Culture is all about parties and offsites - Anonymous employee OWKIN Employee Review

Thank you for taking the time to provide us with feedback. This is important to us as we continue to strengthen our company culture around our key values of Care, Curiosity, Collaboration and Creativity. You raise some great points around areas where we can continue to improve. I am sorry to hear that you did not feeI heard during your time with us and invite you to reach out to me or any other lead if you’re aware of a situation where feedback (positive or negative) is not accepted. Feedback is a gift, at any level, and we pride ourselves in having a number of channels to allow direct or indirect feedback. Like many other leads I personally hold 2 hours of office hours per week, every Thursday morning, where any employee can come and talk to me in a safe environment. This is also why we have regular all-hands and Q&A sessions both at the company and functional level, where we open for questions and feedback and allow people to do it anonymously if they wish to do so. We are excited to see how much our team has grown in the last 2 years and how we have progressed against our objectives on diversifying our teams including but not limited to in terms of gender and skills. Today we have people with different backgrounds, in particular in data science, machine learning, computational biology, who typically have experience in academia or tech. We think this mix is a gift, as we don’t want to be “just another biotech”. We are keen to hire our talents where they are in light of our flexible work from home policy. In this year in particular, we have seen an increase in hires in different cities such as London, Cambridge, Barcelona and Berlin and are now working to keep up with these growth to ensure everyone is set up for success. Diversity in all its forms is a key driver for us and we are proud to have built a team where everyone can feel represented and is given the opportunity to thrive. We can still be better, in particular in diversifying our senior leadership roles, and have made this an explicit OKR in R&D this year. We also know that there is no diversity without inclusion and this is another reason why we strive to ensure everyone's voice is heard. Finally I really appreciate your point of view on the benefits of an agile framework and concerns around our perceived emphasis on research or academia. We are proud to grow a successful business with steady revenues from our pharma partners in parallel to carrying out methodological research and academic collaborations that allows us to publish in the best journals and conferences (we have had more than 40 publications in top venues so far!). This research centric methodology and mindset of always starting with a “why?” question ensure that our value of curiosity is at the core of what we do. Today we do not see the agile methodology as the most appropriate for many of our projects in R&D, however, for projects more related to product development (mostly carried out in a sister department in charge of product development) we do use the agile methodology. As a company and in R&D in particular, we need to innovate considering the complexity of the problems we tackle (eg, finding new drug targets or de-risking clinical trials with original AI-based approaches), and this requires pushing the frontiers of existing knowledge and methods. What we look for in our Owkinautes is a mindset of constant curiosity and creativity to allow us to deliver on our mission of understanding complex biology through AI. Jean-Philippe VERT, Chief R&D Officer at Owkin