Business Of Biotech
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Business Of Biotech
How To Hire And Build A Winning Executive Team With Occam Global's Bill Holodnak
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On this week's episode, Bill Holodnak, Cofounder and CEO of Occam Global, a life sciences executive recruitment firm (and occasional investor), shares insights from his decades of experience pairing executives with drug development companies, and talks about the psychology of successful biotech leadership. From building an advisory board to the sequencing of executive hires, such as CSOs, CMOs, CBOs, and CFOs, as a company grows, Holodnak offers specific tips to help founders and investors create leadership teams capable of winning the "slow motion roulette" business of biotech.
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Welcome back to the Business of Biotech. I'm your host, Ben Comer, chief Editor at Life Science Leader, and today I'm speaking with Bill Holodnack, founder and CEO of New York City-based Occam Global, a life science executive and board member recruitment firm. Bill founded Occam Global with his son, john, in 2012, after spending more than 25 years leading a multinational search firm owned by Fidelity Investments. Bill is a renaissance man whose interests extend from pharma and biotech to music, film, history, technology and beyond, and he's also an engaging writer, a claim that I'm making based on the strength of his founder's note on the Occam Global website, which quotes the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev. He's also a member of the advisory board at Life Science Cares, New York. I'm pleased to connect with Bill to talk about what makes a person capable of shepherding experimental drug candidates through clinical development, approval and into commercial use, what secrets he whispers into the ears of CEOs to help them succeed, and how he thinks about matching company leaders with board members, investors and additions to the executive team. Thanks so much for joining me today, Bill.
Bill Holodnak:Happy to be here, Ben.
Ben Comer:My younger sister worked for a couple of years in executive recruiting for large healthcare organizations, hospital systems and the like. It ultimately was not for her. She found it extremely difficult and stressful. So, bill, I'm curious how did you come to executive search initially and what interested you about executive placement and leadership and team dynamics?
Bill Holodnak:tell you a tale of intentional action, but it was largely improvised. Recruiting is a profession unto itself, but, unlike disciplines such as law or medicine, there's no established what the Latins used to call a cursus honorum, a progression into it. It's usually a profession by default and you find yourself there and it works. My own story is I tried a number of different things. I was an academic and a teacher for a period of time. I ran a series of small businesses for a period of time I was a public accountant. I have a CPA, much to my surprise, and that didn't please me, and so I went to a recruiting agency and they kept offering me jobs like internal auditor, controller, financial analyst, misery that I was trying to escape from, not compound, and my willfulness, I guess, or my self-awareness about what was not for me, led the head of the firm to say well, why don't you try this? And I tried it and all of a sudden it was something that I got good at. I got good at quickly, which I took as a measure of compatibility.
Bill Holodnak:Recruiting is a business that is part psychology, it's part business analytics, it's part witch doctor. There's a bunch of different business skills that go into it. If it's done right and it's about creating the right match. It's about being determined, it's about listening, and you have to enjoy people. You don't have to always love them, because that's not possible I don't think but it's really wonderfully and it's wonderfully enriching from an educational standpoint. I just talked to one of my staff members today, a person who was doing a CEO search in clinical research organizations that are backed by private equity and it's a little bit different from what we normally do, and she was just rattling on how educational it was, how getting to know this different species of humanity, this different industry, this different modality of investing was, and so, whether it's within the strict bounds of therapeutics or it's in adjacencies, it's a wonderfully educational enterprise if you have the capacity to listen, and if you don't have the capacity to listen, you probably shouldn't be in LaCroix.
Ben Comer:So you worked at the Fidelity-backed research firm, global research firm for 25 years. What was the impetus for founding and ultimately leading Occam Global?
Bill Holodnak:Well, I worked both at Fidelity and for this Fidelity-sponsored organization for 25 years. I built the organization and accomplished a lot internally at Fidelity and it felt like it was time to do something else. Both of our children were grown and lived in New York and we thought we would try something different in Boston. So it was a bit of an experiment and I was retired for all of two weeks when I was given by my wife the thought that it might be better if I went back to work. Right, so, anyhow, I began by doing some consulting for clients that I had had before, including the Gates Foundation, and then people started offering me work, and my son was just getting out of business school and was in finance, didn't particularly like any of the job offers that he was getting, and so we agreed to work together.
Bill Holodnak:So it was escaping my wife's wrath, it was finding something productive to do with my time. It was an opportunity to work with my son, and we kind of started it in a very improvisatory mode and it's worked. He and I work together. I'm still pleasantly engaged by the profession and we're growing a business. And what you didn't ask me, which I expect you will is you know why the life sciences? Have I gotten ahead of you?
Ben Comer:No, no, there's no cues in this conversation. Let's do it. What excited you? Or yeah, why did you get into life sciences? In particular? Because I believe at Fidelity you were across a lot of different sectors, right.
Bill Holodnak:That's absolutely true and thank you for working without rules here, I do best in that mode. Working without rules here, I do best in that mode. So I was at I'm self-taught as a recruiter. I never worked for a large firm and I began recruiting in technology and venture capital. That was pre-fidelity. And then, once I worked for Fidelity, my job with Fidelity was a little more complicated. I worked a lot directly for the chairman, recruiting senior people in the asset management space. But he knew that I was very interested in entrepreneurship and innovative businesses and so he, on behalf of Fidelity, funded the search firm that I built and ran and grew to 100 people and set up offices.
Bill Holodnak:How I got to life sciences? At the time I was in Boston and the life sciences revolution was just beginning to happen. There were these companies like Biogen and Genzyme and Genetics Institute that were changing the world and my boss at the time said to me have you heard of this thing called biotech? And I was busy recruiting disk drive people and enterprise software people and material science executives. And I said, no, but I'll give it a try.
Bill Holodnak:And I went out and I kind of just forced the issue and I met people. I met biologists, I met chemists, I met life sciences investors and I kind of fell in love with the industry. I fell in love with it because of the very high level of intellect and education among the people who are doing this, among the people who are doing this. And not only were they interesting and supple intellectually, but they had a purpose, and not that developing the latest enterprise software wasn't purposeful, but it didn't have quite the humanistic impact. So I don't want to pretend any false nobility here, but what it added to is a population of executives that were both brilliant, they were innovative and they had the greater good in mean it was. I always make the joke that it was much like Benjamin in the first reel of the Graduate, where somebody at the cocktail party whispers plastics in his ear.
Ben Comer:One word plastics.
Bill Holodnak:One word, plastics and anyhow, the people I met were interesting and it just kind of crescendoed from there. It was one of those odd confluences of opportunity and personal inclination.
Ben Comer:Well, I can relate to that, Bill. It's what keeps my job engaging and exciting. For me is being able to speak with people in the industry who are a lot smarter than I am and who are doing, you know, really incredible things as it relates to human health. You know you mentioned the psychology aspect of recruitment and search and I wonder, you know, if there's something unique about the psychology of you know, someone who wants to become the CEO or the leader of a biotech company? Is there, given your experience, are there archetypes, so to speak, in terms of the people who will ultimately or are likely to be successful? Now, you can't control the science. The best executive in the world can have a failed experiment, a failed clinical trial, due in no part to them, but what could you say about the kinds of people that you've seen succeed and if there are any kinds of qualities they share?
Bill Holodnak:That's a terrific question. So because the science is so dense and so complicated, it's helpful if a person has a scientific background. But there are theme and variations here and some of the most successful CEOs are people who are liberal arts trained but have true intellectual curiosity which you can't avoid. You either have to know the science by virtue of your education and early established interest, or you have to come to terms with understanding the science through just intellectual appetite. Understanding the science through just intellectual appetite and intellectual curiosity is one of the most. Intellectual curiosity and self-awareness are two of the most important things I look for in terms of potential leaders. But with biotech, because of the density of the science, you have to either get to it through education and developed experience or you have to get to it by virtue of just sheer inquisitiveness and engagement of the other. You know.
Ben Comer:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, let's talk about the self-awareness side of that. You know, what could you say about I don't know how and this I think gets into how a leader presents herself or himself internally and externally, if we're talking about potential investors or regulators, internally, with other team members, with with board members. Is there, you know? Is there coaching that you can do on that? Is it something that that people are born with a certain amount of self-awareness? What would you say on that? Is it something that people are born with a certain amount of self-awareness? What would you say to that?
Bill Holodnak:In answering that question, I'm fond of invoking Shakespeare, who said, in a slightly different context there are those people who are great, there are those people who make themselves great and there are those who have greatness thrust upon them, you know. So it's an interesting experiment in watching people who either come to it naturally or develop it in process. A person I like to call attention to is one of the most extraordinary biotech executives that I have met. It's a guy by the name of Peter Hecht. I first met Peter when he was fresh out of the Whitehead Institute at MIT. He was, I believe, a cell biologist and he had an idea for drug discovery and so, without any business training, he decided to start a business on the basis of his science and he did the family and friends thing by getting money. Then he was just adapting to the capital raising with venture capitalists and he got some excellent venture investors.
Bill Holodnak:I believe Venrock was one of his early investors and Paul Klingenstein from Accel was one of his investors, and he was just about to build out the organization. That's when I met him. So he's this remarkable guy who's a brilliant scientist and then who had this emerging will to be a commercial person or an executive and he was an autodidact. He learned on the job, he adapted in amazing ways. So I got to him and helped him build out his organization. But he had already convinced very seasoned venture capitalists to put money with him and he just progressed as the company moved along all the way to commercialization. And he did that through kind of native intelligence, adaptability, inquisitiveness. So he raised money from friends and family that's an easier thing, I think, than raising it from venture capitalists. Then he raised interim financing what we used to call what was it called mezzanine financing and then he got public and he addressed public investors. So he went all along the life cycle of financing and then he built the organization out. He actually focused the company on a particular product, an irritable bowel disease and he got that product approved and into the market.
Bill Holodnak:He's one of the few examples of somebody that I know that has bridged the gap or moved from stage to stage, because you know, as the Brits say, there are horses for courses. You know, some CEOs are meant to be catalytic agents and bring things together and get something started. And bring these things together and get something started. Others are meant to define a product development strategy and begin to build clinical development. Then there are those people who drive clinical development and get a product ready for the market. And then there are those people who are commercial and if they don't adapt to the different challenges of each stage in the life cycle, if they don't hire the right people, they oftentimes get bogged down, and it's not uncommon in biotech to change out CEOs every two or three years because they either don't succeed, the science betrays them, or they don't adapt to the changes that come from the evolution of a biotech business.
Ben Comer:Right. And when you met Peter, was he a client and what did you help him do?
Bill Holodnak:He became a client. I was introduced to him by one of the investors and I helped him originally. I helped him with so many things. I helped him with board members. I helped him recruit his first chief financial officer, a guy out of Genzyme. I helped him recruit his chief commercial officer, the person who ultimately and we recruited that chief commercial officer two years ahead of the introduction of the product because Peter was so insightful that he wanted to build commercial thinking into the company because it was mostly R&D types and financial types, people who didn't understand the implications of what you had to do to get reimbursement, market access, commercial distribution.
Ben Comer:You know it's interesting you say that because we've published a number of contributed articles in Life Science Leader just really hammering on this insight of thinking about commercial earlier on, earlier on, when you're in the development phases, let commercial questions guide trial design, and I can just tell by the article still coming in that it's not something that companies always do, but that's interesting. I did also just want to get a sense of Occam Global's client base. So are you in a position to pair CEOs with a network of venture capitalists that are either clients or a part of your network? I mean, can you kind of work both sides? I mean, do you have VC clients who are looking to? You know, perhaps, staff? You know a new startup? Do you also work with independent biotech? You know leaders who are attempting to build out their team? Give me a sense of who your client base is and the work you do at Occam.
Bill Holodnak:Well, the root transaction is we get hired by an investor or a founder an investor, founder or board member or board members to recruit something, whether that's the first CEO, whether it's a replacement CEO, whether it's a head of business development, whether it's a chief scientific officer it can be any of those possibilities and ones that I didn't mention. Oftentimes we develop a relationship either with the investors or the board or with the entrepreneur themselves, or we give them advice on where to go for money, how to pitch themselves. Sometimes they listen and sometimes they don't, of course, but we get involved in a more elaborate relationship and for us and this is important for you to understand, ben and people do say this and it is a bit of a cliche, but I'll utter it anyhow we're in the transaction business because we have to be, but we're really in the relationship business. So we try to get more involved over time, more deeply, with companies and we wind up giving them behavioral and organizational advice and fundraising advice. For example, we're working with a Scottish company now involved in automating chemistry.
Bill Holodnak:The major application is in the life sciences. This is the first time CEO guy who's brilliant nature publication academic out of the University of Glasgow. His name is Lee Corona and Lee never ran. You know he was inexperienced in business and he came to us to help him recruit something that would make, or someone would help him make, a more complete effort. Make the effort more complete to grow the business.
Ben Comer:So he's kind of the scientific lead and he was looking for something of a business lead.
Bill Holodnak:He was looking for a business lead. We helped him recruit a chief business officer. We helped him recruit a chief operating officer. We helped him recruit a chief operating officer. We helped him recruit a chief technology officer. We helped him add two senior board members for him. At this point, we led him to some sources of financing, so we became more complete advisors and we invested in the company as well. That's something you should understand about us. We're not the only search firm that does this, but I think we're uncommon in our commitment to either work for equity or actually write checks.
Ben Comer:How do you make that decision? I mean, you're working with a number of different companies, a number of different executives. Is there a kind of a signal that goes off for you when you say you know what this is, an organization and an individual that I want to actually invest in myself?
Bill Holodnak:I wish I could point to an algorithm or a decision rule that led us to say yes or no. It's oftentimes intuition about the intellectual openness and integrity of the person. Of course, it's his vision. I mean, lee Cronin, you know, is very, you know, he's honest and direct, sometimes to a fault, but he's very open. He's got a big brain, he's got huge ambition. He could change the way chemistry is done through the use of robots and AI and he actually has revenue and he's hired really intelligently.
Bill Holodnak:For a guy who didn't know anything about hiring commercial people, I'll give you an example. His chief technology officer is a guy by the name of Mike Bell, and Mike was one of the primary product engineering executives at Apple. He was responsible for the iPhone and the iPad getting into production and getting made. So for Lee to be able to, we introduced him, but for Lee to be able to close him around, this vision was extraordinary. The guy could have done anything he wanted.
Bill Holodnak:So what am I trying to tell you, ben? It's an intuition based on self-awareness, openness, respect for us, because we can't do the you know people can look at us as just you know providers of resumes. It's the wrong way to look at us, you might want to look at somebody else like that. And if we get a sense of a trusted relationship and an openness to dialogue where we can help them, learn from them, continue to help them at an even higher level, that's really important to us. So it's a belief in the general business proposition, of course, but it's really about an intuition about their quality as evolving executives.
Ben Comer:Well, let's stick with this example of Lee just for a second, because I'm curious about how you think about something like personality compatibility. And now you've mentioned you know you've surfaced candidates, for Lee ultimately made the hiring decision, but you brought these candidates to him it sounds like a number of people that he's uh ended up hiring. What you know? What do you think about? You know, when you're selecting candidates to put in front of lee, and to what extent are you, you know, doing those initial interviews with potential candidates and thinking about how they might respond or not to Lee's personality?
Bill Holodnak:He has a big personality and he has a forceful personality and you know, sometimes he's a fire-ready aim, if you know what I mean. But we explain the dynamics of his personality. We do that as a way to test the compatibility that we are sensing. We also do it to prepare them for an intelligent interaction with him. And we prepare Lee in the same way. Right, we say here's the opportunity to recruit him, here's the questions he has you should be thinking of. Not only do you want his or her skillset, but are you going to be able to work with them, Are you going to be able to continue to evolve with them? And and Lee is, you know again, he writes page of papers for nature and you know there is a certain amount of intellectual confidence there that can sometimes get in the way of human interactions, if you know what I mean. But he's very self-aware about it.
Ben Comer:Yeah, yeah. Well, that's really interesting. Speaking of kind of big personalities and I'm sure you have had clients who do you know, maybe off the bat, view you as someone providing resumes, it strikes me that it could be difficult to build trust with individuals like that, gain their trust, have them be, you know, looking to you to select you know a short list of candidates that they can then go through. How do you do that, bill? How do you build that level of trust with someone that they're essentially in some ways putting their business in your hands, because ultimately, you know the business is going to succeed or fail on the strength of the individuals that work there.
Bill Holodnak:Totally true. And you know, some people just look at it and say, well, I'll just see who they got and I'll hire and I'll make the decision. I don't really need input from them. That's one way of dealing with us and it's one way of making a decision about a recruiter. Other times they want to work with us and respect our expertise and then sometimes it's in the middle, right, there's alienation and distance. There's immediate intimacy, and then there's something in the middle, the way we build trust, which is really the most important thing. I think the most important question that you asked just now is when we interview somebody, we try to understand them and we report on the client on the basis of that understanding. And if I'm giving you too much detail, let me know.
Ben Comer:No, this is great, go ahead.
Bill Holodnak:When we write somebody up and we write everybody up Parenthetically I believe in the importance of language and I believe in the importance of writing, because when you write and you convince yourself that you've written clearly, then that means you're thinking clearly. So it forces a completeness of thought and it enforces it. Really, proper use of language enforces integrity as well. Couldn't agree more. So when we write somebody out, we we take them through their background. We understand where they came from socioeconomically. We understand why they chose from socioeconomically, we understand why they chose a profession or an education and then a profession. And then, most importantly perhaps, we try to understand how they've managed their professional growth, why they've gone to work for certain employers, why they've left certain employers, what job was most fulfilling to them.
Bill Holodnak:We'd like to see people who change jobs based on learning rather than just money or title. And so we look, we look, we, we, we understand the motivational arc of their, of their history, and we report on that. And then we also tell them these are people, this is a person we want you to see, and these are the reasons why these are the skills they bring to the bear, that you want, and these are their personal leadership qualities that are going to make them successful in this context. But here are some concerns. So how do we build trust? Through completeness of reportage and through intellectual honesty and evaluation. We would never write somebody up that we didn't want them to see, but we will not tell them they're perfect because, unfortunately, perfection is elusive when it comes to human beings.
Ben Comer:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I wanted to pick up on you know you talked about, you know Lee's foresight to hire a you know a commercial executive early on, before they were, maybe even in late stage trials. Which leads me to the question of how do you know when to add to the executive team? And maybe we can use just a generic example, and I have the audience of business of biotech in mind here. Have my, you know the audience of business of biotech in mind here. But the scientist-led startup biotech you know what is and let's say it's you know the very earliest stages. There's a you know a discovery that maybe this scientist made herself or himself in the lab, you know, is looking at tech transfer, is looking at spinning that out into a company. What's most important early on from a staff or executive team perspective? And are there specific cues, I guess from the very beginning and then moving forward into preclinical research and ultimately clinical trials, where you really need to start hiring people?
Bill Holodnak:Okay, you've asked a number of questions in there.
Ben Comer:I have, I apologize, no, no, no.
Bill Holodnak:It's an all-star love and interviewing. So usually these companies are started by brilliant scientists and all due respect to my scientific friends. There is a certain tendency to think that management is down on the pecking order of the great chain of being. You know the gray chain of being, you know scientific intellect is supreme. Managerial competence is something anybody could do if you had a little bit of time.
Ben Comer:Right, the inorganic matter, the rocks.
Bill Holodnak:Yes, exactly, exactly so what we try to do. You know, and look, there are some of these scientific founders that have incredible commercial moxie. They understand and you know, they're okay, maybe functioning a little longer as CEOs. But two of the key hires in these cases are chief scientific officer and chief business officer. The chief scientific officer should be put in place because if a scientist truly wants to become a CEO, then they have to distance themselves from the science, distance themselves from what they do so well and they're so splendidly competent in, because the CEO role is a role of. It involves salesmanship, it involves strategy, it involves organizational development and leadership. It requires a person who will integrate effort. If that person tries to be CEO and CSO, oftentimes their CEO content is diluted. So we like to urge them to think of getting a CSO relatively quickly An industrial strength scientist who's used to, you know, kind of building a path toward most often the case drug discovery and development.
Bill Holodnak:Then on the business side, you need somebody who's got contacts in pharma, knows how pharma thinks, can do deals and can. Equally importantly, oftentimes these rich scientific platforms have multiple possibilities. These rich scientific platforms have multiple possibilities and we've always found that the glory of platform companies is that they could do everything. The shame is they often wind up doing nothing because they dissipate energy across too many projects. So somebody like a chief business officer could help prioritize opportunities and then leverage those opportunities for non-dilutive financing with pharma. So externalizing those two functions the management of the science and commercial negotiation, and staying in control as the organizing intelligence of CEO that's a really a critical thing to get done. Not easy. We can make it a little easier, but it's challenging and it requires commitment.
Ben Comer:I'm envisioning the headstrong founder scientists who balks a little bit about the need to hire a CSO. Do you have a kind of data package that you can share with someone like that, to say X, y and Z company succeeded, they hired a CSO, they separated the roles. How do you deal with that?
Bill Holodnak:Well, it's a wonderful question and it's something that's on our minds for a variety of reasons. We have data packages for compensation and I have developed various position papers in the past talking about when to hire somebody and how to hire them and how to organize the evolution of the executive team. But we come equipped with experience and anecdotal argument more than quantified, and we're actually working on our data now to build tools like the ones you suggested, because scientists are fact-based and trust and verify.
Bill Holodnak:We would be better off if we had a database to verify our choices. I'm arguing from humanistic wisdom here, I suppose.
Ben Comer:Right, okay, yeah, that makes sense. I wanted to perhaps ask next about the potential to hire prematurely. As a company is growing and maybe we'll go back to this founder scientist, he or she has now hired a CSO, they've hired a chief business officer, maybe they have a chief operating officer. What could you say about the sequencing of the executive team, and is it possible to hire, say you know, a commercial person too soon or a chief financial officer too soon?
Bill Holodnak:That's a good those are. Those are a good series of variations and questions and a theme and variations that you've you've called attention to. Yeah, I think that you can hire prematurely. You can also be behind the curve. I mean, you know, building in pairing a scientific founder with a CBO is really important. Building awareness on how they have to distance themselves from the science is also really important. On how they have to distance themselves from the science is also really important.
Bill Holodnak:Sometimes we're in resource-constrained environments and we have to talk about that as an evolution rather than a specific program. But getting the founding scientist away from I can do it all myself is really important and they've got to be thinking of that. So when do you add a commercial person? I go back to my example of Peter Hecht Peter wanting to hire, between 18 and 24 months ahead of product introduction, a commercial person. I think that's very smart because you have to get that thinking.
Bill Holodnak:In Hiring a chief medical officer, which is a very expensive and a very risky hire, you don't want to delay too long on that because you want to build clinical wisdom. Now there are some people who are not like PhDs but MD-PhDs that start companies. But making sure you have disciplined and highly professional clinical development. Wisdom is really really important to making the right selection and building an argument around the asset value of the compounds you're discovering and developing. So they're expensive, they're risky hires, some of them are risk adverse, many of them are and they can't be recruited too early. But I would err on the side of recruiting a little too early rather than a little too late, with both the CMO and the CMO.
Ben Comer:And the chief financial officer. Well, chief financial officer is different. Okay. I'm sorry, the CBO yeah.
Bill Holodnak:The CBO should be hired right away, and sometimes you can get finance embedded in the talent there. A CFO, really, you only want to hire that person when you're looking toward a public offering.
Ben Comer:Okay.
Bill Holodnak:Because that's really the value. The managerial economics among biotech companies are relatively simple. Really the value. The managerial economics among biotech companies are relatively simple. You know there's very little in the way of receivables or inventory that have to be managed. You have to have orderly bookkeeping and all of that. But you don't need the high-powered CFO too soon. That's really when you're within a year, maybe 18 months, of an IPO or you're trying to position yourself for sale on an M&A, but it usually when your business plan is more defined, your product strategy is more defined and you have a real need to package the value of those assets in a way that's going to make the shareholders happy.
Ben Comer:Do you ever run into situations, bill, where, let's say, a client of yours is an investor maybe it's a VC group, maybe it's an individual investor who has a kind of preset idea about what core team is successful and kind of when that core team needs to be assembled, team needs to be assembled, and do you, you know, do you have ever have to push back on that? Or do you kind of you know, if it's your client, you kind of go along with, you know what, you know what their scheme is for setting up a company and getting it going? And I asked that because you know my next question is going to be has that changed at all? Is there a change in thinking in terms of how investors are looking at leadership and at companies and what they need? But let's start at the first question before I add on four others here. Bill, how do you manage that if you have a client who is an investor who says, well, we need this position and this position and this position right now?
Bill Holodnak:Well, you know, investors vary in their quality. Some have more instinctual wisdom about how businesses are run. Some have come from an operating background. Others are more purely financial investors and are looking for their return. No matter what their origin are, what their sympathies are, we try to represent the loyal opposition.
Bill Holodnak:I guess we're trying to help you. We don't know all of the facts. We respect you, but have you thought of it this way? Here's our experience in terms of kinds of CEOs to recruit. Here's our experience on timing of CMOs and structure of the CMO package. Here's, you know. Here's an idea about when you should add board members, because board members we haven't talked about this it's a parallel track in terms of the organizational evolution and sometimes adding a really a very experienced board member at an earlier stage can give you business development contacts and commercial wisdom that complement a founder. First-time CEO founder oftentimes benefits from a chairman, sometimes an executive chair, and if you have that in place and you have the right kind of relationship between the chair and the founder, you can sometimes delay the executive hires because you're getting education, wisdom and substance at the board level. So it's a there's a bit of an interplay between board population and executive population.
Ben Comer:Yeah, almost a mentorship role with those early board members. And you're right, we haven't talked. We haven't spoken about the board yet. But what's your approach to board members? Let's say you're working with someone like Lee or Peter and they want to establish a board. Maybe you encourage them to establish a board. How do you decide who to look for? What's your kind of talent pool for staffing a board?
Bill Holodnak:Well, I mean, let's just take maybe a number of specific examples. Oftentimes, when there's a scientific founder or even a first-time CEO, it's really good to get a board chair in place who helps manage the governance process and serves as a mentor. Now, sometimes there's fetishism involved here, that the investors want a luminous board member who, by virtue of title and corporate affiliation, adds luster and optical value. That's all good, but optics should be not captured at the expense of substance, right? So you need somebody, and by that I mean, if you get somebody who's luminary and they join the board, you want to make damn sure that they're going to give it time and it's not just going to be an honorific or it's not just going to be the 18th thing on their agenda all the time.
Bill Holodnak:The second thing you have to look for is you not every senior executive. Many of them do, but not all of them don't have the mentorship gene. You've got to find somebody who wants to spend time with a person and who wants to teach, who wants to help them develop, not tell them what to do. That can create more problems. But if you get somebody who knows what they're doing and can use the Socratic method to educate the CEO that's a great combination. The CEO that's a great combination.
Ben Comer:What about board size? Is there? I mean, is it a case by case? Is there an appropriate in your mind size for a board of directors for, say, a startup, you know, scientific, founder style company?
Bill Holodnak:I mean, there's no magic number. You know, seven looks like the golden mean to me, but can it go as high as 10 and not be wacky? Yes, can it go as low as five or four and still be functional? Yes, you know. So it's situational and judgmental. But back to an earlier question you asked and I didn't answer.
Bill Holodnak:When we come in on these issues, we try to take a strategic approach. Assembling a board is like an exercise in portfolio management. What we do is we get the company to look at itself and look at its current board. What are the key skills you want around the board? Do you want regulatory experience? Do you want clinical development experience? Do you want disease-stating specific experience? Do you want technology-specific experience? Do you want business development expertise? Do you want financial expertise? Do you want a serial CEO, somebody who has been through an operating cycle to bring general wisdom? So what we try to do is create a portfolio of desired skills and then do a gap analysis and then try to recruit, in an ordered fashion, people to fill those gaps, whether it's R&D, whether it's business development and strategy, whether it's general management, whether it's R&D. Does that make sense to you? It does.
Ben Comer:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I guess the, you know, the areas of expertise will be sort of probably adjusted based on the stage that the company's in right.
Bill Holodnak:Absolutely, absolutely.
Ben Comer:You may not need, like you know, a commercial commercial, someone who's commercialized you know five successful products on your board when you're in pre-clinical studies, for example that's, that's, that's totally true.
Bill Holodnak:Um, uh, I mean uh, we, we, we. I guess I can mention the name we work with with Mammoth on a board search recently and they were a company that Jennifer Dowd and the company Gene Ed, and they were focused on diagnostics at the beginning and then they were pivoting. Then they were involved in a pivot toward therapeutics for a variety of you know economic and organizational reasons or strategic reasons, and so we helped them add some of the key and translate executive translation at the executive level, and we helped them add a very experienced board member, bob Brown, who was a founder of Dyserna and who was an R&D expert, and Bob Brown, who was a founder of Dyserna and who was an R&D expert, and helping them add to the board real-world expertise in terms of drug development, drug discovery and development as opposed to diagnostics.
Ben Comer:Right.
Bill Holodnak:So I hope that example was helpful to you and I can talk about other examples if you'd like. I can talk about other examples if you'd like. The important thing is we try to engage clients in a I hate this word, but I'll use it anyhow holistic way to get them to think about how they can best, through organizational gestures, how they can best position themselves for success. You asked me earlier why I found biotech so enticing, and I talked about the people and the mission. I think it's a wildly risky business. You know I often refer to it as slow motion roulette. You know the drama goes on forever and then you're either on black or red and you or you lose. You know, and and I think the people who have us have the self-possession and strategic engagement are really amazing.
Ben Comer:It transmutes into interesting personality qualities, I think yeah, it must take a lot of fortitude to live with that risk, you know, day in and day out as a trial progresses.
Bill Holodnak:Indeed, indeed.
Ben Comer:The current funding environment for early stage life sciences no surprise is challenging, to put it lightly. Right now the public markets are kind of closed for the moment. I wonder what kind of impact that's had on the talent pool for maybe a biotech that's just getting started. Bill, along with the funding environment, there's been a number of layoffs. You know there's, so maybe the talent pool is is expanding. What? What would you say about the, the size and shape of the talent pool and and good people out there that you know, that you can put you know in front of your clients?
Bill Holodnak:I've been doing this through a number of economic cycles and people always ask this question. In down markets you know whether the company turmoil created by the funding environment makes my job easier because there are more people available or there's more opportunity to recruit people. That's true in one sense, but if you remember why people come to me or come to a search room, it's to find somebody special, and the special people are infrequently unemployed. If you know what I mean, it can happen to anyone. So what I think to you is that in the cycle of the market there's either too many jobs for too few people or too few people for too many jobs. Why did I get into this profession? Sometimes I scratch my head because it never gets any easier based on economic cycle. Sometimes they're just more business. But solving the human riddle to get the right person in the right executive role, which is key to the company's success, always requires liberal elbow grease, if you know what I mean.
Ben Comer:Absolutely. It reminds me I wanted to ask you about skills in terms of company leaders, and maybe you hear this from your investor clients. Maybe you know it's individual founders who are looking for this, but have you, you know, noticed, you know, a desire for any kinds of new skills when it comes to company leaders, whether it's and I guess I have AI and technology kind of in mind, and maybe it's a case-by-case type of thing that you can't generalize across the entire industry, but are there any specific skills that seem to be more in demand now than, say, a few years ago?
Bill Holodnak:Well, you could argue that right now. I'm going to give you at least two answers to that question. Right now, clinical development expertise is really in demand because the investors and corporations are buying developed assets. So I would say that there's a high demand at both the board level and at the executive level for very talented drug developers, people who can cultivate the asset value of these discoveries that are being made. So you know, and you know, sometimes pure scientific talent is more desired or there's more an effort rather on clinical development, there's an effort on business development. If the capital markets are robust and there's lots of public offerings happening, then scientific, the functional desires or the priorities change with the market. So I've just given you the example on the current market.
Bill Holodnak:Clinical experience is really important In terms of new skills and I've kind of written on this a little bit. Getting people with artificial intelligence, machine learning capability, is really key because for many of these companies this is a very newly evolved discipline and there's not a whole lot of people who are broadly experienced in it and there's even fewer people who are experienced managers. So it's very hard to get people with AIDD experience or AI experience into the drug development space and it's very competitive because of the prices that are being bid up. Competitive because of the prices that are being bid up. But what you really need is to get somebody who has real sympathy for the mission of drug development and the complexity of biology. So you're looking for a hybrid. You're looking for, and that hybrid match can come with alternative composition.
Bill Holodnak:By that I mean you can either find an AI person who really is mesmerized by the possibilities of transforming drug discovery and development or somebody who has a personal issue. And I mean there's one guy that I know very well who became early on. He was from Toronto and he was very highly developed in neural networks and he worked for major industrial corporations as an AI scientist. Then his mother died of cancer and he thought couldn't we find a cure for cancer more readily with AI in place? And he moved his career. So the people can come from computers, computer science and AI. Or they can come from biology and become our self-taught as AI people, or they have a conviction as an AI person that this is where they want to work. So finding really talented AI people to come into drug discovery and development and the big pharma clients are eager for these people. The biotech companies are eager for them, so there's a big market for them, for them, so there's a big market for them.
Ben Comer:And it's very interesting evolution of a new species and a high demand one, excellent. I want to shift gears here a little bit and ask you about Life Science Cares New York. I noted on your LinkedIn profile that you are on the board of advisory there, I think, board of advisors at Life Science Cares New York. I wonder if you could just give a kind of quick overview of that organization and maybe why you joined.
Bill Holodnak:Well.
Ben Comer:I mean.
Bill Holodnak:This was started by a group of thoughtful, big-hearted life science executives, most notably Rob Perez, his old friend, and Rob is a wonderfully talented and successful commercial executive-cum-CEO in biotech and I think he, whether because of his upbringing or because of the exigencies in his own soul, thought that he had such a wonderful career in biotech that he ought to give back, and he thought that there were other life sciences executives that ought to find ways to improve the communities in which the industry grew up. So job creation is one of the big objectives, so it's like a wonderful sense of social mission and giving back and you know so what's not to like about that. I've been very successful as a result of my involvement in the life sciences world. I've talked to you earlier about my huge respect for that industry and the people in it. So I'm not trying to proclaim nobility for my own soul, but that's the logic of it, right, and that's why it was founded and I'm wholeheartedly supporting it over that.
Bill Holodnak:And I think it's great to do not-for-profit service. I sit on another jazz not-for-profit service. I sit on another jazz, uh in not-for-profit in New York and I I've been on the board of the Berkeley college of music, uh, and the San Francisco jazz. So I I think like, whether it's biology or it's jazz, uh, it's given, it's made my life rich in the world, a richer place, so why not give back, Right?
Ben Comer:Absolutely, absolutely Well. Thank you for that. We are coming up to the end of our time, bill, but before I, before I get into my my exit little speech here, I wonder if there is any final advice that you would give to, you know, a potential founder scientist who might be listening to this show. Aside from give you a call, we'll take that one as a granted. But anything you know, for someone who is thinking about, perhaps you know, taking the plunge, stepping out of academia attempting to translate a discovery into a medical product that could help people, what would you tell them?
Bill Holodnak:Well, I run into a lot of people who get in, who start in academics and have got any either pharma or biotech or both because they wanted to see. They wanted to see patients benefit and they also wanted where in academia. It's pursuing knowledge for its own sake. Industry offers the opportunity to make social impact, to assume a pragmatic focus, and I think that that's great. And I just think that the advice would be understand. It's a business and if you want your science to be realized, understand it'll take commercial expertise to do that and commercial understanding. So be prepared for something new and something difficult in ways that are different than scientific achievement. So it's a wonderful thing to do, but understand you're entering into a different realm with different exigencies. And back to calling me call me or call somebody. Get great investors, get a great board and listen to advice. Be your own person, but understand you're in for an adventure of a totally different sort.
Ben Comer:Bill, thanks so much for joining me today.
Bill Holodnak:It was great, Ben. I always enjoy our conversations. I hope I was helpful to you and to whomever is listening in.
Ben Comer:We've been speaking with Bill Holodnak, founder and CEO at Occam Global. I'm Ben Comer and you've just listened to the Business of Biotech. Find us and subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and be sure to check out our new weekly videocasts of these conversations every Monday under the Business of Biotech tab at Life Science Leader. We'll see you next week and thanks, as always, for listening.
