There is a version of governance education that happens in business school, in case studies and tidy diagrams showing the relationship between management and the board. Then there is the version that happens when you are a young founder building a drug development company from the ground up, raising hundreds of millions of dollars from investors who take seats at your table, navigating clinical trials and the full commercial machinery of a public biotech company in real time. Leen Kawas received both educations. The second one, she has said, taught her significantly more.
Kawas co-founded Athira Pharma in 2014, guided it through years of late-stage clinical development, and took it public in 2020 in a raise that exceeded $400 million. She was, at the time, one of only 22 women founders in the United States to have led their company to an IPO. Her full career record is documented on her Crunchbase profile — she has since co-founded Propel Bio Partners, joined the board of Inherent Biosciences, and serves as CEO of EIT Pharma. The perspective Leen Kawas brings to governance questions is not theoretical. It is the perspective of someone who has sat on both sides of the board table and learned, often under pressure, what the difference actually means.
What Nobody Tells You About Board Structure
Kawas has been candid about one of the most consequential mistakes a first-time founder can make: moving too fast on board structure and governance. In the early life of a startup, the pressure to close a funding round tends to compress the time available for careful deliberation about who is around the table, what authority they hold, and how the structure will function as the company grows. Leen Kawas’s approach to board governance in biotech draws directly from this experience — the decisions made in the early chapters of a company’s governance life are remarkably difficult to undo.
A board composition that made sense for a pre-revenue startup can become a significant liability when that company is preparing to go public. Her advice to founders is pointed: slow down around governance decisions even when everything else is moving fast. The board you build will either accelerate or impede your ability to execute, and the difference is not simply a matter of the individuals involved. It is a matter of whether the structure is fit for the company you are trying to become, not just the company you currently are.
The Board as an Operating Asset
Kawas regards a well-constructed board not as an oversight mechanism to be managed but as an operating asset to be deployed. The distinction matters enormously in biotech, where the challenges facing a company can involve simultaneous complexity across scientific, regulatory, financial, and commercial dimensions that no executive team can navigate without external expertise and network access. How Leen Kawas puts this philosophy into practice is outlined here.
The right board members bring connections that can become the foundation for strategic partnerships or acquisition conversations, regulatory experience built across dozens of programs, and credibility with investors and clinical partners that a founding team in its early years does not yet possess. At Propel Bio Partners, Kawas evaluates the governance structures of companies she considers investing in as part of fundamental diligence. A company with strong science and a governance structure that cannot support it through the complexity ahead carries a risk that does not always show up in the financials until it is already a crisis.
Diversity as a Strategic Variable
A board that is homogeneous in background and perspective carries blind spots that no individual within it can identify, because the nature of a blind spot is that it is invisible from inside the frame that creates it. Kawas has been direct about her belief that diverse teams produce better decisions. In biotech, where the cost of a wrong decision can be a clinical trial failure or a regulatory setback, the quality of that problem-solving process has commercial as well as scientific consequences.
For Kawas, the inclusion argument is not separate from the performance argument. It is the same argument. Building a board that genuinely reflects a range of perspectives is a decision about the intellectual quality of the institution’s most important deliberations, not a governance checkbox. Leen Kawas expands on this conviction at leenkawas.news, where her thinking on leadership and board diversity is explored in depth.
The Governance Instinct at Propel
Everything Kawas learned at Athira is now embedded in how Propel Bio Partners approaches its portfolio. The firm’s investment thesis is not simply about identifying promising science and deploying capital. It is about providing the strategic, operational, and governance support that transforms promising science into companies capable of navigating the full complexity of development and commercialisation. The conversations Propel has with portfolio companies about board composition and the structures that will serve them as they grow are not separate from the investment thesis. They are central to it.
This is what the board education of a founder who has been through a full cycle actually produces: not a checklist of governance best practices, but an instinct for how structure and culture interact and where the pressure points will appear before they become crises.
What Founders Actually Need to Hear
The governance lessons Kawas has distilled from her experience point toward a single underlying principle: the structures you build around your company will shape what your company becomes, and they deserve the same quality of attention you give to your science.
Her advice, offered across mentorship conversations and through the direct engagement she brings to Propel’s portfolio, is to treat governance not as the overhead of building a company but as one of its most important investments. The founders who understand this early build companies that are significantly harder to derail. The ones who learn it later tend to learn it expensively. Kawas is one of the rarer cases: a founder who learned it the hard way and chose, deliberately, to spend the rest of her career making sure the next cohort does not have to.