• Genentech’s come-from-behind scientific contests against prestigious university teams led to biotechnology’s first research and development contracts with pharmaceutical companies. By 1980 the firm was setting scientific and business standards that a handful of fledging biotech companies and academic entrepreneurs would attempt to emulate and adapt to their specific needs.
• Its public stock offering raised over $38M, as share price rocketed from $35 to $89 in a wild first few minutes of trading. It was the largest gain in stock market history, making headlines around the world.
• In one of the most influential sets of experiements in biology, Cohen and Boyer had flung open a door long shut to the productive study of the genetics of higher organisms. As Boyer remarked: ‘This technology could take you to the point where you could isolate any gene and make large quantities of it and then study the hell out of it if you wanted to’.
• Scientific ingenuity, technical proficiency, and relentless drive defined Genentech’s triumpth over rivals.
• Over the long run - and really the timing is when you can achieve it - in order to capture all the value from the research that develops a new drug that treats a disease, you have to be able to make and and sell that drug yourself, in part to control the distribution of it, not relying on someone else; and in part because you capture greater rewards by selling it yourself. Over the long run, unless you capture those rewards, you cannot invest as much in R&D that allows you to develop the second and third product.
• Young as Swanson was - younger than his management team and most of the scientists - he was firmly at the helm and holding Genentech to a tight rein. He kept everyone focused on product-oriented research, meeting benchmarks, and creating corporate value through alliances, investment, products and patents. His initial objection to the somatosin project was not an aberration; he continued to have scant tolerance for spending time, effort, and money on research not tied directly to producing marketable goods.
• Second only to his fixation on product focus was his insistence that Genetech achieve break-even earnings, if not profitability, even as a struggling start-up.
• Despite the fixity of Swanson’s corporate goals and bulldog tenacity, his management style was conspicuously informal and interactive, In dealings with the scientists, he was mainly a facilitator and cheerleader. With no background in molecular biology except what he picked up, he could only reassure and apploud from the sidelines. Yet he delighted in popping unannounced into the labs, looking over the scientists’ shoulders, asking questions, exulting over positive results, goading everyone on when results disappointed, It was a form of hands-on management that one of his heroes, David Packard of Hewlett-Packard renown (and a Genentech director as of 1981), called ‘management-by-walking-around’. Swanson would continue this highly personal practice well into the 1980s, until the company grew too large.
• The scientists had unusual latitude in making decisions about the conduct and direction of experiments. It was a new experience for many of them, accustomed to being under the thumb of the professor at the head of the lab. The three quick gene-cloning successes indicate that this latitude paid off in fostering ingenuity, productivity, and self-confidence in the firm’s first generation of scientists. Only in 1983 did Genentech create the formal position of vice president of research and appoint a UCSF professor of molecular biology to fill it.
• Genentech culture was in short a hybrid of academic values brought in line with commercial objectives and practices.
• It was a very different way of doing science, because this was a demonstration that you can accomplish a lot by working together with different disciplines.
• Bob wanted everything. He would say, ‘If you don’t have more things on your plate than you can accomplish, then you’re not trying hard enough.’ He wanted you to have a large enough list that you couldn’t possibly get everything done, and yet he wanted you to try.
• A minute after the opening bell, the share price skyrocketed from $35 to $80 - the fastest first-day gain in Wall Street history
• Genentech’s IPO established the idea that you could start a new biotechnology company, raise obscene amounts of money, hire good employees, sell stock to the public. Out competitors started doing all of that.
• If the research goes well, we can handle the rest of the problems of the world.