When Mike Doustdar started as a summer employee making copies at Novo Nordisk—a teenager living in Austria after fleeing unrest in his home country of Iran at 12—he never imagined he would remain at the company for more than 30 years, let alone lead it as CEO. Doustdar now heads the Danish company that makes the popular diabetes drug Ozempic and weight-loss medication Wegovy, both of which contain the GLP-1 compound semaglutide. In January, Novo Nordisk launched the first GLP-1 pill for weight loss, marking a significant step in making the drugs more convenient and less expensive to take than the injectable forms previously on the market. It’s a critical test. Doustdar was tapped as CEO last summer in part to restore the company’s presence in the diabetes and obesity space, after ceding ground to competitor Eli Lilly. Lilly’s weight-loss drug Zepbound comes at higher doses and so tends to produce greater weight loss than Wegovy. Novo Nordisk needed a chief executive with resilienc...
One time I was hailing a taxi in New York and this group pulled up in a limo. They called me in and every other word out of their mouths was 'dude'. We ended up going to a bar and we were all sitting around a booth. It was an empty, long bar, and at the end I saw someone with teased-up platinum hair, ivory skin, black nails, jewelry and a little midriff shirt. We were all drawing straws to see who was gonna go up and say hello. Someone else ended up winning and before approaching, poetically said, "Despite the doubt clouding my mind, I fuel the fire of my ambition and kept pushing forward."