The investors' network.
The seat goes to whoever the lead investor knows. That person may be excellent. But the pool was twenty names, not the market, and nobody checked whether the stage they know is the stage you are entering.
Christian Rados, biotech headhunter since 2011. 100+ clients, 1,000+ placements, most of them at Director and VP level.
A seat on your board is due. An independent director, a chair, someone who has done audit or clinical at the stage you are entering. I run it as a search across the whole market, with the same three fits as every C-level mandate. Not as a round of calls through the investors' address books.
Most boards get filled by the cap table. Each lead investor sends a partner, the founder keeps a seat, and the independent seats stay empty until someone raises it in a board meeting. That is governance, and it is the easy part.
The search starts when the board needs something it does not have at the table. A director who has raised the round you are about to raise. A chair who has run a CEO succession. Someone who has signed off audited accounts before a listing, or sat across a regulator before a pivotal readout. If what you need is an advisor and not a seat, I will tell you so on the first call.
A non-executive seat for someone who has been through your next stage, as operator or as director, and owes nothing to any investor at the table.
Half operator, half diplomat. Knows when to push the CEO, when to back them, and how to move a board conversation to where it needs to go.
An audit chair or a finance director before the listing or the crossover round, credible opposite analysts and institutional investors.
A director who reads the Phase 2 protocol before the meeting and asks the question that changes the next clinical decision.
Three reasons I see again and again. None of them is about the person's CV.
The seat goes to whoever the lead investor knows. That person may be excellent. But the pool was twenty names, not the market, and nobody checked whether the stage they know is the stage you are entering.
Board work is a few days a year, so the person who says yes fastest wins. The people who would change the outcome are running a company right now. Nobody asked them.
A director who took a company through Phase 3 and a listing is the wrong director for a Series A with one preclinical asset. Same title, different job. The table gets filled by reputation, and the gap only shows when it is expensive.
The wrong board hire costs you nothing visible. Nobody catches it in three months, the way you catch the wrong CFO. It sits at the table for years, until the financing stalls or a first-time decision goes wrong, and the seat is already taken.
The Rados Method checks three fits. Skill fit comes first, and I check it on every candidate: experience, availability, location, independence. Any serious search does the same. What decides the seat are the other two: stage fit for the board, need fit for the person.
The seat comes from the stage, not from a name someone mentioned.
I place the company on a six-stage lifecycle from what can be observed: the round, the headcount, the clinical phase, the board as it stands today. From that comes the seat. An audit chair before the listing. A clinical director before the pivotal readout. A chair who has run the move from founder-led to institutional governance.
Then I search the whole market against that seat. Region, time commitment, conflicts, readiness. Not against who is free this quarter.
A board seat is a few days a year. The good candidates are not looking for one.
So I ask which two of the six human needs this seat would feed for this person. If the honest answer is the title, they will not show up when it counts. If the answer holds, they stay for the years the seat needs, and they pick up the phone between meetings.
The need stays constant. When the role changes, what feeds those needs changes with it, and a person can starve on the needs that matter most. A board seat feeds some of those needs and starves others. Fit is a question I ask, never a verdict on the person.
Three things you do not get from a round of calls through the network.
Not career board members with a stack of seats. People who have sat in your next stage, as operator or as director, and can tell you on the first call what they would do at your table in month one.
I reference every candidate with people who sat at a table with them. A CEO they chaired, a board they served on, an investor who watched them in a hard meeting. Not the two names at the bottom of the CV.
A board search runs quieter and slower than a C-level search, but it has a date: the financing, the listing, the readout. I work back from that date, so the person is at the table before the decision, not after it.
Where the candidates come from.
From the network I have built since 2011: CEOs, CFOs, CMOs and CBOs of venture-backed and listed biotech. Many of them are between two operating roles, open to board work and not advertising it. They pick up the phone because we have spoken before the search, not because of it.
A first call takes up to sixty minutes. Bring the cap table and the next twelve months. I will tell you which seat I would fill first, and whether that needs a search or an introduction I can make for free.
A first conversation is the cheapest part of any executive search. Sixty minutes on a call to understand the stage you're in, what you actually need, and whether I'm the right person to help.