Fozia Saleem: What academic founders should look for when hiring their first CEO

In this episode, we meet Fozia Saleem, CEO of Magnitude Biosciences, a Durham University spinout that uses tiny worms to help pharmaceutical companies test drugs earlier, cheaper and faster during the drug discovery process.

Fozia joined the team as CEO to lay the foundation for scalable growth. In this episode she shares her experience, including the 5-month process to determine if there was a good fit, how she approached the challenge of developing a more commercial culture, and how she balanced the founders' emotional connection with investors' expectations.

She explains why it's critically important to get commercial expertise infused in a spinout as soon as possible, why it's never too early to start thinking about systems and structure, and how effective systems in a startup must always be stage-appropriate.

We explore the challenge of embedding commercial expertise in spinouts early, what can be done to help connect academic founders with experienced business leaders, and why she believes the problem isn't a lack of the right type of people, but that we're not looking in the right places.

Fozia's story offers a fascinating perspective from someone who is leading a spinout she didn't start, but has come to love as if she'd founded it herself.

This is a must listen for academic founders and anyone who supports the venture-building process of university spinouts.