Kevin Gorman and the art of staying long enough

By June 2024, Kevin Gorman had discovered a small inconvenience of announcing your retirement: people started walking straight past you to speak to your successor. He made a joke of it at an investor conference. After more than three decades helping build Neurocrine Biosciences, he was already getting a preview of life outside the center of the room.

He also offered his own version of the customary corporate forecast: Hawaii, Fiji, Tahiti. The destinations were a joke about his future, delivered before the discussion returned to business. Here was a founder preparing to leave the chief executive’s chair, with enough distance from the occasion to enjoy its absurdities.

The serious point came soon afterward. “There’s never a perfect time to leave,” he said. Another milestone would always be approaching. Wait for one, and a reason to wait for the next would appear. In a career measured in decades, choosing an ending could require as much judgment as choosing a beginning.

“There’s never a perfect time to leave.”

Kevin Gorman · June 2024

Two kinds of homework

Gorman’s education paired a doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles with an MBA in finance from the same university. He also undertook postdoctoral training at The Rockefeller University. His later career would place him between the research bench and the balance sheet, with formal preparation for both conversations.

From 1990 to 1993, he was a principal at Avalon Medical Partners. There he worked on the early formation of several companies, including Neurocrine, Onyx Pharmaceuticals, Metra Biosystems, Idun Pharmaceuticals, and ARIAD Pharmaceuticals. The company-builder was at work before the public-company chief executive appeared.

Neurocrine was founded in 1992. Gorman joined its staff in 1993, initially leading business development. Those dates belong together: forming a company and going to work inside it are different stages of the same undertaking. The distinction also helps explain why his connection to Neurocrine cannot be reduced to the years he held its highest operating title.

He subsequently served as chief business officer and became chief operating officer in September 2006. That position put research, business development, and commercial operations within his responsibilities. By the time he became CEO, he had already seen the enterprise from several directions. He inherited a company whose machinery he knew.

The building became working capital

On January 14, 2008, Neurocrine announced that Gorman would succeed Gary Lyons as president and CEO and join the board. Lyons stayed on as a director. The announcement described an internal transfer of responsibility, with the outgoing chief remaining involved in the company he had led.

The financial backdrop gives that transition its weight. In December 2007, before Gorman’s appointment, Neurocrine had sold its San Diego property for $109 million and leased it back. After retiring mortgage debt and paying transaction costs, it received approximately $61 million in cash. An address on the corporate letterhead had become a source of liquidity.

The lease initially ran for twelve years. The arrangement let the business keep using the premises while giving up ownership. It also created rent obligations. The transaction illustrates the sort of decision hidden behind the word survival: cash today, commitments tomorrow, and work continuing in the same rooms.

The harder contraction continued. By late 2009, Neurocrine’s workforce had fallen to 67, from nearly 600 in 2005. Employees sold surplus equipment in the parking lot and switched off every third bulb in light fittings. Such details puncture the tidy language of a corporate turnaround. The people inside it still had to come to work each morning.

June brought two signatures

In June 2010, Neurocrine signed collaboration agreements with Abbott and Boehringer Ingelheim on consecutive days. In the company’s subsequent financial update, Gorman said the agreements had restored a sound financial footing. The emphasis was on the practical result: the organization had obtained room to keep operating.

The Abbott agreement included a $75 million upfront license fee. Its contract distinguished that payment from later milestone payments. That distinction matters when reading a large deal announcement: money paid at signing and money dependent on future events occupy different places in a company’s plans.

These were transactions at a company whose chief executive had spent years in business development. Seen across that career, the agreements connect an earlier specialty to an immediate operating problem. Gorman’s work had moved from helping assemble young businesses to keeping one of them capable of taking its next steps.

The sequence resists the usual overnight-success treatment. The venture work came first, then the operating roles, then a difficult appointment, then the agreements. Each stage supplied experience that became relevant later. A career can look remarkably well ordered when the dates are arranged afterward. Living through the dates is another matter.

A trophy has a short memory

In June 2018, Gorman received EY’s San Diego Entrepreneur Of The Year award in the Life Sciences category. The presentation took place at the Fairmont Grand Del Mar. The group photograph has the familiar furniture of an awards evening: formal clothes, glass trophies, and an enormous yellow backdrop.

An earlier public appearance had taken him to a different stage. Nasdaq announced that he would ring its opening bell on December 2, 2016, at the MarketSite in Times Square. For a San Diego executive, the venue put the company’s name in the middle of the financial world’s morning routine.

The bell and the trophy belong to the visible side of running a public company. Both give a business an occasion to be seen. Set beside the long chronology of Gorman’s operating roles, they also show how little of a career happens during its most photographed minutes.

EY’s 2018 national winners brochure also lists Gorman in the Life Sciences category. Recognition had reached beyond the city where the company was based. By then he had spent a quarter of a century on Neurocrine’s staff and roughly a decade as chief executive.

Awards ceremonies compress years into an evening. Their photographs are useful precisely because the compression is so visible. Everyone is upright, the lights are on, and nobody is selling spare office equipment in a parking lot. The trophy can acknowledge an outcome; it has very little space to explain the route.

The other people at the table

Gorman joined Xencor’s board in April 2017. Xencor’s CEO, Bassil Dahiyat, highlighted his experience in company-building and preparing an organization for commercialization. It was an invitation to bring lessons from an operating career into another company’s boardroom.

Inside Neurocrine, Gorman described an approach that gave employees permission to explore ideas without disproportionate blame when an idea failed. He supported local scholarships connecting undergraduates with graduate students or postdoctoral researchers. His account of mentoring emphasized allowing people to make decisions and experience the consequences.

Those positions fit together. If people are expected to exercise judgment, they need opportunities to use it. The approach also asks something of a chief executive: an ability to tolerate decisions being made by somebody else. Delegation becomes more consequential when the person receiving responsibility can actually change an outcome.

There were small public examples. At a J.P. Morgan conference, Gorman directed a question about a transaction to Kyle Gano and Jude Onyia, identifying them as the colleagues who had championed it. At another appearance, he asked his fellow executives to introduce themselves. The CEO’s microphone could make room for other voices.

A company learns to outlast a job title

In a shareholder letter reflecting on Neurocrine’s first thirty years, Gorman acknowledged that the company had not evolved exactly as its original business plan imagined. He connected its character to the experience of responding to challenges. That admission is more interesting than the familiar claim that everything went according to plan.

The long view also changed the business he was describing. In January 2024, he told an investor audience that Neurocrine had spent about 26 years as a research and development company, with only its most recent six years as an integrated commercial organization. The founder had stayed through a change in the company’s basic operating demands.

Remaining at one company can sound like repetition. Here, the job kept changing. Building partnerships, overseeing operations, running a public company, and supporting a commercial organization call for different decisions. The chronology offers a useful corrective to the idea that staying in place necessarily means doing the same work.

October 11 was a working date

The succession announcement came on May 28, 2024, with an effective date of October 11. Gano, then chief business development and strategy officer, was named CEO-elect. He had joined Neurocrine in 2001. The choice placed the next chapter with an executive whose own tenure already stretched across more than two decades.

The interval between announcement and handoff gave the transition a public schedule. Gorman would continue on the board; Gano would join it when he became CEO. The arrangement kept institutional experience available while changing responsibility for the daily operation of the business.

Gorman retired from the CEO role on the stated date. Neurocrine’s current leadership listing continues to identify him as a director, and its 2026 proxy materials record his earlier tenure. The title has changed. His association with the company continues.

There is a particular discipline in that ending. A founder’s work can occupy so many years that staying becomes the default answer to every question about the future. Gorman put a date on the change, backed an internal successor, and kept a defined place at the table. After learning how to stay through uncertainty, he gave leaving a place on the calendar.