Biotech CEOs, your job is not just to raise money.

Fundraising is all-consuming. It becomes a critical mission for the CEO.

“I am responsible for all these people. I must succeed. They trusted me with this mission.”

You tie your whole self-worth to a check. “No check? I’m a failure.”

While extreme focus is essential, you need to step back and look at the bigger picture.

Your goal is not just to raise $10m, $50m, or $100m. That’s a very limiting mindset.

Your goal is to get this thing into the patients and generate outsized returns for those who took a bet on you.

Here’s an example: If you think that everything else other than a fat VC check is a failure, you’ll definitely miss that NIH grant that could help you do a small trial and generate a little more data that could take you a step closer to patients and that fat VC check.

Survival needs creativity, and creativity needs an expanded state of consciousness.

Here’s an example from life: A musician feels stage anxiety in front of 500 people because they are too self-conscious. But when they shift their attention away from themselves and go, “Okay these people came to see me tonight and listen to my music, how can I truly serve them by gifting them the most pleasant evening?”… their anxiety disappears, and they survive!

Making it all about self-survival and self-preservation is definitely not the optimal strategy for survival. Neither as a CEO nor as a company. Neither in biotech nor in life.

The biotech ecosystem, just like life, is a system. If everyone cared only about their own self-survival, the system would collapse, and everyone would die.

And at the end of the day, you don’t have to be right. You don’t have to survive as a CEO and a company. You and the team may reinvent yourselves as a new company.

Your company is part of a system and a continuum of innovation and progress in human health.

Am I saying “aim for less”? No, the opposite! I’m saying that expanding and focusing on your bigger purpose will get you more.

With expanding love, Angelos.

ps: Gloria Gaynor said it too… “As long as I know how to love, I know I’ll stay alive… I’ve got all my love to give, and I’ll survive.” Survival is about giving love to the system… Na na na na….. na na na na na na….. 🎶 🎵 🎶 🎵