Lessons learned as a New-Here CEO

My academic training was not in drug discovery and trying to launch PostEra in a domain I was not trained in has taught me a bunch of lessons that I hope can help other Founders out there. Here are some reflections on how to be a New-Here CEO.

• Lesson 1: Chesterton's Fence
• Lesson 2: No-one's qualified
• Lesson 3: The price of expertise
• Lesson 4: Fail because you were wrong
• Lesson 5: Inches and Miles

Lesson 1: Chesterton's Fence

It's important to understand an industry before you try to swoop in and revolutionize it. Upon moving from Finance into Biotech most things seemed new, novel and exciting but some things just seemed downright bizarre or redundant. It was particularly important in the early days to understand why such "fences" were there at all before trying to tear them down: "What's the point of running all these expensive in-vivo experiments when we're not trying to cure rats?".

It's also important to realize your company is probably not the first, nor the last, to try and innovate, and so it was very instructive to speak to other Founders who had tried similar ideas but didn't succeed. I'm very grateful for those early conversations with Y Combinator CEOs whose computational biotech startups didn't work out.

After a while you begin to see that many of the bizarre and redundant fences are there for good reason and you'll save your startup a lot of pain by respecting such industry convention. But don't blindly conform.

The new lens you have on an industry is valuable and though you may find yourself asking 9 dumb questions and getting a roll-of-the-eyes from the odd industry veteran, that 1 question for which the only answer is "That's how we've always done it" is where you should fight to differentiate your company.

Understanding when to tear down a fence and when to leave it standing is half the battle in deciding where your startup is going to innovate. Learn from industry norms and veterans, but their word is not Gospel, and sometimes an informed but stubborn optimism is the only way that industry entrenchment will be overcome.

Lesson 2: No-one's qualified

When entering a new field you're likely to feel a bit of an outsider for a while. All the jargon is new, you're still figuring out who to follow on Twitter, you don't have any valuable industry connections, and you worry every client views your sales pitch as a scam. All of this can lead to a sense of "I'm not qualified". To an extent this is true, but it's not the whole story.

Underneath that feeling is an assumption that if only you had the domain expertise that your startup would be a guaranteed success.

However, what I've found in launching PostEra, is that great Science is necessary but not sufficient to build a great Company. Without a solid business strategy your Science is unlikely to generate much commercial return, without good financial management your Science will quickly deplete the engine of dollars needed to power it along, and without great Culture your Science is hindered by your Scientists not pulling in the same direction.

The point is that though other CEOs/Founders in your space may be more scientifically qualified for the job it's very unlikely that they are also world leaders in business strategy, financial management, building culture and the myriad of other things needed to convert great Science into a great Company. As such, no-one is totally qualified for the job and we're all learning, failing, and improving as we go.

Don't let domain expertise, something you should still be working hard on, be the only lens by which you view your relative competence. Everyone has something to learn here.

Lesson 3: The price of expertise

As a young CEO and one still new to the industry a healthy dose of humility was and is needed to recognize that I will not have all the answers. As such you then rightly begin to look outside the company to bring in expertise that you don't have, whether that be scientific, operational or managerial. This is a perfectly good thing but I want to warn against one risk that is often overlooked in the scramble to bring on the experts.

It's worth being aware that if someone is really a luminary or industry leader, that their expertise also comes with their way of doing things. When you bring an expert into the company, particularly in a full time capacity, you are not just hiring their brain and battle scars but their lens on the industry and preference for how organisations operate.

Any successful, decorated veteran will have their way of doing things and may often expect you, who haven't achieved what they have, to respect and adopt such preferences. Here is where you need to ask yourself an important question: Expertise and reputation aside, does this person fit the mold and culture of what we're trying to build here?

If they show little interest in your vision and culture and simply want startup autonomy then you may soon find yourselves at odds as you seek to protect your foundations while the expert feels boxed-in asking "but didn't you hire me to do what I do?". Consider if an advisory or consultancy position may be a better fit. Also, never hire someone just to be a notable face on a pitch deck. If investors are impressed by that, then they are not the thoughtful investors you want to be partnering with.

My hope for PostEra is that we ultimately go on to produce some of the luminaries and industry leaders of the future by thoughtfully challenging existing ways of doing things. We absolutely need the experts of today to guide us in getting there, however, as with anyone we bring into the company, they too must be engaged with the basic vision and culture that we as the Founders established.

Lesson 4: Fail because you were wrong

My second lesson in this series tried to communicate how nobody will be an expert at every aspect of building a great startup and how that should give New-Here founders some hope. The upshot of this is that every CEO will and should be seeking advice in areas they are not experts, and though this is good, I want to warn against one risk that can arise if you find yourself frequently asking for advice.

It's easy as a Founder to be intimidated by the magnitude of the decisions you constantly have to make: Hire this person or not? Spend this money or conserve cash? Pivot the business model or stick with what we're doing? Sometimes the difficult part is not the fear of making the wrong decision but, with everyone looking to you, you find your mind empty with no conviction one way or the other. The natural response is to go find someone who has conviction.

However, before you get advice ask yourself why you're doing it. Some Founders ask for advice not because they want additional input into their decision-making, but because deep-down they actually don't trust their own judgement and want to outsource decision-making. I don't think it's ever acceptable as a CEO to say "We made this key decision because X advised us to". Whoever X is and whatever their pedigree, you personally have to be convinced that it is the right call.

Otherwise you'll find yourself being blown back and forth by whatever the latest advisor told you, and you're no longer building your company but a company built upon the ideas of others.

This is bad, not just because you as the Founder know your company better than anyone else, but because a startup is an experiment and if it's going to succeed or fail it should be because of the decisions you made and believed in. Is it sad if your startup doesn't work out? Yes, absolutely. But I'd argue it's more sad if it fails without you ever knowing if your ideas and instincts were the right ones. So yes seek out the best advice but don't outsource decision-making; that must stay with you.

Lesson 5: Inches and Miles

Entering a new domain where you are going to be a leader means learning a lot of new things very quickly. At times it can feel like trying to drink from a fire hose and, because you're not being taught in a structured way like in a university setting, you've often got no idea if you're focused on the right thing.

At PostEra this learning was not just confined to the complex science of how to discover a drug but, how to raise money from investors, how to run an interview process, how to strike deals with pharmaceutical companies, and even how to establish state tax accounts in an IRS-compliant way.

In such a vast and open-ended space of learning you cannot learn every detail of every topic and so you face a natural question: Inch-deep and mile wide or inch-wide and mile-deep? My solution to this problem is one I don't always feel happy about but which I still believe is the right one.

Instinctually I always prefer to head down the deepest technical rabbit-hole of the latest ML for Drug Discovery at the expense of other areas mentioned. The reason I often resist this instinct is twofold: Firstly, as CEO I will not be the one writing our machine learning code in the long term, if I am then our hiring process isn't good enough, and secondly, an organization benefits from orthogonal branches of knowledge.

If all I bring to the table as CEO is more of what our team of scientists and engineers already have, then it leaves us vastly uninformed as an organization about the many other non-scientific aspects of how to build a great company.

As such my rule of thumb is: Go inch-wide and mile-deep on topics that will be in your long term job description, things you're unlikely to delegate, and are also orthogonal to the knowledge base of your organization.

With that said, I do my best to remain inch-deep on as many other topics as I can. This is important because as a leader you often have the greatest vantage point of your organisation and knowing 50% about two topics usually produces better strategic decisions than knowing 100% about one topic.

So if you're a founder/leader I'd encourage you to frequently take a step back and ask yourself if the knowledge you're accruing is in your own best interest or in the best interest of your organisation.

If you found any of this helpful, feel free to check out a similar set of lessons I wrote up on being a First-Time CEO. As with that post I will again sign-off here by saying that taking the plunge and starting something will teach you more than all the blog posts in the world. As always, if I can be of any help to new CEOs/Founders, feel free to reach out.