Diogo Rau
speaker
67 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Diogo Rau’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Pushkin
I think I have that reputation of being unusual. At least I like to try to do things a little bit differently.
Yeah, yeah. You worked in the tech industry for how many years? I worked in the tech industry, well, really my whole life. But the last 10 years before I came to Lilly, I was at Apple. And before that, I was doing other kinds of technology work at McKinsey. And before that, I was in the startup world. So I've really spent my whole life in technology.
Well, yeah, and that's the way a lot of these things start. There was a recruiter that I worked with who gave me a call and said, hey, I've got this opportunity. It's in life sciences. And I was like, I've never done anything in life sciences before. He's like, that's okay. So I look at the spec and the spec is, it's pretty interesting. So I'm like, okay, it's worth a phone call.
And then I meet our CEO and our head of HR, and like, these people are really nice. And so that's like the second thing that I notice is that they're really, really, really nice. And that's a big difference, by the way, coming from versus the tech world. Happy to say a little more about that.
And then I start talking to our head of research and development about some of the problems that we're trying to solve in life sciences. And I realized, wow, this is like a fascinating space. I kind of thought that like everything exciting in the world was happening in tech. And then I came to realize, no, actually, there's a lot of exciting stuff that's happening outside of just the tech world.
Well, the number one thing that I actually saw was actually the nice people part. But you know, the second thing that I noticed was really long time scales. Like the size and the duration of things is just beyond belief. My first executive committee meeting in 2021, we were talking about a revenue forecast that was for 2030. And that's nine years out.
In tech, looking like 18 months out in revenue is ridiculous. Wait, so when you see that, what's your reaction? Oh, it's BS. There's no way we can predict our revenues for nine years from now. And of course, now I realize that I'm in here, that there are a lot of things that you can predict. And it is actually very predictable. It's a big bet. And if it works, you'll hit it.
But it's much less volatile. It's, these timescales are crazy though, because like at our last executive committee meeting right before the break, we were talking about a product launch. I'll ask you a question. When, guess when our product launches that we were talking about in December? Well, now that you've primed me, it's going to be five, six, seven years. No, 2036. Oh, my God.
And I can guarantee you there are zero tech companies right now talking about what they're going to launch in 2036. Yeah, yeah.
Yes. You can't be certain, of course, that anything is going to be approved. And so we apply a probability of technical success. This phrase I'd never heard of before I got here, but every step of the way has probability of technical success. And so you factor it in and you take all that into account. But you know when you have a good medicine and you know what it's going to take.
But it just takes 10 years to bring a medicine to life. And I don't think that was one of the things that I realized before I came into this, just how long it takes and how much money it takes. So it is possible that you will work on things that you will never see come to fruition? In fact, most of our scientists that work here will never see their medicines that they're working on come to life.
which is kind of crazy to think of. How does that affect the culture of an organization? It gives it a really long-term perspective, like a crazy long-term perspective.
When we're talking about things, making decisions, we're really not thinking, you know, like in an executive committee level, there are some things that we're doing on a this-year basis, but there are a lot of things that we're doing that we're really talking about like the 2030s, like just... just a much different time scale from anything else.
And so we're not going to do anything stupid, I think is one of the good things. We're not going to trade off some of the long term to get a little bit of benefit in the short term. So I think it makes us much more rational that way. I guess I would say we play the long game.
My boss, our CEO, gave me a mandate to really change, to bring in technology into everything that we did. So it was not a caretaker role sort of a mandate. We want you to just keep running the things. We want you to really figure out what can you do to shake things up. And so that was really the goal. And I think a big part of it was bringing a consumer orientation as well.
And I think this is an industry that has largely worked the same since the 1950s. I mean, if you look at it, the way you get medicines today as a patient is basically unchanged. You go to your doctor, they write a form. Maybe now they submit your prescription electronically. You still have to make sure you can pay for it. You still have to go to a retail pharmacy in most cases.
None of that's really changed since the 1950s, even though we have so much more. So a big part of what we're trying to do is actually... A big part of my mandate is to really bring this into the 21st century, or at least the late 20th century.
I mean, what's the kind of remit? The great thing is that I get to focus on all of that stuff. So everything that's technology related. I do cover everything from the discovery side through the consumer side. And actually, those are probably some of my favorite parts. Because, of course, I shouldn't be saying favorites.
But I love the discovery side and discovering new molecules and what we can do there. A lot of cool stuff, especially with AI, we could talk for hours about. And the consumer side is also the place where I see, where I have a passion coming from my prior life at Apple and just seeing the potential we have to change everything there.
Showing 1–20 of 67 · page 1 of 4
Next →