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Florian Wegener: CEO of Zageno · BioBoss

• 0:00
  Florian Wegener: Very often.
• 0:02
  Florian Wegener: It's not about giving the right answer, but asking the right question.
• 0:07
  John Simboli: That's Florian Wegener, co-founder and CEO of Zageno.
• 0:10
  John Simboli: Listen in now to hear the conversation I recently had with Florian at his office in Cambridge.
• 0:17
  John Simboli: I'm John Simboli.
• 0:19
  John Simboli: You're listening to BioBoss.
• 0:22
  John Simboli: This morning I'm in Cambridge with Florian Wegener, co- founder and CEO of Zageno.
• 0:25
  John Simboli: Florian, how did you find yourself here at Zageno?
• 0:30
  Florian Wegener: I am In my fourth career.
• 0:33
  Florian Wegener: I'm a physician by training, a cardiologist.
• 0:36
  Florian Wegener: I was trained in three different countries, namely the United States Canada, and Germany.
• 0:42
  Florian Wegener: And I performed specific so-called EP studies and measured the electricity in the beating heart of my patients.
• 0:53
  Florian Wegener: If we would detect signs of arrhythmia in the patient, I would insert an ICD, so-called, implantable cardioverter defibrillator, to prolong the life of the patient and increase their quality of life.
• 1:10
  Florian Wegener: My second step, actually, was joining the Boston Consulting Group.
• 1:15
  Florian Wegener: I worked with BCG always between big pharma and med tech.
• 1:19
  Florian Wegener: I also learned about payers in different countries, but at some point I felt that I was lacking expertise in, you know, finance, accounting, et cetera.
• 1:32
  Florian Wegener: And BCG was kind enough to sponsor my MBA, to IE Business School in Madrid.
• 1:40
  Florian Wegener: And IE business school in Madrid is a great place.
• 1:43
  Florian Wegener: It's, you know, located in the heart of Madrid, a vibrant city.
• 1:47
  Florian Wegener: And it's really the entrepreneurial school in Europe.
• 1:51
  Florian Wegener: And I usually say I got infected with a virus called entrepreneurship there.
• 1:57
  Florian Wegener: And then moved on and joined Qiagen, one of the leading biotech companies.
• 2:05
  Florian Wegener: And, you know, being at Qiagen, I was an intrepreneur, I was a manager and I really learned that I have a passion to build and develop businesses.
• 2:16
  Florian Wegener: I actually was allowed to hire 70 people.
• 2:21
  Florian Wegener: We built, globally, e-commerce capabilities for Qiagen.
• 2:26
  Florian Wegener: We launched web shops in 16 countries at that time.
• 2:29
  Florian Wegener: And, we are offering a digital customer-user experience to researchers.
• 2:36
  Florian Wegener: During this period, I met with David Pumberger, who became my business partner and co-founder of Zageno.
• 2:46
  John Simboli: What's the life of a cardiologist like compared to the life of an entrepreneur?
• 2:52
  Florian Wegener: I left the hospital for two reasons.
• 2:55
  Florian Wegener: So I left the hospital because I felt very lonely sometimes.
• 3:00
  Florian Wegener: And in fact, I was a young physician.
• 3:04
  Florian Wegener: I was also a researcher and I felt like 24 hours, seven days per week, I was either with a patient, mostly very tired, or I would have to focus on my research and get a paper out.
• 3:19
  Florian Wegener: And so that was, on top of that I felt like my career for the next decade was clearly a long and dark tunnel.
• 3:29
  Florian Wegener: And this is where I really listened to myself and I took some time off and decided to leave the hospital.
• 3:37
  Florian Wegener: And coming from the positive side of things, I always wanted to create something that helps people.
• 3:45
  Florian Wegener: I always wanted to build something large that would impact many, many people.
• 3:52
  Florian Wegener: As a cardiologist, the two people that you operate on, on a day, you know,, your work has a lot of impact to those people.
• 4:04
  Florian Wegener: But, in fact, today I feel, being an entrepreneur with such a great platform, we can influence and better the life of thousands of people.
• 4:17
  Florian Wegener: And I was always striving for something and looking for such an opportunity and I'm very glad we came up with the idea of Zageno.
• 4:26
  John Simboli: How did you decide you wanted to lead an enterprise life sciences company?
• 4:32
  John Simboli: As you were thinking that through, did you say, did you find anything that was close?
• 4:38
  John Simboli: In other words,"You know, I could go to this existing thing and I could help to build it" or, I imagine the answer is,"Did you realize that you had to create it in order for it to exist?"
• 4:50
  Florian Wegener: It is so easy to understand that there is a need for an Amazon-like marketplace, that there is a need for digital aggregation on the researcher and purchaser side.
• 5:03
  Florian Wegener: You just have to speak to people who work at the bench and start asking them questions, not only about the work they do and the success they have, but also about the pain points.
• 5:17
  Florian Wegener: And when you do that, they will start speaking about how painful it is to find the right product and to order it.
• 5:24
  Florian Wegener: And I sometimes feel there is such a clear need, it is interesting to me that no one ever before really realized that and started a Zageno-like endeavor earlier, I thought about this many times and, in fact, all investors ask us,"So why are you the guys changing this industry?" And I think one explanation is that you find highly educated and very intelligent people in the life science research industry that are so driven around or towards the goal that they are trying to achieve with their research that they sort of do not invest time in bettering other processes.
• 6:19
  Florian Wegener: And I feel when you go to the supplier side, and this is where I worked for a supplier for several years, you will easily find out that the sales process and the marketing and the service processes are also broken on the supplier side.
• 6:36
  Florian Wegener: And one of the drivers for that is that the needs of the researchers have changed.
• 6:44
  Florian Wegener: Everyone wants to have an Amazon-like experience also at the workplace.
• 6:49
  Florian Wegener: And on the other side, I think the founders and managers of life science companies have also understood that value creation of their company happens in the lab.
• 7:02
  Florian Wegener: So, in fact, most researchers are not so happy if they see a salesperson interrupting them focusing on their work.
• 7:11
  Florian Wegener: And so this is where, where I feel Zageno can really help those two sides to come together and create a win-win situation.
• 7:21
  John Simboli: Florian, what were you hoping to achieve at Zageno that could be done here and not at another company?
• 7:28
  Florian Wegener: Believe it or not, in life science orders are still being placed via fax, email, and phone.
• 7:35
  Florian Wegener: We, at Zageno, accelerate innovation by enabling the scientists.
• 7:41
  Florian Wegener: We have this saying.
• 7:42
  Florian Wegener: .
• 7:42
  Florian Wegener: .
• 7:42
  Florian Wegener: Eureka moments.
• 7:42
  Florian Wegener: .
• 7:42
  Florian Wegener: .
• 7:42
  Florian Wegener: let's create Eureka moments.
• 7:47
  Florian Wegener: And the Eureka moment is when a researcher or someone internally at Zageno experiences a brilliant breakthrough or a happy moment.
• 7:56
  Florian Wegener: And at Zageno we are creating a brand new market.
• 7:58
  Florian Wegener: That's a unique opportunity and it's a completely new model for the industry.
• 8:08
  Florian Wegener: So Zageno is a market maker.
• 8:10
  Florian Wegener: And by the way, being a market maker sounds cool, but comes with a lot of pain because you have to explain to everyone what do you do?
• 8:18
  John Simboli: You carefully give the story, as you're beginning to with me right now, in many different venues.
• 8:25
  John Simboli: And that at the end you kind of test that to see if they understood it the way you intended it.
• 8:30
  John Simboli: And sometimes they don't.
• 8:32
  John Simboli: Sometimes they've got it all backwards or they've filtered it in some way.
• 8:36
  John Simboli: That person then says,"Oh, you are in this business" and you help them, gently, and say"No, we're actually in this business." What are the misunderstandings and how do you help them to understand what it really is?
• 8:46
  Florian Wegener: Zageno is a marketplace.
• 8:48
  Florian Wegener: We think of us as a digital matchmaker and I feel it's easy for people to understand; one day go on Zageno.com, that we offer an Amazon-like ordering experience.
• 9:04
  Florian Wegener: However, what is not understood at the first glance is really that Zageno is way more complex.
• 9:11
  Florian Wegener: We are, in fact, an enterprise software that offers many additional business processes including approval processes, invoicing and payment processes.
• 9:25
  Florian Wegener: Why is that important?
• 9:27
  Florian Wegener: It is important because in the B2B world researchers make the decision on the product they want to use for the experiment.
• 9:36
  Florian Wegener: However, there are entire teams, procurement teams that need to fulfill those wishes and they need to establish relationships with these suppliers.
• 9:47
  Florian Wegener: These can be hundreds or thousands of suppliers for a research institute.
• 9:52
  Florian Wegener: And without having approval processes in place, without offering one invoice, one payment to our customers, that's exactly what we do, these processes are very time consuming, and people on a daily basis have to repeat the same work steps over and over again.
• 10:19
  John Simboli: So when you clarify, as you just did, and they say,"Ah!" Is that a Eureka moment for them?
• 10:26
  Florian Wegener: I feel that is a Eureka moment for the researcher because the researcher just places an order on Zageno.
• 10:37
  Florian Wegener: It's a cart with as many brands as you like, as many products that you like.
• 10:43
  Florian Wegener: And then there's a Eureka moment for the purchaser because they just have to click once to accept the entire cart and they know they won't get 15 or 20 invoices from different suppliers for just one cart, but they will get one aggregated payment statement from Zageno and then they will transfer one payment, to Zageno, and Zageno transfers the money to the suppliers.
• 11:09
  Florian Wegener: So there's a lot of complexity behind the easy-to-navigate Zageno website.
• 11:16
  John Simboli: What have you learned in this period of time about what works for you?
• 11:20
  John Simboli: What way of working with people and managing Zageno have you found is your style, that's you?
• 11:27
  Florian Wegener: I feel that leading a team, bringing so many diverse people together.
• 11:32
  Florian Wegener: .
• 11:32
  Florian Wegener: .
• 11:32
  Florian Wegener: one thing I learned, I think during my time as a consultant, but maybe also as a physician is there's a certain art of asking the right question.
• 11:45
  Florian Wegener: And very often it's not about giving the right answer but asking the right question.
• 11:54
  Florian Wegener: And so I see myself as someone that, hopefully, spends enough time with all team members and, hopefully, helps them to come to a better outcome of their work based on smart questions.
• 12:09
  John Simboli: Can you remember when you were eight or nine years old?
• 12:11
  John Simboli: Can you remember what your child view of what you wanted to be as a grownup was?
• 12:16
  John Simboli: And does have anything to do with what you're doing?
• 12:18
  Florian Wegener: I do, actually.
• 12:18
  Florian Wegener: From that age, I knew I wanted to be a physician.
• 12:23
  Florian Wegener: I always wanted to be a medical doctor.
• 12:27
  Florian Wegener: And you know, at that time a friend was doing deliveries for a pharmacy and I thought, hey, this is a great idea.
• 12:37
  Florian Wegener: He made a bit of money, he would bring medication to elderly people who were not in a situation that they could easily access the local pharmacy.
• 12:49
  Florian Wegener: And so I visited a separate pharmacy and explained the concept and I must have been very persistent because they eventually agreed to let me do it.
• 13:00
  Florian Wegener: And I guess you could say that was my first experience in life science.
• 13:05
  Florian Wegener: In one form or another, this is something I've been connected to ever since.
• 13:12
  Florian Wegener: I remember exactly how that woman said," Why would I pay you to bring medication to people if people just come to my pharmacy?
• 13:24
  Florian Wegener: And I said,"But think of the people who don't come to your pharmacy." And she said,"OK.
• 13:28
  Florian Wegener: Let's try it."
• 13:30
  John Simboli: If Zageno develops as you hope it will, what effect do you think that will have on people?
• 13:36
  Florian Wegener: Zageno should accelerate innovation.
• 13:40
  Florian Wegener: We should be a hub for researchers that are planning the next experiment.
• 13:46
  Florian Wegener: When they wake up on a Monday morning, they should open up Zageno,, find the right content, have a community of researchers that they can share their thoughts with.
• 13:56
  Florian Wegener: And doing something and building something like this, we feel blessed to enable researchers and want them to be more successful in their important work to cure cancer, to better animal health, fight rare diseases, work on food safety, all those great things that we at Zageno cannot do directly but we can help them to do this important work.
• 14:24
  John Simboli: Florian, what's new at Zageno?
• 14:26
  Florian Wegener: We closed a significant financing round led by General Catalyst, the leading tech venture capital firm on the east coast, and that brings us into a good spot.
• 14:39
  Florian Wegener: We are actually hiring people and are growing the team.
• 14:42
  Florian Wegener: We just moved into a larger office and we are expanding our business.
• 14:45
  Florian Wegener: From a product perspective,, the product is evolving quickly.
• 14:53
  Florian Wegener: Zageno built the first product comparison engine in this industry, which allows people to compare 10 million products from 3000 suppliers for the first time.
• 15:06
  Florian Wegener: One very interesting feature in Q3 is our spend analytics and optimization tool.
• 15:14
  Florian Wegener: Now when you order all lab supplies through Zageno, our analytics tool allows you to see where your spend goes, at one glance.
• 15:22
  Florian Wegener: And it empowers the researchers or purchaser, for the first time ever, to easily identify where cost savings could be made.
• 15:31
  John Simboli: Zageno is many things as I've heard you explain it.
• 15:34
  John Simboli: It's a procurement platform.
• 15:35
  John Simboli: It's a validation tool.
• 15:39
  John Simboli: Interestingly, it's also a community.
• 15:41
  John Simboli: You're building a community in a sense.
• 15:43
  John Simboli: Can you tell me more about what that means?
• 15:45
  Florian Wegener: Zageno offers people to identify the right product for their experiment.
• 15:52
  Florian Wegener: I think today we are in the beginning of building a community for researchers around the work they do.
• 16:04
  Florian Wegener: We help them to channel their communication within an account, to each other.
• 16:11
  Florian Wegener: There are tools for that.
• 16:12
  Florian Wegener: We allow them to use our chat function on the website to have one person that they can refer to whenever they have a question about the product or delivery, invoice payment.
• 16:27
  Florian Wegener: I feel in the future we need to become way better and we need to offer additional services.
• 16:34
  Florian Wegener: One thing we learned over time is that researchers are very intelligent people, very high IQ, sometimes, or actually often, introverted.
• 16:46
  Florian Wegener: And I feel like researchers would love to communicate more with each other.
• 16:54
  Florian Wegener: They would love to share guidelines and best practices among each other.
• 17:00
  Florian Wegener: However, in the exciting world of creating something potentially big that can change the world, there are lots of restrictions for them to exchange information.
• 17:13
  Florian Wegener: And while they would like to speak to a competing team or they would like to speak to another small or big pharma player and find out what are best practices they often are not, or they don't feel comfort, comfortable to reach out.
• 17:35
  Florian Wegener: And I feel there are many ways in today's technology world how we could help them to communicate in a safe way, within the rules and guidelines that their company allows them to exchange information.
• 17:51
  Florian Wegener: And we could, hopefully, based on their knowledge, become a spot or a hub spot for people driving to understand better how they can do the work.
• 18:10
  John Simboli: How does Zageno help suppliers?
• 18:12
  Florian Wegener: Zageno is an additional channel to the researcher, to the person who really uses a potential product.
• 18:24
  Florian Wegener: Traditionally, suppliers would go to individual accounts one at a time.
• 18:31
  Florian Wegener: They would try to speak to researchers, not entirely knowing what product might be needed in that very specific account.
• 18:43
  Florian Wegener: I don't want to say they were blind, but they still lacked a lot of crucial information.
• 18:47
  Florian Wegener: And so we can help suppliers, being there at what Google calls the moment of truth.
• 18:57
  Florian Wegener: The moment a researcher makes a purchasing decision, they can actually be guided to the product that they like.
• 19:09
  Florian Wegener: And that gives, offers an opportunity to suppliers to not only market their product but really sell it at this point in time.
• 19:20
  Florian Wegener: And that is mixed with or paired with lower operational costs.
• 19:27
  John Simboli: How does Zageno help customers?
• 19:30
  Florian Wegener: So customers win when they use Zageno and what we hear from our customers is that they like the fact that we are independent.
• 19:38
  Florian Wegener: They are very critical thinkers.
• 19:42
  Florian Wegener: They do not like it if people push them towards a specific product.
• 19:47
  Florian Wegener: And so, Zageno, being neutral, i s something that they l ike very much and embrace.
• 19:56
  Florian Wegener: I also feel one feature that they love a lot i s the scientific score.
• 20:03
  Florian Wegener: The scientific score is an unbiased rating system that we offer.
• 20:09
  Florian Wegener: It is basically an objective measurement of the performance of products and how do we do that?
• 20:18
  Florian Wegener: We do it in a scientific way.
• 20:22
  Florian Wegener: We extract product information from millions of scientific papers.
• 20:29
  Florian Wegener: We basically look at the methodology part of papers and we extract the information on products being used in v arious specific setups.
• 20:42
  Florian Wegener: And we then calculate a score between one and ten that will ensure a researcher that that brand or product they haven't used before w ill work if it has a certain Zageno score.
• 21:00
  John Simboli: What kind of partners are a good fit to Zageno?
• 21:03
  Florian Wegener: Zageno partners with manufacturers and suppliers of high-quality technology products for the lab.
• 21:11
  Florian Wegener: We offer an additional channel to the bench.
• 21:20
  Florian Wegener: We are very cost effective as we integrate into the supplier's business processes seamlessly and we help them to avoid any manual work.
• 21:31
  Florian Wegener: So these are the suppliers we collaborate with.
• 21:36
  Florian Wegener: On the end customer side, we work with small biotech companies that are fast-growing, well- funded, that are maybe lacking an IT back end infrastructure to scale their business or scale the operations.
• 21:54
  Florian Wegener: We also work with big pharma.
• 21:56
  Florian Wegener: We work with academic institutions and the first COOs.
• 22:00
  Florian Wegener: So I feel we can really cover most players in the life science research industry and we can help them to make their operations leaner and help them to get better.
• 22:16
  John Simboli: And partners in a more traditional sense.
• 22:19
  John Simboli: As you build out the company and you hire people to be your full time people, what kind of.
• 22:23
  John Simboli: .
• 22:23
  John Simboli: .
• 22:23
  John Simboli: is it possible to generalize and say, these are the kinds of people I'm looking for?
• 22:31
  Florian Wegener: When I look at the teams in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Berlin, the people who are the most successful people within Zageno are all very smart.
• 22:42
  Florian Wegener: They're very driven.
• 22:44
  Florian Wegener: They share the passion to change the world.
• 22:48
  Florian Wegener: It helps a lot when you're open to diversity.
• 22:50
  Florian Wegener: As, at Zageno, more than 30 nationalities are represented and we have very diverse professional backgrounds and teamwork is essential to overcome all of those challenges that we face every day.
• 23:11
  Florian Wegener: And so I feel when you're passionate to change the world, and I feel, you're smart and driven and open to you all sorts of different backgrounds, you will succeed at Zageno.
• 23:26
  John Simboli: How was it that you chose to build part of your business here in Cambridge?
• 23:32
  Florian Wegener: When we started Zageno, it was clear to us that Cambridge is ground zero for the global life sciences industry.
• 23:40
  Florian Wegener: And it was only a question of time until one the founders would relocate from Europe to Boston or Cambridge.
• 23:48
  Florian Wegener: We started building a team in Berlin; today the team consists mainly of coders and content and customer service people in Berlin serving Germany and the UK.
• 24:07
  Florian Wegener: Here in Cambridge,, we have more salespeople, marketing people, communication people because, obviously, the United States is still one of the largest markets in our industry.
• 24:21
  Florian Wegener: And being in Cambridge, we are part of the community.
• 24:25
  Florian Wegener: We're in close proximity to our customers, both the supplier and the customers, and that allows us to learn from them every day.
• 24:34
  Florian Wegener: Cambridge represents an unseen life science ecosystem.
• 24:38
  Florian Wegener: There is a community of international entrepreneurs.
• 24:40
  Florian Wegener: They're Investors, there's a real community of investors.
• 24:46
  Florian Wegener: There are healthcare hubs.
• 24:47
  Florian Wegener: Some of the best hospitals.
• 24:51
  Florian Wegener: There is a very strong biotech scene and all of this is producing innovation.
• 24:59
  Florian Wegener: So when I moved here with my family a year ago, I must say, I was really surprised how beautiful life is here in the northeast.We love Boston.
• 25:13
  Florian Wegener: We love the sea.
• 25:15
  Florian Wegener: The fact that skiing is possible is amazing.
• 25:19
  Florian Wegener: It feels a bit smaller than the Alps in Europ, but it's a mix of very intelligent and driven people, a great place for entrepreneurship and that, mixed with a beautiful landscape, and we feel at home.
• 25:39
  John Simboli: From an access to capital view, was your decision to come here to Cambridge.
• 25:43
  John Simboli: .
• 25:43
  John Simboli: .
• 25:43
  John Simboli: was that an important part of your decision?
• 25:47
  Florian Wegener: General Catalyst is located in Harvard Square.
• 25:51
  Florian Wegener: General Catalyst led the last financing round.
• 25:54
  Florian Wegener: They are a fantastic partner.
• 25:58
  Florian Wegener: They help us really build the business; it's way beyond just giving you money.
• 26:03
  Florian Wegener: It's a great network that we profit from every day.
• 26:06
  Florian Wegener: In fact, the partners and associates we work with really work a few days per week within our company.
• 26:14
  Florian Wegener: But we also have fantastic investors from Germany that invest across the Atlantic and they specifically invest in life science companies here in the Boston area and in tech companies in Berlin.
• 26:31
  Florian Wegener: I'm speaking of Grazia Equity and Capnamic Ventures and I feel the mix of being in Boston and Berlin, having access to great tech talent mainly in Berlin and having access to great life science research talent here in Cambridge or Boston, gives us a huge advantage.
• 26:59
  John Simboli: Florian, thanks for spending time with me today.
• 27:02
  Florian Wegener: Thank you John.
• 27:03
  Florian Wegener: It was a great pleasure meeting you and thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak about Zageno.
• 27:10
  John Simboli: As co- founder of Zageno, Florian W egener set out to do something new: build a bridge between researchers and suppliers.
• 27:19
  John Simboli: When I meet a leader with a vision for a new idea and the drive to make it happen, I wonder what brought him or her to that moment.
• 27:27
  John Simboli: After all, CEOs who t alk with me on BioBoss often say something like,"There are easier ways to make a living." The way Florian says it is,"We a re creating a brand new market.
• 27:39
  John Simboli: So Zageno is a market maker, and by the way, being a market maker sounds cool, but comes with a lot of pain because you have to explain to everyone what you do." One reason Florian stays focused on his goal is his sense of purpose.
• 27:55
  John Simboli: He told me"We feel blessed to enable researchers and we want them to be more successful in their important work to cure cancer, better animal health, fight rare diseases, work on food safety and all those great things that we, at Zageno, cannot do directly, but we can help them to do this important work.
• 28:15
  John Simboli: I'm John Simboli.
• 28:16
  John Simboli: You're listening to BioBoss.