I want to tell you about one of the most remarkable founders I've ever worked with.

This person had everything: a genuine insight, years of data. A clear sense of why their approach could work where others had failed.

When you got them talking about their science, you didn't need to be a biologist to feel the weight of what they were building.

But at the seed stage, when the company was maybe ten months old and the investor relationships that would define the next decade were just beginning to form, they made a decision that quietly cost them.

They hired a “professional” firm to handle investor outreach.

The firm blasted their deck to hundreds of names. They showed up at conferences “representing” the company.

Things felt busy. Everything felt like progress.

The investors never met the founder.

By the time I got to know this person - remarkable, articulate, genuinely passionate about their work, the raise had stalled in a way that was hard to diagnose from the outside.

The deck was good. The science was solid. The firm had checked every tactical box.

But investors kept passing. And when I asked one of them why, the answer was painfully simple: “I still don't know who's actually behind this.”

This founder hadn't outsourced a task. They had outsourced their identity.

And investors, even ones who never articulate it this clearly, can feel that absence like a missing heartbeat.

The deal just feels “off”.

The same way that being an NBA player isn't about dribbling a ball down the court.

Dribbling is how you get somewhere. The game is something else.

Being a CEO - especially at the seed stage, especially in biotech, is about ownership.

It's about being the person who shows up when things are hard, when the data is inconclusive, when a partner is going cold, when a board member has questions you don't have clean answers to yet.

It's about doing the dull, repetitive, sometimes demoralizing work of investor outreach, because you understand that showing up is the job.

I believe that this is one of the hardest identity shifts there is.

But I also believe that most of you didn't start a company because it was going to be easy.

You started it because of the patient who doesn't have a good option yet.

Because you wanted to see your scientific work realized in the world.

Because somewhere in you, there is an industry leader waiting for the permission to show up.

Those things - indeed, all of them, are on the other side of this identity shift.

Today I want to help you get there.

Most leadership frameworks focus on what to do. Our framework starts with who you need to become.

HERO maps four dimensions of the early-stage CEO role.

Each one represents an identity shift - a way of being that the scientific career doesn't prepare you for, and that no curriculum can hand you.

They have to be practiced, repeated, and eventually internalized.

Underneath all four sits a single operating question: what deserves your time and presence - and what doesn't?

We'll come back to that with a practical tool at the end. But first, the four dimensions.

Set the north star; step out from behind the bench.

The identity shift

There is a moment every scientist-founder eventually faces.

It's the moment you realize that the most important thing you can do for your company is no longer the work at the bench - it's the work of making other people believe in what you're building.

Not believe that it will work in a technical sense. But believe in the vision of what it means if it does.

This is your north star. It’s not a slide in your deck; it’s not a mission statement on your company stationary.

It's a picture of a world that doesn't exist yet - one that you can see so clearly and describe to anyone who will listen. Your lead investor. Your potential hire who has three other offers on the table. Your CRO. Your pharma BD contact. Your grandma.

And make them feel the excitement of it. The inevitability of it if you work together.

The best founders can do this in a coffee shop, in an elevator, on a call they weren't prepared for.

The bigger shift is accepting that carrying this flame is now the job.

That means stepping out from behind the bench, from the place where your identity has lived for years, and into the front of the room.

Before you feel ready. Before the data is complete.

The behavioral practice

Test your north star against the simplest possible audience.

Can you explain what you're building, and why it matters, to someone with no scientific background, in under two minutes, and have them feel something?

Not understand the mechanism conceptually. Really feel something.

If the answer is no, the problem isn't your communication skills.

It's that the north star isn't clear enough yet - to you.

Spend time there before you spend time on the pitch deck. And when you find the version that lands, protect it. Say it until it feels like a natural extension of your self - not something that you rehearsed.

Know the milestones. Say ‘no’ to everything else mercilessly.

The identity shift

Academic science rewards volume. More papers. More grants. More experiments running in parallel. More ideas explored.

The incentive structure is built around output and breadth - and if you've been successful in that world, it's because you're good at generating and pursuing many threads at once.

The CEO role inverts this entirely.

At the early stage, your company has perhaps three milestones that will determine whether you raise your next round, attract the right partner, or survive the next eighteen months.

Everything else - the panel invitations, the collaboration requests, the new platforms and tools and opportunities that arrive weekly, is noise.

Compelling, legitimate-sounding noise. But noise, nonetheless.

Discipline, in this context, is not a personality trait. It's a strategic decision.

Every yes is a no to something on your critical path.

Contrary to popular belief, the founders who move the fastest are not the ones who are grinding 16 hour days 7 days per week.

Instead, it’s the founders who have the clearest picture of what the next milestone requires, and the confidence to decline everything that doesn't serve it.

This is one of the most counterintuitive shifts in the transition, because saying no feels like a missed opportunity. In science, it often is. In company-building at the seed stage, it may be what saves you.

The behavioral practice

Write down your top three milestones for the next twelve months - the ones that will materially change your fundraising position, your partnership prospects, or your scientific narrative.

Be specific. “Progress on IND-enabling studies” is not a milestone. “Complete GLP tox package by Q3” is.

Now look at your calendar from last week. How many hours went toward those three milestones? How many went toward things that won't appear in your next investor update?

That gap is where your execution discipline lives - or doesn't. Build the habit of asking, before saying yes to anything: does this move the needle on one of my three milestones?

If not, the answer is no. And no is a complete sentence :)

Scientists build reputations through work. Papers. Patents. Results.

The quality of your output speaks for you over time, and the right people eventually find you. Relationships are valuable, but they're secondary to the science.

In a company, this is reversed.

The science is the tool. Relationships are the business.

Think about what your company actually is, at this stage. It's a group of people (your team, your advisors, your investors, your CRO, your legal counsel, your suppliers, your earliest customers or partners) who have chosen to bet on you and your vision.

Every single one of those relationships was built person to person. And every single one of them requires you to show up, consistently and directly, as the person driving this thing.

People need to know who's at the helm. Not your deck, not your data room, not a third-party firm representing you at a conference. You.

Are you someone they want to work with? Are you someone they'd back through a difficult pivot? Do they trust the person behind the pitch?

This applies to your investors, yes. But also, to the hire who's deciding between you and a well-funded incumbent. To the pharma BD contact who's gone quiet and needs one more reason to bring this to their team. To the CRO who will go the extra mile if they believe in the founder, and won't if they don't.

Your company is not the sum of its data. It's the sum of its relationships. Build accordingly.

The behavioral practice

Audit your relationships across three categories: investors and capital partners, external partners and vendors, internal team.

For each category, ask: who are the two or three relationships that matter most to your next milestone? When did you last reach out directly - not via your team, not via email blast, not through a connector?

If the answer is more than two weeks in any of those buckets, reach out today. Without a polished script. In your actual voice.

The absence of polish is often the point - it signals that the relationship matters enough for you to show up imperfectly.

Work “on” your business - not “in” your business.

The identity shift

If you've ever run a lab, you know the feeling. You're close to everything - the experiment design, the reagent orders, the hiring decisions, the day-to-day rhythm of the team.

You know what's working, what's behind, who needs support, and what's at risk. That proximity is part of what made you good at what you did.

As a CEO, that same instinct becomes a liability.

Not because the details don't matter - they do. But because your energy is now your scarcest resource, and not all energy is created equal.

There is work that only you can do: holding the flame, making the calls nobody else can make, showing up in the relationships that require the founder's presence.

That’s true founder work. And then there is everything else.

The question isn't how to stay on top of everything. It's how to build an environment where your team can be successful without requiring you at every step - so that when you do show up, it's because you're the right person, at the right moment, for the right reason.

That's what systems are for. Systems are not bureaucracy. They are not process for its own sake. Systems are how you multiply your presence without diluting it. They're how you carry the flame without burning out trying to light every candle.

The behavioral practice

Start by asking a simple question: what in your company only works because you're personally holding it together?

That's not a badge of honor. That's your next system to build.

Pick one - a recurring decision, a workflow, a standard you've been communicating informally - and externalize it. Write it down. Hand it to someone. Train them. Then rinse and repeat.

The goal isn't to remove yourself from the company. It's to show up by choice - not by necessity.

Across all four dimensions of HERO, there's one question that remains consistent:

Does this require me specifically - and does it materially advance the company right now?

The matrix below maps every activity in your company across two axes: strategic value and whether it requires you.

It gives you four clear answers - own it, buy it, minimize it, or kill it.

This is not a one-time exercise. It's a lens to apply to every decision that comes your way so that you protect your energy and your purpose.

Before you decide which quadrant something belongs in, there's a more important question: should this be on anyone's plate?

Remember: operational theater is real, and it's expensive.

Operational theater is activities that “looks like” company-building and “feel” like progress, but are fundamentally ways to avoid the things that actually move the needle, but may be dull, repetitive and offer no instant dopamine hit.

Things like actually sending out 20 investor outreach messages per week. Or having the hard conversation with a co-founder.

The signs of operational theater are recognizable: hiring a head of people ops at four employees because a podcast said culture starts early. Building a CRM workflow because a VC firm posted about it. Spending three months refining the deck instead of sending it to forty investors.

The filter is simple. Before anything gets on anyone's calendar, ask: will this materially advance the company in the next 90 days?

If the answer is no - kill it first. Then decide who does the rest.

Reading a framework is the easy part. The hard part is translating it into something you actually do this week, when your inbox is full and your calendar is already double-booked.

These actions are designed to be small enough to start today and meaningful enough to matter.

H - Hold the Flame

E - Execute with Discipline

R - Relationships

O - Organize in Systems

The shift from scientist to CEO isn’t a one-time event. It's a hundred small moments where you choose to show up differently - before you feel ready, before the data is complete, before the identity fully fits.

Here's my challenge for you this week: look at the four dimensions of HERO and pick the one where you're most behind. Not the easiest one. The one that makes you slightly uncomfortable to name.

That's the one to start with.

If you're still deep in scientist mode, that's not a failure. It's just where you are.

The founders who make this transition fastest are the ones who are most honest about where the gap is, and most willing to sit in the discomfort of closing it.

You started a company because you believed something was possible that most people couldn't see yet. That's already a CEO move.

Now the work is building the identity to match.

Hit reply - I'd love to hear which part of HERO resonates most, and where you're finding the transition hardest. These replies shape what I write next.

See you next Sunday.

- Vadim

PS: When you’re ready, here’s how I can help: