Funding Headlines Aren’t Stability: What to Ask Before You Take a Biotech Job

A press release takes an afternoon to write. New raise, new pipeline milestone, new name on the leadership page. It’s designed to get people excited, and it works. But a headline announcing money coming in tells you almost nothing about whether the company cashing that check is a stable place to build the next few years of your career.

I’ve watched candidates get pulled toward an opportunity because the funding news looked good that week. I get it. It’s the one signal everybody can see from the outside. It’s also the wrong one to build a decision on by itself. So what does a headline actually tell you? That a company convinced somebody with money that it’s worth betting on. That’s it. It doesn’t tell you how that money gets spent, who’s steering the ship, or whether the role you’d be walking into still looks the same six months from now. A headline won’t answer any of that.

Ask to See the Financials Before You Take the Biotech Offer

If a company’s private, they’re not handing me their financials. That’s just the reality of it, especially if they’re PE owned. But once a candidate gets close, close enough that the company is trying to close them, the door opens wider. The candidate and I talk through what to ask for and how to ask for it.

I placed a VP within the last year at a public biotech, and he wanted to know more about their pipeline, what’s coming down the road. They could tell him some of it. They couldn’t get crazy with it, a public company can’t hand out insider information to a candidate. But within those limits, he still got straight answers, because he asked.

That’s the part I want every candidate to hear. If you’re not comfortable asking something, ask it anyway. All they can say is no. I make sure people understand the finances, what’s going on with the business, before they sign anything. Sometimes I’ll walk through it and check, did you get what I just said. People tell me yes even when I can tell they don’t, so I go through it again a different way until I know it landed. I’m not doing my job if someone accepts an offer without understanding the business behind it.

Nobody needs to become a financial analyst for this. Just don’t let a good headline substitute for actually knowing what you’re walking into. A funded company and a stable company aren’t automatically the same thing. The press release only ever tells you about the money.

In Biotech, Your Equity Is Part of the Compensation, Not a Bonus Slide

The other piece candidates skip past is equity. Options, RSUs, vesting schedules, all of it. At some companies, that equity is worth banking on. At others, it isn’t, and the difference is rarely obvious from the offer letter itself.

I spend a fair amount of time making sure people understand what kind of equity they’re being offered and what it represents before they compare one offer to another. Two offers can look close on salary and be nowhere close once you understand what’s sitting behind the equity line. Ask what type it is. Ask about the vesting schedule. Ask what happens to it if the company gets acquired, because in this market, that’s not a hypothetical, it’s practically the base case.

Equity isn’t a bonus. It’s part of the deal, and it deserves the same scrutiny as the number next to it. Options and RSUs aren’t interchangeable, and the vesting schedule attached to either one changes what that number is worth to you. None of that shows up in a single line on an offer sheet. Ask for it directly, or don’t be surprised later.

A Lot of Money Is Chasing a Shrinking Pool of Biotechs

Funding is flowing right now, more than it has in a while. Flowing doesn’t mean it’s spreading out evenly, though. A lot of it is landing on acquisitions. Big companies are buying up small biotechs to fill out their pipelines, fast.

Most candidates hear funding is flowing and picture standalone growth, more headcount, more stability. Right now it often means the opposite. A bigger company decided it’s cheaper to buy a pipeline than build one, and a smaller company just became a division of something ten times its size. That’s a very different bet than the one the candidate thought they were making when they said yes.

I’m working with someone right now at a small biotech, roughly a hundred and twenty employees, and it just got bought by one of the big players for over seven billion dollars. That’s not rare right now. It was quiet for a long stretch, like a spring getting wound tighter every day, and now it’s sprung. Rates going up scared people off for a while, everybody pulled their arms in on new investment. But the big guys still need a pipeline, so they’re buying the small ones instead of building from scratch.

All these companies are moving things around, moving chairs around on the deck constantly right now. It’s not a slowdown, it’s a different kind of activity, and it changes what stability looks like when you’re evaluating an offer. A well funded biotech today can be somebody else’s subsidiary before you’ve settled into the role. That’s not automatically a bad thing. Plenty of people land somewhere better after an acquisition. But it’s a different job than the one you thought you were taking, with different leadership, different priorities, sometimes a very different role for you personally. Skip the ownership question, and you’ll answer it the hard way instead.

What Every Biotech Candidate Should Ask Before Signing

A funding headline tells you a company raised money or got acquired. It doesn’t tell you if the leadership team is aligned, if the equity is worth anything, or if the role you’re being offered still makes sense once the check clears. Those are the questions worth your time.

Leadership is part of that picture too. When a company gets acquired, the people who sold you on the role in the first place aren’t always the ones still there down the road. Ask who you’d be reporting to, not just who’s in the interview loop today. Nobody can promise you a certain answer, but asking tells you a lot about how much the company has thought it through in the first place.

Ask for whatever financial picture they’re willing to share, and don’t apologize for asking. Ask exactly what kind of equity you’re getting and what happens to it under different outcomes. Ask whether the company sees itself as a buyer or a target in this market, because right now, most of them are one or the other.

A good headline gets you interested. It’s the answers underneath it that tell you whether to say yes.

None of this means treating every funding announcement with suspicion. Most companies are telling the truth about the money. What they’re not telling you, because a press release was never built to, is what that money means for the role you’d be walking into. That part’s on you to ask about. It’s on a good recruiter to make sure you get an answer.

 

About The Author:

Steven Swan is the founder of Swan Group, an executive search firm specializing in technology leadership placements in Biotech and Pharma. With nearly thirty years of experience, he has placed CIOs, CTOs, and senior IT leaders across clinical-stage startups and large established life sciences organizations. He is also the author of The Biotech Brief, a newsletter for technology leaders navigating the intersection of science, business, and organizational change.

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