Leadership and disruptive innovation in biotech and mental health care: A conversation with Kabir Nath, CEO of Compass Pathways

In this next episode of The Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast, Heidrick & Struggles’ Charlie Moore speaks to Kabir Nath, the CEO of Compass Pathways. Compass Pathways is a company dedicated to studying investigational psilocybin treatment in treatment-resistant depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anorexia. Kabir Nath, whose career has spanned approximately 30 years in the biopharmaceutical and medical device industry, was previously the senior managing director of the global pharmaceutical company Otsuka Pharmaceuticals. In this conversation, Nath shares what attracted him to the biotech space and what it’s like to take over the helm of a company from founders, and how he’s collaborated with them during the transition. He also discusses his perspective on healthcare accessibility, evolving an organizational culture as the business grows, what new skill sets or capabilities he is looking for in talent, and how he manages investor relations. Finally, he shares how he is preparing the leadership team for the organization’s continued transformation over the next few years.  

Below is a full transcript of the episode, which has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Welcome to The Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast. Heidrick is the premier global provider of senior-level executive search and leadership consulting services. Diversity and inclusion, leading through tumultuous times, and building thriving teams and organizations are among the core issues we talk with leaders about every day, including in our podcasts. Thank you for joining the conversation.

Charlie Moore: Hello. I’m Charlie Moore, a partner at Heidrick & Struggles and a member of our global Healthcare and Life Sciences Practice. I’m also the regional leader for strategic accounts in Europe. 

In today’s podcast, we delve into the innovative work that Compass Pathways is undertaking. Led by Kabir Nath, the CEO, the company is dedicated to studying investigational psilocybin treatment in treatment-resistant depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anorexia, paving the way for new possibilities in healthcare. 

Kabir brings a wealth of experience to this role, with a career spanning approximately 30 years in the biopharmaceutical and medical device industry. Before joining Compass, he was the senior managing director of the global pharmaceutical company Otsuka Pharmaceuticals, and he also led their North American business. Kabir has held various leadership positions at Bristol Myers Squibb, Smith & Nephew, and his initial career as a management consultant with Booz Allen. He has lived in China, India, Singapore, Spain, the US, and the UK. 

Kabir, welcome and thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. So let’s just start perhaps with your career in terms of the journey, particularly the considerations that you’ve made around moving roles because you started as a management consultant, moved into med tech, moved across to Big Pharma, and then more recently in the biotech space. 

Has that been thought through? Where are you going with the journey? And why particularly the move to biotech?  

Kabir Nath: So, first, thanks, Charlie. It’s great to be here. Thank you for inviting me to join you on the podcast. So absolutely not. If I’ve ever known at any point of my career where I was going to be in five or 10 years’ time, I might have made perhaps some different choices. 

So really, I have fulfilled an ambition of doing things that felt important, were adding value in different places, but it hasn’t been planned as such. So out of university, as you said, I became a management consultant, as lots of people did back then, did my MBA at INSEAD, and then really fell into healthcare by accident at that point. 

Joined Smith & Nephew, but Smith & Nephew gave me all sorts of opportunities. With them, I moved to India and to Singapore for the first time. And then back to London at a time when they were really restructuring and becoming the focus company that they still are today and the perennial takeover candidate as they have been since that time. But what I really loved was running businesses. And what I’d learned in my time in Asia was that actually motivating a team of people toward a common ambition to do the right thing to provide new medicines for patients was what I wanted to do—new medicines, new technologies for patients. And at the time, Bristol Myers Squibb came calling thanks to you, as you may recall, Charlie, and it was a job out in back out in Singapore to run Southeast Asia. 

And that was my first foray into pharma, and many people moved from pharma into med tech. I didn’t find the move that difficult going the other way, though. It’s more unusual going that way. And after a couple of years, China happened and—that’s the way I describe it. The general manager for China left BMS, and I was asked to go there at a couple of weeks' notice. 

And you can imagine there were all sorts of reasons not to go to China. It was incredibly challenging market. I didn’t speak the language. It was as likely to break people’s career as make people’s career. But we just thought, could we really turn up the opportunity to live in Shanghai and try to make a difference here in the early part of the 21st century? 

So I went to Shanghai and had both the challenge and the opportunity of turning around Bristol’s business there. But what I was able to do was to launch a breakthrough drug for hepatitis B that really put that business back on the map. And China was in many ways the most formative experience of my career. It’s the hardest role I’ve ever done in terms of knowing what to do on day one, in terms of culture and so on. 

From there, back to Singapore again, to the mothership at Bristol in Princeton. When Bristol became a completely oncology company, because I’d never worked in oncology, it was the time to move on. And for me, mental health has always been something that I wanted to pursue. Having lost my father and two close friends to suicide, that was an area where I always wanted, ultimately, to see if I could land my career. I had the good luck to lead Otsuka just at the time when they were coming off the loss of exclusivity for Abilify, rebuild that business. 

And it was while leading Otsuka that I actually became interested in psychedelics. We actually saw that psychedelic medicines could potentially be part of the future. We achieved clinical conviction and through that I actually came to know Compass Pathways, where I now am. Otsuka actually made an investment in Compass Pathways. 

And so I was actually able to get to know the company and so on. And so two years ago, when they were looking for somebody to take over from the founder or CEO, it was a very natural set of conversations. And here I am in biotech, and we’re going to talk a lot more about what it is like to take over from the founder and to run a biotech. 

Charlie Moore: Yeah, let’s come back to the founder question, but I’m interested to know why you went into not only the biotech space, but also psychedelics, because this isn’t an area that Big Pharma has embraced particularly. Otsuka, as you say, did invest. So just a little bit of background, perhaps in terms of your thinking around the psychedelic space, Big Pharma’s involvement, or the perhaps lack of involvement in the area.  

Kabir Nath: It’s a great question. So having led Otsuka for an extensive period of time, I know that we have some great drugs for serious mental illness that work for some patients some of the time. But unfortunately, in general, we do not do a great job with, for instance, treatment-resistant depression or PTSD or some of these other various situations. And as the kind of the tide turned publicly started to turn around, so we say 8 to 10 years ago, at least in the US, around psychedelics, which clearly had gone completely underground and been banned in 1970, as you started to see small studies and so on done, as I say, at Otsuka, we latched onto that and wanted to see whether these really had clinical significance. 

And we very quickly came to the conclusion that these were going to be clinically meaningful one day. Now, whether one day meant 5 years, 10 years, or 20 years was a question and to some degree is still a question. And so from my perspective, it’s absolutely about: can we provide a really important new tool to psychiatrists who are dealing with some of their hardest-to-treat patients? 

Clearly, it is a funky area. I mean, we are studying psilocybin, and we have demonstrated that you actually need the profound subjective experience. You need the altered state of consciousness to actually have an impact on the disease. And if you step back and think, is that something that Big Pharma’s going to embrace anytime soon, you can see how it really doesn’t fit in their model. 

And why did I choose to come here? First, because I think what we’re doing could be profoundly important, but also it’s a paradigm shift for the way that serious mental illness is treated. And commercially, it’s incredibly challenging. If I thought this was going to be easy, I wouldn’t have taken the job. 

So we know this is going to be really different. It really is a change of paradigm for how patients are treated. It requires six to eight hours in a room. It’s so different from taking a pill every day that it’s kind of hard to characterize, and that’s why I took on the challenge. 

Charlie Moore: Super. Thank you. And if we turn to the move from Bid Pharma into the smaller, more nimble risk-taking biotech space, how’s that been?  

Kabir Nath: So far, I’ve loved it. It’s now coming up to two years. And I think, obviously, Big Pharma brings incredible capabilities and discipline on one of the things it brings is resilience. Nobody is indispensable in Big Pharma, yes? If somebody moves on, there’s always somebody else who can cover and so on and take the role. Of course, I knew going into a smaller company that wasn’t the case, but you’re reminded of that on a daily basis, that people really are, in key roles, are indispensable. 

I think the, the thing about Compass, though, also is everyone at Compass—and we now have around 200 people—has a personal connection to serious mental illness, whether it’s themselves, whether it’s family, whether it’s friends. And I know that’s typical at most biotechs, that people are there because they have a personal vested passion in the particular disease in the particular area, but somehow with mental illness, partly because it’s harder to talk about, what we’ve managed to do truly at Compass—and I give George and Katya a great deal of credit for this—is break through some of those taboos. So it is a company where people openly talk about mental health, about their own, about what happens in families and so on. 

And that animating mission and that desire to get a potentially breakthrough new medicine to patients as soon as possible really does motivate people. So that has been the key change. In Big Pharma, many people are passionate, but there are also people who are there doing the job. We recognize that and that’s inevitable. 

There are other things—we don’t have time for silos. Now I still have to work hard to make sure silos don’t exist because we do privilege technical expertise, particularly in development and so on. But in a small company that’s trying to move fast and sometimes break things, you really don’t have the opportunity for that. And I’m loving, you know, having being involved in every aspect of the business. 

Now, you’d have to ask my team whether they love my being involved in every aspect of the business. But one thing about having, you know, one asset in phase three is, you know, you get to touch everything. And that’s fascinating.  

Charlie Moore: And you mentioned George and Katya there, who are the founders of Compass. Tell us a little bit about what it’s like to take over the helm from founders and how you’ve collaborated with them during the transition.  

Kabir Nath: It’s a really important question. And the first thing I had to say is my case was a little unusual because I had known Compass for three years beforehand. I’d got to know George and Katya and Otsuka had made an investment, and I was part of the group of colleagues in the US that really made the case for that. 

So I’d known the company. I’ve been tracking them. All that said, it is a key transition point both for the individuals involved in the company. And what I would say is we were really very, very thoughtful about planning it. So for the first five months, George was still executive chair before becoming nonexecutive chair. 

But we spent a lot of time before I even took over determining what that actually meant and ensuring that, for instance, operationally, he stepped back immediately. So from the leadership team perspective, I was clearly in charge from day one. Similarly, from an investor perspective, we planned over those five months exactly what the cadence of handoff would be. And we stuck absolutely to that. And the third thing I would say is we really invested a lot of time in communicating to the company. So we spent a lot of time. We actually did a big podcast together on day one around how George and Katya knew me, why they’d chosen me, why I’d come to the company. 

And we probably over-invested, appropriately, in communicating to the members of the company why this transition was happening and why it was happening now. And I would say, you know, looking back with hindsight, I think it’s been very  smooth. And I think, obviously, we’re very different people. George is a visionary, much more inspiring, much more forward-looking than me. 

But part of what I was brought in to do was also to bring some of the more, kind of, basic disciplines of drug development at a company that needs to scale. And I think that move has been seen very effectively by the company.  

Charlie Moore: That’s a nice story. Thank you. So let’s move on. Talk a little bit about Compass Pathways in terms of that accessibility question, which you’ve just raised, in terms of how you address the crucial issue of accessibility cost, ensuring that COMP 360 becomes accessible to a broad range of patients and not just those at high-cost treatment centers. 

Kabir Nath: It’s a really important question and really goes back to the foundation of the company. So George and Katya founded it with the view that we had to get to a point where there was broad and equitable access. And that’s why we are doing the hard work of the phase three trials. I mean, the full clinical program, phase one, phase two, we’re now in phase three. Because in our view, the only way to get broad access is to get approval from the FDA or CHNP or MHRA. 

That actually then allows you to start to negotiate with insurers, whether that’s CMS and commercial insurers in the US, whether it’s with NICE and the NHS here, or the similar bodies in Europe. And that’s exactly the path we’ve taken, and that’s why we’ve had to become, in that sense, a more normal biotech company, raising significant amounts of money from the public markets, raising money from healthcare investors and so on. 

And that’s why you see, clearly, still a certain tension between that. And the nature of the drug we’re working with. So there are clearly some in the psychedelic community who feel that Compass and others have, shall we say, sold out by going down this route. But we’ve been very deliberate because we believe the only way to get this paid for, whether by private or government insurance, is through the regulated pathway. And that’s exactly what we’re doing. 

More specifically, in the US, because unfortunately, in the US, as you know, everyone who touches a medicine has to make money out of it. So there we had to focus not only on the drug itself, but the accompanying psychological support that’s going to be provided by a trained therapist or other licensed professional. And so we’ve also had to do the work to ensure that they can get reimbursed for that as well. So we’ve been very thoughtful about that, very deliberate. Still a long way to go. But the key premise is, you know, we have to try to get FDA approval because that will enable us to negotiate with CMS and insurers. 

Charlie Moore: So you’re not just a CEO of a biotech, you’re a CEO of a business which is doing something that no one has done before.  

Kabir Nath: Correct. So no psychedelic has been approved so far. J&J has a drug called esketamine, and there are arguments about whether ketamine is really a psychedelic. It’s mildly dissociative, but this will be the first drug, if we actually generate the data and are lucky enough to get approval, that has this true altered state of consciousness, this truly intense psychedelic experience, subjective experience. And so yes, what we’re doing is something very new in trying to get that into a healthcare system that, as we all know, is not particularly open to innovation and new approaches. But the reason that I’m hopeful and optimistic and the reason we all are working so hard to make this happen is the unmet need. 

So our first indication is what’s called treatment-resistant depression, which is a horrible regulatory phrase that means you have failed at least two antidepressants in the current episode of disease. In practice, it’s a proxy for chronic refractory depression. These are the patients who end up at their third or fourth psychiatrist having tried everything, and have really very, very few other options. 

So this is a population that’s roughly 30 percent of all people with depression will end up with this so-called treatment-resistant chronic refractory depression where nothing works. And that’s why I think it’s worth persevering to see how we get this into the marketplace.  

Charlie Moore: And before we move on, perhaps one further question, particularly for the listeners that haven’t been following Compass, but how’s it going? What’s happening?  

Kabir Nath: So we are currently in phase three with a big phase three program, two trials. The trials are a mixture of US, Canada, and Europe as well, so these are global trials. We had very positive phase 2b data three years ago, and that led us to design these studies. We’re a public company. We have succeeded in raising financing late last year. I won’t pretend that that was easy or that it’s easy even now. So we’re a public company. We are London headquartered, but NASDAQ listed. So we’re that wonderful thing of a UK-US hybrid company, which actually gives us the strength of both cultures. 

Charlie Moore: Let’s talk a little bit about your leadership here, the culture you’re trying to create, and changes that you perhaps have made or looking at as the organization grows. 

It’s only natural that, that companies change shape as that happens. What are the new skill sets and capabilities that you’re seeking to support the growth of the organization going forward?  

Kabir Nath: So, inevitably—and I’m not saying this because it’s right—but it is the only way that biotechs can actually prosper and survive, our initial focus is on the US market. So from a commercial perspective, it is critical that we succeed in the US. So now that we are well into phase three, it’s time to start thinking seriously about that. So we’re in the process actually of hiring our first chief commercial officer to be based in the US. And on the back of that to start to build what will ultimately be, we hope, a significant team, assuming we get approval. Because while this is going to be very different from a traditional launch, we’re still not going to need field teams, including account managers, medical science liaisons, market access, patient navigators, and so on. 

But we’re also going to need all the accompanying capabilities and skills that go with commercial, including distribution and supply chain, including pricing and government pricing, and so on. So over the next two to three years, there’ll be a significant build. And what’s going to be interesting culturally today, we’re two-thirds UK, one-third US. That, in terms of numbers of people, will inevitably shift, assuming success in the US. 

So, as well as capabilities, it’s really important that we preserve the culture that actually unites people very effectively today. So that’s something I spend a lot of time thinking about. How are we going to preserve this UK-US hybrid, where many of the head office folks are and will continue to be in the UK, but much of the expansion will be in the US. 

Charlie Moore: And have you got any thoughts around that? How that should look? 

Kabir Nath: So hitherto, we’ve been largely virtual in the US. It’s been people in different pockets. We haven’t really focused on a geographic center, though we do have a reasonable number of people in and around New York, New Jersey. 

So one of the key decisions will be where is a US office, and again, not for people be there five days a week. But what is a real center of gravity there? Because we will have our CFO is US-based, our head of R&D is US-based, our chief commercial officer will be. And so we need to do that and ensure that. 

A lot of it though is travel. In fact, this week itself we have most of our senior US folks over in the office here in Soho. And these weeks are in many ways the most invigorating and exciting weeks for everyone when you really get all the leadership across together. And we’ll go on doing that on a regular basis. 

Charlie Moore: Super. And what about you? Just in terms of moving from Big Pharma to the startup and surprises. How did you manage the shift?  

Kabir Nath: It’s a good question. So first, I think, I guess I had a reasonable idea of what the job would be, but you never know fully. And obviously one of the things I wanted to do was run a public company with everything that meant around investors and funding and so on. 

I guess I hadn’t realized joining in August ’22 just how much time I would be spending on the financing side with investors and so on. So that was, it’s fun. It’s a new set of skills, but I think—and everyone had told me this—if you spend time with boards and management teams and so on before, it’s not that different. It’s around the ability to communicate. It’s around transparency and so on, but that’s been a key part of it. 

As I said earlier, I’m loving kind of getting back to touching every part of the business. And again, I think it’s really important that my background is principally commercial. If you’re not actually interested in drug development, and the judgment calls that are involved in planning trials and so on, then it’s not the right job for you. 

Because even with that commercial background, you have to have that passion about how you do the best thing across all this. So yeah, it’s been a lot of fun, a lot of kind of reacquainting myself with certain elements of the business. Until now, we haven’t had a chief commercial officer, so I’ve been kind of a little more hands-on on that side. But now I’m going to be stepping back from that. And as I’m fond of reminding people, great thing about being a CEO is you don’t have to be an expert at anything, unlike everyone else on the team.  

Charlie Moore: That’s quite true. In fact, this came up at a CEO dinner we hosted last week in Boston, in terms of what is it that makes, or perhaps doesn’t make, a success for an executive coming out of Big Pharma? Are there some traits that you look at when you interview, when you’re assessing the Big Pharma candidates that you’re looking at perhaps for the CCO role?  

Kabir Nath: Absolutely. And so I think the way I would describe it as is the ability to let others benefit from your experience and your learnings, but with humility. 

So, you know, whether it’s for myself or the senior leaders I look to hire, it’s part of the reason you’re hiring them is absolutely the breadth of experience, the number of situations they’ve seen, both the successes they’ve had and the mistakes they’ve made. But then you need to be able to lean into that with a much less experienced team that’s in some, often in many cases, doing it for the first time. 

But you have to do it in a way that’s not, this is how you do it, But let’s talk about how I’ve done it in the past. Let’s talk about what may work and so on. So it’s that. It’s also people who are not going to make quick changes. And I would say not just in biotech, but throughout my career. I’ve been very leery of hiring people at senior level who kind of make it clear they’re going to bring their own team with them within five minutes. 

Because you never know whether that’s going to be the right fit for the culture or whatever. And so even in coming to Compass, over a couple of years, there have been changes to the leadership. But I didn’t start out by saying, you know, within three months, we’re going to do this. And I’m always a little surprised when people move straight into biotech and promptly bring two or three senior folks with them without really getting to assess the culture and the right fit within that. 

Charlie Moore: So one of the things we think on this topic is actually—and you’re proof of this—is adaptability. So the fact that you’ve moved from consulting to medtech to pharma to biotechs is sort of some of that. But actually, on top of that, you’ve lived in Spain, and you’ve lived in Singapore, and the UK and China and the US. So there’s been a degree, a large degree of adaptability in your career, and we would like to think that that’s actually part and parcel of of the success factors of individuals moving into the biotech space from Big Pharma.  

Kabir Nath: I completely agree with you because, you know, adaptability, there’s how quickly you can get up and learn again. But, I think, shall we call it situational adaptability? That ability to walk into different environments, cultures, and so on. And I think coming back to China, I mean, that was scary at times. And it’s certainly the job where I was least confident that I would emerge successful from it. But the fact that I was able to do that on, you know, ultimately operate successfully in a culture where I didn’t speak the language, where I had to learn so much and so on, has made me more confident about that. 

But I think you’re absolutely right. That’s situational adaptability. And a big part of that is listening. So again, you know, CEOs sometimes talk a lot. And when necessary, I can talk a lot. But I’m also pretty good at listening to begin with.  

Charlie Moore: And I know that because you and I have worked together for a good number of years. Let’s just shift gears a little bit here and talk about the inclusion piece. Because today, particularly in your business, actually, I would assume that the inclusion piece is critical.  

Kabir Nath: It absolutely is. So we know for a fact that, well, mental illness affects everyone. Because of some of the social determinants of it, also because some of the taboos and stigma around talking at it, there is actually a disproportionate impact on minorities of all sorts, whether that’s ethnic, whether that’s gender-based, whatever it may be—so you’re absolutely right. So we think about this a lot. Are we necessarily yet doing the best job we could? Probably not. 

And so there are other ways we can think about—so one is clearly internally to ensure that, whether that’s any characterization, you know, whether it’s gender, race, whatever, that we are as being as open as possible. But clearly it goes beyond that, and I talked earlier around people being open around their own mental health issues. 

It also goes to the area of neurodiversity and ensuring that we’re open about that. And what I can say is at Compass, there is far more dialogue, far more openness around all of this than anywhere I’ve worked. And in terms of what people say around your ability to bring your true self to work, I see that more a Compass than anywhere else I’ve worked. 

Now, as we think then about clinical trials, because clearly that’s a key area, and we are trying to ensure that our sites in the US include a wide range of sites, but we’re also honest, which is we’re studying treatment-resistant depression, which requires multiple visits during the course of the protocol and inevitably the population will still be biased toward the people who have the time to get to appointments and so on and so forth. 

So the next piece is then as we think about commercialization in the future, how are we actually going to ensure that this reaches the right people? And that candidly is work we’ve only just started really to do because we’re still some years away from that. 

But that comes back to what is the key to broad and equitable access? Well, in the US, it’s getting approval. This will be an antidepressant, so CMS is required to pay for it from approval, that’s one of the so-called six protected classes. And we’re going to have to work to ensure that through CMS, through Medicaid, that we do make it broadly available. 

Charlie Moore: So not just investor relations, but by the sounds of things, a big public relations drive at the same time. 

Kabir Nath: It will have to be, yes. 

Charlie Moore: Okay. AI and data. Everybody’s talking about it. But it means different things in different environments. How do you look at that? What’s affecting your business? How are you moving faster? How could you move faster, perhaps, with different approaches to AI and data analytics?

Kabir Nath: Yeah, so this is a key question, particularly in psychiatry. So the reality of psychiatry is, it is the area of medicine that’s probably furthest away from precision medicine of any major area. So, in contrast to oncology, immunology, and a host of other areas that, you know, where biomarkers, physiological, blood-borne biomarkers are helpful, there are none in psychiatry. And we know people have spent billions of dollars looking for genetic markers, looking for any of this. So most of us working in the field believe that the only way we’re going to get there is through data and through some form of digital markers, potentially combined with some other physiological ones like EEGs and so on. 

And so, for instance, what we are doing is we have an app that goes to every patient in the phase three trials. Through that, we’re able, with patient consent, to collect data not only from the app, but actually from the smartphone, from the device, which includes a host of both physical data, as well as data about actual use and so on and so forth, so we will have that. 

We are required by the FDA to record all sessions. So we have the transcripts of the interactions between patients and the therapist in the room, clearly completely anonymized. And so what we have done already with the phase 2b data is run a lot of those through AI ML algorithms, and to see what connections can we make between what may happen there and ultimately the outcomes in terms of depression scores and so on. 

And we started to get some interesting insights, but clearly, those are going to have to be validated much more broadly, not only on our phase three data, but more broadly on broader source data. So if you think to the future, you can imagine a world where what we take from the app and the phone, what we have from the transcriptions of actual sessions, could start us to lead to—Will a patient respond? Or if a patient has responded, can we start to see signs of an impending relapse in terms of speech patterns or whatever it must be or other physiological things? 

Now, we’re not the only people working on this. This is kind of the holy grail in psychiatry. So you will talk to a number of psychiatry firms that are taking all sorts of different approaches, but fundamentally, data, the ability to parse huge amounts of data, the increasing availability of some longitudinal data sets in psychiatry—this is going to be critical to the future of psychiatry. 

And that’s for us is probably the main area of focus. Plus areas like training, as you’d expect. So as we think about how do we train therapists to engage with patients with psychedelics, the extent to which we can actually build AI tools that actually say, you know, what is the best way to do that? And so on. 

That’s also work that we’re doing. For us, it’s not so much clearly in the discovery and so on space. We’re kind of— Psilocybin is a known compound, so it’s more around the use of data to improve outcomes in the long run. As I say, Holy Grail for psychiatry, nobody can claim to be there yet, but there are lots of us working in parallel. 

Charlie Moore: Fascinating. Fascinating. So, Kabir, I’m just interested to know how you’re preparing the leadership team for changes that you’re expecting the company’s going to go through over the next one, two, three years.  

Kabir Nath: So we’re doing a couple of different things. First, we obviously have lots of people who have experience from launches, from late stage development and so on. So we’re doing a lot of teach ins within the company. 

But second, I think this is critical is to get the external perspective. There is so much changing so quickly. Not just in terms of technology and so on, but you can imagine in our environment, in the psychedelic environment, this is very much the external environment is changing all the time. 

So it’s essential we actually get external voices, we take advice appropriately, and we just understand, talk to other people about some of the trends and so on they would see. But I think the other word I would use is adaptability. I mean, we’re going to be facing all sorts of different situations. So actually investing in adaptability for the leadership team. 

And we are starting to develop actually some new leadership training to recognize some of the new, not so much values, but the new capabilities that are going to be required in terms of strategic foresight in terms of really an enterprise mindset moving forward. So we’re working on that as well. 

Charlie Moore: We could go on for— We could spend, we could do part two, perhaps. One final thought from you in terms of advice you’d give an executive sitting in a Big Pharma company thinking about his or her first move into the biotech space. 

Kabir Nath: First I would say, do it. But because I think, you know, there is so much you can learn and so on. But I think the key thing is, look, you have to be comfortable around the balance of risk and risk. Part of that, candidly, is financial. You had to be in a position where you’re willing to sacrifice certain salary for very uncertain upside. 

And that’s clearly something you had to get comfortable with. But I think the opportunity to truly put your mark on something in a way that’s unique is fascinating in biotech. And as I say, you have to enter it with humility. You have to spend time to learn the culture, learn what’s needed. And don’t build your team too quickly. Be prepared to make the right choices over time. 

And, another reminder, the shadow of the leader is even stronger in a smaller company. Yeah, so, you know, I think I’ve always been conscious, and that’s partly from the experience of running somewhere like China, where, you know, the figure of the expat GM was unfortunately in many ways larger than life. 

So I’ve always been very conscious of the shadow. But in a small company, it really is very, very important. That extends not only to how you behave internally, but of course, externally as well. What you do externally, interviews, speeches, and so on and so forth. And the final thing I’d always say is, you know, people talk a lot about culture. 

Culture is us. Culture is how each one of us behaves with each other. And when leaders do that in the right way, that’s incredibly positive and reinforcing. But it only takes a couple of bad examples. Of leaders interacting badly to poison the culture, and that’s something you also have to be acutely conscious of, especially in a smaller company. 

Charlie Moore: Yeah, no, completely agree. I think the other point that I would make, and you talked about it when you started this conversation, is passion for the therapeutic area, passion for the science, belief in it. Because if you don’t have that…

Kabir Nath: Absolutely. No, I guess that probably was a given, but yes, I mean, would I be doing this in a kind of, the next PD1 asset? 

No, I wouldn’t. I mean, and so you’re exactly right. And, and for, not in passion for the science as well, but truly believe that despite the challenges, it’s going to make a difference. And as I say, the reason I came here is I believe this could be transformative, but I also know it’s going to be really hard. 

Charlie Moore: I’m glad to hear that. Well, look, thank you. That was fascinating. And, as I said, we could have gone on, but really appreciate just a short insight into where you are with Compass Pathways. And congratulations.  

Kabir Nath: Thanks very much, Charlie. It’s a pleasure. 

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About the interviewer

Charlie Moore (cmoore@heidrick.com) is a partner in Heidrick & Struggles’ London office, a member of the Healthcare & Life Sciences Practice, and regional leader of strategic accounts in Europe.