Entrepreneurship should be treated as a rigorous, scientific profession rather than a random, gamified process of trial and error.

Noubar Afeyan argues that the prevailing culture of treating entrepreneurship as a random, gamified process — 'shots on goal' — is inappropriate for high-stakes fields like healthcare and climate, and that the process can and should be made more systematic and scientific. ✦ AI generated

Noubar Afeyan · No Priors · 2025-10-31 · original ↗

The motivation for Flagship stems from what I was doing before, which was that I started a company in 1987 when 24-year-old immigrants didn't start companies in this country, but instead it was kind of like former Merck senior executives or IBM senior executives were the only ones who were entrusted with the massive amounts of venture capital, namely two, $3 million per round used to go into venture capital. So this was very early days. And I had the kind of chance, opportunity to start a company right out of my graduate school and ended up raising quite a bit of venture money and eventually kind of went down a path of entrepreneurship. Along the way, one of the things that interested me was why it is that kind of the entrepreneurial process was supposed to be random, improvisational, kind of idiosyncratic, almost emotional, gamey, All of those things I kind of thought was a bit of a put-off when it comes to actually doing things in a serious, professional way. And I kind of used to go around in the very early 90s saying, why isn't entrepreneurship a profession. And if it was going to be a profession, how could it be a profession? Because it's like supposed to fail most of the time and once in a while you win and then you celebrate the win. And what I mean is like it's random. But not only random, but there's like winners and losers and keeping score. I don't know, it's maybe the wrong word, but I just mean like people even call gamification in the software space. There is a version of this, like I don't mind being playful because if you're overly serious, sometimes you miss things, but it can't just all be played. We take hard-earned money, we deploy it to do things that are damn near impossible. Once in a while, we reduce them to practice so they become not only possible but valuable. And yet, People treat it like, oh, well, it didn't work. There's 20 different things we tried. One of them worked. That, I don't know, as an engineer by background, as a scientist, I just thought that what we do, especially, listen, in healthcare, especially in climate, especially in agriculture, food security, you can't think of this as shots on goal and this. Now, you've got to say, hey, we can get better at this.

verbatim transcript · starts at 8:22