In this interview, Ivana Magovčević‑Liebisch, President and CEO of Vigil Neuroscience, explains her approach to leading a fast‑growing biotech startup. She emphasizes that a CEO’s primary responsibility is hiring an A+ team and embodying the company’s purpose and values daily. To keep the team aligned, she brings in patient advocates during off‑site meetings, clarifies each person’s role, and makes decision‑making processes transparent. As the company expanded from 13 to 25 employees, she instituted regular cross‑functional team structures and frequent communication to ensure everyone feels on board. Ivana also stresses a “no‑blame” culture that celebrates failures as learning opportunities, enabling rapid pivots—a key advantage of a small company. The segment concludes with an audience poll showing 92 % support for first‑time CEOs having an executive coach, a practice Ivana endorses.
Ivana, one of the things we've talked about prior was getting team buy-in. This was one thing that, you know, when you're trying to get someone to buy into the culture, you need to bring them along on the bus. So tell us a little bit about your approach as a first-time CEO.
So look, I think the number one role of any CEO is to hire an A+ team. And enable them to execute by setting that right culture. And so I strongly believe that that comes from the top. And I think that the way you do that is by, as Frank said, yes, purpose and values, but you have to live them. And you have to show the people that you live them every day. And then that importance of the why as well, critical, as Frank mentioned too. I just had my corporate offsite with my team, and we started with a patient advocate. We actually brought a patient advocate in to talk to us so that we don't lose track of why we're doing what we're doing and why there's that sense of urgency because the patients can wait. And the other time we spent actually at our offsite was really talking about how are we going to ensure that everybody on the team— because it's a team, right? And we all stand and fall together. How do we ensure that everybody on the team understands what are we doing, why we're doing it, what are each of our roles and responsibilities? And it's clear to everybody how the decision-making process happens, right? Because that's what really makes, you know, this team functional versus nonfunctional, because you can lose it very, very quickly. And, you know, it's very easy when you have a company of a couple of people that, you know, everybody's on the same page. But you start growing, and we grew really fast. I mean, in December at our offsite, we were 13. You know, last week at our offsite, we were 25. So how do you make sure that everybody first of all, buys into it, and second of all, understands how they fit into and really feel part of the team. So I mentioned this to you before. It's really about being transparent along the way, sharing with everybody what is going on in the company, and making sure that there's clear communication, clear understanding, checking in on a regular basis. To make sure everybody is on the same page. And also creating these within the teams, creating the cross-functional teams that ensure that the left hand and the right hand know what they're doing. So that's kind of what we've been doing. And so far it's been working, but it's a constant, constant reminder and constant, you know, making sure that, you know, as I said before, this is our bus. And this bus is going in this direction. And we've got to make sure that everybody is on board of that bus. And the other thing that I think is really important, because I've seen this when you have that kind of a culture, you want to have a culture where you celebrate failures. And what I mean by that is a culture that's not a culture of blame. Because then if you have a culture of blame, people are not going to be willing to say, hey, I don't think this is working. And being a small company, I always tell my teams the only advantage we have over a big company is ability to pivot quickly. And so we have to have those kind of conversations. We have to be open with each other. We have to, because we have very limited resources. We have to say, look, celebrate. You know what? It didn't work. That's OK. Let's pivot. Let's make sure that we are doing things that are actually going to create value and make sure that we're still on that path to get to, to patients.
Thanks for that, Ivana. So we're going to get an audience question, but let's give you an update on where the poll stands, because I think you'll find this interesting. Like, should a first-time CEO have an executive coach? Miles, the results are a resounding 92.3% yes and 7.7% no. Yes, I remember interviewing a CEO once and I asked him about the executive coach and he kind of laughed and said, what's an executive coach? Going to teach me? He goes, I don't mean to sound arrogant, but, you know, so we've, we've had those experiences before, but overwhelmingly the audience thinks that we should have executive coaches for the CEO. I would agree. Oh!
