In Conversation: Bill Holodnak on Life Science Leadership and the Future of Hiring

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In this insightful interview, Bill Holodnak, CEO and co-founder of Occam Global, joins Jim Cornwall’s Base to Base Biotech Podcast to discuss Occam’s distinctive, deeply experiential approach to executive search. The conversation goes beyond résumés, exploring how to truly understand candidates and align them with client needs in a meaningful way.

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With over 30 years in the life sciences industry, Bill brings a uniquely philosophical and literary lens to life science executive search and recruitment. He draws inspiration from thinkers like William of Occam, applying the "Occam’s Razor" principle to cut through complexity and focus on what truly matters in a life science executive candidate search.

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Highlights from the Interview:

• Hotspots in the life sciences startup space: Areas like computer-aided drug discovery, cardiovascular/metabolic therapeutics, and clinical-stage biotechs are seeing major momentum.
• The evolving CEO role: Recruiting for the CEO position is complex, with serial entrepreneurs, first-time founders, and big pharma veterans each bringing different strengths and challenges to the table.
• Growth-stage dynamics: As startups scale, so do leadership needs. The right CEO at Series A may not be the right fit for Series C.
• Chief Business Officers in demand: CBOs are crucial yet tough to hire, requiring a blend of high-level strategy and hands-on dealmaking.
• Shifting talent landscape: While the market is leaning into a “free agent” mindset, long-term alignment between execs and companies still matters.
• Board-building with intention: Occam Global strongly emphasizes board composition, crafting well-balanced teams to support CEOs and unlock company potential.
• Best quote: “Much of the truth about somebody's thinking and personality and style has to do with how they plan their career.” Bill, CEO and Co-Founder of Occam Global.
  
  

Note: The interview transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

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Jim: So, to get things started, could you tell me a bit about Occam?

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Bill: Well, Occam Global is an executive search firm focused on the life sciences and, more broadly, entrepreneurial executives. There are different species than the corporate types. As you no doubt know. My son and I co-founded Occam 13 years ago in New York, and we now have people in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. But our practice is truly global, and we're doing a lot of work in the UK and continental Europe these days. But we're a bespoke boutique firm, unlike the larger firms. We take on a limited number of searches a year, and we work with entrepreneurs, venture and private equity investors worldwide, assembling teams, assembling boards, and giving organizational advice when asked.

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Jim: Obviously, hiring is more than just fitting qualifications to requirements. How do you ensure that it's beyond that and that it's a good fit?

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Bill: Well, the origins of the firm are philosophical and literary as opposed to technological. Before I became a recruiter and went into business, I was a student of medieval philosophy, and one of the philosophers I read was William of Occam who was a 14th-century scholastic best known for his thesis called Occam's Razor, which is a decision rule used in a variety of non-philosophical cases, including differential diagnosis in medicine where the simplest truth is the one you should go for or the simplest solution. So that's a doctrine of elegant simplicity, and I mentioned its philosophical origins if I can say it in such a way.

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The work is, and this is to the heart of the matter, you can find rationally through research, especially powered by LinkedIn, you can find how all the people are, you have to engage them, get them to take your call, get them to enter a conversation, and then you have to understand them. We spend a lot of time understanding our candidates. We, of course, spend time understanding the clients, but the match is with the candidate, and there are several people who can be Chief Medical Officers for a CAR T company. You have to find the Chief Medical Officer or the clinical executive with the right leadership qualities and personal style. We spend a great deal of time in our interviews with candidates, understanding where they came from, socioeconomically, how they've chosen their careers, and most importantly, how they've made transitions.

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Much of the truth about somebody's thinking, personality, and style has to do with how they plan their career. Do they take jobs for more money all the time? Do they take jobs for enhanced titles, or do they take jobs to learn? Do they artfully build a portfolio of skills and experiences that make them more valuable in the long term rather than for short-term gain? That's just one example of the kind of query we do. So we spend a lot of time both understanding and then disclosing to our clients what we think about people because we're not paid just to produce resumes. We're paid as intelligent, hopefully intelligent, interlocutors with our clients and advisors and debate with them about what works and what doesn't. And that brings us to another part of our practice. There are different ways you can fill a job. For example, if you're looking for a president of R&D, you can get on a functional level; you can recruit somebody who is scientifically accomplished and very astute at the intellectual aspects of science and the isolation, validation, and prioritization of targets.

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However, you also have to see how much exposure they have to clinical development and translational medicine. I'm using this as a specific example, and then oftentimes the managerial capability, when we look for chief heads of R&D or Chief Scientific Officers, we look for intellectual accomplishment. We look for inspirational leadership, how they recruit, manage, and develop people, and then we look at how well they can represent the science to the institutional investing community. So what I'm trying to tell you, perhaps giving you too much detail here, is that we really write our candidates up, we write a gloss on the text of their resume, we talk about the arc of their career and their life. We also talk openly about where they fit the spec, where they might not fit the spec, where they might have stylistic continuity and cultural continuity with the company, and where they might be somewhat dissonant.

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So, our method is enlightened dialectical reasoning, which involves genuinely connecting with the client. If there's a reason that we're successful, it's because we do our very best to engage with the client and, through experiential inquiry, get to the truth of what is going to be best for them. And then, of course, we do a lot of referencing, not only from people that they give us, but for people in our network because search work, Jim is made up of managing a network of contacts and making them available to your client, but it's also about talking to strangers because we don't know everybody. We can never know everybody. There's always a different and perhaps better opportunity. So we talk to strangers, speak to people we know, cultivate our network, and research. So that kind of thoroughness both in terms of the interviewing process and the reporting process and that kind of self-imposed discipline of talking to strangers as well as the familiar is essential to our success.

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Jim: From the other angle for job seekers, how can they best become more marketable, I guess?

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Bill: I alluded to intelligent and courageous career building by looking for additive experiences and always pushing the boundaries. So always try to expand your professional equation by adding new and challenging experiences. That's a longer-term behavioral consideration, but in terms of short-term, sometimes not always. Sometimes, we try to persuade people who are allegedly happy in their current position and try to get them to consider an alternative. But oftentimes, especially in a market like this, and I'm sure we're going to get to talk about that, where there are more displaced people, the important thing is not to panic, not to rush things and enter into these conversations with the clear open-mindedness of discovering not only what the job is, but how it fits with yourself and what you really want in time. I advise people constantly to do that when they're between jobs. It's a golden opportunity to expand their network and to find out more about the world and themselves.

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Jim: What would you say are maybe the hottest startup areas right now?

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Bill: Well, there are a number. We have been involved in computer-aided drug discovery and development for a long time. We got into that very early based on an introduction to a client called Recursion, now a public company and, I believe, a market leader bellwether stock in that space. However, that was early on, and the whole area of using computation to enhance the efficiency of drug discovery and the nuanced and well-developed clinical trial aftermath is very important. Over the past few years, there's been a real rush to the cardiovascular metabolic space, particularly in the area of GLP-1. One of our clients is Metsera. They're a clinical-stage company, which will get me to another point I want to make. They have a weight loss drug in the market now or are just about to enter it.

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They were ahead of the curve in that, but a huge amount of investment both at the corporate level as well as at the venture level for weight loss drugs and cardiovascular medications. Another thing that's important, and the pendulum swings on this at one point, maybe four or five years ago, but platform companies were all the rage now that which attracts people most powerfully are both investors and executives seeking to advance themselves are companies with compounds in the clinic we're about to take on. We have clients that have both, which are ultimately the most appealing, with a profound platform, and clinical candidates with ostensible asset value. So, clinical-stage companies are very, very popular these days. I can give you examples if you'd like.

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Jim: Sure, yeah. Suppose you have any that come to mind here.

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Bill: Well, there's a company for which we just recruited a CEO in Philadelphia. A world-class immunologist started it out of J&J, and she built an immunology-based platform, but in the process, they discovered an orphan drug, which is in phase two for Poe's disease. So this is a company that has rigorous science, and again, it also has a candidate, a drug candidate. We were able to recruit a veteran CEO, and we can get into this later if you'd like, Jim. Talking about how you recruit a CEO for these enterprises. We recruited an extremely talented CEO with a commercial career who had been a CEO three times and made money for our investors each time. We got such a rare bird for many reasons, but the quality of the science, the dual aspect of this company called Aro, was because it had both a platform and a product capability.

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Jim: I guess it's one thing being able to spot trends and what the current hottest startups are, but how are you then able to match trends with the right people?

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Bill: The AIDD space provides an excellent example of well-wrought matching. So, computer-aided drug discovery and development require people with computing knowledge and ability. Still, they can't be aware of the timeless complexity of biology and wet science. So when we try to recruit a Chief Medical Officer, that person has to know about clinical development in a specific disease state. They don't have to have a PhD in Computer Science, but they have to have an intellectual curiosity about it and an openness to a new way of doing things. So with TechBio as it's now called, it's essential to get people in these senior positions, whether it's CSO or CTO, who have computing ability augmented by engagement in the sense of purpose of healthcare, but also of respect for the complexity of biology. Or we get somebody from the other side who is trained as a biologist or in the life sciences who is either self-taught as a computer scientist or really open to it. So, it is a dual culture. We often muse, both my clients and myself. We're somewhat short in the evolutionary cycle, this evolutionary cycle will produce people who are dually trained in computing and biology or chemistry, but we're not there yet. There are very few people like that. We have imperfect solutions in both cases.

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Jim: I guess we talk about jobs as being circular and that there's always somebody for a job, and there's always a job for somebody, but funding seems to have often been a major issue. Are you seeing a lack of funding right now?

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Bill:  We've been extremely busy the last few years because a lot of our work is with private companies, and even though there have been ravages in the public market and loss in valuation in the private market, there's still optimism about biology and the future of biology and the future of science. So we have seen no slowing in that regard. There are many displaced people these days, but there's always a way to find the match, either through us or on your own. Help me if I didn't answer the question as usefully as I might have.

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Jim:  A lot of biotech companies and life science companies seem to be having trouble with funding, and I wonder if that ever trickles down to affecting hiring at all.

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Bill:  Oh, I'm sure it will. I mean, we've had instances, and particularly with the radical disruption that we're seeing now with the, I don't know what's the right word, the gutting of the FDA, and with the turmoil in the capital markets, their investors are getting cautious. A client was about to launch a CSO search in a B-round of financing. However, it has become a little shaky, so that has been postponed. I'm sure we're going to see more of this, but there still seems to be an underlying belief in the importance of biology for the future betterment of mankind, and there will be new businesses involved. But this is a cause of concern, I would say.

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Jim:  Is it in any way cyclical? I mean, do we have sort of booms and busts when it comes to funding and hiring?

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Bill: I've been doing this work now for over three decades, and yes, of course, there's boom and bust, the pendulum swings, there are cycles, and things change. So nothing is forever, but these are daunting times, to say the least - or at least the last few years in the capital markets for publicly held companies. And now, just the general, I would say, concern about the future of the funding of basic research and valuations in the biotech marketplace,

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Jim: Are there positions that are more difficult to fill than others?

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Bill:  None of them are easy as you, no doubt understand. Something that might be useful to talk about is the CEO role in biotech companies. There are several ways you can solve this puzzle of recruiting a CEO. The most favored one, and I alluded to this earlier with my example of Aro, is the serial CEO, somebody who's been in large pharma, somebody who has transitioned to the pity and terror of the biotech entrepreneurial world and has made money for investors that looks like it's de-risked, and it in substantial ways is a de-risking of the hiring choice. However, if you get a serial CEO who has made money for investors, they have already made money for themselves too. So, do they have the energy, the commitment, the dedication to be a serial CEO? That's what you have to evaluate. Everybody wants that kind of person. They're fewer in number, and even the ones that are available, you have to do emotional due diligence on whether they really want to do it. 

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Again. The other way of solving the problem is with a first-time CEO, somebody from either the R&D or business development and financial functions. The bet is that these individuals can take their experience in drug discovery and development, or their expertise in deal-making and financing, and leverage it to assume the full orchestral responsibility of the CEO. The risk is if they can transition up to the next level. Another phenotype we might want to discuss is somebody coming out of big pharma. The question is, can somebody who comes out of big pharma with the brand identity and resources behind them leave that alleged security and go out and play in an open space?

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Several years ago, we recruited in England and ended up recruiting an American for a London-based biotech in cell and gene therapy for the brain. And for the search committee, we gave them all of these phenotypic options. We gave them serial CEOs and first-time CEOs from both the R&D and the business development functions. Then, we found a person who had a real depth of experience in gene and cell therapy at a scientific level and market knowledge of the CNS space. But more importantly for her in this case, was that she had fought very clearly about what she wanted, and she wanted to move into the entrepreneurial space, and she was going to take the uncertainties and funding and the underevolved organizations organization that she was inheriting and work and build that organization and work to be a fundraiser. And she's turned out to be; her name was Lisa Deschamps, and she's the CEO of AviadoBio. And she's done a remarkable job with coming from that big pharma lineage. This is the point of view that people are hired for their personal qualities, which are as important as, or even more important than, their experience. So, you can solve that CEO problem, but there are not enough CEOs to go around, as you can imagine. You can solve that in a variety of ways, and we embrace the complexity of alternative solutions.

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Jim: Is there a lifespan for a CEO position? Is there burnout, or do they have a shelf life?

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Bill: The CEO role changes and evolves over time. There is a person we refer to as a catalytic agent who brings everything together. Oftentimes these people have scientific backgrounds. They spot or develop the science negotiated out of the academic setting it was in, raise private financing, maybe from angels, raise venture capital financing, and keep moving along that financing curve. Also, hire the organization and manage it. But sometimes, the person who's the catalytic agent isn't the person to offer product strategy, build an organization, recruit people, and do the shameless hustling that is involved in financing. As you move beyond product definition and clinical development, you get to the commercialization stage. And there are some people who are very good at starting something. There are some people who are good at the initial formulation, and there are some people who actually can commercialize.

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The people who run that gamut are relatively few and far between. So burnout, some people, just as the Brits say, there are horses for courses, and sometimes you have to change a CEO out who's the founder for A CEO, who's the galvanizer to the person who knows how to commercialize? Those are three examples of various types of leadership that are required as the organization evolves. There is an example in the US of an Occam client named Peter Hecht. And Peter was the founder of a company called Ironwood, which brought a metabolic drug to market. He was a scientist at the Whitehead Lab at MIT. He externalized the science, formulated the product strategy, hired the team, managed the team, did seed financing, did venture financing, did public funding, and helped commercialize the drug. He then left to do something else but had a remarkable run. So he was an extraordinary creature in the CEO species.

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Jim: Quite often, you find startup companies where the founder kind of falls into the CEO role. Do you recommend companies find an external CEO or go with somebody who's been attached to the company right from the beginning?

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Bill: There's no simple answer to that, Jim. As they say, it depends. We're just working with a founder in the UK right now who's a brilliant physician turned immunologist, who's got a great platform, and he, in this case, is very self-aware. He understands and is quite proud of what he's created at the scientific level. We're helping him recruit a Chief Business Officer. We can talk about that role as well later if you'd like. But he's very open to understanding whether he will be happy and effective as CEO. His intellectual gifts, elegance as a thinker, forceful spirit, and creativity are all to the point right now, but he's aware that things might change. We work with many brilliant scientists, and some of them look at the art and practice of management as something that anybody could do. Something they can also master if they've mastered the mysteries of biology, immunology, organic chemistry, or whatever. The discipline is complex and difficult to master. They can not always think that it's easy to do the other thing. And for ego reasons as well as judgment around what's at stake, they can do it. And again, some of them evolve, some of them learn what a difficult and differentiated challenging position the CEO is, and they're glad to give it up and overstay their welcome.

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There's a wonderful book called The Founder's Dilemma, written by Noam Wasserman, a former collaborator of mine from Harvard Business School. He has a graph, and I don't know whether this is outdated or not, but it shows the value of a company,d and the longer the founder stayed along, the curve began to degrade. And his proposition to the founder in the founder's dilemma was, do you want to be Kenya? Do you want to be rich, or do you want your science to be brought to the market? Do you want your science realized? So commercial skills are different than scientific skills. Sometimes, they exist in the same body, and sometimes they do not.

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Jim: And you mentioned chief business officer, maybe you could go into a little bit more on that role as well.

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Bill: So the Chief Business Officer, in the ideal, you want somebody who has strategic intellect, oftentimes informed by scientific training that allows them to understand the landscape for deals, understand the pharmaceutical world, understand the various modalities, understand the various scientific disciplines, understand functional strengths and grasp where a particular platform company ought to be applying its will to try and get collaborations and non-dilutive funding. That's an intellectual exercise. Part of the Chief Business Officer's role is to do deals. So you want somebody with visceral intelligence and energy who can open doors and close deals. So, the desire is for intellectual excellence and abstract reasoning; it's a dual desire. And then for salesmanship, which is instinctual, emotional, and visceral, if you get somebody who has both the intellect and the transactional ability documented in a deal sheet, oftentimes they want to be CEO. And so recruiting for these CBO roles, especially if the companies want to go in at the high end of the candidate pool, you have to find somebody who will either become CEO, and that's okay, or you recruit them to be CBO, and they've got to be comfortable in that role.

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We've been able to do both in both ways, but that's the tension. Now in the tech bio world, there's a variant here on CBO because the tech bio world is either a software company or a data company, or it has algorithms or data sets that are valuable to pharma and can be used to make certain aspects, whether it's protein drug design, whether it's small molecules, it can make them easier and more efficient. The question is, these companies want to get short-term financing by deal generation, but they don't want to be corrupted into being a pure product company. They want to get involved in the downstream royalties of the product once it's marketed. And so we have to be very clear with our tech bio companies, whether they want somebody who's really commercially oriented or more strategically oriented. Oftentimes, they want both. And we have to explain the extreme difficulty of that. Usually, they have to go with one strength or another, either hire a very senior strategic business developer and augment that person with a head of sales and marketing or recruit a commercial person with a more junior business development role. But it's almost impossible to get the commercial and the strategic in one being.

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Jim: You've obviously been in this business for quite a while now. How have you seen employment changing and roles changing and has your own involvement or has the way that you do your work changed?

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Bill: The way I've done my work? It really hasn't changed. Again, I'd like to see it without ennobling myself. I like to think I'm in the seeking truth business because it's really very important to treat the candidates as well as you treat the clients. After all, you're trying to make a match, but you're trying to make a match that will endure. That's true for both sides because it really does us no good for somebody to go and stay a year and leave or go and stay six months and go for something better or something they really want. And this has happened to me, and I don't want that. There's probably, in large measure, a little bit more of a free agent aspect to employment. People rarely believe that they'll work at the same company for 20 years, and they have to always think of their internal value to their company and their market value.

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But again, a lot of our clients and the compensation packages that go to the candidates are heavily oriented toward equity. So, they want to stay long enough to make sure that equity is worth something. So I would say in general, and this isn't the crisp categorical response you want, there is a greater level of, you might want, there's a greater level of free agent mentality to employment these days, but there are countervailing forces, and from the point of view of our work, we just try to get it all out of the table, what people want, what their short-term and long-term objectives are, and if this match has a real chance of some reasonable level of endurance.

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Jim: Is there anything that you wanted to mention that we didn't cover?

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Bill: A lot of the boards we encounter are heavily investor-oriented, and investors are brilliant people in their way, but they're not operators, and they don't always help as richly with the corporate governance and strategic planning processes. They might. So when we come to a client, sometimes they're on their way to a public offering; other times they're just maturing as commercial entities. We want to get different skills on the board. So, we do a gap analysis. We come in, we look at the current board, we find out what talents are represented, then we talk to the CEO and try to determine what talents he or she wants because board members also come in phenotypes; there's the R&D clinical development phenotype, there's the business development strategic phenotype. There's the serial CEO phenotype. There's the head of the audit chair that we oftentimes recruit.

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So, we do a gap analysis and help a company strategically assemble a board that has the greatest value for the CEO and, ultimately, the shareholders. Sometimes when there's a first-time CEO, we recruit a chair or an executive chair to help that first-time CEO bridge the gap. And those are very interesting recruitments. And the nuance there is to get in an executive chair, somebody who has the mentor gene, because there are people who are very brilliant. They understand markets, deal structures, and organizational development but don't necessarily want to teach or take a personal interest. I'm not criticizing them for that. It's a clinical judgment rather than a moral judgment if you know what I mean.

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Whenever I see a 13-person board, I know that something's awry. Seven to nine people is what it should be, and you're pushing it with nine because you need enough intimacy for a rich dialogue to take place.