[Leadership] How to navigate different stages of growth and commercialization with Sonya Weigle

If you think about what makes you successful in a scientific environment, in a lab environment, how success is defined there is very, very different from how we define it in a fully functional capital-raising organization. And those things, everything from, you know, talent acquisition to leadership development to how you manage folks to how you strategize, how you collaborate, you know, in a lab, being communicative and collaborative and bringing everybody in and all of their opinions in to inform the next step is a critical piece. But as the CEO of a developing company that's trying to attract capital at every stage, as you move forward in the stages, your ability to collaborate really starts to compromise your ability to keep up with the speed of what your investors are looking for, what your board is looking for, what your potential hires are looking for. You know, you can't collaborate necessarily on everything. Everybody can't necessarily have a voice in all decisions. Everything can't always be perfect all the time. You know, in the lab, obviously, obviously it needs to be, but sometimes that PowerPoint has to be just good enough to get the meeting and close the deal. And sometimes that's a hard bridge to cross when you're so used to being so precise and so collaborative with things, but the speed of the deal sometimes requires you to move a little faster than you're used to.

Hey, Sonia, welcome to the podcast. We're really excited to have you here.

Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here.

Yeah, I know this is, uh, this'll be a good, this'll be a fun one, I think. But, uh, I did give you the warning ahead of time as we always ask everybody this question, uh, give us a funny story that's happened in your career.

Sure. So, um, one of the more circuitous angles of my career was when I got into commercial real estate development. Um, yeah. All right. Uh, back in like, I don't know, 2006 or so. Had the opportunity to get into commercial real estate development with Emmitt Smith, who we—

That's awesome.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's, it is, it's—

For Nick, explain who Emmitt Smith is for Nick, because he doesn't know.

Yeah. He's the greatest running back of all time. Dallas Cowboys, you know, 1990s, you know.

American football.

American football. Running back? Was he running back from? You know, I had the opportunity to start this commercial real estate development company with him and with, uh, uh, 5 other partners. And the funny part is when I tell this story, people obviously always say, well, you know, how do you know Emmett Smith? And so I say, well, I was introduced to him through Roger Stalbach, of course.

Again, more American football references than Nick Clare.

Yeah. You kind of have to know, and you kind of have to, you know, it is, um, You know, a little bit of an older reference, I guess, at this point. But, you know, people find that hilarious as well. But my business partner at the time was very good friends with Roger Staubach. And, you know, he expressed a desire at the time to bring a Minardio commercial real estate development solution to his company so that we could partner and go after commercial contracts together. And so, as we put this together, you know, it's like, well, you know, Emmett is retiring from football and he wants to get— I'm mentoring him into commercial real estate. And so, you know, that's how it all kind of came together. But, People often find it funny when I say, you know, A, I was, did commercial real estate with Emmitt, still doing it, but that, you know, I met him through Roger Staub.

Yeah. That's like the twist in the story. It's like one thing to know Emmitt Smith. It's another one to know Roger Staub.

And I'm not even a huge football fan. You know, I went to Emmitt's Hall of Fame induction in 2010 with my family and we were hanging out at the post-celebration and I was like, you know, Emmitt, I didn't, I just didn't know you were that good. Is he the equivalent here of like, he's like the big brother I never wanted?

So he's like Wayne Rooney. No, no, the equivalent here is about me opening a bakery with Thierry Henry, but I was introduced by Arsène Wenger. Sure, there you go. Yes, that's, that is the equivalent. Yes. Uh, that's great. Awesome. Well, Maybe it would be helpful before we dive into everything we're going to talk about, maybe give a little background on yourself and then, yeah, we've got some fun topics to go through.

Sure, sure. So right now I am the CEO and founder of Next Stage Bio Advisors, and we are an advisory company that works with early-stage biotech companies as they face a couple of important inflection points which typically require them to quickly scale their organizations. And so we advise them on how to align their hiring plans to their financial and clinical milestones to scale quickly, efficiently, effectively, sustainably. I'm also the CEO and founder of something called The Catalytic Collective, where I work with executive women in life sciences and biotech to kind of architect their next stage chapters if they're looking to exit the biotech industry. But, you know, prior to that, I've been in global consulting is where I started my career. A million years ago, and I started my consultancy back in 2000 when I was raising very small kids, wanted to do the love, the work that I love to do, but didn't want to travel all the time. And so starting my own business was the way that I could figure out how to both raise my family and to grow a business at the same time. So I've been in the M&A integration space for my whole career. I've done everything from a global radio show and M&A integration to commercial real estate, to, um, just, you know, various entrepreneurial pursuits. But the throughput of my whole career has been around life sciences.

That's awesome. Great. Yeah. Did you, um, and so were you— did you like, uh, study life sciences, biotech, or, you know, anything in the lab, uh, in uni?

No, I am, uh, an extraordinarily, uh, qualitative.

I love that.

Yeah, I was poly-sci, um, English composition and psychology in undergrad, fully intending on going to law school. And then I went to Carnegie Mellon and really leaned into business and management around human capital strategy specifically, and ended up in life sciences when I was with Accenture. It was Andersen Consulting way back then. And, you know, just doing life sciences, big pharma consulting, which after I started my own company evolved into smaller pharma and then biotech specifically. So it's sort of— I've evolved into it. I'm not the scientist by any stretch, but I do get to kind of upskill the scientists so that they can do what they need to do.

Yeah, I also did start in the life sciences and then fell into it and then fell in love with it because it's like the stuff that you learn, like the stuff that we're doing here in this space is just so fascinating and like it's on such a fast trajectory with also like just touching the actual lives of patients with the work that's being done. Whereas like previously I was selling software to like marketing and IT, like, what am I doing there? That's not that interesting. So, um, yeah, that's cool.

Yeah, it's an honor to be in an industry like this. I mean, I'm deeply committed to early-stage drug development, to, you know, being part of teams that develop novel solutions for untreated diseases and not being the science person at all, to get to be on the forefront of that sort of innovation is really an honor. And it's an interesting place to be as a non-science person, someone that's terrible at math.

All right, well, looks like Nick had some technical difficulties, so he's no longer with us. Well, so it's just gonna be Sonya and I to finish this off. But Nick's question before he left was, have you noticed any, you know, sort of like industry differences or nuances, say between like the life sciences or commercial development or any of the other kind of industries you've been a part of?

You know, when I started my consulting career, it was mostly life sciences, but I did, I worked in consumer products, I worked in financial services, Obviously, I've personally done some work in commercial real estate. And, you know, for me, I think the nuances that are different tend to be around compliance and, you know, just sort of the things from a regulatory standpoint that you have to pay attention to. It's very different across industries. Now, you know, obviously the financial service industry is a very compliant industry, but its regulatory and compliance requirements are very different from what you would need in commercial real estate or in, in biotech, in pharma, but regardless of what you're doing, whether it's entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial, being able to stay within the lines of what's required is super important.

Yeah, it's interesting. And I imagine with— when you're working with a lot of these earlier stage companies, they may generally know what some of the regulations are, what some of the things are that they have to follow, but I imagine many of them are maybe they are a spinout from an academic lab and maybe they don't have as much of that sort of acumen. And so I guess what do you kind of notice there as some of the gaps as you maybe go from technical founder to actually now running a company and you gotta, you know, understand not only the like people landscape, operationally, fundraising, your regulatory. I imagine that's a lot to take on for these people.

Well, at that stage, it is a lot. You know, if you think about what makes you successful in a scientific environment, in a lab environment, you know, what— how success is defined there is very, very different from how we define it in, you know, a fully functional capital-raising organization. And, you know, those things, everything from, you know, talent acquisition to leadership development to how you manage folks to how you strategize, how you collaborate, you know, in a lab, being communicative and collaborative and bringing everybody in and all of their opinions in to inform the next step is a critical piece. But as the CEO of a developing company that's trying to attract capital at every stage, as you move forward in the stages, your ability to collaborate really starts to compromise your ability to keep up with the speed of what your investors are looking for and what your, your board is looking for, what your potential hires are looking for. You know, you can't collaborate necessarily on everything. Everybody can't necessarily have a voice in all decisions. Everything can't always be perfect all the time. You know, in the lab, obviously it needs to be. But sometimes that PowerPoint has to be just good enough to get the meeting and close the deal. And sometimes that's a hard bridge to cross when you're so used to being so precise and so collaborative with things. But the speed of the deal sometimes requires you to move a little faster than you're used to.

Yeah. It's like, as a, let's say you're a team of 10, you could have all 10 people in a room. And as a CEO or founder, you can be very hands-on in sort of every decision. You can be involved in all of those decisions. But when you're at, you know, 50, 100, 200 people, like you physically cannot be involved in all of those decisions. And so I imagine one of the most important things, right, is, well, I guess there's probably two, right? It's like, how do you create that vision and strategy for the organization? How does it permeate down through it? And then how do you get the right people in place to, to drive that?

Yeah, you know, one of the analogies that I love is that you've got to go from being first chair clarinet to being the orchestra conductor.

I like that.

You know, you may be so good at the clarinet, and that's what got you here, but now you've got to walk away from your instrument and you have to lead the entire orchestra. And, you know, that's really, really important. You've got to go from being super, super proficient in one area to good enough to lead and to guide across all of the areas. And, Certainly surrounding yourself with the right team, stepping back and understanding and recognizing talent and skill and ability, you know, in your initial C-suite that you put together, you know, making sure you're hiring people that have experience that can hit the ground running. You know, you're not necessarily developing your junior pipeline right away, right? You're just, you're bringing in experts at that point. So that requires capital, that requires speed, that requires, creating an environment that people with experience will say, hey, this is something that's worth taking a shot on. I want to be part of this team. And then selling that team to investors who are investing just as much in that team as they are in the drug and in the strategy. Because you've got to— they want confidence that this is the team that can execute. That's a lot to think about as a new leader.

That's really interesting, which is they're not just buying into your technology, or what it is that you've developed, or your therapeutic, whatever it is. It's their— they also have to buy into the team that you've built. And I think this is also that sort of transition point where you're going from, I've got this really cool technology, I'm a technical founder, technical CEO, and I can't just go into an investor meeting and show 'em a bunch of data slides because that doesn't, like, that's not gonna resonate. They're not gonna understand what you're talking about. And then then how do you then think about hiring that team? Because that team becomes a big selling point. And so I imagine that that is, that is prob— I mean, I don't know if it's more important, but it's probably just as important is hiring the right sets of people and then really selling that team as part of like any sort of investor pitch or anything.

Yeah, no, it, it's absolutely critical and getting to a place where you understand. A lot of times, HR is sort of seen as, you know, personnel. And it's so much more than that. It is a strategic driver. It's a quantitative set of circumstances that align with the strategy and allow you to execute. So if you sort of deemphasize the role of HR in building out the organization, you know, you really do that at your peril. A lot of times you'll see early stage companies make the mistake of hiring people they know, who people they're comfortable with, who are, who may or may not be a sustainable figure for the long-term growth of the company. So, you know, what your organization structure looks like at the very beginning is very often not the same set of folks, the same structure, the same approach, the same culture that's going to get you to that that next stage. Because at some point, you begin as a leader, as a CEO and a founder, to be held accountable for the folks that you've put in place to drive, right? And so when an investor is talking to an early-stage company and they want to know, well, what is your clinical trial plan? Who's developing those clinical trials? If it's not somebody that has demonstrated experience, expertise, a track record of success in that, it's not going to have a lot of credibility. They're not necessarily going to believe that you're going to be able to develop this drug. They're not going to— believe that your CFO can put together the financing plan and the run rate in order to do it if, in fact, they've never done it before. So, you know, and hiring the wrong people, it's really, really expensive. It can be as much as 2.5 times their base salary to replace them depending on the role that they play in the organization. I mean, those are real quantitative figures that, you know, help me to help CEOs understand it's really important to hire quickly but effectively and to align those hires with your financial and your clinical milestones. So you're not hiring the wrong people at the wrong time or too many people or not enough people so that everything that you do, every milestone that you meet has the people you need to get there, but also justifies the people that you've just bought in.

Yeah, it's really, it's really interesting because I think biotech has a really unique, um, business model where milestones are so far out in the future a lot of times, and so many things are dependent on like biology working, right? Or dependent on like, you know, these things that you, you can kind of control, but not really at the same time. Like you can only do so many tests in vitro before you have to move to in vivo, and then you have to move into people. And it's like, because it has these crazy long milestones where if something goes wrong, it can really throw off the entire, like, program, the entire company. Uh, even something as simple as, like, outsourcing something to a CRO, or if something doesn't go well, that is a massive problem because the timelines are so long. And then, then you have to— then you're battling runway. It's, it's— so how do you kind of talk through those decisions with founders where they may not be thinking about like every single milestone or thinking about different scenarios that could occur that, that may, may impact like the overall outcome or, you know, success of, of their company.

Yeah, it's a huge risk. I mean, you know, one of the things that's really unique to biotech is the huge risk-reward profile that we operate under. And the things that we're doing are so critically important, right? We're developing new drugs. So it's a risk worth taking. But you have to be very, very considered and measured in how you scale the organization to meet really long milestones. You have to kind of see those smaller milestones that lay in between and hire accordingly. And so a lot of times what I advise is to bring in very experienced but fractional expertise. You know, you're not risking, you're not paying big salaries for something that may or may not, you know, you begin to convert people from fractional to full-time as you get closer to those milestones, as the data starts to mature, it looks a little better. You bring people in that have the risk tolerance for something like that. But you need that expertise, right? You can't risk it on somebody that's never done it before. You know, that expertise is what's going to attract that capital and, and, and extend that confidence. But you, you know, you start that way and then you kind of build from there and then you allow them to build their teams as the, as the, as the milestones reveal themselves successfully.

And when, when does somebody like, what, what sort of, I guess, milestone, what sort of stage should a founder be thinking about starting this process of hiring these people, right? Hiring, you know, much more experienced people who maybe are more used to managing versus doing, which is probably not something you've hired people for as of yet. And then the follow-up question to that is like, what are some of those things that you're looking for even in a fractional person, right? Is it, oh, you've done this before, but you know, is it a similar modality? Is it a similar, therapeutic area? Like, what are some of those, like, characteristics that you're looking for too?

Well, so the, the first characteristics at the very beginning, you're looking for co-founders. You know, you're looking for folks that are willing to operate at risk. You know, maybe you get a seed partner that can underwrite your operations, you know, maybe provide some sort of remuneration for time spent, but it's really an equity game at that point, right? And you need to get it to a place where you can attract that Series A of capital. And once you you get that round of capital in, that's when you can sort of bring in the— start to bring in the doers. But you're looking for someone that has a really strong commitment to the disease state. You've got somebody that's got, you know, understands the therapeutic area and has an entrepreneurial spirit and risk tolerance to kind of go for that. And it's, you know, and that really resides strongly in the biotech space, you know, where you really run into trouble a lot of times is trying to conflate pharma with biotech because it's, you know, they're two very different, in my mind, success profiles where, you know, if you bring somebody out of large pharma and then you place them into biotech, they may not necessarily— they're kind of used to having, you know, big teams, big resources, other things. And, you know, for a long time in biotech, you know, it's going to be all hands on deck and it's going to be, You know, your, your finance person is also doing your legal, is also doing your compliance, is also doing your HR, is all, you know, and so it's, it's someone that is really excited and engaged around the idea of starting something new.

Yeah, that makes sense. And so it sounds like you, you find that, that co-founder, you get it to the point where now you've got your Series A funding. Is, is that You mentioned the doers can come in there, or is that more where you start to look for some of the, the leadership hires with, with a lot more experience? Or is that maybe more like Series B, uh, type, type, uh, timelines?

It's sort of in between, you know, once you get Series A, you can start bringing in leaders who are also still gonna be doers. They're gonna be player coaches.

True.

Where, and you may be, you know, outsourcing things, you're still using consultants. But you're beginning to invest in systems at this point. So from, from a human capital scaling strategy standpoint, that's— we want to build the infrastructure so that when we are scaling, we can move candidates through the system quickly and efficiently and the system won't break. So that's when you take that Series A capital and you start to invest in talent acquisition systems, in, in human resource information systems. All of the things that underwrite the employee lifecycle. Because you want to be able to attract really great talent. And in order to do that and retain them, that system has to be put in place. So you want to build something, take the time and the expense to build it properly so that when you're bringing people in, a person a week or whatever it is that you're doing, they're moving through in a way that's effective and efficient, but also well received. And it's a great experience because that's their first experience and vision to the company. And then you're going to want to start to build what the culture is going to be. You've got to be conversant around what's the environment that we're inviting people into, what's important to us, what do we value, and to make sure that anybody that you're bringing into the organization is aligned with that. Because again, it's still going to be very small. We all have to be on the same team singing from the same songbook.

So as companies are thinking about, let's say they're planning ahead and they're maybe thinking of doing things the right way, so they're like, okay, cool, I need to put these systems in place. What are some— do you have like a set of like core principles or sort of pillars that people like, that you really need to make sure that you instrument? Like, I don't know, hiring, uh, rubrics or, uh, onboarding plans, like those types of things? Or are there some sort of like key areas that your people really should be focusing on when they're— when they know that they need to do a lot of hiring in a short period of time and get it right?

Yeah, there's— so there's sort of a 90-day sprint that I like to take that looks at assessing who we are as an organization right now. So what would the existing employees, however small, what are the things that they would consider to be success markers for— that got them here and have enabled them to plan for the future? So what are those cultural things? What are those competencies? What are those behaviors? That regardless of how big we grow or how fast we grow need to remain. And then you use that to build a framework for your talent acquisition and for your onboarding, and then for your performance management and talent development. It's never too early to be thinking about those things because that's the one thing that's going to remain constant even as you grow. Bigger, you know, you're going to— communication is not going to be the same, right? As you get bigger, you're not going to hear from the CEO all the time. You're not going to collaborate across. But we've got to create collaborative workstreams without creating silos. You know, without having that cultural foundation in place upon which to grow, you know, if you don't take the time to do that on the front end, then it's going to be really hard to stitch that together later, especially when we're working in hybrid and remote environments. Yeah. You've been trying to figure that out. It's really worth taking that first 60, 90 days to put that stuff in place. And that way you understand from a corporate strategy how we define those human capital milestones that are aligned. So we know that we want to be first patient in at a certain date. So we need a clinical team that looks like this. And you kind of reverse engineer and to say, OK, we need a process to go find these folks. You're going to find the right folks faster and bring them in. They're going to be excited to come. It's all going to move much more efficiently if you're able to be super conversant, whether you're the talent acquisition person, whether you are the hiring manager, whether you're the team that's part of the interviewing. Panel, if everybody is singing the same song about what we're doing, why we're doing it, why we're excited about it, and why we're excited about you. All of that stuff is foundational, but once you have it, you just kind of move through it very quickly after that.

And it's interesting too, because I think with biotech, you have some of that is probably inherent into the, into, into like the mission is like, we're going to like cure XYZ disease. Like that is, that was a pretty cool mission to be a part of. Whereas like if you're, you know, maybe in there just a different type of industry, that may not be— it may be a lot harder to sort of come up with those types of ambitions and things.

Yeah. You know, I think patient focus is often, you know, one of the core principles or values of every biotech. You know, what goes along with that? You know, are we collaborative? You know, or, and consensus-driven, or do we move quickly? You know, I did an M&A integration for a joint venture between a big pharma and a smaller pharma, but the smaller pharma had more market share and they were actually the driver in the joint venture. Oh, interesting. Yeah, so the employees of the bigger pharma were like, well, you know, we're the big pharma, of course, were running the show and they actually weren't. And so when you've got a smaller one, in this case, it was a smaller one that had way more market share and they would, they described themselves as nimble. They, you know, they made quick decisions that, you know, they're, and they're fast. You know, this is what success looks like over here. Whereas the larger pharma was very collaborative and everybody needed to be on board. And so they moved slower. Some would say from the outside, you know, that's why the market share was so sort of crazy. Well, at that point you have to decide, well, which culture wins? Are we consensus-driven or are we nimble? You know, which, how, how do we integrate these two? And so, you know, it's important to have that together before you do the transaction.

Yeah. And I think too, even, even within teams, like different, if different teams are functioning in different ways as you start to grow, you got 100 people, you, you have 5, 6, 7, 8 different teams doing different things, you know, working towards the same goal. They may want to try and set their own sort of like culture on that team. But then if that doesn't align to the company, that's where it's an issue, right? So if you, I feel like if you let the culture persist on its own, you end up with pro— like more of a melting pot probably, which is in, which is good normally. But in this analogy that I'm using is probably not as good. Um, where then you have all of these culture clashes where you have people that are like, I want to be involved in everything. And then you have other people that are like, I'm going to go fast and break things, you know, that's, yeah.

Well, and you know, where you really see that is when you have, uh, an R&D company or a clinical company. That has successfully done a Phase 3, and now it's time to apply for approval and commercialize the drug. So here you're busy going for your Phase 3, your FDA approval, right? And obviously to get to that point in any biotech, I mean, that's huge, right? I mean, that is success. But now you're going to impose this commercial organization, which is an entirely different animal. So the cultural tissue rejection that can happen there is very a very real thing because you've got, you know, very methodical, very systemic thinking, you know, clinical folks. And, you know, that's what made them successful, obviously, because look, we got the drug here. And then you've got these commercial folks who are like, fill up my bag, I'm ready to sell. What are, you know, let's go. And so you just have to remind people that we are on the same team, you know, and but for all of the amazing work of this clinical team, this commercial team would have nothing to sell. But for this commercial team, we would not be putting the drug in patients and on the market and scaling the company and everything else. And so that— there's a lot of work that has to happen beforehand.

Mm-hmm.

And make sure that tissue rejection doesn't happen.

Yeah, I think that's, that's really good. Yeah, I mean, we're talking about a bunch of different stuff here. I guess we're coming up on time, but is there maybe any other sort of, you know, last, you know, tidbits of advice you could give to anybody who might be either at a, at a smaller company as an employee and trying to, you know, think about these sorts of challenges or founders out there? Yeah. Any, any last words of wisdom?

Yeah. You know, I think the important thing is to identify your company's true north and stick to it, you know, and understanding that culture development and organization design and all of those things are, are, are, are fluid and they do ebb and flow. But that true north is really, really important because it enables you to align around a particular, a very specific objective and, and direction. So regardless of who you are in the company, what role you play, what level you are, whether you are a key stakeholder outside of the company, I think this applies to the board and investors. Everybody needs to be aligned around that true north.

Regarding the true north, do you think that's something that can be done just within the company, or do you think that it's important to work with outside parties, whether that be consultants, etc.? In order to refine the thinking? Because I find that oftentimes if you're in an organization, you kind of get groupthink around certain things, and then you, it's, you don't really have as much, um, uh, like challenging of your concepts or your ideas. It's like, do you find that it's more beneficial when, um, companies do look towards, you know, maybe external support in order to refine that true north, refine some of these your capabilities, and that you might be biased, obviously. But just kind of curious from your thoughts.

I think it's important to have both that intrapreneurial and entrepreneurial perspective when it comes to these things. So if you are placing value and equipping and allowing your organization learning and OD function within the company to operate as a strategic partner, then you'll have those resources to bring that outside perspective. But the benefit of going outside of the company and using consultants and other resources is they're bringing knowledge and expertise from other scenarios. They're able to see things that you necessarily can't see. And they're able to work on these things in parallel. So it's really important that— you're able to both stick to your knitting and doing what— do what it is that you are tasked to do in terms of drug development and everything else, but finding partners that can in parallel equip you and your teams and your leaders to think strategically and to do all of these things is also really important. You know, that outside perspective can be really, really valuable.

Yeah, I definitely agree as well. But yeah, this has been, this has been great. So I really appreciate you coming on and sharing, you know, your, your wisdom, expertise. And then we educated Nick on some concepts related to American football.

So it's great. This has been, this has been awesome. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Awesome. Well, have a good one. We'll talk soon.