Semper Maior:

Pumping up the candor

CULTURE | FINANCE | BIOTECH

Wouldn’t it be better if everyone in our ecosystem were candid with one another?

After all, within companies it’s common to encourage everyone to speak their minds. If you see a problem, call it out; give honest feedback; feedback is a gift; people have a duty to dissent if they disagree with something. So, what stops this corporate if-you-see-something-say-something from going beyond managers and employees? If we normalized candor, we could learn more from one another, cross-pollinate best practices, and correct misunderstandings.

The value of candor is pretty obvious to everyone. When I recently ran a poll on social media asking what could make the biomedical innovation ecosystem better, more candor beat out more humility, more creativity, and more effort (humility, which some respondents pointed out goes hand-in-hand with candor, came second).

I think it’s possible for individuals to maximize how much candid feedback they themselves receive. Although there are many situations in which candor is useful (hiring, firing, vendor selection, board meetings, etc.), to keep this actionable, let’s just focus on the narrow case of investors sharing what they really think with management teams trying to finance.

I think that we can dramatically increase the candor in those cases. And the power to pull that off lies with executives and everyone else who influences how financings are conducted.

After that, I’ll discuss Core biotech’s performance for 2024. To be candid, it was a year that could easily be forgotten – a recovery deferred. In terms of the setup for 2025, even though this initial start to the year is notably gloomier than how 2024 started, the sector’s fundamentals feel like they did going into 2024. I think biotech is poised to do well from both pharma’s incessant need to acquire new assets and public company attrition creating a vacuum for private companies to crossover. So 2025 should be better than 2024, especially if we all manage to offer more cowbell… I mean candor.