Speed is visible. The handoff decides the race.

By Jay Berube
Founder & CEO, Berube BioVentures

Run a company like a relay.

Speed matters, but most races are lost in the handoff.

I spent years running competitively, long enough to understand the difference between moving fast and racing well. My track PRs were 1:56.57 for 800 meters, 4:02.25 for 1,500 meters, and 4:25.09 for the mile. After college, I ran a 2:52 marathon.

Those events are very different, but they taught me the same thing: raw speed is never the whole system.

The fastest athlete on the track is not automatically part of the fastest relay. Four exceptional runners can lose to four slightly slower runners who understand timing, trust, acceleration, positioning, and the exchange.

The baton does not stop.

That may be one of the simplest models I know for understanding a company.

Businesses like to measure the runners. Revenue. Sales performance. Technical expertise. Conversion. Productivity. Utilization. Individual output. We hire talented people, place them into specialized functions, give them increasingly sophisticated systems, and then wonder why the organization still feels slower than the people inside it.

Often the problem is not the runners.

It is the exchange.

A lead moves from marketing to sales. Sales moves it to technical review. Technical review becomes qualification. Qualification becomes quoting. A quote becomes negotiation. Negotiation becomes execution.

Every transition introduces risk.

Context disappears. Urgency changes. Ownership becomes ambiguous. The customer repeats something they already explained. A technical team receives only half of the commercial context. Sales interprets “possible” as “probable.” Operations assumes somebody else followed up.

Everyone can execute their individual responsibility correctly while the larger system quietly loses velocity.

In biotechnology, this problem becomes even more pronounced because almost nothing important happens inside a single discipline. Scientific possibility has to move through development, manufacturing, analytical work, quality, regulatory strategy, capital, commercial judgment, and time.

A molecule can be excellent and still fail inside a poor development system.

A capable CDMO can lose a strong program because the transition was slow or unclear.

A venture can have exceptional science and still destroy value because technical, financial, and operational intelligence never becomes one coherent decision.

The interface is not administrative.

The interface is part of the product.

Speed Is Not Activity

One of the easiest mistakes in business is confusing effort with velocity.

A runner can exhaust himself training for the wrong event. A company can do the same thing.

More meetings. More dashboards. More qualification. More internal review. More emails. More fields in the CRM. More systems designed to document the systems already documenting the process.

Everyone is busy.

Nothing is moving.

Real speed is not doing more things faster. It is removing unnecessary resistance while preserving the constraints that actually matter.

That distinction matters enormously in sales.

Sales is not the art of forcing movement.

It is the art of arranging the field so movement becomes natural.

The best commercial relationships rarely feel dragged forward. The next step increasingly makes sense because the right information, technical fit, timing, economics, people, and trust have been brought into alignment.

The meeting follows naturally from the question.

The technical discussion follows naturally from the meeting.

The quote follows naturally from technical alignment.

The project follows naturally when enough of the field has been organized correctly.

There is still persuasion. There are still objections, competition, losses, negotiation, uncertainty, and pressure.

But force and momentum are different things.

The strongest commercial systems create momentum.

The Athlete Is Not the Training Plan

Running also taught me that performance is never produced by the athlete alone.

A good coach can write workouts.

A great coach learns the athlete.

Two runners can receive the same training plan and produce completely different results. A coach has to understand the event, the body, the injury history, the temperament, the ambitions, recovery, nutrition, form, sleep, and sometimes the life happening outside the track.

Training becomes a feedback loop.

Apply pressure.

Observe.

Communicate.

Adjust.

Repeat.

Eventually, coach and athlete discover what that particular runner is capable of becoming.

Leadership works the same way.

People are not interchangeable components inside an organizational machine. The best leaders learn how different people think, communicate, respond to pressure, make decisions, recover from mistakes, and perform when conditions change.

Standards can be shared without pretending the path to those standards must be identical.

That distinction matters.

A mediocre organization gives everybody the same process and asks why performance differs.

A strong organization builds a common operating system while preserving enough flexibility for individual intelligence to matter.

Standardize the machinery.

Do not standardize the human being.

Know Who Is Running the Next Leg

The relay makes this even clearer.

You never hand the baton to an abstraction called “the next runner.”

You hand it to a particular person whose stride you know.

Relay teams practice exchanges because the outgoing runner has to begin accelerating before the incoming runner reaches them. The receiving runner cannot wait until the baton arrives and then decide to start moving.

The exchange works because both people already understand what the other is about to do.

Business should work the same way.

A great handoff does not begin when one person’s work ends.

It begins earlier.

The next person should already understand the customer, the objective, the risk, the context, and the reason the work matters. They should be accelerating before responsibility formally changes hands.

That is the difference between forwarding information and transferring momentum.

The first creates work.

The second preserves velocity.

This is also why communication cannot be reduced to documentation. A CRM entry may preserve facts. It does not necessarily preserve judgment.

Why does this opportunity matter?

What changed during the call?

What is the customer not saying directly?

Where is the technical uncertainty?

What part of the relationship is fragile?

Where is the actual decision?

Information can be transferred mechanically.

Understanding has to be handed off.

Build a Team That Can Think Back

Leadership is often confused with having the answer faster than everyone else.

That works only for so long.

At some point, the founder has to build a company capable of producing answers that did not originate inside the founder.

A weak organization expands the founder’s reach.

A strong organization expands the founder’s intelligence.

Those are not the same thing.

If every important decision must return to one person, then the organization has not developed distributed capability. It has simply created more limbs around the same nervous system.

A stronger structure emerges when different forms of intelligence are allowed to meet.

One person sees the customer.

Another understands the technical constraint.

Another sees the manufacturing bottleneck.

Another understands the economics.

Another remembers the history.

Another sees the risk nobody wants to name.

Another sees the opportunity everybody else missed.

Then those perspectives collide.

Something appears between them that no one person possessed beforehand.

That is where a company begins to acquire a Mind of its own.

The founder should not want a team of echoes. The goal is not to hire people who return your own thinking with better formatting.

The goal is to build people capable of improving the thought.

A company becomes more intelligent when its people can disagree without fragmenting.

Authority Has to Travel With the Baton

There is another common failure.

A leader tells someone, “You own this,” but retains every meaningful decision.

That is not ownership.

Responsibility without authority is accountability without control.

If somebody owns an outcome, they need enough authority to move it.

That does not mean eliminating review, governance, or escalation. It means recognizing that speed collapses when every decision has to travel back through the same central point.

This becomes especially important as a company moves from founder memory to organizational memory.

Early companies often operate through intuition.

Who introduced this customer?

Why does the relationship matter?

What did we promise six months ago?

Why did the last project stall?

Which partner is actually the right fit?

What does this person care about?

At first, these things live inside a few people.

Then they have to become transferable.

Founder memory becomes documented process.

Documented process becomes shared judgment.

Shared judgment becomes an operating system.

And eventually, the organization begins to preserve intelligence independently of any single person.

That is scale.

Not simply more people.

Not simply more revenue.

Not simply more activity.

Scale is the ability to preserve and compound judgment.

The Handoff Is Creative

The most interesting part of the relay metaphor is that the handoff does not merely preserve velocity.

The next runner should add to it.

That is what good collaboration does.

One person proposes.

Another challenges.

Reality enters.

The idea changes.

Then somebody owns the decision and runs.

I do not think companies should optimize for permanent agreement. Agreement can be useful, but clarity is more useful. Trust is more useful. Intelligent friction is more useful.

A team should be able to challenge an idea without challenging the legitimacy of the team.

That is how strategy improves.

Too much closure creates bureaucracy. The organization decides too early and eventually becomes excellent at repeating yesterday’s intelligence.

Too much openness creates drift. Every question remains provisional, everybody contributes, nobody owns, and the baton floats above the track while thoughtful people discuss where it should go.

Leadership exists in the interval between those failures.

Close enough to act. Open enough to become.

Race Day Is the Smallest Part of the Race

One of the strangest things about competition is how little of the work anyone actually sees.

Race day gets the photograph.

The performance was built months earlier.

Summer mileage.

Intervals.

Recovery.

Nutrition.

Sleep.

Strength.

Stretching.

Repetition.

Thousands of ordinary decisions made correctly before anybody was watching.

Business works the same way.

The transaction gets announced.

The financing becomes news.

The partnership gets a press release.

The product launches.

The customer signs.

But the visible result is usually only the final expression of an invisible system.

The quality of that system determines how often the visible results can be repeated.

That is why culture matters.

That is why preparation matters.

That is why systems matter.

And that is why leadership has to care about far more than the moment someone crosses the line.

Build Something That Can Run Beyond You

There is an enduring mythology of the founder as heroic sprinter.

I increasingly think that is the wrong sport.

The founder may run the first leg.

Often, the founder has to.

You build the first relationships. Make the first sales. Create the first processes. Fix the first mistakes. Carry too much because there is nobody else yet to carry it.

But that cannot remain the architecture forever.

The measure of the company is not how much its founder can personally carry.

It is whether the founder can build something through which speed compounds as responsibility passes from one person to another.

Can another person take the baton and accelerate?

Can information survive the exchange?

Can a relationship move across the organization without becoming colder?

Can technical complexity reach commercial leadership without being flattened?

Can commercial urgency reach technical leadership without becoming reckless?

Can someone challenge the founder and make the company better?

Can mistakes become memory?

Can judgment become transferable?

Can the organization eventually accomplish something no individual inside it could have accomplished alone?

That is the point.

Execution is rarely one extraordinary sprint.

It is a succession of clean exchanges.

Eventually, if the company is built correctly, you look up and realize the organization is moving faster than any single person inside it.

That is when effort becomes momentum.

That is when individuals become a team.

That is when a company becomes more than the sum of its runners.

Run the company like a relay.

Train the individual. Build the team. Design the exchange.

Speed is individual. Momentum is relational.

The race reveals the team. The training created it.