John Freund | |
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Alma mater | Harvard University |
Occupation(s) | Founder and CEO of Skyline Ventures |
Website | www |
John Freund is an American satirist and business executive. [1] [2] Freund and collaborator David Porter created the 1981 satirical poster Bedtime for Brezhnev [3] [4] [5] and co-authored the 1982 satirical book The Official MBA Handbook or How to Succeed in Business Without a Harvard MBA, [1] which spent 16 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. [6] [7] Freund is the co-founder of Intuitive Surgical, [8] and the co-founder and former CEO of Arixa Pharmaceuticals. [9] He founded Skyline Ventures in 1997. [2]
Freund grew up in New York City. He graduated in 1975 with a B.A. from Harvard [1] where he was an editor of the Harvard Crimson . [10] [11] [12] After completing his B.A., Freund received an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. [13] He received an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1982. [1]
In April 1981, while enrolled in Harvard Business School, Freund collaborated with classmate David Porter on a satirical poster for an imaginary movie called Bedtime for Brezhnev, featuring then-president Ronald Reagan. [3] [11] [5] The poster sold 275,000 copies, [14] and sales of Bedtime for Brezhnev earned them enough money to pay their second year tuition. [1] [5] In the 2021 book Cowboy Presidents, it was reported that Reagan was rumored to have loved the poster. [14] The original art for the Bedtime for Brezhnev is in the permanent collection of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian. [15]
In 1982, Freund and David Porter co-authored the book The Official MBA Handbook or How to Succeed in Business Without a Harvard MBA, which they published under the pen names Jim Fisk and Robert Barron, respectively. [1] [16] The idea for the book first emerged when Freund and Porter approached the publisher Simon & Schuster to distribute Bedtime for Brezhnev, but the head of trade paperbacks instead suggested the pair write a satirical book about MBA's. [13] [17] At the time of the book's release, both men were preparing to start jobs with investment banks. [1] [11] The Official MBA Handbook or How to Succeed in Business Without a Harvard MBA spent 16 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. [6] [7]
Freund began his business career as an investment banker in 1982 with Morgan Stanley. [6] In 1995, he co-founded the robotics startup Intuitive Surgical. [8] [18] Freund negotiated a licensing agreement with SRI for surgical technology that formed the nucleus of Intuitive Surgical's line of products. [2] Freund founded the venture capital firm Skyline Ventures in 1997 [2] [6] to invest in early-stage biotech. [19] Skyline was the lead investor in SI-Bone, a manufacturer of sacroiliac fusion implants that became commercially available in 2009. Following the investment, Freund joined the board of directors. [20] In 2016, [21] Freund co-founded the antibiotics manufacturer Arixa Pharmaceuticals and served as the company's CEO. [9] During Freund's tenure, the company developed ARX-1796, [22] an oral version of a β-lactamase inhibitor called avibactam that was previously only able to be administered intravenously. [23] Freund ran Arixa Pharmaceuticals as a virtual company, crediting low-overhead costs in the development of ARX-1796. [22] Arixa Pharmaceuticals was acquired by Pfizer in 2020. [9]
In 1979, Freund married Linda Gray Sexton, a writer and the daughter of the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Anne Sexton. [6] They divorced in 1998. [6] Freund is married to Linda S. Grais, [24] a physician and biotech entrepreneur. [25]