Explorer · Entrepreneur · Melbourne

I build things that matter. Now I'd like some company.

I'm Gregor Lichtfuss. I drove the company creation that turned a decade of cardiac RNA research into Cardior Pharmaceuticals, and pitched it to its first investors; Novo Nordisk acquired it in 2024 for up to €1.025 billion. I co-founded Exopharm and built it from a first experiment on a tiny bench into sixty-five people and a first-in-human clinical trial — then turned the lights off.

Before that: biological-threat training for the German federal government, a G8 exercise run with the FBI and the CDC, and a PhD in clinical immunology. These days: shrimp, bananas, boats, and a book for teenagers.

I find a need, build the structure, and hand it over. What I'm short of is people who want to join me and take what I build further.

Choose your adventure

What brought you here?

Previously

What I built, and what I took home.

Most of my working life is invisible. I enjoy the building, and I usually hand the result to whoever is better placed to run it. I never worried much about claiming any of it — sometimes there was no equity, usually not even my name in the footnotes. Some of that was the conditions I worked in. Some of it was, let's be generous, a learning opportunity. But I do exist. I am real.

Most of it was a very good time, and all of it was an extraordinary experience. Eleven years in biotech, a one-dollar exit, and rather more experience than the money would suggest — which is what I tell my students. So instead of a CV, here is a look behind the scenes: what I built, what became of it, and what I actually walked home with.

Cardior Pharmaceuticals2014–2016 · Venture creation lead, via Ascenion's Spinnovator

Thomas Thum and Sandor Batkai had the science — the papers in Nature and Science, and the patents. I turned it into the first business plan and pitched it to investors in 2015. Then we handed it to Claudia Ulbrich, who did the hard decade that followed. Nine years later, Novo Nordisk bought it.Along the way: “Heart failure is a dead investment area.” “RNA therapy doesn't work.” “Bunch of amateurs.” And my all-time favourite — “I think you are the wrong person for this job.”

🦄, baby. Even in euros.And a photo of Thomas, Sandor and me at ESC 2015. My name is nowhere to be found. No equity — my contract didn't allow it. I'm as proud as I am relieved that it worked out.

Exopharm Ltd (ASX:EX1)2016–2023 · Co-founder, inventor, COO/CSO

Ian Dixon had the idea and the money. Nobody would take the money and do the work, so I ran the first experiments myself — and found that in a field this new, there was nobody to outsource to. Our division of labour: Ian brought money in, I spent it. A bench at the Royal Women's, then a lab at St Vincent's, then our own floor at the Baker — which we moved into on the first day of Melbourne's lockdown. Everyone else was sending people home; our former hosts lent us whatever they knew they wouldn't need, and freight bound for locked-down customers was rerouted to us. Months of lead time became days. While the city shut down, we geared up. I proposed the Plexoval trial, which nearly everyone said couldn't be done in the time, or at all. Red Cross Lifeblood came in as a trial site for the first time in its history, the O'Brien isolator facility manufactured, and the team delivered the first-in-human study of a platelet-derived exosome therapeutic. Then Ian took it to the ASX. I built the thing that could be listed.Somewhere in the middle of it, scaling from startup to SME, Ian asked me a question: “Do you want to stay in this company? Then you need to do something.” Roosevelt wrote that the explorer prepares the way for civilisation, and must then disappear from before its face. That time had come. I decided not to disappear.So I took a demotion. From COO to Business Services Manager — the internal function nobody wanted, which was chaos, and which I hated on sight. It was also the one thing I am genuinely good at: building something from nothing. With Mickey T and Thien we turned it into an operation that — I'll boldly claim, and cannot prove — ran better than CSL's. I had never had a day of management training, so I went and got some — drawn in, at first, by a Berkeley course called “New Managers Bootcamp: Hire and Fire Without the Drama.” I also hired a coach, Hay Lam Yau, who in our first meeting turned “this is miserable” into “heck yes — let's do something about it, and let's make it fun.”Then things became really challenging, for everyone. I watched something genuinely impressive collapse. I had to fire the people who had built it with me, and whom I cared about. There wasn't much drama. It was just miserable. When each of them joined, I had told them the same thing: this is a startup, I can't promise you anything — except that it won't get boring. Boy, did I over-deliver on that promise. There was no choice about whether. There were choices about how, and those were mine. You should be asking why it collapsed. There is an honest answer. It takes about an hour, and it goes down considerably better with a fully loaded tiki drink — I accept invitations.

A one-dollar exit, a photo of Ian and me ringing the bell, and one of the best teams I have ever worked with.The experience of an entire career, pressed into seven years. I had shares. I didn't sell them when I should have. I'd advise you differently.

Advanced Management of Biological Threats2006–2008 · Robert Koch Institute, Berlin

A German course training clinicians and public health officials to manage highly contagious disease. We took it international, for the Global Health Security Initiative. Then a G8 conference on cooperation between public health and law enforcement in preventing and investigating crime involving biological agents — decision-makers from health ministries, policing and the diplomatic corps — organised with the US State Department, the CDC and the FBI. We wrote a scenario and filmed it with police special forces: a flashbang raid on a laboratory disguised as a clinical research facility, fed to the room as video injects while the delegations worked the crisis in real time. The EU, Interpol and the WHO sent observers.

Knowing how to put on a space suit. A photo of me among very important people in suits at the Villa Borsig. Startling an FBI agent. Admiring an oil painting of the Landshut.I built a course to prepare people for an outbreak, then trained for WHO outbreak response myself and sat on the Burnet call-out list for a couple of years. Never deployed. I've used the experience on everything since, except an outbreak.

Also, for the completists: I created the BioVaria Startup Panel format in 2015, and it has run every second year since. PhD in clinical immunology, Monash. MSc in international public health. Startmate Founder Fellow. Gilwell-level Scout Leader and Australian Sailing instructor. The full trail is on LinkedIn, though it reads better here.

This season

This one is still being written.

In 2023 I had an idea about making food the biotech way. By 2024 I had a shrimp company on paper, and a run of good conversations that all reached the same conclusion: too early — come back when it exists. So I went to build it. No money, no team, no laboratory. I found Elizabeth in Hong Kong, and Greg at the University of Melbourne. I asked him for lab access and a student team, and, to my continuing surprise, he said yes.

What unfolded was a homeless virtual company, makeshift contracts, a certain amount of free conference food, and a wave of university projects that pivoted us from innovation hype to education. The open questions are a pilot facility, and whether the research community wants to carry this further than I can.

What took me into aquaculture wasn't a hunch. After COVID I went looking for where Australia's real advantages lie — a quarter more coastline than the United States, serious research institutions, and money — and at the work on lab-grown meat, which I found fascinating, and badly over-engineered for the problem it was trying to solve. You don't need to build an animal cell by cell if you can farm one properly. Then I ran a scenario study on the future of seafood: population, climate, food security, conflict. I ran it mostly to find out whether I was wrong, because nobody I spoke to seemed to see it. I wasn't wrong. Most of what the study placed at 2050 has been arriving earlier than expected, and it changed my life. It is why I now also spend my time on bananas, on boats, on Scouts, and on a book for teenagers about how to think. The Scouts part follows most directly from the conflict data: friends don't shoot at each other, and the friendships that cross borders are mostly made young. It looks like a scatter. It is one conclusion — that the world is changing dramatically — applied at four different time horizons.

SHRMP.bio should probably end up with a research organisation. But SHRMP, Scouts.international, Aurora and HBTX all have seats in them that need filling.
What we take home from these hasn't been written yet. Casting is open.

The ask

Three things you could do.

What I'm trying to build, in the end, is an organisation doing something that matters — and one people actually want to work for. Two other problems I think need fixing, in general. That takes people who know what they're about, and enough room to do it.

So: read something of mine and tell me where it's wrong. Introduce me to one person. Or take on a bounded piece of work with a deadline and an end — or design one with me — which is how everyone I've ever built anything with has started.

And ask me about any of it. There is a tariff. The banana company costs a beer — a banana beer, if you insist. The good stories cost a Mai Tai. Why Exopharm collapsed costs a Zombie, and there was a reason bars used to ration those. I mix all three: while everyone else spent the lockdown baking sourdough, I learned tiki.

Gregor@Lichtfuss.earth

I have been told by some that I have a sense of humour.
I have been told by others that I am not funny.
I have been told by some that I am funny — for a German.