed aflibercept to Aventis. Then Sanofi bought Aventis, and Sanofi had no interest in an eye drug. To get out of its commitment, Sanofi paid Regeneron $50 million and ceded the rights back. It is worth pausing on the shape of that transaction. A large pharmaceutical company paid a perennially money-losing biotech fifty million dollars to take back an asset — to relieve itself of the obligation to develop the medicine that would become one of the best-selling drugs in the world.
The medicine was Eylea. It blocks VEGF, a protein that stimulates blood-vessel growth, and in wet age-related macular degeneration, abnormal, leaky vessels in the retina are what steal elderly people's sight. The FDA approved Eylea in November 2011. "This is what we were spending our lives trying to accomplish," Schleifer told CNNMoney. "It's not just preventing vision loss, which it does, it's actually returning vision. That's the holy grail in vision." His preferred illustration was not a sales figure but a scene: "People who didn't have enough vision to read to their grandchildren might be able to read."
Reading, again. The neurologist who discovered biotech by reading journals, the son of a man who read enemy codes, built his first great medicine around the ability to read.
The figures arrived quickly and kept arriving. Eylea generated $838 million in its first full year. Sales rose 55 percent to $1.3 billion in 2013, then $1.735 billion in 2014; by late 2016 it was a roughly $4 billion-a-year drug. Regeneron's revenue had been $446 million in 2011. By the time Fortune named Schleifer a Businessperson of the Year in 2015, trailing-twelve-month revenue was $3.8 billion, with $581 million in profit. In February 2014, Forbes reported that Schleifer had become a billionaire, headlining the story as the end of a "25 year search for new drugs." The company would go on to post a 1,457 percent total return across the 2010s, the seventh-best of any publicly listed company in the decade, better than Amazon or Google.
There is one more date that belongs here, and it is not in any of the company histories. The FDA approved Eylea on November 18, 2011. On December 4, 2011, a paid death notice for Charles Baker Schleifer — sweater manufacturer, World War II codebreaker, author of a family maxim about doing well by doing good — appeared in the New York Times. Sixteen days separate the two. The record does not say what passed between father and son in that interval, and it would be presumptuous to imagine it. It is enough to know that the man who taught Leonard Schleifer to equate the two halves of that phrase lived long enough to see, if only barely, the first time his son's company did both.
Look Who's Talking
If the first half of Schleifer's career was defined by failure he could not escape, the second half has been defined by success he cannot quite explain away.
In August 2013, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News placed him first on its list of the highest-paid biopharma CEOs, with total 2012 compensation of $30,047,097 — up 184.5 percent from the prior year. He edged out William Weldon of Johnson & Johnson. Third place belonged to Ian Read, the chairman and chief executive of Pfizer, at $25,634,136. In 2014 Schleifer's compensation reached $41,965,424, ranking him fifteenth among all CEOs of large public companies on the Equilar–New York Times list, and first among biopharmaceutical executives. By 2020, the Times noted that Regeneron was home to the two highest-paid pharmaceutical executives in the country. Read has to be kept in mind. He will return.
In the same years, Schleifer became the most quotable critic of drug pricing inside the drug industry. The two facts are not separable, and the tension between them is the most interesting thing about him.
The crusade had a launch venue. At the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco — the industry's annual high mass, where companies present to investors in hotel ballrooms — Schleifer stood up and told his peers: "We've done all these great things, yet we're hated. We talk about doing things right, but I'm going to tell you I don't think we do." At the Forbes Healthcare Summit in New York, on a panel optimistically titled "Pharma All-Stars: Restoring Pharma's Reputation," he went further.
— Leonard Schleifer, Forbes Healthcare SummitThe real reason we're not liked, in my opinion, is because we as an industry have used price increases to cover up the gaps in innovation. That's just a fact.
Ian Read, on the same panel, objected that drug spending as a share of healthcare costs had barely moved in twenty years. Schleifer's reply was five words long and has the snap of something he had been waiting years to say: "You're not entitled to a fraction of the GDP." The Boston Herald later described one such exchange between Schleifer and another pharma CEO as a shouting match. The man he was shouting at, it is worth recalling, had been paid several million dollars less than he had.
At Boston College in May 2017, he put it in the starkest terms yet. "Drug pricing has the potential to be the undoing of our industry. We're not getting it right." The target was not just the cartoon villains of the era — the Martin Shkrelis and Valeants who bought old drugs and repriced them into scandal — but the respectable incumbents with their routine annual increases. "When people every year are raising their prices by 15 percent, that's where we get in trouble." He also used the platform to defend the NIH against proposed budget cuts, describing "one of the great treasures of this country" as "our biomedical research complex, which starts at the NIH and goes all the way up to companies like Regeneron." The phrasing placed his own company at the top of a public pyramid it had not built alone.
Then there was his own pricing. Praluent, the cholesterol drug Regeneron developed with Sanofi, launched in July 2015 at a list price of more than $14,000 a year, against statins that cost about $50 a month. The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, a Boston nonprofit that evaluates drug value, concluded that a price "between $3,615 and $4,811" would better reflect the drug's benefits — a 67 percent discount. At the Financial Times healthcare summit on May 12, 2016, Schleifer attacked the analysis with an argument that is either devastating or self-serving, depending on where you sit. ICER, he said, had calculated the drug's value, and he "could have lived with" that. But then "they said society can't afford X, so we are going to say it's one-third X… That wasn't scientific. There was no intellectual honesty there." ICER's chief operating officer, Sarah Emond, sitting on the same panel, shot back: "You're attacking the science of an independent non-profit whose entire mission is tied to opening the black box of pricing." Amgen, meanwhile, signed an exclusive deal with CVS Health's pharmacy-benefit business that shut Praluent out. Regeneron and Sanofi countered with UnitedHealth. In 2018 they cut Praluent's price in a deal with Express Scripts. And in 2025 the jury in Delaware agreed that Amgen had played dirty.
Dupixent, the eczema drug approved in March 2017, was Schleifer's attempt to prove the argument with his own product. Regeneron and Sanofi negotiated its price directly with insurers before approval and set it at $37,000 a year — less, they noted, than comparable injectable treatments for skin conditions. Schleifer called it "very urgent that we start behaving as an industry in a way that the public feels it's getting drugs that represent the value we're charging for them."
Forbes, which had chronicled his ascent, ran a 2018 piece by Matthew Herper and Ellie Kincaid whose headline captured the reaction of many observers: "Regeneron's billionaire founder fights for responsible pricing. But look who's talking." The subhead asked about the $37,000.
It is a fair question, and Schleifer has never fully answered it, because the honest answer is structural rather than personal. His argument was never that drugs should be cheap. It was that prices should track innovation — that a company earns a high price by inventing something new, and forfeits its moral claim when it raises prices on old products to paper over an empty pipeline. Regeneron, City & State reported in 2018, reinvested nearly half its profits in research, and all of its drug candidates were homegrown. By that standard he was consistent. By the standard of a patient paying $11,000 a year per eye for Eylea, or a critic like Mariana Mazzucato writing in the Times, he was a beneficiary of the same system he denounced, offering a more defensible version of it. Both can be true. The snow-shoveling boy from Rego Park learned that the price of a driveway is a negotiation. The neurologist learned that a sick person's driveway is not.
"That's too crass, Joe," he said on CNBC in November 2021, when Joe Kernen asked whether the company's new COVID data would be "a money maker." Then, without pausing, he gave the whole philosophy in a sentence: "But our model is we do this in the setting of a business and if we take care of the patients, I think it does take care of the business."
His father would have recognized it.
The President's Cocktail
On February 4, 2020, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that Regeneron would pursue monoclonal antibodies against the novel coronavirus. The company had a standing relationship with the government: in October 2017 it had struck a deal with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, BARDA, under which the government would fund 80 percent of the costs of developing and manufacturing certain antibody-based medicines, while Regeneron retained the right to set prices and control production. Mazzucato and a co-author criticized that arrangement in a March 2020 Times op-ed titled "Drug Companies Will Make a Killing From Coronavirus." Such deals, defenders noted, were routine.
The science was not improvised. "In our case, we had been developing the technology for decades," Schleifer told the University of Virginia in 2021. VelocImmune mice could produce fully human antibodies; the company had used them for cholesterol and allergic disease and, more recently, for Ebola. "We knew pretty quickly that we could create antibodies that, when directed toward the COVID-19 virus, should be able to treat patients." In March 2020 Regeneron and Sanofi began a trial of Kevzara, their rheumatoid arthritis drug, in hospitalized COVID patients, and the company announced its antibody-cocktail program. On July 7, 2020, under Operation Warp Speed, it received a $450 million contract to manufacture REGN-COV2, expecting to produce between 70,000 and 300,000 treatment doses. The government would own them and distribute them free.
Then, in the first days of October, the President of the United States tested positive.
Schleifer had known Donald Trump for years. He was a member of Trump's golf club in Westchester County, a short drive from Tarrytown. At Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Trump's doctors obtained REGN-COV2 from Regeneron through a compassionate-use request — the drug had not yet completed trials or received FDA authorization. On October 7, Trump posted a five-minute video to Twitter insisting the drug should be "free." That same day, Regeneron filed for emergency use authorization, disclosing that it had 50,000 doses on hand and expected 300,000 "within the next few months." The FDA granted authorization in November. In December, the New York Times published a story by Sheryl Gay Stolberg under the headline "Trump and Friends Got Coronavirus Care Many Others Couldn't." In Barron's, a group of bioethicists called the episode "a tangled ethical mess."
Schleifer, speaking months later, stuck to the clinical frame. "President Trump was a good example in some ways," he told Virginia's alumni magazine. "He had some underlying conditions, with his age and weight, but he was treated pretty early, and I believe he was better off with that early treatment." It is the same voice as January 1997 — narrow, conditional, a neurologist presenting a case — and it declines, as that earlier voice declined, to engage with the larger argument swirling around it.
The family's politics complicate any simple reading. A year before the Walter Reed episode, Schleifer's son Adam, a former federal prosecutor who had worked on the Operation Varsity Blues college-admissions bribery case, announced a run for the Democratic nomination in New York's 17th congressional district, the Westchester-and-Rockland seat being vacated by Nita Lowey. He did not win. The father golfed with the Republican president; the son sought to join the Democratic House. In a later public conversation, Leonard and Harriet Schleifer appeared together under a title that might stand as an epigraph for the whole period: "The Limits of Power and Advocacy."
The antibodies themselves did what the science said they would, then got outrun by the virus. In October 2020, the FDA approved Inmazeb, Regeneron's three-antibody cocktail for Zaire ebolavirus — the first drug proven effective against Ebola. Fortune named Schleifer a Businessperson of the Year a second time. Regeneron's 2021 revenue nearly doubled, to $16.1 billion, then fell back to $12.2 billion in 2022 as the pandemic market receded. And on November 8, 2021, appearing on Squawk Box via a home Zoom setup — he'd been on his way out the door when Joe Kernen texted — Schleifer talked about a group of people the pandemic had left behind. The immunocompromised, whose bodies did not respond to vaccines, were "really prisoners of the pandemic," he said. "They can't go out. They're afraid to see their grandchildren." A single subcutaneous dose every few months might protect them. "It could free these prisoners."
"I'm triply vaxxed," he added. "I believe in vaccines." And then, notably, a plea for tolerance toward the hesitant — teachers, soldiers, frontline workers with "legitimately" held fears — that sounded less like a CEO than like a doctor in an exam room, trying to meet a patient where he was. "Put the politics aside," he said. "The data say that antibodies can protect you."
Grandchildren again. In 2014 it was grandparents who could not see well enough to read to them. In 2021 it was grandparents too afraid to visit them at all. Schleifer's moral imagination returns to the same image, and it is not an abstraction.
Reading the Code
By 2025, Schleifer had become, by the company's description, one of America's longest-serving CEOs — at the helm of the same enterprise for 37 years, since the apartment and the napkin. He had outlasted his own mentor, who died a director. He had outlasted his chairman: Vagelos retired in 2023, and the two founders from Queens took the chair together. Regeneron had more than 15,000 employees on three continents, more than 1,800 of them with an MD or PhD, nearly 50 drug candidates in clinical development, and 16 approved or authorized medicines developed, as the company never tires of saying, almost entirely in its own laboratories. In an industry that increasingly buys its innovation, Regeneron still mostly grows its own; the Wall Street Journal, profiling Yancopoulos in 2026, framed this as a choice of internal discovery over acquisition. (The company has bought some things — Decibel Therapeutics in 2023, Checkmate Pharmaceuticals, a cell-therapy pipeline from 2seventy bio in 2024 — but they read as reinforcements, not substitutions.)
The largest product is now Dupixent, approved across a sprawling list of what the company calls type 2 allergic diseases: atopic dermatitis, asthma, COPD, nasal polyps, eosinophilic esophagitis, and more. It won the 2025 Prix Galien USA for best biotechnology product. Regeneron announced a $3 billion manufacturing agreement with Fujifilm Diosynth, bringing planned U.S. investment above $7 billion; Rensselaer, the factory bought before there was anything to make, had been a down payment on a habit. In May 2020, the company bought back 19.2 million of its own shares from Sanofi, which had held 23.2 million, for about $5 billion — reclaiming, in one transaction, most of the equity its oldest partner had accumulated across the long years when Regeneron needed Sanofi's money more than Sanofi needed Regeneron's science. In 2022 it took full worldwide ownership of Libtayo, the cancer drug it had developed with Sanofi under a 2015 collaboration. The drug nobody wanted had become a pattern: let the partner carry you, then carry yourself.
Some things Schleifer simply refuses to do. Regeneron, under him, does not provide quarterly earnings guidance; in his October 2025 conversation with Goldman Sachs's John Waldron, he was described as the only S&P 500 CEO who declines to. It is a small heresy and a revealing one. A company that lost money for a quarter of a century, that was written off in the Wall Street Journal, that watched its stock fall a third and then nearly half in single days, has no particular reason to believe the quarterly calendar is the right unit for measuring a drug.
"We don't have a process where we sit around and we say, wouldn't it be great to have a drug for something?" he told Waldron. "That usually is not how you succeed, because you have to go where the science is right."
Where the science is right, increasingly, is in the code. The Regeneron Genetics Center has sequenced more than three million human exomes — by Schleifer's account, roughly half of all the fully sequenced people in the world — and linked them to anonymized medical records. Its scientists have found, among other things, mutations in a gene called GPR75 that protect against obesity, and rare variants in another gene, CHRNB3, associated with smoking fewer cigarettes. Schleifer has spoken of sequencing 50 million people. He has invested in Truveta, a medical-records venture started by former Microsoft employees, which aims to aggregate records for 90 million people into what he calls a "Bloomberg Terminal of Health." On Mad Money in January 2024, Jim Cramer's audience wanted to hear about artificial intelligence. Schleifer allowed that AI was "the big thing right now," but told them the real tool was genetics. By 2026 he had refined it: AI is only as good as the data it can train on.
In the Goldman conversation, he also said something he had rarely discussed in public. He and Harriet had raised a son with a genetic disability, and he cited it as a core motivator for the company's mission and for its ethical approach to medicine. It reframes a great deal — the insistence on physician ethics, the impatience with an industry that treats patients as revenue, the stubborn faith in genetics. The thing about a codebreaker's son who becomes a neurologist and then spends four decades reading human genomes is that, at some point, the code stops being abstract.
He remains, to the visible end, a neurologist. Asked by Waldron about the diseases that made him leave the clinic — Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS — he said he was optimistic that therapies would soon be able to arrest them, especially if given before symptoms begin. He had been wrong about how to do it in 1994 and in 1997. He has never said he was wrong about whether it could be done. When delivered in this manner.
In August 2023, the FDA approved Veopoz for CHAPLE disease, an ultra-rare genetic condition, the first treatment for children and adults who have it. In September 2025, the company announced it would donate up to 500 doses of its Ebola treatment to the World Health Organization for use in poor countries. And in 2026, the FDA approved Regeneron's first gene therapy — a treatment for a rare form of inherited, profound hearing loss in children, built on the auditory program it had acquired with Decibel. On April 24, 2026, Schleifer went on Squawk Box to explain why Regeneron would provide it in the United States for free.
Thirty-eight years earlier, in an apartment in New York, a young neurologist had named a company after a promise to regenerate the nervous system and tucked a small word into the middle of it, more or less as a joke. The first medicine to come out of that company that is, quite literally, a gene went to children who had been born unable to hear, and it went to them at no cost.
Re-gene-ron. The word was on the building the whole time.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows are the operating principles that can be extracted from Leonard Schleifer's four decades at Regeneron. They are not the principles he would necessarily list himself; several of them sit in tension with things he has said in public, and at least one — the moral argument about pricing — is as much a strategic posture as a conviction. Each is grounded in a specific decision from the record. Together they describe a founder who treated time, governance, and partnership as instruments of science rather than constraints on it.
The principles
- 1.Govern what you claim to value.
- 2.Hire the person who outranks you at the core craft, then point at them.
- 3.Read failure narrowly.
- 4.Make sure no single bet can kill you.
- 5.Import the experience you lack, and let it overrule you.
- 6.Build tools, not products.
- 7.Let partners carry you, then buy yourself back.
- 8.Go where the science is right, not where the market is.
- 9.Criticize your own industry from a position you can defend.
- 10.Refuse the quarterly clock.
- 11.Own the data layer before anyone else values it.
- 12.Fund the pipeline that produced you.
Principle 1
Govern what you claim to value
When Schleifer's first investors told him the board needed an audit committee and a compensation committee, he accepted both and then demanded a third: a technology committee, which he believed no American company had at the time. The move was less about oversight than about signaling — to directors, recruits, and himself — that scientific judgment was a fiduciary matter. He reinforced it by giving the majority of board seats to physicians and scientists, including Nobel laureates and members of the National Academy of Sciences.
The insight is that governance structures are a company's most credible statement of priorities, because they are expensive to fake. Any founder can say "we're a research company." Few will cede board control to people who can actually evaluate the research and tell them they're wrong. Schleifer's own diagnostic for competitors was blunt: "If you look at the boards, that's a pretty good indicator."
Tactic: Write your core value into a board committee or formal decision right on day one, so it survives the moment when it becomes inconvenient.
Principle 2
Hire the person who outranks you at the core craft, then point at them
Schleifer was a trained biochemist, but he recruited George Yancopoulos, then 28, as the company's scientific engine and has deferred to him publicly for 35 years. On CNBC and in interviews, his reflex is to name Yancopoulos before describing any science. The result is a partnership of unusual stability: one co-founder owns the company's direction, the other owns its discoveries, and neither pretends to do the other's job.
This arrangement only works because the CEO's ego is invested in the institution rather than in being the smartest scientist in it. It also gave Regeneron a recruiting advantage that a business-led biotech could not replicate — scientists came to work for a scientist, not for a manager who would "exploit science." The visible deference is itself a retention tool.
Tactic: Identify the single craft your company lives or dies on, hire someone better at it than you, and make crediting them a public habit.
Principle 3
Read failure narrowly
After BDNF failed in January 1997, Schleifer told the press that "the only conclusion that can be made from this trial is that BDNF is not effective for ALS when delivered in this manner." The market drew a sweeping conclusion; he drew the smallest conclusion the data supported. This is the clinician's discipline applied to strategy — never overgeneralize from a single negative result, in either direction.
The narrow reading cuts both ways, and that is the point. It kept Schleifer from abandoning the underlying platform, but it did not license him to keep pursuing the same bet. Under Vagelos, the company did change course, away from poorly understood neurodegeneration and toward diseases with well-characterized biology. Narrow reading preserves the capability while allowing the application to be discarded.
Tactic: After any failure, write down the most specific true sentence about what it proves, and refuse to let the market or your team substitute a broader one.
Principle 4
Make sure no single bet can kill you
The CNTF failure in 1994 cost Regeneron a quarter of its workforce. By the time BDNF failed in 1997, Schleifer had spent two years ensuring "that the results of any one clinical trial won't jeopardize our ability to operate." The company had nearly $100 million in cash — several years of runway — and partnerships with Amgen and Procter & Gamble that survived the failure. There were no layoffs.
The lesson is about sequencing resilience before you need it. In a field where most bets fail, the founder's primary job is not picking winners but staying alive long enough for the platform to produce one. Schleifer later framed Regeneron's long losses as a source of strength: the company "was at its best when it didn't know where the lifeblood of money was coming from." That is true only if you have arranged never to actually run out.
R
Falling Down Three Times
The wilderness years, and what Regeneron built during them.
1988
Founded in Schleifer's apartment on $1 million from George Sing, agreed on a napkin.
1991
IPO on NASDAQ raises $91.6 million.
1993
Buys manufacturing space in Rensselaer, NY, years before any approved product.
1994
CNTF Phase III falters; stock drops 33%; class action filed; 25% of staff laid off.
1995
Roy Vagelos becomes chairman and redirects research toward well-understood biology.
1997
BDNF Phase III fails; stock falls 43%; no layoffs thanks to ~$100M cushion.
2003
First VelociGene paper; the proprietary platform era begins.
2008
Arcalyst approved — the first medicine, twenty years after founding.
2011
Eylea approved; revenue goes from $446M toward multiple billions.
Tactic: Before your highest-stakes bet resolves, structure cash and partnerships so that its failure is survivable without gutting the team.
Principle 5
Import the experience you lack, and let it overrule you
In 1995, at the company's lowest point, Schleifer recruited P. Roy Vagelos, former head of Merck's research and later its CEO, as chairman. Vagelos's two rules — pursue only well-understood biology, and get to human data quickly — were, in substance, a rejection of the founding thesis. Schleifer accepted them, and Vagelos stayed for 28 years.
Most founders recruit senior advisors for credibility. Schleifer recruited one for correction. His own advice to young entrepreneurs makes the logic explicit: they lack nothing but experience, and the remedy is "to find people who have that experience and are willing to work with you and teach you." The harder part, unspoken, is being willing to be taught when the lesson is that your original idea was wrong.
Tactic: Bring in at least one senior figure whose explicit mandate is to tell you which of your founding assumptions to abandon, and give them the authority to make it stick.
Principle 6
Build tools, not products
Between the failures of the 1990s and the approval of Eylea in 2011, Regeneron's most important work was invisible to investors: the Trap fusion-protein technology, VelociGene, and VelocImmune, a mouse engineered to produce fully human antibodies. "We steadfastly were building the tools that would lead to our eventual success," Schleifer said. These tools later produced Eylea, Praluent, Dupixent, Libtayo, the COVID cocktail, and the first effective Ebola treatment.
A product is a single bet; a platform is a machine for making bets. When COVID arrived, Schleifer could say "we had been developing the technology for decades" — the speed was the dividend on twenty years of tool-building. Schleifer's stated ambition was always repetition: "One isn't enough for us. We want to continue to churn these things out year in and year out."
V
Conventional Biotech vs. the Regeneron Model
Where Schleifer's choices diverged from industry norms.
| Conventional approach | Regeneron under Schleifer | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Build a company around a lead asset. | Build proprietary platforms that generate many assets. | Scale |
| Business leaders govern; scientists advise. | Technology committee; scientist-majority board. | Governance |
| Acquire innovation from smaller firms. | Nearly all medicines homegrown in-house. | Scale |
| Provide quarterly earnings guidance. | Decline to provide quarterly guidance. | Discipline |
| Choose therapeutic areas by market size. | "Go where the science is right." | Discipline |
| Defend industry pricing as a bloc. | Publicly attack price increases that mask weak pipelines. | Risk |
Tactic: Allocate a protected share of resources to capabilities that will produce many future products, and measure that work on its own timeline rather than against current revenue.
Principle 7
Let partners carry you, then buy yourself back
Regeneron survived on partners — Amgen, Procter & Gamble, Aventis, Bayer, Sanofi — and Schleifer structured those deals so the company kept its core platforms. When Sanofi lost interest in the eye drug inherited from Aventis, it paid Regeneron $50 million to take the rights back; that drug became Eylea. Later, as Regeneron grew strong, it reversed the flow: buying back 19.2 million shares from Sanofi for about $5 billion in 2020 and taking full ownership of Libtayo in 2022.
The pattern is a deliberate arc of dependency and repatriation. Early partnerships fund the platform when the company is weak; later transactions reclaim equity and assets once the company can carry them alone. The craft lies in writing early deals that leave the door open for the second act — and in recognizing when a partner undervalues what it holds.
Tactic: In every partnership you sign from weakness, protect the core platform and preserve a path to reclaim rights or equity when your leverage improves.
Principle 8
Go where the science is right, not where the market is
"We don't have a process where we sit around and we say, wouldn't it be great to have a drug for something," Schleifer told Goldman Sachs in 2025. "You have to go where the science is right." Regeneron's founding misstep was precisely the opposite: it began with a desired outcome — curing neurodegeneration — and reasoned backward to a mechanism. Eylea, by contrast, emerged from a platform applied to well-understood VEGF biology.
This principle is the institutional memory of failure. It explains why the company's portfolio looks scattered by therapeutic area — eye disease, eczema, cholesterol, cancer, Ebola, hearing loss — and coherent by method. Market-first strategies produce companies organized by disease; science-first strategies produce companies organized by capability.
Tactic: Rank opportunities first by the strength of the underlying mechanism and only then by market size, and kill projects where the biology is a hope rather than a fact.
Principle 9
Criticize your own industry from a position you can defend
Schleifer's attacks on drug pricing — "we as an industry have used price increases to cover up the gaps in innovation," "you're not entitled to a fraction of the GDP" — gave Regeneron a distinct public identity during years when pharmaceutical companies were widely loathed. The stance was credible only because Regeneron's growth came from new medicines rather than price hikes on old ones, and because it sometimes priced below comparators, as with Dupixent at $37,000.
The principle has limits, and Schleifer has run into them. Critics noted his own pay — the highest in biopharma in 2012 and 2014 — and the prices of Eylea and Praluent. His fierce rebuttal of ICER's value analysis looked to some like a reformer defending his own margins. The lesson is not that internal critics are hypocrites; it is that internal criticism becomes a strategic asset only when the critic's business model genuinely differs from the target's, and becomes a liability the moment it doesn't.
Tactic: If you publicly criticize your industry, aim at the specific behavior your own business model visibly avoids, and expect your own numbers to be audited in return.
Principle 10
Refuse the quarterly clock
Regeneron under Schleifer declines to give quarterly earnings guidance — a rarity among S&P 500 companies. For a business whose first profitable year came more than two decades after its founding, the refusal is consistent: drug development unfolds over decades, and Schleifer has insisted that leaders should care as much about a long-shot experimental drug as about the latest sales figures. "The current drugs aren't the ones you will be selling 10 years from now."
Opting out of guidance is a way of choosing your own scoreboard. It removes an incentive to manage short-term numbers at the expense of research spending, and it trains investors to evaluate the pipeline rather than the quarter. It is easier for a founder with a long record and a large stake to do; it is still a choice most of his peers decline to make.
Tactic: Identify the external metric that most distorts your long-term decisions, and stop feeding it, even at the cost of short-term investor comfort.
Principle 11
Own the data layer before anyone else values it
The Regeneron Genetics Center has sequenced more than three million human exomes linked to anonymized medical records — by Schleifer's account, about half the world's fully sequenced population — and he has talked of reaching 50 million. Regeneron also invested in Truveta's effort to aggregate records for 90 million people. When asked about artificial intelligence, Schleifer reframed the question: AI "is as good as the data it can train on," and the real tool is genetics.
This is platform thinking extended from the lab bench to the population. Proprietary tools gave Regeneron speed in making drugs; proprietary data gives it an edge in choosing which drugs to make. Discoveries like GPR75 variants that protect against obesity show how genetic data turns "go where the science is right" from a slogan into a search procedure.
Tactic: Invest early in the proprietary data that will make tomorrow's tools valuable, especially while competitors are still chasing the tools themselves.
Principle 12
Fund the pipeline that produced you
Both founders competed in the Science Talent Search as teenagers. Regeneron later made a $100 million commitment to sponsor that competition, became lead sponsor of the International Science and Engineering Fair — adding $34 million over five years in 2023 — and was an original sponsor of the Westchester Science & Engineering Fair in 2003, long before it was profitable. It funded a mobile laboratory for underserved school districts and teacher fellowships.
Cynics can call this branding, and it is. But it is also a coherent theory of the business: a company whose only durable asset is scientific talent has a direct interest in the supply of future scientists. Schleifer is recycling the mechanism that sorted him out of Queens and into a lab, betting that the next Yancopoulos is a teenager at a science fair today.
Tactic: Invest in the earliest stage of the talent pipeline your business depends on, starting before you can afford it to look generous.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Leonard Schleifer, Cornell Entrepreneur of the Year conversation, April 2019I have this notion that as long as I can see some light, no matter how long the tunnel is, I am willing to get back on the horse.
— Leonard Schleifer, to CNNMoney, 2014We were never in this for the quick fix. This isn't the software business where you could write a program, everybody loves it and before you know it, you're on top of the world. We're doing something that is pretty darn difficult.
— Leonard Schleifer, Boston College Chief Executives Club, May 2017Drug pricing has the potential to be the undoing of our industry. We're not getting it right.
— Leonard Schleifer, Touro College commencement, June 2019All these years, we were failures to the outside world, but in our hearts, we felt we were actually making critical progress.
— Leonard Schleifer, CNBC Squawk Box, November 8, 2021Our model is we do this in the setting of a business and if we take care of the patients, I think it does take care of the business.
Maxims
- Put your values on the board. A technology committee says more about a company than any mission statement.
- Name the scientist first. A CEO who credits the lab in public keeps the lab in the building.
- Draw the smallest true conclusion. A failed trial proves only what it tested, "delivered in this manner."
- Insure against your best idea. Structure the company so that no single result can end it.
- Recruit the correction. Bring in the experienced elder who will tell you which founding belief to drop.
- Build the machine, not the widget. Platforms survive the failure of any one product they make.
- Borrow strength, then buy it back. Partnerships signed from weakness should leave a door open for repatriation.
- Follow the biology. Start from mechanisms you understand, not markets you want.
- Earn the right to scold. Criticize your industry only where your own model is visibly different.
- Choose your own clock. Decline the metrics that punish the long view.
