Biotech CEOs & CBOs - Equity Fundraising vs Deal Strategy

Your CBO is optimising for a $50M upfront deal. Your CEO is optimising for a Series B. And nobody's noticed these two objectives are working against each other. I've been interviewing CEOs and CBOs for an upcoming white paper on how this relationship actually works behind closed doors. One conversation stuck with me. A CBO at a clinical-stage biotech told me something that should be obvious but rarely gets acted on: you cannot separate equity fundraising from deal strategy. They're the same problem viewed through different lenses. A big pharma partnership changes your equity narrative. An equity round changes your negotiating leverage with pharma. The sequencing isn't a detail. It's the strategy. His view is that CBOs should carry equal incentive on the investment side, not because they need to become a CFO, but because you can't make good funding decisions when you only see half the board. The best-functioning CEO-CBO pairs I've spoken with treat capital strategy as one conversation with multiple instruments. Not two separate workstreams that occasionally bump into each other at board meetings. Yet most companies still split them. The CEO owns the investor story. The CBO owns the pharma story. And the board hears two narratives that don't quite add up. I'm still collecting perspectives on this for the white paper. If this dynamic resonates with your experience, whether you've cracked it or been burned by it, I'd love to hear from you.