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🪐 What Changes After Your Exit (Nothing?). An interview with Ronan Berder, exited-Founder & CEO at Wiredcraft.
💆🏻 The Ultimate Founder Mental Health Stack. Psychedelics, depression drugs, dog walks, training, meditation, Whoop and loads more.
🔥 The CFO Who Killed The Spreadsheet. An interview with John Glasgow, CEO & CFO at Campfire.

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INTERVIEW 🎙️

Scott Chetham, Co-Founder & CEO at Faro Health

Scott Chetham is the Co-Founder and CEO of Faro Health. A clinical scientist at heart and a surfer by nature, he spent over two decades inside the drug development system, most notably as Head of Clinical Research Operations at Verily Life Sciences. It was during that time that a nagging question refused to let him go: why were the same costly, time-consuming mistakes showing up across hundreds of clinical trials? Clinical protocols had always lived in static, unstructured files, locking away their data and making automation nearly impossible. The idea that would become Faro Health came to him on a surfing trip to Costa Rica, and he hasn't stopped paddling since.

Founded in 2019 and based in San Diego, Faro Health is bringing clinical trials into the digital age, helping teams manage the complexity of modern trial designs through a cloud-native platform that replaces static documents with intelligent, collaborative workflows. The mission is as urgent as it is ambitious: drug development currently takes 10 to 12 years and nearly $2 billion per drug, with a success rate of less than 10%. Scott believes that compressing those timelines with AI and automation is one of the most meaningful levers we have to make healthcare more affordable. We sat down with him to talk about building from zero to one, what service-based leadership actually looks like in practice, and why repeating your goals every two weeks might be the most underrated management habit there is.

What’s the problem you are trying to solve with Faro Health?

At the highest level, the problem is that drugs cost too much money, and for a legitimate reason. One of the leading expenses is what we call clinical development: the process of proving a drug is both safe and effective. That takes between 10 to 12 years and nearly $2 billion. On top of that, the success rate is less than 10%—closer to 6%—which means that for every successful drug, you also have to pay for all the failures.

So we really have to bend that curve. If we want more affordable drugs and more affordable healthcare, the most impactful thing we can do is directly reduce the time it takes to get a drug to market. To be clear, I don't mean lowering the bar in any way; I mean accelerating the process. Compressing that timeline is key because the timeline is what's driving that $2 billion cost. A lot of that is within our control. Faro Health sets out to automate and bring data to people so they can make more effective decisions, faster. And frankly, there are a lot of very specialized, very expensive people doing very repetitive work. Automating that is how we can really compress the timelines.

What was the most difficult thing when going from zero to one?

For me, it was finding a technical co-founder. My specialty is clinical trials, specifically the science of proving a drug is safe and effective, which is a field in itself called clinical sciences. Because of that, I needed a software co-founder, and finding that first person was the hardest thing. Everything else builds from there; once you have that person, you can start assembling a technical team.

Thankfully, I had prior experience at Google and Google X, where I worked on the clinical side to support their efforts. So while I wasn't a software engineer, I was familiar with that world. But still, for me, picking that first technical hire was the single hardest part of going from zero to one.

What's your main day-to-day job as CEO?

We're at a growth stage, right in the middle of that inflection curve. I have a great mentor who has scaled software companies multiple times, from teams of 10 up to much larger organizations. She once told me, “When your hair feels like it's on fire every day and you're constantly putting out fires, you're probably doing something right.” That's very much the reality right now.

A big part of my day-to-day is living through scale. I put out a lot of fires, and I help teams think through questions like: how do we build for the future? Where do we spend our time and resources to grow effectively? And when do you have to make active decisions between solving for right now versus building for scale? I'm sure it'll change again in another year, and that's the one constant truth about the CEO role, from founding through growth: it's never the same from year to year.

What does your team look like right now?

Honestly, I have way too many direct reports right now, and reducing that number over the next six to twelve months is my number one goal. It's not a reflection of anything other than the fact that we're growing fast, and we now need people who have scaled companies effectively before.

Do you have any special recruitment strategies?

There are certain things I look for. One of them is how effectively someone works on a team. Going from individual contributor to team leader doesn't come naturally to most people, so I look for specific characteristics around that transition. I also tend to ask a lot of questions about whether someone has learned from previous mistakes. It's not about picking on anyone; everyone makes mistakes. What I'm really trying to gauge is how quickly and effectively they can learn from them, because I think that's one of the most valuable traits you can have in a scaling company. The ability to learn fast, move quickly, react, and make decisions under pressure is critical.

Beyond that, we are a very customer-focused culture, so I make sure that any candidate aligns with that. On the positive side, because of that culture, we do have people reaching out to us looking for jobs, which is great. But we still make sure that every hire genuinely fits those customer-centric values.

Could you explain your philosophy around leadership?

We could talk for hours on this, so I'll start at the abstract level and get into specifics. The first thing I always tell my leadership team is: you have to find your own style. Everyone is a little different.

So my approach is really about supporting my team to grow and empowering them. One of the questions I come back to often is: what's the one thing I could do to help you? I think that's how you get your team to scale. It's easier said than done at times, but that's my style. It's not for everyone, but it's how I'm most effective.

How do you set goals?

Conceptually, we do it by quarter. We have yearly goals that then break down into quarterly ones. As CEO, I set the strategic goals—the things we need to achieve. They have to be measurable, and everyone should know exactly what they are. There should never be any ambiguity around them, so everything is quantified upfront. From there, I ask my leadership team to define what is required of their respective teams to hit those goals, along with a few of their own. We try to keep it to three or four goals per team, because at our stage, that's about the right level of focus.

One of the most important things I've learned is that I almost have to repeat the goals every couple of weeks. It's amazing how quickly drift happens, both within teams and at the individual contributor level. People need to be constantly reminded of how their work fits within the broader goals, and that we're not shifting priorities. You have to keep repeating it, and repeating it, and repeating it.

How have you been adding AI operationally in the day-to-day?

It really depends on the team. As an AI company, we're all in on AI, but even internally, we're all over the spectrum. Some teams have been building their own tooling to automate their work, and what they've achieved has been pretty remarkable. Other teams, like our finance team, are not quite as far along.

Personally, I switch between different tools depending on the task. I've built a virtual version of myself for email responses, which works really well—that one lives in ChatGPT. For other things, I use Anthropic, and for some financial tasks, I've actually found that Gemini works better. I tend to be fairly agnostic and use whatever tool performs best for a given job. The email assistant has been a particular game-changer. It runs as a private instance, so it's secure, and it has a full history of my writing style. I can now feed it a few bullet points and some background context, and with a quick refinement pass, I can produce a polished email in a fraction of the time it would take me to write it from scratch. It's not thinking for me; I'm putting my thoughts down as bullet points and building a narrative around them. That has been a huge time multiplier.

I'm constantly pushing my teams to automate more, and we're on that journey, but as I said, we're at different stages depending on the function.

How do you build culture?

It's hard work, and if you don't actively invest in it, you might not like what you get. Someone put it to me very simply recently: you'd better do something about culture, because otherwise it will form on its own.

Being a hybrid company makes it even harder. We do all the usual things (company retreats and company events, for example), and those matter, but what actually makes the biggest difference is consistency. It's people showing up, responding, and modeling the right behaviors day in and day out. If something happens, how do you react? Are you being customer-focused? Are you being transparent?

That all starts with senior leadership being very intentional and responsive, and modeling the behavior you want to see from your team. If leadership isn't embodying a customer-centric focus—being extremely transparent on timelines, limitations, and challenges—that culture of high transparency will never percolate through the rest of the organization. And that ties back to recruiting key talent. You have to hire leaders who share your values. It's a bit like getting married: my wife and I are very different people, but we value the same things, and that's why it works. Leadership is the same. They don't have to be like you, but they have to share your values. That's a big part of how we hire.

How do you get the best out of yourself personally and professionally?

My days are very structured. I get up at the same time every day, get the kids up, have breakfast, and read my emails. I then commit to tackling the most uncomfortable tasks of the day before 8 a.m., so I don't spend the rest of the day dreading them. Then I carve out an hour to work out or do something for myself; that break allows me to reset and recharge for what I think of as the second shift. As a CEO, you're going to work again in the evening; for me, that happens after the kids go to bed. I know that level of structure sounds like a nightmare to some people, but for me, it's the only thing that works. If I lose that structure, I lose my effectiveness.

Extra reading / learning

• Fixing the Flaws in Clinical Research - August, 2025

• How Faro Health is Reinventing Clinical Trials with AI - November, 2025

And that’s it! You can follow Scott on LinkedIn or check out Faro Health on their website to keep up with what they’re building.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

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