From the Globe 100 Breakfast
Some notes from the proceedings:
- Five companies have been on the list each year for two decades: Eaton Vance, Raytheon, State Street, TJX, and UniFirst.
- The original list, in 1989, included no biotech companies.
- The morning's keynote speaker was Christoph Westphal, CEO of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals. This was something of a victory lap for Christoph ( as he's universally known in biotech circles ), and he was in fine promotional form. The three major events of the past year in biotech, he said, were the annual BIO trade show coming to Boston last May.... Takeda's purchase of Millennium...and Glaxo's recent purchase of Sirtris for $720 million. He mentioned the companies he'd previously helped found -- Alnylam and Momenta...and also noted that his two biggest investors at Sirtris were John Henry (of the Red Sox) and Peter Lynch. He told a charming story about asking John Henry for $50 million, and Henry offering $20 million. Henry's version of the story is that he showed up wanting to invest $100 million, but after he met Christoph, he decided on $20 mil. Both Henry and Lynch did pretty well after the Glaxo purchase...
- Globe business editor Shirley Leung showed a great video of a visit to the marshmallow Fluff factory in Lynn.
- You can find all of the other videos, stories, and interactive charts relatd to today's Globe 100 section here. I contributed two pieces .... a roundtable conversation with CEOs Henri Termeer (Genzyme), Paul Sagan (Akamai) and Emily Nagle Green (Yankee Group), and a look at five emerging sectors that could drive the Massachuetts economy over the next two decades.
Labels: Boston Globe, Christoph Westphal, Eaton Vance, Raytheon, Sirtris Pharma, State Street, TJX, Unifirst