What Biotech Founders Struggle to Articulate
How strategic clarity determines access to capital, talent, and scale
After a year of conversations with biotech builders, I’ve begun to notice a pattern.
Founders can explain their science in extraordinary detail. The mechanism. The data. The validation pathway.
The competitive landscape. Ask them to walk through their platform architecture or describe their differentiation at the molecular level, and the clarity is immediate.
But ask them to articulate their stage, their actual risk profile, or why an investor should back them now versus later, and something shifts.
This is not about intelligence. It is about infrastructure.
Most founders have never been asked to answer these questions explicitly. And the industry does not teach this kind of articulation. Scientific training teaches precision about mechanisms. Business school teaches frameworks for analysis. Neither teaches founders how to assess and communicate the structural properties of their own organizations.
The result is a gap. Not a knowledge gap. A clarity gap.
The Seven Questions Founders Haven’t Been Asked to Answer
Over the past year, I have been mapping how companies articulate value across seven dimensions. These are not theoretical constructs. They are the actual questions that determine whether a company can access capital, hire senior talent, and scale without constant friction.
These questions sound simple. Most founders discover they are anything but.
1. Strategic Direction
How clear is your long-term strategic direction right now?
Most founders can describe their vision. Fewer can describe how their current decisions actually reflect that direction. When I ask, “do your resource allocations reinforce your stated priorities,” the answer is often hedged.
The issue is not that founders lack direction. The issue is that decisions often reflect legacy momentum or immediate pressure more than strategic intent. Direction exists in principle but not in practice.
2. Organizational Alignment
How aligned are your key stakeholders on what success means?
This is always a fun one for me. Most founders believe their team is aligned. It rarely is. Then I ask stakeholders separately what success looks like, and the definitions vary significantly depending on who you ask. It makes sense. Different stakeholders. Different subject matter expertise, different opinions on what success looks like.
Broad agreement on goals exists. But the specifics fragment under pressure. One person defines success as clinical validation. Another defines it as partnership traction. A third defines it as capital efficiency. These are not the same thing, and the misalignment creates friction when decisions matter.
3. Capacity and Resources
How sustainably resourced is your organization for upcoming milestones?
This is where founders are most honest. Most will admit they are stretched thin. Key commitments depend on heroic effort or external support. Resources are mostly adequate, but buffers are limited, and variability is high.
The question reveals something structural: most teams are operating closer to capacity limits than they realize. When new demands arrive, systems strain. Adaptation requires firefighting rather than deliberate adjustment. I can look someone in the eyes when I ask this question and almost predict what they are going to say before the words leave their lips.
4. Execution Momentum
How well does your operational rhythm support quality outcomes?
Most founders describe their rhythm as “fine” or “getting better.” Then I ask: how often does urgency override strategic judgment? The neck stiffens. The brow furrows. The head angles slightly downward to look forward with a cautious, measured response. The answer is almost always “more than we would like.” This is where I tend to talk about building a safe space for conversation and “radical transparency”.
Rhythm is erratic. Urgency dominates. Quality suffers not because the team lacks competence, but because the operational structure does not protect space for deliberation. The system is optimized for speed, not for judgment.
5. Cross-Functional Collaboration
How effective are your cross-team collaborations in practice?
Founders will say collaboration works. Then they describe how it actually works: handoffs break down, coordination requires active intervention, and information gaps regularly compromise decision quality.
Collaboration is fragmented or siloed by default. It works when explicitly structured, but defaults to silos otherwise. This is not a people problem. It is a structural problem. Well, maybe sometimes it’s a people problem, but really it’s structural at the core. If you build a space that is collaborative by nature, the people tend to love collaborating. It’s in our nature.
6. Leadership Energy and Engagement
How engaged and motivated are key leaders and teams right now?
This is the question founders are least prepared to answer honestly. Most will say engagement is “good” or “strong.” But when pressed, they admit that energy levels fluctuate significantly. This is a key piece of the puzzle. Some work is energizing. Much of it feels like a grind. Grinding grates on your soul, and it affects downstream performance more than you might want to admit.
Leadership energy is not infinite. When work feels consistently draining, sustainability becomes a real concern. Founders often do not assess this dimension until someone burns out or leaves. I hear comments from HR teams all the time about this.
7. Narrative Coherence
How confidently can you articulate the story of your work and outcomes?
Most founders can pitch. Fewer can articulate a consistent story that resonates across contexts. The narrative that works in investor meetings does not work in partnership discussions. The story told to the board does not match the story told to new hires.
The fragmentation is not intentional. It is structural. Founders have not built narrative infrastructure. They have a collection of pitches, not a coherent story.
Why This Matters
These questions are not abstract. They map directly to whether a company can raise capital, attract talent, and scale effectively.
Investors ask about strategic direction because they need to understand whether the company knows wtf it is going. If direction is unclear or decisions do not reflect stated priorities, the investor sees risk and exits the conversation.
Partners ask about execution momentum because they need to know whether the company can deliver. If operational rhythm is erratic, partnerships become risky.
Talent asks about organizational alignment and leadership energy because they need to know whether the company is a place where they can build a career. If alignment is fragmented or energy is depleted, retention becomes difficult. No one worth a damn wants to invest what little time they have on this planet to burn out after 6 months.
Narrative coherence determines whether any of these conversations land. If the story is unclear or inconsistent, trust erodes.
The difficulty in answering these questions clearly is not a cosmetic problem. It is a structural problem that compounds.
Where the Clarity Gap Comes From
Founders are not trained to think this way.
Scientific training teaches founders to articulate mechanisms, data, and validation pathways. It does not teach them to assess organizational clarity or “strategic geometry”.
Business training teaches frameworks for market analysis and financial modeling. It does not teach founders how to evaluate whether their operational rhythm supports quality outcomes or whether their cross-functional collaboration defaults to silos—it often does.
The gap is not about intelligence. It is about the absence of systematic assessment.
Most founders have never been asked these questions explicitly. They have been asked about their science, their market, their competition, and their runway. They have not been asked whether their strategic direction actually guides their resource allocation, or whether their narrative coherence matches their organizational alignment.
The result is that founders operate without clear visibility into their own structural properties. They know something is not working. They do not know where the friction originates.
What Happens When Clarity Is Missing
When founders have not systematically assessed these dimensions, several patterns emerge.
Wrong-stage capital. Founders attract investors who expect the wrong milestones because the founder has not clearly articulated what stage they are actually at.
Misaligned partnerships. Founders enter partnerships that do not match their capacity or execution rhythm because they have not clearly assessed whether they are ready.
Retention problems. Founders lose senior talent because leadership energy was depleted and organizational alignment was fragmented, but neither was assessed until someone left.
Positioning failures. Founders struggle to differentiate because their narrative was inconsistent and their story did not match their actual strategic direction.
These are not random failures. They are structural outcomes of missing clarity.
Why This Is Really Hard to Fix
The clarity gap is difficult to address because most founders do not realize it exists until they experience the consequences.
A founder raising a Series A discovers that investors are confused about what stage the company is actually at. A founder hiring a VP of Operations discovers that the candidate has a very different understanding of what success means than the CEO does. A founder preparing for a partnership discussion realizes the operational rhythm cannot support the commitments being discussed.
By the time the gap becomes visible, it has already created friction.
The other reason this is hard to fix is that most founders do not have a systematic way to assess these dimensions. They rely on intuition, board feedback, or periodic crises to surface problems. There is no regular practice of evaluating strategic direction, organizational alignment, or narrative coherence—especially not in relation to one another.
The assessment happens reactively, not proactively.
What Comes Next
Next week, I am publishing a conversation with a founder and managing partner of a venture capital firm who has a particularly clear way of thinking about how different types of biotech companies require fundamentally different strategic approaches.
Their framework introduces the concept of “geometry”—the idea that life science tools, therapeutics, and diagnostics operate according to different structural rules. Understanding what kind of business you are actually building turns out to be the first step toward being able to articulate it clearly.
The seven questions I have outlined here are not abstract. They are the dimensions that determine whether your company’s geometry is aligned or distorted. And geometry, as it turns out, matters more than most founders realize.