#10 Dejan Hušman on mentors directing the engines of curiosity

Dejan Hušman is CEO & Co-Founder of denovomatrix – a life science spin-off out of TU Dresden founded in 2018. Denovomatrix is a key enabling technology to manufacturing stem cells at high quality and quantity with application fields in cell therapy, cell-based meat or vaccine production. They are innovating in an area that hasn’t seen much change for the past 30 years but has huge potential for our future.

From a young age, having grown up with entrepreneurs as parents, Dejan felt that being an entrepreneur himself was the only path to follow. He talks about his love for science, building a personal competitive advantage and the role of the other people along his path: in particular, his mentor and his professor and how they helped focus his curiosity, provided the breeding ground for innovation and startups during his PhD and brought together the initial founding team and supporters for denovomatrix. We speak about the most important lessons he learned in these first three years of building the company. And although the journey is far from over Dejan is incredibly clear not only about the vision but also the limitations of the company and the ultimate end goal, the exit scenario for denovomatrix. 

Dejan has benefited greatly from mentors in his last couple of years but also sees the flaws and limitations in the German or European research ecosystem in producing high quality startups. Thus, we hear about his biggest wish for the ecosystem that is to include more experienced former entrepreneurs and other people that direct “these engines of curiosity, i.e. PhD students just researching something” to get to the core question around the value of someone’s research more quickly.