Founder to Advisor

There is a moment in the life of a company when the most useful thing a founder can do is step to the side. After a decade of building, raising the capital, and growing the footprint from a single Kendall Square floor to a national network, I reached that moment with SmartLabs. In early 2024 the company announced a new round of funding and a planned leadership transition, and I moved from chief executive into a strategic advisory role.

The transition came alongside a Series C that the company raised to keep advancing its laboratory infrastructure and resourcing solutions. SmartLabs also welcomed a seasoned biopharma operator, Brian Taylor, as the incoming chief executive. Handing the wheel to an experienced leader at the moment a company shifts from building the model to scaling it is not a retreat. It is what you do when you have built something you want to last beyond your own tenure.

Some of the work I am proudest of in the later years had little to do with running the company day to day. I was appointed to a New York City Economic Development Corporation life sciences advisory group, helping a city think through how to grow its research base. And I had the chance to contribute to the federal conversation, submitting testimony to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on biomedical infrastructure and the role of private sector innovation in keeping American science competitive. Building one company teaches you things that are worth contributing back to the broader system.

People sometimes ask whether it is hard to let go of something you started. It is, and it is not. It is hard because you carry a decade of decisions in your body and you notice every detail. It is not hard because the entire point of building shared, durable infrastructure is that it should not depend on any one person, including the person who started it. If it cannot outlast me, I did not actually build infrastructure. I built a job.

So I think of the transition less as an ending than as a test the company passed. The model is sound, the standards are set, and the team is strong enough to run without its founder in the chair. My work now is to advise, to contribute where the experience is useful, and to keep building at the same intersection of science, infrastructure, and capital that has held my attention for my entire career.