How culture drives results, with Dr. Cheri Ackerman

Hi, I'm Jay Goldstein. I'm the CEO and founder of Founder2Leader, an executive coaching firm that specializes in equipping early stage bio and climate tech leaders for scale. This podcast, From Founder to Leader, aims to demystify what it actually looks like to build hard tech startups. Too often founders share their stories when there are newsworthy successes, the big raises and the lucrative exits. We want you to hear the real human stories that drive innovation, the crossroads decisions, the messy middle, and the practical know how. We hope that these conversations will help you as you take your ideas out of the lab and build scalable solutions to improve human health and our planet. Welcome to another episode of From Founder to the Human Stories Behind Bio and Climate Tech Startups. In this podcast episode, we are demystifying what it looks like to build a hard tech startup from the ground up by sharing the real human stories behind the headlines from the people driving innovation. In today's episode, we'll be talking with Sherry Ackerman, co founder and CEO of Concerto Bio. We're going to be talking about how culture drives results. Thank you so much for joining us, Sheri. Happy to. So tell us a little bit about you and your background and how you ended up deciding to launch Concerto I. So my background, I hail from the western side of Michigan. I did university at Calvin University, which is there. It's a, like local college. And then I did a PhD at UC Berkeley. So that was a big change. Moving out to California, did chemistry there, and then came out to MIT to do a postdoc in biological engineering. And I worked for Paul Blaney at the Broad Institute and worked with Jared K. And Bernardo Cervantes, who was in the Collins Lab kind of down. Down the hall from us. And we all got really excited about the idea that microbes should be used for, you know, influencing all kinds of aspects of human health. And we saw a pretty big gap between what microbes could be doing for human health and what they're actually being used today to do and how, whether or not people consider microbes to be reliable. Can you actually build tools out of microbes? And it seemed like the answer was kind of, we're starting to get there. But one of the major gaps was understanding how microbial ecosystems work. And so we had built this technology at MIT that let us understand these ecosystems. And that really helps with the translation problem, because when you're moving technology from the lab out into real life, it's going to be encountering these very complex ecosystems. And if we can understand them up front we can build products that translate better. So we started working on that concept in the. I guess the technology was invented in 2016, but we started working on the company concept in 2019, ultimately spun out in 2020 and now it's 2026, which is wild to me. So excited to talk about our journey. So I teach this Management 101 class, which is now a classic part of my portfolio. And it was inspired actually by early work with your team when you were only people and starting to scale, right? Yes. For anyone who doesn't know. And you can edit this out if you want to. Jay basically wrote management 101 for concerto while we were also growing from five people up to like 15 or 20. Yeah. So we all, everyone grew together and it was very helpful for us. And one of the things that I loved is that we talked about culture and values. And this day when I teach Management 101, I love sharing your values. And the thing that I love sharing about your values is how you consciously talk about the trade offs that come with your values. And I said, well, I want to just sort of talk a little bit about how you created them and why you, like, made sure that you incorporated that into your statements and how they'll actually play out in like day to day life at Concerto. That question is huge. Then we'll start. No, it's good. How did you make the values the first time? Let's start with the very tactical our values. We have four core values. They're grow by experimenting, work rigorously, listen intently and act with compassion. And I think when I think about the origin of our values, there are two aspects to how did they come to be. One is like they came to be because that is who we are, who we were as co founders at the very beginning. So it wasn't like we sat down one day and decided we're going to listen intently. It was more like we already had habits of listening intently. These were things that we valued already. And so we were codifying something that was already true. And I think it can go either way. Like you can decide we're going to hold a new value and change our habits. That can be very healthy. I think for us it was largely, these are things we already value as people. And then in terms of the actual process of how did we come up with those values? Basically, the co founding team took a retreat to New Hampshire in November of 2020 and we, we sat and talked. We made giant lists of all the different values that we thought could be important and whittled them down. One of our co founders had come up with an exercise that was like, you know, okay, you have your top 10, knock two off, just like keep making it smaller, keep making it more refined. And ultimately we got to the four that we did. The reason that we decided to list both the, the positive value, like what we're choosing for and the cost of that value, what we're choosing against is because actually of a Harvard Business Review article that we had read about. You know, so many organizations have very vanilla values like respect and integrity and diversity. And from. In that article they basically talked about how those are not values that help, you know, how to make decisions or how to run your company there. Those are permission to play values like if you're going to be a halfway decent company, you have to have some level of respect. How are you going to get any work done otherwise? Core values are really helpful for articulating when there are two ways of doing something, both of which could be good, and you're going to choose one way over the other way. So just to give like an example, when we talk about grow by experimenting, we are a company that is constantly growing and changing and trying new stuff. And we don't just do that in an ad hoc way. We do that in a very systematic way. We're going to create hypotheses about, we're going to make this specific change and then we're going to over some amount of time measure what happened because we made that change and then decide at the end of that experiment we're going to keep this meeting structure, we're going to change it. We're going to keep this goal setting structure, we're going to change it. Um, what's the opposite of that? Like what are we not if we are that thing. And some of the things you have to be willing to choose against if you're going to grow by experimenting are things like stability and perfection. And you know, the airline industry, for example, not growing by experimenting. And we don't want them to. We want them to never crash. We want them to never have make mistakes. Right. We need them to be stable and, and run perfectly. So being able to articulate that there are good ways to run companies that would value stability and perfection, that's just not us. And you can go down the list, you know, of, of what are the things that we, the, the discomfort we choose to lean into that we know is going to be the cost of choosing to work rigorously, listen intently and act with compassion. I love that so much. And one of the things that I love as a practice that your team does is I think you really live by your values through the way that you do your quarterly and annual goal setting processes. I'm really curious for you to share with our listeners about the design of how you do that as a group and how you try to live by your values in your process. Sure. So the way that we do quarterly goal setting, it's actually annual goal setting and then that gets broken down into quarters. We use a system called okrs, Objectives and Key Results. If you haven't read the book Measure what Matters, I recommend it. It is the outline for how, you know, we didn't invent okrs. It's a Google and intel thing, I think. So basically we look at, you know, what do we need to get done over the course of a year, over the course of a quarter, and then how do we divide that into different teams? And the, the way that this came about actually was because when we first started Concerto, we would just write like giant lists of everything that needed to be done and then kind of divide up the lists and everyone's buckets were too full and, and we would make a tiny bit of progress on a whole bunch of things. And it just felt like nothing was getting done and everyone was mad about, you know, you said you were going to do this and it didn't happen. Well, it's because I did this other thing and there was no group consensus on what are our actual like, like nothing is coming between us and getting this thing done objectives for this quarter. So we started using okrs as a way to create alignment and prioritization. And I would say the way that our values fit into that is even when we created the OKR system, we said, it's an experiment, we're going to try this way of organizing ourselves and if it works great, we'll keep using it. And if it doesn't work, we will identify all the ways in which it fails and then we will choose something else. In the case of okrs, it did work and we just kept refining it because we felt like it was very powerful. Very much doing okrs forces you to listen in terms of what is everyone's actual capacity. And we do tiered OKRs, so we'll have like the company objectives and key results. And then from that you can say, okay, what is the discovery team doing, what is the manufacturing team doing, what is the data science team doing and how do those feed up in, into the larger company goals? And you have to be very Attentive to all of, you know, do those things actually all add up. It is a process that we run very rigorously. So every quarter, it is usually a two to three week, not full time process, but you know, we take the time to brainstorm out what is everybody thinking about all the different things we could try to get done this quarter and then prioritize them. You know, what are the things we're choosing not to do this quarter intentionally so that we will get these other things done. And then in terms of compassion, we never want to design a set of goals that is going to crush anyone. That's not the point ever. So, you know, making sure that it fits with everyone's vacation schedules and major life events and just regular old daily work life balance. Are we setting up a system in which all the people are going to thrive? Because that's really what makes Concerto thrive over the long term. Back in the day. And I don't know if you still do this. I recall pausing work entirely for like a day or two to deeply, deeply align everybody on the goal setting process. Is that how you still do it? No, actually, we don't. So the team got too big and the dependencies got too complicated for that to really make sense. So what we do is more of like a tiered approach. We start with a set of week one is like we do a set of brainstorming sessions where I am in every single session because that is my quarterly download on what is happening across all the different teams. And most of whom I would not talk with on, you know, a weekly basis or whatever, except to talk with the leadership. But this is like literally everyone from the team is brainstorming across what are all the things we're gonna get done. And then we take that in the second week and write the high level OKRs. So company, I write the company OKRs and then the heads of the different departments write their okrs. And then the weekend after that we have the team leads write their OKRs. So we end up with, I think it's something like eight or nine different sets of OKRs. And they all talk to each other, right? Like they're all in communication and add up in, in specific ways to each other. But yeah, we don't actually shut down the entire, the entire company for like a day and a half, which we, yeah, we did used to do that. The way that we get on the same page now is we use what we call an acknowledgments table. So a couple of, a couple of things. We organize the okrs in a way that each key result, we call out the individual people who we think should be contributing to that key result. And if your name is called out anywhere on that list of krs, you have to sign a thing at the bottom that says, I read this document and I understand that my name is on here. So if you disagree, like, let's talk about it as opposed to getting halfway through the court. I mean, like, I didn't know that I was listed on the data science okrs is doing whatever and it's the person who writes those okrs, it's their job to call out. These are the people who I think are plugging into my team's results, whether or not they're on my team and then make sure that they've actually read through all of those. That's how we do alignment today. Taking three weeks to to write the quarterly goals. How do you, how do you juggle that while also getting your work done? Because that's what you start. If, if a quarter is 12 weeks, it means you're starting in week nine already to think about. Right. So do you, how much time do you allocate away from still executing on them? Well, actually. Right. So the reason that we do it that way is so that we don't have to shut everything down for like two days. It's so that we can, I would say the major time sinks for people who are not leadership are the brainstorming meetings. And then the leadership team has very distinct tasks, like it's divided up of between a group of people. So it's just a matter of, you know, me making sure that I actually have a couple of hours once brainstorming is done and before the team needs to start to actually write those objectives. And sometimes it happens and literally sometimes it doesn't. Like, sometimes I go back to the team and I'm just like, I cannot prioritize this right now. Can we talk about what it would look like for us to have a set of goals that we all agree add up and we're using our annual goals as a North Star, so we know we're moving in the right direction. But we're not going to try to articulate this on a quarterly level, like a company level on a quarterly basis and that's okay? Yeah. What do you think is one of the biggest trade offs that you're making right now in your organization with your values like the startup reputation version of speed? So if you look at Concerto's actual performance, we're very fast. Like we Brought a drug from discovery to. We had inhuman data in like four years, which is unbelievable. To do all of the pre, like, all the discovery work, all the preclinical work, all the IND enabling work, get to clinical results. That's nuts, right? But it doesn't feel, when you're in the middle of it like sprinting. It feels very rigorous. Like, no, we cannot start the clinical trial yet because we, you know, haven't figured out whatever different steps that are leading into it. And yes, this does need to be reviewed by like 15 different people to make sure that we believe because we're about to sink x millions of dollars into this giant experiment that involves real humans. So I think there's some startup version of speed that's like, you know, don't worry so much about planning it out. Just, you know, try it. Just have the conversation, Just, you know, see if you can get the partnership, whatever. We tend to be very systematic about stuff and I think that can be like a. Yeah, investors or people who maybe aren't used to that style can see that as a pretty significant trade off. But yeah, that's just. Like I said, these values didn't happen because we made them up. They just kind of. It is who we are. And we've hired for people who think similarly that you go slow to go fast, like do it right the first time. To this day, you're one of the most deliberate teams about everything you do I've ever worked with. And so that is one of the reasons why I wanted you to share with our audience because everything you've done has been so thoughtful and so well, like really systematically sort of designed. And I think that it is a trade off that a lot of people say, how can I afford to spend this much time on this stuff? And it's because we're so deeply aligned and because we have these processes that allows us to speed up. Right. I love that. So we're heading towards the wrap up. What one piece of advice do you have for our audience? If you have anything to share with them about, you know, leadership or anything you've learned on your journey? What is the one thing you wish you knew earlier? I don't know why this question feels hard right now. I think maybe the thing that I. The thing I've been thinking a lot about is strategicness, like being strategic in creating a network while still being human about my network and why I invest in the particular people that I invest in. So just something to think about. I don't have a. Here's the right way to do it. But I think it's incredibly important in terms of what doors will be open when. And like when you need the door, will the door be there? Has a, has a lot to do with what relationships you invest in over time. And maybe it's not something that can be engineered, I don't know. But I'm definitely seeing the impact. You know, I'm six years, almost seven years into this entrepreneurship journey at this point. And if I include, you know, the years in academia and that's a lot of time to build up a lot of people that I know. And seeing Concerto in the middle of kind of redefining our own identity. We've done a lot of work in the drug space. We're starting to think about the consumer space. And who do I know that can help with that? It's been both cool and like, man, you know, I didn't, I didn't think we were going to need people in this space. So now how are we going to get to those people, things like that? Sherry, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to share the way that you do things with our audience. There's a lot that others have to learn about the way that you're doing things, and I appreciate you sharing. So thank you. Very happy to. Great to be here. Thank you for joining. From Founder to Leader. Full transcripts of the podcast are available on our website. Foundertoleader.com that's the word founder, the word to leader dot com. 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