Flagship Pioneering doesn't go out to find the next big thing in biotech when investing their billions in fund capital - instead, they take a different route.

Flagship Pioneering has founded more than 100 companies in the life sciences worth in total an estimated $75 billion. With a proven model for biotech startup success and a culture designed to surface new and interesting ideas, Flagship offers a different approach to biotech funding that is paying off time and again.

In this episode I talk with Lovisa Afzelius, a General Partner at Flagship, uncover the ways in which Flagship is shaking up the biotech funding model, and come to understand the reasons why others will have a hard time imitating its success.

This episode is brought to you by Jubilant Biosys.

01:52                      Meet Lovisa Afzelius

03:37                      Learning lessons in big pharma

04:56                      From top pharma to startup biotech

07:23                      Two different worlds and ways of thinking

08:29                      Flagship Pioneering

13:39                      Finding the right people

18:13                      Deploying capital to create value

21:06                      Expanding into new markets

21:55                      How does the Flagship model identify disruptors so well?

24:20                      Why don’t others emulate the Flagship model?

25:36                      Building a culture of ‘yes, and…’

27:47                      Learning from the companies that don’t succeed

30:49                      Artificial intelligence and biology

35:19                      Lessons from business that never found market fit

37:29                      The future for Flagship

39:55                      The importance of diversity in biotech

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To dive deeper into the topic:

• The ABC of biotech startup funding
• Meet the ‘biotech mafia’: how specialized biotech VC firms are dominating industry funding once again
• 2025 biotech funding tracker: recent highlights