Early in Andrew Obenshain’s career he reflected on where he’d ultimately want to land and dreamed of being the CEO of a biotech firm. To even get a foot in the door, however, he had to take some odd-looking sidesteps and make somewhat unorthodox choices. The choice of a life partner, though, was crystal clear and proved to be the through line of a full life until a set of diagnoses upended everything. Find out how, with the love of family and friends, joy can punctuate even the hardest of times.
With visions of a biology PhD dashed in a senior lab experiment gone way wrong, Andrew Obenshain envisioned a business career that would ultimately land him as CEO of a biotech firm. The industry being in its nascent days, there weren’t many avenues there, but he found his way into a biotech consulting firm and later a biotech venture capital firm. Realizing if he wanted to be a CEO he’d need to know what CEO’s do and realized they all had on-the-ground operations experience within a company. So to even get a foot in the door, he had to take some odd-looking sidesteps including taking a post business school job as a sales guy which he then parlayed to some other opportunities.
His highly successful type A wife, who had her own career. And while paving the way for many of the family’s moves, she made it possible for them to live out a dream to move with their kids to Paris. A period full of exploration and fun, however, was upended by a set of unexpected diagnoses.
In this episode, find out from Andrew how finding joy can be possible even in the hardest times … on ROADS TAKEN...with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode’s Guest
Andrew Obenshain is CEO of Bluebird Bio, a biotech company focused on advancing therapies for rare diseases. He lives with his three kids in a suburb of Boston and is surrounded by the love of family and friends, present and past, at all times. (250)
For another story about finding joy in parenthood and community despite loss, listen to our Christy Hansel Lohof.
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Andrew Obenshain: Yeah. And that's when I say like, even there's just real moments of joy, even in the most dire circumstances. I have nothing but happy memories of that spring and that summer. My kids do, too. We were so lucky to be able to be able just to come together in those last months of her life and just be together as a nuclear family.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Early in Andrew Obenshain’s career he reflected on where he’d ultimately want to land and dreamed of being the CEO of a biotech firm. To even get a foot in the door, however, he had to take some odd-looking sidesteps and make somewhat unorthodox choices. The choice of a life partner, though, was crystal clear and proved to be the through line of a full life until a set of diagnoses upended everything. Find out how, with the love of family and friends, joy can punctuate even the hardest of times, on today’s Roads Taken, with me Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today I'm here with Andrew Obey and we are going to talk about how our lives are entwined in family and how family can define us and shape us and break us, and ultimately take all forms. So Andrew, thank you so much for being here.
AO: Thank you for having me, Leslie.
LJR: Excellent. So I start this the same way and I ask two questions of all my guests and they are these: When we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
AO: Wow. So when we were in college, I was just an excited college kid to be away from high school and trying everything: Dartmouth outing club, rugby, trying all kinds of different courses. Came in as an economics major, ended as a biology major. So I was just a kid in a candy store with a ton of freedom. And made really good friends, friends that I still have to this day. And then when I was leaving college, I had actually was, I was in a moment of transition because I had found a passion for biology in college, at least the classroom biology, and then discovered my senior year that I was just atrocious in the lab. So any hopes of a PhD went out the window after I committed a crayfish genocide in the lab of Sam Valez. As I managed it, I dissected all the crayfish and got no results and had done a very, very quick career change to look at what all lost people look at at that point, which is consulting.
And so it was embarking on a more businessy career than I had ever anticipated.
LJR: Got it. All right. So I'm unfortunately gonna take you back a little bit because I think one of the things you were known for in our class is being a twin. We had lots of sets of twins, actually, and this is the first time I will have talked to any of individual twins in our class. And so how was that experience from your vantage point of being there with your twin brother, Greg?
AO: Well, Gregory and I both, we didn't realize we were gonna go to the same college. We'd both gotten into the same set of colleges, but he had gotten into Princeton, was thinking about that, and then decided to come to Dartmouth. In retrospect, thankfully. But at the time, we decided that we were gonna live on opposite sides of the campus. And so, or the college chose that for us. So he got the luck of the draw, got the new dorms. I got the Choates.
LJR: So that sounds like a twin, a classic psychology twins experiment.
AO: Yeah. My mother kept on telling me, it's okay, Andrew. It's really near the library. It's really near the library. That was her selling point. Okay. But you know, as happened, so we, we took very different paths through Dartmouth in the sense academically. He started off actually as a science major, as chemistry, and ended up as history. I started off as economics and was biology. He rowed crew. I played rugby. He was a co-president of Amarna. I was an AD. But really we were having a very similar experience. I think one of the things that we discovered very quickly is that we’d go—we thought we had different friends—and we'd go to a party and our friend group was totally overlapping, so we would see each other all the time. And so you can't avoid each other. And it was, we didn't wanna avoid each other necessarily. I've remained very close to him. He was actually staying at my house last night. We remained very close and have always been close.
LJR: Excellent. Excellent. Good to know. All right, so then you, as your own singular person, which I know you are, were making these choices. I like how you characterize consulting as the avenue for the lost. It could be construed that way. Did you feel that way once you were kind of out in the big world? What did those first few years feel like to you?
AO: Well, I knew, so I'd always known I liked biology and I wanted to do it. There was this thing called biotech that was just, I mean, it was really, it started in the eighties, but really it still was a pretty nascent industry when we were graduating. But there was a couple big companies in Boston. And I went to a very specialized consulting firm doing biotech consulting. So I was the 11th employee. I can fast forward that that firm is now close to 200 people and the brand name has grown and thankfully my resume's gotten better over time. No thanks to anything I've done. They've just grown over time and it was a wonderful firm, great place to learn the biotech industry…learning, you know, everything was, it was business consulting and determining whether these companies had products or not. But really it was really tied back to biology, too. You really had to understand the science in order to be able to work there.
I was definitely the personality hire. Mark Ginsburg, our valedictorian also went to work there, as did the winner of the Harvard Biology Award. So I was definitely the personality hire, but it was really great to work with them.
LJR: Great. I, I like that construal as well. Personality hire is a good person to be. They, everybody needs one. All organizations need one, but I bet it was, it was more that you had that well-rounded bit, right? So you thought you were gonna come in as economics, so maybe you had that business kinda acumen percolating back there. You also did understand the science. And you could make your way around a room, so, that's good. How long did that take you to then figure out how you were gonna parlay that into the next step?
AO: Oh, I don't think I figured out at the next step, but I think I, so I knew, I think at this point I was married to the biotech industry. I knew I wanted to do that. And actually, this sounds kind of trite right now, but I kind of wanted to be the CEO of a biotech company someday. So even back then, and I, and I don't, and I, it sounds way more linear in a path than in retrospect, than it actually was. I definitely had some doubts along the ways and twists and turns, but I've always really liked it—The industry, the biotech industry. And so I was also fortunate to be living with a bunch of Dartmouth people in Boston, and we started out with a smaller group and it kept expanding as we expanded apartments.
But Dan Kalafatas, Will Upington, Dave Monaco, Geoff Lieberthal, Chris McGee, Josh Payne, Mike Ray, Doug Asano, my brother. Like we all roomed with each other at various points. Oh my gosh. Those, those four years I was in Boston and they were all going through similar journeys, too. And so it's not only my own experience I was getting, I was actually kind of living vicariously through theirs. And actually it was, it was a great pre-business school learning, right? I get to hear about everything that they were doing and all the industries that they were working in as well. We had a fantastic Cape house too that we used to go down to, and that we had a bunch of other Boston people like Lauren Currie and Hadley Mullen, Mike Triplet, Marni Payne, Heather Morein, K.C. Danzanski, Susie Brown. I'm trying to remember who else was it ever. A ton of, ton of different people, so it was a really good time.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah, the personality hire was not so far off. Like name dropping still comes easy. Yeah. So you knew that the research side wasn't gonna be your angle, but the business side of staying within biotech was gonna be your thing. So business school made a lot of sense. Not that you needed to shift industries, but kind of shift lenses, right?
AO: Yeah. And I didn't actually that my next step actually was not business school. I took a little, I actually, I'd been a consultant four years, which was longer than most people ever stay there. I ended up quitting and driving west and going to San Francisco and getting a job in a venture capital firm out there, biotech venture capital firm for a couple years.
LJR: Ah, okay.
AO: And that is actually where I, that's when I made the decision to go to business school because one of the things I did is like, okay, if I wanna be a CEO of a biotech company, I wonder what all these CEOs do, like what they did beforehand? And I was sitting on boards of biotech companies. I was, I was not sitting on the board. I was carrying the bag from my boss who was sitting on the board and being in the smart guy in the corner of the room. But I was going to these meetings. I started to research the, the resumes of all the CEOs of biotech companies and I ex, what I expected to see is what everyone was telling me was that consultants are really smart. Investment bankers are really smart. Lawyers are really smart, and I was expecting to see that they would all have become the CEOs of these companies. Not at all. It was…people, every single CEO had had a pretty deep resume in neither a big biotech or a big pharma company had actually carried a bag and operated and had a pretty, pretty deep operations experience. I'm like looked at my own resume and. Looked at what theirs was, what was a pretty big mismatch. And so I figured I probably needed to correct that. And so I actually went to business school with the idea of actually making a switch out of kinda the services industry and actually into the industry itself, into pharma or biotech.
LJR: Well, I think you had that inkling though. Early, like, I wanna be a CEO, not of a consulting company. You were gonna be the CEO of biotech. Right. So…
AO: Right. It just, and I was talking very small biotech at that point.
LJR: Very, okay, got it. So going to business school was gonna help you get the operations lens, but not, I mean, maybe some summer placement in operations. But did you need to then like leave business school and get entrenched?
AO: Well, I, so I went to, ended up going to Kellogg. I remember applying for a summer internship and being rejected pretty much at every single big pharma company out there because I didn't have any kind of relevant experience for them and they didn't really believe that I wanted to come work there. So I ended up working for a biotech company, Icos, out in Seattle. That internship was actually surprisingly hard to get. We can go back to this in a second, but I had met my future wife before business school and she was going to Harvard Business School and she got a job in Seattle. So I was dead set on getting out there to make sure she married me.
So I figured I got the one biotech job in Seattle. So that was the victory. But then when I actually came back my second year, I started to apply to the big pharmas, big biotechs and you could put your name in on a list of, and they would choose whether they were interviewing you not on the close list. And I got zero close list interviews. And then I had a, it was a point system where you could actually bid to get yourself on the list of an open list for a farmer. So I bid, I thought, I said I want to go to the best company that's out there where I thought the best training ground was. And at the time I thought it was Merck. So I bid all my points on Mark on the open interview to get that job because I wanted to go through their management training program and learn it the right way. And I ended up getting, you know, I was the only one that got the offer. I ended up getting the offer at Merck. And thus began my glorious career as a primary care sales representative for 15 months while all my friends went off to consulting a venture capital private equity.
LJR: Great. Right.
AO: And my intelligence was solidly questioned at that time by some of my peers.
LJR: Well, but you were where you knew you needed to be, right?
AO: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think, and I was, I had a very long-term vision of where I wanted to go. [LJR: Yeah.] And this was a stepping stone for me. This was not the, I think from the outside it would look, why is he, why has he gone to consulting and venture capital and business school to go into primary care sales and drive a blue Ford Taurus around Boston? But it was definitely, I had a vision of where I wanted to go.
LJR: Yeah. And I'm sure, I mean, you said earlier like your resume got…started looking better when that company did better. [AO: Yep.] But that 15 months probably was the deciding factor somewhere along the way that somebody goes, oh, he's done his time. You know, he knows this bit.
AO: Absolutely, and I think probably for the next, I would say eight to 10 years, every job I got and every promotion I got was because I had actually carried the bag at the time. [LJR: There you go.] Which, by the way, anyone listening to this right now, I don't think that's necessary anymore. It's a very different world of biotech and pharma, but at the time that I did it, it was definitely necessary.
LJR: Okay. Good tip. Good tip. Yeah. All right. So as you're chugging away at the long-term goal. This woman comes into your life who has her own path and kind of ambitions as well. So talk about how one marries those things.
AO: Right. So, Suzanne Michaels was a ’98. I did not know her at Dartmouth at all. However, we had a lot, we knew a lot of people in common. My brother knew who she was. I didn't, I had, I swear I never met her. And I met her when I was living in San Francisco and getting on an airplane to fly to Josh Payne and Marni Fox's wedding. I saw her in the airport, thought she was, God, said that woman's really my type. Didn't talk to her. Went to the rehearsal dinner that night in Boston and she was there. We went right up to her, started talking to her, and that was that. So we started dating, moved, flew back to San Francisco. We're dating for a while in San Francisco. She was incredibly successful, she had come right out of Dartmouth into private equity. Kind of really impressive. And I was holding on with both hands, so she wouldn't let me go. And we followed a similar career trajectory. She applied to business school as well. She got in everywhere she applied. I did not. She happened to get into Stanford and I was waitlisted at Stanford. And this was a time when business schools really wanted more women. So they told her that she came, they would take me, too. [LJR: No.] She chose to go to Harvard. And lived on an airplane for two years.
LJR: I'm not quite sure about him yet. Oh my Gosh.
AO: And and actually for the next, probably in, for the five or six years after business school, I was really following her career. I, we were choosing our places to live. Based on her career with a one small interlude where I went down, we went down to Philadelphia for one year when I was working for Merck. And so I, I think this is what I put back in the professional career, right? I did my, I did my 15 months in the field in Boston, and then I went down to be, to have the whopping title of analyst at Merck to be in the market research group. Which had a terrible name at the time. Business analysis and decision sciences or BADS. And I did that. And she actually, we had my, my, my son was born in Thad. We all moved down to Philadelphia together for one year. She was keeping her, she kept her private equity job in Boston, was flying back and forth, and then came home one day and said, Andrew, this two city two job thing, and it's not working out. And I said, you're quitting? And she said, no, you're quitting.
LJR: You’re quitting.
AO: Oh, I'm quitting. So I got the message. Took a lot to clue in. I quit. We went to Boston. I started job search in Boston. In the meantime, I was a stay-at-home dad for about three or four months, taking care of my son Thad, trying to get other moms’ phone numbers on the playground. And did that
LJR: In a non-creepy way
AO: In a non-creepy way. Suzanne used to be a little freaked out when I'd come home and be like, I got a number. I got a number. And eventually I got a job at Genzyme. And so I'd gone from my Merck experience to Genzyme and then actually I was trying to stay much more on the commercial side and do sales and marketing for Genzyme. But they said, no, you've got this venture capital consulting experience and you've got the operational experience we want you in business development. So I went to Genzyme in business development and worked for them for two years of business development. Did a number of deals, one of which was to bring in three therapies from Bayer that we licensed. Then I got my opportunity after a couple years to move over and run the marketing for those products in the us. But even during that time, while I was working at Genzyme, I was the regular hours guy and being home at night and Suzanne was traveling quite a bit even then.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. And you were adding to your brood at that point as well?
AO: Yes, we were. Yeah. Very, very good. So we had, so in 2006, if that had been born in 2008, Noel was born, my daughter. And then towards the end of our time in Boston in 2011, Zachary our third was born.
LJR: Wait, end of your time in Boston. I don't know where you went next after Boston.
AO: We went to Paris. So we can get into that transition. Cause that was both a professional transition and a personal transition.
LJR: Okay. Let's go. I'm ready to go to Paris.
AO: So again, I had been following Suzanne's career and so my own career, I've done business development at Genzyme, then moved over to run a marketing team at Genzyme, and then Sanofi, big French company, bought Genzyme. And again, I made a move in my career at this point, which was I think counter to just some, not to all, but you know, I had a team, I was running a relatively large business in the US and the new Sanofi had a Head of Commercial for Oncology who was looking for a chief of staff, so an individual contributor role. I thought that sounds cool, right? That sounds like an opportunity to sit at a table and learn about a bunch of stuff that I don't know. Sanofi had had operations in 92 countries and you know, I'd lived overseas as a kid. I had lived in Belgium for three years, in London for five, and I thought this was a great opportunity maybe to tick off some of the international stuff that I wanted to do.
LJR: And do that with for your kids.
AO: Yeah, and do it for my kids too. And, and so at the time I, Suzanne and I talked about it. She said, listen—you know when her career was go going well, but we'd had a third of kids. She was trying to balance both—And she said, listen, if you ever get the opportunity to move to Paris, I will go there. And I said, well, okay, but you know, Paris is headquarters and that's not gonna happen. Like, how about all these other countries, you know, including Bulgaria? And she said, no, no, no, no. I want Paris. And if you knew Suzanne, she, she was very good at getting what she wanted.
LJR: Sounds like.
AO: And so, I let my boss know that I was interested in international job. And on a business trip over to Paris, we going to Europe for a number of countries to visit them. And he said, I want you to meet the COO of Sanofi. I said, well, why would I ever wanna meet this guy? He's a scary German guy. He's like basically a Panzer tank commander without the monocle. He's like, well, if you ever wanna work international, you should just know him. Well, it was a setup. Right before I walked into that meeting, the HR person pulled me aside and said, listen, he's looking for a chief of staff and he might offer you the job. I was like okay.
LJR: Offer you the job?
AO: Offered me the job, right? I didn't even know I was interviewing, and so I walked in, had a conversation with him. He said, well, we will never know if this will work unless we try it. I was like, I think that's a job offer. And I walked out and I talked to the HR guy. I said, yep, that was a job offer. And I, he says, you, if you need, if you want it, you start in three weeks. So I called Suzanne and I said, were you serious about Paris? She's like, yeah, I was serious about Paris. I'm like, well, good as I start in three weeks. And to her credit, she said, let's do it, right? She was the, at that time, she was making, she was making way more money than me. She had the career and we embarked on a seven year wonderful adventure Europe that I will never regret. That was just some of the best times of our lives. And I moved to Paris right away. It was about February and March when I got the offer, commuted back and forth. The kids and Suzanne could move over that summer and we set ourselves up in Paris where we stayed for five years.
LJR: Wow. And at that point, what was the span of ages for your children? So when we moved, my youngest was one Zachary, Noelle was four, and Thad was six.
LJR: Ooh. So was Suzanne at this point trying to do the VC juggle as well?
AO: No. So she, well, Suzanne tried to quit…entirely, she, she quit her job. She consulted for a little while remotely, but, and I, to tell you the truth, I was, I just came home every night. I was worried that she was gonna hit her breaking point at some point. Like, oh my gosh, it's a mistake. She never did, and we never did. We had a fantastic time traveling around Europe. But she did actually get involved in the school. She went on the board of the school and in typical Suzanne fashion, after a couple years, became the chairman of the board and led a big capital campaign to help build a new part of the school and hire a new headmaster so she can never stay very idle for long.
LJR: Very nice. So you've had that European experience with Zurich patched on at the end. Yep. And then was it a return? What, what was the impetus for that?
AO: Yeah, so I'll start with the personal stuff. So while we were in Paris in our third year there, our third and our fourth year there Suzanne got breast cancer, early stage breast cancer, which ran in her family. And we, we were diagnosed while we were back in the US for the summer. Thankfully she managed to have surgery in the US and begin treatment. And then we continued that treatment when we were in Paris. So, and that we at the time thought that was successfully treated. And so it was, I mean, she's such a just such a trooper that she was able to typical A type personality right, when had, you know, gets diagnosed in the beginning of the summer and make sure that all the treatment is done and arranged and arranged back in France. When we land back in France for school, it continues there. And so we, I would say the best way to say that is we soldiered through that time and I was starting, I had to have a switch from Sanofi to Shire and I was starting a new job. I was the general manager for France and for Benelux for Shire, which was a pharma, was a biotech pharmaceutical company.
Sidebar, my major's in college where I was a biology major and a French minor. So I planned that perfectly. [LJR: Exactly.] And so we were, you know, that was a really intense time for us. But we got through the treatment successfully and then continued our European adventure. I actually, I'll go back to the career moment for a second before I get to the, the personal stuff. I worked for Shire's General Manager for France and Benelux. I will shoot my own horn and say, I think I did a great job. Shire did an acquisition of another company and they had a[n] extra head of Europe that got pushed down into France. And so I was now reporting to someone I didn't wanna be reporting to and up quitting that job. And that's when I came to where I am now, which was Bluebird bio. So Bluebird was looking for head of Europe or in France. So my fifth year in France, I was the head of Europe for Bluebird Bio and it is that job—then I'm gonna get to the personal stuff in a second—that led us to Zurich because we set up the headquarters for Bluebird and it in town called Zoog, which is just south of Zurich literally means train. Terrible name for a town. But that's where we set up the headquarters.
And so we were there for a year and a half. And it was at that, it was in January of 2019, and Suzanne had at this point started working again. She was working for a venture capital firm in Switzerland. She was on a business trip to the US and had went to the doctor to get what we thought was a pretty benign lump on her collarbone checked out. That lump was benign, but when they examined her, they found metastatic cancer, triple negative breast cancer. And so we found out on a Tuesday. My son was leaving for a swimming trip or swimming race in Athens, which is, you know, this tough life living overseas that you can go do that. So I waited for him to come home on that Saturday and then I pulled the kids aside on Saturday at home and said, guys, you know, mom's cancer's back we're leaving for the US tomorrow. And we got on a plane Sunday morning and didn't come back. Just left Switzerland. Right?
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. So that was in 2019?
AO: 19, yeah,
LJR: Summer.
AO: So it was actually winter 2019.
LJR: Winter. Okay.
AO: And we, I know cause we landed and we watched the Super Bowl and watched the Patriots win the Super Bowl.
LJR: Oh, nice. So, okay, little joys have to punctuate…
AO: and that's actually thematic. We're about to get into some pretty heavy stuff. But there's, there's, there were, you know, we, there was moments of joy through all of this. We had a, you know yeah. The, I will say that, you know, we're so happy that we moved overseas for seven years because we lived a really complete life together. And in large part, thanks to that.
LJR: Yeah. And, and at formative times in your children's lives that they can say, oh yeah we were full of life then too, which is really wonderful. So yes, this is heavy stuff. What do you do when you've just uprooted your lives because you need to get the best care and settle in a different way here?
AO: Yeah. So I, I mean, Couple things. So first of all, I have had just the most wonderful support network of family, friends, colleagues, right? We have, we were super, super lucky. So when you move back in a pinch like that, you call everybody. Suzanne, again, her typical force of a personality said, we need, we don't know where this, they, they told us by, by the way, that this was terminal, right? At the, at the time we chose not to believe it. We ignored some things. We did to, to try to kinda shoot for the moon. But at the time they told us it was terminal. And so we, she said, oh, we need some, we need to find schools for the kids to be taken care of. Right? We need to put 'em in private school because we, we need, someone's gonna take care of 'em. She worked the phones and her called all of her friends in Boston and managed to get all of our kids accepted into private school within two weeks. For anyone who has ever applied to private school, that is just a miracle. That that happened. I'm so grateful for those goals for taking my kids. At the time I called Josh Paine. I said, Josh, this is the type of car I have in Switzerland. I'd like to have that type of car in the US when I arrive. And Josh went to the car dealership and negotiated the price, and I showed up the car dealership when the car was ready. So thank you, Josh. Her sister got us a house, rent, a rental house. We had our house in in Newton, but it was rented out so we couldn't go home. So we got a rental house and you're, you're just acting at that point, right? I look at those days. It's just, it was just crazy. But you're just acting and you're going through medical visit after medical visit, you know, at the time the kids know that your, their mom's sick. They don't know how serious it is. I will say just the benefit of my kids are listening, we were planning to beat this thing, right, which we told the kid we were planning to be there. And we, you know, we had some good shots on at doing that. But then, you know, there, there's a period of, you know, this, it is an emotional roller coaster for everybody involved and really puts your priorities straight in life.
I will say that Bluebird Bio was just wonderful to me and when, one of the pieces of career advice I gotten early in my career was plant yourself where you will grow. Find a company that matches you. And after my experience with Shire, I'd really been looking, I'd been the, the culture of the company had been really important to me and Bluebird Bio had a great, great culture and one that was really caring and they really showed that here. So I had to call my boss on Monday morning and say, you're your head of Europe's no longer in Europe. And they supported me all the way through. They said, just take the time you need. I actually ended up keeping that job for a little while, then transitioning to an individual contributor job so that I could spend more time at home and have less pressure at work while she was sick. And that helped a lot. And I, you know, it's all a blur. I can't go through the details of everything that's happened during that time. [LJR: Yeah.] Except to say that all, I think all my guy friends had a, we have, we have a group, we have a text chain, a WhatsApp chain of about nine Dartmouth guys. I found out later they all had a side chain that to check in on me and were kind of keeping tabs on me as was my family. So I just, I mean, I'm just so lucky to have that support that we had.
She'd been sick. And then in early 2020 that the pandemic hit. At the time we were on a clinic— one, one of the shots on goal I was taking was a clinical trial. We were down at Yale on a clinical trial where she was immunocompromised. They ended up shutting down the, the hospital due to Covid. And so we, they were, they were switching hospitals. We said, forget it, we. We left the hospital two days early and drove up to our summer house in New Hampshire where we proceeded to spend the pandemic, and that was a blessing of disguise. That's our happy place up there. Yeah, and we have a great community up there as well, and everyone, you know, brought food over, supported us through that time. We ended up staying there from the beginning of the pandemic all the way through August of 2020. Unfortunately, that was the time we went to the doctor and they told us that all the treatment options had been used. There was nothing left. And so Suzanne went on hospice care just as my son entered high school, my oldest, and she passed away September 25th of 2020.
LJR: So you guys had all been up there in New Hampshire through that entire, you know, period where it really was only you guys. It was again, [AO: yeah, it was.] like Europe, that you had this intense experience. Just different circumstances.
AO: Yeah. And that's when I say like, even there's just real moments of joy, even in the most dire circumstances. I have nothing but happy memories of, of that spring and that summer my kids do, too. We were so lucky to be able to be able just to come together in those last months for life and just be together as a nuclear family.
LJR: Yeah. And the care that she was getting, you know, hospice care, I'm sure, made sure that she was as comfortable as possible. But I'm sure she just loved the being of being with you guys.
AO: Yeah, absolutely. And it was just, yeah, I mean the, you know, and, and she was getting progressively more impaired during that time. But I have to say her strength and just the way she kept going, I mean, right up until the day before she died, she was fully her fully and fully. The fully the how do, how do I say this? The fully the force of personality that she always was in leading the family. Right. She never gave that up.
LJR: Yeah. I did not have the pleasure to know her, but I feel like I've gotten to know her. And this sounds exactly in keeping with her life the way she was kind of going out in full energy there. So that's probably also good making a change back to the Boston area. Yep. From New Hampshire, right. Starting a new kind of life and a new kind of set of relationships.
LJR: Yeah. And so her, yeah, so this is, I mean those I haven't talked to many people about this, but you know, those family dinners when you're four people instead of five, right. In the weeks after really tough. And so the thing is that, you know, the, the, everyone just wants to get back to their routine. So we all, all the kids went back to school relatively quickly a couple days later cause they wanted to. I took a couple weeks off before going to work. I should say, I, you know, after that clinical trial didn't work in the spring, I had actually left work. I had taken an absence from work and thank you Bluebird, right, for giving me that. So I had been off for almost three months and so I went back to work. Bluebird actually kind of came to me and listen. You know, you can I, we can either keep you an individual contributor job or we can make you the head of half the company, basically ,the division, which was a big promotion for me, and as crazy as it sounds, it's easier to control your life when you are in charge. So I chose the latter. You know, I think it was absolutely the right thing to do. And so I started running half the business of Bluebird Bio. So we had three therapies that we were developing gene therapies, and then very shortly there thereafter, we made the decision to split the company and my boss took the oncology side of the company, and then I was destined to take the rare disease side of the company for these gene therapies. And so about a year after Suzanne passed away, I became the CEO of Bluebird Bio.
LJR: A year after one big happening and about 20 years after, you probably said to yourself, I'm gonna be CEO.
AO: Yeah. I did not expect it to be a public company, so I was definitely thinking small 10 person company.
LJR: Yeah. Awesome. Okay, so that's a lot to juggle, but I agree with you that sometimes that the control aspect sure. But also something that big just needs to, I need to compartmentalize lots of kinds of my life so that I can make sure that each one is getting all the energy it needs. So how then was it doing that while not only regular parenting? This isn't regular parenting anymore.
AO: No. And it's, anyone's gone through something like this. First of all, we're all gonna go through this at some point, unfortunately. [LJR:Yeah.] Right? And there's periods of frank grief in the beginning you don't even realize it. Right. You, this is all clear in retrospect, but I think what part of what happened is nothing could ever be harder than telling my kids that their mother had cancer. Telling my kids that we were stopping treatment and then telling my kids that their mom had had died. Those three moments are kind of forever seared in my mind. Nothing at work will ever compare to that. And it gives me a totally different perspective and I just don't get, I don't get worked up or upset about work things. So that I always thought I had ability to compartmentalize. Not really. Would still worry. I really learned ability to totally compartmentalize when I was at work, I was at work. When I was at home, I was at home just fully involved with the kids. And I'm gonna give a shout out to all the moms out there because you know this already, but you know, when you're dual parenting. It's like the army, right? They call for a volunteer to do something. The first one to step forward is the one that gets tapped to do it. And the moms always step forward first. It's just they, they just do, sorry guys. It's just true. And they have the worry tax, right? And now I had the worry tax. Now I was the one that was doing it and I thought I was co-parenting before I had been a stay-home dad. I had been the kind of following my wife's career for a while. But this is really different, right? This was the full burden of worrying about everything with your kids all the time. And I am super fortunate to have both great woman friends, but also great guy friends that are really involved parents as it is. So I could lean on them and I could lean on the other women in my life, like their wives and stuff to really help me through this. But I really got a masterclass in parenting after this, right? I thought I was doing a lot of parenting, but I really had to like step it up. And that's happened over time too.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. And I would say not only was it that you were dealing with the volume of it being alone. But you had a special case that you had grieving children.
AO: Yep. And that was, those were the hardest days where I’d come home and the kids are having a really hard time and, and then, and we all were, but there'd be, there'd be nights where you just, you’d come home and you're, or you're at home already. But a lot of it was still remote work actually. The time, which is really what, like, that's really what's helped me a lot. The fact that I do this work home. So I'd just leave my, my office and go to the kids. I could be there for them when they had those moments. And your nights would, you know, some nights would start off normally, some would you be four hours into just a period of despair that you were dealing with and then try to deal, cope with your own despair as well. But I have to say like, you know, you go through different periods and the first one is frank grief, then you start to recover, then you then you know, no path is linear, right? It takes us all a little bit of different times. But I would say that I managed to start, I call it the fifth gear of happiness I managed to hit, which is usually where I am in general as a person. And I started to momentarily hit that fifth gear, probably six, you know, 3, 4, 5, 6 months after Suzanne passed away. I had flashes of it, but it really wasn't until after a year, year and a half that I could really hit that fifth gear pretty consistently. And now I'm two years and don't…I'm not even count the months anymore. Right? Two years, about five months out where I can really get back. I really feel like when I'm back to where we were, my kids are back to where we were, will always be part of us. But I feel like we've really transitioned to our new lives.
LJR: Yes, it's a new life. [AO: Mm-hmm.] But it's not. In absence of the old life, you have all of those memories and you have the values. I'm sure she instilled in them. They're always thinking, oh gosh, mom was so hard hitting. She was, you know, gonna do that. She probably would want me to do this. I'm sure that that still lingers.
AO: Absolutely. And we talk good way and we talk about her all the time. That's one of things that we, and not in a way like hanging on, but a way she comes up at dinner conversation. We make fun of her. For something or [LJR: Right.] You know, they, you know, every once in a while when my, when one of my kids is being a total pain in the ass, especially my daughter who's a lot like her, I'm like, God, Suzanne, get your butt down here and do some parenting, so I don't have to do this by myself. But we, you know, we very much, we, she's very much part of our lives in a very. Good. In a good way in like, not in a morning way, but in a, this, the imprint that that she left. And my kids are incredible too. They are, they're so resilient and have really crafted their own lives for themselves. And now we're kind of moving. I, you know, we, we moved now, it was an awkward family unit after she passed away. I mean, it was a new family unit, but now we are, we're a fully formed family unit and she's still part of that.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure. And now with you leading this not tiny company mm-hmm. You are in a different phase of that professional world of yours, so that's exciting too. And I'm sure it takes a lot of energy, but could the 22 year old Andrew have really seen yourself in these shoes, what would he say if you told him, yep, I'm here?
AO: No, and I couldn't have because, not because I couldn't have seen myself as a CEO of a biotech company. It would've been a very much smaller one. But I considered myself, you know, there was a lot of people in our class that were gunning for corporate recruiting, that were businessy people that seemed to like went to the investment banking. And I still had the stereotype in my head of a really successful business person as a really tough person. And what I've actually realized through my career is, is. Not the tough business leaders that make it right. It's the empathetic ones. It's the ones that can have direct, honest conversations. It's the ones that are true to themselves that actually create a culture. And that's, I, you know, I didn't know that those parts of me, or would be the parts of me that would make me successful as a leader.
So, no, I couldn't have seen myself here. I had a very big misconception about what a business leader was.
LJR: Yeah, I wish, I don't know that that kids are told that now. But I, I wish we had been told that it wasn't always the skills that we assumed were the skills that were going to make us successful that really do.
AO: Yeah.
LJR: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, Andrew, thank you so much for, I know the time had not seemed right for a long time.
AO: Yeah.
LJR: But now I'm glad that you've realized the time is right to, I think, share an important story about resilience and love and family and connections and support and all of those things. So thank you so much for being on.
AO: Thank you, Leslie. It's wonderful talking to you.
LJR: That was Andrew Obenshain, CEO of Bluebird Bio, a biotech company focused on advancing therapies for rare diseases. He lives with his three kids in a suburb of Boston and is surrounded by the love of family and friends, present and past, at all times.
We hope to be like that for our super awesome listeners. So know we'll be back next week with another guest and me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, on Roads Taken.