Lessons learned as a first-time CEO

A quick look at my background will show you I'm a first-time CEO. So 3 years into PostEra, I thought I'd share a few lessons learned along the way.

• Lesson 1. Most of the shiny objects don't matter
• Lesson 2. Yes, it's your fault
• Lesson 3. Be a critical optimist
• Lesson 4. People not technology is the main thing
• Lesson 5. Sprinting and marathon-ing

Lesson 1: Most of the shiny objects don't matter

Keeping your focus on what really matters becomes increasingly difficult as you do countless meetings a week and stay on top of hundreds of emails. As a leader you're constantly trying to assess "how well are we doing?" and "are we going in the right direction?".

Particularly in a biotech where you don't have a SaaS ARR metric to track, it can be tempting to fall back on pseudo-goals that don't matter: Win a "Top 10 startup award" or "Get a speaker invite to important conference" or "Interview with renowned press outlet".

None of these things are bad but they are harmful when you convince yourself they're predictors of your success or more important metrics than "How is our company culture?" or "How's the progress of our ML and Engineering milestones?" or "Is the technology translating into real gains on real drug discovery programs?". Keeping the main thing the main thing is much of the battle as new shiny objects will constantly appear.

As a founder or leader it's important to not conflate the drivers of success with the externalities of that success. Focus on the former; everything else is derivative.

People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.

Lesson 2: Yes, it's your fault

The famous phrase "the buck stops with you" can be intimidating when you transition from a traditional corporate structure into a founder/CEO role. There is no manager covering your back, no authority figure to step in with a safety net, and, in the early days at least, very few mechanisms to contain the damage of bad decisions. Good co-founders is my best recommendation.

The natural reaction can be one of two extremes: Option 1 is you become the archetype micro-manager, looking over every shoulder and making your voice the loudest in the room to try and retain some semblance of control. We all know this is bad for team morale and the inevitable bottleneck you create, but it can become tempting.

Option 2 is the laissez-faire approach, where your fear of the aggressive micro-manager distances you so far from the team that you've got very little understanding of the day-to-day of your company and it sadly provides very easy justification for CEOs to play the blame game on team members when things aren't going well because "I trusted you". Neither of these are healthy.

At PostEra, "we hire people so they can tell us what to do" (Steve Jobs), meaning we aim to give team members a large degree of autonomy to make decisions and mistakes, while still providing clear contours of the broader company goals, and being involved enough in the day-to-day so that 2 standard deviation events don't fly under the radar.

So yes, things are ultimately your fault, but that should translate into you working closely with the decision-makers you hire and not trying to replace or obviate them.

Lesson 3: Be a critical optimist

The thing about working in Life Sciences is that the object of your work, the remarkable human body, was there well before you came along and wasn't created like an app or SaaS product with an accessible README in the codebase or friendly engineers to ask questions of. You're dealing with arguably the most complex system ever and frankly it's amazing that we've ever found a cure for anything.

It's natural then to settle for incrementalism or just plain cynicism because you're likely to be right 90% of the time; most things don't work. But as a Founder you are living for that 10% because that's what moves the world forward and what makes your company worth anything. As the Aaron-tweaked phrase goes, "Pessimists sound smart. Optimists get things done". Yet on the other extreme there is a blind optimism that can be dangerous.

The cost of failure in Drug Discovery is high, not only for your company, but also for the patients who may one day take your drug in a clinical trial. So it's important as a leader to raise the bar of the work you do and ask "Are we sure?" when a new AI model seems to be doing something awesome. But the critique comes from a place of trying to improve your technology not disprove its worth with a smug pessimism.

In short I've found critical optimism to be a useful lens as a Founder: an almost child-like, naive conviction that the impossible is possible and that we really can change the world in the long run, mixed with a very honest, down-to-earth-reality of how today is actually going, how that VC pitch actually went, how our model is actually performing.

Lesson 4: People not technology is the main thing

If you agree with the adage, as I broadly do, that success is "10% idea and 90% execution" then you quickly find yourself in need of people to take whatever great ideas you think you have and actually implement them. If you overweight the importance of the Idea, often a technological or scientific one in my field, you underinvest in good hiring and people management and when this inevitably leads to unsuccessful outcomes you can draw the wrong conclusion that the Idea was to blame.

Often the only way to truly test the utility of the Idea is to execute very well on it which means you should be investing in your people. Also if the Idea does turn out to be wrong then great people are likely to be the first to help you pivot and rethink whereas in the converse scenario, no Idea is going to help you fix issues with the people who are executing on it.

Particularly as your company gets larger, it's actually easier to generate new ideas as your network and stakeholders expand, but increasingly difficult to keep up efficient execution as sub-teams emerge, communication overhead increases, and your role as CEO becomes more abstracted from the day-to-day. Be wary on how abstracted though.

Ideas are absolutely important, and yes of course we need both good Ideas and good Execution, but given a choice I would far rather disclose PostEra's AI know-how than our execution know-how.

Lesson 5: Sprinting and marathon-ing

When I began at Goldman a colleague who had been at the company for quite a few years said to me: "Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint". I promptly ignored him because I assumed that well-worn phrase was merely an excuse for the tired and jaded. After several years of burnout however, I wish I had taken his advice more seriously, but the whole question came to the fore again when we launched PostEra.

How should startup teams operate? Constant sprint cycles or a long steady march toward a far off goal? Again, what I've found is that it's the extremes that get you into trouble. The attitude of everything being a sprint and "everything is an emergency" eventually becomes The Boy who Cried Wolf and your team no longer believes something is urgent because everything is urgent.

It also leads to a short-termism that doesn't allow for upfront investments that will scale better down the line, like your Engineering infrastructure. However, startups are different from big established companies and it's precisely the fact that they can sprint which gives them a competitive edge; a 1 month ML sprint in PostEra really can change way we do parts of medicinal chemistry, whereas no 1 month sprint at Goldman is ever going to fundamentally alter the company's operations.

The forcing function of a sprint can be very healthy and we've tried to keep the gritty, fast-paced startup culture by "forcing" ourselves into sprint cycles particularly in the context of client partnerships, external motivation is often a more potent incentive, while maintaining our more overarching marathon-like goals.

The marathon goals are the right ones but the sprint goals make that vision feel concrete, so make sure both sets of goals are pointing in the same direction.

There are a lot of words here, but if you take anything away, just remember that experience will teach you far more than textbooks, podcasts or posts like these. Dive in, and if I can be of any help to new CEOs/Founders please just reach out.