Episode 16 | Why This CRISPR Founder Built a Biotech Without VC Money

Tilmann Bürckstümmer co-founded Myllia Biotechnology in Vienna in 2018 and never raised venture capital. Not because he couldn't. Because the money would have cost more than it was worth. The reasoning is specific. A VC needs a 10x or 20x return, and in biotech that return only exists if you develop a drug and get it to market. Myllia is a technology company. Build a technology company on VC money, he explains, and by year three nobody values your technology at all — they value how fast your drug candidate is moving toward the clinic. The thing you actually built disappears. So they took customer money instead, from the first year, and lived with a valuation ceiling. For a while the market punished them for it. Biotechs with no revenue were being valued at $200 million. Founders with revenue got laughed at, because a million in sales made a 200x valuation impossible to argue for. "Sometimes people were belittling us," he says. That has now reversed completely. What it cost him was comfort. He gave up a professorship he had spent thirteen years working toward — habilitation completed — after a single one-hour conversation in a Viennese café, without negotiating a salary. Seven years later the site he ran for Horizon Discovery closed and he was unemployed, which is the only reason he ever founded anything. Four months into the new company every experiment had failed and there were a few hundred thousand euros in the bank. In one afternoon, they threw out the entire business and rebuilt it around CRISPR. "Money means freedom. Money means that you have a chance to develop what you would like to develop." This week on Willing to Win, Tilmann Bürckstümmer breaks down why he refused venture capital, what bootstrapping actually costs, and why he still doesn't feel safe. We cover: — Why venture capital would have destroyed the company they wanted to build — Why investors once treated revenue as a liability, and why that flipped — How losing his job was the only thing that made founding possible — Why he walked away from a professorship in under an hour — The afternoon they scrapped the entire business and started over — How a bootstrapped company changes direction faster than a funded one — Why a Chinese FTE costs $100,000 and a European one costs $300,000 — What CRISPR screening in primary human cells reveals that other models can't — What "winning" means to a founder who says money doesn't drive him Bootstrapping is usually sold as a virtue. He tells it as a constraint, one that forced sharper decisions than money would have, and one he never stopped feeling. He says he has never been comfortable and probably never will be. The part he enjoys most now is sitting in a café with founders half his age, telling them what he got wrong. If you have ever wondered whether you can build a serious science company without selling a piece of it first, this episode has the blueprint. ABOUT THE SHOW This is Willing to Win. Why would anyone bet everything on something that will probably fail? Every episode, I sit down with a founder, an investor, an executive — and I capture the story behind the story. I ask them the real things. What made them start. What keeps them going. Who they became after everything fell apart. They don't choose uncertainty to prove they can survive it. They choose it because it's the thing that makes them feel alive. Betting on the impossible thing is what creates the feeling of impact — and that's what makes it worth pursuing. You might hear your own voice in theirs. The one telling you you're meant for more. More impact. More joy. More fulfillment. Willing to Win. Biotech Leaders Against All Odds. GUEST Tilmann Bürckstümmer — Co-Founder & Chief Scientific Officer, Myllia Biotechnology (Vienna, Austria) LinkedIn:   / tilmann-burckstummer-19b65949   Company: https://myllia.com HOST Christian Rados — Executive search for venture-backed, clinical-stage biotech LinkedIn:   / christianrados-biotechdreamteams   Website: https://rados-recruiting.com EPISODE Willing to Win, Ep16 CHAPTERS 00:00 The professorship he gave up 03:00 The phone call that ended the academic path 06:00 Can you still copy this path today? 08:00 Why they refused venture capital 11:00 What Myllia actually does 13:50 The CRISPR hype curve, honestly assessed 17:00 Both unemployed, so they started a company 20:00 Four months in, everything failed 23:40 The pivot that saved the company 26:30 Where it could have broken 30:30 When investors laughed at revenue 33:00 "Money means freedom" 37:00 China: $100K vs $300K per scientist 39:40 What winning means now