From the Ground Up

Biotech is such a male-dominated field. It's rare to see a woman as the founder and a CEO of a biotech company, much less a public one. And so I'm wondering how then would you define diversity in today's workplace based on your own experience as a woman in a male-dominated field? And how does that experience inform your perspective about diversity?

I've thought a lot about this. I had the fortune growing up in the formative years of my career in a company that actually had a lot of women leaders. I think that sent a message to me that anything was possible. Today and when I founded Veracyte, it was sort of a similar thing. My first hire was a woman, my second hire was a woman. In fact, the second hire was even a more diverse woman. And so from the very beginning, it was just looking to bring in people that would be great fits with our culture and bring talent into the company that could get the job done. I think when you found a company on that premise, then you have fewer biases in the building process.

Define how you intentionally build the diversity of your team.

Some of it's been unintentional, because it hasn't had to be, and there have been moments when there has been very intentional efforts to build diversity. It's funny, when I look at the company as a whole, we have such an incredible broad base of diversity, not just gender diversity, but diversity, ethnicity, diversity, you know, just various elements of people feeling like they can come here and be included in the culture we have. But we still have small pockets of teams, where diversity is less prominent, and that has a lot to do with people's natural biases of recruiting from their own networks. Sometimes that might mean the networks of people they grow up with, go to school with. And so sometimes when we're going to be hiring additional people into some of these teams, we do have to take a step back and say, "Look, we're going to go for a hire that will diversify this team to bring better thinking and experience and perspective into that team." So it's not always about female, male, it can be in small microclimates within your company as well. But I'm pretty proud of the broad base of diversity we've built.