Search

Home > Cold Call by Harvard Business School > How Martine Rothblatt Started a Company to Save Her Daughter
Podcast: Cold Call by Harvard Business School
Episode:

How Martine Rothblatt Started a Company to Save Her Daughter
Category: Business
Duration: 00:20:38
Publish Date: 2023-04-26 13:20:32
Description:

When serial entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt (founder of Sirius XM) received her seven-year-old daughter’s diagnosis of Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PAH), she created United Therapeutics and developed a drug to save her life. When her daughter later needed a lung transplant, Rothblatt decided to take what she saw as the logical next step: manufacturing organs for transplantation.

Rothblatt’s entrepreneurial career exemplifies a larger debate around the role of the firm in creating solutions for society’s problems. If companies are uniquely good at innovating, what voice should society have in governing the new technologies that firms create?

Harvard Business School professor Debora Spar debates these questions in the case “Martine Rothblatt and United Therapeutics: A Series of Implausible Dreams.” As part of a new first-year MBA course at Harvard Business School, this case examines the central question: what is the social purpose of the firm?
Total Play: 0