Richard Scheller Developing Products that Save Lives No.1
It is my very special privilege to welcome our guest today. Richard Scheller is the head of R&D at Genentech. But I have known him for a very long time although he doesn't actually remember it. He started at Stanford as a faculty member in 1982 and in the Neuroscience Department and then Biology, and that was the year that I was a first year PhD student over there. So, I took classes from him. And it's absolutely amazing to see the trajectory of his career. He spent 19 years at Stanford and then went to Genentech. He's been there ten years and he's got some incredible insights about the difference between research and academia and in the industry and we're going to dive right in. So, welcome. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. And maybe you could tell us a little bit about your story and about moving from academia, about what would motivate you. Tell us a little bit about how that happened. OK. I'm going to stand up if that's OK. Thanks for having me. I was a professor here for 19 years. I was a successful, member of the National Academy. I was a Hughes investigator so I had plenty of money. Things were going well. But the research that I was doing had gone through a phase where the knowledge had just exploded over the last decade and the rate of learning started to sort of plateau a little bit. So I just took stock in where I was headed with the rest of my career and thought that I had to do one of a couple of things. Find some new technology to increase that rate of learning again or switch my field to a little bit something different where I felt was sort of prime for that tremendous gain of knowledge again or maybe just do something different.
So my wife, who's on faculty here, and I thought, "Should we move to Boston?" I get to go to Boston and have a bunch of nice colleagues there and then have labs there. But it really wouldn't be very different than here, given that we didn't have any problems here. We loved it here. So I thought if I was going to do something different and move somewhere, since being a professor here is terrific, that I should really move somewhere where it would be quite different. So I thought then what would that be? It seemed to me then that we have done and when I say "we" in this case, I mean, the life science endeavor, not my lab. So everything funded by NIH for years and years. That sort of done what we've promised the society that we would do, which is learn enough about the way cells work and the way tissues work and enough about molecular biology. So that we can actually think about disease in very, very mechanistic terms which is the way I like to think. And wouldn't it be interesting to try and apply my biological insights to disease? So I was fortunate enough then to have somebody. David Botstein was in the Genetics Department at the time, had work with Genentech. He kind of heard I was looking around at different things. He introduced me to the CEO of Genentech at the time, Art Levinson. Art was a scientist, started off in a lab at Genentech, became the CEO. And I thought, "Wow, you know, if I'm going to actually have a boss," which was kind of a novel concept to a faculty member, "if I'm going to have a boss, it should be someone who's a scientist who can actually understand logic and things like that." Someone that I could talk to. So it seemed like a terrific challenge, a terrific opportunity and that it would be really, really different from what I was doing day to day at Stanford.
So, I remember over the Christmas holiday ten years ago thinking, "Should I do this? Should I do this?" Walking into the lab and thinking, "So nice here. My God, I have tenure. Should I do this? What if they fire me?" I could get fired if I go. These are all kind of novel notions to think about but it just seem like a terrific opportunity and I took the plunge and I have to say for me, personally, it was the right thing to do. My learning curve picked up again immediately learning all about kinds of new science, about cancer biology. I didn't really know that. I knew about cell biology but I didn't know specifically about cancer or immunology. I knew absolutely nothing about business. I was on the executive committee of the company. I had to find out what EPS stood for. Really, the executive committee meetings were just learning all about business, all about drug development. How do you develop a drug? I never thought of that before. So it was just absolutely fascinating. I have to say I give the company a lot of credit because, basically, I think it has paid off for them. But it took me two years before I had any idea what I was even doing in business. I mean, I knew about science but it really was a steep learning curve but not something that happens overnight. So for me, personally, I would say I took the leap because I wanted to do something different and I felt it was the right time to become basically a human experimental biologist, which is what we do all in the context of disease, of course.
So I want to build on something you just said. Yup. Because you said you were curious about what it felt like have a boss. Yup. But you also now have 2,000 people working for you. How did you learn how to be a boss with that many people? I mean that's going to be a huge challenge to manage a team that size. Well, that was part of the two years of learning and that was probably the biggest part. One of the huge differences is, I found that in business, you actually get feedback on how you're doing. I'm sorry, unlike here, at least when I was a professor. Yeah, you might see a chairman in the hall every year or so. But you basically did your own thing and then, nobody really provided you as much feedback. So one of the things that I did there was... Someone said to me, "You should meet the head of HR." And I said, "What does that stand for?" Honestly, I have no idea what that stood for. He said, "Human Resources." I said, "Oh, Human Resources." That kind of sounded to me like they must hire the people. So then someone explained to me what HR is and they do all sorts of things and so on, so I learned. But one of the things that the Executive Committee of Genentech at the time decided to do is to collect 360-feedback from our peers and folks that work for us and sort of tell us how we're doing. So this was a really novel experience for me. My first 360-feedback, let me see if I can remember. They said I was aloof, arrogant and dismissive. And I said, "Of course, I am. How do you think I survived as a scientist?" It was a competitive arena. But they said, "Well, you know BS. It's probably not going to work here. So what we'd like you to do is then to go discuss your 360 feedback with your reports and one level down, your directors." So I said, "Wow. OK, we'll go do that." So I went into the room with these people and as a fact, I knew that, yes, most of these people said that I was those things. I didn't know anyone specifically who said it. Of course, it was anonymous. But I said, "Well, gee, people say I'm aloof, dismissive and arrogant and I can't understand this. I mean, my parents said that. My wife says that, my colleges at Stanford say that. You say that. I cannot figure out how you're all wrong in the same way." So I basically found that you need to be a much better listener. You need to really, really respect folks and their opinions. But it is very, it is different in industry compared to being here. I think part of the reason that people found me quite brash was the fact that here, when I said something, nobody actually did what I said. Hopefully, they at least marginally considered it, but then they would go, "No, really?" I mean, post docs, students and then they go do really what they wanted to do, which was fine. So I took that attitude to Genentech and actually found very quickly that-well, I didn't really want the atmosphere of the company to be that way-but it is just different and it is somewhat more hierarchical and that people actually do what you say. So you have to be really careful with what you say because folks are going to take it incredibly seriously. So it's just a million little things like that you learn over time about how it's different in the industry versus academia. But the reason I say that it took me two years before I felt as though I was coming to a place where I really knew what I was doing and could be sort of ultimately productive. So there's no really one thing that I can say that I learned. But I hope I gave you kind of a couple of examples there of what I would say would be a list of a thousand things, if I wrote them all down. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about what your responsibilities are. I mean, head of R&D of a large biotech company, it sounds very impressive. But maybe there, you could give us an insight of what your real responsibilities are.