New search firm offers equity-based option for longevity startups seeking execs in a challenging biotech market.
While the longevity biotech sector continues to grow, indeed outperforming other areas of biotech, a fundamental challenge faces early-stage companies in the field: the difficulty of attracting and affording top executive talent. During the initial phases of company building, longevity startups can struggle to secure the experienced leaders needed to translate strong science into clinical applications.
Many founders come from academic or scientific backgrounds and may lack the commercial expertise or investor connections needed to move their technology forward. At the same time, tight capital markets make it difficult to compete with larger companies on executive compensation. This creates something of a catch-22 – startups need strong leadership to raise funding and grow, but they first need funding to afford that leadership.
To address this challenge, the founders of longevity focused venture capital firm LongeVC have launched Founders Search Advisors (FSA), a new executive search company dedicated to the longevity biotech sector. Built on a venture-style model, the firm says it offers a fresh approach to executive recruitment by accepting equity in place of traditional cash fees, allowing startups to conserve capital while still attracting top talent.
Longevity.Technology: FSA’s approach reflects the realities of the current biotech landscape, where funding constraints and market uncertainty have forced companies to rethink traditional business models. By taking equity instead of cash fees – and even investing through a dedicated fund to cover executive compensation – FSA claims to offer early-stage longevity companies a unique option when it comes to executive recruitment. To find out more about the unique challenges facing recruitment in longevity biotech, we sat down with the company’s cofounder Matthew Toner.
Despite recent growth in the field, longevity biotech is still a relatively nascent segment and has previously faced something of a reputational challenge when it comes to hiring.
“People used to think it was all about chasing the ‘fountain of youth’ or trying to live forever,” says Toner. “But the understanding is changing. There’s been a lot more education, and people now realize that longevity biotech is addressing real, complex biological challenges, improving healthspan and tackling unmet medical needs.”
Longevity biotech momentum
With Big Pharma and major investors also now taking the science seriously, there’s also the looming spectre of aging global populations, all of which is making longevity an increasingly more attractive option for those seeking a new opportunity.
“The combination of education, investor interest, Big Pharma engagement, and demographic reality is driving serious momentum,” says Toner. “The challenge now is attracting the right talent. Just like with psychedelics years ago, some people believe in the science but worry about the reputational risk of joining a longevity company too early. That’s where we come in – helping founders shape their story, position their company correctly, and attract top-tier people who might otherwise hesitate.”
A venture partner at LongeVC and a veteran of the executive search industry Toner and his team created FSA to help founders transition from proof-of-concept to clinical and commercial readiness. All amid some very significant market challenges.
“Biotech has had a rough few years – this “nuclear winter” the industry’s been in has been brutal – a lot of companies have had to conduct mass layoffs or wind down operations altogether,” says Toner. “People might assume this means talent is easier to find, but good talent is still very much in demand. It’s the middle to lower levels that have been most affected – leadership remains as critical as ever.”
In terms of the specific skillsets most in demand within longevity biotech, Toner says that drug development leadership and CEOs are at the top of the pile, with a higher prevalence of fractional leadership, where senior executives are hired on a part-time, or project basis.
“Longevity isn’t like oncology, where there’s an established clinical playbook,” he says. “Companies often need drug development expertise who can take a concept from the bench to the clinic, design creative clinical strategies from scratch and think outside the box. And then there’s the CEO role – company’s need leaders who can take complex science and build a compelling narrative around it – someone with real credibility and gravitas can make investors sit up and pay attention.”
Conserving cash is key
The challenging economic situation for biotech is an increasingly significant factor when it comes to recruitment, particularly for early-stage companies.
“Cash is king, and raising capital has been tough, so companies are doing everything they can to conserve it,” says Toner. “But that doesn’t change the fact that they still need the right people – the right leadership – to get deals done, move through the clinic, and ultimately achieve commercial success.”
After speaking with many of the founders in LongeVC’s longevity portfolio and its broader network, FSA’s founders believed there had to be a better way to address this challenge.
“That’s how our new executive search model came about,” says Toner. “It’s equity-based, so rather than charging the usual $100,000–$150,000 in cash that traditional search firms do, we take equity instead. That helps companies conserve capital and allocate resources elsewhere.”
In addition to its equity-based search model, FSA has established a venture model to invest directly in companies to support executive salaries.
“That allows a startup to pay compensation to a CEO, for example, when otherwise they would have to wait until they had enough data to go out and raise capital,” says Toner. “If we believe in the company and the science, we are prepared to invest to cover the cost of that leadership hire. To my knowledge, there’s no other search firm in the world providing that kind of deep value to early-stage companies.”
Finding the right fit
While FSA can still operate on a traditional fee-based model, Toner says that, in the current climate, he expects most companies will prefer the equity model, for obvious reasons.
“It also changes the incentives – when we take equity, we have real skin in the game,” he adds. “We need the company to succeed. We’re not trying to fit someone into a role just to close a deal, because that could backfire on us. It aligns our success directly with our clients’ success.”
Interestingly, Toner says that finding the right potential fit for a hire in longevity might require delving deeper into an individual’s education.
“A lot of people showed early interest in aging science during their academic careers – maybe in their PhD or postdoc work – but because there wasn’t much of an industry at the time, they moved into other fields,” he explains. “But as people move up the career ladder, they often get caught up in corporate structures where they end up serving shareholders rather than patients. A role in a longevity biotech startup can help them to get back to that original motivation – to focus on impact, on patients.”
“People get into this industry because they want to help people. We’re all impacted by diseases and health challenges caused by aging. Everyone has a personal story. That’s something we want to help founders communicate. When you’re building a company around a mission like that, you attract the kind of people who are truly driven by purpose, not just career progression.”
