Humility is probably the most critical quality for success in your arduous journey of bringing breakthrough medicines to patients.
I am an avid reader and what has caught my attention is how often the concept of humility comes up in biotech founder and CEO interviews.
“The job itself will humble you. You’ll be told no, you’ll be told you’re stupid, you’ll be told all sorts of things. You have to be ridiculously humble and constantly be asking other people, checking on yourself, finding experienced folks, building a personal advisory board… I have a number of people… fellow CEOs who are at our stage, people who are a few years in the future, people who have done companies multiple times… that I can ask questions to.” — Jake Becraft, Co-founder at Strand Therapeutics.
“You may find it daunting to ask for help, you may see it as if you’re looking weak or you’ve failed in some way. The sooner you can get over being afraid of rejection or hearing no, the easier this will become. Because you’ll get it from so many angles, i.e. fundraising, recruiting, sales…” — Lex Rovner, CEO at 64x Bio
“Being humble is at the core of developing managerial skills. While you don’t have to follow all the advice you receive, it is important to stay genuinely open and sincere to all feedback.” — Martin Trevor, Co-founder and CEO at Mammoth biosciences.
“We are taking the first approach to use mRNA therapeutics as programmable epigenetic medicines. It’s a completely new class of drugs never before been attempted. And now we are entering the clinic… You have to have a significant amount of humility to appreciate that you’re going to actually get patients to use these drugs. I mean, imagine the social contract that you need to have with patients, morally, to be able to make it.” — Mahesh Karande, CEO at Omega Therapeutics
“Science is very humbling, and I’ve had far more failures than successes. I’ve gone into work many more days to have disappointing data presented to me, which sometimes meant the end of a program… If after that process, you’re not humbled, I don’t know what’s wrong with you, frankly! There are people who really believe, okay, it’s my idea and we’re going to do it my way. That may work for a while but not in the long term.” — Jim Sullivan, Co-founder and CEO at Vanqua Bio.
“No one is ever ready to be a founder CEO. There will always be more knowledge to acquire to be “ready”. However, I believe there is a point at which a potential founder is ready from a mentality perspective. And the mental perspective is one of humility. I have found this shows up as folks (no matter the background going in) who recognize they have much to learn and are willing to do whatever is necessary to improve themselves.” — David Li, Co-founder and CEO at Meliora Therapeutics
“You have to have the humility to listen to your team; they are often closer to the problem and have better insights than you.” — Ramji Srinivasan, CEO at Teiko Bio.
“Humility is an under-appreciated skill in founders. My interdisciplinary training gives me an edge in understanding how computation and lab experiments can reinforce each other when tightly integrated. In all other areas, there are people in the company who are smarter and better understand the details of our processes. Never let ego get in the way of the right decision.” — Nicolas Tilmans, CEO at Anagenex.
“Drug development is a hard task and daily leadership is about humility in front of the task you have. We tackle the hardest task and you have to be humbled in front of that.” — Stan Crooke, Founder and Chairman at Ionis.
“Biotech success is very hard. 99% fail if you’re in preclinical stages. I use the baseball analogy… The best hitters of all time, still fail more than 50% of the time. If you have a battling average of 0.333, 0.350, that’s Hall of Fame. The same is true with drug development. That should keep people very humble. Every time you take on a new product, a different drug, a new target, a unique modality, a specific dose going after a specific indication… everybody is always doing this for the first time! I don’t care if they have 50 years of experience, every time you take on a new company, a new programming product, you’re doing it for the very first time. So you need to keep that humility. It’s really about going through all the permutations in your mind, all the scenarios, not waiting for the problems to happen and then trying to fix them, but anticipating all the different things that can go wrong. What don’t we know? What can we learn more? How do we get a better understanding of what the right dose is? Can we do some additional experiments? It’s striving to derisk more and more before you push something into patients. That humility solves for a lot of all the other things required from the CEO, i.e. being team-oriented, having a great culture, etc. so that’s why I believe it’s the most important quality. — Chris Garabedian, CEO at Xontogeny.