In this panel excerpt, Speaker A asks whether the company has established bioethical standards or exercises to anticipate long‑term unintended consequences, referencing a book on the topic. Speaker B responds that the most critical practice is intentionally shaping company culture and embedding a decision‑making framework grounded in clear values—such as saving lives, maximizing technology use, or improving healthcare accessibility. He emphasizes using those values as a lens for every major decision, revisiting and updating them over time, and allowing micro‑ and macro‑decisions to steer the organization toward a responsible future even without perfect foresight. The brief exchange highlights the importance of proactive ethical planning, value‑driven governance, and continuous cultural reinforcement in biotech enterprises.
Chapters
Are there any bioethical standards that you guys have set as a company or exercises that you're going through from the very beginning to think about? Because we had Hamath Tanuja, who's also a VC on, and he's talking— he wrote this book about how there can be these unintended long-term consequences that everybody with good intentions wouldn't want to do, but that the company can end up in if you don't think about them from day zero. Are there any exercises like that that the company engages in or that are relevant here?
I think the most relevant one is just what's the culture you're building at the company and being very intentional about that, right? Because it's hard. I haven't read that particular book, but it's hard to probably predict 10 years from now. Yeah. Where you're at. Right. But hopefully what you can control and what will help lead you down that path is like, how do you— what's your decision-making framework more generally as like a company and like, what do you value? Like, are you— to the very beginning of this conversation, right? Like, are you trying to save as many lives as possible, right? Are you trying to maximize the use of the technology? Are you trying to make healthcare as accessible as possible? You can choose your function and then making sure that you stay true to that. Like, it can be updated over time. Like, the way we think about our values and some great advice I got early on is that you should always use your values as a lens for decision-making. And that's how they become real. So like, you can have them on the wall or whatever. But whenever you're making a big decision, you should be going down each value and saying, okay, if I really believe this, like, which direction should I be going? And hopefully those micro decisions and macro decisions lead you to a good place in 10 years, even if you don't know that from the very beginning.
So, Rashid, you wanted to comment? We have 30 seconds.
All right. So quick thing is, I think, you know, the— I do see this, you know, move fast, break things, don't worry about the end product much more endemic. In software-driven innovation companies or tech-driven innovation companies. I think, you know, companies like Mammoth tend to be way more sort of grounded there. It's much more about being real about like the progress, the problems, that set of things, right? And so the culture is at the core in either of them, and you have to kind of find the balance between innovation and this. But pretty much if something is wrong, people in the org have to be able to raise their hand without the fear of any repercussions. To kind of get that message up. And so the culture is at the core, right? Because somewhere along the way, people will know if something's not going right, and people have to feel empowered to be able to kind of go ahead and bring it up without the fear of being shot sort of down by the leadership.
