When you are running a company on a tight schedule, with tight funds, and the need to deliver, you need every single employee to be on board — and that’s why it is important to talk about culture from day one.
In early-stage life science ventures, culture is not a luxury to be deferred. It is the infrastructure that determines whether a team can move decisively, adapt intelligently, and stay mission-aligned through the inevitable volatility of scientific and business risk.
Kevin Pojasek, founder and CEO of Enara Bio, has built a new kind of company culture—one that doesn’t wait for scale. Instead, he started with culture at the foundation, designing it as an operating system to guide decisions, distribute leadership, and accelerate learning.
This culture has helped Enara evolve rapidly in the face of emerging data and challenging market conditions as it explores the frontiers of novel dark genome biology, leading to the company’s Series B financing last year along with multiple Pharma partnerships.
Kevin’s approach centers on a provocative idea: build your organization around roles, not job descriptions to enable employees more autonomy to explore, grow and develop all while delivering on the company purpose to help cancer patients and their families live free from the shadow of cancer.
In this INSIGHTS, Kevin will share how he evolved from an initial sceptic of the importance of company culture in early start-ups to ultimately building Enara’s cultural framework.
The Enara Expedition—enables a high-trust, high-accountability environment where purpose, autonomy, and authenticity drive performance. Expect insights grounded in real company-building—not theory—and shaped by his experience scaling 8 different biotech companies, including Immunocore and now Enara from the bottom up.
Kevin Pojasek, CEO, Enara Bio
Kevin brings a broad vantage point to the culture conversation: as a repeat CEO and a Venture Partner/EIR inside venture capital firms on both sides of the Atlantic, he has seen culture done well and done less well. He has brought his insights into authentic and people-focused leadership to Enara to help build the company’s culture from its earliest days as a seed-funded company through to where it stands today. Enara’s internal work was recently validated through the iEVP survey that we ran withing the LifeScience ORG community, developed by Harvard’s Amy Edmondson and INSEAD’s Mark Mortensen, revealing a rare alignment between leadership intention and employee perception. Kevin draws on frameworks from Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux, but applies them within the high-consequence environment of early-stage life sciences.
Why This Matters to You
For founders of life science ventures, time and capital are scarce—but culture, done well, becomes a multiplier. At Enara, roles are not fixed; they’re dynamic, project-based, and built to reflect both company needs and individual aspirations. This allows team members to lead before they manage, to grow through responsibility—not just promotion and to explore areas of emerging interest without having to switch jobs.
According to a recent McKinsey study, companies that enable dynamic talent deployment—allowing team members to take on new roles as skills and business needs evolve—are better positioned to respond to volatility and outperform peers on innovation metrics. Kevin’s approach speaks directly to this imperative—translating it into daily practice inside a scientific company.
Questions to ask yourself before the session:
What is your authentic leadership style and how can you bring this to life through your work as a life science leader?
What assumptions are you making about roles and hierarchy that could be holding your team back?
If someone on your team sees a better way forward, do they know they have the authority and support system to act effectively?
Could rethinking your culture now make you more agile later?
Even at the very early stages of company building, this session is relevant for you as it invites you to explore how to build a team where everyone knows where they’re going, why it matters, and how they can grow along the way.