What does it take to walk into a CEO seat you never pictured yourself in, and take a company public in a market when nobody else was going public?

In this episode of Fuel for Female Founders, Andrea sits down with Heather Turner, Chief Executive Officer and Director of LB Pharmaceuticals, a clinical-stage company working on neuropsychiatric disease. Heather started as a corporate securities attorney at a firm that specialized in startups, found she could follow the science, and moved in-house expecting a more manageable schedule. What she got instead was a front-row seat to every function in the business. She kept asking people to explain their work to her, and that curiosity turned a legal career into a strategic one, then into the CEO role at Carmot Therapeutics, a 3.1 billion dollar deal with Roche, and an IPO at LB a few months after she arrived.

Heather and Andrea trace what actually transfers from general counsel to chief executive. Big transactions are project management with fifty people on the call, and Heather had already learned to drive those. The harder part is capital. She is direct about raising money in a hostile room, and about the one thing that carries a founder through it: conviction, which she separates cleanly from passion. Plenty of people will tell you it is the wrong idea at the wrong time. The leader and the team both have to believe otherwise, or the wall in front of them does not get climbed.

This conversation goes well beyond biotech. Heather talks about building a personal board of advisors by naming her own gaps first, why she asks her whole executive team to do the same, and how an executive coach of five years keeps her honest about whether her leadership style still fits the company. She is candid about the loneliness of the top job and what the Biotech CEO Sisterhood gave her, and about being the sole breadwinner while her husband stayed home with their twin boys. Her advice to working mothers is the jet lag rule: accept that you will never feel like you are doing enough, and the anxiety loosens its grip.

This episode is for the woman who is carrying the weight of a company and a family at the same time, who is tired of sitting on the sidelines waiting to feel ready, and who is ready to act on conviction before the room agrees with her.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

• How a corporate securities attorney became the CEO of a public biotech company
• Why understanding the whole business makes someone a better lawyer, not a distracted one
• What a general counsel already knows that transfers directly to running a company
• Why conviction, not passion, is what carries a founder through challenges
• Why humility about what you do not know is the trait Heather hires for
• How to build a personal board of advisors by naming your gaps before your contacts
• What five years with an executive coach changed about her leadership
• Why the top job stays lonely even with a strong team around you
• How the jet lag rule applies to being a full-time working mother
• Why work life balance is always imbalanced, and why that is a strength
• What it takes to protect culture through commercialization instead of posting values on a wall

Resources and Connections

• LB Pharmaceuticals: https://lbpharma.us/
• Heather Turner at LB Pharmaceuticals: https://lbpharma.us/heather-turner/
• Heather Turner on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heather-turner-759146b
• Biotech CEO Sisterhood: https://www.biotechceosisterhood.org/

• Fuel for Female Founders: https://www.fuelforfemalefounders.com/
• Andrea L. Johnston on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrealjohnston
• Fuel for Female Founders on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fuel-for-female-founders
• Women I Want You to Know, the former LinkedIn feature series: https://www.fuelforfemalefounders.com/linkedin/