#50: Dimitrios Tzalis - Insights Into Building CROs in Asia and in Europe

In this conversation, we discuss the development of the European Pharma Eco-System, different business models, and what it takes to lead a company to success.

Today’s speaker is Dimitrios Tzalis.
In the 90s, he received a Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego, a Master of Science in Chemistry from the University of Chicago, and a Master of Science in Biochemistry from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana USA.

1998 he returned to Germany to found Taros Chemicals GmbH & Co. KG.

Questions we discuss in the show:

• When and why did Dimitrios decide to found a novel company?
• How did Dimitrios find the Right Business Model?
• How did the industry evolve in India and Germany over the last two decades?
• How do you see the future of the life science industry globally after the push that it got with Sars Cov 2?
• And more…

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
04:25 Introduction Dimitrios Tzalis
05:45 How to Start a Life Science Company During the Dot.com Bubble Times
08:15 The Decision to Start a Company Rather Than Applying for a Job
10:15 How did the European Life Science Eco-System Look Like in the 1990s?
12:54 Where to Get Inspiration for Writing a Business Plan?
16:54 The Structure of the Pharmaceutical Industry in the 90s/early 2000s
20:15 The  Life Science Economy 
22:55 The Different Mindsets  to Bringing an Idea to Market
31:05 How to Fund Early-Stage Development Companies
36:30 From Founding a Company in Germany to  India
41:10 How Technology Changed Collaboration in the Last Two Decades
44:25 Development of Cultural Similarities and Differences Between India and Germany Since 2000
47:00 Is there a Global Convergence of Business Culture?
52:17 The Pharma Industry in India – 2000-2021
55:20 The Future of the Pharmaceutical Industry in India
57:40 How Are Problems Approached in India vs. Europe?
01:01:20 How Entrepreneurs Approach Problems
01:03:15 Entrepreneurship & Passion
01:06:00 The Role of Passion
01:10:20 The Role of Leadership 
01:12:26 Teamplay in Companies
01:14:54 Life Science Business Models
01:20:10 The Private and The Public Life Science World
01:25:00 The Future of the Life Science Industry 
01:42:50 The European Culture Around Entrepreneurship
01:50:00 Short-Term Thinking and Long Term Planning
01:54:30 What is the Most Important Advice to First Time Founders

Follow Dimitrios Tzalis and Taros:

• Dimitrios Tzalis
• Taros

Shownotes:

• Video to the Episode
• Article to the Episode

Podcast Links:
Podcast Website: https://www.lifescienceget2gether.com/
Community Partner: https://linktr.ee/lsg2g
Christian Soschner: https://linktr.ee/soschner
LSG2G Twitter: https://twitter.com/LGet2gether
LSG2G Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/life-science-get2gether
Podcast Episodes: https://pod.link/1493847125
Episodes on YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlZfrwd6iXrQ3LIANISUpP22seS2CsCEV

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Transcript

Christian Soschner 0:00

Welcome to a new episode of the Life Science Get Together podcast. Today, with one of my favorite topics, entrepreneurship in life science. Always when I hear the terms uh entrepreneurship or business, I think about a story that I got taught by one of my teachers at the university back in the 90s before the um the dot com bubble burst. It was a story about uh people who started digging for gold. And uh long story short, it's basically when you want uh to participate in a gold rush, then you can do two things. On the one hand, you can dig for gold uh with a very limited likelihood of finding something, or you join the parties who sell the shuffles basically with a likelihood of uh making good money over time. And this is what uh I think it was back in 1969, 19 uh 1869 and 1870s in California and the United States. This is what uh Liebe Strauss did. Um, the famous gene manufacturing company. Uh, he basically just sold pens and the company still exists. And I think many of the mining companies that existed back then, um about 150 years later, um, are not in existence anymore. The first gold rush that I experienced in my uh business career was the dot com bubble. Uh, I think many of the gold stickers don't exist anymore, but infrastructure companies like um consider Apple also from this part, uh, still are operation, operational and in business. And last year, when the pandemic started, I personally moved in 2006 into life science, and um one remarkable thing happened uh before 2020. Um, I would say very few number of people I know in my environment were interested in the pharmaceutical industry. So basically the discussions ended quite quickly when uh they asked me what you are doing professionally. I said, Okay, I support companies in developing drugs. Um, the conversation was over development of drugs. Yeah, okay, yeah, fine. Uh but uh there was not no interest whatsoever. And also when I opened the newspapers, um I didn't read anything about uh drug development or that a company brought a new drug to the market uh outside the pharmaceutical industry. So in the in the yellow press, there was nothing. Now the first time that I got the information that Merck was approved in a country in Asia on the market with therapeutics against COVID-19 was basically from Facebook, from social media. Um, an acquaintance who is not in the pharma industry just posted it and uh got directly slammed in my face. And uh this development, I think, is so interesting uh that I am very happy today that I can welcome to this podcast episode one of the entrepreneurs in uh Germany who has uh two decades of experience in developing uh drugs from uh scratch. And I want to discuss with him how he did it, uh, which kind of company he formed, if he joined the parties of digging for gold or uh the other parties or both, and about cultural differences between founding companies and starting companies and running companies in Asia and in Europe. Welcome to the show, Dimitrios Zalis. I hope I spell your name right.

Dimitrios Tzalis 3:46

Correct. Thank you, Christian, for having me over at this podcast. And I hope to help you shine a little bit of light in the field of drug discovery and uh to tell you where we stand, if we are the Levi Strauss or if we are the gold diggers.

Christian Soschner 4:02

Yeah, so sorry for that uh for that introduction. I'm uh anytime when I talk about entrepreneurship, this this old story from the university pops up in my mind, and I really like it because it uh describes in clear words what possibilities any industry offers to people who want to found companies. Um, let's start with the first question. What is your background?

Dimitrios Tzalis 4:24

Oh well, I'm a chemist uh by training. I'm a PhD chemist. I started my studies in Germany in Marburg, and I went in an exchange program to the US and I majored in uh chemistry and biology, so I got a master's in chemistry and biology, and then I shifted to the University of Chicago and UCSD, that's University of California, San Diego, where I finished my PhD. So I have a PhD in organic chemistry, and after my PhD, I shifted back to Germany to do a postdoc on the again uh Marburg University, where I had started my studies. And uh a year later, after my postdoc, I basically started uh Taros as a service provider in '99. It was a typical university spin-out, or for those times it was an untypical approach.

Christian Soschner 5:25

Yeah, I believe in 1999, it was uh, I think the the time when the uh dot-com bubble really took off. So with tremendous uh uptake on the stock market, and every company who had an internet strategy somewhere posted on their website uh went public got enough got enough money. What motivated you in those days when I think maybe it's just my perception here from Austria that everybody was talking about the internet uh to start a company in the pharmaceutical industry?

Dimitrios Tzalis 5:57

Well, when I left the US, especially when I left San Diego, um there was a big boom ongoing, again, 10 years ahead of the European market in biotechnology. What today represents Boston uh 20 years ago used to be UCSD. So we had many biotech startup companies and uh that were founded there in a very rapid time, they grew. And um, when I came back to Germany, there was basically very little in the field of biotechnology. People started talking about was on the onset, and the companies that were on the market, they were all focusing on technology platforms or screening uh platforms. And uh nobody was thinking that yes, when I do some tests, after that I will need a potential drug that uh constitutes a chemical compound that is active or that does something in that uh protein that I identified. And that's how the idea came about, and that's how I got motivated. So the motivation really came from my uh experience that I had in the US where entrepreneurship even 20 years ago in biotechnology was common, whereas in in Germany or in Europe in general, back then it was uh it was really very much on the onset. Very few companies existed back then.

Christian Soschner 7:26

Yeah, that's absolutely true. I think uh the 90s the the narrative that I heard also at the university level is was not uh like colleagues from the United States said, uh start your studies, and ideally before you complete your master's degree, you found your first company, and uh if that doesn't work, you found the next one. And in Austria, it was more um finish your master's degree. If you want, you can do a PhD, but ideally, you find a job in a big corporation that is safe and you uh woke up the career ladder. What uh made you um uh to decide? Was there an initial event? Was there a clear event where you said, okay, I'm not interested to uh to start in a big corporation? Because I think your idea could also have been easily brought into a company like Birdinger or similar.

Dimitrios Tzalis 8:17

Well, when I uh finished uh my PhD, I had the option either to go into academia or join the industry. Uh when I was in UCSD, I I knew I wanted to come back to Europe for various reasons. And when I came back to Europe, it became to me very clear that uh uh there are, in my opinion, tremendous opportunities in setting something up. At the same time, there was a crisis for organic chemists. It was very difficult at that time to land a job because most of the big companies had a hiring freeze uh at that time. So that's how the idea came up to uh start forming a network here in during the time that I had my my postdoc. I talked to a lot of people. And as I said, inspired from the from the uh experience that I had in the US, where I saw many people being extremely successful, I took the initiative to start the company.

Christian Soschner 9:18

Yeah, I think this was the uh the 90s was the time when uh Gilead um became famous and created uh I think great one of the companies who created great success. Um, I think uh MCN wasn't MCN also.

Dimitrios Tzalis 9:32

Yes, Genantech MGen was all at the time. Yeah.

Christian Soschner 9:35

Yeah, it's beginning Kleiner Perkins, I think, and uh Andresen Horowitz uh got made good money with that companies. I'm curious when I look uh at the startup scene today in 2021, um pre-pandemic and post-pandemic, I think it didn't change much. Uh, we have a lot of uh incubation programs, we have a lot of acceleration programs, we have even in Europe, meanwhile, we have a lot of seed funds and um series A funds, and especially once the companies are listed, it's easy to find money, either from banks or from later stage funds. How was the situation in the 90s when you set out to start a company? Did you have anything of that?

Dimitrios Tzalis 10:21

None of it, none of the above. I had written a business plan, I uh sent it to some people, people didn't understand the idea. Uh, or they said we are not interested in services. My initial idea or the the initial setup of taros was basically that we were a service provider for the pharmaceutical industry or biotech. And um, so as naive as I was, I wrote a business plan, and then I thought, well, some people buy a house and they take a loan. I'll I build a company and I go to the banks and I say, Can I have a loan? What was the reaction? Well, people told me, you know, Mr. Tzales, if you would have opened a bakery or an epsilon, we would give you the money. But your concept, we just don't understand. But then I got a an LOE with one of the big uh agrochemical companies at that time, and that guaranteed me a certain volume of sales, and which was not a lot, it was 50,000 euro. With that, my house bank back then gave me a loan, and that was the initial uh the initial starting point. So I started with a small loan, and my balance was okay, some people pay off a house, I pay off the the company loan. And that's where where taros started and took off. So I was it was in a way a lucky punch, but there were no instruments at that time for financing. You have to imagine a venture capital scene was basically non-existing back then. Uh seed financing, forget it. Uh I'm still wondering how how I got the money back then, just I would say a lucky punch 20 years ago.

Christian Soschner 12:08

Yeah, absolutely. That um in the 90s I tried to um start internet companies basically with ideas that are similar to Facebook. And uh when we asked people for money, we got the same answer. Um, find a job. So why do you want to do something? Internet, nobody needs it. And there were no instruments, no seed funds or incubation or startup programs, uh, any any any of that. It's good to hear that it's uh was similar uh back in Germany. One question I have to you said you wrote a business plan. Uh, I mean, as the environment was really empty in the 90s, uh, how did you find the the idea that you put in in a business plan? Where did you get your inspiration from?

Dimitrios Tzalis 12:53

As I mentioned, since I was since I was in back then the capital of biotechnology in in uh in the US, um I'd seen many examples of what the companies back there did, and I had looked into what are the biotech companies doing in Germany, and it became very clear to me that all these companies one day will need chemistry in order to develop a drug. If you think how does drug development work, you have a some somebody in the field of biology, molecular biologist, uh genetics expert, who finds a protein that does something in the body and either induces a disease or can be blocked in order to reduce pain. And then you take um a chemical compound and you develop it to a certain degree further in order to uh facilitate it to do what you want it to do, to either block the protein or maybe activate it. And but that molecule has to have certain criteria. Uh, it shouldn't be toxic, it should be metabolizable, it should uh so there are many aspects that I don't want to go into details on the podcast, but there have to be many aspects around that molecule that have to be safe and absorbable by the by the body. Most of the companies in biotechnology came out of biology and screening. And uh if you talk drug discovery, at the end of the day, when you want to go into drug discovery, you need a drug on the table. And I recognize that all these companies pretty soon will have a bottleneck in getting chemical companies in order to prove their concept, and that exactly is what happened. So I, in a way, used logic and I derived the idea from the logic. Also being an organic chemist also helped. I was not a medicinal chemist at that time, that uh changed over time. I I uh um started understanding much better what the requirements are, and uh, but I developed it from the logic of the biology and uh will one day need chemistry in order to provide a potential drug, which will be the product that the pharmaceutical industry or biotechnology company can sell. And that's how I came about uh with the idea. I was lucky that also, besides that aspect, at uh the early 2000s, the pharmaceutical industry also started outsourcing a lot of their chemistry activities. So, on one hand, logic, but on the other hand, again, a little bit of luck that the industry started outsourcing a lot.

Christian Soschner 15:38

Luck, or you just were aware of the how the situation uh develops after your studies in the United States. This would have been my my next question. Um, because I I started in life science in 2006, and uh when I analyzed the industry, I saw that um up to the end of the 90s and also early in the 2000s, the European big pharma companies did everything in-house basically, so from scratch, uh, even basic research. And then there was a slow development uh that I think accelerated about five years ago. That um big pharma, in my opinion, said, Okay, ideally, I mean, we have big corporation, we have uh great scientists uh in the company, but what we can really do well uh is bringing products to patients. So do the final mile, do the phase three study, get through the regulatory approval, and then push it on the market. Uh did you was it really luck, or did you have uh a lot of information from your studies in the United States to make the decision that it really that the pharma industry would develop into that direction?

Dimitrios Tzalis 16:50

The only indication that I had, or my my back then logic, was that the biotechnology companies that would be the future pipeline of the big pharmaceutical companies would require these um uh these chemical compounds as potential drugs. It so happened that at the same time, a few years later, two, three years later, the pharmaceutical industry started outsourcing first the very early phase, and then uh first they they outsourced the biology or the biotech companies picked up these ideas, and then they outsourced more and more. So there was uh aspect of both. But the um that the uh pharmaceutical industry would start outsourcing was, for example, when I did a part of my uh questionnaire before I started the company, I called quite a few companies and they already indicated the yes, they would require the service. I uh set up a questionnaire uh with 15 questions, and one of them was okay. If you would have the possibility to uh uh to get uh organic chemistry services, would you uh take advantage of it? And a few companies said yes very quickly. They were really the forerunners, and some companies you could literally see they did it, but 10 years later. I mean, it is amazing how some companies are quite innovative and quick, other companies take much longer. But also these companies that outsourced, they outsourced very early to Asia. And these companies are now all coming back. So the companies that were forerunners, did their experiences, are also coming back. So uh quite interesting. But so it was a mixture to answer the question. It was on one hand the logic, but on the other hand, uh, when I did the telephone interview, finding yes, there is a bigger need than the biotech companies.

Christian Soschner 18:45

So you did also a little bit of market research, so it was uh hard work rather than pure luck that it just found a company and uh luckily I it it's pretty amazing because um I think until the mid-90s, the general training was uh when we look at companies, is that um companies try to make everything in-house. So it's basically scale in-house and create a big company. I mean, it was the time when Jack Welch with General Electric was famous for his acquisition strategy. I think uh in one interview he said in in one year they acquired more than 200 companies. So it was uh basically integrating, integrating, integrating. And with the internet came a shift uh towards the networked economy. And I see if I find the book uh this was published from a professor in Switzerland, it's the networked economy, das Netzwerkunternehmen in German. So it's uh networked companies. And this was pretty a new concept uh when you started your company. Uh and when you look at the life science industry now, we are living in this networked economy because early stage drug development, I think, up to phase three, uh, is really you have a small entity with a highly skilled project management team uh that acquired two things. Uh, one is IP, and uh on the other hand, capital to pay third parties uh to develop drugs from uh basic research up, I would say proof of concept in human. Uh but in the 90s, uh I think uh it was a very unusual concept to say, okay, let's uh start with a service provider.

Dimitrios Tzalis 20:15

Oh, very, very unusual. Many, many people that during uh my market research are called, they would tell me, and even after I started my company, they would tell me, Well, we have our own chemists, why should we do it with you? It was a standard answer. So at the beginning, as a service provider, it was really a very uh uh difficult approach. I mean, you have really had to ring many bells in order to for one door to open, especially in the bigger companies. And little by little, though, they all more or less uh opened up to the idea because they saw the the huge advantage that came about uh using the service providers. Because as you mentioned, the big companies they focus on their core competencies and what made them unique, and as you said, it's for their uniqueness is uh to bring the drug to the patient, and that they're good at and that they're fast at. And that is where their, let's say, unique selling point comes in. The earlier the research was, they start very early on, the early research to to outsource that or to facilitate startup companies. And little by little they started uh giving up more and more of the drug discovery uh pipeline to service providers or to to uh to spin-outs. So much so that, as you mentioned, the preferential model would be to in-source a phase two or if possible, even a phase three candidate, which would uh be the best case scenario for them. Because then they just have to go through the uh approval process and get it into the market.

Christian Soschner 21:54

I mean, in my opinion, I mean, just in your opinion. So it's uh now I test my opinions with your expertise. Uh, I mean it makes sense uh for two reasons. One reason is the mindset. So when I look at the whole value chain in the industry, I think uh basic research is uh a very creative part, which takes a lot of uh experimenting and trying out new things. Uh when I look at the early stage of product development, I think it makes sense to put the ideas uh into companies because companies usually define themselves as being the place where people are doing or start doing the same thing all over again, uh, which on the downside uh changes the mindset because it uh it goes more into a structured development mindset rather than being a creative scientist. And the closer I come to the market, the more structured it gets. Uh, do you share this perception, or would you recommend to me to change my mind and see it differently?

Dimitrios Tzalis 22:58

No, I think I think uh you're quite correct in your mindset. You have the creative part, and the creative part is not compatible with the industry approach a part. It is very structured, very time-bound. I cannot force you to have an idea or to solve my problem by the 31st of March. Not possible. An academic might sit at the lake or might go for a walk or uh might be somewhere in the mountain, have an idea and be creative and get a solution. And sometimes they have to go up the path of serendipity in order to find a new approach and a new um solution. And that does not match with the approach that the industry is taking. So I think it is very important that we keep and maintain a very healthy academic approach with a lot of freedom to operate, a lot of freedom to think, and not try to commercialize academia. On the other hand, you're absolutely right. The pharmaceutical industry is much better in structuring processes. I have worked in one project with them very closely together. I'll I'll maybe address it later on the European Lead Factory. And that's where I learned how they really work in detail. They're very structured, they have very, very good approaches in order to take the drug once it has reached a certain stage and bring it to the patient. And then there are the companies like mine that are in between, the transitional companies. That means we take ideas, we understand the approach of academia, and get the ideas and shape the ideas to a degree that makes it interesting to the pharmaceutical industry in order to pick it up and then create the drugs. Because I'm um it is like uh a clockwork. Drug discovery is like clockwork, because not like, oh, I have a protein, I have a chemical, and then I test it on the human, and then it's either uh black or white. Basically, you have so many specialists involved in the drug discovery process, and they all have to run into each other like uh a clock, and uh to to be exact in order to create that drug. Most people, I think, underestimate the the complexity it takes to create a drug, and how many experts are involved, and how many expertise have to go in there. And there, the industry is excellent in structuring that and really putting a process in a very complex uh matter to put a structure into it. Whereas academia lives of the creativity. I always say the creative chaos. It is necessary to allow it. And um when the industry tried to enter the field of the creative chaos, I would say they failed, and that's why they retreated and they gave it up. And then there are the aspects like our aspects, where I say uh you have chemistry or you have screening technologies that today have become a certain routine, which is also not the core competency where the industry earns their money. And other people optimize these processes much better than the big industry. And that's why we have now today service providers, and we are working very close together with academia and the pharmaceutical industry. So, yes, your view is absolutely right, but uh there is, as I said, the in-between step in order to do valorization, because academic research is absolutely necessary and they have to have their freedom. But what we have we have to ensure is that we take these ideas and translate them later into drugs. That the firm the the the academic partners are not very good at to understand the value to translate it into drugs or to bring it to a point where a pharmaceutical company is interested in it. And on the other hand, we have to create value of the ideas that the academic institutes create. Why is that? Because that is what gives the society the advantage. If somebody is in the field of molecular biology and finds a new protein that can help tomorrow patients, it is a moral responsibility, on my opinion, to have somebody translate it into a product and that the industry is there for. And then you have to take these ideas, and these mechanisms are the new mechanisms that we have put in place. That means take an idea from academia, translate it into a potential uh drug for the patient, or into a new technology that might help measure something, and this is, I think, absolutely necessary. So academic freedom, yes, but also tools to valorize it. Because, on the other hand, we're creating drugs, we help the patients, we create jobs, we create revenues, we create taxes, and it is the taxes, on the other hand, that pay the academic freedom. So it's a cycle that one is responsible for the other. So academic freedom in the vacuum for the sake of academic freedom is one thing, but I think there is also responsibility on that side to translate the wisdom and not to let it disappear in the um uh in the drawer, as they used to say in the past. So in Germany, there is a saying to leave something in the drawer.

Christian Soschner 28:19

Um, there is a great point that you made that would expand a little bit further. Um, since cryptocurrencies exist, I heard the term trilemma, and I think we also have a trilemma to solve in drug discovery and drug development. Um, it's this translational research, because uh, I mean, when you look at pharma, you have clear structured processes, it's one mindset. Then you have the second problem uh of the trilemma that uh the academic environment is very creative, and the translators need to have both. So they need to understand both and need the ability to talk with both sides. And then to make it really a trilemma, I think we have the third problem, the monetary aspect, um, that the whole thing needs to be financed. And um, I think it was, let me just think it was 10 years ago that I discussed with uh a decision maker in the pharmaceutical industry and just put it very bluntly on the table and said, I mean, look, uh, you make decent revenues and profits. I know that uh uh from your annual and quarterly reports. Why don't you just buy the ideas from uh academia and set up companies yourself? Uh you have billions, you make billions. So this would be an easy job for you. And the person brought uh forth a very interesting argument that they would like to discuss with you and hear your opinion on that. He said, Look, uh, it's also not only a game of possibilities, it's also a game of numbers. When I would start buying ideas from academia, um at the early stages, uh you can do a lot with 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 euros or a few million. Um, the problem is with big pharma, they have to allocate billions. So the argument, uh, the point he brought forth was uh just imagine when I have to allocate one billion and I would start seed funding companies uh that need just the first million to get started, it would create an unmanageable uh um uh portfolio of companies where I am not in touch with the founders, they just get the money and uh just think about the motivation. I mean, when you are a company amongst hundreds um and get zero attention, how motivating would it be when you work at something? And when you look at the seed funds, they very often manage uh small portfolios of 10, 20 million, and uh the attention they get and access to the network is much better and much bigger with uh smaller funds than the farm industry stepping directly into that. Um, is there still some truth in uh in 2021 in that, or uh do you see it differently?

Dimitrios Tzalis 31:06

Um I think there's still a truth to that, because I think what we needed when the translation came, we needed uh different structures. In the past, as you described, there were the big pharmaceutical companies in academia. And uh an academic um is not driven by money, he's driven by recognition, by innovation, by other triggers. The industry is triggered by revenues, by money per definition. And sometimes there was a discourse there. So now then you all of a sudden you have you want to create a company, and this company has to allocate billions. And you're absolutely right. And all of a sudden, they go from very, very big numbers to managing a company uh of a million, or not one company, but thousand companies. So, what happened over the last few years? We created structures where everybody was looking at their level to manage. That means even if a pharmaceutical company has a billion, what will they do today? They put it in a venture fund. And the venture fund, depending on the size, will either put it in smaller venture funds or they will give it into companies that have, let's say, a need of 50 million or 100 million capital. And this goes down the ladder so that we have a management structure that we developed over the last 20 years with venture capital companies that are in the seed financing early, stage A, stage B companies, or venture capital companies that invest in companies that are in stage A, stage B. So I think today it applies with the only difference that today there is a structure in place where people can invest into companies just indirectly. So that means today these companies will invest, but they will invest in investment vehicles that take over the management down the ladder. Because uh as, and I can understand that fully, if you uh deal with with big numbers, it's very, very difficult to uh to understand the need or the pressure of a small company. An entrepreneur has other challenges, other numbers. And in order to work economically, you always have to stay more or less in your range. I cannot have uh a million-dollar company and have 10 million or 20 million at my disposal because uh then I feel overwhelmed and uh to manage that money. And I think this is the infrastructure that we have today in place, and that's what we see. And what happens very often when a company has a maturity, a venture capital company A invests in a seed financing round. Once it has reached a certain maturity, what we see very often, a venture capital B that is dealing with bigger sums buys the shares from the uh uh from the company that was in the seed financing round and so on, goes up the ladder. So that infrastructure today is in place. That was a dilemma, but I think today the dilemma has been solved. It was a dilemma in the past, but I think today we have an infrastructure where people can invest.

Christian Soschner 34:18

I couldn't agree more to that. I think uh the infrastructure also in Europe that we have today is amazing compared to 1999. Uh yes. Uh I think what you what you mentioned is um the portfolio theory that is still um valid today, that um every manager who gets uh some amount of money, be it a billion or ten million, to allocate in company, operates with the idea in mind to put it in 10 to 20 companies. So I think to really have a possibility to manage that and promote the company and be a cheerleader for the company and also understand what's going on uh in that um exceeding that number is makes it really tricky and difficult. I would like to hook into that point uh now and then. So, I mean, what you mentioned also in private rounds, we have the seed funds, we have business angels, we have seed funds. Uh, very often also pharma companies now have initiatives where they really support with grants, uh, early stage development, or also on the university level. We have the series A and B funds, and on then we have the crossover funds who are doing pre-IPO rounds, IPO rounds, and then we have the public market. And today everybody is trained by social media, anyways, in drug development and understands everything. So it's really a wonderful world. But going back to 1999, uh, I always thought when I got to know you that you founded Taros and ran that company very successfully. And a couple of weeks ago, we had a discussion where you mentioned that you're flying to Asia to India. And I always thought you're going there on holiday. And uh then you said, no, that's not. Uh, I also founded a company in Asia. Uh, what motivated you, besides the uh, let's say the tremendous work of founding a company in Nowheres Land already in Germany in the 90s, that you also then uh uh do it again at the same almost at the same time, I think, if I'm I'm I'm not wrong, from my research, um, also in Asia. But what was your motivation to do that?

Dimitrios Tzalis 36:28

Well, it was a few years later, after I moved from Marburg to Dortmund, the same time. What the motivation was was as follows. When I studied, again, it goes all back to my studies. When I studied in in the US, I had a lot of colleagues from China and in India. Basically, 50% of the PhDs were um Chinese and Indians, 25% the rest of the world, and 25% American colleagues. And my colleagues were extremely smart, extremely talented chemists. And some of them stayed, some of them went back. And uh at the same time, I started traveling uh to India, and I identified that uh there were a few hubs back then, generics companies started developing, and there were a few hubs that were focusing on chemistry. And um, I thought that could be a huge advantage to some of my customers to uh to start uh business activities there, where in some projects they would have a cost advantage. So that's how the the idea came about again. Simple following a certain logic, taking the knowledge that I had uh collected in my PhD, and then saying, what can we do in order to be even more competitive? When companies started outsourcing, one of the main aspects was was uh pricing. So that was the initial thought, and that's how I went about going to Asia. And then what we started doing is also advising our partners hey, this does not make sense to do it here. It's very labor intensive, uh, it's it's not very IP critical. Why don't you do it abroad? And uh we were doing them a part here and a part we were doing with our partner in in India. So that's how I came about it. And then I was there very regularly. I traveled back and forth, and um so then I got to know the the country better, the business acumens better. And so we have become quite an important aspect for for companies when they want to outsource. Again, in 2004, Asia was not on the on the map for outsourcing. Five, six years later, it became very big business. Today we have very big competitors, and some of my biggest competitors are out in Asia today. And uh we can still focus and we can still ask for higher prices because we have certain advantages that the the people like to uh to use here in Europe. That means speed, creativity, and uh protection of IP rights, a guaranteed protection or let's say much higher guarantee than uh you can have in Asia due to the fluctuation within the staff. And so once again, it was a certain foresight that that I had seen that the the world would get simply more global. To to quote uh uh Michael Friedman, the world is flat, and it had become very flat for me when I came from the US to Germany. Traveling became much easier, and over the years, what I saw is really the world became flat. It was clear to me that the people who are good in the US, they will go back into their country and they will start exactly the same ideas that they saw in the US, and some stayed in the US, some went back. And that's how the world actually at the end also developed further.

Christian Soschner 39:57

Let's stay a little bit uh at your flat earth in communication and management uh theory, uh, and expand a little bit on that to give uh young entrepreneurs a little bit of insight on how management was 20 years ago. Because I think uh today it's very convenient. I mean, uh, I'm here in Vienna, and I guess you're um in north in the northern part of Germany, let's call it that different from the Austrian perspective, um, without digging too deep into the geography of Germany. So um, and we can have a video call quite simply. So um it's stable, we are connected, uh, we have cameras, we can uh look at each other, see also the uh nonverbal communication cues. And if this new term that uh is becoming popular right now, the metaverse, uh, really takes off in a couple of months or years, then probably we sit on a holodeck, like we see at uh uh Star Trek, so that we can really uh work together and collaborate uh without having to travel. Uh looking back 20 years, uh, how was the world of management back then? How did you run two companies?

Dimitrios Tzalis 41:11

Uh very different, very different. I mean, back then uh internet barely came about. Telephone was extremely expensive. Internet telephony did not exist, forget video telephony. Uh, it was it was very, very, very difficult. It was a lot of traveling. Um, as I said, thank God there was email. So email was was back then just about picking up, so it was a big advantage. Otherwise, it was uh lots of calls, very high phone bills, faxes. Um yeah, it was sometimes thinking, it was a different world, it was much more involved. But the difference was when you were out, you were out, you could switch off. Today, when you're out, you're always on your job. That's true. When you were on a business trip, it was the one hour of your meeting, and maybe one hour uh taking your notes, and that was it. Today, you have a one-hour business meeting, you take your notes, and then you check your emails and you do all the rest. That's very different, very different, and uh also the world also has changed, even India has changed, traveling has changed, not only communication, but also the access to certain places has changed. Today, if you go to India and you want to travel to any small city, you will have a flight there. Like then you had three, four big hubs, and then you would take the bus or uh a taxi, which would take forever through some dusty roads to get from place A to place B. And uh today it's much more convenient. Today, wherever you travel, you can find at least in India that that is the case, but the same also applies to China. You have the same level of communication tools, infrastructure, so hotels, uh food, all this plays a big role when when when when when you manage in two in two different continents, and all that is uh is today much easier than it was 20 years ago.

Christian Soschner 43:15

I agree with that. Um in 2003, four, five, I was working for an Austrian company who is uh in the sugar business, it's uh subsidiary of Südzucker. I think Südzucker is uh probably a well-known term in Germany, it's a sugar producing company. And by this time, um the company did a lot of uh MA activities in Eastern Europe and uh started building a global division. So, as you mentioned, being out of the office meant there is no communication with the office. So, week of travel, there were internet took off, but at least it uh email took off, but at least it needed an internet connection, and it was not as convenient as today, where Wi Fi is available everywhere, or uh having global access. Access to the internet with uh a local provider is basically let's say compared to 2004, it's at zero expenses. So this was not possible back then.

Dimitrios Tzalis 44:10

Yes, yes.

Christian Soschner 44:12

How how do you let's say a little bit uh differences and similarities between uh India and uh the European culture? How did you perceive back then the differences between India and Germany culture-wise?

Dimitrios Tzalis 44:26

Back then the differences were were very big, were very big for uh for us to understand the Indian culture and mentality, but also for them to understand us. And um in India, the personal aspect was for the longest time extremely important. In Germany, it is about the business. When I go somewhere, it is about the business, and I talk very little private, if possible, nothing at all, if I can choose, right? Whereas in in India it was completely the opposite. For the first one hour, you would talk about family, your vacation, your kids, so you bond, and uh the business gets then as a as a sidekick in into the focus, but it was not the first point of discussion. When I used to meet partners, or even today, you meet and you talk business right away. You don't talk uh much about oh, how are your kids to an unknown, to a person that you have never met, you'll never talk family. In India, it was completely the opposite, and so it was the first personal touch. And but the whole business acumen is still very personal in India, but it has been influenced strongly by the Anglo-Saxon mentality. So the the way uh meetings are being conducted, punctuality and so on. In the past, punctuality simply because of the infrastructure of India was not possible, plus minus one hour was was okay, it was was no big deal. Um people wait in the office, and if it is an hour later, it's an hour later. When I would go five minutes late, I would start sweating, right? In the into a meeting, and there they saw it very relaxed. But that all has changed. I mean, there has been tremendous changes in the in the business acumen and the business culture in India.

Christian Soschner 46:18

How is uh yeah, how is it to how is it today? Uh, there was um a couple of years ago, there was this theory that uh ultimately when um access to the world still evolves and gets better, for example, with the hyperloop concept of Tesla, or maybe someday we also have, besides the holodeck, also the possibility to beam anywhere in the world. Um, the theory that comes with that is uh that we will end up in a global culture that uh has no uniqueness anymore. So it's quite uh similar everywhere in the world. So it's it doesn't matter if you're in the United States, in India or in China, we will have one culture. Did you perceive a move towards that endpoint over the last 20 years when you compare uh India and uh the Anglo-American um business culture?

Dimitrios Tzalis 47:08

You know, to be honest, I think to get to this unique global culture will take a very, very, very long time. Because despite the Anglo-Saxon influence, uh, India has maintained a lot of its cultural aspects. They're very proud of it, they maintain it, and um the the the the mindset will not change. If you even look at Europe, we are trying to form, forget the global aspect, we are trying to form a unified Europe. But the beauty and the uniqueness is if I go across the border to Belgium, which is just one hour drive for me here, already have a different language, I have a different structure, I have a different attitude. Um a part of the uniqueness of humans is that we are in a way diverse. I think our moral compass might might become uh similar. Uh, what is acceptable in a society, what is respect, what is uh respect for women, respect for uh different people who are different, different religion, different orientations, that will become, I think, unique, that we are much more liberal, but I I don't see that we will get uh one global culture where there will be no difference. Simply where the pockets are too different. As Anglo-Saxon as India is, uh, as colorful as that is, if you go to India, India is not people conceive India as a state, but if you're in India and you spend some time in India, it is as diverse, if not more diverse, than Europe. Uh they have 22 official languages. We're talking languages with their own script, not accents, not uh uh let's say uh similar languages like uh uh the Italian, Spanish, and French that have a similar root, right? Uh no, they're completely different scripts, different roots of the languages. So, and they have not unified despite being occupied by the Brits for so long. I don't see it. I don't see it, at least not in my lifetime. I don't know what happens after my lifetime. But what I see is a unification of a moral compass of uh yeah, of uh of certain aspects that make us easier to live together. There are certain aspects in our life, uh, respect for each other, respect for difference. That's the what I was looking for. The respect for difference, for being different, is evolving in more and more states. And uh unfortunately, we see some states where, as we see it in the recent activities in Afghanistan, that goes back, but it's represented by a minority. And when the people get the choice again, they will opt for respect for difference. And I'm pretty positive about that. And that's what I see in all my travel activities. People will not become one, they will become one in their values and their respect for others, but they all will differentiate themselves in their cultural aspects, which is nice and unique, you know, because when you go somewhere and somebody has a different culture or they have a different habit, it's nice to watch. It's it's very refreshing. Some things you take with you, and then you go back to your own country. And today we have yoga, we have meditation that we uh took uh with us from India, we incorporate into our life culture, but we didn't change our life culture, and vice versa.

Christian Soschner 50:50

That's that's um a great perspective, I think, to take uh what's useful with you and um integrate it in your own life uh without losing your uniqueness and uh still keeping your own values, but with a respect for the differences of other other cultures. I think this would be a great endpoint to achieve uh as a human race without having wars to fight uh over differences and uh staying respectful, which also needs to set boundaries. Um let's go a little bit back from the cultural aspects um and expand on the business aspects of the industry. We were talking about how the industry evolved and developed here in Europe uh from basically an empty field with just uh not an empty field because there are these big pharma corporations, but now when I look at the industry in 2021, it's much more colorful. So to stay in this uh cultural discussion we had a couple of minutes ago. We have a lot of service providers, we have a lot of, let's call them gold stickers, these are these uh specialized companies that uh hold DIP run by the experts in a field, like for example, like CRISPR therapeutics in the United States or BioNTech here when we look at mRNA technology. Um, how did the industry evolve in India in the last 20 years?

Dimitrios Tzalis 52:16

Tremendously. There have also been tremendous changes over there. What we see that or what I saw is that a lot what we outsource, what you have to see 20 years ago, we had a lot of steel chemical production facilities, a lot of pharmaceutical production facilities. And we started outsourcing these activities, and a lot of these outsourcing activities were picked up by the uh by the Indian industry, and they have grown in a tremendous way over there. Um, I mentioned chemistry services, they also set up large uh entities for service providers over there. Um, here in Europe, we started going more and more into creating IP, going more into innovation. Uh, India was very busy over the last few years creating a lot of these production facilities together with China. But on the other hand, in the field in the IT field, they developed in the creative uh area. That means a lot of the programmers, a lot of the uh IT experts that had the creative mindset, they stayed in India. They didn't travel to the US. The US company set up shop there, they set up infrastructure there, so they stayed there. But in the pharmaceutical field, what I saw was that they stayed with the production facilities. And only now they start going into the uh innovative drug space. And I still think there is quite a path for them to go, to go to really into the cutting-edge technology that we saw here. You mentioned two areas of CRISPR or uh mRNA technology in the field of vaccination. I think there India will still is is still has a way to go to get into the field. Will they do it ultimately? I'm pretty positive, because again, the world is getting flat. Um the the margins in their field, in the production is still very good for the for uh uh in in the Indian setup. It's as good as the pharmaceutical industries have here in the drug discovery field. But as their margins will go grow lower, they will be also look into innovative drug space. And um as I said, they picked up where we left uh technologies open for them to pick up, but I think it's just a question of time when they will start getting into innovation.

Christian Soschner 54:50

Yeah, I think I mean you mentioned the digital space that a lot of uh uh tech uh internet tech uh basically think evolved in India or uh is is taken up in India, and uh what I see in our industry, I think we are on the onset of marrying uh artificial intelligence and and technologies alike with uh drug development. So maybe there is uh a huge space and use opportunity, huge opportunity for India. How do you see that?

Dimitrios Tzalis 55:19

I think there is a huge space there. Uh maybe a very, very interesting uh development that I saw in India, which was also quite interesting for me. Uh, a lot of companies in the US, they outsourced a lot to India because it was cheaper, it was easier to do, there was more manpower, and so on. So, especially back then when there was the uh the year 2000 scare, right? Uh the IT scare. And you had companies like Tata uh Consulting Services, which is a huge IT uh service provider. And what we see now is that these companies, like uh Tata Consultancy Services, have started opening research sites in the US. So where the US companies were opening research sites in India, we see now that the world has taken one round. And what I found extremely interesting is that exactly uh Tata had invested into a building, into a new chemistry building in San Diego, where in the past I would see buildings being financed by Western countries and getting the name by some uh Western corporations. Now it's sometimes the other way around, and that shows you how the cycle is closing. And I think similar approaches will happen over the next uh decades, even in the pharma space. Exactly the same thing that we will see the circle, the cycle going once around.

Christian Soschner 56:47

No, I absolutely agree with what you say. I think this uh dichotomy that it must be either or uh we loosen up. A lot of things can uh exist at the same time, and it's not talking so much at competit uh over competition anymore. It's like I like this book from Simon Sinek, uh The Infinite Game, and where he mentioned that uh we must focus on solutions and start collaborating instead of uh thinking how we can win over a competition. And uh, I think this mindset probably is much more present already uh historically in India and in China than it is in Europe and the United States. But I think this is something that probably we Europeans and also people in the United States should pick up to think in coexistence uh rather than competition. How do you see that?

Dimitrios Tzalis 57:39

Yes, I see it very much so. I I had taken before our talk a note, and uh I was thinking what's the biggest difference between the way problems are being approached in Europe and how problems are being approached in India. They're two completely different approaches. In Europe or in the Western world, our first reaction when we run into a problem is we are paralyzed and we start thinking, oh God, a problem, shock, how are we gonna approach it? In India, they run into a problem, and then they think, oh, an issue I have to solve, one more issue that I have to solve. And the small problems they solve very often, very pragmatic. That means they solve the small issues, and then the big issues, they deal with it. It's just okay, I deal with it. Here, if it is a big or a small issue, we all first get paralyzed. It's a very interesting phenomenon for me. Nobody there gets too worked up over an issue, a pro a problem. Then it's just okay, it's an issue, I'll solve it, just a question of time. Really, that's the issue, and the the attitude. Here, it's always, oh, we have a problem. And then when you look at it and you think, hey, uh, we can solve it quite quickly. Yes, but do we stick to all the rules? Do we stick to all the uh uh did we dot every i and did we cross every T? And uh we get stuck there very often, and that's why we think we will at the end of the day equalize. What will happen is because we are slowing down in solving our problems and they're speeding up. On the other hand, um that freedom to operate uh that is there also gets over time more and more and more restrictive. Let's see, we see even uh in China where they were very liberal or what uh the environment was concerned, even there they're putting a lot of laws in place, they're putting a lot of restrictions in place. I think when you come into a certain maturity space or in maturity area, we start equalizing. So um I think as I said, over time the the wealth over the world will will get more distributed. The way we approach a problem gets distributed. But culturally, I think there where we can get into culture again. Here we're very uh when there is a problem very, very uh um hampered, we see it as a huge issue. It's different over there.

Christian Soschner 1:00:26

While you were speaking, um I was thinking about a quote that is attributed to Buddha, uh, which is also I think uh connects to India. And um it's um a little bit uh let's say if I can bring it together, it's uh that uh he said all people in their lifetime have uh at any time in their life, they have always 50 problems, and only a few people have uh one problem more. Um they wish to have no problem at all. So maybe this explains the why Europeans are paralyzed, or German and Austrians are paralyzed when they run into a problem because they say, Oh, I don't want to have problems. And uh probably it's also symbolizes the Asian thinking that okay, there will always be problems, so let's solve one after the other and just let some sit and don't do anything with that.

Dimitrios Tzalis 1:01:22

Yeah, there is there's okay, there is a problem, it's just a question of time till we solve it, but it'll be solved at the end of the day. Well, that's also has been a part of entrepreneurship for me. As an entrepreneur, um all you do is at the end of the day, you solve one problem after the next, if you one issue after the next, not really a problem, yeah, because you can run always into new issues. I was a chemist. Today I'm I'm uh I have to understand a spreadsheet, I have to understand marketing, I have to understand business development sales, I have to understand global cultural differences, and um, they can create issues along your way. And people, when they come to me, they don't come to me with the success stories. Very often they come to me when they have an issue and they don't know how to continue with that issue per definition. That's the description of my job. So if you don't learn as an entrepreneur to really do that, you will not be successful as an entrepreneur. And that's where I picked up the spirit a little bit over there, where I said a problem is not a problem, it's just an issue to be solved.

Christian Soschner 1:02:30

Yeah, I think I think uh what you mentioned is uh key to success for anybody who wants to become an entrepreneur. Um, this acceptance of problems, because it's the job of an entrepreneur to solve problems and find solutions, and it never ends. It's uh also a hook point to the book of Simon Sinek, this uh infinite game. I think I have it here. I'm very recommendable to read this one. Um where he also says, I mean, entrepreneurship and running businesses is an endless game, it never ends, it starts and then you just do it every day. And you just need to laugh to solve problems, manage people, and every day there will be something new and exciting, and no day would be the same. Was it also for you in your journey that way? Yes, exactly that way.

Dimitrios Tzalis 1:03:17

I have a little anecdote to that. Um when in as an entrepreneur, you spend a lot of time in your in your job, and um you always have issues to solve. And um my wife at one point told me, Well, uh, when will you have more time? When will you do this? When will you do that? And I would say, Oh, when I reach this aspect, then I will have time for this, that, and the other. After a few years, I was saying, oh, when I do this, then I will have more time. Then she turned around one day and said, Do me a favor, just don't promise me anymore that you will have more time. That will not happen. As an entrepreneur, you do things because you do it out of passion. I think this is what helps. I think the the the core issue is you do it out of passion. If you don't do something with passion, you're not good at it, then it is better to go take a job or uh everything. You have to find your space where you find your passion, and then you're good at what you do. Yeah, I think it's like that as an artist, as a musician, as uh whatever job you have. And in today's world, we have the luxury to choose. You know, I don't understand the people who really are frustrated in their job. Unlike if there was a time and age, it's now that people can choose. Either I could go today and work in a big company. People are looking for qualified people, they're looking for for good people. There's no reason to be in a job where you're unhappy. And uh entrepreneurship is about passion, yeah, certain logic and a certain passion.

Christian Soschner 1:04:59

I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. It's uh very well put. Um, it's about uh passion and loving the process of solving problems and managing people, and then it's a habit, just do it every day, and you'll love. I also agree. I mean, the world today is um is a world of endless opportunities. When I look at the noble business models that arise, I mean, basically, everybody has the possibility today to become a solopreneur. So, Medium, for example, is uh paying money for writing. So it's just people just need to sit down and write. And when other people read that, uh, automatically the algorithm creates cash flows. Or YouTube, for example, it's a wonderful place for people who like video to just start with nothing and create the audience. Back in the 90s, it was uh finish your school, get a job, and uh, there were not so much opportunities. So I think this uh world is moving to a better place.

Dimitrios Tzalis 1:05:58

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. I was involved in the European Lead Factory, which was a consortium, a public-private consortium funded by the EU. It was the largest drug discovery consortium funded by the EU. And it was for transitional work from academia to the pharmaceutical industry. And there I had the luck to meet people who are passionate about being in academia, people who are passionate about being in the industry, and also other entrepreneurs like me. It was 30 partners. I was in the project executive. I had helped set the whole thing up. And there you saw what passion can move. We had there a consortium of 30 partners. We had the funds from the EU. But within that consortium, I could not tell anybody what they have to do. Either they were self-motivated to participate, or uh I could try to convince them, but I had no means, like in a company where I have means to say you have to do this, and I can ask people in a strong way, or if they don't like it, I can, in the worst case scenario, let them go. In a consortium, you can't do that. And that's where I saw what passion makes. In this consortium, there were, as I said, so many partners. At the end, we had 150 FTEs. And I saw what can be created. Within a very short period of time, we had an operation that is a drug discovery screening operation with 150 FTEs set up. And we reached all the goals that we had. And you have to imagine it was not a for-profit approach. It was really an approach where we did the screening operations and all the screening and the data was free of charge to the biotech industry or to the academic institutions that put in their target to be screened. But to set that up, you needed the passion of the people and the voluntarism of the people. And there I got to see a glimpse of the world of academia, what drives them, what makes them successful, but also in the pharmaceutical industry, which people are successful, who enjoys what they're doing, what can they contribute? And there I saw the difference between people with passion at what they do. And very often passion comes with success. People are extremely successful when they're passionate. And you see people who just do a job, which is also okay. But that's, I think, sometimes the difference between success and uh and uh yeah, maybe a bit less successful.

Christian Soschner 1:08:48

And I think from um social development point of view, we today have the luxury to find out uh what our passion is and start uh working in that direction. I think it was different 50 or 60 years ago in Europe, where out of necessity people just uh needed to do what needs to be done to have uh uh houses and uh shelter and food to eat. It was the time after World War II. So today is really, I mean, it's it's a world of abundance, in my opinion, and uh people just need to pick up the opportunities. It reminded me of uh of a talk I had uh in the 90s when I was a member of a fraternity where uh what you said, passion, where one evening I complained that um it's so unfair uh running a team at a fraternity because uh people are not motivated when I don't pay them. So uh an elderly person heard that. I think he was in the 60s, um, and he walked over to me and said, Christian, you see it wrong. It's not the right point of view that you have. Uh, it's your job as a leader uh to look at the people and find out what they are passionate about and uh what motivates them, and then give them jobs accordingly. It doesn't really make a difference uh whether you pay them or not. If there is no passion and people don't like what they are doing, uh regardless uh the size of their salary, uh they won't do the job. And uh it's your responsibility to make sure that the right person gets the right job. So it was um also a very, very nice anecdote.

Dimitrios Tzalis 1:10:17

I can't agree more to that. That's also the job that I see in my company. I I have to motivate the people. The people are only as good as as much as I motivate them, and I have to discover their talents. When people come in, very often I get job starters in my company, most of them chemists. And um, but not everybody wants to be a bench chemist. So you have to see, okay, some people are more communicative, so they are going to business development, but you have to discover and you have to offer them to lead them towards that. Sometimes people themselves don't even know where their talent lies or what makes them really happy. And when you see, as I said, uh he's not an introvert, he's more communicative, and you see him on the bench, he's not so happy. You take him, you make him an offering, you you ask him, and you ask him to help out. So you lead them towards it, and then they're very happy and very successful. And I think that's a part also of an entrepreneur. A part was for me also to identify the people, to be a good manager, identify the talent, and then also coach the people to a certain degree. That's another aspect. One was to motivate, but the other thing is also to coach. Because when somebody is a new job, um, he's first overwhelmed. And then you have to make sure that that you say, hey, it's okay. It's normal that at the beginning you're overwhelmed. But once you enjoy, you fly in it. You know, you're not successful right when you start, just because your passion, you're not successful from day one. So uh I can't agree more with uh with the old gentleman that that gave you that advice.

Christian Soschner 1:11:54

I think what you say is key to success that uh very often is overlooked uh when um uh people found companies, it's a team play. So it's uh running a company is not a one man or a one person or a one-woman show, uh, it's putting a team together. Every company is a team play, and uh I think this is also key for it doesn't matter which kind of company, the minute people think about putting something into a business, they must be aware of uh you're entering the world of playing with a team.

Dimitrios Tzalis 1:12:26

I fully agree. I fully agree. If uh people asked me very often today, what would you do different, differently? And I would say very clearly, today I would start with a team. I started the company by myself, but I asked two or three people when I finished my studies, and back then nobody was crazy enough to start his own company. Everybody went to the pharmaceutical industry to work and or took a safe job. Today, the young people have the opportunity to find some partner who's interested. Today I would say to everybody look for other passionate people in complementary fields. If you're a chemist, look for an accountant or look for an MBA or look for a marketing expert, look for somebody who's complementary in order to be able also to have somebody to share ideas and to share problems. I think you're absolutely right. It's very important to work as a team.

Christian Soschner 1:13:21

Um, what you said um back in the 90s when I got my master's degree in economy, the success metrics of uh companies were freed was uh growth of revenue, growth in profits. And um, then the third one was head count. And um, what you said when you started to try to find a team back in the 90s, it reminded me of uh a story I experienced in 2006 when I decided to join um a spin-out from Novartis and uh start working with that because this let's call it gold-digging pharmacoma uh uh life science companies that uh are run by highly specialized teams, they have uh one speciality in their balance sheet. It's uh they accumulate losses. So, for example, a company like BioNTech, uh I think they must have hundreds of millions of losses by the time they brought their first mRNA vaccine to the market. And when you look at this balance sheet, it's it contradicts what people teach at the university level. And the first response was when I informed my circle of friends uh back in 2006 that I joined the life science industry, the glorious life science industry of drug discovery. They say, Are you nuts? Uh this cannot work, they don't have any revenues, they just accumulate losses. So it's a very, very unique uh uh business model. How do you perceive the different life science business model when we talk about uh drug discovery?

Dimitrios Tzalis 1:14:54

I think today it's the same way. They are the service providers uh like we are. We are a service provider. Today you have different mixed models. You have the service providers, which over the years, like uh Levi Schlaus, to pick up your example from the beginning, have really increased tremendously in value. Just for example, um, when I started my company, nobody wanted to invest money in it to buy a share. That's why I went for a loan. Um today, most of my competitors have been bought up by private equity company for unbelievable uh valuation. And um that shows you the understanding today of the value of companies generating revenues. So even that in the life science industry, that's also there. On the other hand, the cycle of drug discovery is multiple years. So when you hit uh the gold mine, you hit it big. Let's say biointech, they hit the gold mine, they hit it big. And there's no doubt about it. And it's like that for other companies too. So for the investors, it pays out if they do 10 investments, if one makes it, they're they're they're they're set. Uh, but that's necessary because these projects otherwise would have been done in the pharmaceutical industry. And it was the same thing. You start 10 projects, nine fail. And that's why pharma research is so expensive. That's why pharma drugs are extremely expensive, because there are huge risks associated with it. And to bring a drug to the market, the life cycle of from early drug discovery to the drug, it takes between 12 and 15 years. So um then you have to have a 10-year, um, yeah, six to ten year planning of losses in order to be able to uh to hit the market. And what is a yearly profit? Yearly profit is very short, short-sighted. Innovation takes time, cycles of innovation take time. Today we live in IT, it is much shorter cycles, but in drug discovery, it just is a bigger, a bigger cycle. But uh, it doesn't mean that it is a bad investment. Today many people have accepted it. It's very common for investors, but also for people to work in life science companies.

Christian Soschner 1:17:16

I agree to what you say. Uh recently, um I read uh an article, I think it was in Nature Biotechnology, um, that uh analyzed the time span that was needed to bring an mRNA vaccine to the market. So I completely agree to what you say. It's 10 to 15 years until it hits uh the market when we are in development, not including the basic research. And I hope I get it right in my mind, but uh I think the the first steps into that vaccine technology that ultimately led in 2021, that the mRNA vaccine was put on the market, it already started in the 60s, uh, both having nanoparticles and also the mRNA discovery stage. So we're talking about 30, 40 years of hard, basic research work, which is not easy, which is very complex. Uh, and then uh 10 to 15 years seems to be the last mile. And uh then comes the rollout on the market. And uh one of the studies that I read uh that analyzes the money needed to bring one therapeutic or one vaccine to the market uh comes up with figures of one to three billion. So every business plan that we start writing starts with interact development or vaccine development starts with this one to three billion mark somewhere in the plan. And uh back in the 90s there was no investment industry here in Europe, so it's uh quite interesting how things evolve.

Dimitrios Tzalis 1:18:45

Well, because the pharmaceutical industry was doing it themselves. Yeah, they were bearing it.

Christian Soschner 1:18:52

Yeah, I agree to that. When uh you were talking about the funds and that they already start uh investing in uh in also in service providers. I mean, my advice 10 years ago always was when people ask me where I can invest in in therapeutics, just I said, just don't do that. Most of that is private. And uh, if you don't have at least 100 million to allocate in companies, uh, because of this uh success rate that you mentioned, nine out of ten fail, and uh the one succeeds. Also, funds need to be aware of that, that probably when they invest in 10 companies, one makes it. But uh, you just need one BioNTech to repay your investment. And uh, but the market changed when I look today on the Nasdaq and also on European stock exchanges. Very often service provider, uh drug developers get listed very early, for example, or later, Vertex Pharmaceutical, um, for example, is listed on the Nasdaq, BioNTech is listed on the Nasdaq, Moderna is listed on the Nasdaq. Then we have a couple of uh oncology companies like uh CRISPR or Intelia, who are also listed on the Nasdaq, uh, but are still in development phases. Um, have you ever thought about taking your company public?

Dimitrios Tzalis 1:20:11

Um the next stage for our company would be uh basically private equity. For us, there is no market to go public because the entry cost of reporting, etc., etc., and the effort is simply too big. The difference is too big. So you have to have a certain maturity. In the past, you had uh for smaller biotech companies in Germany a market where you could uh go to the to the to uh collect smaller amounts of money, but today the markets that are available in Germany, and that's why it has not crossed my my my mind, is simply the entry ticket just with the with the documentation, etc. etc., is way too high. It's way too high. So all my partners or my competitors, uh however you want to call them, they all basically, or not all, but a large number have sold out to private equity companies or to companies that have that are uh major service providers and are listed already.

Christian Soschner 1:21:19

Yeah, I know I agree with that. I mean, being distant company, it's it's a different game. It's a different game when it comes to managing analysts and uh investors. The public market can be good, but it can also be very tricky. So it needs specialized expertise and definitely on the reporting side and communication side, uh, a lot of resources that uh private companies don't need. So I think to just put it bluntly. I've worked in both uh public and private environments, and the public environment is just a machine, I would say. It's just uh also on the communication side. Everything must be, especially today, everything must be timed on the minute. It's no possibility to lay any delay anything, just imagine I mean quarterly reports, you can't delay that, so it's uh would be it's it's different. Let's talk a little bit about uh the future of our industry. Um when I talked with people, and this was also the the beginning of this life science get together networking community. When I talked with politicians and investors uh in 2017 or 16 about investments in life science, I pretty much was empty. Um, most of the funds and professional investors uh like investing in revenue-bearing companies and profitable companies. Uh, don't take a lot of high-risk games like uh nine out of uh you have a success chance of uh five to ten percent. Um, and also prefer industries like real estate, for example. Um, then in 2017, I compared uh the venture capital that runs into the development from conceptual uh basic research ideas into products, and I found that China and the United States allocate four to five times as much capital into that area than Europe does. So I was not sure if um our community here in Europe was aware of that, so I decided to start a small initiative to start talking with politicians and just making them aware of the fact that uh we lost the digital game here in Europe, so we don't have any Apple or Amazon, and we are on the verge of losing also the life science game because there is just more investment uh left and right of Europe when we look at uh at uh um the landscape of the world. And uh not much changed, honestly speaking, from 2017, 1819, and then came the pandemic, and something amazing happened that a European company was so smart to start uh developing a technology that basically saves the world, uh, back in a time when nobody was interested in that. And since that moment that BioTech basically um uh managed to get also meanwhile full approval in the United States, I think more and more people here in Europe, uh, and the United States and China are aware what this industry can do and how that can perform, and they always get more and more interest from, let's say, unusual parties that uh want now to invest in life science and take the risk just for philanthropic reasons that they want to help to solve such health problems. Um, my question to you is is this just my perception, or do you think that the spirit and the spirit of collaboration and uh investment and uh starting opening uh from unusual investors that have not invested in the life science industry so far to have a philanthropic approach? Do you think that the spirit will remain and sustain and also push the European life science industry further in the future where more money is available to bring more technology to patients?

Dimitrios Tzalis 1:25:07

It's difficult to say. What I think is you're absolutely right that uh we are investing way too little. The sad part as a European, now I'm talking as a European, is that in Europe we have excellent creative minds, great scientists. Cureback is just one uh Cubac and BioNTech. I mean, one should not forget that the the original idea of mRNA comes out of CureVac. Um we have super creative minds in Europe, excellent scientists, but we are incapable of valorizing it. We are putting any roadblock possible over the 10-year delay, even in the IT industry. Um voice over IP was a uh German development by German scientists, but they couldn't get phone numbers allocated because of all the restrictions. Many inventions that we see are based on scientists that go abroad. Many Nobel Prize laureates in in medicine come from Europe or in the sciences, but they're all in the US currently. Why is that? And that's where it starts. And will it change just because Biotech and CureWork were the original inventors of the vaccine? I hope, but I'm not certain. Because we are still too how should I say, um too slow for changes. The world is changing around us, is changing extremely, extremely fast. In Europe, we love our comfort zone and we hate to leave our comfort zone. And anything that's new is suspect. And uh, what I don't know, I'm not trying to taste. There's a German saying for that. And will it change because of one occurrence? I hope uh the industry or the political establishment will understand of the power that they have here in Europe, within the academic community, within the biotech industry, within the creative minds, and that they will try to valorize it. It cannot be that we create here value and the valorization speaks the value out of it, the revenues out of it, are being made abroad. Yes, we are here in Germany, the car industry is very big, and so on, the chemical industry. But as you said, the the all the IT KI we have missed. Um, not because we didn't have the capabilities or because we didn't have the research infrastructures. It was just simply because we were too careful in accepting changes. Um, would we have the innovators to have Google or Apple or whatever you want to name it? Yes, we. Would have them. Would it ever be possible to have such a success story in Europe? Hardly. Because there are too many obstacles. I wish and I hope that it'll change. But let's wait and see. I wish, I wish.

Christian Soschner 1:28:18

It's it's quite an interesting development when I think back uh again to the 90s when you started your company. Um basically there was a lot of tech coming out of Europe. So it's uh out you mentioned automotive industry, I think Daimler, Volkswagen, BMW, um, also the French car makers and the the Scandinavian car makers and the British car makers were very innovative, or are still very innovative in the field they are operating in in the traditional uh oil-based vehicles, they call it that way. Uh, then we had the mobile industry, I think also was very innovative. I mean, Nokia, uh Erickson, uh Siemens, for example. I remember one of my first mobiles was from Siemens. And not only were they innovative in technology, they also were innovative in business models because they they realized very quickly, uh, here in Austria, for example, uh, I got a lot of mobiles in the 90s for free. So they just say, okay, let's put people on the network, and once they're on the network, we can then charge them for services. So it was a a shift in the uh thinking of you need to buy the mobile, and uh that's it. Uh, to you get the device for free, and uh then you produce revenues for the company. It was very innovative in the 90s, and uh then somehow I think uh with uh the new decade and the new century, things slowly started to change, and I think Europe lost lost the edge. Uh when you look at Europe today, I mean uh Apple invented the smartphone and somehow eliminated all the mobile industry that was in Europe. So something we missed when we look at Google search engines. We have the smart minds. I mean, we had a lot of projects also set up here in Europe, but somehow we we did not really uh want to evolve and develop that and started buying uh services from the United States. So all our data, in my opinion, is managed out of the United States currently, all European uh also cloud services. I mean, uh the big cloud services still, I mean, it's Amazon, AWS, um, Microsoft, I think Azuft cloud. Um, do we have a European project uh that works? I don't think so. And uh similar to life science, I mean, when I think at how I can evolve and develop life science companies, it's it's pretty simple. We have great technology here in Europe. Uh, we have the, in my opinion, we have the world's best scientists in basic research here in Europe. Um historically, because the universities are quite old, I mean, the oldest universities are here in Europe. So historically, there is a scientific culture uh deeply ingrained in this continent. Um, we also have uh tremendous public funding support for the early stages. And um, when I think um at the beginning of a company, we need a few hundred thousand euros that can also be brought up by people from the industry, which usually, when they found companies, they are in their 50s, anyways, uh, had some income over time and accumulated some wealth over time. So this can be done with business angels. But once the company is founded and goes into pre-clinical development, there is still hardly any investment community here in Europe. I think we have more opportunities still than investment capital available. And when I talk to investors also on the podcast, they acknowledge that fact and say it's a very investor-friendly environment. So uh entrepreneurs should not be too bold in negotiating valuations because there are more opportunities on the market than capital. Um, thinking about taking a company public uh in life science is next to impossible in Europe for just one fact, we don't have these IPO investors here. I mean, they are all in Boston and San Francisco, and I don't remember the book or the podcast where I heard that. Um, one factor that people attribute to the rise of Silicon Valley, uh back I think in the 70s and 80s, uh, was basically coming for the governments, but they said uh many companies back in the 80s were just uh their first customer was some governmental air um organization that just bought local products. And uh I think this is probably a part that's missing. Uh, how do you see that?

Dimitrios Tzalis 1:32:41

You mean now that the public um side doesn't buy enough local products?

Christian Soschner 1:32:46

Or I mean, in my opinion, the first the first big company uh that uh got a governmental organization as the first customer was basically biotech with the with the with the pandemic.

Dimitrios Tzalis 1:32:58

Oh I know what you mean. Um I think it helps, but it's not necessary. What would really help is if the despite there being so much capital, uh sometimes you have capital, but you don't have infrastructure. You don't always need the government to be the first, the first customer, but the government should be the provider of an infrastructure. Um for example, why taros was possible as a service provider was because I I moved into an infrastructure, I grew in this infrastructure, I paid my rent, I didn't have to build a building. It's not my expertise, but I grew in my expertise. Uh the public side has to provide the infrastructure, which lately it has slowed down. If you look in Europe, and uh I think you're aware of this discussion, if you look for infrastructure for biotech companies, it has become a despora. All the the labs are occupied, and there are no labs for new startup companies currently in the field of uh biotechnology. So there the government should make it a low entry point for them where people don't have to invest millions into a building, into a lab. And then later on, very often the companies will find their customers. Um and if you say, especially in the field of drug discovery, what one has to be careful about, most of the drugs, at the end of the day, the government buys through the health insurances. There, the health insurances should not put huge barriers in buying drugs because they're too expensive, but they have to be expensive because the cost, the entry costs, are huge. But if we again put barriers in the price, in the pricing of certain drugs, then we will also prevent the the drug discovery in the medium run. So, yes, there is a responsibility by the government, but I think it's not solely the government. But the government responsibility, in my opinion, would be for the early stage. The later stage, the companies have to find their way to find the customer. And you're right, biointed was the government, but indirectly, especially in the drug discovery field, it is uh the insurances and uh and the governments.

Christian Soschner 1:35:22

I'm not worried about later stage companies. I mean, once uh they got the first license deal in with um when we look at the B2B business, um, it's quite easy, or when they bring the first drug to the market themselves, like Vertex or Moderna, they they're doing fine. But I completely agree to what you say. Uh it's the early stages that are critical where uh a lot of things can or need to be fixed. And uh looking at one is infrastructure, definitely. So lab space is very scarce all over Europe. Um, as a company, as an early stage company to should focus on moving the first pro uh first idea into product stage, um, needing to raise funds to build their own uh lab facilities, uh just taking three to five years more. I think it's an Austrian company, Intercel did that back in 2005, 6, uh, 4. They built their own their own facilities, so which is still there and uh facilitated a lot of life science companies afterwards. Um, this is definitely one point. And I think also tax taxation regulation, um a lot of uh capital is not available because of tax reasons. Um it's not, I mean, that there is no incentive to invest in a life science company, for example. Um, this could be easily fixed with uh making it tax deductible, for example. So even when someone provides uh 40,000, 50,000 euros or 10,000 euros for a startup companies, if they can uh deduct it from their uh tax payment, any tax payment, it would be very beneficial for the startup scene. And I think this is all that happens in the United States. I heard in a podcast that they have this instrument, which is 401k or rough IRA, where they not only can invest in listed companies without having to pay taxes, they also can invest in startup companies out of that instrument, and that provides a lot of capital. And in Austria, I mean it's just the Austrian situation that I'm familiar, it's basically I need to earn a salary, uh, which is taxed. Uh, then from the remaining parts, uh, I have to save, which basically the interest rate is taxed, and or I invest it in public companies, which uh capital gains are taxed. And from the remaining parts, I then, when I have accumulated enough wealth uh that it makes sense to go early stage where the risk is very high, then have to take it from money that already is taxed three or four times. And the United States provides a lot of capital with instruments uh that are only taxed after money really is taken out by the person who runs the instrument. And I'm not I'm not talking about foundations with billions of money in debt. Uh, it's just a person with $10,000. I mean, they can just uh play that game without having to pay additional taxes. Uh, do you also see these uh these these benefits in the in the US system compared to to the European system, or do I miss something?

Dimitrios Tzalis 1:38:19

No, I think it's the same. It's the same. I see it the same way. Basically, the US has a lot of tax incentive systems for people to invest. If you invest here, as you said, out of a taxed income into a biotech company, in order to be able to tax deduct this, uh, especially in the life science industry, where it takes 10 years to have revenues, or if the company goes belly up, I have to wait 10 years that I can activate that money as a loss. Uh, so to have it tax deducted. And in the US, it's slightly different. They can activate the the funds much earlier. Uh in Germany now, they started giving the companies, the biotech companies themselves, once they have uh profits, uh tax breaks. But that's only once you get to a to a stage where you have uh profits. Now, this year or last, no, I think no, last last year, they introduced a tool where you get a tax return on investment, on research investment. But that only was introduced last year, which gives the company somewhat of a break, which is okay, but it's by by far not as good as let's say in the UK or in Ireland or in the in the US. I think there, Europass is still way to go in order to make it attractive for investors to put their money in, especially considering that the path is extremely long in drug discovery. But as we see in the in the uh mRNA technology, the returns can be tremendously.

Christian Soschner 1:39:57

Yeah, not only the returns, I think also the social impact. When I look at the big problems that we need to solve these days, I think one problem still is communication uh that needs a lot of acceleration. And uh, I think the solutions are definitely coming out of the deep tech space, which is basically ideas that started out of universities. Um, then we have this uh global warming discussion. It's uh I think meanwhile, it's an accepted fact that uh the human race influences uh the climate change, and uh politicians and people are aware of uh wanting to change that. And I think it's also a challenge for deep tech. I mean, like uh Tesla Elon Musk says, uh it's a problem that needs a lot of thinking and it's very complex. Um, then we have life science, I think longevity is still a hot topic, and new viruses will also evolve and arise in the future, and uh also new bacteria probably, and new health challenges will arise, and much more problems. And when I look uh at the last 20 years, uh, and I ask myself the question where did all the solutions to big problems come from? Uh, it definitely, in my opinion, were entrepreneurs who started companies. So let's look at Apple. Apple changed the, let's say, the way we can uh access uh, I mean, it's the app economy that basically Steve Jobs invented. So we have the small device that holds our whole life, and this was unimaginable 30 years ago. When I look at Facebook, Facebook changed the way we communicated. If, in my opinion, it was Facebook who drove the expenses for global communication down to zero. So the internet uh changed the way we are doing business. So, for example, Amazon changed the way of e-commerce or commerce. Um, the first interviews I heard from Jeff Bezos was called the nerd of the Amazon. Umbody thought that it's necessary to have the internet to sell something to people, but uh he restructured the entire logistics globally. So all these inventions um got their push from entrepreneurs from this rare breed. Also, when I look at the finance industry, for example, uh Square, it's uh like Wirecard, but the American version uh is remodeling the way we are doing finance. And uh, I think also in the future, it's uh entrepreneurship that changes the world. So um I completely agree to what you say that Europe needs to brush up the perception I think uh the culture has towards entrepreneurship. It must be more positive.

Dimitrios Tzalis 1:42:47

I fully agree. I think um the ideas will come out of academia for to change the world, but academia is extremely well financed. Even if I see it here on the spot, uh the universities will get very quickly new buildings. But in this translational phase from the universities to the customer or to the industry or whatever you want to take. In the US, they accepted that Amazon was running billions and billions over years of losses, that it is a part of the concept that it takes much longer. Big solutions require big investments and a longer time. The quick fix solution, everybody can do at the end of the day. So we have to accept in Europe that the solution will take much longer and that we have to invest in the future, and that we have to take this academic brilliance that we have here in Europe and put a translational system, I want to call it, translational uh entrepreneurship that brings the product either to a big company or directly to the customer. To get back to the problems that we have to solve, I think as big as climate change is, one aspect that COVID made very clear to us, mother nature can be extremely brutal. With COVID, as sad as it is going, and as sad as it as it is that we have lost so many lives, we still were in a way uh lucky. Imagine now a COVID virus with the lethal rate of Ebola, contagiousness of COVID, of the Delta variant, for example, and a lethal rate of 70 to 90 percent. And because we lived 70 years happily and we didn't have major diseases that we had to deal with, we thought, oh, we we live in a bubble and healthcare, we just deal with the lifestyle diseases, and a lot of investments that we did was I I call them lifestyle diseases, obesity, blood pressure, etc. etc. Through the Ebola outbreak, I think that was the first, I think, red flag that we got. Um, where we contained it very quickly, but on the other hand, as I said, combine these two viruses, and we have disaster to come, and we are not prepared for viruses. We have nothing. Another aspect that we are completely underestimating, and it's as dangerous as climate change, is uh when you have antibiotic-resistant bacteria, we are getting more of it and they're getting deadlier. And uh we are heading towards a direction that is not healthy. We have to invest significant amounts to develop new bacteria, uh not new bacteria, new antibiotics against these bacteria, and also protect these antibiotics. Don't make them available for every chicken and every cow and every pig on this planet, yeah, because at the end of the day, it has to be the last line of rescue. Because we saw in in every few, even if this every hundred years, every 200 years, we get a pandemic. It can be bacterial like the Black Plague, but it can be also viral, let's say, like the Spanish flu or like now uh COVID. We reacted faster, we have quicker mechanisms, but that is that we were lucky that we had mRNA technology that helped us uh bring a drug quicker to the market. I think we have to be very careful, and just because a problem is not there, we should not ignore it. We have to anticipate, especially when it comes to health. And there, especially Europe, having great academic institutions, having so much investments in the healthcare industry, and not industry, but in the healthcare from in the academic world, it's their responsibility to make sure to translate it into a potential product, into a potential cure for customers for patients and at the end customers. But the patient should be in the focus, I think. It's very important. And um the translational aspect and not to let our resources go waste. Otherwise, it's a wasted investment. As great, great as it is, if we don't valorize, if we don't create a drug for a patient, even if we don't have an issue, let's say, like a viral infect was for 70 years not really a big issue. But all of a sudden, Ebola showed us that we are basically nothing in in in we were not prepared for it. As I said, we were lucky that it was not as contagious, but COVID made it very clear, and we lost a lot of lives because we had simply nothing in the drawer against viruses. And um there we have to to uh to be smarter about it and anticipate issues. There are certain issues that the scientific community is warning. COVID is one thing, but antibacterial uh resistance is another aspect that has to be looked at.

Christian Soschner 1:48:15

It's a very interesting discussion about delayed gratification, and I agree to what you say. Um, and this is a also a cultural aspect that I not fully understand so far. I mean, when I think back at my first training in economy in the 90s, um, the European teachers were always very proud of the long-term thinking and anticipating of long-term problems of the European society. And in their examples, they compared the European economy and thinking and mindset with the American mindset. And back in the 90s, it was or also late 80s, it was uh the perception that Europe thinks long-term. And the United States, because of their short-term profits, uh, they think in these four-year cycles. So it's very, very short-term. And they have quarterly reports and stuff like that, which means that uh they're looking more for short-term solutions, which neglects the long-term effects. And somehow they changed over time. And I agree to what you say. I mean, uh vaccines and uh also therapeutics or antibiotics against bacterial infections, they need just time to develop. It's not uh a thing that uh you can put online like an app in three months. Uh, we need to train now for an event that may or may not happen in the next 10 years, but someday it will happen, it's it's for sure. And this was uh, as I said, the warning call or the wake up call that Mother Nature sent us with with SARS CoV 2 said, Okay, I give you a virus that's not very that's very contagious, but uh compared to Ebola, uh less harmful. But maybe one day it really happens. I mean, Stephen King wrote it in his book, The Stand, exactly this scenario that uh a virus spreads. Which is as contagious as SARS-CoV-2, the Delta variants, and as deadly as Ebola. So the solutions we need to build now, and I think this is uh for all problems that we have, these uh these deep tech problems um that need a lot of preparation before the actual problem really arises. And what I don't understand is why this European mindset changed. What's your perception?

Dimitrios Tzalis 1:50:28

I think maybe the only constant thing is change. And we were looking at the US the way they were doing it, and we started adjusting to that because it was a successful model, no doubt. But the US recognized intrinsically what the weakness was in their success model. And while they were changing, speak with private equity funds and venture capital funds, providing capital that is long-term, uh uh that has a long-term view. In Europe, we unfortunately didn't uh see that development. We're seeing it, but again, we are following. We are not uh at the at the um uh at the front, forefront of this development. I think once again, we had a very great approach, but you can't only just look at 10 years uh uh visions and ignore your your day-to-day business, but you cannot also just look at quarterly uh spreadsheets uh and and profits and ignore the long term, and it has to be a balance. And I think what we will see in Europe will bounce back as usual, uh, but we lost a little bit the edge there, and it's a normal change. I think it's also kind of trends that we set. It's I think the economy has the same thing as the fashion industry. We have trends and we are following them, and then we follow back and then we fall back into the same habits. I think it's cycles that we go through. And that I don't see too critical. It changed, but I think it'll change back. The question is how fast?

Christian Soschner 1:52:01

Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, we have uh also China joining. So I think in the past it was Europe, the United States. Now China is very strong, and they've put out their plans in becoming the innovation leader uh globally. Then we have India. I think India has a lot of uh great future, similar to China, in my opinion. Um Africa, I think also with uh, I mean, cryptocurrencies, for example, is a technology that is uh that is aiming to um let's say uh how should I say it in a in a in a politically not incorrect way, but let's just think about it, uh, that connects uh Africa to the global capitalist system, which basically overcomes the barrier of uh a functioning having a functional banking system, which uh unfortunately in some countries still today are added on the internet that 1.4 billion people still uh don't have a bank account in the world. So without the bank accounts, they can't participate in the global innovation system. And um cryptocurrencies like Cardano, for example, try to overcome that and uh to make these people also support that. So I uh Africa also I think has a great future to participate in that. So we have uh, I think instead of one or two blocks, we have uh three to five blocks uh doing research together, and this is a great future, in my opinion. Uh, which leads me to the final question because I mean we I think we can talk endlessly, we can add another two hours uh effortlessly. Uh, but I also know that you have to run a company and probably also some some some other meetings to do. Uh, let me ask you one final question. And uh, I mean, you are now running your companies since 1999, and you also um witnessed the shift and the change in economy, not only locally but also globally. And you're also in touch with uh young scientists, young entrepreneurs, and let's just imagine that one of these uh scientists uh approaches you and says, I mean, you built a nice company and you have expertise in Asia, in the United States, and in Europe. Um, and this person asks you for just one advice in your scarce time and say, Give what is the most important advice that you can give me when I want to found the company?

Dimitrios Tzalis 1:54:29

Pursue your dream. Very clear. Pursue your dream. That's the time to pursue it. Today is the time. Go for it. That is that is, I think, the the best the the best uh advice at the moment that I can give them. If they can, if they can create something, it is in today's time. They're all the freedoms, the capital is available, uh, the the mindset of the people is there for entrepreneurship. They can build teams, they should pursue their dream. Because if they pursue their dream, they will excel in it.

Christian Soschner 1:55:07

Dimitrios, this is uh the best advice ever. I think, and uh it's uh very clear pursue your dream and you will become successful in the end. Dimitrios, thank you very much for this nice conversation. I wish you and your family and your team all the best for your future, and I'm pretty sure that you will thrive and prosper also in the coming two decades.

Dimitrios Tzalis 1:55:31

Christian, thank you for having me over at your podcast. It was really a pleasure talking to you and discussing uh many, many, many global topics and uh yeah, looking forward to your future podcasts, the different podcasts that you have posted. It's a great series.

Christian Soschner 1:55:49

Thank you very much. Have a great day. Bye. Bye, bye. Thanks for listening. Please, please share the podcast and make sure you've subscribed. Have a great day.