Welcome to the Wiley on Business podcast where Jake Wiley explores how individuals and companies make dramatic breakthroughs and transform businesses from a job to an enterprise with real value.

In this episode, Jake interviews Dr. Ioannis Tsamardinos, a world-class scientist and innovator – CEO and Co-Founder at JADBio, the only AutoML platform specifically designed for life science data and particularly molecular data.

Ioannis Tsamardinos is a Professor at the Computer Science Department at the University of Crete where he heads his own lab and an all-star team MensXMachina. They successfully translating academic R&D into real-world business tools ready to market. A sui generis persona – mentor, expert, researcher, author, speaker, inventor, entrepreneur, and athlete – Ioanni’s work on automatic time-limited actions design was applied to the NASA Dean Space I software.

Dr. Tsamardinos explains how a professional crisis set him up, for where he really needed to be. He talks about what he’s got going on right now, what’s most important in this world, and what are the key points for business success: a good team, social networks, basketball, enjoying your time apart from “business as usual”.

According to him, you sometimes have to get out of your own ways: “For a long time, I knew what I want to do in my life, that I wanted to be a scientist. However, the economic crisis came along, and I realized I had to do something different and stop pretending things will be okay by just being a professor in Greece. The whole academic system was about to collapse in the country. And that’s when I decided to become an entrepreneur and tried to turn the crisis into an opportunity. That meant changing my life goals, my interests, perhaps my career path, my day-to-day activities. It was not about publishing the next algorithm in science anymore. It was about putting together a business plan with a vision, getting funding for it, building software for clients. And not just because of academic curiosity; I had to combine my vision for science and technology, and the science I wanted to do, with business opportunities.“

So looking back, we have to realize that we are also need a bit of luck to get where we are. I absolutely don’t regret going out of my way; it is a great experience; I have learned a lot and become a different person. Even if my startup efforts fail, I will still be satisfied, having enjoyed the journey.

Ioannis Tsamardios, CEO at JADBio

Listen to the full episode “Dr. Ioannis Tsamardinos – Sometimes a crisis in your career is exactly what you need!“

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