Our Company Values, and Why They Matter to How We Hire
At Formation Bio, our people are our competitive advantage. Our ability to work together and think differently drives our long-term success, and our values make that possible.
This post tells you what our values are, why they exist, and how to show us how they come through in the way you work, think, and approach problems.
Why our values exist
Reimagining how medicines are developed isn’t easy. We’re taking on one of the world’s hardest and most important missions, and it takes people with outsized curiosity and conviction.
Our values enable us to move fast without sacrificing quality, challenge each other respectfully, and maintain the mission at the center of every decision. They inform how we decide who joins us, and they drive how we work together once someone is on board. Assessing values alignment is a core part of our hiring process, and a way that we ensure new hires will be set up for success from day one.
Our four values, and what they look like in practice
Think in first principles. We rigorously interrogate all possible paths to understand how we can do things differently and faster. We challenge assumptions, ask why, and solve problems from the ground up.
How this shows up in our work: First-principles thinking isn’t optional. It’s how we solve problems and make decisions. We learn the business, push the boundaries of our industry, and keep asking how we can do it better. When something 'has to' take a certain amount of time, we break the process down into steps to identify which ones directly impact outcomes, versus the ones that are pure convention, and then we redesign around it.
What this looks like in an interview: We might ask how you would reimagine your role if you were starting from scratch, or what part of the way things have always been done you would question first. "This is how it’s always been done" is not how we think or work, so we want to evaluate both your instinct and experience pushing forward original ideas and principles.
Be a scientist. We are curious and we continuously learn. In debates, we steelman, not strawman. We listen, rapidly iterate, and make the best decisions with the evidence we have.
How this shows up in our work: Strawmanning is misrepresenting or weakening someone’s argument to make it easier to dismiss, while steelmanning is the opposite - restating their argument in its strongest, most thoughtful form before engaging with it. Steelmanning fosters deeper understanding and better decision-making. In a debate about which path to take, the person most skeptical is often asked to make the strongest case for it first. That's steelmanning in action.
What this looks like in an interview: When we ask about problems you have solved, we are listening for how you took in new information, what changed your approach, and how you sought out another perspective – even one that inconvenienced your original plan, before deciding how to move forward.
Deliver care. We lead with empathy. We value different perspectives, collaborate across teams, and support one another. We give and receive direct, actionable, and timely feedback to hold ourselves and others to a high bar.
How this shows up in our work: Collaboration isn’t optional. We break down silos and solve problems together, knowing that multiple perspectives are needed to get to the best decision. We share credit and care more about the team being right than being personally right. We believe that giving feedback is a way to make someone better, and we are not afraid to share it directly.
What this looks like in an interview: We'll ask how you've given difficult feedback, and how you've handled feedback that was hard to hear. We're listening for how you interact with the people around you, especially when you disagree with them, and how you build the kind of trust that lets a team challenge each other without making it personal.
Champion the mission. We keep our mission as our north star to deliver impact for patients. We hold ourselves accountable for our wins and failures and keep moving forward.
How this shows up in our work: Velocity matters. We run at problems, move fast, and deliver. Timelines matter. We set them, stick to them and aim to expedite them whenever possible. We are highly adaptable, flexible and resilient. When something doesn't pan out, we name what happened, take the lesson, and move to the next shot quickly instead of relitigating it.
What this looks like in an interview: We'll ask how you've decided what to prioritize when everything feels urgent, and what you did when a plan you were accountable for didn't pan out the way you’d hoped. We want to understand how you stay focused on the outcome that matters, even when the process gets messy or distracting, and how you keep a team moving forward instead of stalling on a setback.
How we assess values in your interviews
Throughout the process, you will hear a lot of behavioral questions that begin "tell me about a time when…". We lean on these because the best signal we have for how you will handle a challenge here is how you handled a similar one before.
Expect follow-up questions and be prepared to share specific examples. We will ask you to go deep to help us understand why you made that decision, how you weighed the tradeoffs, what you would do differently with what you know now. We are trying to understand your reasoning, not just your results, and every person you meet with will be listening for how our values appear in the stories you tell, alongside the role-specific skills you bring to the table.
How to prepare
The best thing you can do is show up ready to talk honestly about how you operate:
Know our values, and spend some real time reflecting on where they already show up in how you work.
Come with specific examples. Think of the moments where you challenged an assumption, made a hard decision, or reasoned through a problem from the ground up.
Be ready to talk about feedback, both giving it and receiving it. How you handle a hard conversation, and what you do next, tells us a lot about you.
Explain your reasoning out loud. We care as much about how you reached an answer as the answer itself.
Ask us questions. Interviews go both ways. Use the time to find out whether Formation is right for you, and press us on how these values actually show up day to day. We would rather you ask hard questions now than discover a mismatch later.
Not everyone will fit here, and that is by design
Our interview process exists to evaluate how these values have shown up across your career so far.
If you read these values and felt something click, if you have spent your career questioning the default path instead of accepting it, digging for new evidence instead of settling for certainty, being kind to the people around you while still holding a high bar, and staying laser focused on outcomes that actually matter, this could be a fantastic place to contribute and grow.
Joining our mission is rewarding, invigorating, and challenging and the team is eager to welcome new value-aligned Formies. We're looking for people who want to do the hard work, and do it well. If this resonates, we’d love to hear from you.