Novartis CEO Vasant Narasimhan on Transforming a 250-Year-Old Company

We unlocked almost a $180,000,000,000 of value. Took this company that was a conglomerate, and we turned it into four companies. We had these other businesses, but it was never really the core of kind of who we are. We were misallocating capital. Spinning off companies sounds easy in retrospect. Actually spinning off three public companies is a massive, massive undertaking. You can rewind a disease or completely, in some cases, almost create a functional cure for patients. One of our retinal patients was an individual in bed all the time, receives our cell therapy. Six months later, no sign of disease. I mean, this is extraordinary. Cell therapies and immunology, alongside immune reset, bispecific, tri specific. That is gonna be a whole renaissance for cell therapy. When Vasanth Narasimhan became CEO of Novartis in 2018, he inherited a conglomerate, consumer health, animal health, vaccines, generics, devices. Over six years, he spun off three public companies and unlocked almost $180,000,000,000 of value. Today, Novartis is focused on four disease areas and three platform technologies, cell and gene therapies, RNA medicines, and radioligand therapies. One of their gene therapies, Zolgensma, treats children with spinal muscular atrophy, a disease that would otherwise be fatal by age two. It costs over $2,000,000 and it's reimbursed in 48 countries. Basen started his career doing public health work on tuberculosis in Peru with Paul Farmer and Jim Kim. That still shapes how he thinks about access to medicines today. A 16 z general partner, Jorge Conde, talks with Basant Narasimhan, CEO of Novartis International. So, Voss, I wanna welcome you back to the a 16 z podcast. Thank you very much for being here. It's great to be back. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Appreciate you making time. So why don't we start with just a brief introduction? So you are the CEO of Novartis. Novartis is, of course, one of the top 10 global pharmaceutical companies, has had major impact across a range of diseases, has major impact on patients around the world. But for the audience, maybe we start with that brief introduction. Can you give us what Novartis is in a nutshell and who VAS is in a nutshell? Why don't we start there? Yeah. Absolutely. Alright. So Novartis, 250 year old company that's really been a conglomerate for most of its history. But I think we'll talk about it over the last ten years. We've really focused it down as a pure play medicines company. We reach about 300,000,000 patients around the world. We operate in over a 100 countries, over roughly $55,000,000,000 in sales, nearing a $300,000,000,000 market cap. And we really focus on four core therapeutic areas, oncology, immunology, neuroscience, and cardiorenal. And we're really into platform technologies. I've really tried to pivot the company into leading platform technologies. Myself, I'm a physician scientist by training. I grew up mostly doing R and D work and public health work at the company. And with some business roles, became CEO …