BIO from the BAYOU: Build Your Biotech Network with Key Opinion Leaders and Investors
25 Jun 2025 · 19 min
0:00
In this episode of Bio from the Bayou, hosts Dr. Elaine Hamm and James R. Zanewicz interview Carlo Ottacino, CEO and founder of One Team Partners, about the pervasive problem of burnout among biotech founders and CEOs. The conversation opens with Dr. Hamm describing her own fatigue and the challenging fundraising climate, then pivots to Carlo’s core thesis: sleep is the single most critical lever for preventing and recovering from burnout. Carlo stresses a consistent 7‑9 hours of quality sleep and a regular bedtime, citing research that less than seven hours impairs reaction time to the level of driving under the influence. Beyond sleep, Carlo identifies early warning signs—frequent priority shifts, an inability to set a singular direction, and a resistance to delegate. He explains that CEOs often mistake multitasking for productivity; in reality they are task‑switching, which taxes the brain and reduces output. Practical tactics are offered: use timers to curb mindless scrolling, set strict limits or uninstall addictive social‑media apps, apply a simplified Eisenhower matrix (focus on 1‑2 high‑impact tasks, delegate or delete the rest), and adopt a “dynamic life‑balance” mindset rather than a static work‑life balance. The hosts introduce an internal shorthand, “elephant,” to call out moments when someone is distracted or not fully present. Carlo shares personal anecdotes about his own burnout cycle, the ego trap of believing he must do everything himself, and the shift to learning to be “selfish” in caring for oneself so one can better serve the organization. He also highlights the importance of delegating with empathy—allowing team members to grow even if they initially perform tasks differently. The episode closes with a concise call‑to‑action: prioritize sleep, use timers, and be mindful of the “elephant” in the room. Overall, the episode blends research‑backed data, actionable habits, and cultural cues to give biotech leaders a concrete playbook for staying sharp without burning out.
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Serving the entire Gulf South, but recorded in the heart of New Orleans. Welcome back to BIO from the Bayou. I'm your host, Dr. Elaine Hamm, the Executive in Residence at Tulane School of Medicine.
And I'm James Zanewicz from Soon Lane Medicine, your other host. And today's guest is Carlo Ottacino. You may recognize him as the CEO and founder of One Team Partners, a group that specializes in helping early-stage startups bring their innovations to market while building high-performance and motivated teams. Welcome back to the show, Carlo.
Thank you very much for having me. Excited to be here.
Well, I'm excited to talk about this topic because I'm not excited about a lot of things these days because I feel like I myself am suffering from CEO burnout. And there's a lot of different factors factors that come into that. And it can come out in many different ways, one of which is not as, not as excited about some of the things that I used to be. There's a little bit of a loss of passion because it just, man, you get worn out. So I think that CEO burnout isn't just the thing that I'm suffering from, but probably a lot of startup companies are suffering from these days, especially in the biotech community, as we're raising money in a very difficult climate. And it just feels like you're just constantly hearing no, and it becomes a struggle. So what, in your view, are some of the biggest contributors to burnout among startup companies in particular?
So I would narrow it down to one primary principle that I like to ask anybody who's, who's feeling burnout or burned out, and it's sleep. How are you sleeping? It's a fundamental principle that—
What is the sleep of which you speak?
Yeah, exactly. So I ask explicitly, do you on average get 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night? And do you go to bed at the same time every night?
Oh, that's a hard question.
Well, Dr. Hamm, do you do that? She looks so guilty right now. She's like, don't want to answer.
Yeah, and I definitely don't doom scroll and do all the right things. Yeah, sleep hygiene. Yeah, yeah. No, sleep is such a good indicator. I hadn't thought about it. It's one of the first things that we look at in depression of like, sleep. And in fact, I've heard sort of the difference of anxiety versus depression is the ability to fall asleep versus stay asleep. And that's such a key indicator that you don't think of. Like, everyone struggles with sleep, right?
Yeah, I just say there's an opportunity to kind of see it as a primary contributor, not as a secondary or tertiary contributor. It's a primary contributor. You will find there's a significant reduction in people's ability to perform and react at their best if they are getting an average of 7 to 9 hours of sleep. a night and go to bed at the same time every night, regardless if it's weekend. There was a study, and I usually, when I'm with CEOs, I said, would you like— let me reframe the question. Would you like it if 90% of your workforce showed up to work drunk? And I haven't come across a CEO that said yes, they would like it.
And you haven't met New Orleans CEOs.
Yeah, exactly. So I said, not yet, but Because there was a study that was done that one night of getting less than 7 hours of sleep creates a reaction time for somebody that is as if they're driving under the influence.
Yeah.
They did it. And so, if your reaction time performs worse than somebody who's driving under the influence, then maybe you might want to address sleep as something. And, it is the quality of the sleep. There's so much that goes into sleep and sleep hygiene. that can be improved, but that sometimes when you share all of this stuff can be overwhelming. So I just said target 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night and going to— let's start there. Let's start with the fundamentals and then we can do it. But it is recasting the stigma that I, at least when I was early on in my career, people who could say, oh, I can thrive, or I only got 4 hours or 6 hours of sleep a night, I can thrive on that.
Yeah.
It was a sign of— spoken about as a badge of honor.
Yeah, people brag about it all the time, and it makes me sad because it's like, that's a horrible brag.
Yeah, exactly. And so, understanding that burnout is one of those things that it is a process. It is not an event, it is a process. And so, once you start feeling that burnout, it's like, we gotta unpack kind of months of things that might be going on that sort of accumulate, and there's no one thing to sort of try to avoid it. But you can start by getting— I'm going to sound like a broken record— getting enough sleep.
So consistently.
So other than bragging about not getting enough sleep and how you're super tough and can handle it, you've worked with a lot of executives and founders. What are some of the other trends or early warning signs that you've noticed that could indicate that a CEO is headed towards burnout?
2 things. An inability to truly set a direction, a singular direction, and stick to it with a level of patience. So there's a lot of priority sort of shifting disguised as new strategic, but if it happens too frequently, that is an issue. And then a resistance to delegate and not be part of the decision-making processes for everything. Particularly for smaller companies, you see these leaders that feel like they need to be part of the decision-making process for everything. And that's just a sure recipe for driving yourself to get burned out because you just can't be everywhere at the same time. So learn to delegate and learn to prioritize and have a certain amount of patience with the priorities that you set.
That patience part is really hard.
So, yes, those are the things that I see are kind of really early and are easier to pick out. And so you start with those. Activities. And because CEOs are sometimes the most— they pride themselves on their ability to multitask. And so I said, well, wait, let me absolve you of that. Nobody's able to multitask. They're able to task switch. And the more you task switch, the more tension and stress you put on your brain, and it actually makes you less productive.
That's when Elaine yells at me on a Zoom and she's like, I can see you're doing email. Stop. And I'm better at it now because I'm like, I know she's gonna call me out because I'm not good at hiding it.
We have an internal term that we say when we can tell somebody is getting distracted and we say elephant. So, or you're elephanting. And we just say, let's address the elephant in the room that we all can tell that you are not fully present in this meeting.
I love that. Well, speaking of multitasking, I think if someone told me I had CEO burnout, I would probably make a list of all the things that I need to do to fix it, and then probably get overwhelmed and go back to TikTok and scroll and watch videos about burnout instead of actually doing anything about it. So how do you help? And what sucks is like, I feel like CEOs are CEOs because they can triage problems and problem solve. But sometimes when it's yourself, it can be harder. So how do you help? CEOs and founders effectively set and manage them without getting overwhelmed?
Yeah, and I think that's— it's just about habit building and obviously habit breaking. So try to be mindful of when you're mindless. And so scrolling is a mindless activity. And a lot of fitness professionals or nutritionists will say you're a victim of your environment. And so if you're finding trouble sticking to a diet plan, Stop buying the cookies, stop buying the chocolate, stop buying all of that. You don't know. So—
So you're saying that the fat suits I had to buy on Monday for bio were not a good thing, and probably because I was buying cookies? Yeah.
No, it probably is the worst excuse that might be.
Yeah. Same with social media. Those apps are designed to be addictive. So you have a choice that you can make. You can either set a timer or you can just uninstall the app. I'm just gonna make a conscious choice to uninstall the app. And I know because they're designed to be addictive, I'm gonna go through withdrawal and I'm gonna have the, urge to reinstall it and go through it and share with somebody that you're doing it so they can call you out. Like, did you just reinstall TikTok on there? Because you're doing the thumb flick, but I can tell that something's going on.
Did you hear that, Ham?
TikTok is bad.
Is bad. All social media is bad.
Yeah.
But we gravitate towards those because it's that like, I want to be mindless for a little bit, you know, and laugh at puppies or whatever it may be. But you're right, there's an addictive piece of it and there's a point you have to put it down to do your job.
Yeah. One of the things that I've heard that would apply is you don't need to go cold turkey if you— but set a timer and be diligent about that 10 minutes and, oh my God, that 10 minutes went away. Or if you feel the urge, set a timer for 2 minutes and see if that urge subsides after 2 minutes. Don't resist it for 2 minutes. That's the same technique of when you're trying to do deep work that you would do. Oh, I want to go to any distraction or I'm feeling something. Just set that timer. That allows you to then let your brain sort of decompress from that sense of urgency and reset. Yeah, exactly.
I literally have a timer on my desk because I struggle with that issue. And I will say, James, by the way, TikTok has a lady that comes on there and she's like, are you scrolling instead of sleeping? Instagram never did that for me. But I really, I really do need that timer to help from a focus perspective, because when I have that feeling of burnout, focusing is one of the hardest pieces. And when you have a million things going on as CEO and lots of plates in the air that you're trying to juggle, Like, it just becomes overwhelming and hard to prioritize and then focus, and then the cycle begins.
Mm-hmm.
Well, continuing along this line, so the delegation of tasks, I think, is really important because then it does take things off of your plate and allows you to focus on some things that may require your attention that someone else can't do. So, and I think when you're in a startup, you tend to start with doing everything yourself because you're a company of one or maybe two if you're lucky. So, there comes a point though where you can't. What advice do you have for leaders that, that need to come Get over that mentality of like, they're the only ones that can solve this problem and learn how to delegate it effectively.
Yeah. And that's the part where it's just, you're dealing with discomfort and just know doing something different does not mean doing something worse. So when you delegate, they will do something differently than how you would do it, but it's not necessarily worse and can sometimes be better, which is a Can be a hit to the ego, but that's okay. You're the CEO. You can handle hits to your ego, but really just get comfortable with the idea of you got to be somewhere to where you are because somebody gave you the opportunity to learn. Pay that forward to somebody else and offer them the same opportunity to learn by asking them to do something that maybe they can't do as well as you could right now. But will be able to, through that experience, learn and guide them along the way. It doesn't mean that you need to be completely disconnected, but just guide them along the way.
Yeah.
And find joy in the ability to teach others rather than doing yourself.
And I think female founders need to think about that. It applies to beyond the workplace, that it applies to home as well. Like, you'd have to get some of those things off of your plate at home too. You're going to be overwhelmed there as well as your startup. And does my husband do laundry like I would? Absolutely not. But do I do laundry? No, I do not. So you got to take your wins where you can.
So, well, so I think that is, you know, very interesting is the, the thought that, you know, burnout comes from all aspects of your life. It's not just from work. And so you always have long and short-term demands, both in life and in your business. And in your business, it might be You know, funding and product development or just the simple things to keep the lights on. Or it could be long-term sustainability and what your plan is for 4 years down the line when you've achieved your regulatory approval and you're actually on the market. If you're in biotech, you're at home, it could be, you know, getting the laundry done versus sending your kid to kindergarten in 5 years, you know, whatever it is. But all these things come together. And so then other than a timer, which we talked about that rule, what are some other tips, tricks, tools that people can use, COOs can use to balance those different kinds of demands, those long-term and short-term demands? short-term in their minds?
That's a great question. And it first starts off with, you did touch on it. We have a view of the world that it's life balance. It's not work-life balance. Work is a part of your life. So just try to keep your life in balance. That does not mean equal, right? So you look at these gymnasts that can do things or ice skaters that can do things that maintain in balance, but they are in positions that if they were to try to stay in balance, it wouldn't be as dynamic. They can stay in what I would call dynamic balance, and they know how to not fall over and do very neat things that any other normal human might fall flat on their face if they attempted to do. So that's just one of the things is just reframe how you interact with the world. And it's not work-life balance, it's life balance. And I want to not try to blend activities that should be separate into at the same time. So don't do work and non-work activities at the same time. I'm going to be at the soccer field watching and chatting with work and trying to read emails or do one thing. Trying to do both at the same time, it's multitasking. You're going to burn yourself out. You're going to never be able to turn off. And acknowledging that life has its seasons. So When you're a parent of young kids, you might want to be involved in more of their activities than you are when they get to be older, and that's okay.
And they start to ignore you.
And they start to ignore you and roll their eyes, and where you really like to start to tease them because it becomes a challenge of how often can I get them to roll their eyes in one conversation. But those are things that you can start to just give yourself permission to acknowledge and We've all seen the typical Eisenhower matrix, which has that 4 blocks of like, do now, plan for later, delegate, and just delete or just stop doing. I turn that into just 2, right? Sometimes the things that we think we should delegate, you should just delete. Nobody should do it. Just because you're not doing it doesn't mean it's any better. No one should be doing it. Find those things you can just say not to do. That's one of my favorites that people like, well, we'll just automate it. Or you could just decide that nothing, not a machine or a human needs to do it, and we're just going to stop doing it. And then really focus on what are the 1 to 2 things I really need to focus my attention on today? And then what are the other things I need to plan for in the future that I want to keep my eye on? And so, Whatever you're doing today should ideally set up with what you can leverage in the future, and just always kind of thinking in that way. What am I doing today? And I know what I want to do in the future, and how can I leverage as much of what I am doing today for the future?
That's great. All right, well, you are an actual CEO yourself, so let's get a little personal. I'm sure you've faced this before. Any personal examples where you've faced burnout, and what did you do to overcome that?
Yeah, I mean, facing, I would say now you caught me on a good 6 months. I haven't felt that urge of burnout, but I would say probably a year ago I was really starting to feel burnout because as a new company, you're trying to catch fire in the marketplace. Unfortunately, it wasn't catching fire as fast as I would've liked to do. And so I was fighting a number of different things of the ego hit of saying, I know how to do this. I can do this on my own. I can do this better than everybody else. And saying, well, no, a lot of this just required time And I'm no better or worse than anybody who's gone along in this journey. And then just the financial strain on the organization when you're going through a down cycle of how you keep the lights on and still be true to the rest of the organization. But, and I would have told myself, like, no doubt, Carlo, this is obvious, but when you're living it, it's really hard to notice it.
Always.
Is if you stop taking care of yourself, Because you're worrying, you make it worse. You don't make it better.
Yeah.
And so in order to be selfless, you have to learn to be selfish. And that was one of the things that was hard to kind of come to terms with. Like, that sounds great. That sounds simple. It's hard, though. And it's a hard balance. And it's really hard to do.
It's securing your mask before securing the mask of others. That was always a good metaphor that I thought about. I was like, well, of course that makes sense. And it's— but it's hard to remember.
Yeah, but caring about your organization, deeply about your organization, can't come to your own self-sacrifice.
And speaking of self-sacrifice, we're starting to get the high sign from our producer, Ian. And so I want to make sure that we give you a chance to give your final words of wisdom, Carlo. What are the final bits you want to leave people with?
I want to leave with just get 7 to 9 hours of sleep and go to bed at the same time every night.
And elephant. I can't wait because I know Elaine is going to just look at me and go, elephant, elephant, elephant. And I'm going to be like, I hate Carlos so much right now, but he's right.
Elephant with probably a curse word after that too. Like, hey, elephant. Well, Carlos, thank you so much again for talking with us. Again, we'll be sure to keep an eye on, on One Team Partners and your team building advice in the future. As always, we have his contact information, the One Team Partners website, and other informational links posted in the show notes. Make sure that you check them out to learn more. Thank you for joining us and listening with us today, and make sure you get sleep. And Carlo, thank you so much for your time today too.
Yeah, thanks, Carlo.
Thank you very much. This was a wonderful conversation.
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