Willing to Win

Fifteen percent of biotech deals took half the capital in 2025. A senior banker explains who got it and why.  Jan De Kerpel runs life sciencesand healthcare investment banking at Van Lanschot Kempen. Before that he was a scientist, working on an HIV drug that is still saving lives today. He moved from the lab to the trading floor by accident, and he has stayed there for twodecades because, he says...

Period pain isn't normal. Medicine made it normal. For decades, severe menstrual pain has been dismissed as something women should accept, normalize, or medicate away with the pill. Meanwhile, an entire market and an entire patient population has been ignored by mainstream biotech. In this episode of Willing to Win , Christian Rados sits down with Simone Sabbione, co-founder of Meliodays, the Muni...

Chris Przybyszewski raised over $150 million, founded five companies, and was fired four times. He also studied literature and founded a theatre before biotech. In this episode of Willing to Win, he gives the unedited account of taking US Biologic from a Lyme disease vaccine to a near-acquisition, with a poultry program and a chewable human flu vaccine in the pipeline. Willing to Win is the biotec...

Miguel Coego Rios has spent 20 years leading through the toughest environments in European pharma. Restructurings. Turnarounds. Investor pressure. From the outside, he looked unbreakable. He wasn't. In this episode Miguel does something most senior leaders never do - he talks openly about the moment resilience stopped being a strength and became a trap. Medication. Anxiety. Six months of recov...

Klaus Weinberger co-invented one of the first real-time PCR assays used in diagnostic labs across Europe. He never patented it. He never made a dime. That was just the beginning. What followed was three decades of building in life science diagnostics. A sabotaged patient database. A toxic board member who cost two years of runway. A company sold after nine years with deeply mixed feelings. A fundi...

What do investors actually look for in founders when the stakes are real? In this episode, Melissa Simon (Wieland Capital) shares how investment decisions are made in life sciences and healthcare beyond the pitch, beyond the story. We talk about what builds trust during due diligence, why realism matters more than conviction, and what it actually means to commit capital when outcomes are uncertain...

Dr. Pierre Morgon has fired good people and been fired himself. Twice. After 40 years and countless board seats in biotech, pharma, and vaccines, he shares what nobody tells you about leading in life sciences. In this conversation with Christian Rados he talks about why comfort is "horribly sedative" in big pharma, what founders get wrong about IPOs, the boss who told him to never love t...

Episode 8 of Willing To Win Every Chapter Needs a Different You - The Cost of Not Transforming with Peter Seufer-Wasserthal   Peter Seufer - Wasserthal didn't have one career. He had eight. Each chapter demanded a version of himself that didn't exist yet.   PhD chemist. Business developer. Remote operator from anAustrian village before the internet. The outsider who outperformed the insider. The g...

Willing to Win - Biotech Leaders Against All Odds Episode 7 Every scientist who enters drug development believes the science will find its way. That if the biology is right, the path forward is clear. That conviction is enough. Zoltan Magyarics believed it too. Then the phase two failed. The lead program died. And the belief that great science finds its own way broke with it. In this episode of Wi...

What Nobody Tells You About a Life-Changing Deal (Erich Tauber) Episode 6 13 years of building. Never funded for more than 12 months. Hundreds of investors who said this will never work. Then a life-changing deal with Merck, signed in the middle of a pandemic, thirty minutes after telling the notary it was fifty-fifty. But the hardest part wasn't the struggle. It was what came after. In this e...

If you take real risks as a leader, failure is guaranteed. The only question is when. Most executives try to avoid failure. Great leaders prepare for it. In Episode 5 of Willing To Win Biotech Leaders Against All Odds, Christian Rados sits down with Ilkka Haukijärvi to explore what Winning means. Ilkka made a radical domain jump. From Director of HR at a Finnish university to CEO building a global...

Willing To Win: Biotech Leaders Against All Odds Episode 4 Ownership Of The Downside | Elite Leaders Under Pressure (Jesper Brandgaard) What separates elite leaders from the rest? In this episode of Willing To Win, Christian Rados sits down with Jesper Brandgaard to unpack a leadership principle most executives underestimate: If you want authority, you must own the downside. Jesper Brandgaard is C...

Willing To Win: Biotech Leaders Against All Odds Episode 3 An IPO Is Just the Beginning | The Real Fight Starts When You Go Public (Oliver Schacht) In this episode of Willing To Win , Christian Rados sits down with Oliver Schacht to unpack a truth most founders only discover the hard way: The IPO is not the victory. It is the moment the real pressure begins. Oliver Schacht is a PhD-trained molecul...

Willing To Win: Biotech Leaders Against All Odds Episode 2 Feeling Out Of Place | The Story Behind Edwin Moses - And How Insecurity Fueled Optimism In this episode of Willing to Win , Christian Rados sits down with Edwin Moses , one of the most accomplished and quietly influential leaders in European biotech, to explore the inner journey behind a lifetime of exceptional outcomes. Edwin Moses has p...

Episode 1 of Willing to Win . In the opening episode of Willing to Win , Christian Rados speaks with Thaminda Ramanayake about leadership when ego must be set aside and decisions are made without certainty. When Thaminda joined CureVac, the company was under intense pressure. The stock was in free fall, the equity story relied heavily on litigation, and confidence in the European mRNA ecosystem wa...

Willing to Win is a podcast about leadership in biotech when there are no easy answers. In conversations with founders, CEOs, and senior executives, the focus is on what no one prepares you for:making decisions under uncertainty,carrying responsibility without a safety net,and leading through pressure, doubt, and consequences that don’t disappear. At its core, Willing to Win is about conviction ag...