Hi!

Our first IR Roundtable event was a wide-ranging discussion that covered strategies for building a strong investor relations function, engaging investors with clear and compelling stories, and how IR and comms teams can partner more effectively.

If you weren't able to join “Investor Relations Across Market Caps” webinar, listen to the replay here, or review our top 10 takeaways:

1. Build teams with complementary skill sets. Pairing finance backgrounds with communications expertise can create valuable balance, though the right mix depends on your company's needs.

2. Anticipate talent needs based on your pipeline. Building communications capabilities before key milestones arrive helps avoid scrambling, though resource constraints may dictate different approaches.

3. Connect internal and external perspectives. Bringing researchers into investor meetings helps them realize "the outside world is paying very close attention to the work they're doing in the lab."

4. Develop spokespeople through incremental exposure. New executives often benefit from observing investor interactions before leading discussions, building capability through incremental exposure.

5. Be strategic about executive access. Require one or two IR prep calls to assess investor intent and protect leadership time while ensuring productive conversations.

6. Simplify complex stories. Distilling complicated pipelines into memorable concepts like "5 launches in 5 years" can resonate with generalists and get them interested before having to dive into technical detail.

7. Balance novelty with consistency. Executives often ask "what's something new we can highlight" when consistency and stability might better serve investor confidence… and strike a balance when giving milestones and targets (not too easy/not too much of a stretch that you miss).

8. Stay open to all investor types. Since "you never know where your next shareholder's coming from, IR should talk to everybody," including short sellers, mutual funds, and hedge funds. They can all provide valuable insight, and they all talk to each other.

9. Use group meetings thoughtfully. Bus tours and similar formats can efficiently engage multiple stakeholders, though their value varies by company stage and targeting strategy.

10. Leverage AI tools for quality control, not necessarily creation. Some teams use AI to identify "gaps in communication that we were blind to" rather than having AI generate content from scratch.

Many thanks to Susie Lisa (Vertex) and Jen Robinson (formerly of Verve), and T2B's IR Roundtable members for generously sharing their time and insights.

While many of us at T2B call communications our “home,” IR often falls within our remit, or if not, IR practitioners are often our closest collaborators. We’re grateful to our IR Roundtable team for bringing this conversation to life, and we can’t wait to see what they have in store for us next!

Happy weekend!

Lynnea

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