1. Remain private or go public?

Private means you don’t have a perceived value of your company that’s hanging over your head when you’re negotiating with potential partners, acquirers or investors.

Also, when you have some new data you can take your time to understand it before you put it out there. As a public company CEO, you have to put all material information out within hours.

One downside of being a private company these days is less access to capital, i.e. more aggressive terms and “down rounds” [when the company accepts a lower post-money valuation than at its previous financing] — Daphne Zohar

Stay private longer to mature your profile and your pipeline, get the right team in place, and get ready to go public when the markets are more robust. — John Maraganore

2. Be very open with your investors when raising your next round.

Investors are starting to appreciate that it’s okay to have a contingency plan. You can go out there and say I want to raise this much but I have a doable plan with a lower amount. — Grace Colon

3. Always be efficient—in both good and bad times.

I’ve seen companies that overspend when the tide is high. Don’t act like money is cheap; it is not. — Daphne Zohar

4. Look for sources of non-diluted funding.

We have a person in our team who is focused only on getting grants and non-diluted sources of funding. That gives us a lot of strength to pursue our vision. — Daphne Zohar

5. Forget the stock market and focus on what’s best for your company.

Ask the right questions: What stage are we at? When do we have to raise? How much? Chasing the money when times are hot may not be the best individual decision for your company. It may put you in a situation where you can’t raise money even when you have things going well. — Brad Loncar

6. Layoffs are painful but you have to live another day.

We did two layoffs at Alnylam and they were the most painful thing I’ve ever had to do as a CEO, but they were necessary. But one thing that we did do was, we kept a list of all the people that had to leave and every week in our management team meeting we would review that list to find out where everybody was. I would also personally call colleagues in the community and say “hey, I have this excellent regulatory person, this research associate…” — John Maraganore

7. Should I focus on a product or a portfolio?

It depends on the company. If you’ve got a disruptive platform company, you have to focus on both the platform and the products that are coming out of that platform. If it’s just a company with two products, then yes, this might be a different case. — John Maraganore

8. Carefully design your company and prepare for bad times.

If you’re always trying to recalibrate your work based on whether financing in the stock market is good or bad, you’ll always be playing catch up. You want to be ahead of the curve, not behind the curve. If the right thing for you is to be a platform company, then be a platform company and raise enough money even during bad times to make that happen. If you’re constantly changing, that’s not a good thing. — Brad Loncar

9. Public Markets are Biotech’s Face to the World

“It’s bad for the whole biotech industry when immature companies go public. Some say that there’s no difference between the private and the public markets; they’re just different funding sources. I disagree with that. The public market is the public face of our sector to the world.

When investors in the public markets get burned on biotech, that’s a bad thing for the whole sector. The fact that the bubble has deflated and the companies that are now going public are good quality companies who are either at or close to the proof of concept stage, it’s a good thing for our sector.” — Brad Loncar

ps: Brad reminded me of Daphne Koller, the CEO of Insitro, who once said in an interview… “I’ll tell you when the public will see that it’s serious: When I make medicines that actually help people get better,” Koller said. “That’s the true validation of this, and going public is frankly just a distraction towards that goal.”

Molly He, the CEO of Element Biosciences, shares a similar view: “The commercial maturity, the company maturity, should be there before we say, ‘Hey, we’re now ready to be a public company. I think this is the piece a lot of companies, small companies rushing to IPO did not see, and I think some are suffering from that today.”