The evening of October 18, 2012, was warm and cloudless the way Silicon Valley evenings often are. Art Levinson had just departed Laurene Jobs’s home and was motoring along in his aging Lexus to see Larry Page, and a few others, for dinner at his house in Palo Alto. Laurene was Steve Jobs’s widow, and as Apple’s chairman Levinson had driven down earlier from San Francisco to review a few matters with her.
On and off, Levinson had been thinking about the get-together with Page. He was skeptical, but that wasn’t unusual for him. He was always skeptical. But this particular idea…well, it was intriguing. Very intriguing.
A few weeks earlier, Bill Maris had contacted him, and that had led to the dinner. Along with Sergey Brin, Page was the co-founder of Google. A little more than a year earlier, he had taken over from Eric Schmidt as the company’s CEO, reins he and Brin had voluntarily handed Schmidt in 2001, when the company was still in its infancy. Maris was the head of Google Ventures (also known as GV), a fund that since 2008 had thrown hundreds of millions of dollars at cutting-edge start-ups like Uber, Nest, 23andMe, and a long catalog of others. Together, those businesses had made Maris one of the most successful venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.
Maris reached out to Levinson and told him about his idea. Maris knew it might seem a little out of the ordinary—well, maybe way out of the ordinary—but he hoped to get Levinson’s feedback. He wanted to create a start-up designed to cure aging—even death itself.
Levinson had been aware, vaguely, of various efforts to extend life. He had heard of Ray Kurzweil’s prescriptions for radical life extension, had come across Aubrey de Grey’s work on abolishing aging here and there, and suspected the National Institute on Aging (NIA), Harvard, MIT, and other organizations of that ilk had likewise dabbled in the question. But this was a different beast entirely. Google was involved, and Google had a way of bending the fabric of culture and economics the way black holes bend light and gravity.
Levinson knew this because not long ago, he had been a member of Google’s board himself. This was not likely to be some small-time, lab coat, federal grant effort where a few mice were run around the maze and written up in another peer-reviewed science paper. Google had cash, lots of it, and serious intellectual firepower. And that meant any endeavor it brought to the table would also bring serious muscle.
So, Maris asked, was Art willing to talk?
Yes. He was.
THIS THRILLED BILL MARIS to no end. He had been pondering his Big Idea for a while now, and having a heavyweight like Levinson interested vastly improved the chances of the whole endeavor advancing from concept to reality.
Maris had begun to cook up his concept after noticing in the late 2000s that just about every health care company in the world seemed to be either building a computerized diagnostic company of some sort, or a high-tech hardware device designed to improve health. Clearly, biology and computer science were melding. He had also seen this with J. Craig Venter’s work during the Human Genome Project in 2000. Venter had accelerated the use of computers to translate DNA’s molecular messages into digits. That meant researchers could, at least theoretically, reorganize them in all sorts of absorbing ways to unlock the mysteries of the human genome—as well as the drugs that might improve their shortcomings.
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?”
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.