By Ankit Mahadevia, former CEO of Spero Therapeutics and Atlas alumni, as part of the From The Trenches of LifeSciVC
I recently read Yuval Noah Hariri’s Nexus; what stuck with me was how a society uses information to create shared meaning can have a profound impact on people’s experiences. Hariri employs this lens to illustrate the significant differences between living in Moscow versus Michigan in the 1980s and Beijing versus Boston today. What’s true for society is also true for growing organizations, whether two employees or 2,000. I’m sure you can recall very different experiences you’ve had at various organizations; how they shared information was likely a key driver of those experiences. 
Founding teams have an opportunity to establish effective communication and decision-making processes from the start. So, how does information impact growing organizations, and what can we do to optimize it?
In my experience, three critical information-sharing decisions that affect performance: 1) how teams create shared purpose, 2) hold their team accountable, and 3) how they compartmentalize information.
Information to create shared purpose
A shared mission is a key reason why many of us are willing to undertake new, risky endeavors and persevere through challenges. Early on, the thrill of overcoming early obstacles to grow the company is often enough to drive unity of purpose on a small team. While you’re fighting for scientific and financial survival, forcing a dialogue with your team on your “reason for being” feels like overkill. That said, the “feisty underdog” mentality that drives an early team can become self-limiting as the company scales. Sharing information consistently about a company’s origin story and its reason for being can help maintain focus in both good times and more complex ones. A prior company I led experienced rapid growth as we adjusted to remote work during the pandemic. We took the time, both at All-Hands meetings and with each new hire, to share the company’s history and provide examples of the specific patient needs we were serving – it made a significant difference in creating a shared purpose to counterbalance the fragmentation that growth and remote work created. If I had to do it again, I would have started becoming more systematic about our shared purpose far earlier in the company’s growth, perhaps as soon as we grew beyond the core crew of fifteen or so that launched the company.
Information to create accountability
Hariri argues against the notion that providing more information to more people more often is the key to progress. The concept of radical candor has gained popularity in driving organizational accountability, perhaps due to this myth. The book’s point is that unfettered information can be entropic for society if there are no strong institutions in place to create shared meaning and order. For organizations, I believe the same is true; radical candor can be supremely unproductive without the appropriate mechanisms to support systematic feedback and accountability.
While it’s great to empower a team to express their thoughts freely, not everyone consistently applies this principle in their daily work. What resulted from our experimentation with radical candor is that unstructured candor more often originated from certain parts of the organization, typically those with more extroverted members. It can be challenging to distinguish between the volume, quantity, and actionability of feedback. It was also difficult to account for the varying activation energies of different teammates when sharing feedback. Additionally, without institutional systems to act on the input, radical candor misses an opportunity to ensure accountability.
We have had better luck driving open and honest feedback through the company’s systems. One example that worked for me in prior roles is committing to quarterly calendar discussions that systematically review the company’s therapeutics (though this approach can be applied to any initiative within the company). We used a simple written template that required the team to specifically outline a program’s strengths and shortcomings and invite feedback from the group outside of the core team. The structured written format (plus posting the document for all to see) focuses on the project rather than individuals, enables the whole group to view and contribute feedback, and discusses it in a setting where we can drive accountability.
Information within a company hierarchy
Nexus asserts that the degree to which societies compartmentalize accurate information comes with risks, whether that information is tightly controlled or more widely available – there is no correct answer. In my opinion, there is a right answer for emerging biotech. The risks of tight compartmentalization far outweigh the benefits, with due respect to the constraints of publicly traded companies and specific transaction discussions. Therapeutics development is complex, requires remarkable resilience, and the buy-in of experienced, talented professionals. It is hard enough to advance a drug even when the teams doing the work have the identical cards as your leadership team. Perhaps this is a religious argument, but it is borne out of observations about what results look like at the team and Board level, where a management team is needlessly curating information. In one egregious instance, a (very short-tenured) CEO would rehearse before a Board of Directors (BOD) discussion, down to his team’s speaking lines, and insist on taking all questions and answers (Q&A).
This is all well and good to say, but a company is as transparent as the systems it employs to achieve that transparency. Here, there is no correct answer, but I will note that the choices a team makes early form a template and expectation that shapes the future, even in small ways. Two companies I helped co-found around the same time made different choices about how inclusive they were in the Boardroom – senior leaders only or the whole team. Even a few years later, with other leaders, these companies continued to diverge in the number of people attending Board meetings. It pays to take some intention to think ahead about how the company plans to keep people on the same page.
Some humility
Much as societal structure is but one factor of many that drives societal progress, these suggestions are not to say that there is an organizational or informational magic wand that will outweigh either scientific serendipity or thoughtful product positioning. That said, making the right choices on how to create a shared vision, drive accountability, and share information to foster transparency can help make progress a lot easier— and a lot more enjoyable.
