Amgen exemplified the dreams and aspirations of biotechnology’s first generation. By early 2008, the global market capitalization of the entire biotechnology industry was around $500 billion. Of this, Amgen represented 10 percent. Back in 1982, however, when Gordon Binder, who was then 46, got a call about joining the California startup, he says he nearly blurted out, “What’s biotechnology?” He would learn quickly. By the time he retired in 2000, Amgen had become the world’s largest and most successful biotech company. Its “financials ascended so sharply,” Binder says, “that you could strain your neck trying to follow the trajectory on a line graph.”

The firm was founded in 1980 by six venture capitalists who put up $81,000 each. Their strategy was, by today’s standards, incredibly broad: to exploit the new science of genetic engineering for human health. They had the good fortune to recruit as CEO George Rathmann, a scientist who headed Abbott Laboratories’ diagnostics division. Shortly after the brilliant, charismatic Rathmann signed on, in October 1980, a four-year-old San Francisco firm called Genentech became the first biotech company to float an initial public offering (IPO). The result astonished Wall Street, tripling in value during the first day of trading, generating $35 million. Genentech’s success enabled Rathmann to raise millions, even though, Binder notes, Amgen then consisted of just three people and “couldn’t point to any products or patents, only a plan.”

Binder’s account of this history, less a narrative than a series of snapshots and vignettes, reveals the inside story of Amgen’s rise, as hectic as it was spectacular. One of the book’s central lessons is that there’s never enough money. By 1982, when Binder moved to Thousand Oaks as chief financial officer, Amgen had burned through much of its $19-million war chest and was running out of cash. Fortunately, biotech pioneers Cetus and Biogen recently had managed highly successful public stock offerings. So, unable to raise another round of funding from Amgen’s original investors, Binder persuaded his board to pursue an IPO. Since the company was many years away (Rathmann had no idea exactly how many) from actually producing and selling a product, there were no standard metrics for valuing the business. “Some early analysts valued companies at $1 million per PhD,” Lehman banker Fred Frank remembers, calling that method “rather idiotic.” As it happened, Amgen timed the IPO market perfectly, raising $42.3 million before the “window came down like a guillotine,” cutting off companies from public equity financing.