Adam, if you know about 10 years ago, I was here in October because I was kicked out, from Penn, was forced to retire. Then my husband supported me and said that, you know, when finally visited in Germany and found that maybe BioNTech is the right place, then he said "Just try it and I will make sure that you don't regret." Looking back in my life he supported that I would go, and for nine years I commuted to BioNTech in Germany. I did all these experiments actually, with my own hands, I was 58 years old, I was still culturing plasmids and feeding cells, so it is very unlikely.

But, of course, we had one problem that the modern mountaineer doesn’t have. That is, this psychological barrier. We really didn’t know whether it was humanly possible to reach the top of Mt. Everest. And even using oxygen as we were, if we did get to the top, we weren’t at all sure whether we wouldn’t drop dead or something of that nature. All the physiologists had warned us that the altitude at the summit of Everest was a very marginal altitude and might be extremely dangerous. So, one had this feeling in your mind all the time that maybe you were pushing things a bit beyond what humans were meant to do and you couldn’t ignore that feeling. But, because of strong motivation, you keep plugging on and you seem to be going okay and nothing seems to be going wrong, so you persist. And we persisted, of course, and ultimately, set foot on the summit.

The second filter is to gravitate towards working on hard things. I’d love to tell you I was an immediate success after leaving Stanford… I wasn’t. Even a decade later, I felt like I wasn’t on the right path, and it took me a while to find my footing. Until I applied to Google. I had my final interview there in 2004, it was April Fool’s Day and the day Gmail launched. So when my interviewers asked me about it, I wasn’t sure if it was a joke or a real product. That’s because at the time, one gigabyte of free storage for everyone felt super ambitious, and almost impossible. A couple years into the job, I got my chance to work on a seemingly impossible problem, too. It was around this time that the internet was moving into a new phase. The web was evolving from simple web pages to rich applications. There was a group of us that felt we could reimagine the browser to be much better and faster, and we had an early prototype that we thought was pretty good. Internally there was a consensus that building a browser would be incredibly difficult, requiring hundreds of engineers; we had a group of about ten. The consensus was right. It was going to be really hard. In some ways we were naive, and it's good to be a bit irrational when you approach new things. And in 2008, we launched what we thought was a great browser. We had eight million users in the first twenty-four hours, and the reviews were really positive. And then user growth stagnated. After a year, we had around two percent share. I remember Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, made fun of Chrome in an interview and called it a rounding error. It could have been demoralizing. But with that California optimism, I told the team that the fact he went out of his way to dismiss us meant we were doing something right. We kept going, setting highly aggressive stretch goals to keep the team pushing. We rapidly iterated, shipping the browser every six weeks while others shipped one maybe every six months to a year. Success began to follow. Working on hard things has taught me a lot: It typically attracts other great and optimistic people. And even if you miss meeting the high goals you set, you’ll still achieve something great. So when you have the choice to work on something hard — say yes. Do what excites you

Then you have the clients. The care and feeding of clients is really one of the main obstacles, because you always have a client with some preconceived idea of what a house looks like, and all you want him to do is leave a check and go to Europe for a couple of years. Or leave two checks. But alas, life isn’t simple. If it were, more people would be better architects.

The person who has inspired me my whole life is my Mom, because she taught me commitment. She sacrificed. We weren’t dirt poor, but we weren’t real rich or anything. I would always have what I needed, and when I looked in her closet, she would have two dresses. She taught me to be outside of yourself, to get outside of yourself, and to be committed to somebody. That’s the same thing that I try to teach. Throughout my life, my mom has been the person that I’ve always looked up to. She never went to high school. I remember, in an old Polish way, she said, “Mike, I went to the eighth grade twice because the teacher liked me.” She had great, self-effacing humor, and loved life. I really admire her.

The world would say it was failure. But the difference was so small between us. They played great, but they lost.