- [Deb] Welcome back to Business Concepts
for Life Scientists: Strategy.
This is Deb Dauber,
and in this section, I'll be talking to you
about how to understand a scientific enterprise's
value proposition, organizational context,
and strategy, when you're on the outside.
Now, as students and as postdocs,
you're probably pretty comfortable
with evaluating an academic lab from the outside.
You know to look at their publications,
listen to their presentations,
and, perhaps, peruse their website for more information
about who they are, what they value,
and what they would like to be doing.
But how do you do this for a company?
For this section, we're gonna use, as a case study,
the Amgen website.
Now, Amgen is a very large, publicly-traded company
and I happen to know, from experience with my job,
that they have a really rich website
in terms of how much information they put up.
So they're a great example to do today.
However, any company that's publicly traded
will have most of these components
somewhere on their website
and it's really worth poking around more
to see how much you can learn
about companies you're interested in.
Let's start with Amgen.
First I'm gonna point out the About tab.
The About tab has an overview of the company.
For Amgen, they have Quick Facts.
In this case they have Mission and Values.
Many companies will also include their vision.
They have a section on leadership,
where they'll tell you about their board of directors,
as well as their scientific advisory board.
Now, if you're a scientist,
evaluating a company from the outside,
you may or may not have a great sense of their business,
but you probably can evaluate
who is their scientific advisory board
and do you think those are the right people
to be giving them advice?
Really the next thing we wanna know though,
is what is the what and the why?
What is their technology?
Why is it important?
What diseases or problems are they trying to solve?
Amgen breaks this into two pieces.
The first is Science,
where they talk about
their research and development strategy,
their pipeline, their trials and more.
And the second is Products,
where they talk about commercially-available products.
I wanna take a brief moment,
go back to Science, and show you the pipeline,
because most companies will have their development pipeline
at some point on their slide, on their website.
In this case, the pipeline tells you
how many products are in development,
and in what phase, and, if you click on it,
it'll tell you a little bit about the drug itself.
This is a great way to learn more about Amgen
and what they're doing,
and where they are in their stage of development.
What are some of the other tabs we have here?
Careers, obviously, is a tab you're all familiar with.
Careers is where you go if you're looking for a job.
However, by looking at what jobs a company has listed,
you also learn something about where they want to grow.
Are they hiring research scientists or clinical scientists?
Are they hiring regulatory experts
or are they hiring commercial experts?
This will tell you a lot about their near-term plans
and what they're investing in at the moment.
Partners will tell you something about
who the company is partnering with.
This informs not only what resources they have,
but where they are in their own lifecycle as a company
and what kind of a company structure they have going.
Are most of their products partnered
and, if so, with who?
That will tell you a lot about their stability
and their strategies.
Media is where you'll find press releases.
Some people will call this Press.
And, if they're a publicly traded company,
anything considered material to their value
will be put out in a press release.
So Media is a great place to learn more
about what the company has been doing
in the past week, month, year, decade.
Finally, Investors.
Investors, like you, are sitting on the outside of a company
and wanna learn more.
And, in the case of a publicly-traded company,
the company is obligated to share with them,
what they're doing and what they're trying to do.
So, let's go to their tab.
Now first I'll point out,
because the investors are so important to the company,
their tab has a lotta links back to some of the
aspects we've talked about already.
For instance, Amgen, under Resources,
has both Leadership Team, which we talked about,
and Pipeline, which we also talked about.
Under News & Events,
let me move this over a little bit,
so you can see it a little bit more clearly,
here we go,
under News & Events, you can see
they have Press Releases again.
I wanna talk about some other events.
I wanna talk about Analyst Presentations.
In this case, we'll look at the Events Calendar,
although we could have looked under Presentations also.
Here we have Upcoming Events
and here we have Past Events.
A company that's publicly traded,
either has to, or wants to,
or some combination of the both,
regularly present out to analysts,
what they're doing and what their plans are.
Basically, what is their strategy.
And this comes in a couple different formats.
One would be just regular presentations to investors
at investor conferences.
That might look like this, this Cowen presentation.
And here, you can see their providing you,
a PDF of their presentation.
Or, there's also earnings calls.
Once a quarter, the company will have an earnings call
to report out to analysts.
These are even better 'cause,
not only do you get the audio of the earnings call,
but included in their audio,
is the question and answer period with the investors.
So, you get a sense, not only of what the company
is reporting out to investors,
but also what are investors asking in response.
This gives you a great sense
of what the business of the company is.
Finally, I wanna go to the Financial section
and show you SEC Filings.
Now, you're not gonna see them here,
'cause I don't have it preset,
but if we go to SEC Filings, we'll go to Annual Filings,
and, eventually, you'll see pull up 10-Ks.
And then, a company's 10-K
or if they're just filing for an IPO for the first time,
an S-1, is a very long document.
It's primarily a document
meant to give financial information,
but in order to understand the financial information,
they also have to provide a lot of context around it.
This is a very long, dense read,
but it's probably one of the most
comprehensive descriptions of the companies activities
that you will find.
Between the 10-K, the analyst reports,
and the investor calls,
you will get a really good picture
of what this company's strategy is,
and what their challenges
and how they're trying to meet them, are today.
So that's my little walk through the Amgen website.
I definitely encourage you
to pick a company you're interested in,
and walk through their website
as an exercise in learning more about them.