Your first board chair can be the most consequential relationship you build as a founder-CEO and many early-stage leaders get it wrong, not because they pick the wrong person, but because they don't know what they're actually hiring for.

A great board chair isn't a validator or a safety net. In life science ventures, where the stakes are clinical, commercial, and existential all at once, they are the person who holds your governance architecture together while you're building the science, the team, and the pipeline simultaneously. They ask the questions your investors won't, challenge your assumptions before a Series A board does, and - critically - know when to stay in their lane and when to step forward.

Jane Dancer will share what the relationship actually demands: how to define the mandate before you hire, what to look for beyond the CV, how to onboard a NED so they can add value fast, and how to build a working dynamic that holds when things get difficult, because they will.

Jane Dancer

Jane has over 30 years’ experience in the life science industry across biotech, pharma and agrochemicals. She is currently Chair of Spirea, PharmEnable and Elasmogen and an NED at Macomics and Nanosyrinx.

Her past roles include CBO at F-star, VP of Business Development at Cellzome, and Director of Business Development at Astra Zeneca (formerly Cambridge Antibody Technology). The first part of her career was spent in the agrochemical industry in research and project management.