by Chip Walter
But it was one thing to have an idea, and another to make it a reality. And that was why Levinson was important. Truthfully, Maris hadn’t thought he had a chance in hell of getting to Arthur D. Levinson, chair of Apple Inc., and CEO and chair of Genentech, the world’s first biotechnology company.
Blake Byers, a Google Ventures colleague and biomedical engineer, had told Maris that if anyone could build a company that could cure aging, Levinson was the guy. Byers knew this because his father, Brook, was one of the original founders of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers (KPCB), arguably Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capital firm. KPCB had been an early investor in Apple, Google, Amazon, and Genentech. Genentech not only went on to revolutionize medicine and the pharmaceutical industry; it also became one of the inspirations for Michael Crichton’s best-selling novel Jurassic Park. Everyone in Silicon Valley knew what a force Genentech had become in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and that made Levinson a particularly appealing candidate. Nevertheless, Byers was also pretty sure Levinson would never be interested in getting involved in Maris’s idea. At age 62, Levinson was winding down from Genentech—and except for Apple, was downsizing from other boards and various corporate undertakings.
“You’ll never get him,” Byers told Maris. “Let’s go over some other people.”
“Wait,” said Maris. “Let’s not do Art’s thinking for him. Why not feel him out? If he’s not interested, let him say so. What’s the worst that can happen?”
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ART LEVINSON WAS HARDLY a household name, despite his impressive pedigree. He was that low-key. But inside the fabled worlds of Silicon Valley and the pharmaceutical industry, otherwise known as Big Pharma, everyone knew precisely who he was. Genentech was up there in the pantheon of Silicon Valley companies with Hewlett-Packard and Intel. It was founded after Herb Boyer, Stanley Cohen, and Paul Berg co-invented recombinant DNA, among the truly epic pharmaceutical advances of the 20th century. Boyer then went on to co-create the company in 1976 after an out-of-work venture capitalist named Bob Swanson contacted him. The founding revolutionized medicine. Later, Boyer hired Levinson as a bench scientist, back when he was a bright postdoctoral student at the University of California at San Francisco. That was in 1980. Within 15 years, Levinson was running the company.
And it wasn’t just because he was a suit. He was a serious molecular biologist—a doctorate in biochemistry at Princeton, more than 80 scientific papers, 11 patents, and a long list of awards that included the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the top science honor in the United States. In 2006, Barron’s listed Levinson as one of “The World’s Most Respected CEOs,” and Glassdoor rated him the “nicest” CEO of 2008, with a 93 percent approval rating.
There’s a picture of Art Levinson when he was a kid. He’s around seven years old. His hair is tousled and blond, and he’s wearing a pair of flannel pj’s, striped with buttons up the front—the kind every boy in American seemed to wear in the late 1950s, bought right out of the children’s clothing section of J. C. Penney.
Levinson still had a bit of that boy in him. In some ways he was a throwback to the 1950s, like Timmy in Lassie or the Beave in Leave It to Beaver. But it wasn’t that simple. This was a man who had once simultaneously sat on the boards of Genentech, Apple, and Google. Bob Cohen, who worked with Levinson at Genentech, said he never feared Levinson entering a meeting with another CEO because everyone knew Levinson was the smartest man in the room. (Levinson said that was probably more a comment on the insights of CEOs than his own intelligence.)
The point was, boyish wasn’t quite the right word to describe Levinson. He was savvy. Maybe he had that Cub Scout vibe, but he also had a bear trap for a mind and a disarming honesty that might border on bluntness if he weren’t so polite. Thus, despite his good-guy reputation, Levinson never did anything he didn’t want to do. He could be stubborn that way. He had his own methods for thinking things through, and they often didn’t sync with what others might consider perfectly obvious.
When Levinson first sat down with Herb Boyer in 1980, most of his friends and colleagues told him to run away as fast as his legs could carry him. In those days, nobody in the academic and biological worlds actually got into bed with a business! The proper approach was to rise up the academic pyramid by doing research that would be accepted for publication in one of the peer-reviewed journals like Nature or Cell or Science. If somewhere down the line, some corporation absorbed your research for practical use—well, that was for bankers and executives and others of their kind who sullied their hands with commerce. But academicians, pure of heart and mind, were to be driven not by greed but by the virgin pursuits of knowledge, and knowledge alone.
Boyer, in particular, had nearly been skinned alive for his incursions into the world of business when he and Swanson created Genentech. Despite Boyer’s reputation for groundbreaking research (or maybe because of it), some of his academic colleagues considered him a traitor of the most perfidious sort.
Levinson had heard about the way people treated Boyer, and it bothered him mightily. But what really got under Levinson’s skin was when they went after him. Once he had decided to take the Genentech job, one of Levinson’s professors looked him right in the face and said, “I think it’s disgusting what you’re doing, and as far as I’m concerned if I never see you again that will be just fine with me.”
Well, for Levinson, that only made the move more appealing. He had a bit of a libertarian, I’ll-crawl-you streak in him, and sometimes it got the better of him. He used to feel sorry for his wife, Rita, when they were first married because sometimes, when the two of them attended a neighborhood get-together, someone would say something arrogant. It really fried him when people looked down their noses at others, and sometimes he would just go off on them. Then Rita would have to calm him down before things got out of hand. What could he say? He liked going against the grain. It must have been in his DNA.
Thus when it came to Genentech, what did Levinson care if investors or a government or foundations funded it? Let the scientists and researchers sneer and roll their eyes and tsk their tsk’s. If the crowd was following a particular trend, if a lot of “groupthinking” was going on, in Levinson’s mind that was a sure sign that it should be questioned. Not that he wanted to be difficult. Far from it. His father, a Seattle doctor, had always counseled him to work hard and be honest. “Do good work,” was his motto. “And don’t waste your talent.” His mother had drilled into him the importance of being civil and respectful, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t go your own way. What were we, sheep? Never follow the masses, at least not until you had gone back to first principles and thought the thing through.
Much later, when he was moving up the corporate ladder at Genentech, Levinson met Steve Jobs and eventually joined the Apple board. Then, in 2004, he was asked to join Google’s board, where he remained for five years until the corporate orbits of Apple and Google began to collide. Nevertheless, even after Steve Jobs’s death in 2011, when Apple’s board made Levinson chair, he remained on good terms with Page and Brin and Schmidt at Google. That was the way Levinson was: He seemed to get along with everyone.
6 | THE DINNER
Just as Art Levinson wasn’t your average dyed-in-the-wool scientist, Bill Maris wasn’t your average number-crunching venture capitalist. This was one of the things the Google hierarchy liked about him: He was a true idealist.
Maris grew up in New Jersey in a big family. His grandparents on his dad’s side were both deaf and used sign language to speak. As a kid in the 1980s, he recalled his parents had been so broke they actually made tomato soup out of ketchup and hot water. Despite these experiences, Maris’s general view of the world was that people weren’t put on Earth to get rich; they were there to improve the human condition.
This was one reason why it hit him hard when he watched his grandmother wasting away with dementia and witnessed his father dying of a brain tumor at age 67. H
e was 26 at the time. One minute his life was great and the whole world was riding high; the next, he was facing the worst day of his life. That taught him that the only thing that really mattered was your health. And it made him wonder, why should his grandmother, or anyone’s grandmother, have to suffer the way she did, losing her mind, inch by inch? And why did his father have to have his brain obliterated by cancer? Why did people have to die at all?
If he were to write up on a whiteboard all the symptoms of aging without actually calling them aging, Maris figured it would look like any other degenerative, genetic disease that would eventually kill you. Surely science could find ways to stop such a sickness—even reverse it. But if that was true, where was the company that was getting on it?
When Maris looked around in 2012, he found the answer was no one. Some nonprofit organizations like Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison’s Medical Foundation and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging were exploring ways to eradicate aging diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. But none of these delivered the heft needed to really get at the problem in a truly fundamental way. To make matters worse, Ellison had recently decided to gut funding for any new antiaging projects after throwing almost $350 million at the problem over 15 years with little more to show for it than a lot of his Oracle profits disappearing down a black hole.
As recently as five years ago, the great pashas at NIH, as well as others among the towering spires of academia, looked upon aging research as largely crackpot: nothing any real researchers would deign to contemplate. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) didn’t even consider aging to be a disease! If it wasn’t a disease, how could there be drug trials? And if there were no FDA trials, why would anyone develop any serious science or even a single useful drug therapy?
In the midst of all these contemplations, Maris met Ray Kurzweil. He had already heard about the celebrated futurist’s inventions, documentaries, and lectures, and had read his books, including The Singularity Is Near; Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever; and Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever. By now, Kurzweil was considered a kind of guru among the ranks of the geekerati. Four years earlier, in 2008, he and Peter Diamandis, the man who invented the XPRIZE, had conceived the idea for Singularity University.
“Singularity” was Kurzweil’s term for explaining that by 2045, the rapid rise of artificial superintelligence would trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in changes in human civilization so radical they would be impossible to describe. Diamandis, therefore, suggested creating a university that would prepare people from all walks of business and science and culture for a future when the Singularity would come. He asked Kurzweil to join him. Larry Page embraced the idea, and Google became one of Singularity University’s biggest supporters. So did Genentech.
Kurzweil believed that the same artificial intelligence that would lead to the Singularity could also cure death. That thinking had spurred Maris’s belief that it was about time to create a company that could truly attack aging. And it was around that time that he began percolating a series of longevity ideas. His first thought was to create a grant-making institution, using Google Ventures (GV) money, load it with 50 really smart scientists funded to the tune of two million or three million dollars each, and then let them have at it. But he quickly realized that, like the Buck and Ellison foundations, those efforts just wouldn’t deliver the muscle and focus needed to truly get the job done.
Next, Maris thought he might create Google’s version of NIH, except for profit. Hire a platoon of scientists and have them start whittling down the aging problem. He might even run the operation himself. But the more he thought about that, the more he realized a for-profit venture that big and complex would require truly serious capital, as in a good $500 million. Maris could carry some pretty heavy water inside GV—in the tens of millions—but nothing that monstrous. For that he would need outside venture capitalists of the Kleiner Perkins, Accel Partners, or Intel Capital variety. And that meant taking discussions to quite another level.
One of the people Maris admired most at Google was John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins’s chairman and a longtime Google board member. Compared with Doerr, Maris considered himself a neophyte. He was in his mid-30s. Doerr was somewhere in his early 60s, a legendary investor who, under Barack Obama, had been asked to join the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board to repair the shambles of the Great Recession. Doerr had seen more Silicon Valley venture proposals than pileups on the 101 Freeway.
Before he met with Doerr, Maris thought it might make sense to create a deck that outlined the heart of his Big Idea. He wanted to shape something powerful, not goofy. And if it was goofy, he figured Doerr would be the man to tell him so straight out.
Maris met with Doerr at Kleiner Perkins’s offices in Menlo Park and put the idea to him this way: John, imagine you’re walking along a beach and you find a lamp, and in this lamp you also find a genie. Naturally, it has three wishes. So what do you wish for first? What is the one thing none of us can control? Time, right? At your age, if all goes well, maybe you’ll live another 30 years? That’s 365 x 30, so let’s say 10,000 days.” (That got Doerr’s attention. The idea of days somehow didn’t seem to feel as far away as years.) But wait, it could be worse: What about zero days?
Maris told the story of his father’s brain cancer diagnosis. His father asked the doctor how much time he had. The doctor said he never made those predictions anymore, because one time he told a cancer patient that he only had six months to live: 180 days. Well, the man thought, at least I have time to get my affairs in order. So he walked out of the doctor’s office feeling all would be well enough, and was flattened by a bus. Literally. The poor man was killed by the proverbial bus. He didn’t even get six hours, let alone six months!
The point Maris wanted to make was that none of us can take anything for granted. Here we are, this remarkable assemblage of atoms and cells that somehow add up to us. And every day we are alive is a blessing, a miraculous gift. But every day those gifts grow smaller; the sands of time dribble away. And that’s where the genie comes in. Because then you could ask your genie to add all the fresh days you wanted onto the back end of your life as quickly as they were being lost at the front end. In other words, the genie could just stop the clock and keep you young and healthy…forever.
And, Maris reminded him, it’s not insane that this could happen. His conversations with Ray Kurzweil had reminded him that computing was revolutionizing the life sciences. The fact that Craig Venter and his team at Celera had completed sequencing the human genome in 2000 made it abundantly clear that it was only a matter of time before science understood what our genes were telling us and how we could repair them. Given the right resources, that was what the genie could do: Buy time! Maris dragged his hand across his hair and gazed expectantly at Doerr. “That is the kind of company I am describing,” he said. “What do you think?”
Long pause. But not because Doerr didn’t like the idea. Because the man was floored. No death? Or at least a very long life? And a good one at that? Stunning! He told Maris the idea may have been the most compelling pitch he had ever heard. So, asked Maris, would Doerr support the idea? Absolutely. He would put money in it himself! Maris had already run the concept informally by Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, and he liked it too. Should we share it with Larry Page, he asked? Yes, said Doerr. Of course, talk to Larry.
Page loved the idea too. This was precisely the delicious sort of thinking he embraced: long-range, outrageous businesses to invest in that had the potential to create truly radical change. This was why the folks over at the Googleplex offices in Mountain View had come to call the big ideas they were brewing “moonshots.” That was, of course, a reference to John Kennedy’s famous 1962 speech declaring that the United States would, inside of 10 years, put a man on the moon. We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard—that was the way Kennedy had put it. And that sentiment was right in Page’s wheelhouse
. Page liked Maris’s idea so much that he suggested Google fund the whole company. Keep it simple.
But this brought everyone back to the key question: Who was the right person to undertake such a monumental effort? And more importantly, who was the person most likely to actually wrestle the damned beast to the ground?
Thus did Art Levinson find himself motoring along the ribbons of Silicon Valley highway on October 18, 2012, headed to Larry Page’s house where he would soon be discussing the extermination of death.
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BEFORE ART LEVINSON’S ARRIVAL, Page reviewed the thinking he hoped would win the man’s heart and mind. Even though he was shy, Larry Page was driven and competitive, and he wanted the meeting to go well. Page already trusted Levinson from his days as a Google board member. That was important. And he knew Levinson was a grand master of the pharmaceutical arts. He understood molecular biology at a granular level, and had helped Genentech through some of its toughest times when he took over as CEO in 1995. And like Page, he was unusually focused and didn’t care much for failure.
Art was the right man for the job, all right, but would he accept it? Page and Maris weren’t sure because Levinson often said no to ideas that anyone else would have leaped to take on. That made him one of the more refreshing characters in Silicon Valley, but it also made him unpredictable. Money and power were usually the big drivers in the Valley, but Levinson didn’t really care much about either. For him it was about the hunt, and the reward of solving complicated problems. Well, Page had a whopper for him now.
