Jonathan Thon is a serial entrepreneur and founding CEO of STRM.BIO. Before STRM.BIO Dr. Thon founded Stellular Bio where he served as CEO and chief scientific officer. Before Stellular Bio, Dr. Thon was an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.
Establishing and leading a startup is hard, but it is also an opportunity to do something creative, fun and unique.
Most academic scientists are trained to believe that our skillsets and expertise are limited to our own academic focus, but they are completely independent of our field.
A startup company should only be focused on one idea at a time and learning to trust your gut when making decisions will help your team stay on track.
Rarely leveraged at academic institutions, executive coaches can provide invaluable insights and advice to principal investigators.
Part of being self-aware is recognizing where your strengths and weaknesses lie, and being able to fill those gaps on your team with those who will be both a good technical and cultural fit.
Once you know what type of brand you are aiming for, you can identify the values that your team should embrace.
Having a distinct brand that is integrated with your research program’s culture allows your team to define its strengths and intended contributions to a field.
Branding is the exercise of summarizing an organization’s culture to attract a particular type of employee, collaborator or funder.
There’s evidence that increasing diversity within science might directly enhance the scientific enterprise, but in order to do so, we need to acknowledge our implicit biases.
The idea of successive iterations across stages of development is not incongruent with the concept of mastery, and one might expect that further iterations drives greater competence.
The current system of academic science is not organized to support all scientists equally.
