What does leadership look like when every mistake costs capital?
Most leaders I work with have more room for error than they realize. A pharmaceutical startup doesn't. The team is small, the specialists can't cover for each other, and a single drug can take a decade to reach the finish line, with no guarantee it gets there.
In this episode of The Perfect Route, I sit down with Isaiah Shalwitz, Senior Vice President and co-founder of Inversa, a pharmaceutical company developing an eye drop for diabetic keratopathy, a condition with no approved treatment. Isaiah brings twenty years of drug development experience, including leading development teams at Akebia Therapeutics.
In this conversation, we cover:
- Why the pharmaceutical industry struggles to tell the story of how hard it works, and what drug failures have to do with drug prices
- How Isaiah measures engagement on a small, largely virtual team where he rarely sees his people
- Why he invites anyone in the company to challenge strategy, and what he learns when someone goes quiet
- The "blob of paint" approach to collaboration that cuts busywork and speeds up decisions
- What the next twenty years of pharmaceutical innovation may bring, from GLP-1s to longevity research
- The two lessons ten years of entrepreneurship taught him: persist, and assume you don't know everything
Whether you lead a startup, a specialized team, or a department that runs lean, you'll come away with practical habits for building candor, ownership, and momentum.
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