Nov 22, 2019, 4:27 PM ETInterview, Fireside Chat

Safi Bahcall, Author of "Loonshots"

Bakal transitioned from a physics background to McKinsey, and finally to biotech entrepreneurship, driven by a pursuit of higher purpose and tangible impact rather than a random career path.
His parents, both astrophysicists, instilled three core principles: the pursuit of a "higher purpose" in life, the appreciation of science as "professional puzzle solving," and the necessity of continuous learning.
The decision to enter biotech was catalyzed by his father's cancer diagnosis, shifting his focus from advising companies to creating solutions that extend life expectancy.
Bakal served on President Obama's Council of Science and Technology Advisors (PCAST) to author a modern successor to Vannevar Bush's "Science, The Endless Frontier" report.

Bakal's PCAST project analyzed the World War II "Vannevar Bush" report, which shifted the US from a position of significant deficit against Nazi Germany to technological dominance.
In early 1939, counterfactual analysis suggests Nazi Germany held the advantage due to superior U-boats, the Luftwaffe, and early access to nuclear fission; the Bush report helped reverse this trajectory.
Bush implemented a dual-environment strategy: he separated "de-risking" groups (military manufacturing) from "creative" groups (scientists) because the disciplines require opposite cultures and cannot be forced to innovate together.
Bush's primary role was managing the "transfer" of ideas between these two groups, recognizing that the failure point in innovation is rarely the generation of ideas but their reception by established systems.
He viewed the tension between "creators" (who see new ideas as beautiful babies) and "operationalizers" (who see them as flawed raisins covered in vomit) as a necessary dynamic for success.
Bush's success relied on "loving both sides equally," refusing to favor the scientists or the military, which prevented the dismissal of radical ideas due to cultural bias.

Bakal coined the term "loon shot" to describe fragile, high-impact ideas that are frequently dismissed as crazy or impossible by mainstream experts.
"Three Deaths" of Loon Shots: Breakthroughs like statins often survive multiple near-failures before success; Bakal cites the statin discovery as enduring three distinct rejections.
- Akira Endo, the inventor of statins, faced initial failure when the drug failed in mice because mice lack the LDL cholesterol the drug targets; the project was nearly abandoned.
- The project survived a second failure when the drug appeared to cause cancer in dogs; this was later identified as a false positive specific to the dog species.
- The project survived a third failure when the initial company (Senkyo) abandoned it due to the toxicity reports, eventually requiring another company to pick it up.
Nokia Case Study: In 2004, a small Nokia engineering team proposed the concepts of touchscreens, cameras, and app ecosystems, which became the iPhone.
- The proposal was rejected by the core "soldier" management layer, which was optimized for incremental innovation and risk reduction.
- The rejection led to a market cap loss of approximately $250 billion (dropping from a $300 billion valuation to a $13 billion sale of the mobile business).
- Bakal argues Nokia failed to create a structural "island" to protect the creative team from the dominant corporate culture.

Bakal identifies 3D-printed vascularized organs derived from stem cells as the most significant biomedical breakthrough of the last decade.
He predicts brain-computer interfaces capable of translating neural signals into speech or vision will be the most groundbreaking innovation of the next decade.
Bakal cites the best advice he received from Judah Folkman (a pioneer in anti-angiogenesis cancer therapy): "There are no experts of the future."
Folkman's advice emphasized that leaders must persist when "arrows are in their ass," maintaining conviction against experts who claim an idea is impossible.
Bakal's book, Loon Shots, argues that large organizations must learn to nurture these fragile ideas by quarantining them from standard operational metrics and risk-averse processes.