The ‘de-risking’ playbook, as explained by Moderna CFO

Jamey Mock has always been a company man. Or three, to be precise. In his multidecade finance career, he’s only worked at three companies: General Electric (GE), PerkinElmer, and now Moderna, where he serves as CFO.

And he wants to keep it that way: “Hopefully, it’ll only be three companies,” he told CFO Brew.

That kind of consistency is perhaps expected for a man who spent nearly 20 years at his first gig. Mock started at GE in an entry-level training program before moving on to audit staff and then other leadership roles within finance.

“I loved my time at GE, but I always wanted to try to be a CFO,” he explained, so when life sciences company PerkinElmer came calling with a CFO post, he jumped at the opportunity—despite the fact that he’d never worked in healthcare.

But his time in GE’s early-career training program prepared him to dive into unfamiliar roles. “In my first seven years, I actually had 19 jobs,” Mock explained, saying that was due to the nature of the program’s rotations. “You just get comfortable being uncomfortable.”

If you’re looking for a guidebook on how to magically gain the exact right skills for your next job, you may find that Mock’s career fits the bill. Once at PerkinElmer, he became well versed in life sciences and biotech more broadly, which eventually primed him to take over the CFO spot at Moderna in 2022—right as the world started to emerge from the pandemic, thanks in large part to the company’s mRNA vaccine.

Risky business. A career with as much consistency as Mock’s might seem risk averse. Yet as CFO of Moderna, risk management is the order of the day, every day. 

Moderna was a unique company from the outset: Just over a decade old, the biotech company went public after a mere eight years and quickly got its moment in the spotlight as a central pandemic-era vaccine supplier.

At the same time, though, it’s a company with “one product and 6,000 employees,” Mock explained. That one product isn’t a product in the traditional sense, of course. It’s technology involving messenger RNA, or mRNA, the molecule that holds the playbook for cells to make proteins.

“Of course, it’s much more complicated than saying it’s just one technology, but understand: it’s literally one thing, and it affects how your body operates and how you create proteins,” Mock explained.

In biotech and life sciences, getting a product to market in a timely manner is crucial, which makes taking risks even riskier. But for Moderna, an all-in focus on mRNA also makes the company uniquely adaptable since the genetic material can be reprogrammed to attack a number of diseases.

Accordingly, Mock considers potential research and development investments within a “de-risking” framework that’s also applicable to CFOs outside of the biotech industry. He means it in the most literal sense: “We need to de-risk whether, can we get the mRNA to work, and develop the protein, and make an impact on an infectious disease?” he noted.

In Mock’s telling, Moderna knew mRNA tech could “work across all of respiratory, so we knew it was going to work in Covid…we had a pretty high confidence level in flu and RSV. So, what does that mean? Once you de-risk that, you’re willing to put more dollars behind it and more investment behind it.”

Bigger picture, Mock says it’s all about asking, “Is the overall investment de-risked because our technology has the capability of meeting an unmet need?”

“The same is true for any investment,” Mock said, which is what makes it a nearly universal truism for other CFOs. When he was at GE, he served as CFO for the company’s aircraft business, and looking back, he says he did similar risk calculations. “If there was a good airplane that we were going to try to get on—that we thought would sell well—then we were going to put more money behind a particular engine because that airplane was going to win,” he remembered.

A new era. Now, Mock is guiding Moderna through a new era, as the company continues to expand beyond its Covid vaccine-centric work. In the days of yore, a CFO might not have taken a hands-on role in explaining this pivot to employees, but Mock understands the growing obligations of the job.

“The CFO role is one that really has to cut across the entire company and understand everything that is going on,” he said. “It really has to be much broader than just the finance function.”

In the biotech industry ensuring employees are in line with long-term strategies is key—and CFOs play an essential role in that.

For instance, when communicating a reduction in R&D spending to employees, Mock found that “employees respond to that if they know why. And our why is, ‘Look, we have this powerful platform that we believe can bring loads of drugs to market, and we’re going to do that. And therefore, every decision we make, be it either on R&D or spending elsewhere, affects how we’re going to bring those drugs and how quickly we’re going to bring those drugs [to market],’ and then people respond to that.”

He continued: “In my experience, when you tell [employees] the mission and the goal, and why we have to exert or implement financial discipline, and what does that mean, they respond to it really well because they stay focused on the prize.”